{ Untitled: Under the Auspices }

Book excerpt: Poetry. Art. Photography. { UNTITLED: UNDER THE AUSPICES } is a book of auguring, or divination codex, where birds are the words, in particular the common starling (with a few cameos by seagulls and crows). The sequenced set of flight patterns, or murmurations, were captured over the course of the past few years in the skies over Rome, where the starlings winter in the months of October and November. In the ancient Greek, Egyptian and Roman empires, the will of the gods was determined by "taking the auspices," or interpreting the flight patterns of birds. In fact, Romulus and Remus, the infamous twin brothers raised by a she-wolf, were both augurs. To settle a dispute about where the city of Rome should be founded (Romulus preferred the Palatine hill and Remus preferred the Aventine), they both took auspices and Romulus "won," hence Rome is named for him. The murmurating cross-sections in this book were captured mostly from the loser's Aventine perspective and from along the banks of the Tiber, where Remus and Romulus were born. To preserve the integrity of interpretation, for those "reading" the book, no words or characters were used in the compiling and editing of the birds, only punctuation and numbers. The book itself also contains no title or author, though they are referenced here to meet the metadata demands of this modern world.