I’ve been a secret bird for a while now. A collector of whatever randomly strikes my fancy. For years I’ve tended a nest in the subtlest of places, my head. Mornings I fly off through my eyes, rove about, snatch up a fact here, an anecdote there, then evenings return back through those same eyes before closing them. Sleeping, I add to my nest and dream from it.
Once, about twenty years ago, while on one of my many walks through the alleyways of my neighborhood, I caught a curious sight at sundown. Atop one of the buildings a flowing swarm of small birds was circling a tall chimney. Looked not unlike water in vortex down a drain. Every few seconds a bird churning among the others would dart into the chimney, followed shortly after by another and another. These were chimney swifts, I was later told, after I brought this sight home to describe to a friend. The thing I needed to know about chimney swifts, the friend said, is that their legs extend from their underbellies from an unusual angle, therefore allowing them surer grip of a vertical perch. Imagine the insides of that chimney you saw, she said. Dozens of swifts clinging to its interiors, affixed by tiny claws to seams between brick and mortar. Yes, I said, I could see them, picturing them according to the loose specifics of her description. They were in my head; woven into the never-ending elaborate architecture of a thought-nest.
Remembering that evening twenty years ago when I first snatched them from conversation and flew off with them, I’m reminded of the truth of such birds: their lives are short and their individualities interchangeable. Yet the alley where I saw them remains a few blocks away, same building and chimney. I could easily walk from the house and locate the same spot and stand there and wait for twilight. Would birds come to swarm the chimney, flitting down one by one to fill it? If they did, would these be descendants of the same birds I stir in my head, for pleasure of thinking of them? A private moment when I saw them, so a private moment when I think of them. Birdwatching across void and oblivion, I hope the point has been proven, is an underrated discipline.
*
I have wings, a beak, feathers and near-hollow delicate bones. Every feature of my physique has been designed for flight, passage from earth to air and back again. But that’s not how the mirror sees me, nor how I appear when I fly through the eyes of strangers or loved ones. Of all disguises, the easiest to adopt and maintain is that of a human person. The better to hide my nest, keep it safe from discovery or invasion. Behind this face, unremarkable on the face of it, I tend to my own personal perch and nursery.
Look at the face. Watch the person. He yawns, stands from his chair, walks. Out the room he goes, into the hallway and from there into the bathroom. Soon the sound of urine pluttering against toilet water can be heard, followed by a guttural flushing. Soon after he returns through the doorway to take his seat again. All of these actions he has executed to continue the ruse he is nothing other than human. But all these are evidence of a modest implausibility: the nest he carries within him has grown several hundred times larger than his mere physical dimensions and contains currently not only himself but scattered aspects of a city, many cities, a country, many countries, a planet, many planets, a universe.
Since the nest can’t be examined by sight of him, everything about it, the materials it's composed of, the near-daily modifications to its cradle and boundaries, must be asked after. Whatever he chooses to disclose about it must be taken on faith, even if an exaggeration or calculated lie. In its chaotic tangles are many thin lengths of paper, quotes from elsewhere reproduced in his own hand, by turns enigmatic or practical. Many read like Chinese cookie fortunes without a future.
Asked about his nest, the man coughs up one such length of paper. He fishes it from his throat like a pesky hair, unwads it, straightens it on the desk before him. For benefit of the curious reads aloud the message inscribed on it, a quote from a French-American scholar long dead: The walls around the town kept it small.
Indeed, this can happen.
And also with nests and heads. To grow beyond the material strictures of a head, a nest must grant itself permission and ambition. Otherwise it will conform to the dimensions of mere human likeness, content to appear exactly as it seems, a town in love with its walls.
*
Fiske and Taylor write of birdlessness in a dry, theoretical manner. Their interest lies elsewhere, among social animals with a supposedly more complex language and culture. Belonging as an essential need and therefore a threat: to seek it is to be desperately driven by the prospect of not having it. They speak of social cognition, the brain’s daydreaming about its person’s involvements, their aspirations, alliances, fears of discord or rejection. The mind’s natural resting state, according to Fiske, to Taylor, is fundamentally oriented towards one’s relation to the crowd, to others.
