Birds Art Life Read online

  • • •

  For example, a chapter called “Love” followed a Quebecois man who found solace in walking around the world as he recovered from a mental breakdown. “Body” told the story of a man whose debilitating anger had led him to pursue the art of rock balancing. Halfway through, a thirty-something musician appeared in the segment titled “Meaning.” After years of wallowing in creative depression, he had quit drinking and had found peace by birding in the city. “I didn’t even have to think about it. I just felt easier. I felt easy-hearted,” he said.

  He had discovered his joy was bird-shaped.

  The musician was funny and had a smile that was very quiet. He came across as fervent about birds without being reverential.

  • • •

  Later that evening, I looked at the musician’s bird photographs on his website. It was an extensive and odd collection. They were not the sorts of pictures you would see on a greeting card or in a glossy bird calendar.

  • • •

  These birds lived in gardens of steel, glass, concrete, and electricity.

  There was a bird with a plastic Frozen Mango bag on its face and another bird nested in a shattered light fixture. There were birds on tacky stucco walls, rebar bundles, giant forged nails, and wire fences. The birds were doing ordinary bird things—perching, flying, preening, hunting, nest building—but there was no doubt that they were of rather than above the mess and grit and trash of the world.

  • • •

  The message in the photos wasn’t the usual one about environmental sins or planetary end-times. The message, if it could be called that, was about love. It wasn’t love for a pretty girl or a love that placed the beloved on a plinth or in a vitrine. It was not the kind of love that knocked you over, left you in a state of craven hunger, and gave you jittery bouts of insomnia. It neither idealized nor sought to possess. The love I felt in the photos was a love for the imperfect and struggling. It was a love for the dirty, plain, beautiful, funny places many of us call home.

  • • •

  My heart beat a little faster looking at them, at the birds and the space around them.

  • • •

  I had grown solitary while waiting for the world to quieten around a story. I had grown solitary as an only child of two aging immigrants, who had fled their respective homelands for a continent devoid of family, who had drawn a strike line through their histories, who sat on the land like two potted plants rather than trees in soil. I had grown solitary as a writer whose craft demanded my separation from others. Is that what I saw in the space around the birds? My own solitude?

  • • •

  I made contact with the musician and arranged to meet him for a bird walk. I wanted to be enraptured and feel I was still inspirable. I did not see nature as my own personal Lourdes or healing wilderness.

  • • •

  Or maybe I did.

  “Hello?” the musician said, loping toward me with his heavy camera, a stout figure in layers of woolly brown. “Hello?” I replied. I was standing by a large duck pond on a cold but sunny December morning, exhaling cloudlets of breath. People walked by on the path with their dogs. Ducks waded past us on the water.

  • • •

  I had sudden misgivings. I felt shy. What had I been thinking?

  • • •

  The musician was a serious birder. I belonged to the vast numbers, satirized by Portlandia, who knew nothing about birds and thought mostly of them as a decorative motif. My house was a frivolous bazaar of nature-themed trinkets, from the prettiest handcrafted duck lamp to the usual menagerie of stuffed toys to our Anthropologie owl mugs. I lived in a state of unforgivable anthropomorphism. Anthropoapologetic. That’s what I was feeling.

  • • •

  What did I know of live birds? What did I know of the wild world, and what did it know of me?

  • • •

  I did not grow up picking berries by a river valley or clambering through dark, dewy forests or observing tide pools. I had many adventures as a child, but they did not involve the wilds of Canada. They involved casinos, international airports, and mammoth department stores.

  • • •

  My parents were devoutly metropolitan. My father was a London-born foreign correspondent, stationed in Tokyo when he met my Japanese mother, a demure, long-haired sumi-e artist who initially balked at my father’s immense height and skeletal bearing. Their courtship began at a Canadian embassy party in a thick fug of cigarette smoke. He fell in love with her charm and prettiness. She fell in love with his worldliness and the promise of escape.

  They married, and a couple of years later, work drew my parents to London, where I was born. And then another job drew them to Canada. An exotic cosmopolitan couple had suddenly landed in a quiet North Toronto neighborhood. No Kensington High Street, no Shinjuku, just a thick blanket of snow. Just unidentified scampering animals and unfamiliar winged creatures. My father dashed off somewhere for work and my mother was left alone in a cold house. Quiet quiet, no noise except the birds outside, a choir on their way from or to elsewhere, birds thriving in their new territory. All those notes held in the cold air, the migrant songs, were not a comfort to my mother. Having lived through hardscrabble war years in the Japanese countryside, she had no fondness for nature. She liked busy downtowns, a thick cladding of civilization. She liked sashaying down the street in a miniskirt and heels, Rothmans cigarette in hand, and causing an uproar. My mother was beautiful and boasted she had, on various occasions, turned the heads of such men as Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and King Hussein. Toronto did not impress her. Instead of appreciation, my mother looked out her icy Canadian window and saw problems. What to do with all the fucking snow? What to do with the fucking gazebo?

