This was back in November, a couple months after my sister died. It was a beautiful day, but late in the season, and most of the leaves on the trees had fallen and been raked up and blown into piles in the streets and then carted away by the city. There's something totalitarian about this. The way you can't be a leaf and die normally, right there under the tree you gave all your energy to, all the whole three seasons of your life, for crying out loud, and four if you include the winter just before you were born, when the tree was dreaming you in the tips of its branches. Oh well.
I was coming from downtown, walking back from the library or the coffee shop, and thinking of my sister. Her contagious smile. Her unhappy soul. The note she left behind, "to whom it may concern." And I was feeling that emotion you feel when you say the word “gulf,” or maybe “vast.” I've always thought that those two words were amazing for how small they were and yet how tightly they packed their meaning in. But then I sometimes think, “hmm maybe it's the very the shortness of the word that has has the effect of making the thing that it means seem bigger.” Or, to say it a different way, “maybe the word, when it's set up in your mind against the thing that it means, makes you (the speaker) feel about as small as the word itself." Do you see what I'm saying? Try it.
Vast.
Gulf.
See what I'm saying? The gulf is around the word "gulf," not in it. And the word's own smallness makes the gulf of what it means seem larger.
Or: the vastness of "vast" lies outside of the the word "vast." There it is, looming around the little word, making itself by relative comparison even vaster.
Anyway, I was only about a block away from our house, passing by a beautiful old brick building that used to be a school, when, hearing something, I stopped. On the grounds there, around the school, are several beautiful trees: a tulip poplar, which is tall and straight, a couple of bass trees, and several sugar maples. The birds were in the sugar maples. Singing, all of them at once. Not just a few birds either, but something like a collective choir. A garrulous village. A whole sonic census of them. I walked across the grass to get a closer look.
During spring and summer robins tend to be fierce and territorial with each other, but when the nesting season is over, and all the young are raised, they all mellow out, and come together to hunker down and ride out the winter. They're named Terdus migratorius, but in places like Northwest Indiana, they never really migrate. They just pipe down and turn down the personal furnace. If you want to see them in winter, you'll have to look for them, because they're quiet and brown and like I say, hunkered, but if you look with any conscientiousness, you'll probably find some. Search the crab apple trees or hawthorns especially. Robins eat that wrinkled old fruit to supplement their fat stores.
The wonderful noise. The mutual song. Time to taste it, time to enjoy. Robins. Robins. Robins.
I'm not saying there's anything particularly pretty about their singing, especially when they're singing as individuals. Still, when they're all out there together, happy about life, happy about the sun, happy about having company, happy about being robins, well, if you're at all vulnerable to beauty, you can't help but stop and serve yourself some of the homey mince pie of their cheer.
I sat down against the tulip poplar, and listened for something like half and hour. I closed my eyes. There was that warm orange light softly rubbing my eyelids. And I sort of transferred the robins to my brain. I sort of imaginatively imported them, and there in the sad neuronal branches inside my skull they perched willingly and gladly sang. So cheerful. So sure things would be okay, at least in a way. Winter comes to everyone, but right now there's the sun.
HB
Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Standing Up For the Music of the Earth
This was back when I was maybe eight or nine. My family had just come back to the United States from India, and we were living in a duplex that my grandparents owned. We lived on the bottom floor, and my grandparents lived on the top floor, and an uncle of mine, who was maybe thirty or so, lived (with a bunch of cats) in an apartment not far away, but visited the Raymond Avenue duplex almost every day. He was for the most part gentle, but he also had his rages and depressions. He was paranoid schizophrenic, and things were kind of touch-and-go with his treatment. He couldn't hold down a job. His hands shook from his meds.
He was a huge music fan, and to satisfy his acoustic appetites kept a pretty impressive stereo system up in his room, which was on attic floor of the duplex. He would spend hours up there, lying on his bed like a teenager, just kicking back in his socks, smoking, and listening to his (pretty sizable) collection of LP's. Clearly his music was a way of escaping from the difficulties of his life. You had the beauty of the music. You had its ability to surround you and enfold you, and just soothe away the pain. It was like a suspension bridge, beautiful and golden. Listening, making use of its transportational beauty, you could get yourself to the other side of a difficult, die-hard hour, or maybe even two, and not really feel as if it had been so bad.
