Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  I was not raised in any faith. I was the child always surprised by grace before mealtimes at the houses of friends. The great authorities of my childhood were National Geographic and New Scientist magazines, though I wasn’t ignorant of the Bible. My grandmother, a tall and striking woman with raven curls and stylish crimplene blouses, had given me The Children’s Bible for Christmas before I could read. It was illustrated with scenes painted according to the aesthetic conventions of 1950s Technicolor Hollywood epics. The scenery mostly resembled southern Californian hillsides. There were scenes of hail raining upon dying cattle, men sweeping up frogs, an angel giving a shirtless Gideon the eye, and – my favourite because it was a bird I’d not yet seen – Elijah being fed lumps of meat by a raven. The Book of Revelation posed certain issues for the artists, who, faced with matters traumatically eschatological, opted for blue-toned abstraction.

  Growing up living on an estate owned by the Theosophical Society didn’t bring me to faith, but it widened my understanding of what it could be. Our neighbours believed in reincarnation, occultism, in mysteries at the heart of all the world’s religious texts, and when I’d walk past the open door of the Liberal Catholic Church on my way to watch birds in the woods I’d sometimes stop to take deep breaths of sweet incense, though I don’t remember ever venturing inside.

  During my teenage years I didn’t think much about religion except that I didn’t have it, didn’t need it and that people who did were sad, an unexamined contempt that was perhaps misdirected envy at the thought that some people could so easily feel unconditional love. But it was around then that I had a dream about God. It happened precisely once, and there was no question of what I was dreaming. It – for this was no He – was tall, roughly the shape of a human, lacking eyes and any kind of facial feature, and Its surface perfectly reflected everything around It. A slowly moving, purposive mirror that spoke things that weren’t words that I could feel in my bones, deep subsonics. It burned unbearably hot and unbearably cold at the same time. I don’t recall that It had any regard for me in particular, nor why It should have been in my dream, but then, I suppose, I was not supposed to, and that was perhaps the point. The dream didn’t make me believe. Nor has anything since. But recently I’ve been thinking about religion again.

  What has led me to it is largely a matter of craft. When I was writing my book about the death of my father and dealing with the matter of grief by training a hawk, I kept trying to find the right words to describe certain experiences and failing. My secular lexicon didn’t capture what they were like. You’ve probably had such experiences yourself – times in which the world stutters, turns and fills with unexpected meaning. When rapturousness claims a moment and transfigures it. The deep hush before an oncoming storm; the clapping of wings as a flock of doves rises to wheel against low sun; a briar stem in the sun glittering with blades of hoarfrost. Love, beauty, mystery. Epiphanies, I suppose. Occasions of grace.

  For a long while I tried to write about such things by borrowing from the extensive literature on the philosophical concept of the sublime. It got me some of the way there, but never far enough. Only recently have I found the language I need – in writings about forms of religious experience. Books written by people like William James and Rudolf Otto, books that investigate the nature of our intuitions of the sacred. The experience of the numinous, in Otto’s account, is of a mystery outside the self that is both terrible and fascinating, in the divine presence of which ‘the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the furthest fibre of its being’. These are texts you’re probably handed on your first day of studying theology, but all of them are new to me. Trying to think and write after reading them feels a little as if I’m trying to learn glass-blowing on my own. Their concepts are hot, supple, incandescent, feel slightly dangerous, and I’ve not been taught anything about their tolerances, or what to do with them, and the things I will make of them will surely provoke pity and amusement from experts in this field. I’m a writer and historian, not a theologian or metaphysician. But even so I’m drawn to think about this stuff, to try to shape it, with all its burn and glow and texture.

  The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god. Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention has unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory – the pattern of hailstones by my feet upon dark earth; a certain cast of light across a hillside through a break in the clouds; the face of a long-eared owl peering out at me from a hawthorn bush – things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time and possess sufficient quality of attention to see them at all. When they occur, and they do not occur often, these moments open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend. What I feel is certainly the mysterious terror and awe of Otto’s numinous consciousness, the sense of something wholly other that renders me breathless and shaking – and something else, captured in four lines from William Blake’s Milton:

  There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find

  Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find

  This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found

  It Renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.

  I am far from an industrious soul, except in my capacity, perhaps, to pay close attention to things. But these words speak exactly of how those moments seem to me. Not only do they renovate each moment of the day, but multiply into everything there is and will be. They break time itself.