  • • •

  Here’s what she did. When spring came she dug up the entire backyard and installed a traditional Japanese rock garden, a carefully ordered and manicured landscape, which she raked with monkish regularity, clearing away Frisbees, badminton birdies, and baseballs that sailed over the fence from the park behind our house. If she had to have nature, she would have it her way: soft sprinkler-grown moss and carefully pruned Japanese trees. She did this every time we moved, creating four new rock gardens in seven years. Raking and raking her way to happiness.

  • • •

  My mother became an art collector and gallerist. (Her own ink paintings, dating back to her pre-married life, had been left behind in Japan, so acquiring the luster of legend.) I grew up in a house cluttered with precious items and bizarre junk, newly acquired antique furniture, mementos of strangers. Our tiny nuclear family became a country all its own with its own unique and insular customs.

  The musician eased my shyness by talking me through the ducks on the pond. There, he said, see those ducks landing on the water, the ones that look like clumsy seaplanes, those are mallards. And over there, that funny cluster swimming in a tight circle in the middle of the pond—see? Eight, nine, ten, eleven of them churning food to the surface—those are northern shovelers. He pointed to a solitary duck that resembled a large turkey bobbing on the water, a cross between a farm duck and a mallard. Apparently his mate had died recently. She disappeared one day and there were rumors of a carcass sighting.

  • • •

  Can a duck feel lonely? I wondered but I did not know. I didn’t know anything about ducks. I didn’t even know about the oil that coated their feathers, which was strange because I had probably heard the expression “like water off a duck’s back” a thousand times.

  • • •

  The farm duck–mallard seemed to be enjoying himself. He was cruising around the various duck cliques, chatting up the ladies. He was a duck with charisma.

  • • •

  Did the musician have charisma?

  A little.

  Did the musician grow up feeling close to nature?

  No.

  • • •

  The musician told me he grew up in a city-bound
family. He had only one boyhood memory of nature—which involved catching a caterpillar when he was six. He placed the caterpillar in an empty margarine container, laid down some grass for food, and closed the lid. No one had taught him that he needed to create airholes. So he sat, watching and waiting for his future butterfly.

  • • •

  He told me: I started going on bird walks to get out of my studio and out of my head. I used to worry about being loved as an artist. I wanted to be understood. I wanted to be admired. I wanted to be significant! I wallowed in a shitty state of insecurity most of the time. Now I spend hours trying to spot tiny distant creatures that don’t give a shit if I see them or not. I spend most of my time loving something that won’t ever love me back. Talk about a lesson in insignificance.

  • • •

  The moment of us not knowing each other quickly receded. I was used to being around people who were somewhat hobbled by their artistic temperaments. What differentiated the musician was that he had made an unusual change in his life, separating himself from the speedy world and from the imperative to feel tragic about things, but otherwise he was still a familiar duck.

  Let’s walk, he said.

  I followed him on the path.

  • • •

  As we walked, I was thinking about something I had just read in a book by Amy Fusselman: “You would be surprised at how hard it is to be open to new and different good things. Being open to new things that are bad—disasters, say—is pretty easy. . . . But new, good things are a challenge.”

  • • •

  Part of being open, I decided, meant cultivating a better kind of attention. I wanted to achieve the benevolent and capacious attention that the be-scarfed artist and the bird-loving musician showed the world.

  • • •

  My usual (nonmaternal) attention had three strains. There was the dogged attention I gave my art, the boxed-in attention I gave to my devices and screens, and the durational attention I (sometimes) gave to challenging books/art/films. All these seemingly dissimilar forms of attention had something in common: they were on their way someplace. They sought a reward, a product purchase, a narrative connection.

  • • •

  Was it possible that my focus on making art, on creating tellable stories, was intercepting my ability to see broadly and tenderly and without gain? What would it be like to give my expansive attention to the world, to the present moment, without expectations or promise of an obvious payoff? Was I capable of practicing a “God’s love” kind of attention? An adoring and democratic awe? Could I be more papal?

  • • •

  The musician was oblivious to the questions moving through my head, questions that had developed a weird ecclesiastical cast, as we walked. He was too busy peering into shrubs, grandly and generously giving his attention to the birds—leaning to hear, bending to see, falling silent when he heard a melody, looking for the singer.

  My sons were whistling when I returned home. My elder son had taught my younger son how to carry a tune, and I listened to them in their bunk beds whistling into the night.

  On the street a few days later I spied a young man moving strangely on the sidewalk. He was stepping forward, then stepping back. He was leaning to the side, then stepping forward, then stepping back. Sometimes my husband and I do a pretend modern dance, and this reminded me of that. I crossed the street to see why the man was dancing on the sidewalk.

  • • •

  Lying there, broken and flightless, was a pigeon with a bloody severed tail. I unearthed a gym towel from my bag, and we encircled the bird and carried it gently to a sheltered doorway. Then we crouched down and tried to make eye contact. I don’t know if the bird noticed us with its glazed eyes or if it felt absolute indifference, but we took the bird in as it grew increasingly still.

