My Raptorially Splendiferous Left Arm

In August 991 the English led by the Earl Brythnoth suffered a defeat at the hands of Viking raiders at the Battle of Maldon. Brythnoth was an old man and his rag-tag militia stood no chance against the Vikings, professional killers and extortionists one and all. What survives of the anonymous early English poem begins with Brythnoth, presumably, ordering his men to drive off their horses in preparation for pitched battle against the raiders as they came across the causeway from Northey Island on the Blackwater River, then almost as an afterthought:

Whereat one of Offa's kin, knowing the Earl
would not suffer slack-heartedness,
loosed from his wrist his loved hawk;
over the wood it stooped: he stepped to battle.

(Translation from the old English by Michael Alexander, from the Penguin book of The Earliest English Poems.)



Offa will lead the Angles after Brythnoth falls, but it is his anonymous kinsman who lets his hawk fly free that foreshadows the disaster that will befall. To drive off the horses is a military expediency, to let fly the hawk is an acceptance that death comes stalking the battlefield. Offa's kinsman must have really loved that hawk to ride with it onto the brink of battle. After it ends badly for the English, the old Heroic Faith is roused by Bryhtwold, himself almost as old as Brythnoth, as he stands near the body of his Earl: "Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will, the heart fiercer, as our force faileth. Here our lord lies levelled in the dust."








One thousand and seven years later Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen conducted a famous experiment at the University of Pittsburgh wherein healthy subjects experienced a artificial arm made of rubber as being their own. The subjects felt the stroke on the artificial right arm while their own real arm was hidden from view. The phenomenal self-model has long been know to expand our sense of ourselves into space (think of driving a car, riding a skateboard, skiing etc...wherin you experience those things as an extension of self) but in the experiment the mind was tricked into expanding its PSM into a discrete, seperate physicality. And so we come know that a hawk on the fist is no different for Offa's kin. Even so, the hawk is on the fist. There is a contiguity that is not there in the Botvinick and Cohen experiment. Yet I conjecture that Offa's kinsman, if he had an out-of-body experience upon his death at Maldon, watched it through the eyes of his loved hawk

Two nights ago, after an intense manning session with a Red-tail hawk wherein you perambulate about house and yard, introducing the hawk to things it would rather not see (humans, dogs, daytime television) I fell asleep on the couch after I had put the hawk in its mews. I fell into that twilit world while reading my Amazon Kindle, and it was poised in my left hand some inches above my chest and equidistant from my face. On that cusp between consciousness and unconsciousness, I had the distinct feeling that the hawk was on my wrist. I was consoled that as he looked down he could not help but see a human dead to the world, like those hundreds of corpses on the Blackwater River. But I woke with a start before I could fly off in him.