Consideration of a Crow and Eternity
A few words on viral animal videos, the end of thought, and related matters.
An idea that has not so much interested me as persistently refused to stop resurfacing in my consciousness every now and again for really, I suppose, as long as I can remember, certainly since childhood, is that of finding oneself, after death or otherwise definitively “moved on” to another state of being beyond life as we know it, stuck for eternity in some sort of featureless Realm with nothing but some specific media object or objects to keep you company, forever. Superficially this is just a rather more metaphysical iteration of the “desert island” question (“What book/movie/record/etc would you take with you to a desert island?” you know how it goes), but if you look at it a second you’ll see the stakes are really quite different. First, there’s no assurance that you’ll get to choose what you have for entertainment in this Realm, and second, and I think this is why it sticks in my head, why it nags at me, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t get to choose because no choice could be adequate. No matter what, it’s a question of a finite amount of material versus an infinite amount of time. You could have all the contents of all the libraries in the world, a corpus which would take, I think it’s fair to say, an unimaginable amount of time, millions or billions of lifetimes, to really, truly comprehend, but eventually you would. There would come a day or an hour when you had wrung every possible thought and insight from every page, every sentence, every word of every book, considered every implication and exhausted every form of inquiry, formulated every possible critique and its every possible rebuttal, subjected every text to every method of analysis and drawn every conclusion there was to draw, a day or an hour when suddenly, inevitably, you would find there was, in the most literal possible sense, nothing left to do. Everything had been understood. The banks of memory would have been filled up and emptied out. There would be no more thoughts to think. No matter how long you attempted to forestall it, this time would eventually come, because any work of art, any byproduct of human thought, would prove itself, eventually, to be inadequate in the face of eternity, as all dead and static things must be. Eventually, it would be as if there had never been anything there with you at all.
This isn’t a real problem, of course, because we’re not immortal, and because we live in a world with others, whose consciousnesses can never be fully known in this way… But nonetheless, it’s something my brain likes to torment itself with. And really, not with the “Time Enough At Last”-esque maximal case, usually, but with the opposite, with the idea of an eternity in this Realm with something that, under normal circumstances, would not be substantial enough to hold the attention for an hour, much less a lifetime, much, much less an eternity. For example, simply because it’s the most recent bit of media to bring this idea to the surface again: I saw a video on Twitter last night, captioned “a crow softly saying ‘woo!’ for 50 seconds”. Here’s the tweet, for however long it lasts:
It’s a lovely little clip, about 50 seconds long, depicting exactly what the caption describes. Watching it makes me feel good. In an understated way, there’s something very beautiful to it – there’s no pretension to it, no grand purpose or design, just a simple document of a simple moment that, nonetheless, is somehow very special. I think we’re lucky to have it. In the normal course of events it might be worth watching, with a placid smile, five or ten times. Maybe fifteen at a stretch. That’s quite a bit longer than most animal clips, but still less than 20 minutes of entertainment. What happens after that? How much more could I, could you, get out of this if you really had to? If it was the only thing between you and the awful abyss of eternity? Unlike, say, the totality of human literature, this is something you can actually begin to imagine the answer to, or at least what the experience would be like getting to the answer. The two essential question are, What can be seen?, and What can be heard?, in the broadest possible terms. Under the conditions of eternity, anything more is missing the point, as eventually all that would be left is the raw information the video contains, stripped of meaning or value, purpose or hierarchy. So that is what you have to think about, as much as one really can.
First: What can be seen? The footage is handheld and looks like it was shot with an older camera or smartphone, but probably within the last decade. In terms of technical image quality, it’s not awful but it’s not great, and it’s clearly gone through a few rounds of compression. It was shot with a long lens, pointed downwards at the crow, which is hopping around in a flat, wet, sandy area, foreshortened by the focal length. This is pretty much all you can see. The frame never really makes it above the horizon line, so there’s very little sense of what sort of place it is, where it is, what the world around it looks like. There’s some piles of rubble in the background that can be seen sometimes, and there’s one cut, about 23 seconds in, not to anywhere meaningfully different, just slightly to the side of where we just were, where we can see a bit of short green grass poking through the sand. Otherwise it’s just brown and watery. The bird itself is ordinary-looking, although of course every bird is in some sense remarkable. It paces around, seeming both intensely purposeful and profoundly purposeless in that way only animals can, poking its neck forward, often, oddly, looking straight down before making its sound. We see it both from the side and, especially after the second and final cut of the video, from the front. We never see the sky, but from the weaknesses of the shadow beneath the crow, and the general color of the light, it seems to be an overcast day. The cuts are interesting because they disrupt the temporal continuity of the video. Within the Realm, trying to determine the extent of this disruption would no doubt become a point of obsession for some amount of time, despite the fact that it’s almost certainly impossible to ever determine in a satisfactory way.
Second: What can be heard? The soundscape is both richer and even more limited than the imagery. Aside from the “woo!” noises of the crow itself, which are surprisingly soft and melodious, there is actually quite a bit of noise. At the very start of the clip it sounds as though a plane is passing overhead, and this bleeds into a general sonic environment of slightly crushed-sounding wind blowing in the camera microphone, a passing cars or some sort of machinery somewhere in the distance, and something that I at first took to be the rustling of leaves but upon closer listening proved to be breaking surf, which, of course, suggests this flat, wet, sandy area is a beach.
This is, I think, the point at which it would begin, if one were to have to spend eternity with this clip, after its basic pleasures had been exhausted: with forming hypotheses about where it was shot. But there’s not enough here to ever know for sure. Eventually, I think, one would come to find the rhythmic character of the sound more important than the superficial information it contained, would begin to appreciate for its rich noisiness, full of little gray digital details that rise and fall with the clipping of the mic and the coming and going of the waves. Every minuscule movement of the crow would become as familiar as the back of your hand, would be analyzed and ranked until you could say what your favorite movement was, what you favorite frame was, until it ceased to mean anything at all, and the crow became like an emptiness in the middle of the frame, and instead everything around it became the focus, the dismal brown sand saturated with water, the rubble in the background, every frame examined and re-examined to gain as complete a picture of the landscape as possible, ambiguous clumps of pixels interrogated with your face drawn close to the image as you try to guess what information the compression algorithm has washed away. You would wonder about the sky, try to imagine it from how it looks from the way the light lays flat and tepid across the ground, and then slowly you would begin to forget what a sky even looked like, because there’s nothing of it in this video that is, now, your only memento of a world where skies existed. Eventually you would cease analyzing altogether, because there would be nothing left to analyze, each pixel of each frame would be burned into your skull, and you would begin to watch it only to try to remember what it was like, in this place with birds and engines and crashing waves that grind stone into fine powder, what the wind sounded like and what it was like knowing there were consciousnesses other than your own that you could affect and that could affect you. And you wouldn’t cry, and you wouldn’t speak, because neither of those things would have any purpose anymore, and there was nothing more you could extract from them that would produce a sensation within you that was any different anymore from simply being still in silence. And the crow would say “woo!” for 50 seconds, forever. And this is what I think about sometimes.
