The Flight of Birds

by Joshua Lobb

  The sun’s in his eyes. He blinks. He looks at the space where the birds used to be and the dark blue ocean rolling—relentless, mesmerising—over the rocks.

  When he’s ready, he makes his way home.

  The young man, exhausted, sleeps on the bus, dreaming of seagulls. Years later, he will hear the story of the farmer and his wife read to him by a child, carefully and quietly, so as not to wake the patient in the bed opposite. He will remember sparking strips of white against an open blue sky.

  Field Notes

  Field notes have been described as ‘jottings’: ‘quickly rendered scribbles about actions and dialogue’.1 Certainly the field notes I came across during my archival research could be called ‘scribbles’. Narrow notebooks with scratchy black pen marks, sentences half-finished interrupted by diagrams attempting to represent a bird’s call. Field notes are provisional: conjectures hazarded before the definitive meaning is determined. Field notes are personal, private: they are accounts of what happened to the note-taker when the thoughts were being made. Field notes, then, are also about process: ‘Writing, rather than the written.’2

  Strictly speaking, what follows aren’t quite field notes: they were written retrospectively and they don’t have the scrawling energy of a note written at the moment an observation is made or a thought is struck. What they are focused on, though, is the process of writing The Flight of Birds: a tracing of the oscillations between (sometimes contradictory) ideas; the marking out of discoveries made, digressions explored and surprises chanced upon. More importantly, they are discussions about the points of encounter between two ‘fields’ that made the writing possible: the discourses or disciplines we call ‘fiction’ and ‘animal studies’. Neither of these fields have one single path running through them: they contain multiple, sometimes meandering tracks; they even crisscross and wind around each other. To labour the metaphor further, their paths sometimes run parallel to the fence line and sometimes jump the fence entirely. These field notes map out some of the ways I traversed the fields, moving from one field to the other and back again. In particular, they demonstrate the relationship between the subject matter and the form of my writing, and the ways the key concerns of animal studies stimulated or—to put it a better way—animated my writing. They are part of a broader discussion about the role of fiction in engaging with the lives of nonhuman animals and the ways that fiction as a critical practice might contribute to the crucial discussions instigated by thinkers in animal studies. More specifically, these notes are an account of how I re-evaluated my creative project: from asking the question ‘How can I write about birds?’ to ‘How can I write with birds?’—or even towards the more significant question: ‘What might a bird’s story look like?’

  Encounters on the Bridge

  The first birds I noticed were three black cockatoos flying overhead as I walked over the highway bridge near North Wollongong railway station. I was a jumble of worries. The everyday anxieties about being late or the latest work crisis were tied up with long-term fears about the future: economic, political, ecological. Cars clanged and hissed as they passed me. I could see schoolkids pinching and shoving each other on the train platform below. Doors slammed in the carpark. Underneath the train tracks was a stormwater drain, tentacled with graffiti, the remnant of a creek. As I plodded along, the cockatoos wafted down from the open sky and hovered at eye level. They were so close I could have reached out and touched them. As I watched them suspended in the air, I could see their charcoal wings were fringed against vibrant blue, the dirty-yellow smudge on the side of their faces, the glinting beaks, the black eyes ringed with silver. Then, one by one, the cockatoos dropped lower, under the bridge, and flew away. They were bewitching, remote, oblivious. They were in another world.

  This almost-encounter with the cockatoos stayed in my mind’s eye for some time before I knew what to do with it. I’d be walking the dogs or sauntering to the station and I’d linger on the crest of the bridge, hoping they’d soar past again. They didn’t, but I did start noticing—by sight and by sound—the multitude of birds in my neighbourhood. Members of the Illawarra Birders group have sighted over 350 species of birds in the area, citing over seventy species of birds as ‘common’.3 Pelicans and silver gulls in the harbour, white-faced herons and sooty oystercatchers on the rocks; galahs and kookaburras in the garden, catbirds and brush turkeys along the track up the escarpment. Unlike the office worker, Peter, in the story ‘Magpies’, I’m not a twitcher. I often don’t know the right names for birds. A man I met when I was out walking one day berated me when I referred to a pied currawong as a magpie. The birds I’d see poking at the rubbish near McDonald’s, I’d call ‘those yellow-faced birds with their legs on backwards’ (I think they’re masked lapwings). I distinguished bird songs by placing them in the categories ‘the calls that I like’ (the warble of the butcher bird, the soft coo-coo-coo of the wonga pigeon) and ‘the calls that shouldn’t be blaring at four in the bloody morning’ (the wattlebird and the koel and the one I can’t identify that goes ‘dak-DAKK dak-DAKK dak-DAKK’, interminably).

  And my imagination still circled around the bridge above North Wollongong station. To bring in another metaphor (and I will admit to the problems of metaphor later in these notes), my mind was spinning a tangled web. The web was messier than the ones I’d get caught up in on my evening walks with the dogs. These threads wove in and around me as I began to conceive of the project that became The Flight of Birds. They formed unbreakable knots of inspiration, they frayed and confused my thoughts, they even lured me to places I hadn’t imagined.

