Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  In the Uttara Kanda, the last book of the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, Indra, the god of the heavens, took the form of a peacock to escape the rampaging ten-headed demon king Ravana. (In the folktale version, Indra just hid behind the peacock’s fanned-out train.) “Pleased am I with thee,” a grateful Indra told the peacock, which until then apparently was a large purple bird. “No fear shall spring to thee from serpents; and thy plumage shall be furnished with an hundred eyes.” This is one of those fantastic stories built from real facts: A peacock is a nimble omnivore that often eats snakes. Having been given that ability by a god makes for a much better story, one that can easily be embellished and expanded. For instance, the peacock is believed in lore to be not only unafraid of snakes but also immune to venom, which it happily metabolizes into the iridescence of its plumage. Not surprisingly, peacock feathers have long been used in folk medicine as a curative for, among many other things, snakebites, a belief “so strong among the people of the Punjab that they smoke the feathers in a tobacco pipe as an antidote.”

  As travelers and traders spread the peacock west—King Solomon was importing them to Israel almost a thousand years before Christ, and Aristotle wrote of them as domesticated birds around 350 B.C.E.—the stories got weirder, darker. Simply explaining how the peacock’s train came to be adorned with eyespots, for instance, could be a miserably grim tale.

  In Greek mythology, the peacock was the favorite bird of Hera, who was a hot mess of a deity. She was the queen of the gods because she was married to Zeus, but she was also his sister who, as a baby—and this might be the root of the family dysfunction—had been swallowed by her father. Hera was beautiful but also jealous and spiteful, vain and cantankerous, outright cruel if she was in the mood, which she often was and which was not particularly surprising, because Zeus was a philandering cad. She caught him seducing a mortal named Io, but by the time she got down to Earth to confront him, Zeus had camouflaged Io by turning her into a cow. A very pretty white cow, but still, a cow. Hera, knowing the cow wasn’t actually a cow, told Zeus she would be very pleased if he gave it to her as a token of his love. Which he did, because he couldn’t think quickly of a good reason to say no.

  Hera put the white cow out to pasture. She assumed Zeus would change Io back the first chance he got, so she sent Argus Panoptes, a giant with a hundred eyes, to keep watch. Zeus, being omnipotent, could have freed Io at his leisure, but then he would have faced the wrath of Hera, whom he feared more than he loved Io. After pondering this predicament for a while, Zeus decided to send his son Hermes to lull Argus to sleep and then, depending on who’s telling the story, either sliced off his head or beat him to death with a rock.

  With Argus dead, Io trotted off, and Hera sent a giant fly to bite her incessantly until Io escaped to Egypt and Zeus turned her back into a nymph and got her pregnant.

  But back to the peacock, because this whole tawdry soap opera is meant to make a point about a pretty bird: Hera gave the peacock—as a gift—all of the eyes that were gouged from Argus. According to the ancient Greeks, then, the peacock is beautiful because he was decorated with the offal of a dead monster enforcer.

  There is a thread of duality in the Western version of the peacock—the beauty always shaded with a bit of scorn, a negative tarnish for every positive. (The drab peahen doesn’t factor into any of these stories, and the scriveners did not write about peafowl, either.) The bird is lovely but arrogant; or his plumage is gorgeous, but his feet are hideous; or his breast is an unreal blue, but his voice is that of a screech owl. There is in the peacock, always, a hint of the immoral, of damnation.

  In one version of the Beginning, for instance, the peacock was extraordinary even by the standards of Eden. “He was the most beautiful bird of Paradise in voice and form, and he outdid them all in singing the glory of God,” an Islamic storyteller named al-Kisa’i wrote almost a thousand years ago. “He used to go to the highest station of the seven heavens, whenever it came to his mind to do so, and his exaltation would reverberate throughout Paradise.”

