Birds Art Life

by Kyo Maclear

  Here is what the doctor said: “What an amazing question. The honest truth is that I don’t remember. It’s not part of my memories of jail. When you asked and I went back to the day, I can’t help but remember birds. The sight of birds. But not their sounds. And not in our first jail cell (first thirty days), but in our second (last twenty-one days). How could I have seen them but not heard them? It makes me think that my memory is false.”

  The doctor suggested I contact the filmmaker, who might be able to help him “figure out what was real.”

  The filmmaker wrote: “I don’t remember birds—and I think it was because there were so many cats—lots of cats—wild scrawny nimble kittens, smudges of fur living on garbage—there was an orange one that would leap up and hold on to the grille of our door, whenever one of the prisoners came back from a family visit with chicken. . . . In our second cell, when we’d be let out for exercise, we would dawdle in the hallway, staring out past the walls at the highrises—and the balconies—hoping we’d see a living person—fantasies of communicating some sort of secret semaphore across the half kilometer that separated us—but there was never anyone there on the balconies. It was like bird-watching, I guess—waiting vainly without binoculars for the sighting of a rare bird. And then one day she was there—in a pink headscarf, smoking a cig on the roof, taking a break from taking in the washing. One of our cellmates who we nicknamed Shiny was a bit birdlike—a big clumsy teenage ostrich, pecking at us. There was one bird that made the news. It was a stork that did not understand the intricacies of international borders.”

  In a short but stirring art video made a few weeks after their release, the filmmaker shows a series of hand-drawn flash cards he created in detention as a retroactive diary of their experience. Prison Arabic in 50 Days acknowledges that their stay, while awful, was relatively short. Because they were Westerners, their circumstances and prospects were better than those of their Egyptian cellmates. The video is dedicated to the many who campaigned for their release and honors the many who are still behind bars. One flash card depicts a wristwatch, accompanied by the word, in Arabic and English, Khalas. “Enough.”

  It is possible my sons developed a lofty sense of their powers of political persuasion during those terrible weeks. But I have no regrets if they think they are presto invincible, or if they believe creative acts can double as activist maneuvers. No regrets.

  Art is an entry point for the difficult. The beautiful is a gateway to the urgent. In my desk drawer, the poem Adrienne Rich wrote in response to Brecht, “What Kind of Times Are These.”

  . . . why do I tell you

  anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

  to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

  to talk about trees.

  NOVEMBER

  ENDINGS

  (Goldeneye Ducks, Long-Tailed Ducks, a Kestrel, and a Peregrine Falcon)

  On becoming guideless and learning to let go

  of the idea of being led because there is really no one person who can give you a map for living.

  The last leaves seemed to turn and shiver and fall at once. The musician and I were walking around Humber Bay Park, past the pressed brown grass and the dusty green plants and the crowds of darkened flower nubs. I could feel the park coiling into itself, slowing its pulse and reducing its palette, preparing for the cold days ahead.

  The musician felt far, far away, walking slightly ahead of me or beside me, but not with me. He had never in the months we had spent together ever made me feel uninvited, but now, as I walked in his shadow, quietly following, watching his head dip with each step, as if tracing the rhythm of some private thought or song, I felt like a lousy tagalong.

  A few days earlier he had told me in an email that he thought he might be losing interest in birds. I dismissed it as a bad mood, the symptom of a slow season. But now I was wondering if he really meant it. He gestured halfheartedly at a cluster of long-tailed ducks and a few goldeneye ducks. He pointed to a kestrel perched on a lamppost, bobbing its tail. He was playing the role of a bored and dutiful tour guide.

  • • •

  With a few exceptions, the park was mostly barren and birdless, which didn’t help. It merely contributed to the empty feeling that was starting to yawn inside me. It wasn’t just that I had lost a birding companion. His enthusiasm had made me believe in the city’s wrecks and barrens. He had added a shine to the dull wastelands, and added magic to shores clotted with ugly condo towers and building cranes. I had relied on his gusto to elevate my interest. Now that he was elsewhere, I felt the city lose its fairy-tale luster.

  • • •

  I felt the musician lose some gleam too, as if some internal rheostat had been lowered. Was it just a bad day? Or was it a bigger crisis? Could a passion just fizzle out?

  We walked to the lake and stood there for a while talking and watching a couple of mallards drift along the shoreline. He said that his sudden overexposure to bird photography had left a “bad taste in his life.” (The equivalent, he said, would be if he only spent time with musicians who were into “superslick commercial music.”)

  He said he needed a break.

  He said: “I’ll be surprised if I go for more walks in Toronto with my camera.”

  “I don’t need it.” “Special trips are different. Those I need.” “It’s just going to get harder in Toronto as we lose more and more space for birds.” “The birds are going to start leaving.”

  It was difficult to argue with this last point, especially standing in a limbo of new real estate, on a day that had been almost devoid of birdlife. In fact everything he said was understandable. It was the way he said it—hard and defensive, protesting too mightily—that was unconvincing. I watched his eyes settle on a duck wading a few feet away and noticed a slight wistfulness. “You know,” he said, with a sigh, “even though it’s over I’d be surprised if I saw the feather pattern of a female mallard in ten years’ time and didn’t swoon.”

