Owls

While the faces of other birds of prey are forward-projecting and in a certain sense aerodynamic, like an extension of the body in flight, with beaks like arrowheads, the owl’s face is flat and round, and its beak is small, not unlike a nose. The flat and round character of the face is emphasised by the circle of feathers that surrounds it, and this, that a space seems to have been cleared for the face, rather like a clearing in the woods, makes the owl’s face look naked, almost like that of an old man. Presumably this is why in popular belief the owl is viewed as a sinister bird, linked to the powers of the dead: when an owl hoots near the house, someone there will die soon. The other birds of prey are just birds of prey. Though it was said of the eagle that it could carry off small children, and it was considered dangerous, it was never sinister. This was so because the eagle is at one with itself, its shape and its actions form a unified whole, and this unity, however cruel – as when the powerful talons rip open a body and the yellow beak is red with blood and the eyes stare inhumanly straight ahead, soulless and cold – is predictable. The sinister is linked to the unpredictable, the ambivalent, that which veers from one thing to another. The owl is a bird of prey, but its face resembles that of an old man. And although the owl’s eyes too have a fixed stare, they are large and round, and besides, owls have eyelids, they blink. I saw an owl once, it was in a wildlife park, and though I wasn’t shocked when it suddenly blinked, it was still unsettling. I had never thought of the fact that birds never blink. When this owl, it was an eagle owl, as large as an infant, suddenly blinked, it veered from the birdlike to the human. Together with its perfect calm, this gave the impression that it knew something, that it possessed a form of knowledge, deeper and truer than everything that surrounded us, the asphalted, sunlit walk past the cages, the kiosks selling ice cream and soft drinks and hot dogs, the parents dragging around little carts with backpacks or children in them. This is what has made the owl the companion of Minerva in Roman mythology; she is the goddess of wisdom, music and poetry. When Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk, he was thinking of wisdom. This can be taken to mean that wisdom or insight follows the event as night follows day, but it can also be understood as saying that wisdom belongs to the night, the dark, the obscure, the sleeping, that which lies near to the dead yet isn’t dead, the borderland where owls roam in popular belief, when with their hoots they warn of the arrival of the dead in the world of the living. And one could certainly say that owls’mythological connection to poetry derives from the same borderland representation. The most striking thing about owls, however, is not what they represent, but what they are, in themselves, as birds. For none of the notions that coalesce around the owl’s appearance, the eerie world it appears to glide in and out of, belong to the nature of owls, which is as indifferent and as instinctive as any bird of prey. Owls live by killing small animals, which they rip with their claws and swallow whole. Those parts of the animal that they don’t digest, such as bones and skin, they regurgitate in those characteristic balls which one can come across on the forest floor. Everything about owls is geared towards this, even the wreath of feathers around the face, since this wreath captures sounds like a funnel, not unlike the way old-fashioned ear trumpets worked, and since sounds are what owls primarily use to orient themselves when they hunt. Their ears are asymmetrical, which makes them better able to localise the origin of sounds. Owls’night vision is up to a hundred times keener than ours, and their plumage is so extremely soft that their flight is as good as soundless. These characteristics enable them to fly silently through the forest in utter darkness without bumping against tree trunks or branches, and to find their prey on the ground, which receive no warning before the owl’s claws sink into them. The owl is nothing other than this: a soundless and highly effective bird of prey. If the true task of poetry is revelation, this is what it should reveal, that reality is what it is. That the forest, with its dense spruces and its snow-covered floor, is real. That the falling dusk is real. That the owl taking off from the branch and flying across the field is real. That its soundless wingbeats are real, that the invisible and to us inaudible sound waves that reach its ears are real. That the abrupt change in its flight is real, that the swoop down towards the ground with its claws first is real, that the mouse that the claws dig into is real. That the red of the blood against the grey-white of the mouse’s pelt is real as the wings beat and the owl rises through the darkness and in between the tree trunks, which a moment later it vanishes among. UVn2fxUOXvsXbbeFq3FcyjD92IrFz0Bms8b4b8GxcJg5yMZTxAgowaDMgdZAc8j8