40 years ago on this day my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. I was a continent away and had to scramble to get home for the funeral. I thought I’d never get over the grief. I did, though. Whatever deep-seated sadness remains is certainly more than balanced by the gratitude to have known unconditional love and been given gifts galore: an interest in all of what the world has to offer among them. She was an intrepid traveler, and nothing escaped her eyes, no matter how mundane. Her moods could swing from amused to serious to fearful to exuberant in the shortest amounts of time and I see myself in that as well.
Mt. Shasta with no and very little snow 6 weeks apart. New crops planted now that rain has started.
Fall colors have arrived.
And frost once you crossed back into southern Oregon.
She would have enjoyed the roadtrip that brought me to L.A. and back, all 3.400 kilometers in a small car, with frequent stops to take in roadside attractions. She loved to drive, as do I, which is a blessing since I can no longer fly. She would have exulted in meeting the newest generation, named Lina in her honor, who will perhaps – hopefully – see the world with the same wonder as her predecessors.
Same view from a slightly different angle 6 weeks apart – beginning of October, end of November, pains now flooded.
Today’s photographs are selected to describe the range from amusement to awe. Here is the absurdity of a Potemkin village mimicking a Western town, a playground for children adjacent to a diner off of I 5 near Kettleman City, with Bravo Farms proudly displaying their collection of old signs, surely ignored by the kiddos who are overly excited to be released from the confines of their carseats. (Be warned: inside the restaurant, it is a zoo, with shooting arcades and proud display of gun imagery, overpriced and greasy pulled pork sandwiches, and noise levels that aim to deafen your remaining hearing capacity.)
Maybe they should reconsider their choice of beverage?
On the way North, 1000s of Ross geese had reached their destination, ready to stay in California for the winter. Seeing this abundance of beauty is one thing, hearing it is another – the sounds are indescribably moving.
I picked today’s music accordingly – migrating swans and other birds can be heard in the background.
Mud hens congregate in front of the geese
And since that was the only serious piece I could find on migration, there is another Swansong , Schubert’s Ständchen transcribed and transformed for piano by Liszt – one that was played by my mother at bedtime, right below my room. Love is nigh.
Walk with me. Make sure you bring the rubber boots which I, as per usual, forgot on Monday.
It was a spectacularly beautiful day along the Columbia river, with cloudscapes encouraging all kinds of fantasies and re-interpretations. They also made you wonder what would appear if you lifted them. Were they hiding Mt. Hood, or Mt. St. Helens, or would a peek of Mt. Adams appear? Those speculations relied, of course, on the general knowledge that those mountains are situated in the approximate location you were staring at.
What happens when you lift clouds without having the faintest idea what the background will reveal? Pleasant surprise, useful information, or a wish they’d hung in the air forever given what you discover?
These thoughts were rumbling since I had just read a fascinating new paper by two Yale psychologists, Woo-Kyoung Ahn and Annalise Perricone. In essence their research looks at the consequences of providing genetic information to people, information concerned with their potential susceptibility to mental disorders like depression, Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol abuse or eating disorders. (I’m summarizing below.)
Would you like to receive that information? Hand it over, hey, all knowledge is good! Allows for personalized treatments, specific interventions! What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, as it turns out, and not always what you’d predict. Information can harm you, and curiously enough, both the kind of information that confirms genetic susceptibility to a disease or its opposite, the reassurance that you don’t have the genes that might contribute to a problem.
Let’s say you learn that you have an elevated genetic risk of living with depression. Would you change your behavior in ways that might affect the emergence or severity of the disease? As it turns out, people generally don’t. That failure to do so is closely connected to our general misunderstanding of how genes work: most of us think they are immutable, that we can’t change anything about their expression. “Genes are destiny,” is the assumption. This mistaken belief is called psychological essentialism, where genes are believed to provide the essence for the characteristics observed in a person. Take height, for example. People tie a person’s height to their genetic make-up – never mind that an environmental manipulation, the absence of presence of sufficient nutrition, can stunt growth in any given individual.
Now add prognostic pessimism, our general belief that mental disease is pretty resistant to treatment.
“The extent to which one believes that one’s mental disorder has a genetic origin is positively associated with the extent to which one believes that mental disorders are untreatable or inevitable . For instance, the more individuals with depression attribute their symptoms to genetic factors, the more pessimistic they are about their own prognoses.”
