“Not tears of fear but of grief. She wept as we weep once or twice in our life. Tears that carry amniotic fluid and sea salt and the dreams of sirens in them, that hurl truth, sorrow and defiance into this world, all at once. As she wept, she wiped the tears over her bruised and muddied body. As the tears made tracks, her skin started to gleam. Clean and bright again.” Martin Shaw

Tags

art, birding, birds, birdwatching, grief, Martin Shaw, nature, painting, philosophy, poetry, Smokehole, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, wild, Wilderness, writing

Because the vagrant snow bunting had appeared in my yard before waking, I knew when she called that he was dead. And upon hearing her voice, I began sounding like a strange bird, just uttering no, no, no. As if songs can magically push out reality and hold back time for just a moment.

What’s hard about this one is that he was inside that cathedral with me for many years, and I can still see him running back for me when the most rarest or most gorgeous bird was ahead and I hadn’t caught up yet. And of course, how he told my sons the exact trees where the chickadees were waiting so they could feed them from their hands. How I would wake up and say let’s drive out hours into the prairie to see this lifer and he would always beat me there. And now without warning except for the apparition of a snow bunting we had seen one windy day together two years ago, the cathedral is more empty. With that disappearance, my ancient rituals — timed with spring and fall migrations to welcome the beings from thousands of miles away as they pass through — have fallen into obsolescence.

And here is the ritual of writing, which lately (I apologize) tends to be predictably filling out absences with words. Because he told me, nothing can better bring back a presence than by just the uttering of it.

Nathan sent me some words about the stories we need in our lives and are less and less being told. And in those time-tested tales there is always a moment when we are thrown into the belly of the whale or into the dark woods or what have you. The writer says we are most cautious now of that wilderness, even having chopped off our hands to stop touching what is alive, and asks us to go sit willingly in the wild places and listen to what speaks to us.

I am using words here to listen, deep in another wilderness, sent here by the loss of a soul that scaffolded me, who saw hundreds of birds by my side as I looked at them too. Who sent me birds in every form, and delighted in my birds. And tried as he could to birdwatch in these stupid writings here. I have nothing to offer here because I am still in the wilderness listening, covered in mud, bruised in the middle of me, and seeing ghostly figures in the distance, those who I miss. They somehow feel nearer and nearer to me as I approach my own disappearance.

And yet, by some grace, so much gratitude, there is thanks for those who are waiting in the nearby village, full of love and mercy and words and bird feathers for me. Coming back to tell me they also can hear a beautiful bird just ahead, and they will help me find it.

(Annunciation, 2024 by Summer Mei Ling Lee. 23.5 k gold, watercolor and oil paint on wood panels.)

“To be wedded to the wild means some part of you — maybe a large part — guards your solitude like we guard an endangered owl, tells stories as much for the benefit of the lively dead as the moribund living, makes wayward choices many view eccentric, is capable of sustained generosity, has flashed your teeth and counted costs, has dragged meat back to the cave under the moonlight, has stalked all of Russia with only a line of Anna Akhmatova for company. To be wedded to the wild means you have curated a doorway beyond societal expectation of the perpetual, grinding tic of acting nice. That you have recognized discipline as the essential companion of the wildness, that sobriety and ecstasy have made a pact.

That is how good art gets made.” Martin Shaw, Smokehole

“But these blinds birds made of paper could not recognize my father. In vain did he call them with the old formulas, in the forgotten language of the birds — they did not hear him nor see him. All of a sudden, stones began to whistle through the air. The merrymakers, the stupid, thoughtless people had begun to throw them into the fantastic bird-filled sky.” The Night of the Great Season, Bruno Schulz.

Tags

Alice Bach, anthropocene, art, birds, birdwatching, Bruno Schulz, Connection, creative drive, creativity, Donna Haraway, nature, painting, philisophy, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, Vinciane Despret, writing

She asked me earnestly, in the context of a conversation about the war in the Middle East, does a bird I see also bring about the despair that birds are vanishing.

Counting birds is perhaps a futile defense against their disappearance. Even according to the software that I use to collect bird sightings, the bird closest to me doesn’t count. Neither do the birds in the wild who are escapees — and aren’t we all an escaped being of some sort? Nor do the birds who are introduced here and are considered invasive. Colonial human projections run everywhere, even into the bird world.

The bird in closest proximity, my son’s pet bird.

I listen to a lot of Vinciane Despret these days who speaks about the creative drive in relation to birds and the dead. She describes when a bird dies on the surface of the ocean it feeds life down into the depths of the ocean floor, and that for the natural world the ethical responsibility is that being alive gives existence to others.

