Crows and crowbars: they get you out
When I was in my twenties, I cheated on my kind, honest, and supportive live-in boyfriend several times with someone who was also cheating on their girlfriend with me. We didn’t have the (crass, too cute by a half and overly technical) term situationship then, and affair was not a word anyone would use in 2010s Bloomberg Brooklyn; besides, none of us were married or necessarily otherwise monogamous. It was just, for several reasons, a secret.
The relationship was defined by its lack of definition. I spent a lot of time thinking about what this person was to me, or could be, if those vague and elusive “things” were somehow different, and often found myself fixated on the way that the relationship seemed to exist not only outside of but directly counter to linear time. When I was collecting stolen hours with him or thinking and writing about him and about those moments and how they had changed me, it was as if I were a different version of myself—one that couldn’t coexist with the life I’d built around me and somehow gotten trapped inside. One I liked better. He was my crowbar: He’d opened a portal inside of me, into another timeline, that I couldn’t close again.
I was able to let go of my crowbar, but it turned out I couldn’t let go of the version of reality, and of myself, that I’d discovered. I left my five-year relationship and moved in with a man I’d recently met, who would eventually become the father of my daughter and, for the last year of our ten-year relationship, my husband. When he and I first started dating, we sublet an apartment in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The bedroom window opened onto a fire escape where each of us would sometimes individually sit and smoke cigarettes when we fought badly and both needed a break. It was hot that summer. One morning, I woke up to find the twin claw marks of a crowbar on the outside of the bedroom window—someone had climbed the fire escape and tried to pry the window open. They must not have tried too hard; the sound hadn’t woken me.
*
In Miranda July’s essay, “You Bust Loose from Heaven and Now Your Life Starts,” a deeply practical guide for the collective All Fours group chat to thinking about how to know whether and when to leave the life you’ve built, she writes:
“In the case of a long relationship, you better hope you’re not the exact same person you were at the start. And that alone can be reason to leave. You simply know yourself better now, you would not choose that person if you met them now or you perhaps you would choose them all over again but you would describe yourself and your needs much differently in those first dates and: they might not have chosen you. […] Often there is a new person involved in this crisis. Indeed it is the new person who makes it a crisis, who brings it to a breaking point. Most of the time this new person does not endure but they are still very significant in the story of your life (a friend of mine calls these people crowbars — they get you out.) What I really think is that you are not doing it for this new person, but for this new side of yourself.”
Crowbars: they get you out. Curious whether that usage was more widespread than I’d realized, I started texting writers I know to see if they’d heard the phrase and wondered who Miranda’s friend might be. Nobody knew it.
“I don’t know that I love it as a metaphor,” my friend Kate texted back. We used to sit together on the school bus in second grade. “I get it, but it almost makes it sound like the person is illegally breaking you into a life you weren’t meant to have. I’d rather the person be an escape ladder. Or a rope thrown out a window.”
A crowbar, a person who gets you out, doesn’t have to be a rival lover. I received a welcome podcast’s worth of voice memos from my friend Sonja, with whom I used to mail mix CDs back and forth when we were fourteen in between breathless AIM conversations about what exactly might entail second-and-a-half base (Sonja is now a sex educator). We talked about the idea of a platonic crowbar—sometimes a crush, but sometimes too a new or newly-reconnected-with friend that pulls you into the same kind of easy, immediate intimacy that has you making playlists, texting photos of dog-eared poetry and the moon high over the lake, falling in love with yourself all over again. Shake-and-bake bonding, my summer camp friends once called it. Simply put, love that changes you.
“Later (too late)” writes Haley Mlotek in No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, “I would learn that the people most certain that they knew how other people should live were those least certain of their own lives.” At first glance, this is the kind of smug aphorism spouted by the people who are so unsure about their own lives they can’t even talk to their friends, but I think Mlotek is onto something. In marriage, and particularly perhaps in divorce, even the marks of a crowbar on someone else’s window are enough to make a lot of people move out of the neighborhood. One requirement of a crowbar is that, directly or indirectly, they remind you that you can change your life. Likely, they’ve changed their own once or more. They see you as you want to see yourself—a relief, if a wrenching one.