  When the peacock wasn’t exulting and such, his job was to guard the gate, which he did capably for a very long time. In this Islamic folktale, Adam and Eve wandered the fields for five hundred years, naked and unashamed, eating grapes and figs and pomegranates, and when they wanted to rest, they would retreat to their dais in the Dome of Contentment. They expected to remain in Paradise forever, so long as they obeyed one simple rule: Don’t eat the fruit from the Tree of Eternity. This was not a vague instruction. God announced it quite clearly, and it’s one of His more famous proclamations: It’s in the foundational text for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

  Iblis, an angel who’d been cast out of heaven for not bowing to Adam, wanted to con the first humans into breaking God’s one simple rule. The peacock found him skulking around the gate one day, asking to be allowed into Eden. Iblis told the peacock that he was an especially devout angel who’d been so busy praising God that he’d never glimpsed Paradise. If the peacock would let him in, Iblis promised to teach him three secret words. “Whoever says these words,” Iblis said, “will never grow old or ill and will never die.”

  Now, it should be noted that one of the standard benefits of Paradise is eternal life, presumably without getting sick or old because that would make living forever more of a curse. The peacock really should have known this. Also, he should have wondered why an angel who claimed to be perpetually praising God was outside the gate chatting up a peacock.

  The peacock agreed to let him in. He enlisted the serpent, who at the time was more of a psychedelic camel than a snake, to carry Iblis into Paradise, whereupon he tempted Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Eternity. Humans were cast out to suffer and die and be ashamed of their nakedness. The serpent was dragged about by angry angels until her limbs wore away and her body was stretched, and then she was sent to slither away on her belly. Then the angels turned on the peacock. “Leave Paradise forever,” Gabriel told him. “So long as you shall live, you shall always be accursed.”

  Which was not unreasonable, given the circumstances. Dooming humanity to suffering and death and sin and shame is worthy of being accursed. Still, that’s an awful lot to pin on a bird, even in a folktale. And odd, then, that the angels allowed the peacock to continue being beautiful.

  * * *

  Dean Daniel didn’t really know much about the peacocks at St. John the Divine, but there’s no reason he should. Peacocks are not liturgical creatures. They hold no significance in Christian Scripture, appearing in the Bible only three times and in passing, twice in accounts of Solomon’s traders returning with them from far-off lands and the other when Job asked if God also created the peacock (He did). The bird is not a deity or even particularly holy.

  (In one rare exception, the main deity of a syncretic faith practiced by the Yazidi is represented by a peacock. The theology is complicated, a mélange of mystic Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and other stray bits gathered in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, and most of it isn’t written down. Basically, the Yazidi worship the angel cast out of heaven, who they do not believe is Satan but, rather, a manifestation and messenger of God who has taken the form of a peacock; they are known among some scholars, in fact, as the religion of the Peacock Angel.)

  Nor am I theologically conversant. I am a lapsed Episcopalian at best, a condition I have passed on to the boys. At the blessing of the animals, Emmett was alarmed by the incense, which he mistook for smoke and thus presumed the cathedral was on fire; and Calvin nudged me during a reading of the first verses of Genesis, when God is making the world in six days. “That’s not true,” he whispered.

  “What’s not?”

  “What she just said. That didn’t happen.”

  “Well, it’s a metaphor—” I stopped. He’d had a closet creationist for a teacher once who’d told the class that Jesus made the ozone layer, which, in addition to getting both the science and the theology wrong, led to a discussion about the Bible not be
ing literally true. The middle of a service in one of the world’s largest cathedrals did not seem the appropriate time or place to revisit the matter.

  Dean Daniel was kind enough to give me a tour of the close and help search for the birds. We spoke of the Christian iconography of the peacock, how the annual cycle of molting and regrowing an exquisite train was an obvious metaphor for the resurrection, how the early Christians adopted the coverts with the ocelli as a symbol of an all-seeing God. I’d read St. Augustine explaining how it was that souls could be tormented by hellfire for eternity without being consumed, the reasoning for which involved a slice of peacock meat he’d encountered in Carthage that, over the course of a year, did not rot. “For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property,” he wrote, which confirmed for me only that the peacock is a wildly versatile literary device.

