by Kyo Maclear
The truth probably lies somewhere between these two stories.
• • •
My mother is a mystery to me. Between us is a barrier of language and disposition. She does not divulge or publicly introspect. She is easily riled, so I have learned to keep conversation breezy over weekly meals that I prepare. I will never know if there was a moment before the photo was taken when she enjoyed a kind of giddy happiness as she imagined a fresh start and a new life. I will never know where or what she was running toward and what clinched her decision to return, to keep living in the same house, the same life. Beyond her need to maintain appearances and stability, or some enduring tenderness toward my father, I cannot guess exactly what kept her.
• • •
Still, I have held on to this photo of us at the falls as evidence. The photograph says: there will be times when an impulse to flee and a desire for freedom may tug at you and take you to the watery edge, the insoluble boundary between your needs and others’ needs. Keep sight of the falls.
I used to think that freedom was a hidden object. I stalked it through the house of my life, imagined that I would find it, rolled away under the bed, tucked there behind a chest of drawers.
• • •
I used to think that freedom was a simple matter of “release,” a door to be opened, the inside let out like a caged bird or a wish made true.
• • •
But not all birds choose to make great sky loops of their freedom.
• • •
Now I know the truth about freedom is that it’s a practice and not a permanent condition. “It actually takes a daily effort to be free,” writes Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage. Freedom is not a great leap or a definitive jailbreak or “the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed.”
• • •
What can you do within these narrow lines and this limited time? Who or what is stopping you?
• • •
When I look back on the time my friend and I ran away as teenagers, one thing stays with me: we ran as if we were being pursued, but if we had turned around, we would have discovered that no one was following us. We had internalized our discipline and our jailers. We were good girls who could not afford to believe that flight could be so easy, so unpunishable. After all, if there were no fixed obstacles, what but ourselves kept us in place?
• • •
The finches kept singing as we left the aviary. It was possible that they were singing for distant and unseen cousins in Australia. The sound traveled in all directions. It moved through and around objects. As we walked down the corridor, I could still hear it passing through the walls.
FEBRUARY
SMALLNESS
(Swans, Ducks, Coots, Sparrows, Cardinals, Juncos, Chickadees, a Carolina Wren, a Bald Eagle, and a Screech Owl)
On the satisfactions of small birds and small art and the audacity of aiming tiny in an age of big ambitions.
I work at things. I try to do what the pigeons do when someone drops a loaf of bread to the ground and work larger pieces into a manageable size. I do this with tasks and crises. I do this with chores and meals I prepare.
The musician did this with nature.
His approach, enjoying small spots of nature every day rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape, made sense to me. Big trips were the glaciers, cruise ships to Madagascar, the Verdon Gorge, the Cliffs of Moher, walking on the moon. Small trips were city parks with abraded grass, the occasional foray to the lake woods of Ontario, a dirt pile. Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel—with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers—just seemed so, well, grandiose. The drive to go bigger and farther just one more instance of the overreaching at the heart of Western culture.
I like smallness. I like the perverse audacity of someone aiming tiny.
Together we would make a symbolic pilgrimage to the wellspring of the minuscule.
• • •
In February, the musician took me to a marina on the edge of the city. We pulled into a parking lot empty of cars but crowded with steel fences and heavy machinery, stacked-up docks and decommissioned Portalets glittering with ice. It looked less like Arcadia and more like a scene out of WALL-E. This was not what I had pictured when the musician said “birding hot spot.”
I followed the musician along the boardwalk to a wooded area by the lake.
• • •
A few moments later I was sitting on a rock on the beach surrounded by hundreds of resting mallards, blazing-white swans, and coots. The birds were huddled together for warmth, enjoying a frigid siesta. A resting swan tucked her beak into her feathers, just a few feet away from me.
The musician came over and pointed to the swans on the lake, showing me how to distinguish between the trumpeter, mute, and tundra varieties. Then he went off to photograph a few coots.
Out of my element, I awaited instruction, trying to become one with the rock. And then, just like that, I settled in. The minutes and hours passed. A trumpeter swan retracted its neck and made a funny trumpet song. Three tundra swans paddled up and down the shoreline, a reflection of my own internal drift.
• • •
As the gaps between my thoughts grew longer, everything was changing. I imagined that I was on a fickle movie set—Bergmanesque starkness giving way to Tarkovskian fog as a grey mist crept in from the lake, blocking out the steel refinery across the water. The three tundra swans I had been watching grew dim. I looked down the beach and saw a figure, spindly in the distance: the musician materializing out of the blankness.
During a hike to warm up, we barely spoke because our jaws were stiff with cold. A male and female cardinal swooped past us and landed on a perch; their red and yellow bodies seemed garish against the frugal winter backdrop.
