Consider the Ravens

A collage of reflections curated by Jay Beck

This essay is a collage of quotes and thoughts. Collage is a technique of art production, primarily used in the visual arts, in which the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. So this will not be "only my words", as if I could even have some original reflection that isn't influenced by all of my ancestors, guides, mentors, elders, friends, and the wider more than human world speaking through all this language. It is a collage on purpose, to emphasize the many speaking together.
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"Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them."—Luke 12:24

See how quickly shit gets absurd
You invent angels then you ignore birds
You forget to actually listen to the messengers
While you're writing and reciting
Your own goddamn words

Alrighty, I'll try to chill
Though I'm acutely aware that only ill
Can come of being cut off from all of consciousness
Save for that expressed by humans
In their big hot mess—Ani Difranco

I am only just beginning to understand how to listen to Spirit speaking through the more-than-human and how desperately we need to learn how to hear it.

We at Holy Fools Arts have been experimenting with different approaches to try to aid this type of listening. We believe that art, ceremony, myth, storytelling, and embodied ritual can help us wake up and liberate us from the trance of the human-only-centered dominant reality which is causing so much destruction and oppression. All of life is intricately intertwined together and the things that affect one affect the rest, whether with disaster or liberation. 

These concepts are obvious in Indigenous traditional cultures and spiritual thinking but we have found them to be deeply a part of the Jewish and Christian traditions as well. These scriptures tell us: "Pay attention to the Ravens!" and Hebrew prophets remind us that the trees will rejoice when the oppressive empires fall. We have been following these ideas while simultaneously unlearning the twisted versions of biblical interpretations taught to us in the destructive dominant culture of the U.S.

So let's actually consider the ravens:

Ravens show up all over the world through legends and literature. Because of their dark feathers, massive intelligence, croaking caw, and habit of eating dead things, the raven has long been considered a mysterious bird. It also carries omens of coming doom and has become associated with having a prescience that can be understood as prophecy. A bird as prophet. Can we hear its warnings? According to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the raven (like the coyote) obtained mythic status because it mediated between life and death.

The raven is considered one of the oldest and wisest of all animals. In Swedish, Germanic, and Norse folklore, ravens have connections to the dead as well as to thought and memory and are understood as being messengers for the gods. The Greeks and Romans placed the bird with Apollo, the god of prophecy, and among the Irish Celts the raven was associated with The Morrigan, the Triple Goddess, who took the shape of a raven over battlefields while acting as “Chooser of the Slain” and the protector of warriors. “To have a raven’s knowledge” is an Irish proverb meaning to be one who holds a seer’s supernatural powers.

In the Aboriginal lore of Australia and the myths of many North American Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, including the Tsimishians, Haidas, Heiltsuks, Tlingits, Kwakwaka'wakw, Coast Salish, Koyukons, and Inuit, Raven appears as dual-natured – both Trickster and Creator God – credited with bringing fire, light, sexuality, song, dance, and life itself to humankind.
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The raven is the first species of bird mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible and on numerous occasions thereafter. In Genesis 8, Noah releases a raven from the ark after the great flood to test whether or not the waters have receded. In Luke 12, Jesus uses ravens to illustrate God's provision.

There are many examples of the ways that people across cultures and history have paid attention to this bird for deep spiritual guidance. Theologian Ched Myers reminds us that 

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Sadly, we modern folk have no intention of learning economics from birds and flowers. But to dismiss Jesus here is to miss the key to his alternative cosmology—and to our liberation. The raven (12:24) calls to mind three Hebrew Bible texts that praise the Creator’s gracious provision to all living things, particularly in times of hunger. Job 38:41 says, ‘Who provides for the raven its prey when its young ones cry to God and wander about for lack of food?’ Psalm 147:9 reads ‘God gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry.’ And the prophet Elijah is fed by a raven (1 Kings 17:4-6), a story that takes place during a famine and is followed by another ‘feeding miracle (17:7-16).

