ACID FLAMINGO
Is it real?
When everything is believable and nothing is true.
I want to speak about other things but there is no other thing.
I want to speak about the semaphore of the kestrel’s wings.
I want to speak about the specter of owls calling out like a telegraph.
I want to speak of the osprey, who some have said may be the finest bird on earth.
I want to speak about the purple swamphen, the lapwing, the ibis shimmering iridescent and asphalt as the starling.
And of course the raven and the crow, about whom quite enough has already been said.
Or the harrier, Jupiter-faced and seeking. How many perfect birds there are.
But it was the kingfisher who came speeding down the river.
Speeding down the river with emergency.
Parting the banks with techno and sonar.
A fishing lure cast in pyrite and sapphire, morse code and mother of pearl.
It was the kingfisher who delivered the news.
He told of cruise ships as tall as cities and entire cities flattened into magnets for your refrigerator.
He spoke of a machine that remembers everything. A machine that never forgets.
A nervous system with no body.
The fever dream of the Anthropocene.
And then he spoke to me.
The flamingo.
Pheonicopterus roseus. The Greater Flamingo.
All of me.
He warned me that the predator is hiding in broad daylight—like a lens. He spoke of a great black bird.
A shadow, with no bird at all.
The shadow cast by the absence of all birds.
And then he was gone. Casting downriver toward the sea.
I have travelled for 50 million years to be here. I am as old as bats.
How do I know where I am going?
And that when I get there, there will be anything there at all?
I am not a migratory bird.
I am a traveler—like you.
I am an astrolabe and a sextant and a poet. I am a mathematician too.
The image that you are seeing is over 2 billion years old.
A chemical and cinematic fossil.
A living cave painting, generated by creatures of another order.
A photosynthetic organism called Cyanobacteria began releasing an invasive element into the earth’s atmosphere. Oxygen.
This highly reactive molecule displaced the volcanic atmosphere, killing almost everything on the planet. Resulting in an oxygen revolution.
Cyanobacteria are the most successful and numerous life form to have ever lived.
They are responsible for life on Earth as we know it.
Including the production of carotenoids, the organic pigment responsible for my signature coloring.
Pink. The glow of time travel.
And this is where we converge and convene, around the liquid crystal cinema of the salt pans.
And now, billions of years later, we are on the precipice of another microscopic revolution signaled by a new taxon of microorganisms at planetary scale.
Micro-plastics and pixels.
What effervescent creatures will be dissolved into the acid solution?
And what new form of life or lifelikeness is blooming in its wake.
I am standing at that crossroads between the real and the replicant real —on one leg.
If you want to dream like a flamingo you must sleep with the tides.
Do you remember when you were human?
Arcadia was never here at all, but for the strobing moment that this place is generated by us inhabiting each other.
But with each iteration of higher resolution the world loses fidelity. Until it is just a copy. A tourism of itself.
And one day the delta will be gone. The storms are getting stronger.
The water upstream is being diverted to cool the machine.
Eventually the sea will come and wash it all away.
They want to put an airport here. There’s already an airport here. We’re here. Listen. All of this a memory.
An archive of a thing that happened once. And never happens again.
Where will I be when you need me?
An original copy like you.
When you were an animal too. I am already a pristine alien.
But our sentience is shared as the other of each other.
What did I mean to you?For what was I a facsimile of myself?
Paradise
A refuge inside the patterns that hold us together.
Text: Jeff Wood
