Harmony
I sit in my backyard, head in hand, out of options. My smartphone is dead by my own neglect. 42%, 33%, 18%. Any right thinking person would have gone inside and got the charger. Yet here I am. I can feel my brain untingling already.
Recalling Number 2 from a listicle I read entitled ’5 things Da Vinci did when he forgot to charge his phone.”, I try watching nature. I mean it MIGHT work, right?
My eye is drawn to a group of nine New-Holland Honeyeaters quenching their thirst at the large plant pot near our plum tree that we keep full of water to incentivise precisely such behaviour.
Absent phone, the torpor of my thoughts sluggishly struggle out of Smart Central station. They gain impetus, now rattling dangerously through the recently constructed superstations at Fake News and Echo Chamber. As my mind builds speed through Heed, the rattle dissolves into a pleasant buzz of vibration, before dissolving fully, and terminating silently, at Stillness. The view out the window, is beautiful.
Far from drinking chaotically, the Honeyeaters have a system. They drink in turns. Two-by-two they perch, then drink. Business time complete and now off the clock, the on-deck duo now frolic about in the water, like a pair five year olds running through a fountain. All the while, the next two wait patiently on deck in the plum tree whilst the rest perch high in nearby trees, acting as lookouts.
The whole time, they’re constantly exchanging information about predators and changes in the environment, tweeting with a frequency and volume sufficient to overwhelm even Herr Elon’s new and improved Twitter API. No one grumbles, none of them fight. Once slaked, they switch, and the process repeats.
I sit, spellbound by the dazzling symmetry of discipline and harmony; by the self-interested abnegation in the service of something bigger. There’s system to what I’m watching, but I couldn’t possibly predict anything about it. It’s routine within chaos, cloaked in movement and colour, set to syncopation and flair. To describe it as beautiful seems somehow hollow. It’s more than that, it is beauty.
I have no idea how they know when to move, but they’re all quite certain about the matter. They promptly and purposefully settle into their new positions; no excuses, no tardy slips. They drink water, one of life’s few unavoidable drudgeries with a blend of mathematical precision, deep wisdom, simplicity and the frivolity of play that bears little human equal outside truly great art. I feel like I’m watching the reason that painters paint.
If in a weaker moment, one were pondering the lack of such a thing in one’s own life, the harmony of the whole thing might easily bring one to tears. Or move one to write.
I think about Honeyeaters and ponder what else they’d be good at. I bet they’d be GREAT ballroom dancers. They wouldn’t tread on each other’s toes, and not just because they have less of them. I bet ordering two pizzas sufficient to please a group of five of them is a pleasant and frictionless process.
I wonder whether they’re born cooperative, or if they learn it as baby birds via party games like us? As fledglings, did any of them ’slightly too young to understand the game’ ruin pass-the-parcel by throwing a temper tantrum when the music stopped elsewhere? I doubt it.
I wonder whether sociopath honeyeaters exist. Or nihilist ones. Some birds who let you down because they don’t care about you, others because they don’t care about anything. I consider the parameters of an experiment to test this, before discarding the idea as being unpractical. These calculi are not uncommon in my mind.
I wonder if some honeyeaters, in thrall to their own singular uniqueness feel it necessary to distinguish themselves from the flock by wilfully cutting across the water cooler, tweeting controversial opinions. I wonder if this endangers cohesion and collective security. I wonder if the birds call this ‘Breaking Twitter’ I wonder if they argue about this.
I wonder whether birds arguing about the right to question the system, weakens the system. I wonder whether for some birds, maybe the nihilist ones, that’s the point. I wonder whether whilst crows are out hunting eggs, good decision making is optimised by @EdgeBird busting @HeadBird’s balls about defining females as ‘birds that lay eggs’ while @WokeBird calls this exclusionary to females with chronic cloacal issues (“Your sisters and mothers!”)
I wonder if there’s a tipping point. Where everyday events like drinking water become significantly more treacherous because the trust required to undertake them safely no longer exist? I wonder how this benefits the birds.
Unnoticed by me, my partner places my phone on the table. Soon enough, the characteristic PING of my Twitter notifications, informs me that someone has liked a thing I wrote. Normally a source of pleasure, instead it yanks me out of the moment like blunt force trauma. Egress. Regress.
Slung out of Stillness by the well fortified elastic band of my addled brain’s addiction to some kind of order within the chaos, I sabotage the closest thing I’ve seen to that in weeks, by picking up my phone. End of the line. My mind whooshes, station by station along the Dopamine line, an express service back to Smart Central. Suddenly, I don’t feel quite so smart.
A maelstrom of chaos engulfs my mind, and as each station passes the view degenerates: beauty is devoured by buzz, seeing replaces noticing, speed disintegrates stillness, reason is replaced by reaction and principle supplanted by popularity.
The train careens freely. Perhaps too freely, a direct analogue of the debate I imagine the birds having; birds battling the same problems they’ve have always had, plus a few new ones; collective problems requiring collective solutions. I wonder whether yet another loud voice, chirping chiefly in the name of loud voices alone, is really what they need.
The sky darkens in direct relief to the artificial brightness of my screen. The birdsong, recently so beautiful degenerates into needful, angry chirping and I wonder, when everything the birds say sounds like short, stabbing sounds; whether they have the vocabulary to solve it.
I scroll on.
Yianni Agisilaou 23/02/23