temporal precision

the weight of flight, faith and failure

Zoetrope strips from the 1860’s, maker unknown

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Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.

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One summer’s morning I was standing in the kitchen, trying to make breakfast while being harassed by a fly. There’s a type of fly that appears in the summer whose buzz emits a sound, a frequency, which has the power to instantly send my nervous system into a state of fierce, rigid tension. It was one of these flies which was harassing me on that morning (I know “harassing” implies malicious intent, but, really, who can say). Its persistence had pushed me firmly in the direction of rage so, after levelling some (frankly devastating) insults at the fly, I picked up an oven glove and swiped it quickly, violently through the air in the fly’s direction—and, to my horror, I hit it. The fly dropped, like a piece of gravel, to the kitchen floor. “No, no, no, no, no…” I repeated, as though my monosyllabic mantra might somehow undo what I’d done. Flies are able to process extraordinary amounts of visual information in a fraction of the time that we humans can. While we see a swatting oven glove moving as one fluid arc, the fly perceives it with such temporal precision that every subtle shift within the arc is visible, a bit like a zoetrope spinning slowly enough to see each individual image. It must have had its back turned. On my knees, with my head a couple of inches above the victim of my outburst, I saw that it was still alive. After managing to gently nudge them onto a piece of kitchen paper, I took the fly outdoors with the mind that sun and fresh air might help it to recover. I spent the next half hour coaxing the fly back to health, with a few drops of water on a teaspoon and half a raisin. When, eventually, the fly took to the air, I felt absolved.

With softened shoulders and the gift of a second chance, I went back inside to see multiple missed calls from the same number on my phone’s screen. The number was unfamiliar, and I couldn’t think who it might be, so I carried on with breakfast, when again, the number called. I answered, to discover that it was my dear friend’s father calling, to share with me the news that my friend, Daniel, had taken his own life. “No, no, no, no, no…” the same mantra, the same refusal of the reality in which I’d found myself—only this one held no room for absolution. In the days that followed, I felt as though the volume of the world had increased tenfold, and my ability to perceive it had sharpened beyond bearing. When David returned home and came towards me with the open arms that I would fall in to, he came towards me in distinct frames. My focus drawn so completely into the moment that continuity of motion simply gave way. In hindsight, I believe I gained something of an understanding of how the fly might perceive its particular version of the world. Reality, as I had previously labelled my own perception, revealed itself to be nothing like I had assumed. My back had been turned to the intensity of the now, and the Death of my dear friend had swiped me clean out of the air.

There are many paths which lead to the singular destination of trusting this world, some distinctly more scenic than others. It might be a slow, meandering stroll where the realisation that, even as chaos and violence and acts of insanity unfold, a quiet and persistent wisdom flows unhindered through every opening leaf, each preening Bird and every mother tending her young. It could be a heartbreak so violent that one is dragged to a crossroads where the only signs point toward numbness, Death, or trust. It might be a blind leap of faith. For me, it was, or is, all three. For me, time is a vague and amorphous thing, and at any one moment there are various parts of me on various paths to me; some with broken compasses, some lost and wailing, others sitting back and enjoying the view. But each one heads towards a clearing, within which it is revealed that what opens the leaf, and tends the young, and preens the Bird, and compels each part forward, is love.

Just as my friend no longer inhabited the physical self he had once known, I no longer inhabited the me which existed prior to his Death. And so the two of us had to embark on the process of renegotiating our friendship to accommodate our, now drastically, different states. A process made infinitely easier thanks to the tutelage of a particular constellation of that summers season of baby Birds. From hatchling to fledgling to juvenile to release, each stage brought lessons in attunement, subtle recalibration, trust and eventually, liberation. A gentle redistribution of presence followed, as we learned how to be with who we'd each become. Absolution, though, will only come once I am ready and willing to offer it to myself. The last message I sent to Daniel read, “I wish there was more I could do. I wish I could feed you mealworms every 30 minutes to make you feel better. I wish it was all less complex, and awful and sad. Know that me and about 80 baby birds send you our love.” He replied, “What an image. Thank you for everything”. It’s been three years and I still sometimes look at that message, wondering if that was ‘goodbye’ and I somehow missed it. Even though tending to Death and tending to life can look like the same gesture, the weight of what I could not save and the grace of what I could, occupy entirely different masses; they cannot be measured against one another.

Trusting this world is a place we must arrive at, over and over, and with each arrival more is asked of us. Death has been practicing its art for millions of years, and I trust that it knows what it is doing. As I have come to know Death, Death has come to know me, and when the time eventually comes for the two of us to enter into my last earthly dance, we’ll bow to one another before I take his hand, like the old friend he is, and he waltzes me out of this world.

Yours in aimless flight…

Friends, a brief note: I'm putting the finishing touches on The Deep End, a course for anyone wishing to explore a deeper friendship with mortality. If you're curious about what that might look like, there's a glimpse for you here.