What it was going for and what I see: "Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager

Aristotle distinguished between mimesis and diegesis, with one being "showing things," as in a play, and the other being "telling about things," as in a narration. These terms eventually took on different meanings with the advent of film, but before the cinema, beginning in the mid-to-late 19th century, several movements in art were also pushing what they meant by them. Mimesis had always meant "holding the mirror up to nature," or showing the world as it is, but in the mid-19th century, realism began to take this to new extremes by depicting parts of life nobody had ever thought worth showing. Meanwhile, other writers, influenced by realism and taking it further, began to pay closer attention to the psychological mechanisms of human beings, and the inner thoughts of characters began to be not just a role in moving the plot, but what the whole story was about. In time, some extreme examples of psychological stories became all about the strange mechanisms of the mind, and techniques that are now commonplace, like stream-of-consciousness narration, were developed to try to depict all the weird things a human brain does when it guides us through the world. 

Stories that focus on human psychology are a blend of mimesis and diegesis. They are part of realism, because they are trying to show us the world as it is, but because that world is filtered through our subjective consciousness, what it presents can never really be a true, objective mirror, because our brains don't work that way. They distort the hell out of everything. This influence has never left Anglophonic literature, and many stories still center around an attempt to depict not reality so much as our attempt to make sense of reality. 

That's more or less what I think "Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager is going for. It centers on an unnamed eight-year-old girl growing up in 1980s-ish Michigan. When we first meet her, the girl is in the bathroom at school trying to trick herself into a mind-over-matter cure to asthma, having forgotten her inhaler at home. She finds it's too much to count numbers in order to clam herself down, because numbers don't have an inherent end, but if she recites the alphabet, that does help, because it is finite. Which made me figure that okay, this girl's development is going to include learning to compartmentalize, to shut out all of the big world and bring it down to manageable chunks. But for the most part, she doesn't do that. She actually prefers making her perspective bigger and broader. She likes to ride the Ferris wheel, "because you can see so much at once." She loves fossils and dinosaurs, and she is familiar with the geological timeline of Michigan, meaning she thinks of time primarily in unfathomably large units. No wonder she keeps failing her "clock tests" in school, and no wonder she's especially vexed by the existence of a seconds hand, because she can't understand why anyone would need to count seconds unless they were in a race. 

It seems to me that if the girl is undone by thinking about things that are too large, like numbers that don't end, and if it helps her to get through life by breaking down life to more manageable quantities like the number of letters in the alphabet, she would want to start thinking small, as in seconds and minutes and hours, rather than in epochs. But a lot of her world in contradictory. She can pick the lock to her mother's room but she can't open a can of ravioli. She can locate fossils that are difficult for adults to identify, but she keeps messing up the rather simple concepts of analog clocks. And don't tell me that she's just bad at math, because she can calculate the number of months to the end of the school year. She just has a funny brain, which can do some things well and not others (like remember her inhaler). Which is to say she has a brain like anyone does, because all brains are curiously contradictory. Especially when they're being asked to do more than anyone has a right to expect of them. 

That's what I think the story is going for. It's an attempt to portray the psychological realities of an eight-year-old girl who has way more put upon her than should be. It's a stylized portrayal of how time, space, and the concept of rarity are all "elastic," how they can "bend and stretch and fold," which is how the girl goes from hoping for the small and finite to the large and cosmic. The girl is struggling to obtain perspective by getting away from the trenches of her life while at the same time the day-to-day reality she faces forces her to break from big perspective thinking to small. The end of the story, when she sees blackbirds on the roofs of the houses in her neighborhood and wonders if they are on her own rooftop, is her desire for the ability to get far from her own reality, enough to see it better and make some sense of it.

Regular blackbirds are kind of ugly birds, but I really dig the red-winged variety.

Which, fine, but as I read the story, that's not what really pops out to me. When I read this story, with its improbably ubiquitous dinosaur and fossil references (what elementary school kid has graffitied a pterodactyl on the bathroom stall?), I see a depiction of a species in crisis and about to go extinct. Imagine an alien reading this story and extrapolating from it what humans are like. Humans are so fragile physically, some of them can't breathe without portable medicine and, when it's really bad, a machine. They take insanely long times to mature enough to be independent, so they require constant and exhausting parental care, but they also suffer from evolutionarily disadvantageous psychological problems like post-partum depression. That would be fine, since humans generally live in packs, and others could pick up the caring slack, but in the case of the girl in "Blackbirds," the community that should be her caring village is so stupid and apathetic, they are hoodwinked by the half-assed attempts of an eight-year-old girl to cover up her mother's illness. Maybe the girl herself should realize her situation is intolerable and ask for help, but because her mind isn't totally rational, she prefers the devil she knows to the devil she doesn't, with the unknown devil being what would happen to her family if the world knew her mother wasn't caring for her or her baby brother. It's a somewhat more depressing version of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, in which humans, with their big brains that make them do all kinds of stupid things, are an evolutionary dead end. 

The end of the story is the girl seeing blackbirds on all the houses and wishing she could get far enough away to gain perspective and see them on her own house. I see this as a Jurassic Park kind of ending, only instead of looking at the birds that are the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs and thinking that life finds a way, the birds are making the roofs that protect the houses of human society "go soft" and "melt." An evolutionarily less idiotic species is knocking down the ridiculously flimsy human society and about to take its place. 

The girl struggles to find the bigger perspective of time and space she longs for. She's eight. That's understandable. But for the reader, watching her struggle to take in breaths second by second against the backdrop of hundreds of millions of years since life came into the picture, our perspective tells us that the girl's species is probably boned. We can respect the hell out of the girl and admire her plucky determination to keep life going for herself and her brother, but the species clock for humanity in "Blackbirds" is running out.