The Crow Manifesto

We're all backward. Our machines are all modern and shit - but our minds - our minds are primitive.

James Mangold, Cop Land

'Primitive peoples are polyglots, poets, songsters and taxonomists', writes Allan Cameron in his book In Praise of the Garrulous. The primitive, as its etymology suggests, marks the first, the prime, and the original. Indeed, one only need look casually at the synonyms for 'prime' (main, chief, key, central, foremost, of the highest quality) to see that maybe we have been duped into believing the primitive somehow inferior to the modern. 

Crows are primitive. Man is not. And yet crows can fly. Man cannot.

In what way then is a crow (or any bird or insect for that matter) inferior to man? In that it chooses not to destroy and pollute the land that feeds and shelters it?

When man taps into the primitive once more, he will slowly regain the power of flight, as he will his intimate relationship to the Earth, its plants and its animals. But to do so requires a thorough re-appraisal of what modernity is doing to him, and has already done to him. This re-appraisal is at the root of these existential memos. 

In particular, man needs to reasses 4 things: Balance, Movement, Growth, and Space. And reassess them carefully, within the greater paradigm of the Earth and not just within the broken economic system of the West.

As Bruce Chatwin implies in Songlines, his study of the Aborigines of Australia, the difference between modern man and primitive man is one of outlook. Modern man is forever changing the world to suit his dubious vision of the future, whereas primitive man puts all his mental energies into keeping it the same. 

The word 'same' is key here as it has intonations of 'togetherness' (from the Proto-Indo-European root sem- 'one', also 'as one', also related to Sanskrit samah, 'even, level, similar, identical'. In other words, where primitive peoples recognize their insinuation within the very integument of the Earth 'as one', modern man does not. 

The issue at hand (or even, at foot) is one of roots.




And to me, the men in Mexico are like trees, forests that the white men felled in their coming. But the roots of the trees are deep and alive and forever sending up new shoots.

D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent