Walking the dog yesterday, I came across a dead bluejay. I squatted down to investigate. I birdily tilted my head this way and that to get better angles. Five thousand things came to mind. An abbreviated list:
blue!
death!
awww so sad!
and still so pretty! blue!
I wondered about the morality of plucking a blue feather for myself. I have a feather from a cardinal. It fell onto the pages of my book one morning as I was reading and it’s redness startled me. It was a book mark for a few days, and has since come to sit with my collection of bones and my grandmother’s mantel clock that chimes. Mostly I forget about it. Until I am dusting. Which is generally the most appreciated prayer. I thought about a cadaver lab I am aching to go to, and how this is also a way of prayer. This bloomed into a symphony of thoughts about past body studies and Victorian body snatchers and Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t take the feather. I unsquatted and let the dog pull me along.
I remembered twenty seven different teachings about birds from the Vedic literature. Oh dawn! Take my heartache and give it to the birds! This yellow, so unbecoming and making me ill, but yellow on a bird is lovely. Take my heartache, oh morning sun, and give it to the birds. In the Taitirriya Upaniṣad, the soul is imagined as a bird. The whole texts discusses pedagogy; the how and why of students and teachers; the point of being human and the possibilities of time and mind; the dangers and the foibles; the power of vowing. Be like these little birds, says the master in that text, peck up every seed. Eat more than your body weight in knowledge seeds every day. Fly!
I remembered forty three different poems about birds
Maya Angeleu - I know why the caged bird..
Emily Dickinson - hope is..
Christina Rossetti - my heart!
Claude Monet: I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Charlie Parker. period.
I thought of bird gods. Emissaries between the worlds. Celtic witch folks who were made of flowers and then the beauty of the flowers became the plumage of a bird and then that somehow became people. But they were super people who could also go to the god place. I thought of climates and seeds and people and migration and how these become myth, which aren’t real but move us anyway.
I thought of airplanes and - so terribly odd, so lovely, so scary - deep space and deep water vessels.
Last week G found a parakeet - blue blue - crumpled but alive outside his workplace. Someone had dumped it when they moved out of their apartment. This is selfish and sad, but the truly sad thing was that G’s co-workers said oh yes, it’s been there for over a week. The bird had been there, hunkered under a bush by the door, for eight days and no one had done anything about it. G called a bird rescue. He texted me his frustration with the state of humanity, his co-workers in particular. The bird rescue coached him through the capture of the bird: throw a towel over it, yes that shirt will do, then cup it in your hands beginning from above, with a gentleness. The poor thing couldn’t lift its head when he spoke to it, but rolled its eye. Under the towel, the bird backed into the warmth of his chest. Can I have it? I texted and he shot back are you serious? And why not bring it home, let her live in my office? She had become she, not “it”; even if I was wrong and he was a he, it was now personal, a bird hood. We could sing together in the mornings and she could help me survive the winter. Why not? We waited. The man from the bird rescue told us she died in the night. I had not once prior to this thought I ought to have a bird. I had no reason to think so. I had reason not to think so: I am a dog person; within the strict limitations in which I am able to care for anything, it must provide cuddles and deep brown eyes and follow me around. After we discussed adopting the bird and she died, we wondered if we were so moved by the parakeet’s peril should we not, perhaps, do what we can, even if we could not save this one bird? The rescue place leaned into this and sent us dozens of pictures and profiles of adoptable birds. This horrible tensioning: one cannot save all the birds, so what should one do in this human life? But perhaps we should not be concerned about the birds: there are sad humans to consider. And oceans. And neighborhoods. And trees. But perhaps, perhaps if we can save one bird and do not choose to save her, we are bad people? Ultimately, we didn’t adopt anything. The truth, flittering under these 48 hours of birdy google searches and strange conversations we’d never felt a need to have before, was that both of us were touched to the quick by the greed and selfishness and indifference of people, in lived actual ways that brought up questions about our current circumstances. And the poor parakeet, dead now, perhaps in a handkerchief, a shoebox, a Kleenex, was merely a catalyst. A symbol. A sign. I want to love, I said. Let’s go eat, he said, which is often how we love. And we were all soft and whispery as we chewed and passed the condiments. Something was there that hadn’t been there. Something cathartic - I want the adjective for something that has been cathartasized - oozed in the air. That’s one effect of catharsis: a soporific ooziness.
Crows. I do not actually like blue jays. They are crow cousins. The things are mean. And a little scary. I’ve seen crows murder each other.