Once you’re in this loop – knowing you have an elevated genetic risk and doubting treatment efficacy, the clinical consequences are dire, since your negative expectations will affect the treatment course.
However, we are able to intervene if we teach people about the malleability of genes, and how genetic expression can be counteracted, even shut down, with environmental interventions. Learning about this, people actually become more optimistic about the prognosis. Lots of clinical programs now use that kind of education to help people understand that genes do not mean a certain destiny.
Unfortunately, even if we are able to help people look more confidently at a future where their genetic risk is not all that counts, we have so far no comparable mediations of how they look at the past. When people learn that they have a genetic predisposition for depression, for example, they start to interpret their experienced symptoms as much worse than they actually were. Study after study show memory distortions of the severity of symptoms once you learn about your genetic risk. That exaggerated belief, of course, affects one’s expectation in therapeutic efficacy, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
___
What about learning that you do not have an elevated risk for a particular condition?
That, too, can produce harm. Let’s say you enjoy drinking, or eating, in ways that border on abuse, or so you fear. Receiving the results from your genetic test that you do not have an elevated risk for Alcohol Abuse Disorder or Eating Disorder can now become a risk factor, as you think you’ve been given green light to continue or even increase your behavior. The feedback affects your interpretation of the seriousness of the harm you might expose yourself to, a false reassurance that can have disastrous consequences.
Lifting the clouds of ignorance? Maybe not.
The birds didn’t care, one way or another. Flocks of snow geese huddled in great masses against the wind.
Sandhill cranes starting their track north.
Harrier hawk, hungry as always,
bald eagle surveying his kingdom,
and ibis and herons doing their thing,
all just on autopilot as their nature demands. No mediations required. No pessimism to optimism. Just BEING.
Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.
If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.
A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.
Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)
More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)
So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?
Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.
Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?
What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?
Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.
Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.
We were iced in for a bit last week, although thankfully not for long or as intensely as much of the rest of the country. Photography was restricted to what was available out of the windows, ample traffic given the cold. All those birds made me think of my unhealthy preoccupation with the demise of the bird app: TWITTER.
Nuthatches galore (Kleiber)
Scold me all you want (you know who you are), my time spent on that medium was not preoccupied with “doom scrolling.” It has been a source of information about politics I care about that would have been – is – otherwise unavailable. A lot of the European news are behind paywalls, and some not published in the main media at all, as for example a lot of the discussions among young, progressive Jewish voices in Germany. A lot of Black voices opened new horizons not easily accessible otherwise.
Twitter has been indeed a platform that allowed marginalized voices to communicate and to be heard, internationally it was the choice for many movements that were able to organize this way and get the news out. With the arrival of Emperor Musk, as many call him, although I prefer Elmo, the safety of those voices is endangered. Next to the monopolized print press in large parts of the world, a platform that allowed new collectives to form has now become the plaything of yet another oligarch, his whims defining the rules.
Plaything is too harmless a word – the site is now a weaponized tool that can wield large influence, not least over the upcoming 2024 election in this country. But it can also wreak havoc abroad. Major investors in Musk’s take-over of the company are Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Quatar Investment Company and Binance, the massive crypto finance company founded in China. They have been given special access to confidential company information. (Ref.) There is a huge worry that so far anonymous voices of dissidents will be outed, leading to their persecution. In Saudi-Arabia alone, 40% of all citizens are on twitter, anonymously.
As owner and CEO, Musk has removed the entire human rights team, as well as the team dedicated to disabled users, and the old content curation team which dealt with fighting disinformation. His next move was to ban the accounts of people publicly critical of him, journalists included. The re-admission of previously banned, extremist sites en masse has of course led to explosions of lies, racist and anti-Semitic tropes and disinformation, much to the satisfaction of the owner who encouraged voters to choose far right candidates during the mid-term elections. Just yesterday he tweeted, once again, a word that squarely panders to the extremist belief system that nefarious Jewish powers plan to replace the white US population with Brown people.
Flicker (Goldspecht)
Wren (Zaunkönig)
Importantly, and that is why I think I am so preoccupied with it all, there are no mechanisms that could curb the whims of an emperor. Maybe the financial chaos, with advertisers leaving as well as the important content providers, will lead to bankruptcy. But given that there is a network of unimaginably rich individual and state entities across the world that support his political ambitions, I don’t believe lack of money will be the downfall. Unfathomable riches of a few allow manipulation of public opinion and elimination of critics, quite literally.
