Posting about the death of Alex the parrot, when there's a war going on, the world is heating up, there are starving children, or whatever seems pretty frivolous and self-indulgent. But I remember the delight I felt when I heard about Alex's precocious exploits, and the way he was forcing stodgy old academics to reconsider some of their egocentric ideas about the cognitive primacy of humans (and by extension, our dumb cousins, the primates). It was a time in my life when I was learning things for the first time, and I felt the expansion of possibilities in front of me.
But we hit middle age, eventually, and we're eventually forced to confront the loss of those things we're attached to - our parents become ill, decline and die, our health and stamina suffers, our cognitive acuity begins to fray a little, marriages fail, and we come to realize that the doors of possibility that were open in front of us having been closing, all this time, one by one.
It's difficult to remember, I think, that this is the way it always was - that in my youth, my parents were middle-aged, and beginning to feel the diminishing range of possibilities themselves. At some point, you begin to realize that some of the fantasies about the nature of your future will remain just that - fantasy, and that the starkness of the circumstances you find yourself might be the reality of your future.
I felt like I knew Alex, a little, though I missed him when he visited my university. It made me feel a little of that delight, to know that he was out there in the world, challenging the conclusions of haughty researchers convinced of the cognitive supremacy of humanity. To feel that potential path into the future collapse is disheartening.
But it's always been this way, and it ever will be - that the universe is an ever changing thing, that entropy creeps into even the most robust and complex of systems, and things break down. We used to be of an age when we were saying hello to all of the things we discovered, and forming our attachments to them.
And now we're at an age when we begin to say goodbye, as those precious things we discovered begin to move out of the way for the precious things other people need to discover - things we will probably never know in quite that way, having been forced to confront impermanence and loss.
We experience the universe indirectly, and each of us has our own internal representation of the space in which we operate. It's difficult to know what that means in a metaphysical sense, but in a subjective sense it means that your beloved friend remains in a prominent position, and continues exert his influence on you. I think it's important to remember that those who love us - whether cats, or dogs, or beloved friends, relatives and partners (or avian research subjects you know only by reputation and report), have definite ideas about the manner of influence they would want to exert. Otherwise, their influence is distorted by our grief.
This is the nature of the universe - that even those things that've already happened continue to influence the things still happening. Over time, that influence diminishes, and loses definition as it becomes the foundation for the future (whatever that will be), but only as memory fades. So be true to your friend, because he's still with you, and allow his influence to be as undistorted as you can manage. You have a new friend now, as well. There's room in your heart for both of them.
