Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  There were cages along two walls of the narrow room, a half dozen on each side, only five or six of them occupied. The acrid odor of bird shit infused the air. Victor walked the gauntlet between the two rows of cages, staring when he could into the eyes of the animals, or in some cases the one eye presented to him by a turned head. But nothing could be concluded from their regard. Perhaps he should have gone next door, to the dogs. There, he thought, they would be vying for his attention, panting, licking, yelping, frolicking, begging him to notice. He preferred these birds, though. Stoic, inexpressive, silent, neutral. A dog was no challenge. It did what you wanted or demanded, generally without complaint. Like a servant.

  He couldn’t put it off much longer, even though the man and the boys were going about their business, the proprietor with his nose in his books, the assistants cleaning empty cages.

  “Excuse me.”

  The trio, as one man, stopped what they were doing and looked at him.

  “Excuse me, I’m thinking about buying a bird.”

  “I’d say you were in the right place,” said the proprietor, without smiling. “What do you have in mind?”

  “That’s the question,” Victor replied. “I know nothing about these birds. One that can learn to speak, of course—that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  The trio exchanged looks, but none spoke.

  “I frankly need your advice. I don’t know one kind from another. Could you tell me what you have here?”

  “Yes, for sure,” said the proprietor, walking to the first two cages on either side of the line in front of him, which each housed a brightly plumed parrot, a festival of blue, yellow and red. “Macaws.” Without further explanation, he pointed to another cage, with a smaller bird, green with a red mask like a stain on its face: “A parakeet.” Then to a fourth, vibrantly green: “An Amazon.” “This is our cockatoo,” he said, indicating the largest bird of the little collection, whose head was crowned with a pointy yellow crest, which made Victor think of the punk son of one of the families in his neighborhood. “And finally, meet our African grey,” he said, adding casually: “Henry the Eighth had one.”

  “Did I hear you rightly?” asked Victor. “Henry the Eighth owned one of these?”

  “Sure. ‘Fuck the Pope!’” replied the man boldly in a high-pitched, birdlike voice. “‘Cut off her head!’”

  “Are you serious?”

  “About Henry, yes—but I was kidding about what his bird said. I’ve no clue what Henry taught him in their lonely nights together at Hampton Court. Anything’s possible.”

  “A bird fit for kings!” said Victor with a smile.

  “Not only Henry,” continued the proprietor. “The Egyptian pharaohs had African greys—see them in hieroglyphics. And the Greeks too. In short, a bird with a history,” he said with deliberate pomp.

  “Can this one say anything?” asked Victor.

  “No, of course not, absolutely nothing. No one wants a parrot who can already speak, do they? Spoil the fun of teaching him your own words. And might even put you in embarrassing situations. Once they start talking, that’s it—you lose control, so you better make sure that what they learn is fit to be said in good company and that they don’t drop you in it!”

  The proprietor looked to his assistants for assent. They both nodded gravely, as though silently recalling priceless scandals caused by indiscreet or foul-mouthed birds.

  Victor didn’t have to reflect for more than a few seconds. This little chap would be his. The shop told him—though they refused to guarantee it—that African greys could learn more than a thousand words if coached with talent and if their owners “established a good relationship” with them, whatever that might mean. Victor was dubious about this claim. Though the English language contained at least a quarter of a million words, he knew that the average person used no more than two thousand in his or her lifetime. Could this parrot really become as loquacious as half an Englishman if it proved a good student and he a good teacher? That certainly remained to be demonstrated.

  Two days out of hospital and he had bought a parrot! On a whim, just because he was passing in front of a bird shop! Well, that was pretty extravagant, he smiled to himself. It was the most exciting thing he’d done for a very long time. Perhaps idiotic, but bold, different. Maybe I’m still changing, he thought happily.

  On the way home, he questioned his motives for acquiring this little bundle of grey and red feathers. Imagine. Now I have a companion who can say only what I teach him, can only repeat the ideas that I give him, who will share my political dispositions, my poetic tastes, who won’t—can’t—say anything stupid unless I decide it should be so!

