by Kyo Maclear
• • •
What bothers me is the unspoken assumption that not getting bigger is a form of arrested artistic development or failure. Contrary to my mother’s belief, I do not wish to languish in obscurity and poverty. I am not trying to deny her boasting rights as an immigrant mother. I actually don’t know how to make things bigger. Perhaps I lack the sheer egoism that George Orwell described as a writerly necessity in “Why I Write.” But then what does “sheer egoism” look like to the Asian, female writer? In response to Orwell, Deborah Levy writes: “Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.”
• • •
If I am guilty of hiding among tinier people in a tinier parallel world, it is because I am searching for other models of artistic success. The small is a figure of alternative possibility, proof that no matter how much the market tries to force consensus, there will always be those making art where the market isn’t looking.
A brief sampling of humans and avians, praised for their smallness (a.k.a. The Pantheon of Smallness):
Sei Shonagon (966–1017), Japanese diarist and poet whose brief and beloved The Pillow Book bolstered an association between smallness and artistic quality in Japanese art and literature.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), prodigiously talented Dutch artist who first earned his reputation for small-scale etchings, including a series of portraits of beggars and outcasts, buffeted by bare white paper, noted for their unfinished and incomplete appearance.
Song thrush, speckled brown-on-cream breast, airy, flutelike song with distinctive musical phrases.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), Japanese haiku poet who often captured the tininess of human life in contrast to the vastness of nature, using a granular approach for sometimes grand insights.
Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Austrian composer who (in a short life) wrote six hundred lieder, later popularized by the famous mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, who said: “Schubert is so big, so delicate, but what he did was pick a form that looked so humble and quiet so that he could crawl into that form and explode emotionally, find every way of expressing every emotion in this miniature form.”
Blackbird, glossy black-blue plumage, can sing two songs simultaneously.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), American poet who once described herself as “small, like the wren” and lived reclusively, transforming the minutiae of her life into poetry, and establishing a relationship to scale that placed “small” in the great category of “atoms” and the “North Star.”
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903), Austrian composer famous for his intense, theatrical song miniatures, which have been called “mini-masterpieces.”
Nightingale, plain brown, reddish tail, secretive bird, famous for its beautiful night song.
Robert Walser (1878–1956), German-speaking Swiss novelist who once gave a character the motto “To be small and to stay small,” and who, when later institutionalized for mental illness, became famous for writing his “extraordinarily delicate” prose in nearly microscopic script.
Paul Klee (1879–1940), Swiss-German painter celebrated for his ambitiously miniature paintings, which he infused with music, mystery, graphic charm, and bursts of wicked humor.
Black-capped chickadee, oversize round head and tiny body, very curious, simple whistled song.
Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), Italian painter celebrated for his small-scale and humble still lifes (mostly vases), who expressed great rigor and passion in a practice shaped by subtlety and self-restraint.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), American poet with a small oeuvre but sizable reputation, who said: “Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music . . . some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?”
Purple finch, deep pink “raspberry” head, treetop forager, warbly song.
Tillie Olsen (1912–2007), Jewish American author of Silences whose tiny handwriting and small output belied her large concern for those written out of literary history—the “diminished, excluded, foundered,” those so small you would never hear of them.
Rosa Parks (1913–2005), African American civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, a small gesture that sparked a mass movement.
Song sparrow, russet and grey with bold streaks, stuttering song.
Pete Seeger (1919–2014), self-effacing grandfather of American folk music and proponent of small political actions whose songs often addressed small unsung lives and gathered little voices into roof-raising choruses.
Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), peerless American illustrator/author of children’s books who told PBS in a 2004 interview that he chose this modest form in the 1950s because he didn’t have much confidence in himself. “I wasn’t gonna paint. And I wasn’t gonna do ostentatious drawings. I wasn’t gonna have gallery pictures. I was gonna hide somewhere where nobody would find me and express myself entirely.”
Yellow warbler, bright egg-yolk yellow, sweet whistled song performed from high perches.
Yoko Ono (1933– ), Japanese-born artist who in 1964, before meeting John Lennon, collected her tiny meditations on the big imponderables of life into a small book called Grapefruit, published in a limited edition of five hundred, and whose singing style put the lie to the notion that Asian women are nonthreatening and meek.
Sixto Rodriguez (1942– ), Mexican American singer known for his disarming modesty and humble lifestyle who had no idea his album was a huge hit in South Africa or that he had played a role in galvanizing anti-apartheid activists.
Junco, generally dark grey with bright white tail feathers, singer of short trills and quiet tunes.
Slinkachu (1979– ), a London-based photographer known for creating miniature street installations using tiny figurines—which he leaves to the mercy of roadsweepers, heavy-footed pedestrians, and city beasts.
Minutemen (1980–1985), an American punk rock band named for the brevity of their songs; they believed in “jamming econo” as a response to the corporate greed and mass consumerism of Reagan America.
Goldcrest, England’s tiniest songbird, weighs just 6.5 grams at full size, sings a very high-pitched song that many people are unable to hear.
