I was staying with some family recently. They live in a modest house Up North with a charming garden. Birds of all varieties use the garden and as someone who only recently left a place so devoid of actual nature that the council had to create fake nature and did it so badly that even the city dwelling local populace managed to smell bullshit and completely avoided it…I enjoyed being in a garden which actually resembled real nature (or at least a version of ‘real nature’ curated by middle class boomers).
Anyway in the garden they have a water fountain. It’s a metal, reflective orb that sits on the grass gently bubbling away. And almost every day a blackbird (or similar, I don’t know birds) flies down onto the metal orb and starts attacking the reflection of itself. It energetically hops around sparring with its mirror version, pecking and flapping in an attempt to beat what it imagines is a real adversary whilst having no idea that it is actually just fighting itself. Or at least an abstraction of itself, a mirror image. It does this every day. It may well spend the rest of its life flying down to the orb every morning and fighting an imagined battle with a shadow of itself. Incidentally, one family member mentioned that the bird is male and whilst he goes about his daily fight another female blackbird sits on the fence and watches this take place with the blackbird version of a knowing bemusement etched across its face (does a blackbird have a face?).
I was fixated watching the bird battling against itself, knowing there was something more to this than just some barmy bird antics. How often are we that blackbird? How many days do we spend fighting battles we think we need to fight but which are ultimately futile conflicts with ourselves or abstractions of ourselves. How much of our lives do we spend battling something that’s not actually there without even realising it? Wrestling against things we think are outside threats that need to be dealt with but are actually just reflections of us.
There’s a short story in Genesis where a man wrestles with Jacob all night. That man ends up being God (or an Angel depending on your interpretation) who blesses Jacob for his perseverance.
Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome
Now I am not religious (in fact I spent a lot of my 20’s as a hitchens/ dawkins acolyte) but in my recent exploration of religious texts I’ve decided I quite like the idea that God is actually just the perfect version of you. God is your potential, fully realised. So with that in mind the wrestling story becomes one of wrestling with yourself. And perhaps there is a link between that and our blackbird from which we can draw something useful.
When we find ourselves fighting or wrestling or pushing away, we are most likely having that fight with ourselves. They key is to recognise when you are the blackbird, fighting needlessly against yourself and not accepting the futility of your battle and when you are Jacob, wrestling with the highest version of yourself through which you should persevere to attain your ‘blessing’, once the night is over.
I often battle with myself and almost all of it is useless. Raking over past conversations or interactions, picking over abstractions that don’t reflect reality so I can use them as a bigger stick with which to uselessly chastise myself. These are the blackbird fights I want to avoid. But there are times when my lazy, nihilistic, ‘gloop’ self is wrestling with my potential. When I just want to binge netflix rather than go to the gym or write some nonsense about blackbirds and the bible. Those are the battles I want to persevere through. Choose the fights you have with yourself wisely. Don’t be the blackbird.
