THE NATURALIST
The Naturalist: Towards an Ontogeny of Being
I rent a studio apartment where the only nature is roaches and mice, both reported to haunt the delirium tremens. They flicker at the periphery of sight where vision is without color, and flee from the circle of attention to the shadows. I have more than just dabbled in mouse psychology, even plumbing their metaphysics, but defend this by symmetry. It seems to me more culpable to shunt my nature into the wings than admit its elements of nightmare.
There is nothing mischievous in the mouse’s heart stopping flights from underfoot, and realizing that unveiled his own subjectivity with its potential resonance through octaves of awareness and interpretation.
Mice are more innocent than saints and more lucid than yogis. They are besieged by the world, and secrecy and flight are their only hope. Their memory of events in this world is limited and probably racial and so of little practical use in the immediate. Every moment, though haunted with shadows of hawks and cats, is a dawn of complete naiveté, and the recent catastrophe of my entrance into the room which sent them fleeing under the stove, has slipped their mind, and it is only when I am resurrected from the chair and send new quakes through the boards, that monotheism is re-invented.
Recent memory wiped clean, I imagine them dreaming of the cradle of the race, meadows and fields, before the insatiable appetite of small mammals drove them into the underworld to feast on the brobagdigian scraps of sloppy primates. Given a five minutes to recuperate from the last five thousand years of their history, they will explore the open plains of a lit room, and if you do not startle them, you can see in life their minute heads which submerged beneath great ears and drilled out by large eyes made pure black by their panicked pupil, are devoted entirely to awe and trembling. In death, with their devout front paws stilled, I see their rodent teeth and naked tail, marks of their Faustian contract, and as a fellow migrant wish them rest within their amnesia so they might recover Eden.
Among bugs we can become gods in all aspects but creation, and it is sobering to remember the speculative cruelty with which we began our reign in childhood. The third oldest of my memories-recognizable like them not by setting or even a childish protagonist (who in fact is not there and would have to be pasted in using photos) but as wounding by light-is of a patio nearly as bright as glass where I am swatting a never depleted horde of metallic green flies. I have written "metallic green", is it possible they could also have been copper? I do not remember and recently have only seen shiny green flies, dull black ones, or ones I have been told are carrion flies that are fitted in pin stripes like Yankee uniforms. All I do remember is their reflecting, jewel dazzle, so that, ignorant of their life altogether, I stalked them with a swatter, drunk on power and skill, heedlessly reducing them to incandescent spots of red on the pavement, all the while in a state of pure benighted and revelatory wonder at the alchemy of light.
During those hours of boredom when I first felt childhood withering at the edges, I refined my technique, employing a magnifying glass to shrivel daddy long legs, which are preposterous juggernauts for whom I now have sympathy, but back then were spectacular and incompetent enough to draw my fire. Caravans of ants were lost to mythic disasters, their cities fell, and they trundled out the ark of the next generation, white egg pods, and began their diaspora.
I miss the dragonfly and the honeybee, the butterfly. Only a few years ago a yellow swallowtail found its way to a potted flower on a fifteenth floor balcony where I was placed to see it, but the labyrinth of chance that both of us had traveled to that meeting immediately fell between us, a tale of impossible odds that had been repeated so many times that the first view of inevitable miracle these painted pilots had safely delivered was lost in the rude stitches of math. Once upon a time there had been no maze of disappointment or repetition to wind through when the first red dragonfly had posed on the green reed after sewing the summer moment- the still pond and transfixed boy-into a purse ballasted by the gold sun.
Insects were the first netted by statistics, but the rest of the kingdoms followed, surrendered because I could not shoulder planetary time, and now I find myself trying to retrace my steps to rescue resonance. Instead of seeing insects as the clearest window into the mathematical imperative of the cell, noting their lack of self pity, their eyes without interior chambers, their rank fertility whose vast production would prove love an annexed delusion, I think of the division of their legions into acolytes of either sun or moon, evidence of the universal cell’s allegiance to a prior beauty with all its rigors. Their infinite resurgence, which is immune to us, has left them the original genius, so the decorated kite of a moth’s wings, composed powder whiff scale by powdery mote in a matrix impenetrable to calculation remains the coalesced breath of a verse only deciphered by listening for a song abroad at night.