All this I read some ten years ago. The book was telling me about myself, of my kind, strangelings born from but forever positioning themselves against and outside of nature. It could be thinking about nature is a feeble attempt to challenge it, stand apart from it. Being half-bird, I wouldn’t know. My version of thinking tended to blend with its surroundings, the way watercolors spread across paper in the wake of a brush. These two, Taylor and Fiske, drew with aid of compasses and rulers; a birdhouse set atop a very tall pole, they drew. Then my mind flew in and lit upon it, warping it with soaks of vibrant color.
Do you know the story of pain? their book asks.
Do you know how closely the heart lies next to nerves?
The anterior cingulate cortex, they say. Repeat the words of what’s within you: anterior cingulate cortex anterior cingulate. Here in the brain is where pain wakes as conscious feeling, two kinds so close together as to be indistinguishable: physical pain and social. Cut ties with an old friend. Slice with a knife the palm of an open hand. Some people, they say, do not want to be prone to such pain, so seek freedom from human form—not my way, through cultivation of a subtle otherness, but by death at their own hand or unrelenting aggressive inebriation. It is a sad state of affairs and alas its sadness is proof of its humanness.
Fiske and Taylor…Taylor and Fiske…interchangeable as one author.
When I finished their book, I closed it then shredded it, then bedded my nest with the shreds.
*
I once knew a woman who travelled to Kazakhstan, to Almaty and the surrounding countryside. She had arrived from a long way off, the United States, to teach children how to paint murals. The people there welcomed her with grace and consistent hospitality but while walking the streets, visiting the markets, she slowly noticed how infrequently people smiled. Five days in the country and not a smile.
But not on the sixth day. On the sixth day she saw her first public smile, a woman slightly older than her talking with a friend near a stand selling blue jeans. So delighted and intrigued at this rare exception, my friend walked over to introduce herself. Both smiled as they greeted one another. My friend asked the woman: why are you smiling? No one in Kazakhstan seems to smile. Smiling left sometime during the long Soviet rule over the country, the woman explained. People didn’t trust each other, so smiling wouldn’t seem genuine. If they see you grinning, they assume you’re unwell, mentally imbalanced. Then why do you do it, my friend asked. I do it because I don’t care, the woman told her.
Later that same day my friend was driven across the grasslands to an open place where the sky was large and the people beneath it small. Falconry was still a living tradition in that part of the country, she'd heard. There she met a man who trained falcons to perch on his forearm and leap to flight at his command. He would feed the great birds bits of meat from his hand, cover their heads with little leather hoods to blind them, once they’d returned from the sky to his arm. Released to flight, they would cruise and dive and angle, hunting smaller birds. My friend was not an admirer of this. She thought it cruel but kept her opinions knitted into a smile.
A month later, having circulated among the villages and painted a few walls with children, my friend took flight herself and returned home. In her living room she showed me photographs of very specific people I hadn’t known existed until she'd shown me. Some had names and she pronounced them. Many were people seen once then never again. One photograph in particular comes to mind: a boy dressed in traditional garb, white and gold. She’d been invited to a ceremony celebrating the child’s first steps. Not long after the photo was taken, a goat’s intestines were looped around the child’s ankles, then, held upright by a parent, the child was guided forward, one foot then another. All of this I’m recalling years after it was told to me, my friend describing what she had seen then left behind to return home. The smiling woman, the falcon, the child’s ankles wrapped in innards. Look here, at this face of mine, me sitting in silence in a room or on a train or bus, you’d hardly notice. These too are well worth hiding.
*
Do you know the story of pain? the book asks. Every second that passes the world answers: yes. Daily it’s written yet goes unread, for reading is slow and takes time and pain is quick and eternal.
