Being a Beast

by Charles Foster

  The world was a web, fine as gauze, woven of causes – each cause connected to the others and each traceable ultimately, if you followed things carefully, to the swifts. I suppose I was a gnat’s breath from psychosis.

  It wasn’t good. The swifts were alpha and omega, and that denigrated the rest of the alphabet and truncated my vocabulary. I obsessed like this for years. Sometimes it was an exhilarating game, which in my more pompous moments I dignified as a thought experiment: ‘How do swifts connect my tennis elbow with the collapse of an Icelandic bank?’ I’d ask myself. In the few blessed moments of self-mockery, I reminded myself of the story about the Fundamentalist Sunday school:

  Teacher: ‘Caleb, what’s small, furry, eats nuts, has a long bushy tail and leaps from branch to branch?’

  Caleb: ‘Well, I know the answer must be “Jesus”, because it always is, but it certainly sounds like a squirrel.’

  In my case the ultimate answer was always: ‘Swifts’.

  Then, overlying and consolidating this primary pathology, there was a second generation of weirdness. Just as pilgrims revere the footsteps of the disciples who revered the footsteps of the Master, so I followed in my own swift-following footsteps. In the spring I’d sit watching the Strait of Gibraltar in the same bar, in the same seat, drinking the same sherry, because that’s where I’d been and that’s what I’d been drinking when they first made landfall. I’d ask the musicians to play the same tunes that had brought them in before. At the very end of April and the start of May in Oxford I’d keep my eyes fixed on the ground until I got to the end of the road where I always see them for the first time – fearful of seeing them elsewhere.

  This sounds like (at least) severe personality disorder or OCD. Well, perhaps. But a kinder word is ‘habit’.

  I’m happier with that. Indeed I’m excited about that. Habit might be a way into the swifts. All other portals seem to be locked and double bolted.

  Although they often seem to refute it, swifts are subject to the same laws of nature as I am. However strongly they taste of immortality, they die. Gravity doesn’t mean as much to them as to me, but they’re not immune to it. We share a jurisdiction and hence a passport. We can live together; we can travel together; we already have some shared habits, and we can work on acquiring more.

  Laws of nature, according to the biologist Rupert Sheldrake (who collated many of the facts at the start of this chapter) are like habits. They tend to be true because that’s the way the universe has become accustomed to behaving. Sodium and chlorine atoms naturally adopt the configuration that they do in the structure of salt crystals because they’re used to it; it’s been done trillions of times before; the template’s established; the electrostatic grooves are nicely chamfered; things slide neatly together because practice makes perfect; habit is the line of least resistance; and habits have evolved because they work, and been maintained because they keep working.

  As anyone who’s just taken up running or dieting will know, new habits are hard to develop. The universe is a hard surface on which to engrave new patterns. But once something’s been done once, it’s a great deal easier to do it again. Think of the chemist’s beard and the rats in Oxford and Sydney. Once it’s been done a thousand times it’ll be easier still. No wonder the history of evolution so often looks jerky: nothing for many millions of years, and then a huge stride.

  My fingers stopped growing because their tips hit the boundary of a remembered pattern. That was habitual behaviour. It’s what fingers do: they obey that pattern. The young cuckoos were drawn to Africa by a memory, ingrained into the cuckoos’ collective unconscious, of what cuckoos habitually do. Jung got it right for cuckoos, fingers and salt crystals.

  This entails a lot of mystical talking. Sodium has to talk to chlorine; embryonic fingers have to talk to some sort of ideal finger; young cuckoos have to talk to their dead ancestors. The whole massive enterprise of migration becomes one vast Ouija board. It’s creepy and Platonic. Swifts are tugged at 6,000 metres (almost 20,000 feet) by an impalpable tide generated by millions of dead swifts. They’re corralled by dead sky shepherds across the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the western edge of the Sahara and into the Congo.