  Phil, the white peacock, was wandering near the statue of St. Francis. In his sermon during the blessing of the animals, Dean Daniel mused that St. Francis, were he to materialize on the Upper West Side, probably would nod politely at a statue of himself feeding animals but that he would be drawn to the statue nearer the street, the casting of a man sleeping on a bench called Homeless Jesus. He reminded the congregation that St. Francis renounced a life of wealth and privilege to minister to the poor and that maybe, possibly, the church bigwigs had anointed St. Francis the patron saint of animals to distract from that message. “I can’t imagine that Francis would be comfortable in this world, or even perhaps in the church today,” Dean Daniel said. “The call I issue to you is rooted in Francis’s life and mission and ministry. I call on you, and me and all of us, to be kind. Simply to be kind.”

  He said that softly, in his calming cadence and with a trace of his native North Carolina basting his words, an accent that is subtly warm without the ear quite knowing why. I hoped the boys heard him clearly.

  The dean and I found one of the other two peacocks—Harry and Jim looked pretty much the same to me—on a gate post. His train brushed the ground, long and luxurious, but he was not fussy about it. He appeared neither proud nor vain, only mildly curious.

  Dean Daniel fed him some almonds from the stash he carries in his pocket. “They’ve created their home here just by being beautiful,” he said. “And that’s all they need to do.”

  Harry’s neck, or Jim’s, sparkled in the late-morning sun. Yes, a peacock really doesn’t have to do anything more than that, sparkle.

  “But it’s amazing,” I said, “that they’re even here to do that. Big blue bird in the jungle, and those feathers hanging out like a handle for a jaguar or something. I mean, it’s a miracle they survived long enough to evolve.”

  The dean didn’t say anything at first, not that I was expecting an answer.

  “Maybe a miracle,” he said at last, “is really just life in God’s kingdom slowed down enough for us to grasp it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Mr. Pickle was spreading his feathers at least twice a day and more often three times. Considering I wasn’t his primary audience, I assumed he was displaying more frequently, and I happened to catch sight of it on occasion. The average peacock spends about seven percent of his day with his train erect, which works out to just over four minutes of every waking hour. Mr. Pickle appeared to be skewing the curve.

  Carl tried to display. He’d raise the scruffy duster on his behind and wiggle, shuffling his feet in a small aggressive circle. But the gap between the two peacocks was narrowing rapidly through attrition: Mr. Pickle had been shedding train feathers almost since Independence Day. I found one or two loose in the pen one day, then five or six by the end of the week. By the time the boys went back to school, the coverts were dropping in clumps and his actual tail, short and drab, poked out like a poorly designed prosthetic. At the end of August, it seemed that the only useful purpose of a peacock was to supply iridescent stems that could be gathered into mason jars and vases to give to friends’ kids and our kids’ friends.

  Peacocks are only marginally more interactive than ball pythons—ours did not like to be touched, let alone handled—and significantly less so than chickens, a behavioral disappointment the boys caught on to quickly. The novelty had worn off before the end of summer for everyone but me.

  In fairness, the main reason Calvin and Emmet got bored with the peacocks was because of the puppy, a pug we named Tater because a pug puppy is the approximate size, shape, and color of a Yukon Gold. Unlike the chickens and the peacocks, Tater was thoroughly planned. Almost a year earlier, Louise had researched dog breeds, looking for one that was small but sturdy, accepting of grabby child hands, and possessing the temperament to endure being put on a skateboard or a trampoline or inside a dark pillow fort. In the spring, before the chickens, she hunted for a breeder until she found a hobbyist who kept meticulous records going back decades so she wouldn’t inadvertently mate cousins and siblings and end up with puppies wriggling out of a cripplingly shallow gene pool. That Tater would be whelped in June by a pug named Louise was a pleasant coincidence.

  For several years, our only pet had been a moody cat—a stray, as all our cats had been—and within a period of eight months, we had purchased a menagerie of seven animals, counting Cosmo. Yet the only one into which we’d put any real consideration was the dog.