• • •
On a dirt trail, the musician stopped to take pictures of a few juncos and chickadees, cooing like a pornographer—“sweetie, sweetie, doll, you look beautiful, don’t you.” Snowflakes settled on our heads. Click, click, click. A few plump white-throated sparrows hopped into view. “Sweetie, sweetie.”
Hunkered down on the trail, the musician entered a tunnel of concentration, as snow spun around us. I imagined a sudden squall, a stampede of bison, a gang of wrestlers in metallic unitards, and knew that nothing would distract him. I went back to the car in the parking lot to warm myself. I adjusted the heat wraps I had velcroed around my torso that morning, layered a pair of woolen socks over my mittens. I hopped from foot to foot in intervals, singing “Get on the Good Foot.”
Back on the trail, the musician held up his hand. “There. Listen. That’s it. The Carolina wren.”
We caught a glimpse of the wren—a blur of rusty brown disappearing in a bramble—too skittish and quick for us to get a good look. A blink later, a juvenile bald eagle soared overhead. It was dark brown all over, still too young to have grown its distinctive white tail and head feathers. We followed it to the water, where we watched a group of hooded mergansers with crests resembling Elizabethan bridal hats. They dove for barnacles while giant ice cubes clinked around them.
• • •
On our return to the car, a crowd of seven people was standing by a tree, telltale cameras aimed upward. Resting in an elevated nesting hole was a tiny screech owl, laboring to sleep. Screech owls have intricately barred grey-brown plumage, an invisibility cloak that allows them to perfectly blend in with their surroundings. Hundreds of people could have passed within yards of that owl and never known it was there. But some sharp-eyed birder had blown its cover by sending out a message board alert. So, now, a storm of flashes.
• • •
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” wrote Simone Weil. But in that moment I could feel the musician’s blood boil at all the ways we wrong birds with our interest. He put his camera away without taking a single photo.
There were other people at the marina that day, not just t
he photographers. There were specters on the misty beach and flitting presences as we walked. There was the woman who left birdseed at set points along the trail. She skulked past us, furtive in her Stevie Nicks–style hooded cape. When she left, I placed a bit of the birdseed on my outstretched hand and a chickadee landed. It weighed no more than an ounce or two.
There were a few elderly birders. Bearded and sportily dressed, they approached us with tips, sidling up to the musician like scalpers or hash pushers at a Grateful Dead concert. “Tundra swan on the beach,” they said. The musician seemed fine with this fleeting and peculiar intimacy.
• • •
Back in the car, we cranked the heat and headed home. We were both quiet, lost in our own thoughts. I was thinking, with a few notable exceptions, the birding scene seemed pretty great. I liked the anonymous no-pressure camaraderie. This is what birds do when they join a swirl of other birds, I thought. They don’t proclaim their individuality or try to make a splash. They dissolve into the group. I wondered if this merging felt so relaxing because it was an antidote to the artist ego, built on an endless need to individuate, to be your own you. In place of exhausting self-assertion, the relief of disappearing into the crowd.
• • •
I lifted my cup of coffee from the dashboard cup holder, took quick sips. I inhaled the smell of wet wool from the scarf double-wrapped around my neck.
• • •
A week earlier I had gone to see the musician perform for the first time. I arrived late, so I sat on a broken barstool bracing my foot against the wall to reduce the wobble, while the room flickered under a slowly rotating disco globe. Pints of beer lined the bar. There were about forty people in the room. The musician was spiffily dressed in suit and tie. He grimaced, stammered, paced. I rocked on my stool, legs dangling, nervous for him but also curious. I knew he lived inside a world of music, that he could sit in his apartment listening to Mahler and The Band and playing his piano for hours. But I also knew he was full of artistic doubt, and that the equanimity he found while birding evaporated the moment he hit the stage.
• • •
His singing voice, sweetly hesitant, was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It felt like a miniature paper boat launched in a crowded wading pool: an intricate, crushable thing. His lyrics, rich in references to birds, ghosts, horses, sad families, scoundrels, and hope, had a raconteur’s charm. That such a pure and trusting voice could emerge from a self-doubting man felt like magic.
On the highway, the traffic moving smoothly, our subject was ambition. The question for each of us: How much is enough? We were talking about the musician’s new album. He was giving it the same name he gave his website, Small Birdsongs. It would be a suite of simple songs and he would play all the instruments.
“I like the idea of songs sung by those without big voices. You know, small birdsongs that rise above the noise of the city.”
“I know, I know what you’re saying,” I replied.
If you pour everything into the tiny vessel of a song, and wear out your heart, what is that? Is that small or big? If you choose to put yourself out there on a small stage, singing for the small somebody inside of you, knowing how quickly songs wane, is that modest or gargantuan?
Day after day I write my words at a small table in a small nook in a small café on a small street. On warm days, the doors are open. Sometimes house sparrows hop past or fly overhead. I don’t know when I began to prefer small things. Drawings of the small moment, nearly microscopic sculpture, compact stories, animated shorts, airy novellas, little gardens, economical studios, cozy dinner parties, small days of small demands that allow small increments of writing time.
