Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
Strange times. I find myself thinking those two words with increasing frequency in these, strange, times of ours. Sometimes I’ll say them aloud. “Strange times,” I’ll announce, to a seemingly empty room, with a slow shake of the head. The smallest of exorcisms. I was in great need, last week, of a remedial boost following an injury which saw me temporarily incapacitated. I’d been shocked by the breakneck speed at which I’d decided that, without being able to show up in the world in the ways that I typically do, I was entirely useless. Worthless, even. Good for nothing. Oh, how our shadows long for the light. As is my habit when in the grip of a script inherited from a deeply unwell culture, I summoned to mind that which has recently enchanted me. Top of the list being the nest of five Thrushes at the rescue centre, each of whom make the smallest little trills, comforting one another with tiny murmurs of potential song while, after being fed, they settle down and fall back to sleep. How inexpressible my gratitude for the sounds of my wild kin, and how endless my rage at all the man-made noises eclipsing them. On the day that I am crowned king I will see every leaf blower and lawn mower thrown into a pit and set aflame. We will dance around the bonfire of insanities through the night, and come morning we will sit in sweet, sane silence, and we will listen to the Birds sing. But alas, until coronation day I remain subject in a kingdom of mechanical efficiency, trapped ‘neath the tyranny of the decision that taming nature was more important than listening to it.
Thank heavens, then, for the audacity of nature. Of beauty. Thank heavens that neither seek permission nor approval, and that both remain relentlessly determined to exist, even in hostile territories. Thank heavens for the city Birds who sing higher and louder than their countryside kin in order to rise above the noise, and, to the unlikely Sycamore somehow growing from the side of a metal bridge at Victoria Station: I bow to your tenacity. I share your drive to root and to rise, and to draw from darkness offerings to the sun.
Someone recently brought a Sparrow to me. She had been caught by a feral cat minutes before and she was, sadly, well beyond saving. I took her somewhere quiet, cool and dark and held her in my palm as she quickly approached her last moments of this existence. Whether person or Bird, final breaths are final breaths; weighty, laboured, sacred. I wordlessly repeated the refrain that I often do when in the presence of a dying being, “You know how to do this. You know how to do this. Trust that you know how to do this.” And she did. Later that day I wrapped her little body in a shroud of dandelion leaves and buried her with a piece of lapis lazuli. She looked like a tiny Egyptian king.
I often think that I’d have felt quite at home in ancient Egypt. I’m not sure any civilisation ever engaged with Death quite so conspicuously. Death was studied, mythologised, painted, measured. Wrapped in linen and gold. Now it’s wrapped in bleached sheets and euphemism. But beauty conspires with life, it breathes with it; and so it breathes along with Death, too. It weaves through everything without concern for what might seem appropriate, and is indifferent to our desire for moral geometry. There was a time when I was ashamed of my authentic responses to the world, ashamed of the awe I felt in grief, of the poetry I saw in dying. We so want to keep beauty pure, to keep horror neatly contained, but instead of hard stops at the end of these spectrums the extremes always seem to curve back on themselves—as though experience is more spiral than straight line. Perhaps, in reality there is no clean division between the sublime and the catastrophic. Only the intensity of staring at the event horizon of conceptual understanding, where the categories we use as safety blankets simply start to dissolve.
Such is the relentless beauty of nature, and the relentless nature of beauty, that she has no qualms in dancing cheek-to-cheek with horror. Like how impossibly beautiful the night sky over the Atlantic was, as the Titanic disappeared beneath its surface. How the same conditions that created that fateful iceberg, created a cloudless, moonless, star-thick sky, reflected back to itself by the eerily still, mirror-like ocean. The night was said to look “like the inside of an entire globe1”, with the profile of the sinking ship “a black outline”, “bordered all round by stars.2” That night was not beautiful in spite of the people drowning in it, that night was beautiful alongside the people drowning in it, in a kind of terrible unity that mocks our preference for things to feel uncomplicated.
Author, teacher, environmentalist and activist, Joanna Macy, says that “In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.” She’s a woman who knows a thing or two about courage, hope and beauty, and she is, as I write, actively dying.
May she be wrapped in linen and gold.
Yours in aimless flight…
Helen Candee, first class passenger, describing the view on deck
Lawrence Beesley, second class passenger, unknowingly describing thermal inversion
As I grow older (83) I contemplate death more, hoping I can choose my way. I want to go the way you describe the bird you so gently held. Thank you for giving me the description I needed. The world may be changing and not as we older folk know it but there will always be life and death...that is the way of it.
Your longing to create a bonfire of the world’s lawn equipment made me laugh out loud. May your reign begin soon, Your Majesty! Thank you for your essay.