We can’t have a properly ghoulish Halloween season without mentioning its literary personification: Edgar Allan Poe. And one cannot speak of Poe without thinking of “The Raven” — equal parts poem, scary story, and meditation on grief. Here’s the gist: A widower, who is also our narrator, sits mourning his deceased wife, when a raven breaks into his house. The narrator makes all kinds of appeals to the raven to either explain his presence or get out, but the raven says only: “Nevermore.” Well, you can win any argument that way. Those who played last Wednesday’s Strands board were treated to a tribute theme for the poem. THE RAVEN was the spangram, and terms from the poem’s opening lines filled in the themed words: MIDNIGHT, DREARY, PONDERED, WEAK and WEARY. These are also the five words I use to describe myself in a job interview. Shortly after playing Strands that day, I picked up the week’s issue of The New Yorker and happened to land on a feature about the language of birds, in which I learned that “ravens really can say ‘nevermore.’” Further research led me to the discovery that ravens can also follow it with “waka waka,” which means it’s possible that throughout the entire poem, an episode of “The Muppet Show” was playing in the background. It should be no more remarkable to hear a raven say “nevermore” than it is to hear a parrot say “Polly wanna cracker?” We’ve always trained birds raised in captivity to mimic us. Still, the New Yorker article seemed to suggest otherwise — that birds have something remarkable to teach us about how language can be used. That Poe’s Raven had something to say, or even grieve, too. One of my favorite artworks is “Dawn Chorus” by Marcus Coates, a British performance artist. In it, he transformed human voices into an avian dawn chorus through a painstaking process of slowing hours of birdsong down, having humans mimic those sounds, and then speeding the human voices up to bird tempo. The effect of the piece is staggering, because it gives one the sense that humans, too, could be the dawn chorus. If only we tried to exist at a different frequency. I can’t be certain that we gain anything by trying to meet the birds on their level. The Raven certainly didn’t meet the narrator on his level — he just sat on the pallid bust of Pallas above the chamber door the entire time. But if we tried to communicate more like the birds — repeat ourselves, vary our tones in context and revel in the sounds we make rather than the words we make them into — could our own language evolve? Or are we consigned to shouting into a one-way void that spits out only the word “Nevermore … waka waka!” Brain Tickler |
