Link to article: On Seabirds And Sleep.
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[[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] > We keep the exhibition space open for anyone who wants to use it. We never take anything down: the only person allowed to remove a piece is the one who put it there. > > Many pieces stay up forever. There's nobody to take them down. > **We Don't Know Where We Left The Birds** > //(T. N. Kumar, 1987, Crayon on Corrugated Iron)// > DCAT-E1058 [[=]] the sunset here is that weird palette of a huge golden circle on the horizon and then the regal blue of tired clouds with spatterings of black inky seabirds they crawled out of the desert (this is odd for seabirds, yes) and screamed pentathol notes we took one from the sky by plucking it in midair it started leaking when we cut it and the pitch dribbled out of the incision and coated us all in a deep darkness which despite all soap and fire never got free of our cloth or knife or skin. [[/=]] > Oh, yeah. I remember Kumar. Decent enough chap. I was always confused about the crows, though - I mean, he calls them seabirds right at the beginning. I guess he just thought that since the crows were next to the sea, they were seabirds? Whenever I asked him about it, he just shook his head, you know, kind of grimaced a little and walked away. > > Last I saw him was '92. Did he kill himself? I mean, that's just what I heard, anyway. You'd know better than I would, right? [[=]] the pitch stuck to us, an odd combination of resonance and resignation caused and caustic meant it was not ever going to leave our hands. we had killed a seabird and you should not kill anything which flies if you cannot do the trick yourself it rung in our minds as we bravely leapt into unconsciousness but when we closed our eyes and opened our minds all that we saw was that huge golden circle and regal blue and countless black seabirds being pulled by us down through huge pipes like we were fracking the skies and driving these living thinking beautiful things down into the dirt and caging them in the most horrible of prisons and forcing them into those human simulacra we did not get as much sleep as we should have preferred but none of us thought to ever say a word. [[/=]] > Man, that guy was a ghost. He'd kind of... I dunno, "shimmer", I guess you'd call it? He shimmered a bit when the light hit him just right. > > I mean, obviously the birds were probably metaphors for something, but I'm not sure what. [[=]] we could not keep our pupils dilated because the sun was always at the edge of our vision and so we tended to have to squint even in the night for the glare was not quite blinding but it made the corners of our eyes itch like they were being salted by malicious things which hated us for perfectly understandable reasons corvids make me uncomfortable but not because we killed so many it was actually in my childhood when I saw a crow ram into the side of the wall of my grandfather's old shed which is actually what I am writing this on since he died in august of last year so I tore down the shed and the bump that the crow left is almost impossible to see but I can tell the crow wriggled and it made me sad to see a thing which used to be animate slowly but surely fall out of its own mind and into that hypothetical great beyond which even now I don't think I can quite bring myself to believe in because when that crow died there was no soul spirited from the body when the light left its panicked eyes I knew that it did not go anywhere because a candle flame snuffed out does not go to the source of all heat and fire. [[/=]] > It didn't quite constitute an information leak. Out of context, you couldn't deduce anything of a sensitive nature. So no, it wasn't punishable. And as far as I'm aware, it wasn't us that killed him. > > It was certainly concerning that they took the brain. [[=]] of late the dreams have changed a little bit from what they used to be because I no longer go to the sunset and there aren't any birds there only men of iron and steel who are riding on steeds made of copper and formaldehyde and the whole thing just reeks and the stench of arcing makes me want to vomit but I keep my mouth shut tight and the contents of my stomach ram against the inwards facing side of my teeth and I coat the graves below in digestive juice but there is a way to stop the awful things that we created, because a free crow flies higher and further and greater than uncountable crows in cages so we, that is, I and the rest of the seers of seabirds in sleep went to try and save the rest of the dreamspace from the awful things that the fracking of the sky had brought into existence the whole industrial machine could be undone from the core of it if only we could recall that vital piece of information which for some reason was the one thing somehow not etched deep pitch in our heads - we don't know where we left the birds. [[/=]] > He told me the birds were in Memoriam. I never really understood what he meant by that. But, well, y'know. Poets don't write to be understood. [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]