Hay pájaros en el alambre, there are birds on the wire, they say, in Spanish. Meaning (according to my informant; I know there are many speakers, many usages), the coast is not clear, don’t be lulled into a sense of security, don’t drop your guard. On hearing this, I assumed that the birds are on a telephone wire and they are listening to your conversation, in a sort of literal wire-tapping way. Where is everybody? Is it that I’m at home, talking on my old-fashioned fixed phone, maybe twirling the tightly spiralled phone lead as we speak, to someone else in their house, point to point, while in between us, on some stretch where the phone wires run overhead along the side of the road, the birds are perched there, and they can intercept what I’m saying, through sensing the electrical charges running through the wires? Or maybe they’re not reading and decoding the pulses and power through the cable (tiny headphones and a book of cipher keys at the ready), they’re just feeling it run under their claws, the message is running by them and they somehow get it, absorb the whole sense of it, into their feathers and fast-beating hearts. The birds are not near me, they’re mid-distance, over the space that the message has to traverse, and they are listening to or appreciating what I have to say, somehow. They’re picking it up as it goes.

Or, as the phrase does not specify that it’s telephone wires (officially a wire is a single strand, a cable is several bundled together, and that would be tentidos telefónicos, anyway), maybe the wire the birds are on is not a telecommunications one but a containing one. It has only a practical, positional purpose. Like the wire along the top of a fence: it’s preventative, to stop the cows from coming out of this field. While it’s there, the birds can perch on it. And while perching, they might listen with their ears to what I’m saying as I wander down the lane. (Brief interlude from writing to search up whether birds have ears.) This is, the birds would be in close enough physical proximity to hear my voice as I chat to my fellow stroller, or as I speak into my mobile phone. They’d intercept the voice as it travels through the air. That is, they’d hear. These are both forms of listening in, but to different states of the message: one encoded and carried through the wires, the other just the voice that reaches as far as a nearby creature.

So I was pondering the locational and media implications of it, wondering where the phrase was coming from. But the meaning in Spanish seems to take a different turn from what I’d expect: instead of the communicational, it’s used more physically (alongside hay moros en la costa, there are Moors on the beach [and I’m not even starting with this one]), to mean, don’t come out of your hiding place, it’s not safe to emerge, you can’t do your thing without interference or trouble. The coast is not clear. Either way, once it’s translated, it also suggests to me that: you’re being considered. Your words aren’t private; somebody is noticing. And that: this is not a good thing. Those listening are not well-disposed towards me. It’s ominous.

In another sphere of learning, I’ve been reading science and economics papers, including: “Birds on a Wire” by Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics (2022), in which the physicists consider statistical features of what happens when birds fly up, alight on a wire, and this might cause pre-existing birds to leave. Void densities, gaps, steady-state occupancy; transformations, equations, higher dimensions: through this, what they want to know is, how will the creatures tend to distribute themselves along a space, a stretch. What are their tactics for managing proximity. How do we deal with being close to someone else.

And they charmingly introduce the paper with the disclaimer, “While our model is couched in terms of birds, it should not be taken literally as a description of real birds. There are many other influences that the [sic] determine how birds organize themselves on a spatially restricted landing spot, such as a wire. Nevertheless, the behavior of our admittedly unrealistic model is non trivial [. . .]”

I gather that this is how they do things in economics: make a model that rarifies and reduces a real case somewhat, so that you can test for the particular aspect of the phenomenon at which you are looking. It’s a sort of abstraction, a, what if we thought about it in certain terms, looking at these aspects and discounting, for now, the rest. Choosing a point of view from which to consider. Of all the elements in a scene, deciding which to focus on, how to direct your vision and explanation. Saying, let’s imagine that we are like this, so what would have to happen next. What world shall I create, what conditions do I want to impose on, develop in, my situation here. I like this, it’s what we do when writing, too. And elsewhere.

It also seems that, while this paper begins with the simple lone wire, the line of thought extends to further dimensions. What’s the maths of what would happen if the birds had a grid, a noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-toe, I translate), chalked out on the ground, showing their possible landing nodes? You can model this, but it’s way more difficult. What, even, would happen if it were a three-dimensional structure, like a square-skeletoned climbing frame in a playground; how would the birds besport themselves then? Apparently, advises another data scientist I lunched with, this level of the question is as yet too hard for the complexity modellers to find steady solutions for. Though I can solve their perplexity with an easy answer: it would be The Birds (dir. Hitchcock, 1963).

Looking at the birds; looking at the wire. I’m very interested in the sending of the message down the line, about how information travels. In Jaws the book of 1974, Peter Benchley describes how the shark first attacks the swimmer, Chrissie Watkins. When she starts to swim, “the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm.” Its ampullae of Lorenzini have nerve endings which “detected vibrations and signalled the brain.” Then, rather beautifully, the shark accelerates “with a speed that agitated the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water and caused them to glow, casting a mantle of sparks over the fish.” Then it smells her and senses distress signals, then it bites her:

“Below the surface, the fish shook its head from side to side, its serrated triangular teeth sawing through what little sinew still resisted. The corpse fell apart. The fish swallowed, then turned to continue feeding. Its brain still registered the signals of near-by prey. The water was laced with blood and shreds of flesh, and the fish could not sort signal from substance. It cut back and forth through the dissipating cloud of blood, opening and closing its mouth, seining for a random morsel.”

