international conversations about birds

BLACK SWAN/POWER STATION 1973

I've dredged up a memory from my early seventies London phase which I thought might be of interest. it was prompted by this 15 November 'black swan theory' posting. I'd gone to Battersea Power Station to make some reference photographs for an illustration I'd been commissioned to make for the Scientific Book Club and was suddenly confronted with a single black swan, there in the then filthy Thames. The presence of this exotic creature, which I'd only ever seen before on (triangular?) postage stamps, captivated my attention and seemed very aware of me as I tracked its passage along the embankment through the viewfinder of my Pentax camera. Later I was left with the distinct feeling that the incident had been a kind of 'visitation'. A few years on from this and I would read Colin Wilson's Mysteries and learn therein about the possible significance of the sudden (sometimes ominous) appearance of black dogs... but surely they're a different kettle of fish altogether... are they not?

Sean Halligan / 8 December 2008

A couple of days ago Shaw and I were talking on skype about the birds idea, where it came from and where it might be going. He sent me a press story about a black swan. Shaw was also talking about the black swan in a cultural and conceptual context. Googling "Black Swan" takes me back to Wikipedia:

• The black swan theory refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. The theory was described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—"undirected" and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, the first world war, as well as the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.
  

• The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass. Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the black swan narrative to discuss falsification.

Earlier in the week I had sent an e-mail to Shaw and Hangfeng about finding a reference to a Persian poem called the Conference of Birds.

The Conference of the Birds is a book of poems in Persian by Farid ud-Din Attar of approximately 4500 lines. The poem uses a journey by a group of 30 birds, led by a hoopoe as an allegory of a Sufi sheikh or master leading his pupils to enlightenment.
Besides being one of the most beautiful examples of Persian poetry, this book relies on a clever word play between the words Simorgh — a mysterious bird in Iranian mythology which is a symbol often found in sufi literature, and similar to the phoenix bird — and "si morgh" — meaning "thirty birds" in Persian. Wikipedia

It was in China, late one moonless night,
The Simorgh first appeared to human sight -
He let a feather float down through the air,
And rumours of its fame spread everywhere;

Posted by Philip Courtenay