![]() I suppose this whole thing made me feel more certain that the mundane can be heartbreaking, the factual can be poetic, the most simple can be the most vast. This also links learning with poetry for me the more actual facts and history I learned about these animals, the more poetic they felt. This feels very generous on the part of the mourning dove. Mourning doves became the canvas for whatever I was thinking about, and it turned out they’re a very versatile canvas the more I think about them, the more it feels like anything I’m dealing with can be projected onto them - their wings, their livelihood, their mating patterns, whatever. They weren’t about mourning doves much at all. These posts ended up being an outlet for whatever it felt like I was thinking about - death, family, love, growth, community, ghosts. (I don’t think that this feeling is distinct to humans, but I do think that it’s an integral part of being a sentient person.) The desire for closeness combined with the ultimate futility of that desire is to me, a very, very human thing. Hedgehogs in winter huddling together for warmth, only to poke each other with their spikes, consequently get cold, then huddle again for warmth, then poke, etc. ![]() Which is an idea that I can only really explain, weirdly enough, by thinking again of animals. Of course, I’m unsurprised that this reminds me of the phenomenon that I always seem to come back to in my writing - happysad. I found myself drawn to mourning doves’ qualities that resembled, or could be interpreted as, similar to humans:Īnd for some reason, identifying these “human” qualities in non-human animals feels poetic, powerful and interesting. ![]() (I do think animals probably mourn, and maybe they cry or sing when they mourn, but it seems far-fetched to assume that the sound of their mourning mirrors ours.) We have no idea what mourning doves sound like when they mourn - we don’t even know if they mourn! Yet their sound is legible enough to read as a human sound, a sound specific to a human ritual. ![]() Starting even with the name we call them mourning doves because some group of people thought their cries sounded like human mourning. Looking back on these writings from the past few months, I find myself thinking about the desire to see mourning doves through human-tinted glasses. ![]()
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