“Birds know nothing about the rich man’s agriculture or barns, yet they can teach us about divine provision. Jesus invites us to have ‘eyes to see’ a Great Economy from which we are deeply alienated, being utterly preoccupied by the works of our hands and our built environments, having objectified and commodified nature beyond recognition.... This very cosmology has been embraced by indigenous peoples the world over and throughout history, whose economic lifeways were traditionally characterized by symbiosis with nature and by local, cooperative, and sustainable production and consumption....The Bible is simply reminding us of the oldest wisdom on the planet. But we moderns long ago rejected it in favor of the delusion that we can defy every limit in our pursuit of artificially engineered ‘growth.

Jesus tells us to pay attention to birds and flowers to understand how to live in right relationship: to understand our interconnection with each other and the more-than-human.
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In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram explores how "the human mind came to renounce its sensuous bearings, isolating itself from the other animals and the animate Earth."

Because the dominant culture is firmly grounded in the myth of human specialness, a myth encouraged by technology, we can feel free to exploit other animals and the Earth itself. But our very perception, our very human-ness, depends on a "synchronization" between our rhythms and the rhythms of the natural world. With technology, we use our minds to master functions; our senses are hardly used at all.—Susan Salter Reynolds

If our destructive behavior is grounded in a myth, a story, a false telling of the way we should think about the world, then we need to hear some different stories. Who else is speaking and how can we listen? How can we respond in a way that helps us form healthy and liberated lives for not only us?
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Consider too: are the stories we tell more than just mere words?

For [w]ords are increasingly merely signs, codes, not the ‘echo of the deeply interconnected matrix of sensorial reality’ it once was and still is in some cultures ("a swirling garment of vapor and breath worn by the encompassing Earth itself"). The alphabet, the written character, no longer referred the user ‘to any sensible phenomenon,’ further widening the gap between the senses and the natural world.

“The only way to heal this rift, to bring meaning back to speech and to the written word is through the recognition that language must be flexible and that it is not our exclusive provenance. Animals speak, the Earth speaks; to us, about us, with us.—Susan Salter Reynolds, quoting David Abram

If there is an important, massive, cross-species conversation happening then what do the Jewish and Christian traditions say about listening to the more-than-human? How are our liberation and understanding connected to hearing them?
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One of our mentors and friends is a powerful theologian and poet from Detroit named Jim Perkinson; he writes: ​

“Untamed spaces of wandering have always been the place of both deepest pedagogy and most reliable regeneration for the social movement known as ‘Israel.'” 

"The biblical witness is preeminently a witness to the priority of the ‘wild.’ Wildlands emerge in its narratives as the source of both material life-support and of spiritual teaching, the incubation chamber and inspiration for folk movements of all kinds seeking to elude or exit the imperial project of domestication and enslavement. Israel itself begins as a … movement of slaves exiting Egypt and re-learning how to ‘live on the land’ in the outback environment of Sinai, led by a Moses who had himself been re-schooled for 40 years by his herd animals in that ecology.
“…The later history of the Hebrew ‘outlaw’ movement after it settles uneasily into subsistence farming … is a series of prophetic movements, epitomized by Elijah, living raw and wild in wadi Cherith, pronouncing weather as weapon in the struggle against King Ahab, and learning his hunting tactics from resourceful r.avens. The movement begun by Baptizer John camps out in Elijah’s old ravine, and teaches its lessons of return to what the watershed can teach and provide.
“…Which is to say, that the biblical tradition is inspired by a version of the earliest resistance tradition on the planet — pastoral nomads who went AWOL from exploitative agricultural practices relearning their ecosystems in apprenticeship to their herds, finding Divinity most powerfully present at the head of the watershed as a Storm-Deity, granting life and nutrients in seasonal rains and riparian veins of abundance, revalorizing ritual practices (like Sabbath and Jubilee) whose significance is one of limiting human aggression on the environment in favor of trusting the land to produce ‘of itself.’”