Sometimes I think I have joined the exile of bird feeders. Our wish, those who sow the sky, is to talk with birds. This would be a gentler madness, bats replaced in the belfries by pigeons or swallows, a luminous harvest. Our wish is for silence only interrupted by song. We have retreated from the awe that recovers wonder after looking at death.
The shriveled limbs of plucked turkeys and chickens were a riddle to me. How could the oars and scimitars of flight be grasped in these withered stubs? Granted that these were flightless birds, and in the case of the turkey with his embonpoint as preposterous a form to soar heavenward as a banker off a morgue slate, but the buckshot garnished Mallard a hunter served me for lunch had the same atavistic nubs and seemed no better outfitted for the his skidding, coasting, and headlong passages through the sky. And then I watched four goslings matriculating into fledglings and then on to full-fledged geese and thus overheard pilgrimage being whispered into form.
I first saw my four tutors through the bars of a tall fence by the Hudson River. They were settled on a narrow, rocky beach that would be their nursery for the next two months. The beach was covered at high tide, and trusting themselves to the moods of the river they would decamp until the next low tide. Not finding them on their spot I would think they were finally gone and I had missed the event, but it turned out they were to give me a parting gift. On a soft summer night, I saw them gliding in line on the Hudson, whose black waters at that hour were embossed with the city's lights. I knew them by count, six long necked silhouettes against the backdrop of the lit windows in the high rise condos on the Jersey side, and never has Jersey seemed more the far shore or a family seemed more serenely afloat on the ephemeral lip of eternity.
The chicks were a scruffy crew in the beginning. They were still molting the yellow feathers of hatchlings. To me, they looked as if they had been tarred and feathered. Their plumage had not yet amalgamated, and their wings were naked stubs, like those on a plucked chicken.
Some species of geese migrate at altitudes as great as thirty thousand feet. Morphology is destiny for creatures. The negotiation between form and elements is the origin of theology, though creatures are never challenged by faith, which means parables unravel, and the sullied word rises into breath. A goose can shrug off altitude and slalom down to a landing on water beneath rigid wings, only back peddling at the end to adjust pitch for touchdown, but it does not spiral up thermals like raptors, and it can not kite like a gull, shearing flight from a headwind. It is indentured to galley labor. I think of scales of being rising towards transparency and descending again to invisibility. I think this a labor consistent with our metaphysics, our onerous and sublime efforts to dispel shadow from light, Harpy-ridden by love.
Referring to field notes: An equation could probably be made between the thickness of a bird's body and the amount of time it can spend in water and energy it must expend during those trips. Terns, small as plovers, minimize their time with lightening quick surface jabs, gulls prefer aerial theft to getting their feet wet. Cormorants, scarecrow thin and lacking water-proofing oil, swim like the dickens when under water and then hang themselves out to dry, when they look like a mad gardener's vengeance on aristocracy: A kudzu topiary or ivy espalier. Penguins, naked legs shortened to minimize heat loss, are hobbled in a waddle, but translate into wonders in the sea by oaring with their wings, flying through the water while those birds that make quick sorties are basically landlubbers and run through the brine, awkward compared to blubber-warmed penguins who have not hedged their bets with a possible retreat to the sky. The level and duration of a species commitment to the sea can be measured with the fullness of their metamorphosis to enjoy it.
Morphology/Morpheus-form as inculcated dream (the substance of time), and language destined to recapitulate this original expression. Powerless to refute water as amniotic time, the ocean as the cosmos, learn to cast writing into the adventure so that in passage it is formed by delighted discovery.