We were almost home from the marina, on the last stretch of road into the city, when I asked the musician about posterity. I was thinking back to his bar performance and wondering, given his stage shyness and aversion to self-promotion, if he ever thought about things like his “legacy” or the idea of making “art for the ages.” I wanted to know: Was it enough to sing small songs that rose to the surface for a moment, shared then gone? What about everlasting glory? Didn’t he want a smidge of that?
• • •
Although it was clear he did not dream of being a megastar, I sensed that he would be disappointed if his music went entirely unnoticed. Neither the musician nor I was whispering down wells or writing words to be kept in a drawer or buried underground.
He smiled and after a moment said: “You know, sometimes I like to think about all the stuff people have ever made—the vast history of beautiful songs and books—sitting on the shelves of a giant library, say the Library of Congress. I picture stacks of shelves from floor to ceiling and imagine all the artists that I love with a shelf of their own. Maybe Glenn Gould would have two shelves. Maybe another artist would be right near the top with three shelves. Then I think: what I want is a tiny spot on a shelf. A few inches of space. It doesn’t matter where. Maybe in a corner. That would be nice.”
I nodded: a little spot alongside all the gifts of the made world. A dream, and maybe not such a small one after all.
MARCH
WAITING
(A Horned Grebe, a Cooper’s Hawk, and a Solitary Western Grebe)
On the frustrations and unexpected rewards of waiting—for birds and
inspiration.
When I waited it was early spring. Green snowdrop shoots and the first show of crocuses. It was a time to feel optimistic, and yet somehow I felt the opposite. The musician and I were sitting in a booth at a family restaurant in High Park. The weather the past few weeks had been grim. The dirty walls of snow lining the streets had begun to thaw. Now the roads were filled with a substance that resembled grey margarita mix.
Usually I enjoyed our conversations, wide and sprawling and lingering. Friendship is lingering. You need that sense of time and timelessness hanging out with friends requires, so it was not surprising that in recent years I was drawn to younger men, usually a few years younger, who did not have family obligations and who did not feel every minute—every second—needed to be accounted for.
But at that moment the musician was on a detailed tirade about some person who had annoyed him on a birding message board. A person I did not know, whom I would never meet. I leaned back, waiting for him to finish, falsely patient, unsticking my stare from the sugar dispenser, noting the silent sweep of the clock hands on the wall ahead of me.
It was an exhausting reminder of the realities of personhood—the discovery that the musician would have turbulent and tedious moods like the rest of the world, that I would be a sullen and impatient friend and actually have no idea how to “linger” without agitation.
Feeling time acutely, I rushed from the restaurant to pick up my eight-year-old son from school. Despite my last-minute dash not to be late, I was late.
• • •
In those ten minutes of waiting, my son had fallen on jagged ice and gashed his chin open. I found him walking by himself across the frozen field, dragging his heavy knapsack behind him. I did not see the blood from a distance, but I could see right away he wasn’t walking normally. He was walking tragically, dazedly, like a novice pilot who had just crashed his plane in the middle of an arctic wasteland. I ran over and crouched down with him in a huddle to assess the wound while he moaned and his tears plopped on the ground.
Because it was a deep cut, I scooped him up and we went to the nearest hospital. My son’s moaning, which had briefly escalated to ungodly shrieking in the confines of the car, subsided the moment we passed through the door into the crowded ER entrance. He had been here before and he knew the drill.
Dusty alcohol smell, triage nurse with glittery blue eye makeup and opulent bosom, burnt-orange vinyl chairs, teenage boy with broken ankle and scar under one eye cramming a chocolate bar into his mouth, skinny girl holding a skinny purse, white-haired woman with patch on her eye, middle-aged man in wheelchair drinking orange juice from a very long straw, TV screen playing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, custodian endlessly wiping the floor clean, the indescribable yellow-beige wall color . . . The hours passed and we invented new sitting positions and our stomachs growled and we grew parched. We ate the almonds I kept in my knapsack. Then we raided the vending machine for Snickers and SunChips.
My son grew sleepy. His nervous but ready expression softened into boredom as he sprawled across my lap, folding his hands under his cheek as a pillow. I told him I was sorry for being so late to pick him up. “It shouldn’t have happened,” I said. He looked up at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about. I gathered up his arms and legs until he was folded in my arms like a futon. An inebriated woman who looked like she had recently lost a fight with a wall was smiling affectionately at us. Her nose and forehead were bruised and bandaged, and her mouth was an impasto of rust-colored lipstick. I smiled back. The room was crowded with people. We all had this waiting in common.
My son’s name was called. Lulled by exhaustion and the ER doctor’s slow, reassuring voice, he submitted to a freezing needle with only a modest groan. I held his legs while the doctor sutured his chin, tugging on the frozen skin, and held his hand when he bid the ER staff a peppy farewell. (“See you soon!” he said. “We hope not!” they replied.) He was experiencing an endorphin rush and a flash of nostalgia. It was his second bad fall in six months, his second round of stitches, and both times there had been no momentum behind the fall. He had just fallen.
