Idle Concerns
Mar. 16th, 2004 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteI worry sometimes about seagulls - I wonder if that's even an appropraite name for them anymore, watching their teeming hordes prancing stiltedly across parking lots miles and sometimes entire states away from anything even vaguely resembling a sea. Even if their bodies have managed to adapt to such a lifestyle, it can't be psychologically healthy for them to be trapped so far from their namesake.
Do mother seagulls whisper to their nestlings of a time so long ago that it has slowly become birdy myth, when the grey speckles on their wings were echoed in churning white-capped waves beneath them? Can their tiny brains encompass a collective unconscious that holds images of endlessly churning water, and the taste of salt and fish? And if so, do they long for a return to that core state, endlessly promising future generations that they will be the ones to reclaim their birthright, spurning this unnaturally solid and motionless world for one that rocks them gently and sings them to sleep with the sound of water on stone that nurtures a sea-creature's soul in ways that dry land never can?
Or, perhaps, do they see themselves as conquerors of a new world, abandoning watery uncertainty for a life of ease and luxury? Have they willingly traded white caps on black oceans for white dividers on an asphalt parking-lot sea, and, surveying their domain from telephone poles and rooves, think the change dear but worthwhile as they feast on human detritus and think us the fools for abandoning it to them?
Or am I just far too bent on taking an incredibly dim bird and turning it into an excuse to abuse a metaphor well past the point of sanity?
Do mother seagulls whisper to their nestlings of a time so long ago that it has slowly become birdy myth, when the grey speckles on their wings were echoed in churning white-capped waves beneath them? Can their tiny brains encompass a collective unconscious that holds images of endlessly churning water, and the taste of salt and fish? And if so, do they long for a return to that core state, endlessly promising future generations that they will be the ones to reclaim their birthright, spurning this unnaturally solid and motionless world for one that rocks them gently and sings them to sleep with the sound of water on stone that nurtures a sea-creature's soul in ways that dry land never can?
Or, perhaps, do they see themselves as conquerors of a new world, abandoning watery uncertainty for a life of ease and luxury? Have they willingly traded white caps on black oceans for white dividers on an asphalt parking-lot sea, and, surveying their domain from telephone poles and rooves, think the change dear but worthwhile as they feast on human detritus and think us the fools for abandoning it to them?
Or am I just far too bent on taking an incredibly dim bird and turning it into an excuse to abuse a metaphor well past the point of sanity?
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 07:21 pm (UTC)Mine!?
Never go to college health care centers!!
Date: 2004-03-17 12:22 pm (UTC)But yah, what he said. I think it's fun to write and imagine this sort of stuff too, but in reality Seaguls are "not so much with the brain power"...certaily not the kind of long term memory or story telling you speak of. I can see it now....
"Daughter let me tell you the tale of churning white-capped...Ooh a french fry! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
no subject
Date: 2004-03-16 08:26 pm (UTC)You remember the song, don't you?
Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to show off
All his aerobatic tricks, he had quite a blow-off
Eight miles from LaGuardia his program got upset
He was sucked into the engine of a trans-Atlantic jet.
Chorus:
Jonathan Livingston's feeding all the fish
Sliced, diced and toasted he's a very fancy dish.
High above the Ocean
Half way to heaaaaaaaaaaa...ven.
Slurped through the engine of a 747.
I have the rest, if you'd like it.
Of course, among seagulls Jonathan's exploits are legendary. Having given his life for all seagulls everywhere, they are now blessed with a manifest destiny to fly higher, go further, and acheive more than seagulls could before Jonathan.
They even number their calendar: BJ and AJ
no subject
Date: 2004-03-17 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-17 07:15 am (UTC)ALBATROSS!
Tom
no subject
Date: 2004-03-17 07:15 am (UTC)Today I saw a seagull
Date: 2004-03-18 11:40 am (UTC)Puggles