Brains. Birds are symbolic of stupidity. But also beauty and song and freedom. How both? And why? Crows, again, because they have the largest cerebral hemispheres of all the avian crew. But if all it leads them to is murder and theft, I wonder about the importance of intelligence.
Bones. I did this once before, this osteomancy during a dog walk. It was years ago and in that case a sparrow. There was a dead sparrow on a sidewalk and there was me: poking at it with a stick. One cannot look at a bird’s bones and not know they are born for flight. This raises questions of humanity: arms and legs and standing up ness, our tongues like snails and our political brains; what are human bones good for? the memory of this, and a pair of sneakers I no longer have, and the dog who is no longer alive, and the way bones have changed for me since, all came to mind as if they were still present and I could touch them.
Bones and song. The reason (I learned this studying bones with Amy Matthews) you can hear a bird no larger than a fist across a mile of forest is that their bones are designed to be amplification systems. A bird is a little boom box. They are bodies full of song. Bird bones sing. Our bones don’t sing so much, but they do sing some. This tied into other edge of my comprehension studies of the body electric, how tissue forms and morphs, various inquiries around gravity and dance. We have three little bones in our ears, and this means we can move. But what is hearing to balance? Maybe everything.
The chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I have no idea where I learned this. I do not even know if it is true.
I wondered how many tattoos, proportionately speaking, are feathered.
In French: oiseau. Perhaps my favorite word ever. For no reason at all aside from the feel of the word in my mouth being so perfectly like what a bird is: all those airy vowels, a sibilant in the center.
Love. I learned, during our parakeet imbroglio, that most birds kept as pets prefer companionship. Many of the mythy birds are mythy precisely for their monogamy.
Murmurations. A murmuration refers to the cloud like formations of starlings, swooping and shape shifting in the dusk sky. How do the starlings move in that way? A pouring, liquid scatteredness, a togethering; a cohesive wild that slides and angles but never bursts. Science has only been able to measure or describe the phenomena as a capacity of each bird to somehow - that’s the scientific word, “somehow” - maintain a precise distance to the few birds nearest itself. The distance is close without crashing, far enough to move freely at 50 miles an hour, which is so precise it cannot be fathomed really. There is no center to a murmuration, no leader of the bird swirls, which has made starlings the mascot of socialist inclined social justice in recent years. Scientists figure murmurations are a protective herd instinct: there is safety in numbers. The birds in the center are safer than those on the fringes, and each bird has some inner pull to get themselves to the middle, but the middle constantly shifts. A raptor would have a hard time predicting the waves of the flock’s movements, and there is apparently some danger to the predator of crashing. The more birds in a flock, the more eyes to survey for predators. As one they purl, bank, ascend, bunch, and wheel. In a lovely but why, biologists surmise that murmurations are starlings inviting other starlings to gather as dusk approaches so they can all roost for the night together safely. This means murmuration must be appealing, fun, to the starlings.
I call this kind of measuring - just enough, not too far - the goldilocks scale, and I apply it to most everything. Hot sauce. How dirty my jeans are before they need washing. How to move my body. How to write.
God. Once upon a time, right around when I was learning about bones and birds and human bodies and that life is strangely wonderful if you just listen, I was complaining to my 12 step sponsor about the god stuff. I complained and wheedled about this a lot. She generally shrugged. She was enormously patient with me, in a goldilocks scaled way. One day, she up and says I needed to choose a remembrancer. Something that would remind me to pray. Or just to stop for a moment. Frustrated and stubborn, I looked out the window. What on earth could be a stand in for god? A finch flew by. I am using the name finch but I didn’t know what it was: a common brown little bird. A Bird, I said: I choose a bird. Little did I know I was damning myself: once you decide to notice the birds they are everywhere. It may be that I thought I was getting myself off the hook with the fleetingness of a finch seen out of window, gone before you know it according to some need you couldn’t see. I might have been depending upon that specific bird without understanding the commonness of birds. It’s Hitchcockian. Except bafflingly song like. There is a narrow difference between a spiritual life and a haunted one. To wit: am I being attacked?! No. They've been here all along. Aren’t they lovely?
All this and more in a few minutes, a mere slice of a moment around eight in the morning in July. It happened while an Amazon van rolled by, its heavy metal complaining over a pothole, and the little Hmong girl who lives down the alley rode her glider up and down the sidewalk. She goldilocks: showing off for me but veering away whenever I catch her eye. She has done this for six years.
You see what it is to live in my brain.
I bet yours is not terribly different.
The mind appears to be chaos, meaningless ephemera. It’s a wonder any of us get anything done in a day. It’s a wonder we have anything like a cogent personhood. I once had a conversation with a man who had been in classic Freudian psychotherapy for over ten years. He waved his hands around, amazed that all of us messed up human beings manage to get along as well as we do get along. A little self awareness is dizzying. Multiplied to humanity, it’s a wonder.
But I don’t think that it quite is. An awkward sentence, but the awkward belies the truth of it: I think there is a narrow space between everything happens for a reason and life is chaos. It is a narrow space, to be sure, but it opens and we can fly in it - we do in fact fly in it like the murmuring starlings - all of the time. The distance between something and nothing is a goldilocks measure. The difference between a meaningful life and one that doesn’t seem so is tiny. And the difference is directional. God might be a bird and might be a myth and might be Jesus, but is undoubtably Good Orderly Direction.
The difficulty with reason or meaningfulness is that we think we have to understand or grasp it. It cannot be grasped. Do birds represent peace, or war? You can’t be sure. Both does not mean neither: but neither does it mean both. Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation agreed: thinking we need to translate or unpack meaning misses the meaning. “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” she wrote.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about religions, purity and taboo and has been much on my mind. She said “The human body is always treated as an image by society.” Essayist Rebecca Solnit picked this up and drew it out: everything is a symbol of the body, and the body is at the same time a symbol for everything else. Meaning everything is just short of meaning nothing whatsoever, and that little bit matters.
There is in us some craving to accord meaning and significance to the world, to find correspondences and signs in it. I’m tempted to call this craving instinctive, but I believe it is even more than that. An instinct is an adaptive evolutionary development, a reflexive movement or cascade of movements that pre-empt our cognition and more or less our ‘control’. I want to find a word more than instinctive because the instinctive can, in fact, be re-routed by training such as torture, meditation, or athletic drills. Instinct can be mucked up by sophisticated living in our modern world. Instinct can simply be mistaken, as when we jump from a loud noise that isn’t in fact a mortal threat. How we have been socialized changes whatever evolutionary urges we came in with. By definition, instincts are adaptive. Our biology is changeable; the mind’s search for meaning is not.
I am not troubled that some folks are deeply drawn to this kind of talk while others are cynical. I myself am often cynical. Wondering whether these things are true or not, whether they are real or not, is completely irrelevant. Cynicism is its own kind of meaning, a varietal of belief.
The question of whether there are correspondences in the world - or natural laws, an order to all of this apparent chaos - is a different question than whether that order has a morality or intelligence or personhood. I don’t know anything about the second question. I find it a piddly overestimation of human intelligence. It’s like the neuroanatomist’s joke: If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we could not. It’s been quoted so often we don’t know who originally said it. I say, if you think you know what god is, you’re wrong. It’s our humanity that wants everything to be ‘understandable’ and conflates the understandable with the quote unquote real.
I find the first question more helpful. The answer is immediately yes. Yes, there are causes and consequences in this life, gravity and light, connections and threads, a design. I can know that there is an order to the world without having to understand the order. And this is precisely where it gets useful, can become a direction, a line of inquiry: do I understand enough?
I’ll venture further: the music made by disparate notes in conjugation is thrilling. There is a resounding satisfaction that comes from finding meaning. This can be utilitarian or aesthetic, banal or transcendent.
It can make sense of suffering. In the years following WWII, poet Jacques Prévert wrote intimately to and for the French who had come of age during the German Occupation: “It’s terrible / the faint sound of a hardboiled egg / cracked on a tin counter / it’s terrible this noise / when it stirs in the memory / of a man who’s hungry”.
“For my children”, “for my people”. or “for the land” has sustained the majority of human life, even if the details are fuzzy.
Finding meaning can be an ecstasy.
The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654, may be the most famous bird ever painted. It also proves my point. The Goldfinch is a masterwork of trompe-l’oeil, or trick of the eye: there is a depth of feeling rendered by the semblance, the illusion of reality paired with the realization of the unreal. The painting is real; the bird is not, which proves the importance of birds by by hinting. The painting is precious, lovely, just so. There is an enchantment of the black, yellow and red against the white wall – the young Fabritius captured the bird perfectly with a tiny chain. Fabritius used loose, big, visible brushstrokes but conveyed the incomparable loveliness of a really quite ordinary bird. I am fascinated (a word that also implies catching, tricking, mesmerizing) by the light and the shade, that knowing little eye, the delicacy of the chain. It is a life-sized but ordinary little bird against a slightly damaged wall. That’s all. Not much.
It’s just so.