  Then the conversation shifted and the musician mentioned he was back in the studio recording his album. He was excited but he also had those “bonkers feelings.” All his energy was going into stirring and reawakening his song muse. He felt doubtful about his music but he was moving forward, doing his best to unbelieve the negative voices in his head.

  • • •

  And then I understood. For most of the year I had followed the musician. As we shared thoughts on art and I talked about how birds were making their way into my work, he had disparaged his music, acted as if it didn’t exist. Now that he was transferring his feelings back to his music and reentering that dark, luminous place of creation, he was moving in the reverse direction—tidying away the birds.

  It was possible that he could care passionately about only one thing at a time. Or that he needed only one passion to feel order and purpose in the universe. But I had difficulty believing that birds and music were just transposable distractions, simple ways of “passing the time,” as the musician was now explaining to me. Were they really just different but equal forms of “antideath medicine”? Was that really what he believed? That our primary impulse in life was to fill the holes left by being human, to divert ourselves from life’s central sadness? Did he not need music and birds for reasons beyond solace? Were there not also intellectual, ecological, and imaginative reasons to go birding as well?

  I was happy the musician was finding his music again. I was rooting for him. I was entertained by and worried about his excited speech and the evangelical sheen in his eyes. I wondered if he could make his album without trying to please anyone. If he could complete it without withering at criticism or flying off on the wings of ecstasy when he received praise. I wanted him to be able to transfer to his music the goodness—the free and smooth and happy feelings—that came from birding.

  For me, birding and writing did not feel interchangeable. Birding was the opposite of writing, a welcome and necessary flight from the awkward daily consciousness of
making art. It allowed me to exist in a simple continuity, amid a river of birds and people and hours. The stubborn anxiety that filled the rest of my life was calmed for as long as I was standing in that river.

  The musician and I walked home along the waterfront boardwalk until we reached a stretch of beach known as Sunnyside. At its peak, between 1922 and 1955, Sunnyside was the festive heart of Toronto. Home to balls, band shells, jazz concerts, tightrope walkers, and even a year-round amusement park, Sunnyside was the place Torontonians came to play.

  Toronto loved Sunnyside. But then we abandoned it. We got caught up in the rise of car culture and the building of expressways (which bisected the waterfront and tore up the amusement park lands). We choked the beach off from the rest of the city. We started heading north in search of “truer, wilder” nature. Sunnyside became less desirable as we poisoned the lake.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to walk around Sunnyside and not feel the ghosts of dashed dreams. A “party is over” mood pervades, especially in the desolate months of winter. I felt it in the old Bathing Pavilion, with its massive columns and classically arched main entrance: a beauty queen stripped of her crown. The façade’s peeling paint and crumbling stucco had left it looking gloomy and neglected. The grounds seemed designed for historical film shoots and elegiac thoughts.

  On that cold November afternoon, I stood on the boardwalk overlooking the deserted beach and tried to picture a bunch of rowdy bathers vying for a spot of sun. I imagined men in straw boaters and women with bathing skirts down to their knees. I wanted to conjure some magic from the faded festive architecture—a rising raft of balloons, a carny shouting, “Step right up, boys, the first ball’s free.” But mostly I wanted to see a bird, a bird that would make the day seem less vacant and the space less depleted. The musician and I were nearing the end of our final walk together.

  Then, suddenly the musician was making his way toward the lake. He was beelining for the concrete breaker walls built to help calm the water for swimmers. I hurried to catch up. There were a few untagged trumpeter swans on the beach, but the musician ignored them and kept moving toward an odd crow-size silhouette in the distance. Was it a juvenile cormorant or maybe the kestrel we had seen earlier? It was neither.

  What we saw before us was a peregrine falcon.

  Top of the food chain, fastest animal on earth, able to dive for prey at the speed of 320 kilometers per hour. There it was. A bird that had been nearly obliterated by the effects of the pesticide DDT, a bird that had made an incredible comeback since the 1970s thanks to recovery efforts, a bird that generally preferred to perch high up (scouting for potential prey from cliff tops or the window ledges of skyscrapers) perched at eye level on the breaker wall.

  An odd and ancient hush. Stunningly still. It possessed an earned stillness, the sort that follows soaring flight and aggressive muscular effort. I raised my binoculars and gazed at its slate-blue back and the barred feathers of its chest, its yellow feet bright against the drab concrete perch. What I felt most was its self-containment, an aura of separation and indifference.

  I lowered my binoculars and noticed the musician was no longer standing beside me. My guide, whom I believed to have been swallowed up by other realms, whose bird love had allegedly faded, had waded into the cold, murky water. There he stood, in a lake that was gradually being restored through recovery efforts, feet sloshing crazily in his leather shoes. I felt my eyes get tingly and hot as I watched him move ardently toward the bird.

