There is a sentiment in journalism school, this idea that one must knock on doors, pick up the phone, interface, Get The Story. It’s not that truth does not interest me, it’s that I don’t feel compelled like a hound to scent, to rake over the details of objective truth. There is now more than ever a blend of subjective and objective, something John D’Agata trained us for in his book on facts. Still I can hear the questions of that first journalism cohort: truth overall, in search of truth. But with editors and industries and boardrooms and stakeholders, what is and has been the truth? Who holds the multifaceted mirror we seek?
The rooster knew what it meant to announce something beautiful before it happened. Before the light cracked the trees, before heat shimmered in the soil, he crowed. A bird built to believe in mornings that hadn’t come yet.
Before weather apps and sirens, there was a call, low in the chest, ridiculous, operatic. You used to hear him in the shadows of temples, carved into Etruscan wine vessels, painted beside the moon in Vietnamese woodcuts. In Japan, his crow was said to summon the sun goddess out of her cave, pulling the world back from darkness. The French made him a national emblem, not because he was noble but because he was stubborn, noisy, insistent. Polynesians carried him across oceans beside pigs and gods. Once celestial, now a fried chicken logo.
He knows what we used to fear, to flee, to worship. He’s seen thresholds. Watched hens go broody in the dark, refusing to leave the nest even to eat. Watched humans string his kin into sculpture then prophecy then soup. He’s lived a thousand years in every direction, a survivor of what killed the dinosaurs. Chickens, and roosters among them, are older than almost everything we eat. Their calls echoed long before cathedrals, before calendars, before the scaffolding of fact. The rooster learned to live in every corner of the world.
See, there are some things you can’t go back to and some choices that when you make them, you close certain futures forever. I have ambition, or did, but it was direction I allowed myself to be pulled in, letting my waterlogged compass soak in the orange, allowing the river to overtake my boat. For a long time, and even now, I’m afraid to lay claim to or place ownership over things because they can then be lost. An item once named is an item grieved.
Marriage even feels like this. Like I have officially told the universe, this is my love, my heart outside my body, this is how you can hurt me deepest. And I wait for the hurt, the shoe, the cleaving, the absolute shattering of enjoying with gratitude what today is and knowing a day may come where things could be different, harder, a loss entirely. But I have to shake it off. There is abundance here, joy here, wonder still to be felt. To live in scarcity is to invite more of it. These are the stakes of life.
The rooster’s body requires the fiction of light. Somewhere in his genome, in that spiral of jungle and smoke and domesticated violence, he remembers what it means to be depended on. Ornamental and sacrificial and revoked. He rises, scratches, sings. I think of all the prophets we mocked long before we were hungry enough to eat them.
The rooster doesn’t apologize for what comes next. Maybe this clawed descendant of a time when it only ever rained is the only one who knows what morning means.
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