Likely a hermit thrush, I learned, an unusual bird here at this time of year (Drossel)
Here is one of my favorite political reviews of the year that speaks to the choices the powerful have, reminding us of and analyzing a biting poem by Browning in this context, no less. Greg Olear’s column Prevailhas been a recent discovery for me and a source of pleasure. So are the birds, to which I will now return, hidden behind the window frame, camera in hand.
Yesterday was the first night of Hanukkah. The photo below appeared all last week in various Jewish publications, a timely reminder of how close light and darkness, faith and fascism existed in the past. Not surprised it resurfaced this year across many voices. It was taken by the wife of Rabbi Akiva Posner the last night of Hanukkah in 1931. They lived across from the NS headquarters in Kiel, a small Northern German harbor town, and were acutely aware of the rising danger. The family left Germany early, in 1934, and due to the Rabbi’s diligent warnings, the community of ca. 800 Jews in that town lost fewer than 1% to Nazi murder because they heeded the signs without complacency.
May the lights shine in remembrance, warning and consolation for those of us who celebrate this minor holiday.
***
Between the bustle of the holidays and the end-of-year fatigue my capacity to write in-depth musings is limited. Maybe the same is true for your capacity to read, but maybe not. Therefore my compromise for the rest of the year is to link to some texts that I found interesting, or funny, or meaningful – and for whom I had a nice challenge to pick appropriate visual companions.
We’ll start with something that today’s title riffed of: Thoughts on slow birding. The idea, in a nutshell, is to forgo the hunt for ever more, ever rarer species, but instead get your fill on what’s right in front of you out of your windows, at your feeders, in your backyard, on your balcony, the glimpses taken on your walks. Here is the link to the article that favorably reviews a book about just this topic, Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard,” by Joan E. Strassmann, an animal behaviorist and biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis. If you have a bird enthusiast for whom you still need a present this would be handy, but spendy at $27.
The library has the book – wait time in Multnomah County is 14 weeks, however, which tells you something about birders in our communities!
Photographs of diverse sparrows, finches, robins, and one Rufus Towhee were all taken last week in my immediate surround. Slowly and patiently.
Music today is a sweet song of calm and peace from Beethoven’s late string quartets, Op. 135, to go with the “Let’s take it slow” motto. I chose that over the 5th Symphony, although it is claimed that the beginning notes were borrowed from the song of the song sparrow.
The sonnet below was written 135 years ago, and none, none of the beauty that it describes has changed – a kestrel on a fall day, surrounded by the blues and golds of a blazing landscape.
The kestrel I photographed had his soaring and striding already behind him – I had been standing under trees dropping leaves and watching, when s/he came to rest. I don’t share Hopkin’s religious fervor – he was a Jesuit priest and actually dedicated this poem to “Christ our Lord” – but feel in complete agreement when it comes to embracing the beauty of fall.
I leave it with you for the days to come – I’ll take a break for Thanksgiving week and hope to return with more images of blue and gold-vermillion.
The Windhover
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple – dawn – drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, –the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Given the marathon of two in-depth reviews last week I think I’ve used up (almost) all my words for October… let’s just quietly hang out on the beach then.
Afternoon soft light, winds sweetly teasing, tons and tons of gorgeous birds.
You think you could just sit there and bathe in the momentary peace and beauty. That is until you see the crab. Snatched by a pelican.
What comes to mind? The warming of the waters due to man-made climate change. (Or, as is also the case, issues of over-extraction and regulations that contributed to the extinction.)
The Alaska snow crab harvest has been canceled for the first time ever after billions of the crustaceans have disappeared from the cold, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea in recent years. The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery. But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. (Ref.)
It doesn’t help to see the loving pelican parent feeding that crab to junior. What comes to mind?
The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Index, which monitors 32,000 separate populations of species around the world, found that on average they were 69% smaller than they had been in 1970.
Here is a beautiful essay by Bill McKibben with the title A Fast-Emptying Ark – The World Grows Quieter by the Day. He spells out familiar causes – habitat destruction, climate change – but also offers an almost poetic lament.
And with my brain’s tendency for far flung associations, I think of birds bringing harm to other birds. In Oregon this month alone Canada geese, mallards and bald eagles carried the highly pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI virus) across areas where they can infect domestic poultry.