*
The place I’d heard the term used in the same way was in the first line of the devastating Fiona Apple song “I Know,” which opens “so be it, I’m your crowbar / that’s what I am so far / until you get out of this mess”. Admittedly, to be the crowbar in someone else’s relationship is an ambivalent cameo. In your own story, you’re the crow.
The man who was my crowbar once told me, before we’d ever had sex, that he would only cheat with someone who was also in a relationship. It was for security, he explained—mutually assured destruction. A single girl was too liable to get attached, get mad and send a Facebook message to your girlfriend. It was safer for everyone this way. Honor amongst thieves, he called it. A moral code so specific unto itself it transformed into a secret language. The Latin version of that Roman-originated idiom is corvus oculum corvi non eruit, meaning "a crow will not pull out the eye of another crow.” Solidarity.
Crows are exceptional in a number of ways, and along with the rest of the corvid family, outliers in the bird world for their intelligence. Louis Lefebvre, a biologist and comparative psychologist at McGill University who specializes in the bird mind, has used the concept of “innovative behavior” as a measure of bird smarts. It’s not just crows’eerie human-like behaviors that surprise us, in other words, but that they’re incredibly capable of coming up with new things to do, given new environments and resources.
In Ancient Greek Κορωνίς means curved, or bent, and shares its root with κορώνη (korṓnē), the word for crow. Crows’ ability to fashion tools is their most famous skill, and I’ve developed a pet theory (probably wrong, due to the use of the phrase “iron crow” in Shakespeare and elsewhere) that the crowbar is not so named because its toothy hook particularly resembles the curved beak or the feet of a crow but because it’s exactly the kind of tool a crow would use, and does. Studies have shown that not only do crows create and use tools but actively enjoy doing so. They’re more enriched and entertained, and therefore willing to engage in food-collecting challenges that put up more of a fight. “The New Caledonian crows have very big brains and they are outstanding tool manufacturers. So they'll take a stick, strip all the leaves off, and turn it into a hook by bending the tip.” A crowbar. Incredibly, the study further showed that it wasn’t simply the effectiveness of the tool that pleased the crows. “We feel that that's pretty strong evidence that it's not just that they had to work harder or spend longer. It really is somehow the actual presence of a tool and the use of a tool itself.” Emphasis mine. Crows like a challenge. They like to figure something out anew, something they haven’t tried before. To, given new input, change their minds. That’s how we learn about ourselves.
Along with tool use, maybe the most uncannily human intelligence observed in crows is recursion—a kind of thinking related to associative reasoning, or preemptive recognition of patterns. Not only can crows recognize symbols, they can make sense of them in relation to each other.
Liao and her colleagues started off by teaching two crows (Corvus corone) to identify the symbols { }, [ ] and < >, rewarding them with treats only when the birds pecked in the order of a center-embedded recursive sequence, such as { ( ) } or ( { } ). It took the birds about a week to learn to peck the symbols in that order, after which the crows sat for their final exams: strings of similar symbols they had not yet seen, such as { } [ ]. Humans, toddlers and monkeys faced with such a test usually understand that if { ( ) } is correct then { [ ] } or [ { } ] is also correct.
To me, this means that crows would probably understand the pooping back and forth forever in Me and You and Everyone We Know. Recursion is a hard enough concept for humans to grasp, so I asked one of my smarter friends.
How would you explain recursion to me?
I would simplify it, he wrote back.
