Tags
"Où s'en vont les gens qui meurent?", Annunciation, art, Étienne Souriau, birds, birdwatching, death, Gadamer, Indonesia, Loss, Love, Mourning, nature, philosophy, poetry, Ruby-Throated Bulbul, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, temples, Vinciane Despret, wildlife, writing
1060.
He refuses to call the birds even if it means his customers will see less birds and from farther away, or that his customers could choose another guide who does.
He knows that these encounters are where truth can reveal itself, not when we try to shape the world around us.
What all the birds are telling me these days is that it’s never been about the birds, or the lover, or the one who is no longer here. I start with some words, and then I wait. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.
We waited for hours in the sticky heat, scoping out across a ravine where it’s impossible for the villagers to plant rice fields. It’s always when you are about to leave when they enter and that’s why birders never leave — even if my son is pulling my arm or I have missed a zoom call. I have started to live for these Annunciations, the moment like this, when he careens without fanfare into a morass of jungle vines, the flash of gold and blood red grabbing my eye.
There is a lowly triumph when you are the first to spot a rarity, especially before the native expert does. But this was also about waiting and listening, Tai would say to weaken our ego. And sometimes something happens and sometimes it does not. Birds, like my favorite art, exceed explanation and translation.
As much as the people of this area leave gratitude for every spirit here—the spirits of the trees and the water and, especially, the winds—they also still catch wild birds and cage them.
I waited for three days for our escaped pet cockatiel to come down from the trees in our neighborhood back to me. Every morning I would wake before sunrise so that I could hear her first calls somewhere outside and re-locate her from the night before. I cancelled every appointment and obligation and tracked her. A few times a car or the oblivious dog-walker would startle her and she would make a wild flight, so I would run after her, under her next impossibly high perch. I blasted cockatiel calls from my phone and called her name incessantly, altogether confirming my title as the crazy bird lady on the block. There were many desperate moments when our eyes locked, and I registered her simultaneous anxiety to return to me with the existential fear of what that entailed.
On the third night, when daylight was fading I lost sight of her in a patch of thick pines, on the exact hillside property over which our group won a lawsuit to prevent it from being paved over. I made a call out and she answered me from the darkness. And then went forever silent.
My guide used to take the money from his tours and buy back the freedom of those caged birds. Maybe he still does, but I didn’t ask, because I know the discipline of that practice is to never commit it into words. From one angle, it can feel relentlessly useless. From another, it is where God is located.
His people apparently think the gods are also located in all of these miniature temples, plopped every hundred yards, it seems. My favorite one was where White-breasted Waterhen was gobbling up their offerings right alongside the scooter-filled jungle road.
We lost sight of the bird somewhere in the ravine, so we finally could take a nature break, which we jokingly dubbed “apologizing to the trees.” Then we finally left with my tiny indexical residue of a photo strained from what seems like a mile away in my giant lens.
There is an ache that I will never see that bird again, and my photo will never improve. But I also have the wound of possibility of re-animating it all in reverie. Like everyone and everything dear I have ever lost.
He writes that there is something more primordial than the one who gives and the one who receives — the experience giving itself.
Vinciane Despret puts it another way: love exists because there are those who love: “Perhaps one has to imagine love a bit in order to love, and in imagining it and by loving, love exists.”
To end her lecture on where do the dead go, curiously fashioned for children, (and we are all children in the face of death), she leaves us with this invocation: “When a pagan meets someone, they never know if they are having business with a god.”
Two weeks after our cockatiel disappeared, I was across the country when a neighbor spotted her less than a half mile away. Lupe went right away and was able to capture her. Everyone who had been in these words with me cried in joy and for a moment my intense mourning lifted. Then I saw her up close, and even if my youngest son still refuses to accept it — our new bird is not our lost one. A lot can change a cockatiel who is in the wild for three weeks, but they can’t get younger. Still I took the wrangled bird in and made a perch so she can sit up high and eat, sleep, and watch birds fly by outside. Another little altar for the temple of words.
