Casa Goofy has a new tenant, or member, or should I say inmate, because he doesn’t pay rent, or get a vote on anything, and he has to be caged. He’s a Cockatiel, (that’s a bird, not a sex toy) named Jojo.
I had goats for awhile but they ate me out of house and home, I had ducks and geese, and someone stole them. I had pond systems but the mosquitoes annoyed the neighbors so I dried them up. Then I started over using solar pumps to make ten ft. high water falls to aerate the water.
The standard dog and cat was ok for awhile, but something was missing. I want one of everything I said, but I’ll settle for just one more representative of another species. There was a big debate about that and the extravagant side won. No it didn’t win, it SETTLED. It wanted an octopus that could predict stock prices. I wanted a big Amazon Grey that could do trig and solve Rubrik’s cube faster than your honor student, but the price was out of sight. Ok maybe just something different.
Enter Jojo. I keep him in my aerie, the top half of a VW bus (hereinafter referred to as the camper) on top of my school bus parked under a mesquite tree in the back yard. The branches of the tree cover the back end of the big outdoor bird cage I have set just outside the roof hatch of the camper, and the branches also shield the back end of the camper where I sleep and, just past my feet, keep the small indoor cage.
From the rear camper door, I can observe the tree which some summer mornings has birds in it, and/or my cat, Tiger, swinging from the tallest tiniest branches, from the roof hatch I can observe (Yogi Bera said “You can observe a lot just by watching.”) clouds and moon and stars, sun and rain, and from the side window I can keep watch over the golf course for sudden explosions of beauty, and alert the neighborhood before it disintegrates in them. Nobody pays me for this, it’s just something I do, I mean, what the heck, it’s a job, keeps ya sane.
Jojo was really LOUD when his owners showed him to me, so, as a joke, I told him to shut up and was so surprised when he did, and started making softer sounds. And now when I come in he changes his song from shrill to chirps and gurgles. When I get up he comes to my side of the cage and stares at me and chirps. His vocalizations have become extremely complicated and varied, kind of like he might be imitating a pop song or two and some random bird calls he heard during the day, and trying to say something himself that's VERY important....so insistent and patterned and complicated that I feel like these natives in the jungle when Max Roach set up his drum set on the shore just to see how they'd respond if he played for them. He had a native interpreter with him and when the native drummers responded, the interpreter told him, "They are saying, 'We understand that you are trying to talk to us but we don't understand your language.'" EGG ZACTLY!!!!
I’ve never fully understood my growing fascination with the intelligence of nature. Is it that as I enter my anecdotage I get smart enough to appreciate non human forms of intelligence (and consequently frequently (and often) shut the side window to the ominivorous beauty of the dawn fearing the cosmos may swallow my ass whole, or is it that as I lose competence, common ground and bargaining power with my own species, I have no choice but to turn to other species for comfort? O all of that, of course.
In the morning I open the rear door behind Jojo’s cage and the sunlight comes streaming in thru a shade screen curtain and dead mesquite branches and you can hear the sound of falling water from the solar pump I have rigged up over the closest pond to the bus. And Jojo screeches in his louder calls to distant relatives in forests thousands of miles away, and I imagine he’s part of a flock of parrots beside a waterfall on a tropical isle.
Recently I’ve had a resurgence of beating my head against the wall of the world, because I can’t get Casa Goofy to a place where it can take care of itself after I die. It won’t, in its present state, be able to provide housing and a website for an international exchange of art and artists, or provide an art-in-nature laboratory, or have an advisory board that can lobby for large scale green energy solutions for the community….none of the above. It will fall into the hands of the same banality gang of real estate brokers and gentrification dancers who gobbled up and shit out every art enterprise in the inner city I was involved with for the past thirty years. I want revenge, revenge for crimes against consciousness, the best kind of revenge, which is living well and doing good. I want to speak and be heard, answered and challenged. (I think that’s called a conversation.) But I was recently told by a lot of BIG SILENCES from some editors, and a disappointing reply from another, that I didn’t have a place at the public table, that my enterprise would not even be discussed, would not even qualify for a refusal. Not that I was ever even entitled to life, even, not that I shouldn’t be grateful, even, for a whole bunch of ALMOSTS…but it’s understandable that so many incomplete projects is maddening and saddening, also understandable that I’d be totally vulnerable to the maddening, and that the shit I’ve seen in national politics and in particular in the so called arts district (I wish they’d end the cognitive dissonance and turn it into Las Vegas for godsakes) the past thirty years could give anybody PTSD, and it’s natural to want revenge, but the first and only and most feasible thing I can try to enhance (if never to control) is my own consciousness, if by no more convenient and immediate medium than by continuing my study of the intelligence of nature. And so, once again, from STAGE RIGHT
ENTER JOJO the birdbrain…you must understand this is not pejorative, everybody’s brain has its own particular genius…and such a cheerful fellow he is, especially when the back door of the camper is open. His louder screeches can be heard all over the lot. And he seems to not only know I’m there, but is perfectly willing, ready and able to challenge me to some kind of duel, the rules of which I don’t understand. They involve running back and forth across the bottom of the cage and hollering nonsense syllables. OK maybe I do understand. That’s me trying to talk to an editor. That's me trying to go fast enough in the rat race that I can spin up into outer orbit. So just because I don’t know exactly what he’s saying, doesn’t mean it isn’t a conversation, eh, Max Roach?
He starts chattering in low chortles like a tiny Model T trying to start, and then he sounds like a catbird doing imitations of other bird calls. Then it doesn’t matter much that we don’t understand his language. There’s a lot of music in foreign languages that can still be enjoyed even if we can’t translate any of the words, IF we’re grateful for what we DO have and understand, within limits, (which is always a hassle).
Jo Jo raises his right foot as he sings, sometimes pulling his claw together, as if to point out and savor each purposeless note, becoming both critic, choir and conductor, and the whole neighborhood rings with mimicry and sympathy. I think about letting him go, sometimes, wondering if he could survive, but I still keep him, mostly, I think, to remind me of myself.
He starts chattering in low chortles like a tiny Model T trying to start, and then he sounds like a catbird doing imitations of other bird calls. Then it doesn’t matter much that we don’t understand his language. There’s a lot of music in foreign languages that can still be enjoyed even if we can’t translate any of the words, IF we’re grateful for what we DO have and understand, within limits, (which is always a hassle).
Jo Jo raises his right foot as he sings, sometimes pulling his claw together, as if to point out and savor each purposeless note, becoming both critic, choir and conductor, and the whole neighborhood rings with mimicry and sympathy. I think about letting him go, sometimes, wondering if he could survive, but I still keep him, mostly, I think, to remind me of myself.