  Part of the numinousness in these experiences of nature is how unpredictable they are. There is no point in searching for them. In my experience if you go out hoping for revelation you will merely get rained upon. But as the music of Radio Mayak showed me, I’ve found it easier, over the years, to encounter numinousness in a different way – in those moments where mystery arises from the meeting of human art and unpredictable natural phenomena. The gift of the Radio Mayak interval melody was in how that melody reached me. It was carried to my ear on radio waves reflected from the ionosphere through a process called skip-propagation. From Moscow the signal rose high into the atmosphere, where it hit a layer of charged particles and was bounced back down towards me. I could never predict when the melody would ring clear and true because the ionosphere is always in flux, its conditions shifting according to the time of day, the season, even the stage of the eleven-year sunspot cycle, every alteration affecting the strength of the signal reflection. The sense of numinousness that interval signal gave me arose from the interaction of innumerable events – some chance, some law-bound. When I think of that melody now it contains the nature of space weather, regularities and irregularities in the shape of the world, the laws of electromagnetics, and the hope of unknown broadcasters in a distant Soviet radio station for listeners, for human minds that might attend to what they had sent into the air.

  The most numinous ordinary object I own is a Sony BHF90 ferric-oxide cassette tape. Its black plastic casing is dented, its green label scuffed with age. It grinds and rattles when it plays. I’ve had it for nearly thirty years. It came into my possession mysteriously when I was a literature student spending a lot of time with friends in a college house in Cambridge. One of them was a tall man who possessed a kind of brooding softness, like a voice pitched sotto that makes you lean in and find yourself unexpectedly close. His best friend in the house had recently abdicated from manhood – not because he felt it failed to match his gender identity, but more that he had just worked out that the actions of men were mostly dreadful. He had a thing for Virginia Woolf, smoked roll-ups, wore his thick hair in a ponytail. Together they read Pasternak, and rejoiced in bizarre acts of motiveless violence against the house; they smashed chairs to the sound of Bartók string quartets, stuck cutlery into the plaste
r ceiling of the kitchen and left it there for its pleasing creepiness. Even so their company felt a safe harbour to me. Not many things did. I’d dropped out of college for a little while because I’d fallen in love with a married college professor, the kind of married college professor who much later told people I’d entirely made up our affair. It was a foggy summer, all late traces and contrails, grasshoppers singing in the thick grasses along the paths through the town commons where I’d walk for hours with no particular destination. I was very lost when the tape appeared.

  There’s only one track on it. It is a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. From the announcer’s introduction, I think it was recorded from a radio programme in Japan. After it came into my possession I listened to it, rewound the tape and listened to it again. I listened to it hundreds of times. It wasn’t soothing. The music was torqued at precisely the angle of the pain in my heart and it always felt too fast in places and far too slow in others and somehow the way that it flowed from one to the other felt like the way the human mind deals with the foreknowledge of death. The music coursed with every emotion I’d ever pushed away and pretended I didn’t feel. But that was only a part of the recording’s power. It wasn’t a high-quality tape; the signal-to-noise ratio was poor. It stood even then for all the ways that age and distance corrode. Cosmic rays burying themselves in vaults of water. Rust on the tips of your fingers.

  But these things alone didn’t make the recording numinous. That was born of chance: it had been recorded from the radio during an electrical storm. The skies the signal had travelled through to reach the radio had been hot with potentiality, intermittent frequency overloads crackling and spitting and annihilating the broadcast with bursts of white noise. The lightning strikes were occasional at the beginning of the symphony, but towards the end they came so often it was hard to hear music at all, just scorching crepitation rampaging on and on, with faint strings behind it like crosscurrents on a sea. When the lightning obliterated the music, the noise was so loud it was like silence. It felt as if God had put thumbprints on the tape.

  I knew it to be an unrepeatable event, fixed, for ever, on tape, so that it could be played again and again, and there was something so transgressive about this that listening to it felt like heresy. I’m still not sure how much of my need for this tape was refuge and how much a desire for obliteration. I think of the son of one of my mother’s friends who became pathologically obsessed with C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when he was a child and no one knew why, and it turned out that he had found out about a great family secret, one that could never be spoken out loud, so he cleaved to this book about the end of the world, about a boy whose sins could be cut from him like skin. Maybe the tape was something like that. Something impossibly heavy that held me in thrall, a scrap of the divine not good for my soul, a thing that should never have been fixed in place on tape to be repeatedly overheard, a thing that stood between me and the telling of secrets. It went on for months until I decided, quite suddenly one morning, that I didn’t want to listen to it any more. These days that tape is somewhere in my house in a box, still hot with what it meant back then, and I have picked it up a few times and held it, surprised by its lightness, and how difficult it is even now to hold. It is a relic of a particular hour, of a long-past time, of the person I once was, and its power now is precisely in the knowing that I will never play it again.