  I can pick out four threads that came out of my knotted thinking. The first thread was the desire to see what birds see, to engage with what the cultural geographer Steve Hinchliffe calls ‘making oneself available … to the world of the bird.’4 This was more than just a self-centred wish to escape my petty worries, to soar away from my earth-bound human existence. I wanted to respect birds as agents of their own experience. The second thread seemed to pull in the opposite direction. Literature is full of cross-species confrontations that emphasise the impossibility of understanding nonhuman animals, particularly birds. In his poem ‘Poor Matthias’, Matthew Arnold writes that: ‘[Birds] live beside us, but alone [from us] … What they want, we cannot guess’; more recently, the filmmaker Ceri Levy says of birds: ‘They are poetic creatures that almost work in an ethereal space to us. Inhabiting our world, but also inhabiting some other, unseen space, a place we can only glimpse … one that we can never exist in.’5 Could it be possible for me—as a writer, as a human—to inhabit the world of birds? Or would I always be ruled by my own anthropocentrism?

  The third thread was to make a correlation between the particular and the planetary. The place where I saw the black cockatoos is coloured by my own fears about the future of the planet. Wollongong is a post-industrial city, an intersection of what we could call ‘nature’ and human attempts to control it. The city is framed to the west by an ancient crumbling escarpment; to the east by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean; to the south and north by steelworks and coal mines. Central to many discussions between friends and colleagues in this place is the issue of environmental change: what we have done to cause it and how it might affect our surroundings.6 These conversations usually focus on the overwhelming scale of what we’re facing, and our incomprehension of it. We could call this feeling a kind of planetary grief, a sense of totalising helplessness. We exemplify Isabelle Stengers’ recognition that ‘Amongst us there are those who know they ought to “do something” but are paralysed by the disproportionate gap between what they are capable of and what is needed.’7 In the environmental sciences, birds are often used to predict changes in ecosystems, acting as what has been called ‘barometers of changing habitats and environmental health’.8

  In my thinking about birds, I began to imagine stories that might portray the ways our everyday actions are indicators of the way we treat our planet on larger scales. A suburban
road cuts through a bird’s natural habitat; a quick trip to the supermarket makes evident the violence we inflict on other animals; people’s treatment of their family pet shows up the hierarchy of the animals we value, and those we do not. Perhaps I could also tell stories that, even if they don’t reduce the ecological crisis, might ameliorate the sense of totalising paralysis. A moment with one bird—or three swooping under a North Wollongong highway bridge, or a flock soaring over the ocean—may allow us to engage with planetary grief in an active and productive way: our care for other species might make the need to ‘do something’ more imperative.

  From these thoughts, you can see the fourth thread being woven: I wasn’t just watching birds, I was beginning to devise stories around them and, perhaps, with them. The stories I imagined were, to use Adam Trexler’s words, a way of representing ‘the emotional, aesthetic, and living experience of the Anthropocene’.9

  Four thoughts intertwined with each other: a desire to understand birds on their own terms; a questioning of my own position in relation to birds; a sense that the particular can’t be separated from the planetary; and a hope that telling stories about another species might draw attention to the planetary, overcome anthropocentrism and give agency to birds. Too much netting over the birds of the Illawarra, perhaps.

  In order to help me unravel the tangled web, I started taking note of the ways that others have written about birds. Of particular importance were the scholarly investigations from the broad disciplinary area that has come to be called animal studies.10 Interestingly, as I read through these writings it became evident that the threads running through my imagination are also woven into the active discussions in animal studies. Central to the field is an imperative to make problematic the dominance of human vision. Philip Armstrong points out that scholars in animal studies ‘are interested in attending not just to what animals mean to humans, but what they mean themselves; that is, to the ways in which animals might have significances, intentions and effects quite beyond the designs of human beings’.11 Susan McHugh’s complex readings of works like Animal Farm and Babe challenge the notion that ‘animals are only literary as human subjects’ and rethinks the textual animals as ‘something other than metaphors or as more than just humans in animal suits’.12 In doing so, we may be able to respect animals on their own terms.

