Excerpts from the book Flacoseries (Flacofolio)
written by Leonard Schwartz with images by Heide Hatry,
due out from Spuyten Duyvil, Winter 2025
©2024 by the artist
Backstory
FLACO (March 15, 2020—February 23, 2024) was a male Eurasian eagle-owl. In 2023, after his enclosure was vandalized, Flaco escaped New York City’s Central Park Zoo and took up residence in and around Central Park. He became adept at living in the wilds of New York, flying, hunting, and becoming a local celebrity, although there remained concerns about his well being in the city. Flaco died in 2024, after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Excerpts From Flacoseries (Flacofolio)
No Obvious Exorcism (Flaco’s Possession)
Ever since my birth, my birth has possessed me. It guides my every move. I cannot think apart from my emerging from the egg, for which there is no obvious exorcism. Ecstatic, rising above myself, no longer myself, in flight through night’s prolongation, silent, winged, free…but still ravenous(ravenous!), still desirous (filled by a joyous burning emptiness), still unsettled. Every living being desires to wander and change. New York City is a world.
Eclipse
He wonders where his life lies. First there was total confinement, then there was total liberty. “I saw the totality in Tennessee in 2017”, a passerby says, referring to an eclipse. On the threshold between winter and spring, during the 90% eclipse in 2024 in New York City, the streets were filled with people looking skyward, many wearing funny looking cardboard glasses. On East 18th Street a random guy lent me his welding glass, of which he was proud, and looking through it I could see the moon cut in front of the sun as if a few feet away. This was 45 days after the eclipse of the eagle-owl, by which I mean the death of Flaco, and 46 days after Flaco had wondered where his life lay.
Earthquake
On the threshold between winter and spring there was also an earthquake in town. That is something one rarely experiences in New York. I felt it off 116th Street – and pretended to myself the shaking came from construction next door. But my body knew it was an earthquake. It told me so, even as my mind pretended otherwise and was the winner in the moment, till informed otherwise. The mind and the body often tell us something different from each other about the same thing. This was the case with the liberation of the eagle-owl.
The Death of Flaco
The raven is the bird Poe associated with the announcement of Death. Did a raven appear before the eagle-owl’s greatest admirer to announce the accident that very night? Which ornithologist predicted the inevitable the most clearly, well before? Exactly how many died during Covid before the eagle-owl broke from the memory of banging pots and pans to offer the city a new conceit, a hero, a narrative contra confinement? We are all erotic animals. That’s what makes his death so terrible.
Then There Is This
The spiritual is unobservable. The city is soaked in the unobservable, despite all the cameras. An owl and an octopus are observable, are observable and unobservable, are open and closed. The one without the bones—that would be the octopus —lives deep in the sea, or on display in an aquarium. The one that throws up little packets of bones, rather than excreting feces, is often high up in the trees. Those are the owls, one of which was Flaco. The octopus has eight tentacles because the seventh day is the day of rest, and on the eighth day you return to the work. Thus, the octopus is always beginning, beginning again and again, as in the writings of Gertrude Stein. But there is no agreement about the telos of the eagle-owl’s features or dimensions. Creation is a chameleon.
Size
The “eagle” in “eagle-owl” presumably refers to the impressive size of the owl. A friend of mine saw the shadow of his wingspan in the moonlight one night in the park and it was indeed impressive, overwhelming even. Could the “eagle” in the name have also suffused Flaco with a whiff of US nationalism? Can we imagine the eagle-owl eating fish like an eagle? When an eagle is part of the name of an owl the possibility of the hybrid is in play, just as with “Eurasian”. “Flaco” is most commonly a Latin American name. There it means “skinny.”
Favorite Oak Tree
St. Leonard is the patron saint of prisoners. St. Francis delivered sermons to the birds. The Persian poet Attar wrote an epic called “The Conference of the Birds”. Pasolini offered us a Marxist crow. Flaco is related to all of them. There was a memorial erected around his favorite oak tree to roost in, in the northern reaches of Central Park. There is a petition circulating to create a statue of him at that spot. The message of any such shrine… will have to be determined. There are multiple possibilities.
