One of the most popular google searches in the wake of the COVID-19 has been variations on the question “Are birds louder now?” Therefore, Mycelium have been looking toward the birds to revive the art of augury, the art of reading birds. However, today the most prominent signs are not found in the majestic eagle, but rather in the poultry factory and the wet market. Also, to listen to the birds is to listen to the absence left by the corona virus, the raspatory gasps of a dying race.
The spoken text is a tapestry of cut outs, ready mades, quotes, original poetry and prose written collectively by Mycelium.
The video is a “becoming bird” ritual, a desperate attempt to engage with nature, which involves the self-inflicted painful process of being rolled in tar and feather.
AND THE BIRDS ARE GETTING LOUDER is a rough cut, that was completed in early May 2020. The final cut, which will have less spoken words and let the images and the silence speak more for themselves, will be finished and uploaded soon.
“And the birds are getting louder” is a short film made in collaboration with Mycelium, Anja Behrens, Cristian Vogel and Nathalie Mellbye. Starring Nathalie Mellbye, Anja Behrens and Freya Emilia Behrens.
It was originaly made for Pythia’s Journals during the wake of the pandemic (13.05.20-16.05.20)
It has later been picked up by additional festivals: Lift-off Network Film Festival, Miracle Film Festival
Watch the movie here:
https://anjabehrens.com/portfolio-item/and-the-birds-are-getting-louder/
Full texted used in the movie:
And the birds are getting louder
One of the most popular google searches in the wake of the COVID-19 has been variations on the question “Are birds louder now?” Phenomenologically, birds are louder due to less human activity in cities which makes them bolder in song and territorial approach, but we are also better able to hear them with much less noise to distract us.
Augury (or oionistike (οἰωνιστικὴ) in ancient Greek) is the art of reading birds. A divine madness, an erotic endeavour.
The birds are messengers
The eagle looking for prey
The poultry waiting to be transported to the slaughter house
The vultures circling a corpse
The trash-eating seagulls
The pigeons in the yard
The magpie stealing shiny objects
The black sun of starlings
The peace carrying dove
The raven that does not return
The aggressive swans
The parrots in the ruins after the apocalypse
The canary in the mine
And the birds are getting louder
“These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.” (Leviticus 11)
And the birds are getting louder
In the Iliad, the plague strikes as birds of prey, deadly arrows and aerial assailants. A godly sneeze.
Achoo (bless you)
In ancient literature and philosophy, the eagle was the most majestic of signs, since it was Zeus’ favorite bird. Today the most reliable omens have come from the poultry factories. The so-called Fowl plague of 1878 is considered the beginning of the recorded history of avian influenza. The signs were clear already then.
And the birds are getting louder
The PREDICT project was launched in 2009 in response to the 2005 H5N1 “bird flu” scare. Its funding ran out in September 2019. In that period they gathered specimens from more than 10,000 bats and 2,000 other mammals. They detected about 1,200 viruses that could spread from wild animals to humans. More than 160 of them were novel coronaviruses.
Reuters writes in 2020, “Piglets aborted, chickens gassed as pandemic slams meat sector”.
Don’t kill the messenger.
And the birds are getting louder
“Great Understatements in History:
Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow — ‘just a little stroll gone bad’
Pompeii— ‘a bit of a dust storm’
Hiroshima — ‘a bad summer heatwave’
AND
Wuhan — ‘just a bad flu season’”
Bolsonaro — “So what?”
And the birds are getting louder
Ritual for a community of absence:
- Wash hands carefully
- Sneeze into your sleeve
- Keep distance – at least 4 meters
- Don’t gather
- Stay indoors
And the birds are getting louder
Don’t join hands across America.
We are not the world.
We are not the winds of change.
And the birds are getting louder
Birds are primordial erotic beings. The offspring of Eros. The plague invites erotism. Wet markets – wet dreams.
“And how are we to explain that upsurge of erotic fever among the recovered victims who, instead of escaping, stay behind, seeking out and snatching sinful pleasure from the dying or even the dead, half-crushed under the pile of corpses where chance had lodged them?” Artuad asks.
The plague invites in death and therefore erotism. The bird is but the messenger. The poultry factory a Sadean wet dream.
“It is the story of the magnificent banquet: six hundred different plates offer themselves to your appetite; are you going to eat them all? […] choose and let lie the rest without disclaiming against that rest simply because it does not have the power to please you. Consider that it will enchant someone else, and be a philosopher.”
And the birds are getting louder
The highest creation on earth is a bird
The most powerful symbol, a two-headed bird
And the birds are getting louder
Ritual of cleanly absence:
- Rinse doorknobs in alcohol
- Rinse buttons in alcohol
- Rinse primary surfaces in alcohol
- Rinse partner in alcohol
- Ingest alcohol
And the birds are getting louder
WHO (Trump pulls out)
And the birds are getting louder
The American president suggests that we inject light into the body. Perhaps it should be the other way around. We should inject the body into light.
And the birds are getting louder
From the billion node thousand gender
perspective of the mycelial ontology –
realtime inverted – the drone strike on
Bolsonaro – from the lungs of Nature into
the lungs of the antagonist – unknown
collateral damage – realtime inverted.
And the birds are getting louder
Religious fanatics in Iran are licking doorknobs to demonstrate their purity and trust in god.
Religious fanatics in the USA are protected because they are covered in Jesus’ Blood.
Amazon wishlist:
Doorknobs and blood.
Out of stock.
