Thirteen Theories on the Better Understanding of Birds of Eligible Age Berta García Faet (bio) Translated from Spanish by Kelsi Vanada Keywords Berta Garcia Faet, translation, Spanish, poetry 1. The world is the sum of facts and birds. 2. Every proposition has form (or syntax: the profile of a Siberian goldfinch) and content (or semantics: the belly of a Siberian goldfinch). 2.1. The contents of a glass of milk, which could be a human body transmitting songs about birds, are the lyrics of the songs transmitted by birds. 2.2. Form depends on the form of flight. 2.2.1. Let us suppose that thinking is flying and vice versa. Therefore, form depends on mental categories; that is to say, form depends on the structure — without words — of thought and flight. 2.2.1.1. Deaf-mute girls dress in words, or they dress in colorful words, in order to say. They handle these structures delicately, with words. 2.2.1.2. Structure and category are synonyms for skin. 2.2.1.3. The lizard's skin defines the lizard which, in my imagination, lives and clears its throat. 2.2.1.4. That which is specific to birds is not called skin, but that which is specific to the bird I am imagining is called skin. 2.2.1.5. In the Cretaceous period, in the mysterious woods of what is known today as China, a bird-lizard I cannot conceive of lived and cleared its throat. [End Page 492] 2.2.2. A word is a drop of rain. 2.2.2.1. Drops of rain — which are words — fall diagonally on objects — real, fictitious, hybrid, or blue. Their existence begins, not in the sky (Platonic theory) nor in the real or fictitious object (Platonic theory), but in a baby's tender shaved head. 2.2.2.2. Every word is a bit much. 2.2.2.2.1. It hurts to be a bit much. 2.2.2.3. All language is lingua franca. 2.2.2.3.1. All feeling out is blind feeling out. 3. In all poems a bird appears. 3.1. In all poems, either a bird appears, or the presence of a bird is suggested, which is beyond the image's vanishing point (there is always an image of a crouching swan) and the poem's original framework (every poem, normally, is about lilies). 3.2. If we pause the video of the bird chirping at second 32, just when its beak is fully open, we will recognize a trilateral trapezoid in its fully open beak. 4. A miracle is a fact inexplicable by natural laws. 4.1. Natural laws, which provide for a mixture of vegetable fibers, spiderwebs, and hummingbird saliva to form a hummingbird nest, are a miracle. 4.1.1. Natural laws are not in the world, but in the mental categories through which we see the world. Although it is a miracle that everything, perhaps, holds together. 4.1.2. Category and structure are synonyms for eye. 4.1.3. The eye is not covered with gauze. 4.1.3.1. The eye is the gauze. [End Page 493] 4.1.4. The world can be viewed in 2 ways: either panoramically, from a bird's back, or intimately, from a bird's breast. 4.2. All prepositions are lies. 4.2.1. All contrasting conjunctions are mean exaggerations. 4.2.2. Coincidence is a miracle. 4.2.3. Love is a coincidence. 4.2.3.1. I, who could have been a theropod dinosaur, 100 million years before Mary Magdalene, a female eoraptor, for example, or a common swallow, distantly related to the theropod dinosaur, or a black slave dying of asphyxiation in an 18th-century English ship, curled up like a swallow, or a happy flower in some pale field of exhaustion in Castille, the land of slaves of the land, or Adolf Hitler's mother, who cultivated flowers, or the caretaker for a turtle who, in its adventure from sand to shore, is kidnapped by a hungry heron like Hitler, I, who could have been a bonsai, a medusa, a railroad, a diadem...