Falcon Read Online Free PDF

from beak to claw with rarest jewels . . . but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token
and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day.
Bogey and the black bird: Humphrey Bogart, the Maltese Falcon and their con- joined shadow in a publicity shot
for John Houston’s
1941 film.
While driving the plot, the Maltese Falcon remains a mys- tery. Although it reveals the characters of the people in the film
– all of whom desire or fear it – and the worlds in which they live, it is a mute object that reveals nothing more about itself. Likewise, that Central Park encounter at dawn tells us almost nothing about peregrines. But it tells us much about the writer herself and about the era she lived in, revealing some intriguing contemporary attitudes towards nature and history. In wartime America, it seems, falcons could be viewed as mystical manifest- ations of an age of theriomorphic gods and ancient ritual. But falcons carried many other meanings, too. Falcon-enthusiasts such as Edge saw them as living fragments of primeval wilderness

imperilled by the relentless encroachment of modernity. Writing about falcons in this period is commonly shot through with a gloomy romanticism akin to that displayed in the works of many contemporary anthropologists who saw the cultures they studied as exotic, primitive, vital and ultimately doomed by historical progress.
And falcons could be icons of history, as well as wild nature. Way back in 1893 a popular magazine described the ancient sport of falconry as having an ‘astonishing hold on the popular imagination of Americans’ with the image of a hooded falcon ‘as firmly impressed on the popular mind as that of St George and
The falcon as a token of a
medieval Golden Age: a detail from a 14th-century fresco by Simone Martini at the church of San Francesco, Assisi.
the Dragon’. 2 And the Second World War heightened this ability of falcons to conjure a lost golden age of medieval splendour. As America increasingly saw itself as the guardian of a European high-cultural heritage threatened by the dark forces of fascism, trained falcons made frequent appearances in Hollywood epics about the Second World War set in the Technicolor Middle Ages. And wartime falcons could also be seen as the biological counterparts of warplanes: heavily armed natural exemplars of aerodynamic perfection. This notion of falcons fascinated the military. It even led to real falcons being incorporated in defence systems – with varying success, as chapter Four shows. And, making all-too apparent the fact that falcon myths can carry real-world consequences, many Americans, viewing nature with crystalline conviction through their cultural lenses, inserted falcons into their own systems of morality: they viewed them as rapacious murderers of song- birds, enemies to be shot on sight.
All these stories are the falcon-myths of 1940s east coast America. Calling them myths only seems odd because most are still being told. Today, falcons remain precious icons of wild nature; they remain elegant icons of medievalism; some still damn them for their ‘cruelty’ to other birds, and American f-16 Fighting Falcon jets are familiar silhouettes in many skies. As the saying goes, myths are never recognized for what they are except when they belong to others.
the falcon and the cock
Myths, then, are stories promoting the interests and values of the storytellers, making natural, true and self-evident things that are merely accidents of history and culture. They anchor human concepts in the bedrock of nature, assuring their audiences that
their own concepts are as natural as rocks and stones. The process is termed naturalization , nature being taken as the ulti- mate proof of how things are. Or how things should be : myths have a normative element, too. Sometimes this is obvious: the Kyrgyz proverb ‘feed a crow whatever you like, it will never become a falcon’, for example, makes inequalities between