Writing, a story, then puts words in a certain order to bring something into existence that was formerly a blank space on this screen. And some of us know that an animal can leave a similar trace, Despret describes, as in the way birds manage time with song, or a wolf paw print in the mud leaves pheromones. She adds, these traces are just the beginning of a story. And these are ephemeral stories (my favorite artists play with ephemerality), just like an oral history but no less important than the ones written down. She asks us, what capacities did the bird or the wolf have to acquire in order to live with each other. And as my great aunt Marguerite reminds us, what did the 5 generations of people before me enact upon each other, and is in turn enacted upon me?

Forgive me as I use more of these words to sweep up the mess of words I am creating.

Sometimes, the words people send me, the feathers they find, the scribbles, underlined passages, my memories of their presences and absences: they swirl into words and form a clearing where I glimpse the hidden pattern of things. And before it slips away I have to give testimony: these words, the paint, the connections we have, they all play upon me, just as pianists describe how a piano at some point plays them. Just like Alice, now gone, is still in my words reverberating here. Just how the birds in the field this morning made me late to the studio, where I hear the upstairs woman raging from her cage. And how my son chirps like his pet bird when he makes a bid for my connection.

A painting in progress, 2023. Summer Mei Ling Lee.

What is wondrous is that there are luxuries and gifts that you and the birds have shown me. That a feather is for warmth, but it doesn’t need to glint in the sun as metallic blue only for survival. And when Caroline sends me the image of one fallen along her walk, there is a ballooning of connection to her and all things. As is when Nathan says the birds outside his home were reflected inside and every line of writing he has lovingly sent me. The image of a list of every creature that Eva painted onto a hidden board of a home she was leaving forever: There is pleasure in singing — and no, not every part of a song can be minimized down to utility or survival. If you have ever heard a bird sing outside of mating season, after a cold night when the low sun casts warmth, even before the bugs start rising, you know. What is extra, luxurious, is beauty. And now, through these words that will up and disappear, I can see some inkling of the productivity of my life, never measured by wage or even number of paintings, or for sure approval. I count “birds” because it reveals a network here available to me and those I love, but really available to all, some discovered beauty in living and singing it. And we never know for sure how it sinks to the bottom of an ocean and feeds another soul. (And if you have followed me this far you know this is not a beauty of artifice). I want to measure my life in terms of this beauty. “Life, she loves living.”

Picture of a bird I sent Alice on her bookshelf, 2017.

“The subject is only the transient addressee of a verb which seizes them.” — Donna Haraway

“In heaven they’ll tell long stories of the horror of life on earth ending each session by chanting beautiful poems we did not deserve.” – Jim Harrison

Tags

Alice Bach, art, birds, birdwatching, Jim Harrison, Mourning, Performance Art, poetry, Professor Alice Bach, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee

His hands were trembling so excitedly that he couldn’t text the group chat about what he had seen.

601.

Some lost birds set off mysteries that make even the most analytical of nerdy birder brains just pause.

The bird he had found belongs to a species that is the most ancient of gulls, whose home is just across the equator, but was now plopped down on our beach a couple miles from my son’s school — even more unusual for a bird that hunts at night and sleeps during the day at sea. This Swallow-Tailed Gull’s home is the Galápagos Islands where now weather patterns have made food scarce. He landed here, 3350 miles away as the crow flies.

At mid-life, there is an accumulation of absences and I imagine it intensifies until the final absence. I wouldn’t dare count them like birds, but they are related, each one becoming more precious, more miraculous, more stinging, and adds evidence to some sort of hidden pattern that will stubbornly remain just out of sight. One took flight almost a year ago, and I didn’t know it until this week.

Just like other birds, when I look back there was a mundane attempt to connect with me and say hello, which now I know was a goodbye. And in my list of birds, for some I have had the presence of mind to answer, and sometimes the presence of mind to not. For her, I didn’t answer the voice in my head that knew something had happened and I texted sheepishly and waited. In our last call, she had some repetitions and some irrational thoughts, and as I watched orioles eat mulberries in the neighbor’s tree, I listened to her lecture on the political nightmares from her Facebook and CNN lens of the world.

25 years before I had been one of a few in a snobby university enrolled in her courses, where we instantly understood we could be ourselves. I took several courses from her including two in Biblical Studies even while deep into feminist activism. I asked her to be my advisor, the year she was told she was removed from tenure track.