I’m interested in this telecommunications sort of language in the description of the shark attack: the signals, the signal and substance, the opening and closing of the mouth like the ones or zeros of a gate or state, a binary digit or bit, a random morsel within the cloud that’s tending towards uniformity.

Jaws is about how to get the message across; how to understand what’s happening in the water and in the town. It’s got telephone calls: this is how they try to locate each other. It’s not echolocation like a ship might use to see where something is on the seabed, but tele-location, ringing round to ask, are you there, is anyone home. Brody rings Mrs Brody at home but she’s not there because she’s out at a hotel shagging Hooper. Brody rings Hooper at his hotel but he’s not there because he’s out for ahem lunch with Mrs Brody. Brody asks Mrs Brody if she’s heard from Hooper; she says yes, which is true, but she changes the direction of the call (ie says he rang her when actually she rang him), and definitely changes the content and the purpose / proposal of the call. She’s messing with the message.

There’s also an incident of actual eavesdropping, when Brody leaves the mayor’s office to take a call from the newspaper man who explains that the mayor is in hock to the mafia. The mayor “gently eased his finger off the receiver hook and placed his hand over the mouthpiece” to listen in. Until he can’t face what he’s hearing, shrieks, “You print one word of that crap and I’ll sue you to death!” and slams the extension down. Which rather blows his cover.

Aside from the humans, I sympathise with the shark in Jaws, who “could not sort signal from substance.” Here, the phrase distinguishes the information that the shark was getting the electromagnetic waves, the smell, the motion from the actual chunks of meat that it’s eating. It’s a variant on the signal / noise dichotomy in telecomms, which is about the real, intended message versus the distraction or interference, the errors that creep in. Here, the signal that the shark was receiving is no longer what is relevant. It just wants the body.

I’ve looked, throughout these Clam essays, as times when the message gets a bit blurry, it shuffles or buzzes. When parts of the message drop out, are lost, disperse, between the signals and the sharks and the substance. And particularly, I’ve been interested here, in when there’s confusion between a hissing “S” sound or a shushing “SH” sound. You can see the difference in morse code, where three dots are for S, while four dots is H. They’re just adjacent, not quite spot on. You can see the contrast in the name and speaking of the actor Sean Connery who first plays the eponymous hero in the James Bond films. His name looks like it might be pronounced “seen”, with an S. But it’s “shorn”, with a SH. And he fuzzes his pronunciation, because he has Scottish roots: yesh, he says, those are gunsh in my pocketsh. You can see it in the different national pronunciations of the name of Zinedine Zidane, footballer: depending on what language he’s being interviewed in, the sports journalists might address him as THinedine, or TSinedine, or ZZinedine. It depends where you put your tongue.

I was trying to find the technical terms for describing these different pronunciations, as I’d thought that the hissing sound was called “sibilance”, in contradistinction to the shushing sound. But it turns out that they both are sibilance. In phonetics, S is a voiceless alveolar fricative consonant; Z is a voiced. TS is a voiceless alveolar affricative; SH is a voiceless postalveolar fricative. They say. (And each sound has a different official way of writing it down. The last one uses the ʃ symbol, which is unicode character U+0283, or, Latin Small Letter Esh. Which is a great name.)

It might be a detail, of interest only to speech therapists and linguistics scholars. But it reminded me of an earlier example, an instance of pronunciation having more serious consequences. It’s an incident in the Bible, in Judges 12:5–6, where, after a battle with the Gileadites, the Ephraimites are trying to cross the fords of a river to get back home. They think they can safely sneak by, indistinguishable from their near neighbours. To be indistinct, as water is in water. But the Gileadites devise a test.

“And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” (King James Version.)

So there are all these dead bodies, at the edge of the shallow water, on account of their pronunciation. The word itself, shibboleth, means either “ear of corn” or “flowing water, stream” this second meaning makes sense that it’s the word that comes to mind, for the Gileadites, as that’s what is right in front of them. But, thankfully, it’s not so often that a regional accent, the difference between alveolar and post-, becomes so crucial. Maybe the Ephraimites warned each other: watch out, this coast is not cleared. There are enemies on the beaches. Hay pájaros en el alambre. Don’t let them hear you say it wrong. Although, the Bible doesn’t explicitly mention this proposition, that they might like Spanish proverbs as much as I do.

But through all this speaking, listening, overhearing, I’ve been wondering whether it’s all cast in too negative a light. Nobody wants to be intruded upon if what you’re discussing is secret, private, intimate, personal. But why do we write anything? Because you want the message to get through, to come down the line cleanly. For it to travel through the wire, land inside the ear. But the listeners aren’t always where you think they will be. Maybe they are nearer, just swooping or hopping around, in places that are hard to predict, model, even imagine. They change.

It might be threatening, to be eavesdropped upon. But maybe these birds, the pájaros, are not ominously advancing, random in their scatterings and disposition. Maybe they are just interested in what I have to say. They are audience, in a good sense. I like to frame it like this, that there are unexpected flashes of what: electricity, words, comprehension? , pulses of meaning, both underfoot and in the air. It’s non trivial, in fact it’s the vital substance, that we might be heard and understood.

Message received? Out.