In Florida almost the entire bird stock of a small farm was killed by the virus brought in by an invasion of Egyptian geese – Hurricane Ian produced much standing water in which the virus finds good conditions to multiply. In this particular case, a beloved internet creature – the emu Emmanuel who used to be of “help” creating educational videos about farming – was also afflicted and the owners are trying everything to rescue him. I wonder if such a single instance of an internet celebrity – he really was and for good reason (his owner was wonderfully funny in talking to him) – might alert many people to issues of climate change who would otherwise be uninterested or uniformed.
Let’s hope the loss has some positive consequence attached. Including the insight that who we vote for matters for action or inaction regarding climate change. Voter registration deadline is tomorrow. There are only two states with direct ballot measures on the issue this year – California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 30, the Tax on Income Above $2 Million for Zero-Emissions Vehicles and Wildfire Prevention Initiative, and The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 that would allow the state to sell bonds to fund $4.2 billion for environmental improvements that, according to the proposal, would “preserve, enhance, and restore New York’s natural resources and reduce the impact of climate change.” (Ref.) But who governs states or legislates federally plays of course a huge role in general.
Walk with me. I’m systematically doing the rounds of all my special places that will close certain hiking loops after September 30th, to protect migrating birds. Wednesday I was at Tualatin River National Wildlife Refugee.
Fall already visible in the colors. Oaks turning red, yellow poplar leaves dropping, ponds green with duck grits, the whole landscape begging for water colors. Henk Pander, Erik Sandgren, where are you when we need you?
I had come expecting a few straggling flowers and was not disappointed. You have to imagine them bathed in strong smells of wild Thyme, Camomile and something quite sour, hinting at fall.
The usual suspects were still hanging out or taking off for a spin:
Cedar waxwings were stocking up in the Hawthorne,
And then there was this guy, out of the blue, having me stop in my tracks. An adult male harrier, otherwise known as a “gray ghost”, my learned neighbor told me when I asked for help with identification.
You know how during fire works they wait until the end for one final mega explosion? I felt that nature was celebrating the end of summer with a similar display – the pelicans flew over my head, landed in the water, circled and then spread out. Likely on their way down south. Just a stunning sight, and auditory experience, with their wings flapping so close to me.
Anyone with a tendency to anthropomorphize would swear he was grinning at me…
And yesterday off US Hwy 30, some mix and match of the traveling parties, ibises looking on :
The muskrat decided to get out of the way fast, camouflage and all.
Squirrel, on the other hand, was unperturbed, just watching the pelican show while nibbling.
I felt reminded by nature – and in turn want to remind the many people who are dear to me and having a rough time right now – that we aren’t done yet! Change is in the air.
Music is about the Equinox (9/22/2022,) the mood fit.
Easing back in after a lovely break, some of it spent sitting near the butterfly bush (Buddleja) in the garden, watching hummingbirds, contemplating practical advice from the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Muta Maathai: Do the best you can!
Recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation, the Kenyan scientist who died in 2011, urged relentless involvement in protecting our planet. As a founder of the Green Belt Movement she empowered communities to improve their lives and make the world a greener place.
Here is her allegory that has become kind of a mantra for me:
“The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire. All the animals in the forest come out and they are transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird. It says, ‘I’m going to do something about the fire!’ So it flies to the nearest stream and takes a drop of water. It puts it on the fire, and goes up and down, up and down, up and down, as fast as it can.
In the meantime all the other animals, much bigger animals like the elephant with a big trunk that could bring much more water, they are standing there helpless. And they are saying to the hummingbird, ‘What do you think you can do? You are too little. This fire is too big. Your wings are too little and your beak is so small that you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’
But as they continue to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and it tells them, ‘I am doing the best I can.’
And that to me is what all of us should do. We should always be like a hummingbird. I may be insignificant, but I certainly don’t want to be like the animals watching the planet goes down the drain. I will be a hummingbird, I will do the best I can.”
***
My ongoing resolution:
SMALL DROPLET – BLOGS against the fires around us: I’ll do the best I can.
Random chain of thought on language and politics while I was watching my beloved crows and their babies.
We have a phrase in our household, disaster crow, that loosely refers to someone who attracts accidents or is otherwise stricken by bad luck. The original German was Unglücksrabe, a raven, not a crow. It is well integrated into the German vernacular and originated with a poem, Hans Huckebein, der Unglücksrabe, about a raven who was brought home from the woods by a boy, only to wreck havoc on a household with mean spirited and sinister raven intentions, ultimately hanging himself in a ball of yarn he tried to destroy. All this in a classic poem by writer and famous satirist Wilhem Busch, whose dark, dark stories, often cruel and vile with punitive death at the end, amused generations of Germans, since the lat 1800s.