A few years ago, I made a sort of pilgrimage to see her in the Midwest town of her final professorship. We talked non-stop, the kind where my throat hurt and my head ached, but there was so much to learn and so much to explore with her. She told me about her life before she decided to get a PhD, which she didn’t do until her late 40’s. Years of Jungian analysis, what Anne Sexton was like in person, her childhood boarding school run by nuns who all seemed to have “lost husbands in the war.” She asked so many questions in the way I felt she cared about the depths of me. I reminded her that she once taught us that the bible in Hebrew contains idioms and euphemisms not available in English translations. For example, feet is a euphemism for male genitalia, and then she let our young minds run through the list of people who wash Jesus’ feet, and whose feet he washes, and on and on. Now, 25 years later she had totally forgotten saying that, but she laughed and said, I guess the point is, who is the authority?

She was a devout Catholic, and felt the church could be changed from within. She and her fellow Catholics did vigils in front of buildings where executions were occurring, lined up near nuclear plants, and fed the poor. She told me you couldn’t donate more than $500 to the Catholic Worker she belonged to, otherwise you had money that was likely made from exploiting others and they wouldn’t want it.

I reminded her that she took me to the University Faculty Club for dinner. That she put down the Diet Coke can that was always in her hand just to order another one the moment we arrived, and there in my Doc Martens and piercings, I listened to her whisper gossips of other department faculty. She told me she never ate there and thought it perfect to invite me so we could delight ourselves as two outsiders irreverently feasting ourselves in the ivory tower.

In the Midwest, I slept in her home of books, books lining every possible wall, from floor to ceiling. The guest bed was directly below rows upon rows of early editions Virginia Woolf novels and essays. Along other shelves were books she had written for young people, she said her favorite was about a talking bear and another about a teenage girl discovering life is not going to work out the way she thought. And it still breaks my heart to remember every little scribble of a bird drawing or postcard I sent her over the 25 years, framed and perched on her shelves. One sparrow sketch sat next to a humbly embroidered fabric that read: An immaculate home is a sign of a mis-spent life.

There is a trick that birders sometimes use to coax a bird out into the open, one that should be used prudently because of the stress it can cause. Afterall, the rare ones are usually lost. A birder uses their phone to play a digital recording of the bird species’ song which can trigger a territorial response, or the species’ call which can trigger a search for a flock. On my phone I have a handful of voicemails of people who are no longer here, their voices as fresh as today, sometimes wishing me a happy birthday, one was reaching out to console me after a loss, one is from Alice asking me to call her back a little later when she returns home.

Performing Mourning, Summer Lee and JiaJing Liu. Photo by Eddie Wong. Hungry Ghost Festival, SF, 2023

There was no need to play a sound for the Swallow-Tailed Gull, as it slept out in the open for a row of 30 birders lined up admiring it. I had to go home after a few hours, my youngest son can only stare at a gull and listen to bird-talk for so long. Later a birder friend wrote me, describing with uncharacteristic melancholy the moment when the sun sunk right above the ocean and the gull gathered itself up into flight, disappearing out over the horizon. When I left Alice in the Midwest, she watched from the sidewalk as my car left her driveway. She yelled out, see you around, kid.

602.

O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud
into the marvel of this final night.

James Harrison (1990) – The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems

“What the river says, that is what I say.” – William Stafford, Ask Me.

Tags

Ask Me, bird-watching, birds, birdwatching, George Steiner, giotto, grief, grieving, Love, painting, Summer Mei Ling Lee, Szymborska, Takeyoshi Nishiuchi, William Stafford, wonder

591.

A bird took me by the wing once. Pregnant and in pain, afraid for the baby and afraid for me, I was trapped in bed and wanted to sleep away the remaining prison term. One night, a snowy white Egret visited me in my dream. I locked eyes onto how luminous she was even in the sheer darkness. I followed her up and out of my room, up the stairs, through the shuttered window and into the dense fog above my house. As if such wonder could be contained, I took stock of the immensely opaque ocean air, and then my thought of well, now what? immediately ended the ascent. With the heaviest of thuds I arrived back in my body, into the discomfort of being a body again, and incredulously awake from the dream.

I didn’t know that memory was what I was going to write. But maybe it appeared because along my commute here to this place I remembered he told me once: to be human, we must renounce paradise and accept ourselves as fallen.

(Giotto, 1302. Scrovegni Chapel, Padova)

I can’t write about what I wish I could write about, but I could write about fallenness:

Her aggression hiding the need to be lovingly reassured. How I wanted to give him more love in the last hours than I had the rest of my life, and how there are no other words for it. How one evening we are laughing and she is a tipsy teenager again with lit-up Elton John glasses, and the next evening she slips below the water line and is gone. One week he asked me to teach his course for him because he knew I understood everything, and the next week I cannot fathom why he could take his last breath from himself. How such love and pleasure could follow in the year of someone else’s disappointment and regret. And just a few days ago, she tells me she witnessed a scene of a bird attacking a raptor who was in turn attacked and fell dead to her feet. We both knew what this meant — and just now, I receive some iridescent feathers she has sent me in the mail, from 2773 miles away.

