For a hundred thousand years, the greatest of the gods was the crow, the dream-carrier, who brought civilization to the people in paleolithic times. Mammoth-ivory carvings found over a vast area from Europe to the Near East depict a goddess with the raptor traits of a carrion bird: three fingered talons and a beaked face - a predator crow with breasts.
About ten thousand years ago, when the goddess became a god, the same winged omnivore continued as chief diety almost everywhere: the archaic greeks called him Cronos, literally The Crow, the tireless traveller and hunger machine the romans renamed Saturn, god of time, the sun god Apollo, whose name means The Destroyer, was another greek avatar of the crow, as was the norse king of the gods, Odin. To the celts as well as aboriginal american nations, this scavenger bird carried the cosmic significance of The Great Benefactor, the creator of the visible world. The germanic and siberian tribes similarly worshipped the crow as an oracular healer. And in china, the black-feathered predator was the first of the imperial emblems, representing Yang, the sun, and the vitality of the emperor.
During medieval times, "the shadow of the sun" was how european alchemists defined the crow, their symbol for the "nigredo", the blackness of despair and its poison-cure, the unity latent in chaos. That unity is the crow's rapture, a lifeforce so powerful it can actually live of death itself. That - and its outer space color in broad daylight - is what impressed the first people. The crow is the hunger of the sky. When it comes down, it eats everything, including the dead. And it rejects nothing. it is invulnerable, it is wider than time.
At our human limits, when we've gone as far as our bodies and imagination can take us, we meet the eternal ones, the powers that built our flesh out of the mineral accidents of creation and that are now building our individual fates out of time and the accidents of our hearts. They are spaceless and timeless as numbers, and yet, as with numbers, all order in space and time comes from them. In a glare of earthlight, the crow emerges out of the super-real. He is the appetite of the eternal ones for the mortal powers of the world.
J. O'Barr's "The Crow" is an excarnation of this celestial devourer. This crow is the same melancholy avenger who castrated his father, king of the mountains (Uranus), ten thousand years ago in the first kingdoms, the brutal aryan warcamps of indo-europe. He is immemorially old - and inconsolable, because he is his own Hades. Ghosts dwell in him. His clown-white and feminine features harken all the way back to the ivory crow-goddess of a hundred thousand years ago, the maker as the taker, the blood drained face of mama death, her ghost crows descending to pluck the souls from our corpses.
The blood remembers this. What O'Barr adds is the acid-burn of city apocalypse, the physical dread of our animal grief in the asphalt canyons where death pretends to be life. By this immediacy, O'Barr creates rough, spare, sinewy, and rapid arcs of vision and makes a simple supernatural tale of revenge a poison-cure to the complete absence of imagination - mindless violence.
Tears, salty blood, boneshards and the sludge of brains attend this vision of the transcendental mystery of the crow. It is how the dead are tongued with fire. It is an unnaturally natural way to express what the dead have no speech for: shadows of ink play with motionless motions on the emptiness of the page and a crow wakes in the heart. It is an illusion and a voluptuous truth about why we are unfinished and cannot fly.
And, because the hand really is no different from what it creates, it is also O'Barr's personal truth - a ritual done for us.
As with every true ritual, it is a killing floor. The more sacred the ritual, the more messy and gruesome the blood-letting. Saturn disemboweled, Odin pierced and hanging from the storm tree - the crow creating a zombie to destroy dozens of violent, evil lives. This purging of evil is a primordial fantasy prominent even at the deepest range of consciousness - because it is rooted in the suzerain truth that we are all equal before death. No mortal has the right to take another's body or life. Yet people are raped and killed every hour. The whole world is infected, and the innermost secret spirit inside the recesses of inert matter watches without blinking.
"The Crow" is this chthonic spirit's long fantasy. Four billion years of raw food eaten alive has made the animal mind we have inhereted a wild, hungry happiness. Life feeds voraciously on the silences of the dead. Behold our species' ravening of planetary sources. We are already, all of us, survivors of aftermath. In our ignorance and tameless greed we have raped and killed the only woman the crow ever loved. Now his scar split mask fills the world. And each of us is one of his casualties.

Copyright 1995 Kitchen Sink Press

Used without permission, but with the hope that all sins can be forgiven...