There is a gull-like bird which nests upon a certain island. There, it nearly absolutely prefers to nest in the branches of one specific tree, which I believe is found nowhere else. The tree exudes a thick, oily, glue-like sap, and is also covered in thin, hard, foot-long thorns.

The birds die by the thousands. Pierced by thorns, blinded, glued to branches and other detritus, their wings stuck together, their feathers destroyed. And they keep going back to precisely these trees. You can imagine the chance their young have. Some, however, apparently manage to survive.

Now, I know that a human watching this would marvel at the blatant and apparent stupidity of these birds, yet humans do something incredibly similar — and we do this far more broadly, such that it affects nearly all that we think and act upon.

With few exceptions, we profoundly prefer, and hallow, even, the most toxic and poisonous of the results of our representational capacities, and worse, we think this genius — while we die by the thousands or millions and the bases of life on earth are torn apart by our strident myopia. Because we favor peculiar relationships with language, knowledge, and ideas.

At least the birds are not ripping the entire web of life to shreds. Their primary effect is to thin their own numbers and sacrifice themselves. I wonder if they think the trees grand, or holy… powerful… or safe? I wonder if they see the promise of ‘great progress’ in making nests in these trees. Perhaps it is all of this and more, for even when clearly dying of sticky, irrevocable adhesions and piercings, the birds return to the trees time and again, much as we do to models of ourselves and the world which, quite literally, appear eager to dine on the ever swelling sacrifices of living beings and places in their name. And this is where the story becomes more acute as regards its ability to reveal our own failings to us.

There is something interesting going on in the trees on this island. They have somehow developed the capacity to attract and destroy the birds. One might wonder how this is useful to the trees. Firstly, the birds defecate, which provides some degree of fertilization or nutrient distribution in the soil. But nothing beats a dead body. The trees are effectively consuming the birds, albeit very slowly. They attract them, most probably with a chemical that mimics something the birds find compelling. As they die, all over the island, their bodies presumably nurture these trees (as well as other local flora and fauna).

Why should our relationships with certain linguistic forms and ideas result in piles of bodies, human or otherwise? When they do, we can begin by remembering the story of these birds and their favored roosts. Our ideas are prospering at the expense of all other life on Earth. The trees seem kind in comparison. They cannot attack the sky, or the water. Our ideas do. They attack everything on Earth, without cessation, in more and more ways as time proceeds. This includes us, and our putative hope of intelligence.

The trees, at least, were not invented by the birds. We are even more confused than they, for in seeing them, we startle at their ignorance, entirely overlooking the dire reflection of our own strident myopia. A reflection whose countenance should be familiar, and whose hyperbolic inflations should never for a moment escape our attention or amendment.