  Was his act the realization of a tyrannical dream of power, he joked to himself? It was true that he had very often thought about dictators and why it was that history had not thrown up any who were benevolent, none that he knew of at least. Perhaps it was because the temptation to create a world to reflect your own tastes, prejudices and obsessions, and to exclude and eliminate all that troubled you and made you suffer, all that you had already resolved and didn’t have time to return to, was just too overpowering.

  When I take over the world, the first benevolent dictator in history, what shall I do, he would ask himself from time to time, as he did again after leaving the shop? What will be my first actions? And he had to admit that however many philanthropic and humanitarian programs he would launch, on the first morning of his reign he would also imprison, if not string up from lamp posts, all the bar pianists in the country, and would himself attend the lynching of those half a dozen who had made him suffer so much in the town’s hotel lounges. So much for his reign of benevolence, because after the pianists came very rapidly to mind other dreams of murder: television game show hosts, psychoanalysts, advertising agency ‘creative’ executives, male models, tabloid journalists, stock market traders … The list was finally endless.

  Victor had once again wrought mass slaughter before even getting home, a ten-minute walk away. He had taken the shop’s advice, without quibbling, on the cage for his bird, though it seemed inordinately big for the little fellow (Victor had established that it was, indeed, a male), even if it was a baby and thus destined to grow. The assistants would deliver bird and cage just after closing time in a couple of hours, and the proprietor had agreed to throw in a first supply of some of the food customarily eaten by such parrots. For the rest, they had given him Internet addresses for various bird advice sites, where one could pick up information and experiences of every kind, shared by parrot experts and fellow owners. No, the care and feeding of the little chap shouldn’t be beyond him. Much more difficult would be to decide what on earth to teach him to say.

  A Stroll through the Brain

  Victor cleared the sideboard in the dining room of its useless trinkets and placed the cage in the middle, facing the table where he usually ate his meals. The bird had likely not enjoyed its trip from the shop, carelessly bounced up and down in the arms of the sweating assistants, who had clearly run part of the way to get this additional chore over with. It looked ruffled and disorientated.

  The proprietor had been true to his word and provided a bag full of food pellets and a variety of fruits, including a handful of grapes that had been crushed in the trip, a dozen cherries, which had met a similar fate, and a few bananas, apples and oranges. Victor supposed that the bird could not peel a banana or an orange (and laughed at himself as he speculated on this) and thus skinned and sliced some of the fruit, laying it out carefully on a plate like a dessert he might arrange for himself.

  Victor took time in the kitchen preparing this little supper, hoping that in his absence the bird might tranquilly survey his new environment and begin to get comfortable. It hadn’t budged, though, from its crouched position on the bottom of the cage when he returned. He had to slip the plate under the bars on the tray provided for this purpose, but in doing so he knocked the bird off its feet, eliciting a tiny, pathetic squeak.


  “I’m sorry!” said Victor. “I’m new at this game. I really don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ll learn.”

  The bird did not as much as look at the food and just continued staring morosely in front of itself.

  Victor thought it best to leave him in peace for a good while and went to his study to catch up on his paperwork. He couldn’t concentrate on bills and correspondence, though. Did I really just buy myself a bird, he asked himself? I must be a bigger fool than I thought. I was fine, living alone, no especial responsibilities to anyone or anything. And now I have a bloody parrot. To feed, to amuse, to cherish (he giggled as this word came to him), to nurture … to teach! What an idiot.

  It was very odd having an animal in the house, a silent, immobile one at least. Quite sinister, in fact. He strained to hear whether any noise came from the dining room, just a little squawking or the rattling of a beak against bars. Nothing. Victor was beginning to regret that he hadn’t after all acquired a puppy, with which he would already be playing and tumbling around and watching as it crashed into the furniture.

