Sometimes
24 January, 2008

Sometimes, it is easy to speak. The words just fall out and you don’t even have to think about the way you move your lips or the processes involved in forming the sounds in your mouth and throat. But just imagine if your mouth was glued together. Not literally, of course, but frozen, clamped together by…what? Fear, embarrassment, disgust?

It can happen. One day, long ago or far off into the future, I don’t know, I found myself talking to a friend. We were, to all intents and purposes, walking down a busy street. It seemed like daylight, as I recall, but it could have been that the street lights and reflected glory of the capitalist saviours that line our shopping streets have given me that impression. It could have been midnight. Although, you would have thought I would have been tired, or drunk, and I don’t remember being either.

No matter. Details are, by their very definition, tethers for the spirit. So, my friend and I, we walked and talked, observing other people on the street, and then forgetting them as our linguistic flights of fancy struggled to get into the air and then arced into the gutter, describing a parabola of empty digressions and pointless assertions. At some point, while thinking of what to say next, I traced one of these curves, and that was when I saw it.

A pigeon. I don’t have an aversion to pigeons, you must understand. They are fine birds, in their natural habitat. Our particular brand of urban slime does not suit them, however, and, gripped at the throat, I stared in horror-filled fascination at a bird, hobbling around on a pair of stumps (his talons being missing) and his scrawny body showing through greasy, unkempt feathers that stuck out in clumps like the branches of a Christmas tree at the end of the festive season.

Not a pretty sight. One of his (why I am ascribing a gender to this ambling pile of litter is an interesting question in itself) eyes was covered by a puss-filled scab, which only served to enhance the impression of an animal on the edge of existence. Death would, surely, have been preferable, even to an animal that has not been programmed to think beyond his survival instinct.

I don’t know why I was so entranced, as one can see such unpleasantness on almost any busy city street, except that I realised I felt more sorry for the bird than I did for the homeless man who sat in a nearby doorway, slumped over a cardboard sign. I suppose the argument runs that the bird is a victim of our nature-tampling activities and would not, ordinarily, live in such a concrete wasteland, whereas the homeless man does have choices. Lots of them. So, it is reasoned, he does not deserve our sympathy to the same degree.

However. The pigeon doesn’t actually have to live in the city. It (he, whatever) could fly away to a wooded glade in an archetypal pastoral scene. But it takes the decision to stay on balance, based on a genetic algorithm handed down from generation to generation. The thing is, although the chances of being maimed by traffic and contracting horrible diseases are high in an urban sprawl, natural predators, which it is, after all, primarily programmed to avoid, are less common. And it is easier to hide from those that are there in the endless brown-grey cliffs. There is also the fact that, in the city, food is more plentiful to consider, even during winter, when it is less cold than in our pastoral scene.

The homeless man, on the other hand, could be on the edge of psychiatric illness, an alcoholic, a victim of crime or a property crash. Perhaps he is divorced and the subsequent emotional and financial strain left him without a house and without a job. Once out of the system, it is almost impossible to get back in, as it is entirely geared to ushering in the new and the young, not the deadbeats with broken spirits and gnarled skin. It could be that he is stuck, more of sinned against than sinning, and cannot break free.

So I turned those thoughts over in my mind, while my friend continued to talk about nothing at all as if it was everything that had ever been, and concluded that everything is not what it seems. Sometimes.