Birds Art Life

by Kyo Maclear

  3. The best songs don’t always come from a locatable place. Sometimes they seem to come from nowhere or everywhere—for example, a thicket of sound under a parking lot overhang in the middle of a long winter.

  4. Birding is more than an activity. It’s a disposition. Keep your eyes and ears and mind open to beauty. Look for birds in unprecious places, beside fast-food restaurants, and in mall parking lots.

  5. Good shoes go a long way.

  6. Never carry more than you need.

  7. Just a nice stroll through a park is enough. Walk everywhere in the city and you will find you don’t need to traipse up Everest or schlep to Kalamazoo to go places.

  8. There is really no one person who can give you a map for living. But this may not stop us from wishing there were. It would be nice if there were such a person or such a book, with a list of things to do and avoid, definitive directions to take and not take, cautions to navigate by. Act this way. Live that way.

  • • •

  What he really taught me was that the best teachers are not up on a guru throne, doling out shiny answers. They are there in the muck beside you: stepping forward, falling down, muddling through, deepening and enlivening the questions.

  I am grateful for the loop of time we shared together. I know I am not the only person he has affected. The musician changes the way people look at birds. Following a bad breakup several years before, he confronted his ex-girlfriend in a bout of self-pity and said, “You’ll never remember me.” And she replied: “You’re wrong. You’ve given me a gift. I never used to notice birds and now I think I love them.”

  • • •

  When he told me this story, I thought: Now I think I love them too.

  DECEMBER

  EPILOGUE

  On living long and feeling both little and lavish—with birds, art, love, and death.

  Many years ago, on the eve of my marriage, my father gave me a lacquer box with a black-and-white photo inside. It showed my father from behind, peering out over a lunar landscape.

  • • •

  Written on the back of the photograph were the words This is a very historic photo of a time of horror and happiness. In September 1969 I traveled from Hanoi, Vietnam, to the border with the South—the first television correspondent to do so. What I saw no one in the West at first believed, countryside bombed so totally that it looked like the craters of the Moon. When I returned to Hanoi (traveling at night to hide from the bombing), I vowed I’d do a television history of Vietnam some day to “repair” the damage. That same day in Hanoi I received wonderful news that forever altered my life: a telegram from Mummy saying you were on your way!

  • • •

  My husband thought it was an interesting but strange wedding gift. On the one hand, there was the photo—ugly marks of bomb impacts on the ground. On the other hand, there was the refined lacquer container, subtly inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a reminder of my father’s simple yet elegant taste. Horror and happiness. After years of observing my father, however, I didn’t see it as strange at all. Intense maybe, but not, in the out-of-character sort of way, strange.

  • • •

  In the months and years after our wedding, I kept going back to that box. It seemed, in that manner of certain keepsakes, to offer some basic truth: life is a mixture, a combination of opposing elements.

  • • •

  My father has always been drawn to life’s craters. As a war reporter and later a documentary filmmaker, he made a life of doing what most sensible people avoided—he rushed toward disaster. He faced forward when others would have looked or run away.

  • • •

  He chose war because it allowed him to step into a meaningful narrative. He chose war because it was a good story and it held a sense of camaraderie and because he felt he could make a difference. Or maybe he chose war because he saw in the brutal act of fighting a clear-cut expression of the brutal act of living. Or perhaps the reason he chose war could be summed up in a quotation from psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Freud’s close colleague, who once noted “how very much easier it is for the human mind to tolerate external danger than internal dangers,” a remark Jones felt to be supported by the decrease in suicides and mental illness in London during the Blitz.

  • • •

  I don’t know why my father, a physically gentle and peaceful man, chose war, but I do know the choosing sculpted aspects of his personality and shaped his view of human nature. He accepted loss and sorrow graciously, but he never learned how to accept happiness. My father secreted these notions into my blood. He secreted words into my brain. I moved forward in the marks of his footsteps. There was safety in choosing a state of sharpened and fortressed caution over the hazy and vulnerable state of hope. Prepare your mind for the worst, my father taught me, this is how you stay alive. Danger and misfortune, disappointment and embarrassment, are always lurking.

  • • •

  But in his illness, when there were genuine medical underpinnings to support his pessimism, and my own, the question of how do you stay alive seemed insufficient. It became more important to ask: How do you live?

  • • •

  My walks with the musician were taken with living in mind. They took place against the shadow of my father’s illness. The emotional chiaroscuro of this time brightened an awareness that doesn’t, in my life, get lit up very much. The birds circled overhead, circled around our bodies, circled around each other. I learned to listen to them. Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, the robins said with their robin accents. Birdie, birdie, birdie, yelled the cardinals, upping the ante.

  • • •

  I’m listening to them right now as I write. Sometimes it’s just unbelievable, the racket they create, as if they were competing with all the other noise in my neighborhood. Then it all stops and I hear a dull clank of bottles. I look outside and see a very old Asian woman with a quilted jacket and a wool hat pushing a cart full of empties up the street. Last year she brought us a seedling tomato plant to thank us for putting our bottles aside for her. Rattle, rattle, a steady flow of seniors with carts and bags of bottles continues throughout the day.