But maybe most interesting of all, the little winged angel on the wall of the 14th century chapel, an angel whose bottom half is scumbled out with gray paint. As if to show we can try with paint or words to describe that dimension, and then as a result, something bigger than us, something more knowing than we are, arrives.

I don’t know what the 600th bird will be. 500 was the Bee Eaters from Africa who summer up north near the farm of the women who took me in, sick, a little lost, and with two sweet but wild boys. In the evening as we are eating in their garden, the Bee Eaters fly over us as if they are unscrolling stars on the chapel ceiling. Excited, they then yell to me in Italian and I don’t understand what they are saying, but it is to make sure I see them as they do — and something about how when I arrived, Summer arrived too. And then again, a year later, they tell me the Bee Eaters have arrived, and now they know, so will I.

I have no way to count the returning ones. It could be unending, they are events only half-way through.

And for those who followed me this far, and you don’t understand it all — I love you for it. I have hope that the nearer I am to it, the more mysterious it is. The more painful and yet the more beautiful. It just takes you by the wing.

This is why, for now, I am not afraid of the technologists who are coming after us with their machine-learning algorithms. Their logic cannot follow a bird that glows in the dark and flies into a house and through walls. Not just because the death of art is translation, he tells me, himself from behind the veil. But also because you and I still feel the “intolerable burden”, the beautiful burden, of the presence of something Other, and some of us have merely forgotten.

(Oil Painting of Leah’s bird by Summer Lee, 2023)

“Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.”

— William Stafford, Ask Me.

(Oil Painting by Summer Lee, 2023)

“The Infinite Cage” — Joron

Tags

art, bird watching, birds, birdwatching, death, Home, memoir, migration, nature, painting, philosophy, Photography, poetry, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, words, writing

(With a few words in a note to me, she tore open the blank space here, and asked me to write again. Her gesture brought tears, in both senses of the word, and so it starts with tears — because it involves breaking the icy river, the cowardly reluctance to thaw it, to think it isn’t always flowing underneath.)

(Santa Croce ceiling bird.)

Beauty, Nathan reminds me.

What of my small experiences wants words to land them here. What birds would touch down from untouchable sky in order for me to see them, count them, photograph them, devote myself to them.

Because now these birds seem wild and unbelonging like the work that sits months waiting for me in my studio.

Last week we made a strange reunion of local birders on the back porch of a stranger’s house, to peer over a fence into the neighbor’s yard to glimpse a young Summer Tanager eating desperately at the feeder. He was undoubtedly wayward and far from home territory because of the onslaught of coastal storms. We were welcomed into that space and to each other, with only a quick mention of the mass shooting that had happened the day before shattering our small town. Then, the bird arrived, and as Eva describes, we wandered into the center of the circle of wonder. Summer Tanager was the greeting.

How often I delude myself to be disconnected from it all. And as Eva exclaims more loudly, impatiently, because the most obvious is the most difficult — we are always in the circle of wonder, never outside it — and we can indeed find center. Never by our own narrow volition, but by wandering.

(Red Phalarope by Summer Lee, a pelagic bird brought inland by storms, 2023.)

But I want words for those birds, those moments — not the ones where I tenderly helped unclench his fingers from the hospital bed, or the impatient coldness I can turn towards my own children, or how exhilaration smothered grief when driving away from her hopeless apartment for the last time. Not for the woman who rocked her body in prayer before every beautiful dinner she served and told me, this is not the life I expected for myself. And even still, not the gift of my children’s joy that persists despite me, or how I can burrow into the surrendered miracle of my new, unexpected lover.

Somehow there should rather be words for the Virginia Rail that crept out from its perennial hiding place to the spot below the window of my car. And how we caught eyes, one being welcoming another.

The people in that odd backyard meeting, with undoubtedly their own sufferings and joys, would understand. The Virginia Rail is basically all we talk about for hours and hours, even though long ago and long gone — until the next improbable Beauty arrives. And of course, those far away but close to my heart who send me words fluttering down from the sky, out of nowhere perfectly on time — thank god they understand too.

(The Virginia Rail. January 2023.)

In these birds, these words, these friends, I know is the paradox of faith, and how it takes care of us by destroying us.

