Mexican red-headed parrot
For some reason, I have developed a sudden affection for parrots; or psittacines, as some people (irritatingly) insist on calling them.
I don't know why, but it probably has as much to do with their intelligence as with their vivid colours, for I'm also fond of birds that belong to the crow family and they mostly like to rock an all black plumage (at least here in the temperate zone that I inhabit).
The fact that parrots sometimes not only imitate but mock human beings further increases my fondness for them. It's as if they want to remind us that we are, after all, only an unusual type of ape that has, as Nietzsche says, lost its healthy animal reason along with its body hair.
The fact that parrots sometimes not only imitate but mock human beings further increases my fondness for them. It's as if they want to remind us that we are, after all, only an unusual type of ape that has, as Nietzsche says, lost its healthy animal reason along with its body hair.
D. H. Lawrence was also amused with the manner with which these super-smart birds use their language skills to make fun of people - and their pets. In the essay 'Corasmin and the Parrots', he describes how "two tame parrots in the trees" near his house in Mexico are ever-ready to ridicule those who pass below "with that strange penetrating, antediluvian malevolence" and a squawking sound that belongs to an earlier evolutionary period (or sun).
He writes:
He writes:
"The parrots, even when I don't listen to them, have an extraordinary effect on me. They make my diaphragm convulse with little laughs, almost mechanically. They are a quite commonplace pair of green birds, with bits of bluey red, and round, disillusioned eyes, and heavy, overhanging noses."
First they mimic the sound of a servant, Rosalino, whistling, as he sweeps the patio with a twig broom: "The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so. And this little-more-so is extremely sardonically funny. With their sad old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle."
And then they "break off into a cackling chatter, and one knows they are shifting their clumsy legs, perhaps hanging on with their beaks and clutching with their cold, slow claws, to climb to a higher bough, like rather raggedy green buds climbing to the sun", before suddenly imitating the sound of someone calling the dog with "penetrating, demonish mocking voices".
That a bird - or any creature - should be able to pour such acidic sarcasm over the voice of a human being calling a dog, strikes Lawrence as truly incredible. It makes him chuckle and it makes him ask himself: "Is it possible that we are so absolutely, so innocently, so ab ovo ridiculous?"
And of course, he's honest enough to acknowledge the answer that comes back from an older dimension of being: "not only is it possible, it is patent". Ultimately, man is the joke of all creation who should cover his head in shame.
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Corasmin and the Parrots', Mornings in Mexico, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press), 2009.
Note that the original 1927 version of Mornings in Mexico can be read online thanks to Project Gutenberg Australia: click here.
