How is it that a bird of flight can suffer jet-lag? Strange enough it is indeed! Parallel processes include the fact that my reconnaissance within medieval villages in the south of France revealed not so many visible noctambules, but the sounds, the sounds! the sounds! It was a figure-ground reversal that haunts me still…It seems that even ancient villages are all tele-synesthetic these days–cable equipped, wi-fi bathed– so that anything more than invisibility would be just another iteration of the simultaneous whirl of globalisation. Nocturnal predators in these anomalous spaces have adapted in relevant ways—they opt for old fashioned obsfucation of visually detectable coordinates. And they do just fine panning their incessant hoots from every which where all through the night!
Still, the owl form appears—a laughable skeuomorph idling on fence posts and decrepit walls, a cheap mimicry that betrays the adaptive strategies of these noble creatures. Like a small maple syrup jug with non-functional handle, these false idols are scattered about the countryside, dismissed by would be prey, gaudy deterrence machines all told. Yes, yes– these regionally iterative trompe l’oeil reveal in reverse the mutant outgrowth of what was once called the picturesque. Or, in other words, they reek of an inadequate ability to reset the sleep/wake cycle in response to info-environmental time cues, i.e. history is spatial: technocultural jet-lag.
While shy of a confirmed link, or two, there is reason enough to consider the “Mothman,” or “Bird man” as an adjunct operative. Zoological authorities will always laugh off any cryptid by pointing to a commonplace look-a-like. In presence of