Origin of the Birds I, II, III
Color Pencil on Paper, Digital (Procreate)
2024
I
I looked around: I didn’t recognize anything. Trees, crystals, animals, grasses—everything was different. Not only did birds inhabit the branches, but so did fish with spiders‘ legs or worms with feathers. …All of a sudden it was flung open. I smiled. My eyes filled with tears of emotion. Before me there was a creature of a beauty never seen before… All around me, birds: flapping of beaks, wings that flutter, claws extended, and the cry: ”Koaxpf . . . Koaxpf. . . . Koaaacch. . .“ Who are you?“ I asked.

II
“For a fraction of a second between the loss of everything I knew before and the gain of everything I would know afterwards, I managed to embrace in a single thought the world of things as they were and of things as they could have been, and I realized that a single system included all. The world of birds, of monsters, of Or’s beauty was the same as the one where I had always lived, which none of us had understood wholly.”

III
Hundreds of beaks and claws were tearing the canopy of the nuptial bed. The birds fell upon me, but beyond their wings I could recognize my native landscape, which was becoming fused with the alien continent. “There’s no difference. Monsters and nonmonsters have always been close to one another! What hasn’t been continues to be… -I was speaking not only to the birds and the monsters but also to those I had always known, who were rushing in on every side…

— Origin of the Birds, The Complete Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino