Tags
art, Étienne Souriau, bird watching, birding, birds, birdwatching, George Steiner, Jim Harrison, Martin Shaw, migration, painting, Paul Celan, poetry, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee
Life-preserving but not life-giving, he says. Maybe the best critique of art I’ve ever heard. “Nothing is harmed but nothing is thriving either.” The people around here trained their eyes away from the gods, ancestral dead, magic — and sometimes even beauty. Everything is a utility or transaction for something else, and that’s not how the most important things come to exist. And, “The true entrance into us will not occur by an act of will.”
Myself, I want to dance with all that is wild and alive, but am just sometimes scared to. I realize now back on this sky-murdering plane home, full of doubts and in mistake-review mode, I was still greeted that day by gleaming Prairie Warbler, in all his breeding plumage glory. He popped up in front of me when there could have been nothing at all in that sickly, urban forest. Odds are more likely that he would have been a thousand miles further along into Canada, but he was right here. Exactly where I have met so many who I have loved and who have loved me. As he explains, those things we need most in this world are more tangible in the messy, uncertain wild.
Just two weeks ago, blue-eyed Pietro drove me to a nature preserve that is now tragically a farm, where persists a pole at the side of the field with a platform on top. And up there in a roughly-woven basket structure she stares down at us, telling me something I don’t know how to write, something about fear but also just continuing on despite the hunters. She could live for forty years and knows how to squeeze water from moss into her thirsty chicks’ beaks. For what.
And then he takes me way out where the road barely can be made out anymore, to the last remaining colony of Lesser Kestrels in the eaves of a long-ago collapsed home. He jumps out of his tiny car when he spots them and shrieks like a boy. He delights in telling me when they fly back into view, for a period of time even longer than I still care. He can see them everyday and I will never see them again in my lifetime. And soon no one will. I know why he shrieks, but it’s impossible to write it, even though I feel it in my bones and try every time. I am deeply aware and sorry for that failure.
But after each word, it is impossible not to mention those that understand and keep me company — it’s why she has sent me a bird along her walk. And why he sends that line of poetry. Otherwise it can feel like the people here are dying mostly because they don’t even notice, nonetheless jump out of their car and shriek in delight. I think that’s why Celan threw himself into the Seine river, it becomes overwhelming that the rest of the world swings through the crowd like an ignorantly sharp elbow into a tender bruise.
She cried openly this time when I left the farm, weeks before the Bee Eaters arrive. This year, I gave her a Little Ringed Plover instead. I am trying to fashion band-aids out of the birds, those little gods and ancestors and bits of magic in the trees. Band-aids for those whose tendernesses in the crowd, including my own, I absurdly want to preserve.
“If we must be careful of any anthropomorphism when studying animals, it is not bad to sometimes do a little zoomorphism when studying man, whose lucidity and power of reasoning are often exaggerated.” (Étienne Souriau, The artistic sense of animals, 1963. My translation).
Unwanted Advice: Reflections from a Self-Appointed Life Counselor 