For those of us who have spent some time watching the cormorant in its native environs, whether from the winding precipice of the lungo mare or immersed in the buoyant waters of the Adriatic, this apparently modest creature has become a leviathan of the shallows. Elegantly awkward, serene and Luciferian, a glutton with poise, the cormorant swallows more than its own weight and vomits up the rest. A fine parable of that conceptual avarice for which the measure of satiety is an afterthought amid the swerves and diagonals of the hunt.

The cormorant is a Keatonesque general: first out of the trench in this bird war that fractures our present like a collision with a sheet of glass. Our editorial ambition: to trace its fragmentary trajectories with the dying art of pigeon scratch, with philosophical tooth and claw, and to cultivate an unlikely tolerance for the refinements of non-sense that engender artistic acumen. All species of style, tone, and manner have leeway to lay their singular stress, so long as they remain lucid — which is to say, not blind to the inverted crown that is both perch and privy, upon which our emblem spreads its wings. Less unctuous than its marine companions, the cormorant’s signature pose extends through the moment it takes to dry its feathers in the breeze, pausing to display its plumage before preparing, time and time again, to enter the alien element of thought.