Honking

“Raven is the one chosen to do the honk, which he’s always trying to perfect; which he’s always trying out a one-more-time, brand-new version of that never quite works. Still, we stop and listen every time he flies over, because we can hear his lordly mind working up there, convinced that this latest batch of airborne croaks is the real thing at last, at last.”–Anita Sullivan

The Highest Cauldron 

By Anita Sullivan

CRESWELL Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—6/15/2015—Raven is the one chosen to do the honk, which he’s always trying to perfect; which he’s always trying out a one-more-time, brand-new version of that never quite works. Still, we stop and listen every time he flies over, because we can hear his lordly mind working up there, convinced that this latest batch of airborne croaks is the real thing at last, at last.

And if it were, it would indeed be magnificent.

Unlike most birds who, when they sing, pour into the air example after example of totally completed, honed-by-evolution, vocal masterpieces, Raven’s calls come out only halfway done—place-holders every one of them, the work of an apprentice without a lot of potential. Raven emits what in the final Annals of the World is meant to be listed as HONK. The slot in the index has been held open for him for a long time.

Does anything, then, actually—Honk?

Well, no.

Raven makes many different calls, but they all sound as if he’s practicing for an ultimate honk that will happen differently, later.

Sometimes, the sound he makes seems to be muffled by leather, so that he is a bird creaking overhead. The world darkens imperceptibly, in disappointment.

Long ago, Raven and his call seem to have been separated, so each of them wanders orphaned in the world, looking for the other. Sometimes, he flies over emitting the kind of sound that usually happens inside the oarlock of a rowboat, as if he came out of the egg in a cave where he could produce enormous resonances with very little effort. The proportions were wrong; the space itself was doing most the work, so when he emerged into the larger world it was as if his throat had shrunk for lack of exercise. He was a blowhard without an instrument.

Like the princes who come to the castle seeking to marry the princess, but each one fails the king’s three tests?

No, because there is, at least, a princess.

And because, eventually, one prince does succeed, but not without the assistance of magic.

For Raven to find his Honk, there is no magic.

It’s like becoming fully human: we keep striving to do something we know but have never heard or seen an example of. And even if we had, we’re not cut out to do this thing we try for, so we continue to accomplish extremely difficult feats in place of it, some of them quite beside the point. An entire galaxy of activities pours out of us—but no Honk.

Raven reminds us that in some other universe there is Honk. We have all heard it in our genes, in the star-borrowed marrow of us. Raven will carry it in muffled form throughout the ages, like hunter-gatherers used to carry the embers of their fires wrapped in moss and hide when they moved camp from place to place. When the dark bird rows through the sky above us softly displacing the air with his wing-flaps, yowping and creaking, those of us down below on the forest floor can nod a little and remember so many things we know—the color of the centaur’s eye, sitting on the serpent’s knee . . . .