I will taper down this roughly thawed cascade of words to say that 77 unique species of birds have visited my yard in the 20 or so years I have lived at this home. And I wonder about what I missed in the times I drifted away. Once a group of us chased a vagrant Dusky Warbler across a field of dried fennel, a man’s long camera lens thunking against my head to capture the bird, preventing me from photographing it well. The bird flew off confused, and we stayed to celebrate, for me the 560th species. A bewildered boy next to me scanned over the expanse of chaparral and said, just think how many dusky warblers might be out there and we would never know.

(The Dusky Warbler)

So maybe in my silence, where words haven’t been, is a backwards way to acknowledge some secrets. Not about the “yoke of perishing” we come into being with. More like finally seeing the Prairie Warbler next to the local sewage plant. That time, it took minutes to see his yellow light darting in the scrub, when the year before I spent weeks, thousands of miles away, to no avail. How some things will always escape, even as I am coming closer and closer, and reveal secrets of me that are unknown to myself even. Dufourmantelle cautions, mystery is not an enigma to be solved but prayed to, and truth is only a veil.

“Endure, o mystery of being, so that I might pull threads from your veil.” – Wislawa Szymborska

To See is to Be at a Distance. – Takeyoshi Nishiuchi

Tags

art, Barn Owl, birding, birds, birdwatching, merlo, philosophy

399 birds.

It is a silly and random number, especially when applied to the chaos of life.

I have counted 399 species of birds over the years, my life staggering and flowing with the number. With them, there are little drab stories and big colorful ones too. Births and deaths and hopes and losses, and fears and little reliefs and bits of joy. Like how, when she addresses me as “my love,” a bird flies through me. And gratitude for those who counted with me. With poems and stories and letters and sometimes just a line that says, I saw this bird. A bird, like a thought migrating over arbitrary borders, that reaches me and perches on my heart.

(Pompeii fresco)

So many gifts.

Like the story about the man who paints. We met long after we lost Takeyoshi, meeting only because we both lost precious Takeyoshi. So how could it be that we both have spent our lives making artwork from birds.

And some of those who have taken it to the other side with me. We easily slip into the private language of obsessive details about where that bird was seen and when. Daily reports of who arrived and who left. Remember that time? And all the while, I ask myself, why does this young man, and that old man, and this lost soul, and that serious cynic, why do we devote ourselves to birds. Track them. Count them. Photograph them. Why not butterflies? Or pieces of rotting fruit? What of them drives us to beyond which we can go no further, knowing the bird might be long gone.

He once whispered, It is not like I need to see all of the birds. I replied, I need to. He added, Well maybe it isn’t necessary to do so in one year.

I climbed several thousand feet up a fog-covered mountain twice in three days to see a small group of Bell’s Sparrows, a species not even listed in most books. The second day the wind opened the curtain of fog just long enough to see the tiny apparitions.

Or the other times, like Prairie Warbler who visited from far away. I waited patiently for weeks at the pond where it drinks. My friends saw it. I never did.

How futile to argue with a Prairie Warbler.

(Merlo from Sara’s yard, July 2021)

And then the ones that flew over like signs from dreams. Sometimes it was when the heart was heavy from an absence. Or there was an unexpected blessing. Like when, in my grandmother’s land, the golden pheasant was digging through trash at the hastily-restored ancient wall, or the little wren that sang outside the window of the home that stands guard over displaced immigrant bones.

Or the magpie that comes to her door, reminding her to stay in the garden rather than retreat inside. How magpies risk themselves for shiny objects, reminding us all about the unfolding, if not wayward, path. Along which there are no repositories, because shiny objects have no use in the next season, the next life. Because there is always a next season.

And scooping up the dying and dead ones, sometimes trying to save them, as if I could. In the hand, they weigh at most one or two nickels, and are soft and fearful, and heavy with mourning. How they persist so dutifully against so many odds, storms, predators, just to succumb to human ignorance and interference and land in the bottom of a muddy hole I have dug for them. The point at which finally I have learned: it is witnessing, not intervening, that heals.

In some cultures, they remove themselves from their kindred to shift their senses towards the animal world, and away from the human ones. They perform rituals to cleanse and purify themselves. Then after a few days, the animals appear to them, what we have survived upon since the beginning. And we follow.

In life, I never have had the emotional strength to keep up with where the birds take me, especially Fox Sparrow. But somehow the discomfort eases just enough to comprehend the next rare bird who I must change my life for. And less and less do I know where that will take me. But the 401st bird is already just in view over the horizon, trailing off towards this choice-less path, and I have already devoted my life to it.

The 400th Bird.