  • • •

  I knew the peregrine falcon wasn’t there to symbolize hope and resurrection. If it had a message, it was complicated, saying something about the cycle of humans damaging the natural world: the declines, the failures, the modest recoveries. Inside my own mixed emotions was a little portal of understanding and an invitation to feel what writer-activist Rebecca Solnit once described as an awareness of “two streams” of loss: on the one hand, there was a revived bird on a restored lake, a sense of things that had been saved from slipping away (imperiled species coming back from the brink); on the other hand, there was the pull of things that were simply “vanishing without replacement.”

  • • •

  Life and death. Survival and extinction. The common and the rare. The robust and the disappearing. I had come to see that birding was about holding opposites in tension. It elicited a twoness of feeling—both reassuring and dispiriting—especially in a city, where so little landscape had survived modernity’s onslaught. In that twoness was a mongrel space between hope and despair.

  • • •

  I had learned, on my journeys with the musician, that beauty could exist in the most scarred, phenomenally impure places. I had witnessed how the usual story of urbanization, of humanity’s estrangement from nature, was being revised through rewilding efforts. I had met city birders and local conservationists who were using a different environmental voice, one that could (in Naomi Klein’s words) “speak to the wounded, as opposed to just the perfect and pretty.” It was a voice that looked around the city’s most blemished and broken places and said: “There is something left to love.”

  • • •

  What I discovered about birding was that it was not a rosy or cutesy practice. It did not offer a sentimental overview of the natural world or a flight from consciousness. In fact, it was often the polar opposite. Sometimes in the quiet moments of waiting or walking in a place empty of people, in vacant lots where the damage and hideous underview of the city was not to be denied, I felt a loneliness that struck me to my core. Why would anyone invite the experience? And, yet, there was also something undeniably uplifting in catching glints of life, sharing sightings with strangers. There was grace in witnessing the constant aerial motion and nervous twittering of common species. In the coldest months, when gloom seemed natural and even predestined, it was nice to see there were birds creatively opposing it.

  • • •

  When the damp reached our bones, we decided to leave. The musician, who had been crouching down on the beach, photographing the peregrine falcon under the big empty sky, packed away his camera. We headed north, away from the lake, crossing the pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Boulevard. Roaring sound of tires, bright rectangles of space between the slats of the railing. The arch of metal separating me from the sky felt unusually slight.

  I called my father when I returned home. I tried two times before I finally got him on the line, fresh from a shower. We had our usual brief but newsy conversation. Big news, small news. A veteran war reporter cannot stop paying attention to the world. Through the worst moments of aging and illness, what has rescued my father is a bottomless hunger for headlines and a complementary sense of his own minor scale in the larger scheme of things. He inspires me in this way.

  It didn’t matter that our conversations had become more halting, or that when we talked I could feel him thinking himself through the talking, occasionally receding as he wrestled with words that were themselves receding. It did not matter that he forgot words like cease-fire and sanctions or the names of countries he had visited as a foreign correspondent. Yes, the person who had ignited my enthusiasm for language was losing his own, but what mattered was the effort. My father was a survivor, working-class child of the Blitz, dodger of obstacles. Like a stammerer who reaches for the synonym and learns to become more adept at sentence construction, I felt him dance around the gaps.

  • • •

  My father brimmed with effort. As we spoke that day, I knew that wherever he was seated in his small apartment, on the sofa by the window or at his old mahogany desk, he was nicely dressed, cleanly shaven, freshly combed. In his kitchen: stacked plates and clean glasses. In the closet, stacked towels and folded linen.

  • • •

  I recognized the DNA of this effort in myself and others close to me. I recognized the valiant, creative, sometimes futile microstands we take against the myriad forces that upend us like bad pranks. Life is just this way, filled with embarrassin
g, run-of-the-mill, sometimes awful obstacles. If we’re lucky we learn by watching others make it through, still standing and smiling. If we’re lucky we learn to live in a flux of adaptation. In the twoness. Flickering between ease and difficulty.

  • • •

  My father had faltered and rallied, declined and thrived. Even at his weakest, when he had depended heavily on me, I had also depended on him. This give-and-take was all the more meaningful for two people who were, are, pridefully and painfully self-reliant.

  • • •

  When my father and I ended our phone conversation that day, I found the navy blue Oxford dictionary he had given me for my seventh birthday. I confirmed the word peregrine means “having a tendency to wander.”

  • • •

  It clearly fit the peregrine falcon, which is known to travel vast distances, but maybe it also fit me and this book I was writing about being a little lost, this book of inward and outward traveling to the verge of life.

  The musician sent me a photograph of the peregrine falcon we had seen. He was still feeling exhilarated by the day. His excitement made me wonder if his talk of “disavowing birds” was just a ruse.

  It then occurred to me that perhaps he was letting me go. In great Hollywood tradition, I thought: maybe we are having our own little Searching for Bobby Fischer or Karate Kid moment. Maybe my guide (who had never sought acolytes, who had never lectured me on what to read, who had never, for that matter, been explicitly guiding) was creating the conditions for me to guide myself.

  Among the things the musician taught me, directly and indirectly:

  1. There are no big reasons to live. Just little reasons.

  2. Make leeway for chance. Sometimes you don’t want to be driven to a point. Sometimes it is exactly when we lose our bearings or take a detour that life really gets going.