by Kyo Maclear
I both love and regret how similar we are.
That evening, as I imagined a box and, inside the box, a very small goldfinch nestling, I realized my actions needn’t have been drastic. I could have simply tucked the bird into a protected shrub away from foot traffic and dogs. The parents might have continued to care for it until it could fly. I could have notified park staff.
Instead, I had relied on someone else to demonstrate leadership. I had been won over by the musician’s laissez-faire attitude. It had seemed convincing. And maybe he was right. “The goldfinch isn’t a species of concern,” he later insisted. “It’s thriving. If it had been a rarer bird, say a Connecticut warbler, I probably would have done something . . . but I still feel that we should never, ever handle wild birds.”
Maybe it would be better to let out a gentle sigh at the transience of the world and carry on.
But there was also a chance he was wrong.
“We have to work to find that first, true impulse,” writes William Kentridge in Six Drawing Lessons. In our waning, unreliable memories, outrage is too easily lost. “We are left with something closer to regret. Regret at what happened, but also regret at our inability to hold onto our feeling.”
When I asked my mother-in-law if she had ever doubted or regretted her choices, she said: “I have never regretted speaking out, sometimes to my disadvantage. Not all of my choices have been well thought out. But that impulse to intrude made its mark when I was very small and it pulsates to this day.”
• • •
She then added: “I think regret is something like lost hope. Taking action generates hope.”
I would have kept the bird in my room and fed it moistened seeds and mealworms. It would not have been heroic. I could have made a fuss. I could have risked being a cliché of earnestness, risked trying and failing.
Deep down I think I knew the remorse would not be large and crushing. It would be small and manageable, just a tiny bird, embarrassingly little. Not a crisis. And that’s why I regret it. Because the attitude that somehow, without our acting, the little things will take care of themselves does not ring true anymore.
OCTOBER
QUESTIONS
(More Ducks, and a White Stork)
On the necessary unnecessaryness of art and nature appreciation, especially in times of crisis.
I didn’t feel myself. It was October, and as the planet tilted into shadow the birds were shouting at me from the trees. But my heart wasn’t really with the birds. I was thinking about my husband hunched over his computer, tracking news of our friends, imprisoned in Egypt for more than a month and a half.
• • •
For a time the story was international news. Two Canadian citizens on their way to a humanitarian medical mission in Gaza, caught up in a security crackdown during a stopover in Egypt. I won’t belabor the facts except to say that our friends were witness to a massacre of unarmed protesters by the Egyptian military, and that they—a Canadian filmmaker and a Canadian doctor—paid the price for stepping forward to assist the wounded and dying.
• • •
They worked for six hours in an improvised field hospital at a nearby mosque, watching the mosque’s carpet turn from green to red. By the time they left, they had seen forty people die.
• • •
The news told us certain important things.
Detained without charges along with six hundred others . . .
Thirty-eight men in a three- by ten-meter cell . . .
They have started a hunger strike to protest the arbitrary nature of their detention.
• • •
But we still had questions. Was it true that they were sleeping on a concrete floor in a cockroach-infested room with thirty-six other men? Had they recovered from the beating they endured upon arrival in prison? As we worried for their physical and mental health, bits and pieces of information reached my husband, terrible details written in letters smuggled from prison.
• • •
We felt awakened to the knowledge that this was the kind of event that happened all the time without attracting much attention from those not directly affected. Massacres of peaceful protesters, acts of arbitrary arrest and infinite detention, innocent people tucked away in the world’s most hidden corners, lost to the abyssal unknown.
• • •
My father supported us during this time. He offered advice, journalistic contacts, interpreted the news closely. He rallied, as was his way, when things got tough. He had wisdom we did not possess. His professional experience included coups, revolutions, massacres, genocide.
• • •
I remember that during our friends’ imprisonment a white stork was captured and jailed in Egypt under suspicion of being a spy. Actual investigation revealed the alleged spy camera was a tracking device used by French scientists studying the bird’s migration patterns. But it did not escape us that the Egyptian junta had reached new levels of paranoia.
• • •
“Are they going to be freed soon?” our sons asked, weekly, daily, hourly.
• • •
Along with countless others in the Toronto arts, humanitarian, and medical communities, we poured our energy into securing our friends’ release. If there was optimism to be felt, it came from this groundswell of activity and love.
“What sort of thing is a coup?” my younger son asked one morning. To his ears it sounded sweet and soothing. Coo.
• • •
I didn’t know how to respond. Every day as a parent is full of minute calibrations, wondering what I am giving, what I am taking away. I know enough to know that just because a child takes things in stride, seems able to confront difficult events in the world, doesn’t mean he is impervious. What to do with a child who is so canny to crisis?