  He pottered idly around the house, avoiding the dining room but keeping his ears keen to any sound that might come from there. It was getting dark and he lit lamps as he passed them. Could parrots see at night, he wondered? Owls could, after all. And cats. He’d have to check. He had a lot of things to learn.

  He poured a large glass of whisky and ensconced himself in an armchair in the living room with the intention of killing an hour or two more with a book. A few that he was trying to fight his way into, without success, lay on the floor by the chair. He had recently realized that he had all but abandoned works of fiction, assuming you could exclude autobiographies from that category. It had been a gradual process and one of which he had barely been aware. As a man of the world, he felt it was necessary to stay abreast of trends in literature, as indeed those in music, in art. But contemporary writers just failed to seize his interest. They were not writing about the world that he, for one, lived in, and so he could not be persuaded to care, though he had tried. It was surely his fault and not theirs. After all, the difficulties they faced were almost insurmountable: how could a writer any longer circumscribe a world—like good old Proust, or James, for example—in their time? Everything was now changing every five minutes, and you couldn’t stop it from changing long enough to fix anything in place. To pin down any durable truth writers were now condemned to pick some grim, stagnant, and usually obscure, corner of life to describe and animate, and he couldn’t any longer follow them. And that was not even to consider the tons of books, apparently the most popular, which had nothing whatsoever to do with anybody’s life, as far as he could see.

  Victor stared glumly at his bookshelf, then leapt up suddenly and seized a book at random. He opened it somewhere in the middle and read: “Sofya Osipovna had no future, only a past. And this sense of life lived—her very own, unique life—for a brief moment blocked out the present, the very edge of life’s abyss. The strangest of feelings! Something you could not put in words, or share even with the person closest to you—your wife, mother, brother, son, friend or father. It was the soul’s secret, and the soul, however passionately it might want to, could never divulge its secret. You take this sense of your own life to the grave, without ever sharing it with anyone. The miracle of the individual, unique human being, whose conscious and unconscious encompass everything good and bad, funny, beautiful, shameful, pitiful, reticent, tender, shy, surprising—everything from childhood to old age—is fused, inextricably bound up with a mute and mysterious, solitary sense of one’s own, singular life …”

  There was literature, thought Victor. How could he ever, even for a moment, have lost faith in it? Idiot! Yes, reading remained an absolute necessity for him, as essential as breathing. It was one of the rare activities that could actually stop him from thinking, or rather stop him from thinking about the thousand quite useless questions which had little by little colonized his mind over the years and were now demanding attention. Struggling to illustrate the topography of his brain (he sometimes wandered around inside it as one might take a stroll through a town), he had finally concluded that an immense question-production plant had risen from the ground, where the workers slaved day and night, in shifts, manufacturing daft and for the most part gratuitous interrogations. Unfortunately, the town planners had not thought to construct a similar factory for the production of answers, and the questions, without opposition, had been allowed to take over the whole place, promenading themselves in all their finery along the boulevards, choking up even the side streets and cheekily mocking the inhabitants.

  The whisky was a well-established way of dealing with these arrogant fellows. After two or three large tumblers, Victor no longer felt any compulsion at all to take notice of them, let alone respond to their jibes and provocations. “Go your way!” he would say out loud. “I don’t give a hoot about any of you! You just make me laugh!” The questions got funnier with each glass. Who cared, who cared? They couldn’t any longer knock him off balance, or torment and anguish him, not as long as the whisky’s effects lasted, at any rate.

  He had once or twice tried to describe this picture (Bosch must surely have painted it; he’d have to check) for this or that woman who he thought had drawn close enough to him to care about what went on inside his head. (This was never a temptation with men, with whom he never had the slightest inclination to become intimate). He hadn’t yet provoked any interest, but he would probably never give up. One had said: “You do complicate life, you know.” To which he had replied: “No, my dear, life complicates me,” which he thought not only true but rather clever.