Because Holy Fool Arts resonates deeply with this view of these sacred stories and we see that listening to the more-than-human is necessary for sustainable lifeways and liberation for all, we try to amplify this message by re-membering with our art. In the theatrical productions of our project ‘The Carnival de Resistance’ we address these many layers of symbolism and tell these old stories again, speaking from the perspective of the more-than-human. In our show "Rooted Wind" we weave ceremony, Midrash, theater, music, dance, storytelling, and circus arts together to highlight the powers of Earth and Air by embodying what we imagine to be the voices of birds and trees. This show features loud-mouthed “Raven,” mute “Dove,” and the “Voice of the Cedars,” using poetic soliloquies for the gift of creation and prophetic rants against its destruction. We believe that this type of art is resistance and helps us wake up.

We need this ‘waking up’, for, as mythologist Martin Shaw says:

I notice that several times a day I go into what you could call a mild trance state. I’m … talking about falling under the influence of advertising, or various politically engineered neuroses that might be floating around. …And the way I recognise it is that I feel less than grounded. I feel I’m not in the realm of imagination, I’m in the realm of fantasy. So the imaginal is not present; the Earth as a lived, breathing, thinking being is not present. … And so actually I think stories have a capacity to wake us up.

We are living in a time when we need symbolic intelligence, not just sign language. We are being fed signs, and signs that frighten us, and then paralyse us, and then colonise us. And imagination, through myth, wants to give you symbols to raise you up.

The complete colonization of the mind is the final frontier of capitalist domination. This domination proceeds, at ever-increasing speed, through the reduction of the imagination to that which can be predicted and controlled. This is why, as J.F. Martel says:

Art is in itself a form of resistance to the commodification of consciousness. Every bit of time and energy spent creating or experiencing works of art escapes the grasp of those forces that would reduce us all to a quantity or algorithm.

Similarly, the only thing art can do is reveal the non-human forces that shape the world. It oxygenates society by infusing it with a more expansive reality than its preconceptions, opinions or beliefs allow for. True works of art are powerful symbolic constructs, genuine oracles that can give society access to what’s going on below the threshold of collective consciousness.

Since we are all …caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth -- our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.—David Abram

With this understanding in the forefront of our artistic approach, our ceremonial theater then endeavors to embody the more-than-human and begins to be able to hear it speaking back to us, saying, in the voice of the Raven:

"i, full of cries, shaman-hopping, rock to rock
tricky in disguise, in shape-shifting lies
leading evil astray, fed from on high
listed in the book of ages, but no one’s easy food
pecking out the cursing eye
dweller in the re-wilded cities of edom
i neither sow nor reap, but live like an original creature . . .

Quotes From:
Ani Difranco
song: "Alrighty": Album: "Binary"
David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous
Ched Myers
https://www.chedmyers.org/articles/ecology-faith/pay-attention-birds-bible-study-luke-12-ecology-and-economics
Susan Salter Reynolds
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-01/news/ls-41670_1_natural-world
James Perkinson
Messianism Against Christology
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2015/01/30/breakin-down-messianism-with-dr-jim-perkinson/#more-1387
Poetry excerpts from Carnival De Resistance scripts
Martin Shaw
https://dark-mountain.net/the-mythos-we-live-by-uncolonising-our-imagination/
JF Martel
http://realitysandwich.com/266261/reclaiming-art-an-interview-with-j-f-martel/

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Jay Beck is a percussionist, vocalist, drum-maker, storyteller, actor and educator who has been performing, teaching, touring and recording professionally for many years. He has performed with numerous groups including Madison Greene, Woodspeak, Unidos da Filadelfia, Phillybloco, Netos de Kansala West African Drum and Dance ensemble, Psalters and BEAST.  He is a founder of Holy Fool Arts, a core organizer for the Carnival de Resistance and collaborates with his partner Tevyn East in Philadelphia. His newest musical project, Beast, exegetes the symbolic relevance of certain plants and animals within scripture and sacred mythologies through percussive blues-infused original compositions.

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