Bird signs

What is the significance in the flight of a bird? Is it hungry, or fleeing danger, or going to sing? Somehow this movement in relation to a human audience takes on a more signal meaning, responds to a direct call for some indication of the gods' pleasure. It is a motif throughout the Greeks and in the fabulists (Lucretius, Calvino, Pullman, Crowley...) it gets reimagined for an athiest-materialist perspective.

Think of Iphigenia: the case where the bird-sign itself causes the wrath of the goddess, these innocents being killed for the memos of the father. This is merely one kind of sacrifice, though; practically every meal is preceded by another, and indeed everything we eat is alive until we come along with our belly. It just seems curious that of all the things we might investigate, the nature of signs and sacrifice, portents in the stars and the flight of birds have fallen under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, dismissed as superstition or crank studies. Whereas the ways in which we control and direct nature are the acceptable sciences, and look where this has got us. It has so degenerated the health of the world that we cannot help but notice what it is telling us--warning signs, melting ice, desertification.

So much for what not to do, that seems clear enough, and God speaks what we ought to do--when we have access to the good, the just, the right thing. Otherwise it all is so much Socratic perplexity, wonder without action. But along with this, there is the question of what to do with the wisdom revealed by God--there, in that word, is the western answer, it seems to me: to reveal, to publish it, sing praises, put infidels to the sword, and raise astonishing churches. On the other hand, with a sense of restraint, a caste culture, comes a more restricted approach to knowledge, mystery cults, allegorical interpretations by an elite of scribes, hermeticism--some things that can't even be written down, and must be transmitted from master to disciple, or still more, the transcendent experience, which cannot be communicated at all but direct from the God.

And there seems to be some truth to this way of going about things, too--and as Mr Grenke says, even with the most open course of study imaginable, even here a de facto hermeticism upholds in that you can hear some ideas and yet it is as if you never heard them, they just so do not fit with what you are prepared to understand--so that it is not the knowledge that is closed, somehow it is you. This in the context of Plato's statement, in the Meno or somewhere, about all truth having some resemblance as to its origin, so that by the illuminating apprehension of one truth, you are led or can trace that to all the rest. But still, it must be demanded over and over--where do you find that way of becoming open to it? Can you only rely, with Kierkegaard, on the God for this moment, or can you induce some beneficial perplexity, starting a chain of questioning whose links at last begin to aspire to at least one bona fide truth?