Napoleon's Roads Read Online Free PDF Page B

the crows. Sometimes it seems that they are landing on you somehow – on your arms, perhaps, or shoulders – and taking small pieces, bites, that other people mightn’t see but that leave wounds nonetheless. I know it is unfair to talk about crows in this way. I know that they are just birds, if you can use ‘just’ there at all, and that it is not the birds’ fault that they are the colour they are, or that we humans have this thing about that colour, that blackness, or about the sound they make. But we do have it, and they are that colour, they do make that sound, and they have come to have connotations. Their sound, especially, doesn’t help, nor does their habit, in sheep country, of waiting while a ewe is giving birth, to peck out the eyes of the newborn lambs. I’ll admit that other birds have raucous cries, and other creatures have habits like that. But not so many of them are black, and they are not crows.
    ~
    The heart, spread out in time, wanders through some strange country – deserts, mountain passes, forests, nameless composite cities, but mostly deserts, often deserts. It seems to me that if there could be a map of such places, to show where the heart had been, to show how, alone, it had fought there, survived there, the crows might begin to understand, might begin to be something other than crows. But men – especially men – do not talk of such things. Only sometimes some event, some predictable occurrence will make them speak, if ever they can find the person to speak to – the deaths of their fathers, their mothers, the deaths or illnesses of their lovers, their wives, their children, or even, sometimes, the devastation that a sudden, unanticipated desire can bring, erupting from a place they had not known existed. Then – in broken sentences, unfinishable sentences – they compare notes and experiences; then the possibilities of a Map begin. A landscape seen as a crow might see it; distances measured ‘as the crow flies’.
    ~
    In a film I once saw, of the rituals of a desert tribe in South America – I never did find out what country it was in – a shaman was calling down crows. He was dressed in black, with black wings strapped to his arms, and moving about in a circle, dancing slowly while he chanted, lifting the wings and letting them fall. The sky in the beginning was clear but soon the crows began to arrive, appearing as if out of nowhere. After a time there was a small flock circling about him. When he moved to the centre of the circle he had made, and let his arms fall, they settled on the ground about him and stood there, watching. But what kind of shaman were they watching? The Crow of Loneliness? The Crow of Woundedness? The Crow of Unrelenting Desire?
    ~
    I have a friend who is driven to confess to crimes that he has not committed. That is, he does not think he committed them, although he is harried by dreams that seem to point in their direction, of severed limbs, of disembowelment, of people he has known, or seems in these dreams to have known, weeping inconsolably in familiar rooms. It seems impossible to him that these dreams can have nothing to do with him. It seems to him that if he confesses to a crime – any crime, so long as it is a crime that might somehow fit these dreams – these dreams might go away. I would not have thought about crows at all, were it not for the vision, as he described the persistence of these dreams, of the dark wings circling him, flapping about his shoulders.
    ~
    It is not a good day. Incivilities occur; people act as if their mood were all that matters; things happen that shouldn’t and it’s hard to say why. At last the mail arrives. From one of the envelopes, as I open it, a crow scrambles, all angles and feathers, claws scratching my hands, taking off quickly through the window, circling, returning eventually to perch in a nearby tree. Later, trying to find out about this,