From the Lower East Side to the Northern Reaches of Central Park
The classicist Jane Harrison wrote of “the spoken correlative of the active rite”. The rite might involve a chariot. It might involve a pilgrimage. It might involve an owl. Anselm spoke of bringing his family uptown to look for Flaco, after Flaco had visited the Lower East Side but they had missed him, and that he and Karen were more overwhelmed than the kids when they did see Flaco in the Park.
Squirrel
I saw a crushed squirrel on the curb on Hudson Street, near the Bus Stop Café. It had obviously been run over by a car, or by a bus. Streaked with blood and uneven pulp, inner organs pressed to the surface, it was nonetheless recognizably still a squirrel. Immediately I thought of the eagle-owl. News reports only spoke of rats and pigeons as the objects of his hunt, but surely squirrels too could be prey. To identify with the bird and his needs, and not the squirrel, so much biologically closer to me, shows how fully Flaco allowed us to overcome our mammalian bias.
Writing
I wound myself around the wheel of the chariot like ratan and in this way assisted in transporting the god. I allowed myself to be lifted up and carried away by the eagle-owl and in this manner helped to feed him. I flung myself into language.
Fana
Fana is a word in Sufi mysticism that refers to the annihilation and overcoming of the self. Years ago, an artist from Wuhan painted a huge bird on the wall of a building on 8th Street between 1st and A, a bird that appears to be shedding its own feathers and skin, which are gripped in its talons and dangle downwards as the new incarnation of itself soars through the air. For four years I have referred to this bird as the Fana bird, fiercely carrying off the remains of its own former life. Now there are murals to Flaco spraypainted all over the city. These are testimonials to self and other.
Self and Other
There are murals of Flaco spraypainted all over the city. On the Bowery near Stanton on a wooden board that is part of a business’s façade is a painting of Flaco’s head, only the head, bright red against a background as yellow as his eyes, his eyes and beak central, black and white tears that might also be feathers shedding to each side of his face. Near Houston Street a giant multicolored Flaco towers over a rendering of the city’s skyline, a blue snake slithering rightwards above the owl’s head. Coming up from the subway on 2nd Avenue is a seemingly cross eyed Flaco with “King Flaco RIP” spraypainted in black over a blue background under the tuft of his left ear.
The testimonials are to eye contact. To I and You. To the expressivity of the face without expression. To the expression not of the personality but the soul.
From the Beginning
From the beginning I so hoped the eagle-owl could make it out there, on his own.
Boat Basin
The French nouvelle vague director Jacques Rivette made a film, Celine and Julie Go Boating. At the end of the movie, after many hours of delightful mystery and confusion, the two titular ladies do in fact finally go boating. On the water Celine and Julie encounter the ghosts and otherworldly beings they have interacted with throughout the preceding film, who silently paddle by them in their own boat, in pursuit of some unknown end, members of neither craft acknowledging the other by word or sign. Is this the way we encounter Flaco, visible but in some parallel world, from behind a film of incomprehension, perhaps the incomprehensible itself? One can do this kind of boating in Central Park.
Requiem for Flaco
Flaco was not an idea, he was an actual bird. The owl at the goddess of wisdom Athena’s side was some other owl and not this one. Our ideas gather around the eagle-owl like crows mobbing a bald eagle. Eventually the eagle flees and perches on the far palisade.
Flaco Series (Flaco’s Coda)
To be full of being and yet completely empty: that has been my circumstance from the start. My identity, now as ever, is where I’m not. Just as soon as I have conquered the whole city, I know I don’t belong there; mounting the tower I plunge into mourning. Heaven and earth are waterfalls tumbling in me and also hints of something and somewhere else. Coop and cosmos can and cannot contain me.
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