  • • •

  I had seen dead birds before, but I had never seen a bird die. Rationally speaking, I knew the pigeon wasn’t a message. I am not a sign seeker who scours the skies for mystical portents, yet over the years I have developed a certain faith in chance and serendipity. I would not be here but for the accident of two ill-suited people meeting under unexpected circumstances. I would not have met my husband had I not walked through an unlikely door on an improbable evening. So after the pigeon, after a few more days of unusual and banal bird encounters, I began to feel that I was being told what to do next. I would learn about birds. I sent the musician a note and asked if I could follow him for a year.

  • • •

  The musician said yes.

  Husband: What are you writing about?

  Me: Well . . .

  • • •

  My husband is far too loyal and drowsy to doubt me. If I embark on a fantastically ill-conceived journey, I know he will be the guy throwing paper streamers in the air and hooting “Farewell! Farewell!”

  • • •

  This is what we do. We cheer each other on in our misadventures.

  • • •

  We did this for my father when he escaped from his hospital bed later that winter. He called us from a taxi, recounting his jailbreak as if he had just dug a tunnel to freedom using a spoon, when really he had rolled his walker to the elevator, traveled a few flights to the concourse, and flagged a cab right outside the hospital doors. Breathless with excitement and emphysema, my father jokingly imagined an epic—maybe a nationwide—manhunt. For a moment he was a fugitive, not a patient.

  • • •

  When we cheered my father on and celebrated his getaway, it was not because we were diminishing the medical ramifications of his escape (the doctor would call to reproach us soon) but because we knew that there was something bigger at stake.

  • • •

  There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.

  • • •

  That’s what we were celebrating when we sat in my father’s small kitchen, eating the homecoming lunch my husband and I had brought. We were in a moment of repose. There was nothing to be done or to be put in place. My father felt more alive and durable than he had felt in a long time.

  So when my father asked what I was working on, I told him.

  “I am writing a book about birds and art,” I said (though I hadn’t started; the words and will still slowly forming).

  I put on an open and trusting face, which was an effort because my father, who had been slightly forward-leaning through lunch, was now leaning back and looking at me blankly as if I had just described plans to write a book on farming with wooden implements.

  We sat there having a silent conversation.

  Why?

  Why not?

  Couldn’t you write something a little more useful? A bigger book?

  • • •

  My father, who likes things distant and serious, thinks I write too close and peculiar. He is drawn to the largeness of things, to epic battles and big History, the clash of civilizations. Birds are too compact and ordinary for him.

  • • •

  It is possible we are destined to be like the father and daughter in Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” who misunderstand each other “on purpose.” For example, as we sat in his kitchen that day, I knew my father believed I had chosen birds to deliberately antagonize him, just as I believed his dismissal of nature and art was a dismissal of me. Neither of us was entirely to blame for this dynamic. When I became a writer, I entered the family business and he assumed the mantle of mentor.

  • • •

  A few “useful” books written by my British kin: The Hour of Sorrow, or the Office for the Burial of the Dead: With Prayers and Hymns by George Maclear, Sailing Directions for Bering Sea and Alaska, Including the North-East Coast of Siberia by John Fiot Lee Pearse Maclear, Catalogue of 4,810 Stars for the Epoch 1850 by Thomas Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam 1945–1975 by Michael Maclear.

  • • •

  My husband, who had been
staring at the ceiling while my father and I had our first silent conversation, registering his desire to escape, glanced over at us as we softened into our second one.

  Pain?

  Yes.

  Where?

  Here. Here. Here.

  • • •

  My father’s face was now ashen. I nodded at my husband: Time to leave. My father needed to rest. While he struggled to stand, I had a moment of clarity: I had just told my father, a man who did not have time to waste, that I was writing a book on something obscure and indefinable. Could I not, for his sake, choose a less artisanal subject?

  • • •

  I wasn’t too concerned. At a certain stage, these matters within families don’t get worked out, they just get halfheartedly poked at or ignored. I knew my father would choose to forget what I had said and ask me again a few days later: “So what are you working on?” And then, if the answer still did not satisfy, he would ask again and again and again.

  • • •

  I, in turn, would make things up in response, not because I am an admirable daughter but because I do not want anyone deciding for me what is big and what is little. I do not want fashion or fathers to decide.

  • • •

  Because it’s never that simple. I can pretend not to care and still be wishing for his interest, his engagement, his assent.

  What is worth singing about? What if the song is too small? Books will tell you that birds sing for a number of reasons—to call to each other, to warn of predators, to navigate, to attract mates. But I wasn’t so much interested in what the books believed. I wanted to know what the musician believed. “Why do birds sing?” So, at the end of our first bird walk together, I asked. I wanted him to say they sing because they have to, because they must, because it is part of their very essence, an irrepressible need.

  “I don’t want to get all whimsical,” he said. “Anthropomorphism is a dangerous habit and a hard one to break.”