  Nevertheless, questions still arise about our position as humans and the effect it has on the animals we are thinking or writing about. McHugh, in discussion with Garry Marvin, concedes that ‘it is important to remember that we cannot talk, write, or even think about animals in any sense except in the context of humans, if only because we can never get away from ourselves’. Marvin expands on this, writing: ‘I am very wary about what I … can say about animals per se, outside of how they figure and are configured in the human imagination or in terms of human relationships with them … How does one avoid anthropocentrism when the only languages available to write about animals are human languages?’13 As in all critical discourses, we must always be aware of the dangers of speaking for others.14 But critics in the field also challenge the idea that human language is ‘naturally’ anthropocentric. In her examination of animals and ecological ethics, Val Plumwood makes an important distinction between physical locatedness and ideological interests. By marking out the difference she demonstrates that anthropocentrism is a discursive position as opposed to an intrinsically human trait. Plumwood illustrates the ways anthropocentrism uses the same hegemonic controls as other centric epistemologies such as sexism or racism. These dominant discourses internalise oppressive modes: they link an ideology to a body. I’m a man, therefore I must be androcentric; I’m European, therefore I must be Eurocentric; I’m human, therefore I must be anthropocentric. Of particular note is Plumwood’s analysis of the stories we tell of others as ‘unknowable’, as in the assertions from Arnold and Levy I have cited above. These kinds of (non)interpretations create a polarising structure: we are known; the Other is mysterious, unreadable. They lead to further ‘inevitable’ conclusions: the Other is ‘inessential’, ‘unworthy’, ‘not worth noticing’.15 Plumwood asks us to view human–nonhuman relations not as dichotomies of exclusion but as interactions that permit the location and interests of both groups: through this reconception we might be able to ‘go beyond’ the ideological presumptions of our ‘locatedness’.16

  Several thinkers in animal studies propose models to think beyond the human discursive position. For instance, Wendy Woodward offers a mode of re-reading animal stories that emphasises the encounter with rather than the speaking for. We need a commitment, she argues, to a ‘deterritorializing of our own subjectivities’. Using Derrida’s interaction with his cat as her starting point, Woodward (re)positions animals in human stories as ‘agentive’ and advocates for ‘the naked truth of every gaze’, human and nonhuman. Through the gaze, nonhumans, like humans, can be seen as ‘irreplaceable living being[s]’ rather than ‘exemplars’ of a species.17 In what ways, Woodward asks, can we sympathise with animals on their own terms?

  Animal studies also makes explicit the link between the lives of animals and planetary concerns. Many critics expose the ‘carbon hoofprint’ of killing animals for food (eighteen percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and increasing).18 As critics like Plumwood and John Sorenson have noted, the killing of animals and the subjugation of land for farming has also led to significant biodiversity loss and ecological collapse.19 This devastation has an emotional as well as an environmental effect. Writing about animal killing and extinction, Deborah Bird Rose conceives of our species ‘howling into, and from, an extremely complicated place: the shadow of the Anthropocene’. She continues: ‘Our howling starts from within, from empathy, grief and much more, and it reverberates beyond us’; ‘we howl in the dark for the loss that surrounds us now, and for all that is coming’.20

  Even more interesting for me is the fourth thread running through animal studies, which has already wound its way into the discussion: the hypothesis that the kinds of stories we tell might counter the violent ways we interact with animals. Thom van Dooren muses that ‘telling stories has consequences: one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections, and with them, new accountabilities and obligations’. McHugh concurs, stating that: ‘The future of such communities hinges on aesthetic perhaps more than on any other transfigurations of biopolitical life—that is, on just this sort of creative cultivation of the conceptual places where individuals, species, and other living agents meet.’ Fiona Probyn-Rapsey makes the case that telling stories about animals can provide a space for animals’ agency to be affirmed. She proposes that ‘telling “stories” of animals and telling animal’s stories turns “behaviour” and/or “instinct” into culture’; or, to put it more directly, ‘The idea that they have stories complements the idea that they have subjectivities.’21 This final thread leads us back to the first one: that animals matter on their own terms.

  Perhaps, then, it’s two threads winding round each other: the interrelation between stories about animals and animals themselves. Van Dooren and Rose, talking about moments of encounter between animals (including humans), make the claim that ‘animals, sites, and stories all shape, and are shaped by, entangled and circulating patterns of intra-action’.22 The black cockatoos navigate the bridge and the railway posts and human figures, weaving a spatial ‘story’ through the air; the human, meeting the silvery gaze of the birds, replies with his own story. Stories aren’t just recountings of events but manifestations of convergence and divergence: between subjects, across species, through ideas.

  As I began to construct the stories within The Flight of Birds, the alertness to this intertwining relationship became crucial to the broader philosophical approach I took in my project: I began to consider the ways that writing practice might contribute to animal studies, not just as an object of study but as a critical act in itself. Before I discuss the specific ‘applications’ of the ideas of animal studies to my stories,
I will outline the ways that I believe fiction as a critical practice can work with animal studies in an active and productive way.

  Encounters in Fiction

  Of course, not all animal studies scholars think of fiction in a favourable light. In his memoir The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands asserts that storytelling is one of the most destructive aspects of human culture, justifying acts of violence towards and domination against those we determine are inferior or unworthy. It is this conceptualisation of storytelling that has led Dawne McCance to declare that ‘fiction is not the place in which to deal with … things on an ethical level’.23 Despite these assertions, other critics in the field do see a place for fiction in the discourse of animal studies. Woodward argues:

  [we] can tell stories of animals which are salutary and ethical due to the sympathetic imaginations of the writers and their characters. This sympathetic imagination [can then] be extended to the ‘real’ animals in all their embodiedness and in all their presence so that humans do not denigrate and mistreat them as inferior others.24