Later, I was lying in bed, 12:40 A.M., when I heard my son downstairs, flicking all the lights on. “I am worried,” he said when I came down to gymnasium brightness. “I don’t want to keep falling.” I remembered I had a small sack of Guatemalan worry dolls and found them in my jewelry chest under a stack of unopened envelopes. My son is a believer in special remedies. I handed him three tiny dolls in tiny costumes, which he cradled in his hand, whispering a single worry to each doll. After getting him back to sleep, I lay in bed thinking of those unopened envelopes, seven in total, given to me by my father over the course of twenty years of hospitalizations. Each one contained everything I would need to know, everyone I would need to contact, just in case. I whispered a single wish to each one. I wish you were a love letter, I wish you were a ticket to Italy . . .
Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.
—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• • •
Waiting for a late friend. Waiting in line at the movies. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the mail. Waiting at the checkout counter. Waiting in traffic. Waiting for the train. Waiting for the plane. Waiting in a darkened theater. Waiting in a foreign country. Waiting to give birth. Waiting for sluggish minors. Waiting for elderly parents. Waiting for something to go wrong. Waiting at the doctor’s office. The waiting of chronic illness. Eroded public services waiting. Waiting for the Messiah. Wait list waiting. The hoping and waiting, the waiting and hoping. The waiting of childhood. The waiting to grow up. The waiting of old age. Waiting to recover. Waiting for another stroke. Waiting for the body to let go. Waiting for inspiration. Letting-the-field-lie-fallow waiting. The thinking-of-nothing and thinking-of-everything waiting. Waiting just as the storm ends. Waiting for the sun.
The musician and I met again at the end of the month. We arranged to go to a park along Lake Ontario created on the grounds of a former psychiatric hospital. There was a “hot-ticket” bird, and the musician thought it would be a special treat. The air was damp and soft. Heavy clouds drifted across the sky. It happened to be my birthday.
• • •
“What I’m looking for,” the musician told me, “is an accidental bird.” “Accidental,” he explained, is a way of describing solitary birds that have lost their way. For birders there is nothing more compelling than a bird in the wrong place or in the right place at the wrong time. The bird we were after was a western grebe, a waterbird common in the North American West but rarely seen in Ontario.
• • •
I was stirred by the idea of an accidental bird. Could it be a harbinger of doom indicating climate change, potentially catastrophic to the species? Or was it just a rebel bird with a bad sense of direction and an aversion to flock formation?
• • •
We sat by the edge of the marina bay, under the paper-colored sky, a din of rush-hour traffic in the background, as the grebe floated in the middle of two distant banks. Even far away, it was one of the prettiest and most elegant waterbirds I had ever seen—slender with striking black-and-white plumage. It reminded me of Pina Bausch, long dark hair tied behind her graceful neck. A dancer’s commanding sleekness.
We waited for it to come closer.
And waited.
And waited.
It was hard to decide which side we should be on. This side or that side. We tried one side, then seeing that the grebe had floated closer to the other shore, we made the twenty-minute hike around to the other side. By this point, the grebe was closer to the other shore.
So we waited and waited some more. We sat on the rocks, then on the grass, the sky empty above us, hour after hour. The musician was effortlessly still. My own stillness had the quality of intense effort. If we were in the Stillness Olympics, I thought, the musician would own the podium.
• • •
A little wind whistled al
ong the bone of my ear. More people arrived to see the grebe. When there is a hot-ticket bird, the musician explained, word of its presence will speed along the various communications networks that link bird enthusiasts all over the continent.
• • •
Twenty years ago, if you saw an unusual bird, you might mention it to the person passing you in the park, vaguely motioning toward its location. Now, with mobile phones, bird alerts have GPS precision. A birder in Savannah, Georgia, can learn of a “drab female cerulean warbler at Eighty-Ninth Street near Central Park” mere moments after it is sighted.
• • •
By late morning the edge of the water was dotted with people looking through binoculars, spotting scopes, and cameras set on tripods. A few nonbirders cupped hands around their eyes, trying to spot the celebrity. Where did all these people come from on a working day? Was it really worth waiting for hours on a barren breakwater for a fuzzy photo?
• • •
A Cooper’s hawk with a dark-banded, white-tipped tail flew over our heads. A horned grebe sporting a punky Klaus Nomi hairdo put on a little show, diving and disappearing. The musician and I tried to guess where it would resurface. There. Or there. Or maybe there. It was a fun, leisurely game. It was not a game for a busy, gainfully employed person. But we had long ago shed our busyness.
• • •
The basic measure of time, the tempo around which we arranged ourselves, the water lapping, the sky slowly changing from paper white to cobalt blue, was the tempo of boating retirees. Or maybe it was the tempo of firebrand revolutionaries on a wildcat strike against industry. Either way, we were Not Working. We had desynchronized from productive time frames. My chronic sense of being late for some appointment dissolved.
• • •