An oak tree stood about a hundred feet from the house, and we kids had built a tree house in it. That was my hangout; no roof, just a platform with a carpet of artificial grass. I would read up there. Or just lie back on the artificial grass staring up at the sky. Sometimes, from the oak, you could hear my uncle's music, and I liked that. It felt companionable to me--as if the two of us were loitering together.
I never really got the whole story. Then again, when it comes to the intricate precincts of the human-heart-in-suffering, is there ever such a thing as the full story? Maybe his voices told him to do it. Maybe he was angry at someone for telling him to turn it down, and was trying to hurt them by hurting himself. Whatever it was, one day he just gathered up all the records in his room--every one of them--just gathered them all together, took them out to the alley, and threw them in the trash. We're talking a couple hundred LP's here: everything from James Taylor's Fire and Rain to Dave Brubeck's Take Five to Eugene Ormandy conducting Beethoven's Second. God knows how much money they represented. How many Christmas gifts. Or how many hours of enjoyment he was losing, by throwing them away. If only he had managed to stare down this mysterious and irrational urge to throw the records away, to uproot all that beauty from his life!
I was thinking about this story just the other day, when I was sitting out on the front stoop and listening to the birds, who happen to be migrating through the area just now. There was a flock of songbirds in the maples across the street, just chirping away, garrulous as anything. Talking about Costa Rica.
I was thinking about this story a couple of months ago too, when the katydids and crickets and tree-frogs were making their own kind of music on an August night: chirps and whirs and a sort of continuous background peeping that was so beautiful to hear. So calming. So simple. So ancient. So elemental. So "well, here we are again."
I thought about it back in June as well, when I was out camping with my family in Wisconsin and sat out on a sandstone bluff after the sun went down and heard the whippoorwill making its first enthusiastic love calls...
Here's the thing though. We as a species are disposing of the music of the earth, in something like the way my uncle got rid of his records. Whether exactly on purpose or not, everything we do--our farming, our logging, our road-building, our urban development, our manufacturing, our shopping--everything seems to militate against that music. Consider for instance the frogs. There are probably fewer than half the number of frogs in the world today as there were on the day I was born, and in another twenty years there will probably be half as many as there are today. Goodbye peepers. You're getting dimmer. We're throwing you away.
Or speaking of the songbirds, here's a quote from an Audubon site:
Goodbye happy beautiful songbirds; we're throwing you away as well. No more whippoorwills. Go away, purple martins. We don't want you anymore. We prefer our housing developments and malls.
After throwing away the music of the birds and the frogs, we can also throw away the buzz of the pollinators, which by the way are essential for feeding us. And I hear tell that we're hard at work tossing out the trumpeting of the elephants on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania. Same with the splashing of the salmon in Alaska. But then maybe don't need the salmon; after all, we can grow our own meat in a lab now, right?
Wait a minute! Why are we doing this--throwing away the music of life? Are we crazy? Are we sick? Do we have an excuse?
And once the planet's music has been hauled off, paved over, and zeroed out of existence, where will we as a species, stand? After all, the music that my uncle, in his illness and confusion threw away, could be replaced, and in fact--painstakingly, partially--eventually was. But the music of the earth, once it's gone, will never come back. And remember, remember oh mortal, this music is intimately connected to our own sustenance. A silent planet is a dead planet. A dead planet is nobody's home. Not yours, not mine. Not anyone's.
What terrible voices are telling us to dispose of the music of the earth? The voices of economic capital? The voices of technological pride? The voices of bad religion? The voices of consumerism? The voices of human self-importance?
Wherever they are, and wherever they come from, we must stand and resist them.
HB
Until Saturday the 2nd!
