The language of the birds

Nature is a language, can’t you read?

A chicken spoke to me.

Not just in the normal cluck, cluck, cluck way that chickens are always “speaking.”

In human words.

French human words.

Or at least that’s what it sounded like. Maybe it will sound ridiculous, like I’m letting my imagination run away with itself. Well, there are worse things one can do in this life than to trust in the power of the heart and its strivings…

It was the end of the season last year. I had just finished insulating the part of the garage where the birds were living. I had left the door to their coop open while completing some routine clean-up tasks in there and to let them get some fresh air.

“Peut-tu fermer la porte?”

What?

“Can you close the door?”

She was right, there was kind of a chill in the air. I closed the door.

Sorry, dear.

In Kabbalah, Renaissance magic, and alchemy, the language of the birds was considered a secret and perfect language and the key to perfect knowledge, sometimes also called the langue verte, or green language (Jean Julien Fulcanelli, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa de occulta philosophia, Emmanuel-Yves Monin, Hieroglyphes Français Et Langue Des Oiseaux)

Speaking of the green language, the “langue verte” of the alchemists, the French also use an argot or cant (secret language) called verlan:

[…] French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words.[citation needed] The name verlan is an example: it is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l’envers (“the inverse,” pronounced lan-ver).

L’envers, la langue verte. La langue des oiseaux:

In medieval France, the language of the birds (la langue des oiseaux) was a secret language of the Troubadours, connected with the Tarot, allegedly based on puns and symbolism drawn from homophony, e. g. an inn called au lion d’or “the Golden Lion” is allegedly “code” for au lit on dort “in the bed one sleeps”…

Some have described the “language of birds” as “the tongue of Secret Wisdom. Its vocabulary is myth. Its grammar is symbolism.” They argue that the development of the written language and the language of birds go hand in hand. According to the Fables of Caius Juliius Hyginus, the god Mercury (the Greek Hermes) invented the alphabet by watching cranes, because “cranes make letters as they fly”.

When the chicken spoke to me, she sounded like an ordinary chicken:

ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba

But at the same time, in the rhythms of her speech were unmistakeably the words:

Peux-tu fermer la porte?

Call me crazy — if you want — for falling for this ancient notion that not only is every creature and thing capable of speech, but that we — as their peers existing in the same experiential substrate of reality — are capable of hearing and understanding.

Next to this, the “Internet of Things”

I realize it’s a radical proposition. Opening ourselves up to a great listening, a conversation wherein we are no longer the only speakers: where other beings ask questions and make demands of us. But maybe such a crazy proposition really is the “key to perfect wisdom” (or one of them) of which the alchemists and ancients allegedly spoke.

Or maybe I’m “losing it.”

But if all I’m losing is a mute, empty, lifeless world where the only viewpoint that matters is mine, then so be it. Let the chickens tell me their dreams. Let us walk through the Elysian fields eating crickets and grasshoppers together, and marveling at the wonder of it all.

Let us speak with one tongue in many distinct voices.

Let us open, instead, the door.

Let us ask, listen, and respond.