“I am not a scientist. But I know something of what the scientist ‘hears’ as a researcher in the music of the birds. It is morning, and the music is well underway. The scientist hears ‘signals’ and records, measures, speculates and evaluates. The results become constellations of data, analysis, speculation, theory, publications.

All of this is useful, but only in relatively narrow contexts. Like the way a knife is useful if you want to make a food item into measured portions for…say, examination, evaluation, comparison, dissection, reconfiguration, and so on. By and large, once most scientists determine that the individual signals do not comprise a ‘language’ (and are, in general, signals about mating or territory dominance, and so on), the -way they encounter these signals- changes so that their capacity to meaningfully explore them becomes extremely limited.

This is as it is with literality in general: it converts depth, breadth, and intimacy into accessible, (usually modestly) manipulable function. The result of a kind of focusing effect; the available character, novelty and momentum of the phenomenon is ‘compressed’ to result in ‘more objective’ manipulables, which can usually be somehow metaphied mechanically, that is to say abstracted into a technologies (including cognitive and research technologies)

I am not a shaman. But I know something of what the shaman ‘hears’ as a biosymb in the music of birds, and the scientist can neither hear nor measure it. It is not analysis that the Shaman performs, so much as it is mimicry. He becomes the senses of the -body- of all the signals, within. He invokes them as himself.

The shaman also may hear ‘signals’, but they are not merely individual signals, unless he chooses this intentionally. The sounds and scents, the movements and qualities of the atmosphere, the light, shadows, color… all this combines to into ‘a field’ and this field is at once intelligent, communicative, personal, and ‘has character’ in a sense similar to that of a person whose rich and distinctive character is felt by all who encounter almost any expression of it. The song of the birds is perhaps the most common audible expression of this field, and even a signal that is being repeated can carry novel … content in each repetition… for reasons having to do with identity and temporality if nothing else.

This ‘field’ carries ‘news’. Not in the sense of tidbits of literal information, either. In an exceptionally complex sense whose structure and nature is more like what it happens to be: music, and more like all it may resemble in terms of how it conveys or even ‘catalyzes’ content: poetry or dreaming. The Shaman is having an experience of becoming an organ within an ambient field of -living information- — none of which is merely abstract, and all of which is deeply relational (that is, occupied with actual beings, specific living places, streams of life, senses of being, and so on).

And this is the difference between simile and metaphor, between presencing and representing, between dreaming and referring to. One of these modes is utilitarian and has a narrow field of application which it too often escapes, pretending to godhood. The other is the natural experience and living relationship with context, identity, intelligence, wonder, and insight. It is good when we can allow them both their natural and proper interplay and sovereignties. The latter is tolerant. The former? It can be. More often it is tyrannical and egoic. Promethean.”

— an anonymous ornithophile