  • • •

  The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things. They tell me it’s all right to be belittled by the bigness of the world. There are some belittlements and diminishments that make you stronger, kinder.

  • • •

  My father taught me to prepare my mind for the worst, but he also made me unafraid to enter the unknown. The craters, which introduce you to the pain of life, which teach you about the unsolidness of ground, can embolden you. In my case, they were a portal to my becoming a writer—and a mother who sees that her younger son is not entirely free from these inheritances.

  • • •

  “If I have the energy I’d like to make a final documentary about Vietnam,” my father said to me recently. “It will be set on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

  • • •

  He explains that five decades after American warplanes plastered the Ho Chi Minh Trail with bombs, a secluded and untouched portion near Cambodia is now a sanctuary of endangered wildlife. Tigers prowl down tracks where weapons-filled North Vietnamese trucks once rolled. Elephants lead their young past giant bomb craters to drink at watering holes. Rare birds and apes call from treetops that used to camouflage Communist soldiers from American pilots. In other areas, villagers have transformed the bomb craters into fishponds, microlakes filled with groundwater and rainwater that provide sustenance to the Vietnamese people.

  • • •

  “It will be a story of recovery,” he tells me.

  • • •

  There is ice in the trees and the birds are puffing up to keep warm. In another life, I think my father would have been a student of birds. Sometimes I catch him watching them by his window.

  I ended the year with my family in a small town outside the city. We headed for the wood
s. We walked in circles, making footprints in the soft snow. My elder son—big and droopy in his parka—stamped his name in a clearing. Wearing cross-country skis, my younger son plunged down a hill, then another, moving speedily through his hesitations. The woods were small and finite and it was not long before we had skied to another clearing, where we saw black crows swooping and sparring overhead. As they wheeled off into the distance we caught a glimpse of what was not finite—the sky stretching far and farther, connecting place to place, the sky across which I once, as a child, shuttled (traveling from England to Japan to Canada and back again), until I finally landed.

  I have lived in Toronto almost all my life. It is a city, like most, that has only a cursory and aloof connection to nature through its parks. It is a city to which I have, until recently, had an aloof connection. I wonder if my sons will one day speak of it differently, perhaps in that truly yearnful way that is saved only for the place you came from. I wonder if birds will help them feel rooted where they land. I hope so.

  • • •

  For a long time I did not tell anyone I was writing a book about birds. Depending on my mood, I referred to this book as “a project,” “some bits of writing,” and, finally, and probably most correctly: “a sketchbook.”

  • • •

  When I did finally start talking about the subject of the book, I was surprised by the number of people who shared leads or stories of their own birding passions. Everyone around me, it seemed, was a birder, salaaming the skies, organizing their lives around avian pleasures, making room for indirection, pause, whim. Nomadic in history, curiosity, and creativity, they were caring of place in a way that surprised and moved me.

  • • •

  I wondered what united these people. Was there a common trait? Did they possess special powers of seeing, perhaps a version of the full-spectrum sight possessed by birds themselves, the ability to see in hazy conditions, to locate hidden trails? I browsed through biographies of well-known birders, searching for some clue, some sense of shared outlook or purpose.

  • • •

  I discovered that some birders were drawn to birds for their annual migratory journeys, others for the lavishness of their appearance, others still for their inventiveness. Some started as children, others found birds late in life.

  • • •

  They were poets. Adults born to naturalists. Observant children. They were delinquent teenagers given a second chance, former POWs, amateur ornithologists, and benign hunters. They stumbled into it. They had birds built into their DNA. They were rootless immigrants and they were rich hobbyists. They were environmental activists and jet-set travelers. They traded the bottle for binoculars. They had lost something, hoped for transcendence, wondered how best to live this life. Birds spoke to their irrevocably blue parts, their hopeful parts. They were possessors of a peculiar loneliness. They were gregariously social. They had found the solace of life.

  • • •

  The birders I encountered in books and in the world shared little except this simple secret: if you listen to birds, every day will have a song in it.

  I AM FOR THE BIRDS

  Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) famously wrote a codex examining the flight behavior of birds as a way of understanding mechanized flight and was a known animal rights defender. He frequented the markets of Florence, buying caged birds simply to let them go.

  Charles Dickens (1812–1870) had a beloved pet raven named Grip, who made frequent cameos in the writer’s fiction and is said to have been the real-life inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

  William Faulkner (1897–1962) was a collector of bird eggs and feeder of sparrows who always carried a piece of bread for the birds. (“So does watching a bird make me feel good.”)

  George Plimpton (1927–2003), the protean journalist, editor, and professional dilettante, embraced bird-watching as a hobby while admitting that his abilities and credentials were “slightly sketchy.” “As a birder, I have often thought of myself as rather like a tone-deaf person with just a lesson or two in his background who enjoys playing the flute—it’s probably mildly pleasurable, but the results are uncertain.”

  Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), known as the “revolutionary who loved birds,” insisted she understood the language of birds and once proclaimed: “I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”

  Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) raised over one hundred peacocks (in addition to hens, ducks, and geese) on her ancestral farm in Georgia. She wrote about her peacocks in “King of the Birds,” a meditation on the art of observation, told with humor, a naturalist’s eye for detail, and a dash of humility—“It is hard to tell the truth about this bird.”

  Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) was a keen amateur naturalist and birder who often placed birds (collaged or taxidermied) in his boxes and assemblages.

  Iris Murdoch (1919–1999), Booker Prize winner and bird poet (A Year of Birds), wrote of nature as a cure for her writerly ego: “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.”

  Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) found solace in birds during his final hours at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, dedicating his last poem to a blackbird he watched through his window. Reconciled with the idea of becoming “nothing,” he experienced a concluding moment of peace as he imagined the song of every blackbird that would come “after” him—his heart open to the ongoing world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This small book owes a very big debt to the kindness and dedication of several editors: Kathryn Belden at Scribner, Martha Kanya-Forstner at Doubleday Canada, and Louise Haines at 4th Estate. Kathy, your editorial wisdom and great gifts of art and conversation have been a boon from the start. Martha, your deep care and beautiful mind have made this book better in countless ways. Louise, it has been a true honor and joy to work with you. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank any of you sufficiently for your support, but I’m going to keep trying.

  My heartfelt gratitude to Jackie Kaiser, agent and first reader but, most of all, a dear and steadying friend. I adore you, JK. Your colleagues at Westwood Creative Artists continue to sustain me in all ways. Thank you, Liz Culotti, Jake Babad, Meg Wheeler, and particularly Carolyn Forde for helping this book travel.

  Thank you:

  to the wonderful and welcoming team at Scribner: Kate Lloyd, Sally Howe, David Lamb, Daniel Cuddy, Ashley Gilliam, Julia Lee McGill, Kara Watson, Elisa Rivlin, Nan Graham, Roz Lippel, Colin Harrison, Susan M. S. Brown, with a deep bow to designers Jaya Miceli, Lauren Peters-Collaer, and Erich Hobbing.

  to all the lovely people at Doubleday Canada, including Amy Black, Bhavna Chauhan, Kristin Cochrane, Kiara Kent, Melanie Tutino, Tara Walker, Ward Hawkes, Susan Burns, Scott Sellers, Shaun Oakey, Carla Kean, Val Gow, Robert Wheaton, Ashley Dunn, Mary Giuliani, and, last but never least, the wondrous C. S. Richardson.

  to the stellar crew at 4th Estate, especially Sarah Thickett, Michelle Kane, and Tara Al Azzawi.

  to Allyson Latta, Liz Johnston, Stephanie LeMenager, Stephanie Foote, Sara Weisweaver, and the editors of Brick: A Literary Journal and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, where elements of this book previously appeared.

  to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Chalmers Arts Fellowship for financial and creative sustenance.

  to Jason Logan of the Toronto Ink Company (supplier of inks), who captured my heart with his street-harvested pigments derived, as he puts it, from “sometimes overlooked urban trees, weeds, and plants from the streets, back alleys, and parks of Toronto” (i.e., the perfect drawing medium for a mongrel city-girl making a book about ur
ban nature). I invite you to learn more at www.jasonslogan.com.

  to Ali Kazimi, Richard Fung, Stephen Andrews, Tarek Loubani, John Greyson, Mike Hoolboom, Pamela Brennan, Brenda Joy Lem, Su Rynard, and Catherine Bush for sharing art, activism, bird love, and ongoing inspiration.

  to my friends and family whose companionship and humor make everything possible: Nancy Friedland, Brett Burlock, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Kelly O’Brien, Terence Dick, Naomi Binder Wall, Eliza Burroughs, Hiromi Goto, David Chariandy, Tara Walker; my uncles Andrew and Robin; my sons, Yoshi and Mika; my parents, Michael and Mariko; and my husband, David, to whom this book is dedicated with Big, Big Love.

  Finally, this book would not have been written without the wit and welcome of my bird guide, Jack Breakfast (a.k.a. “the musician,” a.k.a. David Bell), whose bird photographs grace these pages. I encourage everyone to explore his work at www.smallbirdsongs.com.

  I am forever grateful for your friendship and trust, JB. In your own, excellent words: “Love only! Always onward.”

  A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE

  Birds Art Life

  Kyo Maclear

  This reading group guide for Birds Art Life includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. We hope that these questions will enrich your reading group’s conversation and your experience of the book.

  Introduction

  Birds Art Life is a beautifully crafted meditation on the search for beauty, meaning, and creative inspiration in the stillness of the natural world. Seeking an antidote to stress and grief, Kyo Maclear joins a musician on his weekly birding tours of the city parks and harbors of Toronto, learning, over the course of a year, to approach other aspects of her life through a more delicate, forgiving lens. Blending memoir, nature writing, and cultural commentary, Maclear plumbs the universal questions that frame the human experience. How can we draw emotional nourishment from nature? Why, in an ever-expanding world, should we hold tight to smallness? What is the function of creative expression during times of anguish and loss? By seeking beauty in the small things, Maclear shows us a path towards a more meaningful, compassionate, and fulfilling way of being in the world.