July 28-Today I observed the smallest of the four chicks stretch her left wing over her left leg, balancing on her right. The uniform of Canada geese has emerged on all the chicks, though it is still a little patchy and faded. I have worried about this runt of the flock dropping behind the others and dying. But, from the start she (being small I decided this chick was female, no justification for that) has given every sign of choosing autonomy rather than suffering ostracism. She rested apart from the others, and seemed reluctant to stand, which I thought a symptom of malnutrition but which I also conjectured on, sketching an individuality, even self-awareness, an Emily Dickensian minatory privacy. Is there anything more beautiful than a wing? And these wings. They seem primers, epitomes. Smaller wings seem to fold into themselves and become almost interior. Finally, I can see the completion of that part of the wing, extending past the stumpy bone, which most directly harmonizes with the wind. These feathers are the subtler pitch flaps that cannot be cemented to bone if they are to frail flight from contingency. The joints can be used to adjust lift and reef sail against a strong headwind, but the symmetry required for flight can only be improvised using supple digits that are quick to divine an impulse and can riff with breeze, draft, gale, or zephyr.
July 28-night-re-read- Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, a revelation of the mechanics of time, the manufacture of the present and the substance of dreams. Overlooked the one legged stance of many kinds of birds. Flesh informed by the requisites of flight-a perfect ambidexterity and circumferential balance extending from glorious tip of chevron to daffy webbed toe. Night flight erases horizons and level floor. Though not all birds migrate at night, the abilities of phyla are variations on a theme. This circumferential symmetry may even be a gift from kingdom, and maybe from even before. It may be the second word of existence, after "be". Could this reverberate, thinning to navigation over distance, a bridge between minute and vast, minute and eon? Could it persist like a phantom limb, or wait like a latent wing in the gene or like every language, inside the warbling of an infant: audible, seeable, knowable, the religious urge using every means of expression at its disposable? The creation of the moment cell by-cell, feather by feather, detail by detail; action declaring eternity by this thrust towards unity. And then, would I be unjustified in seeing the wing as expressing spirit, and inevitable?
Do they see in lyrics? They have rowed their way to thirty thousand feet. That is impossible to imagine, gaining purchase on thin air, grappling up with air hooks, carrying the hidden ace of flight up your sleeve, conjuring it from a carnival barker's grandiose, anxious movements. But, the digging done, the shovels full of mined air pushed behind them, here they are above a continent of clouds. The air is stripped to will here, a naked force, oxygen dropped almost as an impurity, leaving air nearly a schematic of physics. What this anoxia might produce in a brain we can only guess at. Let me guess that the squabbles and tempers of the flock drop off as an economy of the oxygen starved brain, and that what is left is a passive conduit for recitation, a wind chime, a flute. Stuffed with oxygen a brooding goose can not even count the number of eggs in her nest, but spared that intoxication, they are beaded on magnetic chords that pass them without error over thousands of miles. The clouds, I've seen them from the window of a plane, floating on the astringent high air which has the colors of heated metal. Above or beside them, I no longer see creatures or cities, and an inhuman purity scours my sight. But, I am in a pressurized cabin. What note is the jet stream throwing outside? I guess at the ghostly high "C" I have heard a soprano cast into the smaller vault of a cathedral, a note of disembodied spirit that devastates secret hope. Strung on that excavating note, the geese skim the soulless ice vapor floes, their pecking order forgotten, relaying the ordure of point for the respite at the rear, inscribing geometry from the void. The mystery is coalescence, translation of nothing into element, the word distilling on a transparent pane. These feathers on a cast note see out of it perhaps this way: A shard, a flash, and a stroke of gold. The distinctive action of the sun on water is the sole agent that can retrieve them-they fall then through the adit the sun has drilled to the spot where it drenches itself once again in the mantle of being. From thirty thousand feet these are small portals and fissures, cracks in the faultless vault where wakening pecks through, or better, where an earlier wakening pours through and memorizes itself. Such sights are verses without words.