  Louise and I both had dogs when we were kids, and we always assumed we’d get one when we had the time and yard space that a dog needs. But we traveled too much, and cats kept finding us first. The current one in the house was a foundling that Calvin named Okra because that was where she turned up, the okra patch, ten years earlier. She was residually feral, tubby but quick on her feet, and she liked to bring us dead mice, sometimes half-dead mice, and once a baby rabbit. She was skittish and fickle and randomly peed on rugs and clawed couches, but we respected her mad predatory skills.

  We assumed any dog we might have would come from a shelter or appear out of the mist one morning in need of a home. That’s the kind of dog people we believed ourselves to be, which is to say, the kind of people we told ourselves we were: unfussy, trusting, open to all possibilities. Then we had children and, with them, a latent and wholly irrational fear that a seemingly docile shelter mutt might unleash repressed trauma in a furious, foam-flecked spasm of face biting if the boys picked the wrong moment for an overzealous hug.

  So we got the pug. Ridiculous beasts, pugs, the playthings of ancient Chinese emperors and modern royals and the sort of people who might also enjoy, say, peacocks. Marie Antoinette had a pug. Queen Victoria had many pugs, as did Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whom Edward abdicated the throne. The pug was bred—no, designed—not to ferret out rodents or snarl at intruders but to amuse people, primarily by sitting on their laps. They are smash-faced and goggle-eyed and have such a shortened airway that they constantly wheeze and snort and grunt. Pugs also fart often and overheat easily, all of which suggest they are one of Dr. Moreau’s moderately successful experiments. Was it ethical for us to encourage another litter of pugs, to throw cash money into extending that lineage? It seemed indulgent and, for the dog we wouldn’t adopt, cruel.

  On the other hand, none of that was Tater’s fault. One can hardly blame a pug for not being a kennel mutt. Besides, it is impossible to be conflicted about a pug in the presence of one. A pug is the sort of dog for whom, when you take him to Barnes Supply for a harness, the staff will show you how to properly fit it so they can make an impossibly cute video of the whole thing for their Facebook page.

  Tater became my companion on the morning rounds. He’d do his business, and then we’d release the chickens before visiting the peacocks. He tried to play with the chickens, but they scattered until they realized about a week in that there wasn’t the remotest chance Tater might be capable of catching, killing, and eating them. I’d set up my camp chair outside the garbage coop, Tater would nap beneath the seat, and the chickens would scratch in the dirt near my feet while I
answered emails and made calls. During breaks, I tried to teach Tater to fetch, but any stick big enough to throw was big enough for him to trip over.

  One morning when Louise was working from home, she came out to find me but stopped before she got to the edge of the driveway. Maybe it was that I hadn’t shaved in a while, or that I was wearing one of my summer hobo outfits, as she liked to call my comfortable clothing, or that I was in the mildewed chair that she had tried several times to throw away. Whatever the reason, she watched for only a moment or two, then went back inside. Later, she told me that between the denuded peacocks, the industrious chickens, the dozing pug, and my intermittent jabbering at all six of them, the dog was the least ridiculous creature in the yard. She said it as neither an insult nor a joke but as a reasonable observation, and one with which I could not in good conscience disagree. I was becoming a ridiculous figure, at least in the confines of my pretend farm with the organic garden and semi-exotic pets. It was almost intentional and would have been if I’d only admitted it out loud: I was creating, or trying to create, a home life as far removed as possible from the things I wrote about.

  I’d begun trenching a gulf between work and home years earlier, when I realized the two were no longer properly siloed. Calvin was in second grade then, and he told me one night that a kid in his class was going to have him killed. Why he wanted Calvin killed wasn’t entirely clear, but how it would happen was explained in detail: The boy said his father was going to come to school with a gun and shoot him.

  Calvin told me this when he was already in bed, after we’d read The Lorax again but before I’d turned out the light. He was nonchalant about it, as if getting whacked by a parent were just an inconvenient possibility with which second-graders had to reckon. “He might tell his dad not to do it,” Calvin said. “But he said if we hear any screaming from the bathroom, that’s gonna be his dad giving Toby a beatdown.”