O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried/me along this bloody voyage,/ carry me now into that cloud/into the marvel of this final night. — Jim Harrison

Tags

art, birds, birdwatching, death, Jim Harrison, nature, poetry, Pontormo, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, tragedy

I own a caged bird made up of thousands of serious marks by several colored pencils on paper, framed. None of it is particularly bird-like except the woman I know who applied each one. I met her in a room in an institution in my grandmother’s country. She was one of a group who spent their days in an art room. When one of them began hitting his head and shrieking, I asked my colleagues to leave and I sat down and started drawing birds, too. The silent making in that space brought us all back home. Eventually their caregiver tapped me on the shoulder and said, we knew you were coming from far away. We have a song for you. They handed out instruments to each other and stood in a circle around their art desks and starting singing, loud enough to carry into the clinically sterile halls outside. I clapped my wings and let their foreign calls delight me, until an older man who could sing but not speak wrote on his dry erase board: Ask our visitor to sing a song for us.

If I sing these words about you, you stay alive with me. If I craft these scenes from our past here you still are in them. Humans, by dint of language, are the only beings capable of a future conditional tense. It enables the birds to sing in the daybreak after the night of our death, and we hear them. And the more sensitive, by the size of the eyes of the bird, the earlier the song begins. And the more comfortable and active they are in the dark, from where you also emerge.

Little ink bird, by Summer Lee, 2020

At some point in their circle of death the birds turned towards me and they told me matter-of-factly you had been taken. Gone. Right from the middle of me. The swaths of memory that made you part of me flew out of an absence and circled themselves over and over as clear as today. Some sort of compensation for the violence that I will never see or talk to you again. I would also learn that someone took something from you when we were young that wasn’t theirs to take. It stole parts of your life increasingly, until you were gone. We were born right across the street from each other. Now I am living and you are not. This song is my deepest apology.

Some of the most beautiful birds in the circle know me through intimate, timely words over incredible distances. At the moment when I thought you were most gone, it was as if you were sitting across from me. In her knowing, the beautiful poet bird just then wrote: somehow when they leave the body, they become closer to our hearts.

And yes, these songs fall out like feathers, like when at the end of one morning, the birder opened her car door to leave and told me the lump was cancer. That same day I held Magnolia Warbler who had been found struggling on the ground, and in my hand he shrieked a distress which was the call that there is unfathomable suffering without the consolation of reason.

One morning of those 43 mornings in a row, before the other birders arrived, there at the edge of the puddle was a bird I knew well and would make me famous to other birders for the week. How funny since he was a common bird to me, Varied Thrush, from a dark path along the reservoir near my west coast home. But here, he was a long way out of range. The place I often find myself. Who knows how these specialists drift thousands of miles from their homes, how this tiny bird managed to cross over the Rocky Mountains. Surely alone. We are birds along a life-long commute of thousands of miles. These words are the apology when one goes off course.

Thank you to our parents who let us little kids out to play together hours on end, often into the darkness. Thank you to my mom who visited him a few weeks before in the hospital, to remind him he was not his diagnosis. Though the tattoos of darkness were adding up on his body, there is always the light of possibility for all our self-inked narratives to be not true.

After the 4 hours a day every morning I spent with these birders, the migration season was over. It reminds me of the moment I left that institution where the caged birds sang and made art for their entire lives. A part of me stayed behind to keep drawing birds. But along a corridor on the way out, a mother was visiting her son. He sat alone from the group flatly staring out a window, and she was petting his head, preening him with all her loving attention.

The birders leave because the birds move on. The last bird spotted was an emerald blur of a tiny hummingbird that was late for the cold air. It hovered over our heads just long enough for even the slowest of us to register and then it zipped away into the invisible. 

“Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” Jim Harrison

Detail of Deposition by Pontormo, 1528

“I could never have come to the present without you / remember that / from whatever stage we may again / watch it appear…” WS Merwin

Tags

Annunciations, art, birds, birdwatching, death, Gadamer, philosophy, poetry, St Cecilia, Summer Lee, WS Merwin

The birds come and go here just as Fox Sparrow does in his homecomings and disappearances back on the West coast. Just as truth and beauty migrate out onto another unreachable continent when trying to reason with them. Why can’t you stay here to remind me, I ask through my binoculars. Just once. Their wondrous plumage and secretive calls draw us out from the smallness of our shelters, out into the rainy forests and sometimes in communion with each other, the alive and lonely. This year all the rarest of ones flickered across my field, even a tiny, crystal-blue Cerulean Warbler that spends most of his time too high for anybody to see. A Hooded Warbler touched down too, in a darkly flooded forest where he normally does not, just for two days. Then they leave and we are alone again. Maybe that’s why I told a beautiful woman birder that I saw the rarest bird, when in fact I hadn’t seen it at all. Something about the mix of her beauty and shyness, and something about me being mistaken and humbled. But maybe that bird is still there in our minds, more glorious and hopeful than if we had even seen it.

(Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia of Music. Sculpture by Stefano Maderno, 1599.)

What if this wave of unrelenting and invisible death was actually a grace. Except of course for the poor and vulnerable who always die for our sins. All while I suffocate in the safety around me in the anxiety that it’s never enough. Like when I impatiently told her she just needed exercise when in fact she was just about to die, swollen with failed organs, failed also by my insulated stupidity born of fear.

One time out in the twilight of a chaparral migration, stranger birds gathered in a circle. And even more strangely invited me. They had gathered in order to die. But being birds, they had to first learn how to die through song.

I listened. And of course cried too, as one does even at a stranger’s funeral. One sang of her young daughter who died suddenly. And when the mother’s song entered the abyss of dark and permanent grief, her daughter would come sing to her, to the point where I could almost hear it too. I still don’t want to know if it was an apparition of the psyche or from the other side, because it’s the same place where my own grandmother speaks to me.

This mother had brought with her the chaplain she had met in the hospital. Yes, there is always a bird there, even if we don’t believe, and here she was in the body of a middle-aged, white woman wearing a collar. The chaplain sang to me too, as I worried about my own son treading a difficult path through life. As she warbled, we all sat crying for ourselves and for that mother. Her song was about just being there at the right time, reminding us that our bodies know how to die when it is time.

But the timing of the young daughter’s song, as well as this chaplain, was uncanny. Like the little 9th century bell in Rocamadour that rings when there is an incontestable miracle. Not all pilgrims who have climbed on their bloody, tired knees to that church will hear it. But I can hear that birdsong from that circle of death, even if they are on the other side of the earth now.

Through all the hatred to be had of insufferable humanity, its never-ending range of evils, these migratory birds continue to love me well through certain people, strangers even. Just through their words. Through the poetic words they send me, calls to the heart that rain down on me in dark, muddy forests. In poetic words, there lies the impossibility of their birdsong — as impossible as it is to hold truth and beauty too — that living is through learning how to die. One word at a time, one song, risking itself into unreachable silence.

 

“The greater miracle of language lies not in the fact that the Word becomes flesh and emerges in external being, but that that which emerges and externalizes itself in utterance is always already a word.” Gadamer, Truth and Method.

“Art brings the finite and the infinite, the visible and the invisible, into coincidence.” Takeyoshi Nishiuchi

Tags

Annunciation, birds, Fra Angelico, language, Summer Lee, Susan McMane, Takeyoshi Nishiuchi, Young Women's Choral Projects

The greatest injury to Fox Sparrow might be that scientists are trying to build a mechanical bird to replicate all he can do. But what a consolation it is that they can’t yet fathom his genius — that when he moves just the toe of his wing, he can change the direction of all his feathers, just so. How he can make his feathers stick together with a force greater than Velcro and then separate them at will. Not to mention his song.

And their song. The mystery that all those technical elements can create a moment completely liberated from them.

(Here is Where We Meet, by Summer Lee, 2017. Cyanotypes, fabric, wood.)

There was a time when the mystery itself was worshipped. And that painters knew the impossibility of capturing it, but their religion was to try, for hundreds of years. But in these days, even though no one now can say exactly how a word becomes flesh, we are fed so much technical explanation about this material and that, the biography of that painter and historical event. Circular tales plunging us into neurosis. What else is neurosis but the inability to cope with uncertainty. And the delusion we can ward off any risk. They knew then, as it goes, the angel arrives even if Mary turns her head.

If ever you have held dead Fox Sparrow in your hands you also know that nothing else could suffocate life more than the self-congealing words we wrap around it. Even if it is, and it always is, to try and comfort.

Fra Angelico made a point to put the fallen Adam and Eve leaving the garden in the same scene as the Annunciation. He knew the word can separate, but also in the same scene obliterate all back into the messianic. Caroline’s poems do this many times a week. And maybe that’s why I tire you, to set out so selfishly about here with words from time to time. To remind myself, the truth and untruth of language.

To remind myself that no one can explain how the paint in my watercolor pan can bring Fox Sparrow to me. And how Fox Sparrow can leave just like that, just because I wrote it here.

Mary, in an economy of words we can’t fathom today, said,

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.