Is that a joke, I texted, about recursion
Yes
“Associative reasoning” was the phrase we got to that I liked. Recursion has something to do with the way I’ve always felt like I’m going through life with a highlighter, picking out patterns that, once unlocked, would tell me something important, something true, something that would change everything. In All Fours, when the narrator hopes that placing the last tile will open a portal—that’s how I’ve thought about the patterns in my life. It’s also how I think about relationships: as an ongoing collaboration on a kind of project that matters to both parties. A closeness made of noticing what the other person cares about and honoring that care through attention.
“There’s a subset of the style of conversation we can call ‘and to loop it back’ which is recursive,” Jessica said. Jessica is a new friend and one of those delightful cases where someone whose thinking you’ve admired from a distance exceeds expectations up close. “Open one topic. Another. Another. Another. Close last topic. Close next last. Again. Again. The gestalt of it all combined with the order of them is the true substance of the conversation.”
I asked a programmer who was my best friend in high school, and a crowbar more than once.
Me: How would you explain recursion in a way that is interesting to me philosophically?
Him: The programming concept or Nietzsche’s idea that you will live your one life over and over?
Me: My understanding is that there’s a general theme that connects them that is also the thing that crows understand
Him: Hmmm dunno about crows. In programming recursion is just the idea that you can write a little action (function) and you keep applying it to some information over and over until it solves a problem or gives you an answer or something. The interesting thing is that the thing you write is aware of itself and uses itself
Me: What makes it eventually solve the problem or come up with an answer?
Him: Imagine there is something that you can do a repetitive operation to, to get an answer. The simplest and dumbest example is a list of numbers you want to add together. You can make something that removes the first two numbers, adds them and puts the result back in the list. Then it calls itself with the new list.
Until there is one item in the list and that’s the answer
Me: Ah yes numerology ok
Him: The real use case is when that thing can call itself multiple times but that gets into data structures and junk
Me: Is it never an infinite problem?
Him: In every language I can think of, there is a limit to the number of times something can call itself before the whole thing crashes.
*
I am a collector of patterns. One of the reasons I married my husband was because our birthdays are four hours apart, and I liked to say that we were together once before, waiting to be born. Another was that he reminded me of something I hadn’t figured out yet, maybe something I hadn’t quite seen before. Someone I’d wanted before I knew he existed, maybe before either of us existed. Another reason I married him was that in a lifetime I chose that I’d somehow glimpsed many times before, I already had.
When we started dating, he lived near some old, non-functional train tracks that were often yielding mysterious and sort of steampunk-looking rusted pieces of metal of different shapes and sizes. Every time I saw him, he brought me something he’d found while we’d been apart. They hang now heavy in the back of our daughter’s closet in a green tote bag printed with the cover of To Kill a Mockingbird. The prize among them was a hose clamp that fit my left ring finger as if it was custom forged for me, its steel buckle hovering below my knuckle like a mined diamond. I wore it until I lost it in a bowling alley one night on Staten Island. It was the ring of my dreams at that moment in my life. I put that here not to say that he changed, but that I did.
*
When I got a tattoo of a crow from a flash sheet for $20 in Chicago the tattoo artist asked me, “Do you know the difference between a crow and a raven?”
I didn’t. “It’s a matter of opinion,” he crowed.
I looked at him skeptically. That didn’t seem right. “Are you sure?”
“No,” he said, “It’s a joke. It’s the number of their pinion feathers; crows have five and ravens have four. It’s a matter of a pinion.”
*
Crows come by their Greek name, corone, by way of Apollo’s mistress, Coronis. In the Appolodorus version of the myth, Coronis left Apollo for a mortal lover, and a white crow was the bearer of the news to scorned Apollo. Before killing Coronis, Apollo paused to set the crow aflame, burning its feathers black.
As a culture, we are particularly fascinated with relationships falling apart, circling the remains of love stories that didn’t last to pick out the details solidly different from our own. A protective ritual. The corpuses of our own marriages aren’t laced with those particular poisons, thus we will be spared. Magical thinking as an excuse for the gossip death drive. Before I read Haley Mlotek’s No Fault, the complaint I’d heard most was that it didn’t give a convincing or thorough enough explanation for why the divorce was required. That, of course, and the length of the marriage—being married for a year seemed, to a particular subset of my mostly unmarried and childfree peers, infinitely more scandalous than not getting married at all. What was the point? Was that even allowed?