Once there was a girl in the Ukraine. Displeased with her crying, her parents locked her in a kennel behind their house. Five years she lived among the family dogs; when the police found her, she scrambled about on all fours and barked. She could understand neither the language of police nor social workers, nor of her parents, cruel as they were. She was a dog, yet her name was Oxana. Saved by strangers, sadly she would have to be displaced yet again, taught she was otherwise—to walk on two legs, think as a daughter, talk as a person. She might tell her own story to herself and understand it, but in doing so would have to become a story herself, newspaper articles, television programs. Oxana Mulaya, the grown woman who once survived childhood as a dog.
Once there was a seven-year-old boy named Prava. Technically he was born and raised in Russia but his mother, not satisfied with this, locked him in an aviary and raised him as a bird. Having tired of caring for a human child, she decided to remake him as a less troublesome species. In his cage the boy lived for many years before authorities found him. “Bird Boy”, they called him, for when they asked him questions or moved to help him, he flapped his arms and chirped. Having suffered a slow, arduous transformation into bird-hood and having been saved from his mother’s care, he would have to be taught that no, freed of his cage he could not fly, and no, the language of social workers was not foreign to him. With some time and great effort, he could relearn what he was, and converse with them.
A tale of two children. A chronicle of cage and kennel. I tell it not to depress nor instruct but to acknowledge: to be forced into hiding and into life as a different species is no way to gain an honest otherness. Am I awful for telling it? Would it be less awful if I hadn’t? If I have offended, I apologize. Inevitably, the work of tending a nest is amoral.
*
Clunk—warbler thrashes to ground.
Thump—thrush twitches in a holly bush.
People pause in the middle of whatever they’re doing, modestly startled, sit in silence a few seconds to listen for the sound again. Hearing nothing further, they return to themselves and whatever it was they had been doing. Only when a window cracks or breaks is it deemed a problem.
Good news. Soon there will be a solution for this. Engineers have noted birds rarely fly into spider webs. Spiders long ago solved that particular design problem, weaving UV-reflective silk strands into their patterns. ORNILUX Bird Protection Glass incorporates a UV-reflective coating so birds can detect a window where once there hadn’t been one. ORNILUX Bird Protection Glass will spare the life of many a sparrow. It will help save money on repairs. It may even flatter or confuse the spiders.
How do you rate this innovation, I ask my bird-self. Will it help you navigate the channels between life and death more handily? I suppose, it says. Though flying will have been rendered more predictable, perhaps windows will have lost something.
Thump—
Clunk—
The sound of birds knocking. People startled out of themselves.
*
There are many species of smallness and I have tried each, parakeet, canary, finch, and from these I’ve learned speed, economy of movement, the pleasures of vocalizing my passing breath as bright signifying nonsense. From parakeets I’ve learned something extra, how to perch for years in a cage in the apartments and houses of elderly widowers. Having known a few widowers in my day and having visited their homes, often kept dark to save money on electricity, often cold to keep the heating bill low, I would hear chirps from another room, a bedroom, a living room, ask my host where these came from. They would lead me into a dark, cold room where a bird flitted in a cage, a water dispenser, feeder filled with seed. The poor creatures clung to their perches like hostages. But after years of feeding and commiserating with their captors had become bonded to solitude.
These people had children of course, and grandchildren, in some instances great-grandchildren. But each of these had outgrown them, only to return sporadically as visitors. Between visits the houses and apartments had grown darker and lonelier, in the summer warmer than was comfortable, in the winter colder than was reasonable. On the walls and atop tables and dressers and mantles were framed photographs of visitors who were family, evidence they were not abandoned, that they were cared for on the other side of a phone call. There had been a time when a dog or cat had kept them company, but these had a habit of growing ill and dying, leaving them widowers twice or three times over. Caring for mammals can be expensive, they would be told, much cheaper to take a fish as a pet, or a bird. Not soon after a daughter would arrive with grandchildren, the eldest carrying a cage and within it a colorful nervous creature. Here is a new friend, they tell them, sensitive and playful but easy enough to take care of. So begins years of commiserating with a creature in bondage. Conversing with one another from respective perches, cage and E-Z chair.
