The Crow's Song pt1

I walked alone in the woods one night. It was dark, as it should be at night, and a crisp wind blew, striking me dead in the face. It hurried around me, apologetically, and went about its way; apparently it had business elsewhere. I walked through this wood, and heard the raven’s cry; wait, no, it’s a crow. I wonder why the crow never gets as much respect as the raven. The Raven is always the one people seem to have a hard-on for. It’s like the Raven is the high end bird of choice for pagans and writers, and the Crow is the ghetto-brand bird. I suppose the Raven is thought to be more dramatic because it often flies alone, whereas Crows fly in huge hordes, descending en masse wherever they go. Rather common, people think. Of course, there was the movie, “the Crow” which obviously featured a Crow, but when the character was adopted by the wrestler Sting, he became the Raven.

I was jolted out of this revelry as I looked up and noticed that I was surrounded by what seemed to be thousands of crows. They were everywhere; it being autumn, I could see each and every one of them on the leafless trees of this deserted wood. They most certainly could see me, because each of them had an eye trained on me, relentlessly staring me down. As I pondered this new event, the Crows began to sing. Well, most people call it cawing, but to me it was singing, a million crows singing at once directly into my consciousness everything I had ever done and would do. I know there where one million because I heard each and every song individually, even as they sung at once I processed every note and every note was a symphony unto itself. It overwhelmed me so that I fell to my knees, clutching my head to keep it from exploding from everything that was rushing into me. The song of the horde caused a sort of orgasmic implosion of knowledge into my heretofore empty mind. I had previously thought that I knew things. I thought that I knew quite a bit about the world and the way things work, and why we love and hate and kill just to bring new life into the world. I had thought that I was pretty up to speed with such things, but now I knew that I knew nothing about the most important subject to me. Everything I gleaned from the Symphonic Crows I already knew, but never acknowledged, and so now my mind was truly alive with knowledge of self and other.

I opened my eyes when the singing stopped; whether it was an eternity or a fraction of a second, I cannot tell you. I was physically unharmed, but as I looked around I thought I had gone blind, for everything was black. Then I looked up and saw that the trees were empty. The blackness before me shifted slightly, and thousands of shining eyes trained themselves on me again. The horde was still there, but now they shared the earth with me, so close I could touch them, and spreading for what seemed like miles in every direction. They stared unblinking at me, almost expectantly, as if they were waiting, waiting for me to give a command. I felt different, like the years of "adulthood" had been sandblasted off of me, and something shiny and valuable underneath emerged from that shell of my self. I looked into their shining black eyes, and in their reflection saw that my eyes too were shining Ebony. My own dark pits were reflected at me, and in them I saw the symphony of discord and harmony that my legion had sung to me, the symphony of everything the human soul can contain. It was a beautiful melody.

I did not feel as if the birds were other now; I felt as if I flowed through them, as much as my blood flows through every cell in my body. They were I and I was them, and by extension, the entire forest was contained within me. I was content, as I sat and communed with the crows, singing them little songs to repay them for the songs they sang me. Through the myriad eyes and senses I now possessed, I felt an other that was as altogether familiar a it was foreign. I looked up and saw yet another crow staring at me, this one white as a snow bank, with a similar disposition. The crow’s crystal blue eyes gored me, bringing the cold in with them like an inconsiderate child leaving the front door open on a freezing winter morning. I shivered and rose to my feet. As the shiver ran through me and reached the ground, it rippled through my assembled horde as if they were a pool of ebon water with me at their center. The white crow flew down and hovered before me, daring me to defy it. Then to my horror, it opened its beak and began to sing, sing a song of discord, tragedy and woe. It was a macabre masterpiece of misery, mutilation, and morbidity. It rattled me to my core, because it was horrible, yes, but more so because it was familiar. I knew this feeling as intimately as I knew my own mind, and worst of all, I knew that somehow I had, or would, cause this nightmare to happen. I was the instrument of my own destruction, whether in the present or past I did not know, but it was clear. The white crow’s cacophonous song filled all of the spaces the other crows didn’t, like a mad storm looking for victims. The song roamed the woods, and then settled on me, and into me. I was not aware of myself, but when the song was over, the white crow was on my shoulder. None of the other crows had touched me, but the white one sat on my shoulder, as if he alone were my mascot.

The coldness left me, and I felt as one again. The Black Crows and the White Crow were all me, somehow, and I was all of them now. I began my travels anew. As I took my first step, when my boot hit the ground every bird took to the air as if they were an extension of my own self… every bird, of course for the one that decided that it would be different. The rumble of one million crow’s wings beating the air easily dwarfed the rumble of any helicopter. The white crow kept its perch as steadfastly as if it had been born there. The sum of all of my sins, faults, doubts and transgressions decided that it would stay closest to my heart. In retrospect, I could not think of a better place for my ivory cohort to be. Together we… I… continued on our journey, a cloud of crows moving towards the plains, with my white friend and me at its center.