Unnamed Bird : Bird on the Wire

This is a Bird. All its identifying marks are stripped away. Its colors, song, behavior, community, all gone. We’re left grasping for understanding when we don’t see its eyes. The silhouette, though, defines certain parameters. It gives us a shape and helps us imagine the bird’s extent, the degree to which it fills space. Barbed wire, especially seen like this, inevitably creates powerful and fraught resonances. “Like a bird on the wire….”

In the Treasures section of my library is my signed copy of Night by Elie Wiesel (z”l). By the time I met him, he was a universally acknowledged Great Man. He’d won the Nobel, published dozens of books, and in many ways served as humanity’s conscience. What I remember is his eyes. There was a transcendent calm there. The boy stripped of everything in Auschwitz and the man plied with every global honor, none of these externalities defined him. He did. His extent, the degree to which he filled space, was his own manifestation.

Night is like the Book of Job; the narrative touches only the surface of the story. The unwritten question, the Midrash if you will, compels us to ask, “And how would I have reacted in the same situation?” The books’ power lies in their ability to evoke our “id-entity,” what are we? What is our own manifestation? And when someone looks in our eyes, what is it that they’ll see? When all our externalities are stripped away, how do we define ourselves? This once I’ll leave the Bird unnamed, commemorating the tattooed numbers which tried futilely(!) to unname Wiesel (z”l). Like him, defining our own selves is how we move from silhouette to fully-presented person.