22. περιστέρι: Watching

I woke up early today to write to you, before the churn of demands of the day which are actionable and the bewildering stream of horrors which are personally unactionable begin to cloud whatever clarity one might have. I was asked in Prague by someone who came to the show there if I had any tips for songwriting. My answer is always the same, that it’s about getting out the shape of the thing before your mind starts the process of analysis. The mind being lazy, very quickly it will begin to categorise and order the raw matter into patterns already familiar. So it’s good to get to it before it has a chance to set. Some pigeons have taken to living on the balcony here, and all I can think about now that they have started is that I have a begrudging respect for those people who feed the pigeons in village, town and city squares.

When I first moved to Athens, Plateia Exarcheia had not been barricaded yet. I used to go and sit there on bright mornings and enjoy the comfort of novelty and the anonymity of being somewhere else. After having spent many days doing nothing at all, eventually my eyes took to watching the pigeons.

If you are feeling in any way existential or hopeless at what appears as the spherical movement of behaviour and what that means for knowledge, do not watch the pigeons. These sorry, corrupted things, half animal half plastic, doing little all day other than eat garbage, and either chasing or trying to escape the brutal necessity to multiply. They have often grotesque red profusions convolving from their heads, or club feet still half connected to empty coke cans, or tearing and weeping eyes half blind from the black gutter baths they wet themselves in. Still they stagger on through their agony. I began to think about Wordsworth and felt ashamed at how I perceived these destitute beings, but Wordsworth did not have to live in a world made of plastic. I eventually began to resent Wordsworth for this fact. The more I watched, the more suffocating it appeared to me. My mind set in a certain appraisal for how these things appeared.

If you look at the people who come with bread to feed the pigeons, it is quite different to this. These strange and other lanterns of hope must not see the swarming of corrupted biology and plastic. They see instead God’s creatures, in all their brittleness and imperfection, and see that they respond to warmth. There is a choice involved here, irrespective of the conditions which have led one to a certain way of seeing. At the moment it’s easy to view things in both a caustic and determinate way. That may or may not have validity, but the choice to see the world as what you can give it as opposed to what you can take from it, is a choice. The bread people of the birds are embodiments of this. I don’t know how but,

All of this is because we have been on tour, and have been and will continue to be the people who bring bread for the birds, not the other person. Otto Benson will join us for these dates in North America. I am listening to his new record Peanut now, again. It’s so good. I hope you will come and hang the fuck out with us. Here are some photos from the dates in the UK and Europe.

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