Dark and Raven-ous...

“Mystical, majestic, delightful, spiteful, playful, brooding, mysterious, amusing, gregarious, talented, multi-faceted, multi-lingual, beguiling, charming, entertaining, schizophrenic, phantasmagorical...all in one and one in all...”

These are just a few adjectives attributed not to some polymath genius, but to the omniscient raven. Yes, the blackest of black, beautiful like the night, clever like the fox, and elusive like a dream itself, is the raven. Is it a wonder then that this much misunderstood, feared and idolized bird should have featured in many folklores and legends, along with being inspirational towards several known pieces of art and literature? While in the literary world, the best known example is a poem, called, `The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe, in the realm of fine arts, many eminent artists, such as Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, John James Audubon, Andrew Wyeth and Robert Bateman, to name a few, were challenged to capture its lightless light and its ambiguous personality in some of their masterpieces.

Interestingly, even the fate of the English Crown is intertwined with that of of six captive ravens, atop the Tower of London. Their presence is believed to protect the Crown and a superstition holds that “if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall, and Britain with it”. Thus they are looked after and fed by an official Ravenmaster. Local legend relates the custom of tending to the flock to the era of Charles the Second.

In the native American culture, raven is an important totem, and a lore describes it as a creature of metamorphosis, symbolising change/transformation. It is also called `the keeper of secrets’ and is regarded as a messenger between the physical world, and the spiritual domain. To the native people of the Pacific Northwest, raven is no less than what Prometheus was in the Greek mythology: a titan, who stole fire from the gods to give it to humans, so they too could aspire to be something greater than their dark selves, confined to an animal-like existence in the caves of the primeval earth. While Prometheus was damned to eternal suffering, the raven got charred in the process of bringing fire to man, which explains its colour.

My family developed a love for this uncanny, most amazing bird during our five year stay in the interior Alaska. In fact, it was during our first seven-month-long winter that we discovered the camaraderie of ravens. The haunting beauty of birch forest, buried deep in snow and winter silence, dotted with ravens, is not so black and white...Clad in parkas, we would saunter down the road on our daily constitutionals in the dead of winter, sometimes at forty below or colder. We would keep our eyes and ears open, for the least movement and the slightest sound in case we encountered these fabled birds. It did not take us long to realize that they too sought our companionship, as much as we sought theirs.

Capable of producing a whole gamut of most mesmerising sounds and indulging in outrageously clownish behaviour, ravens never ceased to surprise us. They spoke to the forest in the sweetest, rippling, gurgling voice. It was pure music...music of the river. I could visualise myself, standing by the waterways, skipping smooth pebbles over its limpid surface. When everything lay frozen still, there they were reminding us of flowing streams, and running rivers...of spring...and summer. There were times when on seeing us approach the tree where they were perched, they would start mimicking sounds, and hanging upside down, or just plain gossiping...merely to get our attention. And, we would be so thrilled to watch their performance, that we would forget how cold our feet felt inside the boots, or how the tip of our nose was zeroing in onto a sensation of numbness. We would stand and watch, enthralled, and amused, at times, even doubling up with laughter. And, when the tears from all that laughing would begin to sting the eyes, reluctantly, we will continue our course. Sometimes, the band of these wild performers, on watching us depart, would take off and perch itself on a tree further up, for Act 2, just in case we were still interested.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice asks the Mad Hatter, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

What a strange question! Of course, no answer is given, not by the Mad Hatter, nor by anyone else. The riddle remains a mystery, much like the raven itself.