Birds Art Life

by Kyo Maclear

  A lull can be soothing, tranquilizing, and even restorative. It can be a time to retune and replenish. A lull can suggest a state of peaceful hovering, a prolonged mental daydream, a weightless interval. One can be lulled to sleep or lulled into a trance.

  Yet for many artists I know, the word lull signifies the exact opposite: the absence, the flaw, the incompleteness, something lethal and dangerous, a source of fear and melancholia. There are layered reasons for this:

  1. Superstition. A common and reasonable anxiety among artists is that creativity will flatline without constant practice. Confidence will wane, muscles will grow flaccid. What starts off as a lull will become a rut. The muse will flee.

  2. Capitalism. We live in a culture of high performance and competitiveness. Even artists, perennial outlanders who appear to have more freedom from conventional market expectations than most, feel they must maximize productivity and extract the most out of every day. Even those who live outside the city, in the lulling countryside, feel time pressure and the relentless demand to perform and stay connected. Even the notion of betterment, which seems benign, can be wielded as a baton of self-discipline.

  3. Existential fear. We live in a culture where even the most banal and shallow gesture is considered better than no gesture. Many of us would rather engage in mindless functioning than face the prospect of being inactive. Being an artist is not only financially precarious but existentially wonky. Most writers will tell you they are writers only insofar as they are writing. When the writing stops, the trouble begins—self-recrimination, fears of disappearance, of irrelevance, of the loss of one’s best self, et cetera. Describing the existential difficulty of settling into blankness, that taunting vacancy, writer Kate Zambreno notes: “I know I should leave the house when I am stuck, stalling, but I feel this clawing inside, like if I do not write well I do not deserve the day. I tend to slink into a slothlike demi-existence, watching things behind a screen.”

  4. Therapeutic habit. For those who find work makes them feel light and happy, wards off the doldrums, a lull can mean a setting in of heaviness and despair. In some cases, hard work is an alibi for escape—a means of shirking life and any mess that might be waiting for you once the busyness stops. “Working all the time,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard, “is also a way to simplify life, to parry its demands, especially the demand to be happy.”

  What many discover is that the need to do, accomplish, and succeed perpetually replenishes itself. My father regarded lulls not as a grace but rather as enemies. His generational, class, and personal baggage was such that the only thing that mattered was Work (of the big W variety, not the small w work of cleaning up and tending to family life). Work was a form of mesmerism and ego refuge: best to keep going.

  • • •

  His extreme work ethic became my work ethic from an early age.

  • • •

  But the ethos of relentless, panicked production really came with motherhood. Once I had my first child, I discovered I could not check out when I wanted to. I did not have the license writer Geoff Dyer describes of “letting life find its own rhythm, working when I felt like it, not working when I didn’t.” It became harder to exist easily, away from expectations.

  • • •

  Lately, when I am especially busy, I think of an artwork by my best friend entitled Vigil. It is a reimagined scene using an old family photograph of a woman asleep on a lawn chair. The woman is isolated against a spinning landscape patterned with glowing orbs of light. It is not the sleep of someone sun-dozing. It is the Sleep of Oblivion. I happen to know that the woman pictured is my friend’s mother. I also know that at the time the original photograph was taken, the mother in the picture had three young children and was studying for a graduate degree in occupational therapy, every minute accounted for.

  • • •

  There is something subversive about the sight of a woman who is always on call, always in a heightened state of watchfulness and awareness, momentarily checking out—zoning into her own internal infinity.

  There is so much finitude in the lives of the mother (and father) artists I know. We are so often counting (time, money, errands, cups of coffee, hours until bedtime). We are too often irritable and impatient with our children, and this makes us uneasy and sometimes ashamed.

  I want for every overextended person in my life stretches of unclaimed time and solitude away from the tyranny of the clock, vast space to get bored and lost, waking dreams that take us beyond the calculative surface of things.

  By definition, one does not know whether a lull is interesting or uninteresting, fruitful or unfruitful, until it’s over. And yet—it is hard not to pack the lull with hopes and dreams. In the Hollywood story of the artist genius, the luminous lull of childhood (with its shadows of loneliness and boredom) becomes the spur for creative exploration. The lull gives birth to glory.

  • • •

  But it is not glorious lulls that concern me. It is the lulls that have no velocity, that offer no structured reassurance, that bloom unbidden in the middle of nowhere—when the work is done, when children leave, when illness comes, when the mind stalls. One does not ask of a lull: What can you do for me? These lulls do not have the quality of idyllic floatiness we associate with creative loafing, vacations, or leisure time. (If they did, we might fight them less readily and feel less personal distress.) These lulls carry a restive feeling, the throb of being simultaneously too full and too empty. They evoke what Jean Cocteau once described as “the discomfort of infinity.”

  • • •

  What if we could imagine a lull as neither fatal nor glorious? What if a lull was just a lull?

  When I left my meditation retreat, my mind felt momentarily rinsed. I found the busy street waiting outside our quiet room. I felt tired but peaceful. The hedges were chirping with invisible sparrows. The road streamed with cyclists in cheerful summer dresses and sunglasses. The green of the trees was dazzling in the late-afternoon light. As I walked home along side streets, barbecue smoke rose from backyards.