Novelist Donna Tartt was so captivated by the painting she wrote a novel about it. It was such a good book it won a Pulitzer and inspired a movie.
“In this staunch little portrait,” she wrote, “it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another.”
As Tartt suggests, meaning is a nakedness. It is an exposure. Meaning is a tensioned moment in which we see, but what we see reveals questions that are vulnerable and unexpected.
Goldfinches have been kept as decoration and companions since the Ancient Rome. Renowned for their simple beauty and trilling song, the birds came to be associated with health and prosperity. Vivaldi wrote a concerto for them. There is something deeply appealing about these birds that endears them to humans. Again: “appeal” and “endear” connote a drawing in, a seduction. Fabritius ‘captures’ all this common beauty and slight melancholy so well that the painting is one of the most famous treasures of humanity, even though we know very little about the man. He was a student of Rembrandt. The same year he painted the bird, he died in a neighborhood explosion of gunpowder. He was 32.
Prévert’s “To Paint the Portrait of a Bird”, which I will say in French because it has that lovely word in it and because translation, language, plays a role in this question of real or not. In French: “Pour Faire le Portrait d’un Oiseau”. My favorite version is an old, yellowing, small hard cover book brought out by Double Day and Co, Inc. in 1971. I love it because Prévert’s 1949 poem is presented line by line with Lawrence Ferlingetti’s translation and bright, simple, enchanting drawings by Elsa Henriquez. Prévert’s poem, like the Goldfinch painting, is all about trickery and illusion. I love it because I found this beauty of a book during a very sour January of my young adulthood, and it has somehow come along with me all this time. The poem perfectly captures a goldilocks relationship between humans and the world, or man and nature, that suggests the only way to contain is to create a cage - art, or love, a direction for our mind - without actually capturing the wildness. What is caught isn’t a bird: it’s us.
To paint the portrait of a bird
First paint a cage
with an open door
then paint
something pretty
something simple
something beautiful
something useful
for the bird
then place the canvas against a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest
hide behind the tree
without speaking
without moving…
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but he can just as well spend long years
before deciding
Don’t get discouraged
wait
wait years if necessary
the swiftness or slowness of the coming of the bird
having no rapport
with the success of the picture
When the bird comes
if he comes
observe the most profound silence
till the bird enters the cage
and when he has entered
gently close the door with a brush
then
paint out all the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the feathers of the bird
Then paint the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful of its branches
for the bird
paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness
the dust of the sun
and the noise of insects in the summer heat
and then wait for the bird to decide to sing
If the bird doesn’t want to sing
it’s a bad sign
a sign that the painting is bad
but if he sings it’s a good sign
a sign that you can sign
So then so very gently you pull out
one of the feathers of the bird
and you write your name in a corner of the picture.
Later, I sat on the deck again after reading poetry to G. I thought about poems and friends. The late summer light is already beginning to change, and I have a need to linger in it before September comes. I closed my eyes and tipped my face to the gilding sun. I heard the small, friendly peeps of the cardinal. I didn’t move, but opened my eyes and moved them around until I found him in the underbrush of the lilac. The neighbors have grown a small garden; he stole a seedpod and was quite pleased with himself as he lugged it over to our yard. I stayed very still, and he stayed for a very long time. At some point, it began to rain one of those fresh, summer sun rains in which the sky never clouds over. Sparse droplets fall not too close and not too far apart. I imagined them as illusory bars, and myself in a cage that held the whole world. The cage had trees and cardinals and dogs and my friends in it. I don’t need to have a parakeet in order to mourn and love the world: the parakeet had me all over. This cage is well made, and the maker is so quiet; I can sing, or not, as I please.
I have a fine, delicate chain of understanding what I do not fully understand. It is a towardness.
Now that I have painted with broad, visible strokes, you do too.
One last poem, this one by Jim Harrison. I like him for his face, but also for saying that whenever he feels sore from life, the deadness of routine, he gets into a car and drives to some small-town motel for a few days, to recover his love of bars and the human form, the immensities of the American landscape. This is from the book Saving Daylight by Copper Canyon Press:
Pico
I don’t know what. I don’t know what.
I’m modern man at the crossroads,
an interstice where the thousand roads meet
and exfoliate. Meanwhile today a hundred
dense blue never seen before pinyon jays
land in the yard for a scant ten minutes.
The pinyon jays are not at any crossroads
but are finding their way south by celestial navigation.
You’re not on a road, you fool. This life
is pathless with ninety billion galaxies
hovering around us, our home truly away from home.
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