• • •
“A coup is the bowl they used as helmets in the War of 1812,” said my elder son. This seemed to satisfy.
• • •
It is not unusual for my younger son to turn to his brother for answers. On stormy days, during tense moments, I’ve seen him huddle against his brother as one might nestle under a canopy. He looks to him for a proper read on any given situation. He needs his brother’s cool compass just as I need my husband’s calm and sunny nonchalance. Each of us has our own lodestar.
• • •
A household’s psyche rests in delicate balance.
My bird appreciation dwindled. At least for the time being, it felt unnatural. I knew birds were not trivial. They were constantly chirping, and what they were saying, or what I heard them say, was: Stand up. Look around. Be in the world.
• • •
But I felt a certain embarrassment, and this feeling quickly slipped into a sense of shame. Watching a wood duck on a pond early one morning brought me to tears. I was quaking with cold, watching a slow swirl of mist on the water. I tried to explain to the musician what I was feeling, that birds were diverting my attention from more important matters, and he listened kindly without for a moment making me feel overwrought or rolling his eyes at my unfashionable hand-wringing.
• • •
The musician’s priorities were not my own. As a songwriter and bird photographer he created work that was full of heart and humanity, but if asked to deliver an opinion on a political issue involving humans, he would generally say: “That’s not a topic that concerns or interests me.”
• • •
Still, he understood the essence of what I was saying. He was, at the very least, familiar with the feeling that making art—funny art, beautiful art, tender art, boring art, fierce art, humble art, lofty art, existential art, “political” art (or, in my case, art about the trials of making art)—was a fairly limited and potentially narcissistic thing to be doing with one’s time on a fucked-up planet.
• • •
Leaving aside the grand defenses—that art offers an alternative value system, serves (in art critic Dominic Eichler’s words) as a “wayward conscie
nce in an unconscionable world”—we both agreed that in functional (stanching the wound, stopping sea-level rise) terms, art was fairly superfluous and frequently pointless. Some days this pointlessness was fine and even the point, but other times it felt dubious.
• • •
So, even though the musician did not spend much time considering the whole “who/what should my art serve” question, he could appreciate what I was saying: that being an artist did not stop you from falling short as a citizen.
But something very specific was bothering me. It was a sense of hokeyness. That by focusing on subtle and small awakenings of awareness, I was enacting a cliché of nature appreciation. I was embarrassed by birding’s provenance, its air of elitism and elegance. As with most Western leisure pursuits, the study of birds and natural history blossomed during the Victorian era. The pleasures of genteel liberal culture and high-minded recreation floated upon a backdrop of brutal imperialism abroad and growing inequities at home. While the majority of people in England and the colonies were still surviving on limited resources, worrying about rats and rickets, not to mention the plunder of land and body, white male naturalists were traipsing about the countryside collecting eggs and birds’ skins and getting worked up about the varied and colorful wildlife they saw.
• • •
A fact: if you watch life through binoculars, your vision is naturally blinkered.
On the day we learned our friends’ detention could be extended for up to two years without formal charges being laid, I sensed my older son outside our bedroom, listening to our whispered conversation outside our bedroom. Through the half-open door, I recognized his posture of gleaning from years of my own chronic eavesdropping. When he noticed me noticing, he slid down the stairs.
What was partially true during the Victorian era remains partially true today: people who are busy struggling for survival do not observe birds for aesthetic pleasure.
• • •
Hence a common if unfaceted notion about nature and beauty: that it is permissible only in times of stability and prosperity, that it is essentially contemptible and evasive to contemplate the pretty surfaces of the world while people suffer. This sentiment is encapsulated in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To Those Born Later.” He writes:
What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
Brecht’s words (echoed by Henri Cartier-Bresson a few years later: “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”) reinforce the idea that a love of nature is a middle-class luxury, an excess to be distrusted. To “talk about trees,” to partake of the kinds of self-indulgence and self-delightedness for which the privileged classes are known, is an offense.
• • •
But birds do not stop flying and art does not stop getting made. During their detention, our friends applied themselves to making their clammy sauna of a cell more habitable. They were crafty. They made glue out of macaroni and fashioned hooks to hang personal items from. Their days were so dull, so ordinarily horrible, that they applied themselves to problem solving. They designed a way of showering with a sawed-off Fanta bottle using cold and earthy Nile water. They held nightly lectures, where every cellmate was encouraged to share some expertise (“How to improve your CV,” “Films About Prison”) to ward off despair. They refused to let prison rob them of their self-expression, sense of solidarity, and vocational instinct. The filmmaker sketched portraits of thirty-four of the prisoners on cardboard packaging. He made art because he is an artist and that’s what artists do. The doctor, meanwhile, treated the sick and injured because that’s what doctors do.
