When the air is restive, the river chuckles to itself; it giggles, slapping against one bank or another. When the air is still, the river is quiet, though on occasion, the passage of a boat, or the splay-footed landing of a duck may draw some comment or another from the mostly-silent water. The ducks, of course—landing with splayed feet—bob on wavelets and speak to one another in their soft, quacking tones. Ducks and rivers are the same everywhere. They speak the same avian or riverish languages. There are no accents to distinguish one from another. They are… …coherent. Humans, on the other hand, fascinate me in ways that ducks and rivers do not. Humans—as I have experienced—are incoherent. Humans are the same the world over, but unlike rivers and unlike ducks, human languages are a confused muddle: artificial constructs built from whimsy as much as logic. Humans base themselves on their languages: what they confirm, reveal, or deny. In the study of human languages, one learns of concepts like idiomatic constructs and collocation…the styles in which things are said. Human languages are—in some way—the very cause of human incoherence. We cannot be things that are unspeakable (in the literal sense,) even if they exist. (If a thing has no word in a given language, there's no way to even think about it.) There are people whose tribal names for themselves indicate their status as human. The terms Cheyenne and Choctaw, Arapahoe, Lakota or Yakut all mean the same thing. People. Their tribal organizations are, collectively, the tribes of man. It is no wonder, then, that “everyone else” is something else. Their names do not necessarily translate to “people”, “the people” or “those-of-us-who-are-just-like-us-as-opposed-to-those-of-us-who-are just-like-us-only-different.” Their names mean…something else. Sometimes, a reference to the land on which they live, or the sounds of birds in local trees. It is in this way that humans are wondrous creatures. The wind does not make them chuckle to themselves; they don’t bob on the water, quacking at each other in a way that everyone will understand. I watch them on a regular basis, these incoherent things, called Humans. They divide themselves, classify and reclassify themselves and then argue at the meanings of such classifications. Some of them call themselves human in some local way, where others call themselves “ten fingers and ten toes.” Yes, there are people in this world, at home in the depths of the Eurasian landmass, whose name for themselves is based on the number of digits they possess. Once, a long time ago, I waked through ancient fortifications with a friend who calls himself Czech. We’d gone for Chinese food, and I remember his differences from me—the differences other humans would tell us are important. I remember recognizing him as human because he has ten fingers and ten toes. I remember the sound of his voice, mimicking the quack of a duck in the cavernous interior of a dark, forbidding gate. I remember his laughter and the sound of his voice, echoing, and his calm (though proud) declaration that a duck’s quack will not echo, and as his voice echoed, it was profound and comforting proof that he is not a duck. Occasionally, when I see humans walking, I count their fingers and their toes if I can see them. In doing so, I think of those people somewhere on the Russian part of the world’s largest landmass, doing the same thing and recognizing themselves as human for that. More often than not, I think of a friend declaring with pride: I am not a duck. Those shown in the image here are like my friend. As far as I can tell, they are not ducks. * As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.