  ‘You don’t need to invoke any of that stuff to explain migration’, said a well-known zoologist. ‘Orthodox biology does the job perfectly well. The birds have a genetic map. That tells them roughly where to go. Then there are all sorts of mechanisms that could fine-tune the process. Magnetite crystals in the head, perhaps. Internal clocks and the position of the sun by day; using cloud-penetrating UV light if they have to.’

  Really? Is it so easy? It was this conversation more than anything else that propelled me into Sheldrake’s arms. Terence McKenna sprang to mind. ‘Modern science is based on the principle: “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest”’, he said. That comment was in the context of explaining the natural world as a whole. He went on: ‘The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.’ Similarly with all the uncomfortable facts in the opening list. Give us the laws governing the tendency of genetically identical cells to conform to an invisible blueprint, and a mechanism for encoding the tendency and enabling the conformation, and we’ll write papers describing what happens, using terms like ‘predetermined somatic differentiation’ to try to conceal the fact that we don’t have the first idea how it’s done. Instil in young cuckoos a desire to go several thousand miles, without a guide, to the places in Africa where they’ll bump into their genetic parents, and we’ll speculate intelligently about how, once they’ve been there once, they might use magnetite to chart a more nuanced route back. Is a ‘genetic map’ any less mysterious than the collective unconscious? But without the explanatory power. Isn’t a genetic map, indeed, just one small manifestation of the collective unconscious …?

  You might doubt the explanatory power of Sheldrake’s hypothesis or question his empirical underpinnings, but he’s doing science a lot more satisfactorily than someone who doesn’t see that there’s a problem with cuckoo migration that demands an answer more fundamental than an internal compass.

  Sheldrake gives the name ‘morphic fields’ to the forces that tug swifts and cuckoos in migratory tides, finger cells thus far and no further and makes atoms lie obediently in a customary lattice. The strength of a field, he postulates, is partly a function of alikeness. Theoretically, I suppose, everything in the universe is bound together by some sort of field, but family resemblance increases the strength of the field.

  This is really another way of talking about habit. Swifts share habits with swifts. Habits entrench habits, which in turn entrench habits. But we don’t share habits just with other members of our own species: we share them with all other cohabitees. We become like our dogs and our dogs like us. If we live in a wood we acquire the accents of the trees.

  It should be obvious that we don’t learn just from things that are biologically alive – whatever that means. Learning anything from anything is a clairvoyant exercise. I got my Greek from a live man who got it from lots of dead ones. And my teacher mediated it to me using genetic bequests which, for all I know, he got from Goths and Berbers. Certainly he, like me, shares much of his genetic coding with dead chimps, lemurs, newts and fruit flies.

  ✴ ✴

  All this was exciting and promising, for I had some swift habits. Expensive, long-standing, deeply ingrained ones that took me on trains, boats, planes and paths to pubs, gardens, old girlfriends’ sofas, lighthouses, park benches, the edges of places, insurance company towers in Tel Aviv dressed in mirror glass, a primary school in Berlin and dusty corridors beneath suburban eaves, full of bat shit and fibreglass.

  I shared some swift habits and habitats already. And I had the desire to be one. Surely intention counts for something in the mathematics of morphic resonance?

  ✴ ✴

  There’s a gay Lebanese hairdresser in a thumping
west African town. His salon is a temple where he worships a gently demanding goddess. He would call her ‘Beauty’. Others would call her kitsch, and would be wrong. He’s brought here everything he thought was best from the nations through which he’s wandered. From Paris there are curtains so flimsy that a determined mosquito could headbutt through them. From Italy there are mosaics in distressed high-density polyethylene. But he had chosen to stay in west Africa, and the things he thought best from there were gravid mother goddesses which crouched beneath his jacaranda with their hands on their bellies and antelope horns springing out of their foreheads, frowning eyelessly, their breasts always distractingly asymmetric.

  I was in his courtyard with my mate Nigel, who sells Iron Maiden T-shirts from a barrow in Glasgow. We were fanned by fruit bats the size of cats, cicadas made a near perfect major fifth with the purring air-con, and the hairdresser poured out a bottle of Château Margaux.

