Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

13 Ways of Looking at a Magpie

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 131; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2023.0000

1934-421X

Monica Youn,

Music History and Culture

13 Ways of Looking at a Magpie Monica Youn (bio) One for sorrow,Two for joy,Three for a girl,Four for a boy,Five for silver,Six for gold,Seven for a secret never to be told.Eight for a wish,Nine for a kiss,Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss.Eleven for health,Twelve for wealth,Thirteen beware it’s the devil himself. 1 “Mag” for Margaret, a chattering woman, a scold. “Pied,” as in parti-colored. The offspring of a dove and a raven, not to be trusted. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who was brought in to take the rats, but left with all the children. “Pie” because you never know what’s inside one; they’ll eat anything, you know. [End Page 1] 2 Although magpies mate for life, a female magpie can “divorce” a male in favor of one who holds a larger territory. So, upon meeting a single magpie, it’s polite to say: Good morning, Mr. Magpie, and is your lady wife at home? Thus to suggest that even if the magpie has been rejected, at least this humiliation is not yet publicly known. 3 In the Korean story when the king told the lovers that they must be parted, exiling them to opposite ends of the sky, it was the magpies who volunteered to make a bridge of their bodies, once a year, so that the lovers could meet. Did the lovers hesitate—not quite meeting the magpie’s eyes— before accepting the magpie’s offer, knowing that their black backs would make for treacherous footing in the night? 4 A magpie flies overhead, and for a second you see a police car, white doors open, dragging behind it the long shadow of the road. [End Page 2] 5 According to English superstition, if you encounter a single magpie, you should immediately spit three times over your shoulder to ward off bad luck. But what kind of person has at the ready such a mouthful of spit? A store of liquid hunger that can be so instantly transmuted into contempt? 6 In another Korean story, the hero finally finds the abandoned temple whose great bronze bell had tolled three times in the night to save his life. Under the bell, the bloodied bodies of three magpies whose sacrifice the hero only at that moment deduces. Again, the bodies of the selfless magpies had been put to another use for which they were ill-suited—in this case, a hammer, as before they had made a bridge. Is that why the magpies have been teaching themselves to use tools, to keep from being the means to the end of yet another story? [End Page 3] 7 They are not the same family, the various populations of magpies scattered across the continents. For instance, the Australian so-called magpie is a type of butcher-bird. All it has in common with other magpies is the name the English settlers gave it, white handprints on its shoulders and on the backof its black neck. 8 In another superstition, the magpie’s tongue is believed to hold a drop of the Devil’s blood. If their tongues were cut off, it is said, they would be capable of human speech. In the cartoon series Heckle & Jeckle: The Talking Magpies, the magpies are visually indistinguishable, but one’s accent is British, one’s Brooklyn. Each yellow face consists entirely of one wedge-shaped mouth. 9 The black and white of the magpie symbolizes heterosexual union as in the female / male balance of the yin yang. [End Page 4] Except in the Korean flag, the male yang principle is on top— that’s what is meant by balance. 10 Opportunistic is the word used to describe the feeding habits of magpies. Also certain kinds of infection that are not the original infection. Opportunity, which once meant coming into harbor. 11 In A Clockwork Orange, the overture of La gazza ladra (“The Thieving Magpie”) starts up to the sound of screaming. The camera pans down from a trompe l’oeil balustrade to the baroque proscenium of an abandoned theater, then to a woman...