Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
I have stood, before, barefoot on grass, encased in iron armour, begging to be unburdened—and never have I been denied. Goldcrest and Nuthatch pull at buckle and clasp, and with constraints cast off I am met by the breeze as beloved. Delivered, once again, to the moment.
Sometimes I take my unease and I place it a top a plinth. I’ll stand back—eyes narrowed, thumb and forefinger cupping my chin—observing the facets and shapes of the thing. Just as anyone wishing to better know an object, I’ll begin a slow, circular walk around it; and, from the other side of the room, it appears entirely different. One part spikes and swells, spurred by the existential threats which our and so many other species face, while another part simmers mostly because I skipped breakfast. The glacial stroll around the sculpture of my unease reveals how parts of this writhing mass might be loved into oblivion—how my fear of abandonment can be introduced to my view of the world as indivisible whole, and how concern at my body’s fragility might be met by my trust in life’s unfolding. So much of my fear stems from a lack of faith in my own capacity, when in reality I have proven to myself an ability to traverse such rocky terrain as loving a dying world, and wrestling with bone-breaking grief. Grief, of course, is a uniquely powerful force as it is love itself continuing in alternate form when its typical expression has been interrupted. Grief is not some foreign thing which invades our lives, it is our love speaking in a dialect which our culture has forgotten. The modern Western approach to grief mirrors its approach to Death—hidden, private, pathologised—and so these most fundamental human experiences happen all too often in isolation. But grief needs a witness, and pain transforms through being seen and held by community. To grieve alone is to do sacred work without the container it requires. Capitalism views grief as inefficiency, and so it is given timelines and medication. Pressure to return to “normal” interrupts (or stunts entirely) a process which, allowed to unfold naturally, can fundamentally deepen our experience of being alive. It can attune us to the perfect and inherent vulnerability of every one and every thing, and reveal to us to the simple and miraculous nature of inhabiting a vessel capable of love. These things make urgent our practice of compassion, and laughable our categories of “us” and “them”; thus rendering the well-grieved quite the threat to the status-quo. When we commit to feeling deeply we become conduits for something far larger, and in grieving we might practice what it looks like to love without limit or condition—even when that love leads us into the fire. As children of a culture not forthcoming with the tools required to grieve we are too often forced to fracture and exile wounded parts in attempt to protect the whole; we armour ourselves against ourselves and forget whose side we are on. But the well-grieved heart is the battle-scarred warrior who faced themselves on the field and returned home; unarmed, unarmored, and prepared to become sage. Our dead can bless us with the opportunity to discover what it is that we are capable of holding; from the herculean weight of a world mid-collapse, to the everyday sublimity of the winged.
When the Blue Tits and the Goldfinches come to drink from the water fountain I come to an immediate halt. The deftness with which they bow their little bodies defies the laws of physics, and the balletic arc of their righting themselves to lift their chins skyward—as though in thanks—stills me. The Kite, then, majestic, resplendent, wings spread in confident occupation of his celestial kingdom, lets out a single note cry. The little Birds scatter to the Conifer. I remain, deeply vexed by my human proportions, longing endlessly to disappear into the evergreens; into a world I imagine to make considerably more sense than this.
In the 1960’s a toymaker was tasked by two physicians to make a CPR doll, as the pair required a workaround to the many practical and ethical issues of using sedated but very much alive subjects upon whom to practice resuscitation. It was deemed that the life-sized doll needed to be female-faced for fear that men would have an aversion to ‘kissing’ a male mannequin and so, naturally and not creepily at all, the trio decided to use the Death mask of a young, likely teenage, woman who had drowned in the river Seine in the 1880’s. She was unclaimed, becoming known as l’inconnue de la Seine (the unknown woman of the Seine), and the pathologist who performed her autopsy became so transfixed by her beauty and her strange expression of tranquility that he had a wax cast made of her face. Copies of the cast went on to be sold, and soon her face became a common objet d’art in the homes of writers and artists in early 1900’s Paris, and beyond. When, in the 60’s, the toymaker tasked with making the doll needed a female face, he recalled the mask which hung on the wall of his grandparents home, and so it was that l’inconnue de la Seine continued her strange, prolonged existence—coming to be known instead as “the most kissed girl in the world”. And not one singular kiss consented to. Strange, how the Death of an unnamed girl, fated to exist in the liminal, became vehicle for preserving countless lives—her immortality achieved through the obliteration of her identity. The perversion of the kiss of life given so relentlessly to the face of Death is perhaps a perfect metaphor for our collectively distorted relationship to mortality. It speaks to a blindness towards the inherent connectivity of all things, and a glaring lack of respect for the sacrality of all beings. I am, in part, haunted by the fate of this girl. We walk around strangely convinced that we understand reality based on our sensory experiences (all interpreted by a nervous system which evolved to help us avoid being eaten by prehistoric tigers—not to perceive the ultimate truth). It’s interesting how confidently wrong we can be about what we’ve decided is ‘real’, while dismissing notions that a being might retain some type of attachment to their image even after they’ve become untangled from it. I believe there to be a fundamental indestructibility which sits at the core of every being; and I believe it to be untouchable, even by Death. I suspect, in fact, that Death is all the temporary parts of us simply being loved into oblivion.
This world, stitched together by forces tender and terrible, breaks me and makes me anew in ceaseless repetition. I beg to be unburdened—and never have I been denied.
Yours in aimless flight…
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Thank you for your ongoing company in tears that know all of this and feel all of this. In my struggle for my own words to share, I am comforted by the words you so beautifully share.
As I walk slowly around my own sculpture of unease, it seems an impossible tangle of spikes and edges and ferrous objects that I can hardly imagine how to unwrap. And yet, as I listen to these meditative words, they conjure images of that which unarmours me, the single hop plant discovered down the lane and the ecstatic abundance of fly agaric sprouting in the woods this autumn, the bats that swoop and dart around the ancient yew and the family of foxes that I can just make out in the dusk across the field. Thank you, dear Chloe, for giving voice to what feels so inexpressible. I have been draw further into awakening through The Deep End, and I am grateful for the wake you cast as you move through the waters of life and that your ripples have reached this heart of mine.