  Halfway down the second bottle he began to trust us.

  ‘Come here’, he said, beckoning.

  We ducked through a tunnel made by two kissing Bombax trees and came to a shed, painted gold. The hairdresser unlocked several padlocks, touched a mezuzah screwed to the door frame, opened the door, lit a hurricane lamp and waved us inside.

  The shed was carpeted with freshly cut leaves. The walls were bright blue and, except at the far end, empty.

  At the far end there was a stone table. On it was an incense burner, and immediately above was a picture, draped with red and yellow plastic carnations from a Brahmin’s wedding.

  ‘Fucking hell’, said Nigel.

  Well, quite. It was a common swift.

  ✴ ✴

  The photo had been taken a long way upriver. It was blurred and stained. It showed a single bird against the sky, well off the centre of the picture and apparently above a grove of mangroves.

  The hairdresser genuflected, lit some joss sticks, genuflected again and walked backwards to the door, pushing us behind him. He fastened the locks in silence, chivvied us back to the courtyard and topped up our glasses.

  The swift wasn’t mentioned. We turned to the downside of raw sewage in the bay.

  When we left, late that night, Nigel said: ‘We’ve got to go there, don’t you think? Upriver?’

  ‘I think we should’, said I. And so we did.

  ✴ ✴

  Nigel had never knowingly seen a swift, although their screams must have ruffled the water-lily pond of satellite TV dishes that was the roof of his native Lambhill, and he’d never shown any interest in any bird that didn’t come in a skirt or with roast potatoes. But now he was a man possessed.

  ‘We can leave at 3:30’, he said. ‘It’ll be cool then.’

  ‘It won’t be cool at all’, I replied. ‘Might as well leave it until six. The heat’ll be easing off then.’

  ‘In the morning, I meant.’ And he laughed fanatically.

  ‘There’s no hurry’, I said. ‘There really isn’t.’

  I said that with complete confidence. I wasn’t sure where the confidence came from.

  ‘There are plenty of swifts around’, I added.

  This, theoretically, was true. It was early September. Oxford swifts should have been passing through on their relatively leisurely return to the deep heart of Africa. But that’s not why I’d said there was no hurry.

  Nigel wouldn’t be contradicted. We left at 3:30 am, hung-over, unshaven, unbreakfasted and, on my part, resentful. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind at all.

  Nigel drove manically through the dawn. We stopped only when a dog died loudly under the front wheels, again so that I could throw up under a baobab, and when the axle snapped.

  The axle brought out the best and the worst in the man. He was tyrannically masterful; indefatigable; brutal. My memory insists that he stopped another car, extracted its axle and left a family of nine weeping in the bush on the side of the road beside their wrecked vehicle. Though that can’t be right, it’s how it felt. Whatever happened, soon enough (too soon) we were drinking beer by some mangroves, Nigel was scanning the sky with huge naval binoculars, and I was checking the departure times of buses back to the coast.

  There weren’t any. I had to stay with him and watch him watch. He listened too, for the swift screech he’d read about, until I told him that common swifts are silent in Africa. That helped: he’d been jumping up whenever a door squeaked or someone trod on a cat.

  Usually he paced up and down by the river, stiff-necked, squinting at the sun, expecting swifts to burst out of it. He’d be up as soon as it was light (though swifts are relatively late risers), drinking black coffee to keep his reflexes keen, changing position in case the swifts were hiding behind a tree, sometimes hiding himself and jumping out in case it was some sort of catand-mouse game. As the sun set he’d cradle a mournful glass of duty-free Johnnie Walker, watch nightjars and look cheated.

  There was no hurry. They weren’t going to come just yet. There was time to watch the postcards curl, and the tree with human fingers form a fist, and the premature patina of decay inch over the thatch. The whole place was waiting for a storm, and had been waiting since the last storm. Waiting is what it did.