  I was the furthest thing from a regular meditator, but I liked the way meditation pointed me to an understory of quiet that existed beneath all my busyness and all my social roles. Meditators sometimes call this the “quiet feeling tone” of the body. The understory is that grebe place that withstands the onslaught of bad weather and modernity. It may be hidden or veiled by static, but once we tap into it, it offers a glimpse of our nondoing selves and, possibly, a better version of a personal life.

  • • •

  Now when I hear birdsong, I feel an entry to that understory. When I am feeling too squeezed on the ground, exhausted by everything in my care, I look for a little sky. There are always birds flying back and forth, city birds flitting around our human edges, singing their songs.

  • • •

  If the wind is going the right way, some birds like to spread their wings and hang in the air, appearing not to move a bit. It is a subtle skill, to remain appreciably steady amid the forces of drift and gravity, to be neither rising nor falling.

  AUGUST

  ROAMING

  (Pileated Woodpecker)

  On altering your course, sliding between disciplines, and leaving the door open for the unknown.

  As long as I can remember I have been drawn to people who have side loves. Maybe because no single job or category has ever worked for me, I am particularly interested in artists who find inspiration alongside their creative practice. It could be a zest for car mechanics or iron welding (Bob Dylan) or for beekeeping (Sylvia Plath). I love the idea that something completely unexpected can be a person’s wellspring or dark inner cavern, that our artistic lives can be so powerfully shaped and lavishly cross-pollinated by what we do in our so-called spare time.

  I told the musician that if I could time-travel, my dream would be to spend an afternoon butterfly catching with Vladimir Nabokov or gathering mushrooms with John Cage. I would garden with Emily Dickinson and fly in a plan
e with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (but maybe not over the Sahara). I can get very wistful about other people’s intense interests.

  “What drew me to you,” I said to the musician, “was not the fact that you were a musical talent or a great photographer or apparently very friendly. What drew me to you most was this quality of intentional roaming.”

  I said, “It was your fence-jumping knowledge. I know you’re not a bird specialist, but you know more about birds than I know about any single living thing. You know more about birds than I know about babies, and I’ve had two of them!”

  When I said all this the musician became slightly confused and embarrassed. But I could tell he was flattered to be compared to Nabokov.

  • • •

  Vladimir Nabokov’s interest in the field of lepidopterology was first sparked by the books of Maria Sibylla Merian, which he found in the attic of his family’s country home in Vyra, Russia. Having never learned to drive, he depended on his wife, Véra, to take him butterfly collecting. Though photographs make him look like a playful hobbyist with his floppy butterfly net and his high-waisted shorts, he was in truth a serious taxonomist. During the 1940s, for example, he was responsible for organizing the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and contributed scientific papers to entomological journals. In 1967, Nabokov commented in a Paris Review interview: “The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that, had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.”

  John Cage was not only a major figure of the musical avant-garde but also a passionate mycologist, who first got into collecting wild mushrooms while walking in the Stony Point Woods near his house in Rockland County, New York. His knowledge of the fungal world was so sophisticated that in the late 1950s he won five million lire on an Italian TV quiz show with mushrooms as his specialty subject. In the 1960s he supplied a New York restaurant with edible fungi, taught a mushroom class at the New School, and helped start the New York Mycological Society, a group of mycophiles that continues to host regular mushroom walks around the city and state of New York. “It’s useless to pretend to know mushrooms. They escape your erudition,” wrote John Cage in For the Birds. Mushrooms are haphazard and anarchic, defying the classifying intellect. “I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.”

  Emily Dickinson was a plant lover and passionate gardener from a young age. As a fourteen-year-old student of botany, she assembled an herbarium of over four hundred specimens collected in the fields and woods around the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts—a leather-bound album now held and digitized by Harvard’s Houghton Library. During her life, Dickinson was better known for the beloved flower garden she cultivated than for her poetry. At her most reclusive, when gift bouquets became her way of communicating with the outside world, she continued to roam her garden at night, working by the light of a lantern in her white cotton dress. “I was always attached to Mud,” she once wrote. Of the eighteen hundred poems discovered after her death in 1886, more than a third draw on her vast horticultural knowledge and imagery from her garden and the surrounding land.

  I was thinking about roaming because it was August. The musician, desperate for bird action, had roamed his way to Bonaventure Island in Quebec, where he was hanging out with a hundred thousand northern gannets—noisy and tightly packed in one of the world’s largest nesting colonies outside of Scotland. (His departing message: “Bird-dearth depresses the brain and turns it inward, where there is only junk and loneliness! Beat the heat and kiss a bird: sally forth!”) I, along with my family, had roamed up to a YMCA Family Camp in the woods of Northern Ontario.

  • • •

  We had been coming to our tiny cabin for ten years, trading modern conveniences for cool, sweet lake water. Any issues I had with communal dining, theme nights, bonfire sing-alongs (camp is an introvert’s nightmare) were offset by the joy of watching my sons wander independently on the land. Most days, they left in the morning and returned—grubby, scuffed, and sometimes bleeding—after nightfall.

