\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The Secretary Locotenant of the Order of the Third Bird has recently asked if we at Communiqu\u00e9s<\/i> would have any interest in publishing a selection of the Locotenant\u2019s vast correspondence with various members and practitioners of the Order. The enthusiasm of our response cannot be overstated; the following will be the first in a punctuated series reproducing choice fragments of this archive.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The first letter in the correspondence reproduced below (spanning 9 months) was originally addressed by a member of the Order to the community of Birds at large, and the Locotenant appears to have stepped in on behalf of the Order. These documents reach us \u201cas is,\u201d with little comment or explanation (some of the redactions and paraphrases are the Locotenant\u2019s, some are our own), but they do also speak clearly for themselves, and include tantalizing allusions to the Order’s internal affairs, including the choosing of “Bird names.”<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Several things should nonetheless be mentioned: the July 15 letter makes reference to a lecture that ESTAR(SER) itself delivered on the \u201ctraveling attention artist\u201d Inyard Kip Ketchem (1847-1919) and his famous \u201creduction screen.\u201d It also refers, quite puzzlingly, to the Order\u2019s \u201cfounding myths,\u201d and even more so, to \u201cinvented progenitors.\u201d Most likely, this is a subtle jab at some misunderstanding perpetrated by ESTAR(SER) itself, its inevitable ignorance with respect to the arcane doings of the Order, or the incompleteness of its historical knowledge. May we only comment that, if our knowledge of the Order were not incomplete, we would hardly have reason to continue our loving<\/i> pursuit of its mysteries?<\/p>\n
July 15, 2015<\/a><\/p>\n July 29, 2015<\/a><\/p>\n