But in our small-run, temporary, and mortal-human days, we experience also the phenomenon of coming-into-being. Like: one early morning I hear a strange sound and write:
(whistle made of glass)
and by late morning, as usual, I can’t fathom what I meant. But I see a cedar waxwing on the feeder and another one sitting on a branch in the ravine, and when I play the definitive tape, it turns out that the song of a cedar waxwing sings exactly:
(whistle made of glass)
A few days later I hear a song that sounds like a robin that’s been hit on the head by a baseball bat (see: I’ve learned the robin’s song, a hiccuping doodle I’ve overlooked all my life until this game turned my attention to it), and I see for the first time a black-headed grosbeak on the feeder, a bird that the bird book says sounds “like a drunken robin.”
Then it starts to seem that by listening for their songs I’m causing birds to appear, that this game has the power to pull substance from the air, and I don’t know why it ever made me sad. Delete the fucking from the sunrise, which is always beautiful, even when it’s just the grayness lighting up again.
On the other hand: however irritable I am, I’m not insane. Do I really want to be outside in the damp when I could stay in the laboratory of the bed? Which is where Jim quizzes me as he prepares to leave the house at daybreak, “What’s that?”
Flicker.
And that? Steller’s jay.
That? Willow flycatcher. Fitz-brew fitz-brew.
Now, a Buddhist might argue that as soon as you jump to identify the sound, to give it a name, you’ve jumped away from the sound itself, and maybe this is the reason why the songs lapse from mind so easily — we rush from them too quickly. I’ve sustained my connection to nature by resorting to these games, yet I’m also aware of the paradox: that knowledge games take me out of nature.
And what about the beauty of the song itself, which I know I’ve overlooked in my quest for names? I’m not proud of the fact that I can’t work myself into a state of exaltation when I hear the song of a hermit thrush, which sounds to me like so squirrelly squirrelly. It doesn’t send me into raptures, but on the other hand, it doesn’t fill me with woe, as it did Walt Whitman.
This year, I’ve learned the song. Maybe next year I’ll be able to respond emotionally, once I know the name. Thought first, then feeling. I think, therefore the winter wren.
And to get a perfect score on Jim’s quiz caused me to give my cackling one-ha laugh, because I know he expected to stump me. Desire again, the need to win, since it gives me pleasure — can’t help it — to be in command of anything in the midst of my hermit-thrush-song-style spiraling down.
Jim sides with me when it comes to the ravine: he does not think that wanting to enter it means that I’m grasping desperately for what I can’t have. He thinks that trying to come up with logistical solutions is a means of refusing to surrender. Desire is good; it leads us on. Our happiness should be greedy, should make us want more of it.
Then — action. Since my birthday approaches, he calls one of the Asian gardeners who advertise in the local paper, and Victor Hang (son of Huey, whose name is on the business card) shows up that day, a son with only the subtlest of accents, who seems a bit mystified about our project. But he says, well, sure, if we really want it, for six hundred dollars he can build a trail into the ravine. And though the job is scheduled for the next week, it’s the next morning that a truck shows up, and not with Victor inside, who, come to think of it, seemed too well dressed for manual labor.
Instead he’s sent Juan and Lionel, young Latino guys who attack the ivy with mattocks to unearth downed trees, which they rip with a chainsaw to make steps pegged into place with smaller branches. They find all the materials they need right there in the woods, no trip to the store, working so efficiently that the trail is finished by midafternoon. When Victor returns to claim his check, he speaks in his quiet voice from the bottom of the steps: “Ah, I see — at first I did not understand. But it is like Mount Rainier. All you need is a waterfall.”
I’m studying his wife, a tiny silent beautiful woman who climbs up the trail in flip-flops until she’s at my eye-level, smiling shyly.
By now the migratory birds like the grosbeaks and wax-wings have left for their winter territories farther south, though a few species hang on, continuing to sing (if fitfully, now that their young have fledged).
My turn to descend comes a few days later, and I can’t tell if Jim’s lying when he claims that it’s not hard to carry me down the path. All I’m required to do is not speak until we reach the muddy landing. He’s bought a feeder on a pole and plants it: Happy Birthday. I am forty-seven today, older than I ever thought I’d be. My gift is the trail, the logistical solution, a nod to the refusal for it to be denied. The bottle at the bottom of the ravine turns out to be full of champagne.
We’re sitting fifteen feet below the driveway, but we might as well be in the jungle — the nuthatches veer from our heads just an instant before they fly into our ears. How loudly we can hear the violence with which the air must be beaten in order to achieve the trick of flight. And the ivy is alive in a way I’d not noticed from up top, the leaves twitching and rustling, both from the birds hopping through their open slots and the raindrops that penetrate the canopy of maples.
We don’t need binoculars to tell the difference between the three different types of wren, and I don’t need the tape or a sonogram to tell me the difference between their songs because I can see perfectly well which birds are singing as they stand in the open with their heads tipped back and their beaks open. I imagine that the holy man’s happiness doesn’t hinge on this kind of attainment. He doesn’t hanker after any infrastructure like this trail to take him anywhere other than where he already is, and he doesn’t let fretting after knowledge interfere with his listening and the music’s nameless seeping-in, as he sits in his spot in the Himalayas where the soil is too thin to allow for burial and the human dead are chopped up and left for the birds to eat.
To close that last paragraph, I was going to write “and then our bodies become the song,” but this phrase, though melodic-sounding, is incorrect, I realized. The birds that take part in the “sky funeral” are vultures, birds that portion off the dead. And I can find no entry for vulture on the definitive tape, no song or call or chatter or whinny or drum. These graveyard-workers, the tidy-uppers of mortality, remain resolutely mute.
On Solitude
A tree falls in the forest without me to hear. This is an old riddle, almost a cliché.
Never mind whether or not it makes a sound, what I worry about from time to time these days is whether or not I care or, rather, about what form the caring should take now that the forest has spurned me, now that I can’t enter it. Whether or not I’m bitter about that tree, the loss of the opportunity to hear its crack and crash.
Sometimes I do venture down a logging road, jiggling along. This sensation — motionless motion, uncomfortable under the ass and thighs — makes me realize that it wasn’t so much the wilderness I loved as much as the feeling of my body moving through it, a feeling I loved best when my body hiked in solitude. The freedom of not having a companion whose speed I’d have to adjust myself to, whose pace would tell me, without words, whether I was fast or I was slow. Whether I’d succeeded in becoming what I’d hoped to be (a lone body conquering the wilderness — was that it? a body that transcended its gender?) or whether I had failed.