that comes in raspy syllables is supposed to sound like towhee, although once it is cut loose from its moorings in the aural world and cast on a page passed from stranger to stranger, the word becomes merely a skeleton. Hearing the song is essential if the skeleton’s to garner flesh.
Unfortunately, most bird songs can’t find a good match in our crude human words. This results from the way the songs are produced, by a twin-chambered organ called a syrinx: two voice boxes working in tandem to produce music whose complicated polyphony requires a computer to catch all its details. Syrinx comes from the Greek word for panpipes, which seems appropriate — the bird’s breath is driven through multiple chambers — and even sweet, lyrical at least. Until you trace it one step further back and learn that the word for panpipes comes from the reeds that a virgin girl let herself be transformed into rather than be raped.
To warn of danger: this is one reason why birds sing. But birds sing most robustly in the spring, when the males are gripped by the drive to mate and females submit to the most appealing singer. What appeals to me in birds’ songs is the unabashedness of their desires, blasting so loudly I can almost forget my own body as I lie there listening while the sun climbs above the eastward mountains.
While driving around with Jim the other day, I heard a report on the radio about the ornithologist Don Kroodsma, who rides his bicycle across America each spring, zigging and zagging. His mission is simply to listen. I think he’s trained himself into the mental state called synesthesia, a kind of neural cross-wiring in which the stimulation of one sense results in a perception from a different sense. A person who is a synesthete might, for example, taste mint as a column made of glass, though the most common form of these atypical perceptions is colored hearing. When Kroodsma hears birds, he sees a picture.
More precisely, he sees is a finely detailed oscilloscopic graph — a sonogram. He can hear a warbler in one county, then ride to the next county and be able to discern how that same species of warbler sings in a different dialect. He can also imitate the calls accurately enough to give the dialect’s inflection. This man is a professor emeritus, the announcer says, which means he must qualify, by some measure, as old — and yet he sounds unwinded as he pedals.
I protest: “That’s who I wanted to be. That’s exactly what I wanted to do with my life.” This is the kind of pronouncement I’ll make after I watch, say, a figure-skating competition on TV. Suddenly I will want nothing more than to be a figure skater, always wanting to do the very thing I cannot do, even though I’ve hated skating ever since I broke my tooth on the flooded frozen tennis court at the village park when I was ten. At least three times a day I am overcome by such desires.
Jim says: “No it’s not. You wanted to be a poet. You’re doing exactly what you set out to do.”
But of course I pictured myself as the poet pedaling her bicycle across America, her legs shaped like stout branches of madrona.
This morning, outside in the checkerboard, I hear a song and flip through the pages of my notebook and am surprised to find a diagram that matches what I’m hearing:
The tape poses the hypothesis that this song comes from a ruby-crowned kinglet, a small elusive bird that I’m unlikely to see. Dimly I remember catching one in a mist net years ago when I worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service, holding it in my hand while I blew on its head to expose the hidden red patch. Its heart beat with a frightening force that seemed capable of tearing the bird’s thin skin and making it explode in my hand.
Each bit of new knowledge in these knowledge games is supposed to serve the same purpose as the wads of clay and straw that pioneers once used to chink the gaps between the logs of their cabins. I chink the holes of my losses, like the loss of the mist net. The wind blowing hard is memory, and I’m trying to plug myself until I’m tight against it. Memory, okay, but without so much nostalgic attachment to my bipedal past.
In addition to these games, two general courses of action would seem to be useful in the face of physical malfunction, one being the logistical solution, a solution like convening friends who would be strong enough — and willing enough — to carry me into the ravine (it’s harder to come up with logistical solutions that allow for solitude). But my friend scolds me for even entertaining the idea of asking people to carry me into the ravine: “It’s dangerous. You’d be asking them to get hurt. And what would you do down there anyway? You don’t take advantage of what you’ve got right here.” I hear her voice going quack quack quack.
I tell her I’d observe. “I’d sit down there for an hour.”
“But you’ve never observed up here for an hour!”
“How do you know what I do,” I sniff — a little nervous about her being right.
The other solution, the one my friend advocates, would be to quit wanting what I can’t have—cessation of desire. Like the holy man, I ought to be happy with the driveway, the miraculous driveway, where a hermit thrush stands on top of one of the tomato cages in the raised bed. I know it’s a hermit thrush because, and for the first time in my life, I can see the white whisker marks on both sides of its chin. This is the bird whose song Henry David Thoreau says “banishes all trivialness.”
This bird is also about as close as we come in the New World to the famous nightingale that stars in John Keats’s ode, and their songs share a similar downward-spiraling quality. Among the many well-known lines in “Ode to a Nightingale” is one that ends with the idea that “to think is to be full of sorrow” (echoing — rebutting? — Socrates’ assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living). A year before the ode, he wrote an improvisation that sounds like a run-up to the more famous poem. It included the line: O fret not after knowledge — I have none.
This is the problem with the knowledge game. What with all my questing and all my fretting, it’s hard for me to linger in the beauty of the song. John Keats does linger, and at first his listening sinks his mood, because mortality is what the song of the nightingale reminds him of, particularly the idea of a pain-free, easy death.
This would be a logical obsession for someone who’d just seen his brother die from tuberculosis, especially someone showing signs of the disease himself. In the painting made by his friend Severn, he’s sitting in the woods at night while he writes the poem. Alarm is what registers most visibly in his white face, which is turned back over his shoulder toward the song, as if it scares him.
“Ode to a Nightingale” ends by addressing memory’s inability to fix the song in place: Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep? Evanescence, it seems, is a universal quality of birdsong. The expert on the bicycle is an anomaly. And maybe evanescence is a good thing because it forces the brooding to lift. It lets us forget that we ever thought of death.
When I was younger, Keats’s high-flown language had no appeal, but now his central preoccupation is more urgent to me: How do we go on when the body’s breakdown becomes impossible to ignore? The poem makes me remember that the world is full of things that should be paid attention to, even when they’re darkened by the shadow of one’s own mortality, perhaps especially when they fall inside that shadow. Life’s meaning comes from the fierceness of this attention.
From a scientist’s perspective, though, the contrast that Keats sets up — between unchanging birdsong (= the poem itself, the future famous words) and mortal man — is wrong. Birdsong changes: the expert on his bicycle finds a distinct lowering in pitch of the song of one species (the bellbird) in his thirty years of studying it. Nothing escapes transformation, and even the poem will change as its interpretation is ground by the years, as the New Critics are replaced by the postmodernists — and then the post-Beauty-ists, who see in every animal the putrefaction of its carcass and the decay of its song.