Musing 11

Owl from viral video; don’t get one as a pet | Illustration by Ernest Shepard from Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne,“Visiting Owl “- you have those who can spell and those who are wise. | A resplendent owl - inuit art from an old diary.

Yesterday night an owl perched on the lampost outside my house. What an odd place for an owl to land. He hardly needs to check where he is by this lampshine, now does he? I called to my son to come quickly to see this rare sight. He suggested we were low on trees - true the neighbours love chopping them down.

We sometimes hear an owl in the distance, we do have a few parks nearby, but I’ve never seen one in real life, before. Well, yes, I have, at a bird sanctuary which made me sick to my stomach. Birds in cages, shoot me now. Especially, somehow, when they take them out to fly around in an amphitheatre, swooping low over the audience. Trained to entertain.

← beeswax models

The things we do for our children - not even because we want to but because the System tells you too. You might be neglecting them if you don’t let them watch Teletubbies and take them to the zoo. What kind of IQ does it take to understand that wax work (no, not on Tussaud’s scale) warms through parts within the personal system that no other System will ever reach? There are other ways to keep children happy. Inquire with your inner child.

→ Beeswax

The owl turns its head around like a bottle top: I expect it to come off! They really make those freaky moves, off camera, too! It heard me call my son, and it makes another revolution when my son comments on our lack of trees. Is that now 720 degrees? I feel dizzy.

I am, however, no super fan of owls, unlike my son, my mother and too many other people I know. To be honest they freak me out a bit with their googly eyes. And that gobbling up of an entire mouse. Do I prefer the ripping up of a rabbit by a buzzard?! Isn't he a tidy bird, down the hatch in one smooth go, scaly tail and scrabbly feet and prong incisor teeth and all. The life fizzed off the bone, the rest neatly processed into a tidy ball of spare parts, regurgatated via the passage it came. Recylce plants study and learn.

If I don't like owls particularly much (there are exceptions, see top of page) it may also have something to do with Minerva, whom I blame for confusing erudition with wisdom: we call an owl wise, when actually it's night vision (if we keep it symbolical) has much more to do with mental agility (knowledge-based intelligence).

The owl soon flew off, and maybe left me with a new sense of awe, after such a close encounter. What kind of owl could it have been, my son wanted to know. I couldn't really say: it wasn't very large, then again how big would a big owl be in real life? I try not to recall too much of what I saw at the sanctuary...

I even have a Minerva owl in my bookcase. Possibly to pretend I was any good at Latin.

The owl (most likely a tawny owl) has left me wondering what it came to say. I cannot accept it just needed a rest. Or that my street is mice-ridden (though quite possibly. I try not to think of the house two doors down before the renovation - with ferns growing out of the walls - indoors - and three mouse nests in the old man's bedroom).

My mother is exceptionally fond of owls. Maybe because her dear grandmama read to her from Winnie the Pooh....

In a tribute to #malloryblythe - who is making it very hard for me to leave - and who gave me the idea for digging up work you (or someone in your family) did previously; and for the love of my mother, I post up some childhood drawings from around 1947/8, when my mother was about five or six years old. We don't know exactly how old she was when she drew these, for there is no date in her sketch book, but I can say that she wrote at the bottom of the drawing on the bottom left, that the blue around the house and trees was "to protect from disease".
How can such spiritual atunement get buried under a tonne of rubble?

How close can a girl feel to the stars? How protective the constellations are. (Bringers of messages in the parentheses of falling asleep and waking up?)| If the ducks on the pond have no feet it is because those are under water, duh! | Stars near and far: I don't know who the man (?) in the knee-high socks is; possibly her dad, because I think we're past the age of lamplighters (see Saint-Exupéry) by 1948; I imagine the owl came to sit on the lamppost in the bottom right drawing.