NOTES ON A SPARROW
OF UNCERTAIN COMPOSITION
A Record of Examination, Certification, and the Closing of Inquiry
Further inquiry unnecessary. — The Department of Wildlife
PLATE I • SPECIMEN AS RECEIVED
The specimen arrived without paperwork.
It was found on bare concrete, head lowered, in the posture of a bird reading the ground. A junior officer was dispatched to confirm the obvious: that it was a sparrow, that it was alive, and that no further action was required.
The officer returned with a sparrow and a problem.
At a distance of three feet, the specimen presented as Passer domesticus — common house sparrow, unremarkable, the most administratively convenient bird in the registry. At a distance of three inches, the plumage resolved into text. The breast was a paragraph. The wing was a folded column. Each feather had been torn from a page and laid against the next, so that the whole animal was nothing but printed language, pressed into the shape of a thing that flies.
The question was whether real and made of words are findings that may be entered on the same line.
Standard procedure offers two boxes. BIOLOGICAL — a creature, subject to the protections and indifferences afforded to creatures. ARTIFACT — an object, subject to cataloguing, storage, and eventual loss. The form does not contemplate a third condition. The form has never had to.
The specimen declined to cooperate with either box.
- • Held the posture of a living bird without interruption.
- • Plumage legible under magnification; sentences intact.
- • Cast a shadow consistent with mass.
- • Did not flee. Did not feed. Did not stop being a sparrow.
- • Displayed no awareness of being composed of anything.
A more thorough department would have kept it. Would have weighed the words, named the pages, traced each sentence to its source, and asked the only interesting question: what does it mean that a thing assembled out of writing can stand on its own legs and refuse to be an artifact?
This department is not that department.
Faced with a specimen that was both text and creature — both the means of production and the thing produced — the examining officer reached the conclusion that closes every uncomfortable file. The sparrow was certified biological. The certification was stamped. The inquiry was declared unnecessary, which is the bureaucratic word for unbearable.
It is the position of this office that a sparrow which is plainly made of pages, and which is plainly alive, presents no contradiction requiring resolution. The contradiction is resolved by declining to look closer. Where the evidence is legible, reading it is optional.
The specimen was released. It is presumed to have flown, though no officer observed it do so. The pages have not been recovered. The file is closed on the authority of its own conclusion: that some things which arrive made of words are best certified as biological and returned to the air before anyone is required to explain how.
This record is itself made of words. It, too, would prefer not to be examined.