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1:30 a.m. - 2003-03-02 Its just the metaphor part of birds and not all of it obviously, but birds do this thing we all thing is amazing and they have no idea because it is just, to the bird, what a bird does. Seagulls in particular. They have bodies we'll never understand. They fly and just look around up there and they don't really even know that its something everyone in the world wants. They just think it's what they do, they just do it to get by, to get from place to place, to pass the time. You get the sense that maybe a bird never gets to see itself as a bird, the way we see a bird. Because that's total detatchment. And really, that's the only way we can ever see how beautiful the human race is, is by not being human for a while, and to look at the things we do as if they were not just getting from place to place, but that we are actually flying. 5. I come to wonder whether or not, if birds had poetry, they would write about driving the way we write about flying. Like maybe driving has some mystical, magical quality to a bird. Of course this also brings about a rather sad thing about life, which is that, if humans flew instead of drove, and birds could drive cars, we might sit around, hovering in the clouds, swooping to a tree with the wistful desire that someday we, too, could drive a car, the way those birds can; those birds who get into thier machines and travel at speeds beyond our comprhension. How the rush of the roads beneath thier tires must exhilirate them. 6. Of course, humans have this problem of not being able to believe that they can do anything extraordinary without building a machine to do it first. We tried to build robot versions of ourselves as far back as we had sculptures. Our machines are how we fly, it seems like, and our machines are trying to get us back to that zero state where the animals developed thier superpowers. A cheetah can run fast, a dog can smell, a cat can fall and always land on its feet; a bird can fly, a fish can breath water, a giraffe has long necks to reach the trees, ants have super strength. Humanity got the super power of consciousness, which has not been very practical in day to day living. Humans have an inferiority complex from all these animals; so we build machines to do for ourselves what the animals are born with. 7. To continue with this, I'll tell you a bit of a fairy tale that came my way today while I was working. A Japanese man who spoke very broken english asked me about the efficiency of light that was used in our television sets. He was looking for the most efficient bulb we had. After some research I found out for him that all television sets use 1000 watts of power. Maybe 1000 watts per minute, or hour? I don't know enough about light, or power, or television sets. But he said that incandescent bulbs came first, and the problem with them is that they glow too yellow; it is not a natural enough light, and humans are too sensitive to it. Later came fluoerescent, which uses too much power. He told me he was developing his own television set and wanted to make sure it was the most efficient use of light possible, and then he explained that humans have never been able to produce light efficiently. In fact, we could never beat the firefly, and he wanted to build a machine that was modeled on the way that fireflies create light. 8. Fireflies create light by a process known as bioluminescence: "A chemical reaction consisting of Luciferin (a substrate) combined with Luciferase (an enzyme), ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and oxygen. When these components are added, light is produced." It is also interesting that human beings have started using the isolated genes that allow an animal to generate this light and to cross it into other animals. The artist Eduardo Kac created a glow in the dark rabbit, one that the united states would not allow to cross into the country, since it was not a "domestic breed.". Its name was Alba. Alba had no domesticity because Alba wasn't from anywhere, it was a rabbit with a jellyfish for a father. The United States seems like the only place for this type of animal, really, but I think it died a few years later, in France, before it ever came to this country. Basically our jealousy of animal super powers are crossing into our one superpower of machine building, and I guess in a sense we are becoming wrecklessly benevolent, by using these machines- and I think all science is the building of machines- and using them to give animals new superpowers. Like the rabbit that can glow in the dark. And I mean, do I even need to start on airplanes, really? I don't think I do. 10. We also built a machine that could show us what a cat sees. I think this is interesting because it translates not the images coming from the lens of the cats eye, but the reconstructed image within the cats brain. This same sort of thing seems about 2 degrees away from being able to tape record dreams, and I find it interesting that rather than videotape our dreams, we are trying to figure out how a cat sees. It is a sure sign of jealousy. I mean really, why else would we eat these things? A sure fire sign of massive passive aggressive behaviors stemming from envy of the natural world, you might say. 11. I've also noticed about machines that humans are starting to get really invested in them. Today I pumped gas into my car and paid with a piece of plastic, and there was some communication between the plastic and the pump that I wasn't privy to, and then the gas pump thanked me, which caught me off guard since the machine, a pile of aluminum and tubing, has always struck me as having zero ability to experience gratitude. But suddenly, it believed it could fool me into thinking it was happy about its experience with me, which was phoney anyway, since I barely gave it the time of day. Although my credit card might have. 12. That's all I have to say about birds.
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