Young as well as old readers reveled in the mischievous (mis)deeds of various protagonists depicted in early comic strips, almost, the most famous of them Max and Moritz, and rejoiced at their fitting ending, less of a parable than a sadistic lay-out of consequences. What went unmentioned is the in-your-face expressed anti-Semitism, both in Busch’s poetry and his letters. It was only in 1961 and only for some publishing houses that they simply removed the worst stanzas from whole poems, as if they didn’t exist. (I will not give the garbage room, but my German readers can see for themselves in a smart review in the Jüdische Allgemeine.) The public discussions around Busch’s centennial birthday tried their hardest to minimize, often by adding that he attacked others as well, the catholic church included. The desire to revel in texts that celebrate the misfortune of others seems too strong to be abandoned… Schadenfreude as a national pastime.
However, it also serves to extend latent anti-Semitic ideas in a population that was raised on these stories – and we have ample evidence that anti-Semitism is alive and well. Just this week unknown perpetrators cut down 7 trees planted in memory of the victims of Nazi euthanasia programs and forced death marches, kids among them, at the concentration camp Buchenwald in Weimar. Closer to (now) home, Jewish parents were confronted with the new logo of a Georgia school district:
Distribution is now halted, but anti-Semitic incidents in Georgia have more than doubled between 2020 and 2021, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. (Ref.)
And just in case it is seen as isolated incidents: last week every single Republican House member voted against a Neo-Nazi probe of the military and law enforcement. )The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act did pass with the votes of the House Democrats. All they wanted was for the FBI to report the total number of people who were discharged from the military or police because of their links to or support for far-right extremism .)
In any event, what I was really thinking about before getting side lined by politics, was how frequently phrases pick up bird characteristics or are associated with birds in one fashion or another. That’s true for English as well as German.
Here are some: Crazy as a loon (haunting cry), happy as a lark (melodious songs), skinny as a rail (they hide among the reeds in camouflage), like water off a duck’s back (their uropygial glands coat their feathers,) take someone under your wing (fledglings), ugly duckling (before you develop plumage…), night owl, eat like a bird (small quantities,)eagle eye (superior vision, ability to detect prey), birds of a feather flock together, scarce as a hen’s teeth, proud as a peacock, graceful as a swan, dead as a dodo, free as a bird, as a duck to water and, of course, straight as the crow flies. (I found these here; more complicated bits about words associated with birds can be found in Merriam-Webster.)
For an endless list of the equivalent German expressions you can go here. Notable that bad parenting is called having raven parents, funny or unlucky people are called Spassvogel and Pechvogel, respectively. Instead of picking a bone you pluck a chicken, Hühnchen rupfen, and considering someone stupid or mistaken is expressed as “you have a chickadee,” du hast ‘ne Meise, or “you’re obviously chirping”, bei dir piept’s wohl.
Yes, I know, I’m chirping a lot…
Spatzenhirn (sparrow brain), Gänsehaut (goose bumps,) Hühneraugen (corn on the feet/ chicken eyes, literally), Krähenfüsse (crows’ feet in the face) are also known attributes of this writer. A komischer Kauz (weird screech owl) or odd character, after all.
Oh, I revel in applied language. One of my favorites in this context is the German invention of the phrase Nachtijall, ick hör Dir trapsen, a Berlin idiom that is grammatically false. Literally translated it says, nightingale, I hear your heavy footsteps, (an absurd assertion) but the meaning implies something along the lines of being able to tell which way the wind is blowing. Living language blended two lines from a famous song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, about hearing and seeing a nightingale, creating a whole new meaning with a joke.
Then again, maybe we should stick to the short vocabulary of this crow: woo or wow? Click on this link!
Here is the song about the nightingale from Des Knaben Wunderhorn set to music by Mendelsohn.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (German; “The boy’s magic horn: old German songs”) is a collection of German folk poems and songs edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and published in Heidelberg, Baden. The book was published in three editions: the first in 1805 followed by two more volumes in 1808.
The collection of love, soldiers, wandering, and children’s songs was an important source of idealized folklore in the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century. Des Knaben Wunderhorn became widely popular across the German-speaking world; Goethe, one of the most influential writers of the time, declared that Des Knaben Wunderhorn “has its place in every household”.
And why stop with avian attribution? Here is your poetry fix for the weekend.