One evening my sons helped make a sign for a Tumblr “portrait petition” directed at the Egyptian and Canadian governments. They wanted to add their photo to the wall of pictures calling for our friends’ release. They sipped lemon soda through straws as they painted the words PLEASE FREE. . . . My elder son’s tone had a fatherly quality. “Let’s add penguins,” he said.
• • •
“Penguins?” my younger son repeated. His tone was hard to read. He either admired his older brother’s ingenuity or thought he was a numbskull for being so bloody cheerful. It was hard to decide. I don’t know if he did.
Months later, I found myself reading about Rosa Luxemburg, who, in 1916, was “preventatively” imprisoned for two and a half years for her revolutionary and antiwar activities. Locked away, Luxemburg took particular pleasure in watching and listening to birds within and beyond the prison walls. In letters to friends she mentions reading a study of bird migration and describes her encounters with sparrows, a nightingale, greenfinch, chaffinch, and blue tit. Keen-eyed, clinging to the birds, Rosa lifted her spirits by singing the Countess’s aria from Figaro to an audience of blackbirds. In her eccentric and uncompromising letters, I saw how bravely and closely Rosa observed the world from the small space of her prison, how the birds sharpened her microscope-eyes.
• • •
I also saw that many of our commonplace notions about beauty are simply wrongheaded—that to say that a love of nature is a function of privilege and wealth, that a delight in small things is incompatible with a passion for justice, is untrue and patronizing to the struggling and the poor. Rosa’s letters push back against this assumption by showing how much nature could help, how it had historically helped, to fulfill “the potential dignity and worth of human consciousness.” She was not naïve. What Rosa believed was that a commitment to social justice, far from being incompatible with aesthetic experience and sensual pleasure, demanded it—that politics has to be about harnessing the libidinal and the beautiful and not only about abstract categories.
Through her window, I found a frame to contain both the world of nature and the world of politics, beauty and conscience, small gestures and big actions.
I am inclined to exaggerate the balance of traits in my family, so let me qualify: my elder son tries to be a good canopy but he is not perfect. Sometimes he furls himself up, withholding shelter. Sometimes he feigns annoyance and Weltschmerz. He can be grumpy, short-tempered, aloof.
• • •
But behind any surface withholding is a base of solid, protective love. I cannot count the number of times I have watched him extend a hand to hold his younger brother—the way my mother once held my poncho, the way the siblings of the filmmaker and doctor held them in their absence.
I discovered there were other prisoners who developed an affinity with bird life—from the Birdman of Alcatraz to the so-called bird men of Warburg. (The latter met while bird-watching in a German prisoner of war camp and went on to become founding fathers of the nature conservation movement in Britain.) I sifted through prison letters and diaries (including those written from Alcatraz and Warburg) describing the sparrows in the rafters of an old cell block, the snowy egrets nesting in the shrubs, the crows casing the perimeter fence, the wood pigeons flying through heavy iron gates.
• • •
The birds equaled the deepest longings for release, the desire to claim a better and bigger life.
• • •
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes: “One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past the flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous songs. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks’ jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky—and then I went down on my knees.”
• • •
I spent a few days listening to the music of Olivier Messaien, who wrote what music critic Alex Ross calls “the most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century” while incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp in Görlitz, Germany. Messaien notated the birdsong he heard while in d
etention and incorporated its patterns into his music. Jarring, discordant chords followed by long silences.
• • •
Rosa was not the only caged bird lover. But in her letters, I found something affirmed: birds are necessary. There are so many important things to write about—a feeling that was heightened for me during our friends’ incarceration. But birds kept me going, just as music kept my husband going when he was reduced by fatigue and worry. I watched the birds, anywhere they happened to be, even birds I had seen a thousand times. They limned how high the sky stretched, how infinite and intense the blue could be, how vast the nonhuman world. I listened to the invisible ones, tucked into the eaves or branches of trees, hidden beneath an underpass. Their noisy and happy chirrups seemed to grow more insistent, as if enlarging themselves in counterpoint to the news from Egypt.
• • •
“In two days? In three days? In a week? When will they get out of jail?” our sons asked.
Over weeks of listening to my sons’ conversations, I pulled out a thread of hope. It seemed that watching people rise up in the face of a terrible situation, and seeing their parents do something about it, and knowing there were age-appropriate “artivist” things they could do, diminished their sense of fear and fatalism.
Then, miracle of miracles, our friends were released. After being held for fifty days without charges, they were permitted to leave prison.
• • •
When my younger son heard the news, I saw him proudly eye the Tumblr petition sign he and his brother had painted and photographed. It was leaning against the kitchen wall—the words please free our friends now punctuated by two blue, blobby penguins.
Many months after the doctor and filmmaker returned to Canada, I asked them if they remembered hearing or seeing any birds when they were in prison.