The conversations between parakeets and widowers have largely gone unrecorded, with one exception. A woman who was a friend of a friend’s grandmother. To relieve herself of boredom and loneliness she recorded with a Walkman endless dialogues between herself and her parakeet. When the woman fell ill and was moved to a hospital then a hospice care facility, dying shortly after, visitors to her house entered as family, sorted through her belongings. Among these were boxes filled with cassette tapes, each dated and numbered. After listening to a few minutes of these, they swore off any potential future for themselves as widows or widowers.
What should we do with them, a granddaughter asked. Throw them away? Record over them? Who owns cassette players anymore? After much deliberation it was decided each member of the family should receive at least one to have on hand and listen to, whenever they wished to hear their grandmother or grandfather’s voice again. If it was lonely to hear, it would serve as a reminder: to ward off similar birds from their futures, they would do well to learn their calls.
*
On a podcast the man with clinical depression describes one of his worst episodes. A podcast arrives in episodes, he jokes, so do bouts of hell in the head. It’s a ruthlessly convincing mode of thinking and feeling, he explains, primed for the least charitable read on anything a clinically depressed person might encounter or consider. Everyone is selfish, everyone is starkly, hideously alone. Viewing his fellow commuters stepping from and onto a subway train, he crafts subtitles to their babble and bustle: All this activity is vain and meaningless. Back and forth and back we go, work to home to work again, until we retire then die. He’s aware enough to know this is a case of confirmation bias curdled into illness, but dead weight claims his head nonetheless. He’s unable to view people as anything other than justification for this feeling. You’re a burden, his brain tells him, you’re useless. And so his mornings, days, and sleepless nights go, a man surviving himself, hopeless.
The very week I heard the man’s testimony, I’d lost a cousin. In truth I’d lost him weeks before but hadn’t known. Only later after the news had circulated among family and arrived as a text, had I been made aware: my brilliant, funny cousin had died in London. In the company of his fiancé and future mother-in-law visiting from Brazil, he had thrown himself onto the tracks of an oncoming train in the Tube. I can picture his face as I write this. Handsome, eyes shining with wit and cunning. I didn’t know him well but shared his company off and on through childhood, after which we were discharged from scrappy innocence and sent to wander and fumble for a future. I never met his fiancé. I hadn’t known he had been living in London, or why. I see his mother every few years and have been told she has self-published a book about him. I can’t imagine what it would be like to read it. Maybe it says something about me that I haven’t.
On the podcast the man with clinical depression describes to me and to others how the illness filters stimuli, narrativizes even a walk in the woods as a spectacle of tooth and claw, horror where others might hear beauty. The birds singing in the trees. People not under the spell of depression might pause to listen, savor the intricacy and effervescence of their calls. But him? He hears threats, competition over mates and territory. The beauty that some hear in all this an expression of casual willful ignorance. He loathes birds for hewing so close to their nature and dislikes people for forgetting how unforgiving nature can be, killing without conscience and punishing the weak. In his opinion anyone who practices a bird-call is a pornographer.
*
After she had reached a certain age, her life closing behind her, she found herself free to do what she wished with her afternoons. To the surprise of everyone who knew her, she took up painting and sketching. People were difficult to draw, she quickly discovered, landscapes were easier. Halfway between the two were animals—squirrels, horses, rabbits. For a while she painted from photographs but soon discovered this felt akin to taxidermy. No, to catch the liveliness of a creature, to spare it a slow cold leeching from life as representation, she would have to devise a different tactic, one that let them play a while on a canvas or sketchbook before being released back into their respective wilds.
Though it took some time, eventually she lit upon a method that suited her. No longer would she work from photographs: she’d collaborate with those creatures she could share a moment with, in vivo, en plein air. Mornings she would take a seat in her back yard, sketch pad on her lap, assume a posture of utmost receptiveness and stillness. She would wait much the way hunters in deer stands do, but towards a different purpose. Should a chipmunk or wren appear nearby, she wouldn’t take aim to kill it—rather, with subtle flourishes her right hand would briefly recreate its presence on paper. Once the wren or chipmunk darted from view, her hand would go silent. On to the next encounter, the next brief animal.