• • •
And yet—I do not want my father and mother to grow small through the diminishments of age. I do not want: small that is cliquish or exclusive (i.e., available only to small numbers), small-mindedness or xenophobic smallness (the diminution of newcomers in the name of small-town values), or small-heartedness (emotional parsimony).
• • •
It is not about being perfect, delightful, and haute. Smallness with a big price tag or a shallow claim to virtuosity is not really smallness but rather, as Natania Rosenfeld points out in her lovely essay “In Praise of the Small,” an “inverse of the monumental . . . grandiosity writ tiny.” Call it pedestal smallness.
• • •
I may be guilty of ascribing purer intentions to the small. It is possible there’s a feminist slant to my preference (and an explanation for why symbols of monumental and muscular vigor do not hold my attention). Or a Buddhist bent—a way of confirming my smallness in relation to the cosmos of other things.
• • •
“Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy,” writes Matthew Crawford in his cult book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. “I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things,” said Pete Seeger a few years before his death in 2014. “Too many things can go wrong when they get big.”
• • •
I recognize there is something of a defensive posture to smallness. Because I am the daughter of a bulk-buying hoarder (my mother), I prefer the mini to the “jumbo.” Because I am married to a fan of long, overbearing opera of the Wagnerian variety, I tend to fetishize brevity and acoustic reserve.
• • •
My depleted attention span is also a factor. I am no longer very good with long movies or big books. The Sunday New York Times makes me anxious. Long ago, I sat through Shoah and read door stoppers and listened to CD box sets, but at some point a culturally acquired laziness set in. I still love ample stories and long, winding sentences and characters who have psychological bulk and emotional mass. But I would prefer to read Teju Cole’s Open City over Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
• • •
So now I try to make a case for artful compressions and the necessary intimacy of small-scale work where everything is not proportionately reduced. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal describes the netsuke in his hand as “a small, tough explosion of exactitude.” How perfectly stated. In my experience, a work’s external smallness can lead somewhere internally large.
• • •
But I am also willing to settle for an unexpected Instagram post, a funny comic. Littleness need not be deep to float my boat.
• • •
And of course I’m generalizing and there are things I enjoy that are wondrously big and very grand, such as the Pacific Ocean and certain glittering titanium museums and my close friend’s big books of big ideas and my husband’s big soulful singing voice. I admire largeness in others. I love Louise Bourgeois’s mammoth Maman sculpture and Peter Doig’s lush, antiminimalist paintings. I enjoy the ambitious and epic, sometimes embarrassing films of Terrence Malick. I want to thank him personally for the enormous nerve he showed in The Tree of Life. When was the last time you were in the presence of a work that overreached to such a glorious extent?
• • •
To some people, the desire to do small things and stay small may be perceived as a cop-out, a self-protective position, or a form of pathological timidity and constriction.
• • •
Small is a safe harbor. The smaller your goals, the less likely you are to be deflated or “cut down to size.” In this sense, a bias toward the small could be a version of low expectations. Or a form of feminized compliance, as in “I don’t want to be seen as loud, fat, assertive, or ambitious.”
• • •
Good girls are taught to make ourselves small until there is very little of ourselves left in the world, even as our hunger expands. If we are also “minorities,” embracing smallness is a less mutinous and more predictable route. Little, petite, modest, delicate, submissive, soft-spoken, docile, cute, feminine, tidy . . . Asian women are not assumed to be particularly magisterial, with the exce
ption of Yoko Ono, who is frequently and predictably belittled for her artistic hubris and over-the-top voice.
• • •
When it comes to stature, we live in a contradictory moment. On the one hand, we have a digital culture that cultivates small celebrity. “We’re living on a million tiny stages,” notes Portlandia co-creator Carrie Brownstein. “Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. Dinner plates are showcases for our food, beds become venues for our slumber, selfies are curtain calls for our faces. We put our activities on display, our feelings, our families, our skies.” On the other hand, we have an economic growth model that assumes if you make something small (unless it is boutique and artisanal, and thus financially large or monumentally miniature), it is because you are somehow lacking and frail.
• • •
“Be more confident,” my mother says, as if my literary “style” is a matter of low self-esteem and introversion (which may be partially true), a problem to be corrected through assertiveness training. “If only you wrote crime stories or stories about Leonardo DiCaprio or how about a story about a cat that only likes to eat bananas.” I once asked her what she thought of a picture book I had published (which she sat over—and even Googled—hour after hour, trying to divine its value), and she said, “It’s a pity you didn’t write a big book like______. All my friends talk about her.” She said this while trying to give me a large stewpot. We were sitting in her crowded apartment surrounded by objects from a lifetime of collecting.
That day she had already thrust upon me: a car-size rice cooker, a three-pound bag of walnuts, and a giant pack of sports socks.