Before I was married, I thought that the recursive pattern went like this: [Marriage {Divorce} Marriage]. Wanting to be a wife, to be so chosen, for so long, was bigger than anything else. I thought that the divorce plot was just a part of the marriage plot, collapsed within it, even as a shadowy hanger-on. I hoped that marriage would make my lurking, lifelong fear of divorce feel smaller. I fell for the linear narrative finality of a wedding, the idea that progress towards the ideal of commitment could supersede my darkest doubts. I assumed that becoming a wife would absolve me, change me. It did, just not the way I thought it would. “It is not that marriage is unknowable,” writes Mlotek, “but that we seem to get close to it and it’s so completely what we should have expected that it is unfaceable.”
From the perspective of a wife, the pattern shifted. [Divorce {Marriage} Divorce]. Sometimes I feel like I spent my life doing things in the wrong order, having the same realizations over and over again and never learning the lesson until it was too late. But then I think, no, it had to be this way. Everything happens at the same time. Maggie Nelson wrote in The Argonauts about “the pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
“No one knows what goes on in a marriage except the people in it, the truism goes,” writes Mlotek. “I have often thought that the sentence could stand to be shortened to No one knows what goes on in a marriage.”
*
Crows are monogamish. Birds get a sweet reputation for lifelong true love, but the truth is that birds have a ten percent “divorce rate”. Often, but not always, bird divorce is caused by male infidelity. Sometimes, it’s caused by migration patterns: The couple just ends up in different places at the same time. The intersection of distance and time, for birds, can be a portal. A tool. A crowbar.
Crows are thieves too, or collectors at least. It isn’t just that they’ll take things you leave out, but they notice what you leave. When they bring back presents for people, they try to get it right. They bring human things, like coins or keys or buttons. They gossip, they play pranks. They hold grudges. They’re harbingers of something, that’s for sure, although what exactly varies by the myth and culture telling it. Death, sometimes, but not finality so much as transformation. Not death, but the Death card.
A single crow is an omen. Easy enough to spot if you’re paying even a little attention. More than two, and the symbolism gets a little over the top. Everyone knows a group of crows is called a murder. In one of the last conversations that signified the end, my husband called me “the enemy of our marriage.” It was a rich phrase, and one I was grateful to him for having gifted to me. I filed it away in a drawer, took up the mantle of it in my mind. He was right. I was the enemy of my marriage. I was on the side of something else.
There’s a sense now maybe that to tell a story is to make an excuse for it, that a narrative is in itself a moral. I’m a relativist about that. There is no one story. There is no one way to be a bird.
In The Genius of Birds, Jennifer Ackerman writes about the “metatool use” of crows, the way they can complete a puzzle in two and a half minutes that requires “spontaneously aiming a tool at an object that’s not food but deemed useful to secure another tool”. It’s a skill that has otherwise only been observed in humans and great apes, and requires working memory, abstract understanding, and a few other components to intelligence. But, Ackerman points out, there’s no one kind of intelligence that’s inherently most valuable. After all, that’s why humans thrive in relationship.
“Pigeons, for instance, don’t do well on tasks that require them to abstract a general rule to solve a suite of similar problems, a skill easily learned by crows. But the lowly pigeon is a wizard in other ways: it can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.”
Maybe the homing pigeon’s dogged one-trackedness can’t exist in the same bird brain that conceptualizes the use of a tool for its own sake as the prize, rather than whatever lies beyond the closed lid. That prefers a harder challenge it hasn’t seen before, because inside the figuring out is the work, is the joy, is the pain, is the portal, is the satisfaction of being alive.