Let me greet all such incursions on my cautionary house of being with such grace. To find repose in the pain of resignation. Not a lazy resignation, but at the end of intense searching, like that for Fox Sparrow. I have read volumes on his kindred, and created innumerable treatises on all the possible places he could be when he isn’t here. Some dark and treacherous, like facing decisions I must make for my child, the lightning-lit rain pelting Fox Sparrow as he embarks in his night flight home. Some of his places are as light-filled as the clouds of Veronese, overlooking restless humanity. And sometimes as majestic as the vanishing valleys into the boreal forest I will never visit. Most of all, it’s the perch on the thin wire weirdly placed in that painting. Where he peers down on a woman who has been greeted by an angel, telling her that her life is about to be changed by no fault of her own. And of course Fox Sparrow knowing what we don’t know: that we are all fallen. And that a word could turn into flesh, spirit into form, and save us.

Right now Fox Sparrow is under my feeder scratching the dirt in this humble coastal yard in front of my house. The more hungry he is, the closer he lets me. To see his black eyes see me, see this place, that somehow guided him here to me. Back to the emptiness.

The YWCP chorus, directed by Susan McMane.

“And the emptiness turns its face and whispers ‘I am not empty; I am open.’” —Thomas Tranströmer on Vermeer

Tags

art, birds, Chauvet, darkness, emptiness, Josephine Baker, Lascaux, Rocamadour, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, travel

It’s hard to believe but Fox Sparrow says it’s best to fly in the darkness of night. Thousands of miles in just a few weeks. He might already be gone by the time I return.

The birds are named differently here, and are very wary. I follow their calls but cannot see them.

Before the war, some boys went into the forest nearby and climbed down a tunnel in search of a rumored treasure, in the days when one could dream of backyard buried treasure. When they reached the floor of the cavern and raised their lamps they saw a spectacular herd of bison and rhinos and horses running overhead from a time before history, as if it were yesterday. How most treasures are indeed accidental.

There are differences of 2000 years between one painting and another on the same stone wall. And no other change in style of line or pigment. One can compare in contrast how much the same Annunciation scene changes over 300 years. In those paintings, the perspective shifts immensely, as do the colors, and how the bird overhead goes from contour to volumetric realism. But in these caves, the paintings are almost exact, as if done by the same painter, even in caves 400 miles by foot and 20,000 years apart.

Chauvet painting, 37,000 years ago. (Photo by Jean Clotte)

What is more dystopic: life on the freezing tundra on the brink of starvation, living to kill by rudiment tool; or our tired, cynical eyes fixed trance-like to LED screens, where an unmanned drone can drop a bomb on a coordinate, our own child’s life. 20,000 years in between us and us. It is an impossible stretch to imagine a bison or wooly mammoth in this over-farmed field in front of me, but the painters were us, after all. We share some deep part of humanity, maybe if only just the underground place where we go momentarily to dream. And what is there for both of us is those paintings.

Nearby, I saw her there, in her medieval castle home of 30 years, because she found a way to never leave. Even if she had been a starlet and philanthropist, her money had been drained and they dragged her away from her castle at the end of her life. There is a photo of her in that moment, sitting on the ground of the porch like a beggar, with a few belongings and some bottles of water. It was her fall, but also her protest. Because even to the end we made her perform, the exotic caged bird, singing and dancing, sometimes to our low tastes. The castle feels spent now, as if folded up after an epic performance, breathing only memories of the high days of celebrity-filled theatres, greying sequin gowns, and used toys from a line of adopted children (where did they go?). Eventually, the princess offered her a new home, and Jackie O funded her final farewell/revival show (those women understood), then she died a few days later. In Paris. But for now she prevails in that castle. Not unlike an outline of a gorgeous creature fading on an exposed cave wall.

It didn’t ring while I was here, a small 9th-century bell on the ceiling of a chapel carved into the rock of a cliff. The chapel could seat maybe 30, but receives innumerable pilgrims, for a thousand years now. Some climbed the long stairs on their knees, as if life itself weren’t cut and bruised enough. In the dark space, a black virgin carved by a hermit tenderly watches us. And we watch that little bell that is only rung when there is an incontestable miracle. A list on the wall begins in 1385, mostly for miracles at sea. The sea is a fantasy to most who lived here then, 200 miles from this little chapel. And who decided what was deemed a miracle, she asks me. I don’t know but it always involves suffering. And how miracles are also under the auspices of the accidental.

(Fox Sparrow, when I first met him.)

It becomes obvious here that along these little roads and stone villages there are little sauvage patches of forest left, under which are other undiscovered caves full of prehistoric paintings, so beautiful because they will never be seen. Never to be paraded in front of lustful eyes. Like the birds here who continue to call and flit around, always outside the reach of my eyes.

Darkness, Fox Sparrow says. And I believe him, because all of this unfolds when words fail to contain it. How far these little words go though, sore and tired pilgrims of the darkness, in search of the miraculous.

“The true entrance into us will not occur by an act of will.” George Steiner