The Great Gull Giveaway: Insight & Vision on the Wing

The meaning of life is to find your gift; the purpose of life, to give it away.

Pablo Picasso


Not so much the gift of second sight as the gift of first, primary...  primal sight.
 
Rainer Maria Rilke

Insight and vision are not so much direct gifts but something that one works hard to develop, gifts indirectly then, of a certain synergy of Being.  They are qualities of seeing that require solitude, space, and silence (and a little wildness) in order to mature and grow. Wild animals, especially certain birds like the gull, have these qualities of seeing in abundance, since they are still rooted in the healthy soil of the open seas and skies.

If 'thinking' is a function of space and openness, and circulation, then there are few creatures that can think as well as the gull. For people however, having largely filled in these 'spaces' with a superficial and noisy culture (and accorded themselves a correspondingly superficial and noisy reality), insight and vision are difficult to come by. Moreover, in a society of the specatcle where the image is everything - the image being the two dimensional surface - there is very little if any depth to see into or to en-vision. The third dimension which offers the possibility of revelation simply does not exist. Or if it does, then it is like a black hole that does not yield its light so readily, if at all. In this kind of opaque and top-heavy society where transparency is not promoted (and obfuscation is, via the headline and the image), and only one side of the product is ever displayed as 'the finished product' - vision is reduced to mere looking, and sight to mere gawping.

I do not see any longer, I simply ogle and gawp.

Our natural settings have been replaced with unnatural ones and our senses have atrophied accordingly, losing their organicity and flight, and with it, the ability to peer behind the scenes. The in-your-face-ness of the consumer society also means that we are confronted more and more with the ob-scene, an artificial scene so up front and invasive that it constitutes a veritable violation of one's very essence. We no longer move of our own accord, mentally or physically, but are carried. Our thought processes are largely made up of what big business, television and social media tells us. We are so brainwashed by machines that pollute and destroy, and which invade the space of our capacious bodyminds, that we rarely question this state of affairs, preferring instead to just go with the flow. Yet, as the gull very well knows, only dead fish go with the flow.

So, in the spirit of seeing, and of giving, and of resuscitating, here is the cry of the gull...

La joie m'etrangle; puis je me mets a crier. C'est un cri inhumain - on dirait plutot le cri d'un goeland.

Kenneth White, En Toute Candeur


[...]
squawking, squawking!
no voice of dumb eternity yours
but a barbary tongue firm-cased
in flesh and bone
alive and antic
grotesque and graceful
o bird I see and hear
I feel my body bending to your shape
your throat is mine...

Kenneth White, Precentor Seagull