I thought that I saw a parrot; a flock of parrots flying freely here and there—parrots everywhere. Although I am not entirely sure if they were parrots or not. As I stared intensely out of my window I witnessed a colourful figure ascending from one corner of my eye to the other; in a blink it was there and then it was not. Perhaps it was never there at all? I surmise that it must have been a parrot. But why?
Abstractions swimming around that are now being poured into their new form—a new body, a new vessel, a rebirth (words?). Consciousness—rather, a socially conceived consciousness—has us believe that what we can see and hear is all a part of our conquered world, all of which is within our control by the use of language. But why do we think that we know what something is just because we can name it?
Life is nothing but riddled with transitions, blinking on and off with everything starting up just to end up stopping again. It is as if teleporting and shape shifting were used by science fiction solely as a metaphor to try to explain this very real phenomenon around us. If a seagull were to shape-shift into a parrot would we need to write it down, or could we simply enjoy staring at it? Similar to how others often tell us that we need to prepare for this and that, go here and there, we need not consider the this and that for themselves, that is, the experience of their blinking, because they are everywhere. Or are they?
Strings and things, connecting dots, and waging invisible wars. Invisibility cloaks painted with the murmurs of those who have suffered for them to become unnoticeable. Now visible, the beast is sighted, identified, and rectified as it is no longer caged by the cloaks that previously described it (language). Inference allows us to believe that we know—we understand—what we saw and that by creating a name and a categorical number we can identify our visions and place them neatly in the drawer next to our paintings of photographs. Although one thing was always forgotten to be mentioned to us, for as fast as the tap runs the water out of it, it always evaporates just as quickly before it ever reaches our hands.
“I thought I saw a, I thought I saw a…” For those who are old enough to want to finish that sentence with a yellow-bird-like voice, I must ask you: did someone think they saw you?