  It was this self-reliance and freedom, so familiar to my own childhood, that I hoped to kindle. By the time I was nine, I roved freely around the neighborhood until dark. My mother, busy minding her Japanese art gallery, left the leash long.

  Thirty years later, in the same city, my children rarely strayed from our home or garden. As a parent who sat somewhere in the middle of the helicopter-laissez-faire spectrum, I wondered what it meant for their independence to be so severely compromised. I wondered and yet I found it hard to let them go. Other parents probably wondered too. Maybe we were just worried about the cold opinion of our peers if we didn’t cosset our children enough. All I know is the neighborhood was full of incarcerated children.

  Having entered one of the most profoundly chaperoned moments in history, I wanted my sons to experience the kind of unstructured play that builds courage and curiosity. So late summer had become a time of jailbreak.

  That late summer was also my fifteenth wedding anniversary. While my sons were catching frogs and shooting arrows, discovering that the world outside the city could be exciting, difficult to traverse, and occasionally frightening, my husband and I took long walks through the woods.

  When I met him we were both heartbroken. He was singing in the back room of a small club. I was there because two friends had insisted I leave my apartment and stop brooding over a recent breakup with a West Coast boy-poet. They lured me out of the house with promises of soul food and a change of scenery.

  The man who would become my husband was lean and wiry with short dark hair. He had muddy circles under his eyes and a Grover tattoo on his arm. The room was packed with people he knew, many of them singers and musicians. In his broken state, he sang songs that were full of sultry pathos and self-deprecating humor.

  We were not at our best. So I mistook him for someone else. Here is one who is miserable, I thought, pleased. Here is my type.

  On our first date he wore a dark vintage suit, which gave the illusion of a raveled but despondent man. I thought we would have a quick drink and be on our way. I kept my knapsack on my lap, ready to leave, but the date went on and on. At three in the morning as we danced, pressed together drunkenly, I touched his cheek, his sad stubble.

  • • •

  I thought it was a quick love affair, not the beginning of something that would continue. And when dawn came around and we were still together, the birds were singing. At least I think they were singing. There must have been birds in the decaying gardens and among the shriveled flowers because, though I did not know it yet, there are no birdless days.

  • • •

  I did not know he would stay on, never really leaving. I did not know that between us there was anything to make a nest out of.

  I soon came to know he was not a man who spun stories about himself. He did not overthink, which is not to say he was shallow or incurious. I have never met a more committed autodidact. In the time we have been together, my husband has immersed himself with doctoral focus in Yiddish study, film scoring, cantorial singing, Wagnerian opera, Russian classic literature.

  • • •

  Unbeknownst to me, I had found a man who tended toward optimism. He did not believe that a state of misery was optimal for an artist; he did not choose to cloak himself in tragic myths. He was not a cerebral poet like my two previous boyfriends; he did not engage in vertiginous metaphysical conversations or invest much in his own gravitas. This new man was a singer. And not a moody singer but a singer who loved upbeat soul and hand-clapping gospel. On our second date, he arrived at my door with drugstore chocolate and a bottle of sherry—which he poured into two mugs as we sat down to watch Fat City.

  • • •


  Son of a single lesbian mother who had known her share of tough situations, he had been raised on a hundred lullabies. He had been raised to believe everything would work out in the end and that it was possible to feel purely happy without a precautionary chaser of sadness. The skies would not fall and you were not tempting the gods of misfortune if you did not plan for contingencies and worst-case scenarios. You did not need to fortify yourself (with thermal long underwear, calcium-magnesium tablets, and university degrees) against the coming catastrophe.

  • • •

  He was not raised the way I was.

  My goal was to stay unmarried. I did not see marriage as the path to an imaginative life. I was going to devote myself to art instead. I knew this so certainly by the age of sixteen that I once dragged my mother into a church where a wedding was under way. There, in the back pew of St. Paul the Apostle on West Fifty-Ninth Street in New York City, I told my mother to watch carefully. “This is it,” I said. “This is the wedding I am never going to have.”

  • • •

  We were in New York to see art. Art was something my mother and I had always shared without difficulty. We both loved to visit museums and we both loved to draw. It was because of her that I grew up with a pencil in my hand.

  • • •

  When we came to Canada my mother tried to learn the rules of a new culture with me. It wasn’t easy, as if immigration could ever be otherwise. English remained a challenge. She messed up expressions and verb tenses. Sometimes we laughed when she mispronounced things, for example, when she offered a visiting Japanese doctor her services as a Japanese-English “interrupter.” But in public I could see it embarrassed her. When I was young she complimented me for being clever. Then when I became the first person in our family to attend university, continuing on to graduate studies, she called me an academic idiot. She liked to regale me with cautionary stories: about the “English PhD lady” she knew who had stupidly lost all her scholarship money gambling, or the smarty-pants lawyer at the YMCA who was despised for being arrogant. She (wisely) believed that only a fool would worship the brain over other organs.