  What Animals Taught Me

  A long time ago, when I was nine or ten, I wrote a school essay on what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ll be an artist, and I will have a pet otter, I announced, before adding, as long as the otter is happy. When I got my exercise book back my teacher had commented, ‘But how can you tell if an otter is happy?’ and I boiled with indignation. Surely, I thought, otters would be happy if they could play, had a soft place to sleep, go exploring, had a friend (that would be me) and swim around in rivers catching fish. The fish were my only concession to the notion that an otter’s needs might not match my own. It never occurred to me that I might not understand the things an otter might want, or understand much of what an otter might be. I thought animals were just like me.

  I was an odd, solitary child with an early and all-consuming compulsion to seek out wild creatures. Perhaps this was part of the unfinished business of losing my twin at birth: a small girl searching for her missing half, not knowing what she was looking for. I upended rocks for centipedes and ants, followed butterflies between flowers, spent a lot of time chasing and catching things and not thinking much about how that made them feel. I was a child kneeling to extract a grasshopper from the closed cage of one hand, solemn with the necessity of gentleness, frowning as I took in the details of its netted wings, heraldically marked thorax, abdomen as glossy and engineered as jewellery. I wasn’t just finding out what animals looked like, doing this, but testing my capacity to navigate that perilous space between harm and care that was partly about understanding how much power over things I might have, and partly how much power I had over myself. At home I kept insects and amphibians in a growing collection of glass aquaria and vivaria arranged on bedroom shelves and windowsills. Later they were joined by an orphaned crow, an injured jackdaw, a badger cub, and a nest of baby bullfinches rendered homeless by a neighbour’s garden pruning. Looking after this menagerie taught me a lot about animal husbandry, but in retrospect my motives were selfish. Rescuing animals made me feel good about myself; surrounded by them I felt less alone.

  My parents were wonderfully accepting of these eccentricities, putting up with seeds scattered on kitchen countertops and bird droppings in the hall with great good grace. But things weren’t so easy at school. To use a term from developmental psychology, social cognition wasn’t my forte. One morning I wandered off the court in the middle of a netball match to identify some nearby birdcalls, and was bewildered by the rage this induced in my team. Things like this kept happening. I wasn’t good at teams. Or rules. Or any of the in-jokes and complicated allegiances of my peer group. Unsurprisingly, I was bullied. To salve this growing, biting sense of difference from my peers, I began to use animals to make myself disappear. If I looked hard enough at insects, or held my binoculars up to my eyes to bring wild birds close, I found that by concentrating on the creature, I could make myself go away. This method of finding refuge from difficulty was an abiding feature of my childhood. I thought I’d grown out of it. But decades later it returned with overwhelming force after my father’s death.

  By then I was in my thirties and had been a falconer for many years. Falconry was a surprising education in emotional intelligence. It taught me to think clearly about the consequences of my actions, to understand the importance of positive reinforcement and gentleness in negotiating trust. To know exactly when the hawk had had enough, when it would rather be alone. And most of all, to understand that the other party in a relationship might see a situation differently or disagree with me for its own good reasons. These were lessons about respect, agency and other minds that, I am embarrassed to confess, I was rather late in applying to people. I learned them first from birds. But after my father’s death, they were all forgotten. I wanted to be something as fierce and inhuman as a goshawk. So I lived with one. Watching her soar and hunt over hillsides near my home, I identified with the qualities I saw in her so closely that I forgot my grief. But I also forgot how to be a person, and fell into a deep depression. A hawk turned out to be a terrible model for living a human life. When I was a child I’d assumed animals were just like me. Later I thought I could escape myself by pretending I was an animal. Both were founded on the same mistake. For the deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.

  Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. The purpose of animals in medieval bestiaries, for example, was to give us lessons in how to live. I do
n’t know anyone who now thinks of pelicans as models of Christian self-sacrifice, or the imagined couplings of vipers and lampreys an allegorical exhortation for wives to put up with unpleasant husbands. But our minds still work like bestiaries. We thrill at the notion we could be as wild as a hawk or weasel, possessing the inner ferocity to go after the things we want; we laugh at animal videos that make us yearn to experience life as joyfully as a bounding lamb. A photograph of the last passenger pigeon makes palpable the grief and fear of our own unimaginable extinction. We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbours for things we feel and often cannot express.

  None of us sees animals clearly. They’re too full of the stories we’ve given them. Encountering them is an encounter with everything you’ve ever learned about them from previous sightings, from books, images, conversations. Even rigorous scientific studies have asked questions of animals in ways that reflect our human concerns. In the late 1930s, for example, when the Dutch and German ethologists Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz towed models resembling flying hawks above turkey chicks and saw them freeze in terror, they were trying to prove that these birds hatched with something like the image of a flying hawk already in their minds. Later research, however, suggested that it’s likely young turkeys learn what to fear from other turkeys – and to me these 1930s experiments seem shaped by the anxieties of a Europe threatened for the first time by large-scale aerial warfare, when pronouncements were made that no matter how tight national defence, ‘the bomber will always get through’.