And the birds are getting louder
This is the Parable of the Yeast
The yeast from which thy kingdom shall expand
Holy yeast
Stay on guard
It may be the Evil one, disguised as yeast
Therefore, be careful where you lay your yeast
It starts small and insignificant
But suddenly it grows
It bursts
Out of control
For a long time
There has been no shortage of unleavened bread
And the birds are getting louder
… we cannot gain insight into the birds’ continuous collective flight across the sky, by comparing the flight paths of every single bird. Their dance over the sky on the whims of the wind forms a body in which the individual is subject to the movements of the totality. Therefore, we cannot grasp the totality of the deed without tearing it to pieces and distancing us from it, and from a distance the totality has already escaped us. (mycelium #7)
In theatre, as in the plague, there is a kind of strange sun, an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium. (Artaud)
The mycelic sun is the communicative dance of the birds of the autumn sky, it is the activity and intensity of mycelium, the sums of the suns within within. (mycelium #7)
And the birds are getting louder
Ritual for injecting the body into light (for one):
- Immerse yourself in light
- Become sun
- Photosynthesis
- Become earth
- Emmanete as an earthly sun
And the birds are getting louder
Ritual for injecting the body into light (for more than one):
- Sing – it’s contagious.
- Dance – it’s contagious.
- Fuck – it’s contagious.
- Laugh – it’s contagious.
- Rebel – it’s contagious.
And the birds are getting louder
Doorknobs and blood
Blooddoors and knobs
Bloodknobs and doors
And the birds are getting louder
Pythia, púthein “to rot”,
the name of the high priestess of Apollo and oracle at Delphi.
The Sickly sweet smell of the body’s decomposition,
Mediating the sky with chthonic earthliness,
Python, after she was slain by the falcon-headed god,
Nature in all its splendour, the sign of our time
And the birds are getting louder
- “Do you think the end of the world is coming?”
- Yes and no.
- ‘The pandemic is a portal’ Arundhati Roy says, “a gateway between one world and the next.”
- What do you mean?
- Well, birds and bears and blue waters are all returning to us, to our world, laughing at us from the other side of our windows, thankful.
- April is the cruelest month
Lilacs of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
After the bombings of Hamburg in 1943, nature regenerated herself within the rubble, filling the open spaces with chestnuts and lilacs. Right now, wild boars and other wildlife roam the towns of northern Italy. Gangs of starving monkeys brawl in the streets of Lopburi, Thailand, no longer fed by the tourists. Sheep, horses, and deer in the streets in Japan. Whales gliding in the waters of Marseilles.
- So, do you think it is funny that the oil industry is collapsing? What’s next, you laughing when investment bankers get laid off?
- Yes, actually, it is funny. After all, April is the cruelest month. “Gasoline crack of history” as Burroughs says “the last of the gallant heroes.”
- Is the coronavirus itself a Green New Deal?
- ….
And the birds are getting louder
Amazon faces legal scrutiny over workers’ safety
disease and desist
Calls to evacuate Greek refugee camp
disease and desist
New York City nurses on Front Line call it a Suicide Mission
disease and desist
Amazon Indigenous tribes facing genocide
disease and desist
As the wealthy quaff wine in comfort; India’s poor are thrown to the wolves
disease and desist
If the coronavirus doesn’t kill me, hunger will
disease and desist
Wuhan fish market and Cargill meatpacking plant
disease and desist
And the birds are getting louder
The nightingale sings for the poor and the emperor alike
The nightingale escapes the cage
The nightingale is forgotten for want of finer things (foese nightingales clad in diamonds, mechanic songs that can play endlessly – until the mechanics break down)
The nightingale returns to ward off death with its song
The nightingale reports on the sufferance of the poor to the emperor in his castle
The nightingale asks but one thing: to remain a secret
And the birds are getting louder
Black blood, dark webs
Black marks, wet spots
Antibody
Antibody
This is my blood
This is my flesh
Antibody
Antibody
The spider is the fly
And the birds are getting louder
05.05.2020
- USA 68.934 And counting
- Italy 29.079 And counting
- Great Britain 28.809 And counting
- Spain 25.428 And counting
- France 25.204 And counting
- Belgium 8.016 And counting
- Brasil 7.367 And counting
- Germany 6.993 And counting
- Iran 6.340 And counting
- Netherlands 5.098 And counting
- China 4.637 And counting
- Canada 4.003 And counting
- Turkey 3.461 And counting
- Sweden 2.769 And counting
- Mexico 2.271 And counting
- Schweizerland 1.784 And counting
- India 1.571 And counting
- Ecuador 1.569 And counting
- Russia 1.451 And counting
- Peru 1.344 And counting
- Ireland 1.319 And counting
- Portugal 1.063 And counting
- Indonesia 872 And counting
- Romania 827 And counting
- Poland 700 And counting
- Philippines 637 And counting
- Austria 606 And counting
- Japan 536 And counting
- Denmark 493 And counting
- Algeria 470 And counting
- Egypt 452 And counting
- Hungary 363 And counting
- Colombia 358 And counting
- Dominican Republic 354 And counting
- Ukraine 316 And counting
- Chile 275 And counting
- Argentina 260 And counting
- South Korea 254 And counting
- Czech republic 254 And counting
- Finland 246 And counting
- Israel 237 And counting
- Norway 215 And counting
- Panama 203 And counting
- Saudi-Arabia 200 And counting
- Serbia 197 And counting
- Bangladesh 183 And counting
- Morocco 181 And counting
- United Arb Emirates 146 And counting
- Greece 146 And counting
- And counting
- And counting
- And counting
And the birds are getting louder
Music is the pleasure the mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
And the birds are getting louder.
Counting as they sing.
Counting the dead?
Counting down?
To what?