This approach she refined over the course of several summers. Her range of subjects narrowed, no more cats, squirrels, no more mammals, for a while birds, then those too winnowed down to a few species, until only one seemed to suit her: hummingbirds. These were common in that part of the country but so fleeting in their appearances as to seem rare. To tease them from their native invisibility, she hung a feeder filled with sugar water from the branch of a nearby tree, then angled her chair at a short distance in view of it. There she would sit and wait for an opportunity to recreate on paper what teased the air before her.
This was her sole ambition—to sketch live nude models of hummingbirds. Amused, confused, her children didn’t quite know what to make of it. She didn’t frame them or pin them to walls, labor to work them into finished paintings. Blizzards of marks, scribbles, dashes, brevities moving in wake of her hand. Finished with a sketchbook, she’d gift it to a friend or grandchild, unbothered to lose so many afternoons. To make way for the next round of drawings, she explained, she had to rid herself of the older ones. Besides, these weren’t hers alone, at best only half-belonged to her. They would retain their liveliness only if she handed them along.
*
In an Airbnb in Jämtland, two travelers watch their host through an open window. The man fresh from having given them a tour of their cabin, the sauna, wash room. He strides across a cruddy gravel road to the house where he lives with a Thai woman half his age. Mia farang, one traveler says to the other, imported wife. Over the past several decades Swedish women have fled the countrysides of the north, emigrating to the cities, leaving generations of men behind as unwilling bachelors. Luckily the Internet came along to solve that problem. There services could be found through which someone might purchase a wife. Girls from poor regions of Thailand, the Philippines. Almost forty thousand women from Thailand alone in 2013.
The next three days they see the woman infrequently, smoking on her back porch, carrying linens to another cabin. Their entire stay in Jämtland, rarely do they see people, mostly just houses and parked cars. They walk the road in the direction of the wilderness until it trails off into a marsh, from there walking through the rushes until they find a pair of canoes pulled to land, flipped upside down. They spot a ladder that ascends to a hunter’s tree house of sorts, floor fashioned from corrugated roofing, elk antlers hung from the branches. The place doesn’t exude affluence but the woman they’ve seen standing alone smoking at least had cigarettes and satellite television. When she arrived in country, how did they communicate, she and her husband? Through a translation app on their phones, through hand gestures? As the travelers have noticed over a shared lifetime of traveling, silence between people can mean different things, depending on the country. So it could be for a time they didn’t even understand each other’s silences.
On the morning of their departure, one of the travelers crosses the road towards the main house to deposit the keys in a box by the door, as instructed. Having done so, he turns for the walk back to the rental car, but movement at a window has him notice the woman’s eye peeking through blinds. What would her husband have done if he’d caught her spying on them? Shortly after it began raining. In Jämtland it rained often, chilly and inhospitable to fools who walked out across the land expecting scenic beauty. That much the travelers learned later that afternoon, following a path through mountains.
*
They migrate to survive, follow the food and weather, their long-range efforts starving and exhausting them. My bird-self draws no distinction between species on the matter, human or otherwise. Except this: some do so out of necessity, others for enjoyment.
Whole lives begin, end while I’m not looking, subtle are the cages of selfhood. Not that it’s anyone’s job to sketch every single swift that dives and flits above a chimney, maybe just that they’re a consideration. Walk down this alley, not that one. Stop a second, look up, scan for activity above rooftops.
Is this done out of necessity or enjoyment? Here are a few more living phenomena that harbor no prior knowledge of you—get used to it. Down a dormant chimney they go, a vertical nest originally fashioned for other purposes. This I have noticed and have left behind in pursuit of a more intimate neighborhood. I recall it now to prove how unremarkable secrets can be when kept for their own sake, because they’re common. Crane oriole starling, loon whimbrel raven, adult child newborn. Robin or owl, swallow.
