Starling Milk (Whitechapel Express #1 July): The Impossible

No one in the village of Makuyu was interested in trying rice milk. Not even the other teachers, who’d heard me parroting about it the entire week and had encouraged my venture; not without irony, I then saw. I’d spent the night milking the soaked grains from inside a pair of tights bought in the market (and washed), I’d slept them, and in the morning even the children refused a single sip. I should have foreseen? Cow milk fortifies and doesn’t taste like cow. Rice milk tastes like rice, and does what? Nothing. I like Nothing. But Nothing isn’t for everyone. In any case my investment wasn’t against lactose; I was trying to come up with a way to make money within the village. Was I? It was more a whimsical experiment, a poetic trance that took the shape of an act. If it worked, it would work. It didn’t work. But Nothing did. And I was happy.

It was only in London that I started to think about bird-of-prey milk, because I had the idea of becoming a journalist. I thought: Ega! Eagle eyes. But from the top of my cloud, what news had I to give? I who only took interest in the milk of words, which is precisely their negative: the impossible. I chose a bird-of-prey that walks more than it flies, so I could be closer to people, and I made it my secretary: the Secretary Bird. Every now and then, chronically, almost like a spasm, we report something that takes place between this world and the other.

The other day I was sitting on the grass in Altab Ali Park and next to me came pecking a starling. I thought, observing the night sky revealed by its feathers in broad daylight: this one’s milk must be good. I admired its starry coat, our galaxy shining in purple and green. Stars are of all-colours, it notified me, despite our inability to see. Then I heard the grass crackling under the starling’s feet. A sip of secret information: a bird is only heavy enough to make grass crackle if it's carrying milk. But weight isn’t the right measurement. To be more precise: gravity — reflecting the internal lack of it. It’s in a similar way to how human animals produce art that birds produce milk. Both products are, naturally, supernatural.

In this way, anything in our world can serve as a bridge to another. To be more precise, bridge isn’t the right structure. A deck — which is a bridge cut in half. From a deck one jumps, observes, or is collected by a boat; depending on one’s state of spirit. But today a car drove by the gallery, and it dropped me the keys to my new house. From the deck I see a house called Grove, located within the galaxy called Milky Way. A house can serve as an egg. But don’t get me started on eggs.