He was a huge music fan, and to satisfy his acoustic appetites kept a pretty impressive stereo system up in his room, which was on attic floor of the duplex. He would spend hours up there, lying on his bed like a teenager, just kicking back in his socks, smoking, and listening to his (pretty sizable) collection of LP's. Clearly his music was a way of escaping from the difficulties of his life. You had the beauty of the music. You had its ability to surround you and enfold you, and just soothe away the pain. It was like a suspension bridge, beautiful and golden. Listening, making use of its transportational beauty, you could get yourself to the other side of a difficult, die-hard hour, or maybe even two, and not really feel as if it had been so bad.
An oak tree stood about a hundred feet from the house, and we kids had built a tree house in it. That was my hangout; no roof, just a platform with a carpet of artificial grass. I would read up there. Or just lie back on the artificial grass staring up at the sky. Sometimes, from the oak, you could hear my uncle's music, and I liked that. It felt companionable to me--as if the two of us were loitering together.
I never really got the whole story. Then again, when it comes to the intricate precincts of the human-heart-in-suffering, is there ever such a thing as the full story? Maybe his voices told him to do it. Maybe he was angry at someone for telling him to turn it down, and was trying to hurt them by hurting himself. Whatever it was, one day he just gathered up all the records in his room--every one of them--just gathered them all together, took them out to the alley, and threw them in the trash. We're talking a couple hundred LP's here: everything from James Taylor's Fire and Rain to Dave Brubeck's Take Five to Eugene Ormandy conducting Beethoven's Second. God knows how much money they represented. How many Christmas gifts. Or how many hours of enjoyment he was losing, by throwing them away. If only he had managed to stare down this mysterious and irrational urge to throw the records away, to uproot all that beauty from his life!
I was thinking about this story just the other day, when I was sitting out on the front stoop and listening to the birds, who happen to be migrating through the area just now. There was a flock of songbirds in the maples across the street, just chirping away, garrulous as anything. Talking about Costa Rica.
I was thinking about this story a couple of months ago too, when the katydids and crickets and tree-frogs were making their own kind of music on an August night: chirps and whirs and a sort of continuous background peeping that was so beautiful to hear. So calming. So simple. So ancient. So elemental. So "well, here we are again."
I thought about it back in June as well, when I was out camping with my family in Wisconsin and sat out on a sandstone bluff after the sun went down and heard the whippoorwill making its first enthusiastic love calls...
Here's the thing though. We as a species are disposing of the music of the earth, in something like the way my uncle got rid of his records. Whether exactly on purpose or not, everything we do--our farming, our logging, our road-building, our urban development, our manufacturing, our shopping--everything seems to militate against that music. Consider for instance the frogs. There are probably fewer than half the number of frogs in the world today as there were on the day I was born, and in another twenty years there will probably be half as many as there are today. Goodbye peepers. You're getting dimmer. We're throwing you away.
Or speaking of the songbirds, here's a quote from an Audubon site:
Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.
Goodbye happy beautiful songbirds; we're throwing you away as well. No more whippoorwills. Go away, purple martins. We don't want you anymore. We prefer our housing developments and malls.
After throwing away the music of the birds and the frogs, we can also throw away the buzz of the pollinators, which by the way are essential for feeding us. And I hear tell that we're hard at work tossing out the trumpeting of the elephants on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania. Same with the splashing of the salmon in Alaska. But then maybe don't need the salmon; after all, we can grow our own meat in a lab now, right?
Wait a minute! Why are we doing this--throwing away the music of life? Are we crazy? Are we sick? Do we have an excuse?
And once the planet's music has been hauled off, paved over, and zeroed out of existence, where will we as a species, stand? After all, the music that my uncle, in his illness and confusion threw away, could be replaced, and in fact--painstakingly, partially--eventually was. But the music of the earth, once it's gone, will never come back. And remember, remember oh mortal, this music is intimately connected to our own sustenance. A silent planet is a dead planet. A dead planet is nobody's home. Not yours, not mine. Not anyone's.
What terrible voices are telling us to dispose of the music of the earth? The voices of economic capital? The voices of technological pride? The voices of bad religion? The voices of consumerism? The voices of human self-importance?
Wherever they are, and wherever they come from, we must stand and resist them.
HB
Until Saturday the 2nd!
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