  Everywhere there were wooden masks with slit eyes, and I don’t believe they’d been deconsecrated. We were hundreds of miles inland, but there was a good yard and a half of tide. There was no sign that the sea and the land were negotiating. The sea didn’t have to make any concessions at all. Grey-headed gulls fought, like my children with spicy chicken wings, over the bald leg of a Guinea baboon. The head of the femur glistened like a pearl. Big, old things with moustaches slank in the mangrove arches and were sometimes dragged out, not complaining much, clubbed and overcooked to kill the spear-headed worms that moved in and out of their bowels.

  ‘We’re not going until we see them, you know’, said Nigel after a few tense days of this.

  ‘Of course not’, I said.

  The next day we drove out into bristling bush, away from sleek mud and menace. Here little brown things started up and sprang into the blue or into dark thorn tunnels. The only dead things were white and dry. The worst threats are always moist, and so this place, precisely because it didn’t throw out its arms in perspiring welcome, was kinder than the river.

  I was tired from watching Nigel’s watching. I took off my jacket, propped myself against a tree, counted ants and went to sleep.

  I must have slept for half an hour. I slumped sideways. And then, suddenly, I was awake and on my feet, shouting, ‘They’re here, they’re here.’

  Nigel was fast asleep too. I kicked him awake. I pointed at the sky. For a moment there was nothing there but a sliver of cloud. And then they were there as I knew they would be, seven of them, screaming silently, straight from Oxford and the throne of heaven, high and then low, hunting the wind, ploughing through a thermal which must have been whirring a thousand feet up like the fan on an old bus, trawling a whole weather system because they’re birds of the whole world.

  ‘Fucking hell’, said Nigel.

  Well, quite.

  ✴ ✴

  A beetle caught by a swift over the Pyrenees might still be alive over the Gambia, twitching in the throat pouch, and its carapace might arc down in a mote of dung over a contingent of child soldiers in the DRC. The carapace might deflect a bullet aimed at the head of an enemy. You never know. But you don’t need a fanciful account of benign causation for swifts to matter.

  I can travel the same route as the swift, though not as ecstatically and not as influentially. I’ve tried. Their annual migrations, crossing and recrossing the equator, stitch the two hemispheres of the earth together as those shuttling badgers joined the underworld and the overworld. They stop the two halves falling apart. It’s practical, surgical tikkun olam. When we use violent words for swifts we’re describing scalpels and needles. When I cried with Rachel on their return, it was relief that the world was going to hold together for another year.

  The other sort of word
s – ethereal – are really high-priestly. The swifts are doing something on our behalf. Their motion is redemptive. They move constantly so that we don’t have to. A badger can be local, living in a hole in a Welsh hill, because there are moving things – supremely, the swifts – that do the movement that’s necessary. They’re the throbbing hearts and tidal chests. They keep the bellows of the world working, enabling slow things to sleep without dying. They keep oxygen bubbling through standing water, so that other things can breathe. To be still is to die. Moving things enable stillness: the exuberantly international enables and legitimises the parochial.

  Movement is built into all sustainable systems. God’s preference for the mover over the settler is clear and consistent. The shifting pastoralist is better than the static farmer, and the farmer, bitterly envious of his brother’s higher status, does his best in all generations to kill him. Cain’s doing a good job with the swifts. They’re declining fast, killed by the desire of suburban householders to insulate their lofts – to be warmer, safer, more settled. (This reduces swift nesting sites.) If the swifts go, we’ll go too.

  It’s the people who really can’t move who know how much we need the swifts. The iconic human figure in swift literature is the MS sufferer in a motorised wheelchair, looking up at the wheeling swifts inscribing Platonic forms on a summer sky, and saying: ‘Yes, because they can move, and because I’m part of them, I can move too.’

  I was woken at the foot of that tree in the west African bush by silent swifts that, at that point, were still a couple of miles away. It was an intimacy greater than I’d known with any of the other species, perhaps precisely because I knew that I could get nowhere near them by sliding or jumping or sailing.