160 • Meet the team (16)
Look out for our caretaker, Ken,
And his heavily-hybridised hen:
With its modified beak
It can actually speak
Though not in the language of men.
In any business the janitor – or similar dogsbody – may prove the most interesting and innovative of thinkers. Unfettered by ambition, untainted by rivalry, he or she is free – like a Shakespearean Fool – to defy norms, and provide a foil to institutional formality through the creative quirks of an idiosyncratic mind.
2 thoughts on “160 • Meet the team (16)”
Perhaps a latter-day disciple of the admirable Jacques de Vaucanson?
Hi Raven,
One might indeed guess as much. I have to confess I did not meet the caretaker in question, and have no intention of seeking him out, now that my association with that workplace is terminated: so it must remain a guess.
But Vaucanson, for all his ingenious innovation, was a charlatan – his ‘Mechanickal Duck’ was not genuinely able to digest food, and its fæces were fakes. As I understand it, the approach favoured by the caretaker, Ken, owes more to Mendel than to the gastrobotic school: ‘unnatural selection’ seems to have been his method.
Literate Ravens notwithstanding, the idea that any bird ‘can actually speak’ is fanciful – no creature, aside from certain humans, verifiably uses ‘the language of men’ – but doubtless that would not prevent someone with sufficient imagination/chutzpah from writing a novel in which such a chimerical creature pursues an independent existence, enacting its own, apparently authentic desires.
Thanks for reading ‘My Dog Errol’ … hope to see you here again.
Rick