The Crow Project: Texts

The Doctrine of Cycles

This doctrine ( whose most recent inventor called it the doctrine of the Eternal Return ) may be formulated in the following manner:

The number of all the atoms that compose the world is immense but finite, and as such only capable of a finite ( though also immense ) number of permutations. In an infinite stretch of time, the number of possible permutations must be run through, and the universe has to repeat itself. Once again you will be born from a belly, once again your skeleton will grow, once again this same page will reach your identical hands, once again you will follow the course of all the hours of your life until that of your incredible death. Such is the customary order of this argument, from its insipid preliminaries to its enormous and threatening outcome. It is commonly attributed to Nietzsche. from "The Doctrine of Cycles" by Jorge Luis Borges

Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow

from "Eaxamination at the Womb-Door" by Ted Hughes

The Woiwurong Koori people's elders told a similar myth of how once there were seven young women called the Karatgurk who lived on the Yarra river where Melbourne now stands. They lived on yams which they dug out with their digging sticks, on the end of which they also carried live coals. They kept the fire to themselves. They cooked their own yams, but gave raw ones to Crow. One day Crow found one of the cooked yams and tasted it. He found it delicious and decided to cook his yams from then on. The women refused to give him fire and so he decided to trick them out of it. He caught and hid a lot of snakes in an ant mound, then called to the girls that he had found a large ant mound and that the ant larvae tasted much better than yams. The women ran to the mound and began digging into it with their sticks. The snakes came hissing out and chased them away, screaming. But them the women turned and began to hit out at the snakes with their digging sticks. They hit so hard that some of the live coals were knocked off. Crow was waiting for this. He pounced on the live coals and hid them in a kangaroo skin bag he had prepared. When the women had killed all the snakes, they came back to look for the coals. They could not find them and decided that Crow had taken them. They chased him, but he flew out of reach and perched on the top of a very high tree.

Bunjil saw what had happened and asked Crow for some of the coals, as he wanted to cook a possum. Crow offered to cook it for him and when he had done so, threw it down to Eaglehawk who saw that it was still smoking. He tried to blow it into flame, but failed. He ate the possum and while he did so, the Koori people gathered around and shouted at Crow to give them fire. The din scared him and at last he flung some live coals at the crowd. Kurok-goru the fire-tailed finch picked up some of the coals and hid them behind his back and that is why these finches have red tails. Eaglehawk's shaman helpers, Djurt-djurt the nankeen kestrel and Thara the quail hawk, grabbed the rest of the coals.

Then the coals made a bush fire which burnt Crow black. It also spread over his country and Bunjil had to gather all the Kooris to help put it out. He placed some rocks at the head of the Yarra river to stop the fire spreading that way, and they are there to this day. His two helpers were burnt and became two rocks at the foot of the Dandenong Range. The Karatgurk were swept up into the sky where they became the Pleiades, the stars representing their glowing firesticks. 

Story courtesy of Aboriginal Mythology (1994) Mudrooroo, Thorsons, London, pp. 35-36 

This isn't the wind in the maples, my boy

No song to the lonely moon

This is the wild roar of our daily toil

We curse it and count it a boon

For it is the voice of our cities

It is our favourite song

It is the language we all understand 

It will soon be the world's mother tongue

from "Song of the Machines" by Bertolt Brecht