  Thank God, or rather Scottish distillers, for this incomparable brew, he said to himself. After savoring a first glass with deliberate voluptuousness, turning it around in his mouth to lightly burn his gums and make him shiver as it scalded his throat, he soon poured a second, which he knew would be even better than the first. Isn’t whisky one of those few drinks that actually gets more tasty with each successive glass? Questions, questions. Shut up, Victor, he urged.

  After four glasses, his thoughts turned away completely from reading, back to the bird, whom he had managed to forget for a while. He makes me very nervous, thought Victor, but I can’t just leave him in there and go to bed without at least bidding him good night. And then, out loud: “I can’t keep on calling him ‘the bird.’” A name! Yes, that’s what we need here. I shall give him this gift on his first evening with me.

  You had to drink something at a christening, so he poured himself another glass before setting off rather unsteadily for the next room.

  He switched on a low, dull lamp so as not to frighten or shock the bird. He was pleased to see that it had left the bottom of the cage and was now sitting on the lowest of the three perches. It did not, however, appear to have begun the food.

  “I understand,” Victor said. “You can’t very well enjoy a meal when you don’t even have a name, hey? A name. One that you can say to yourself with pride, perhaps with love? Even if one loves nothing whatsoever about oneself, one can make an exception with one’s name, I think. One doesn’t choose it, after all.”

  He paused for a moment or two: “How about ‘Yorick’? Yes, that’s it—Yorick! A bird of infinite jest!”

  Victor had no idea why this name had instantly popped up in his mind, without the slightest thought on his part. But it was incontrovertible, just right. What else could you call a parrot? So definite did ‘Yorick’ sound to him, he simply couldn’t imagine.

  Chicken Jokes

  The day after acquiring Yorick, Victor spent many hours reading up on African greys. If he had given it any prior thought, he might have supposed that one kind of parrot was much like another. Nothing could have been further from the truth. There were timid and docile species, some which were aggressive and loud, others which were frankly reckless and wild, others which thrived on human affection and tenderness. A whole new world opened up to him, and i
t didn’t stop at the frontiers of the parrot or bird kingdom. He soon found himself reading about other kinds of animals, their characters and their behavior. He discovered, for example, that about ten percent of dogs were mentally ill—the same proportion as human beings, which was doubtless not a coincidence—and that half of them would at some point in their lives suffer from depression, anxiety and phobias. Again, the same proportion as in mankind. And there was more, it was endless. Pigs enjoyed (or more likely, he thought, not) self-consciousness, chickens had a sense of humor (“Why did the human cross the road?” he speculated). The only major mental characteristics that animals didn’t share with humans were schizophrenia, which was rare, and psychopathology, which was inexistent in animals (good thing, he thought to himself—all I need is a psychopathic parrot).

  He finally forced himself to concentrate on the question at hand: the life and soul of an African grey parrot in captivity—albeit that no one, he supposed, had actually captured Yorick, though he hadn’t enquired about his origins in the shop. He was enchanted by what he learned. He had chosen well. The African grey was considered to be the best talker among birds, to be highly intelligent and sensitive and (like chickens, as he now knew) to possess a sense of humor. It needed a lot of stimulation, thrived on human contact, affection and praise and was playful. Victor also copied down the various foods that it was said to enjoy: sunflower seeds, all kinds of fresh fruit, beets, carrots, radishes, taco chips, nuts, raw corn, cheese, yogurt. A staple diet could also be condensed in pellets available from any bird shop.

  The community of African grey owners was truly lavish in sharing its advice and experience of living with this parrot. There were tips galore on various websites about shaping the bird’s character (it seemed that they could easily become obnoxious and mean if treated negligently); on when and under what conditions to allow them out of their cages, particularly to avoid getting bitten; and, of course, about how best to teach them to talk. Victor was keen to get started with speaking lessons, but the general opinion was clearly that one shouldn’t rush things, that getting a bird used to its new environment and, above all, to oneself, was primordial. If one hadn’t already established a bond of some sort, one wasn’t very likely to elicit much response. And, in any case, he hadn’t even decided on Yorick’s first words.