Birds of America

...Chardin, the greatest painter of mid-18th c. France...perfect rightness....the basic nobility of design of something that has had to serve a human need unchanged for many centuries. Chardin's pictures show that the qualities immortalized in verse by La Fontaine and Moliere - good sense, a good heart, an approach to human relationships both simple and delicate - survived into the mind-18th c., and survive to this day in French country districts...

---Kenneth Clark. 

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'Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of it not being soemthing else, but only itself.'

---Lorrie Moore, Birds of America.

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Preparation: always wanting, you feel. The round of our lives settling in no matter what. The great forces of conservatism, time; the msytification of the era we live in, the drawing of equivalences, the exchange of like for like and bourgeois comfort...all of that etches on to our faces a kind of ordinariness with such a lack of distinction that we sometimes struggle to recognize ourselves. With time even our voices will falter, triggering off a memory of some golden patch in your life when there was clarity to your words and a lack of hesitation between them. We forgive our faces for letting us down, for carrying on with the show, but there's no betrayal like that of the human voice.

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"I don't look at my instrument [the bass] as having one specific role; I was raised to go as far as you can...'You have to share the space with people'...Erykah Badu would always say, 'Get out your mind and come out here with everybody else.'"

I don't know if we can get out of our minds any more. There is no 'there' there, only here, here. "This is where it's at..and this is where it's always been at" ( a throwaway line from Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys). And what is the scope for a quiet interiority, the possibility of the 'radical calm' of  being alone and yet not anxious to find oneself in other people or exterior things? What kind of witness to our lives do we want?

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Birds of America (so far) is a collection of sad little stories of small lives caught up in some kind of confusion. There are parts which are jokey, parts which don't quite chime (who thinks like that? who speaks like that?) but you can put that to one side. There are strange instances of a veering into the unreal or the semi-fantastical (I'm not sure why I have that impression. Probably couldn't give you a single line to back it up, but it does feel as if a rare medieval bird would hop into a story, even if its presence was in a single word, a single image).

The survival of folklore, legends, Gothic horror, story-telling, love. The modern west is born with a sense of its own death, right there from the beginning: the dance of death. Nothing lasts, nothing can outshine fate; the sweetness is destined to cool and crack and decay. "Nothing persists..." say the Muslims and in that sense we moderns, to the extent that we are modern, are all half-muslims. But that isn't quite right either. Whereas the muslims continue: "...save for the Face of God"  the moderns would say, hang on, what about love? What about the memory of love? Is that, at least, not always with us?

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Outside your house on a bright and warm summer morning. The great tree behind your back is like an anchor in the world. Trees are sacred because they last so long, see so much.

A fly, bright-backed, fizzing with energy and dash, glistening with intention, with those eyes from an alien universe and that thin coat of armour, appears like a miniature mythical beast with a film of oil over it. Next to it, at the distance of two hands, rests an old, ancient medieval fly, calm, peaceful, dispassionate, Oriental in its stillness. Black and furry and satisfied, it sits on the brick wall like a plump raisin. 

Did they once share the same ancestor, these two flies? How much genetic material do we share, after all? And what chance variations, what random choices lead one of us to go our own way and leave home whilst the other settles for a completely different life? By what chance is it that the old gods allow a thought to grow again, as each thinks of the other after all this time? 

The brief pausing for breath, to take it all in, the early morning light bright, outlining the word with great precision, the warmth of the sun on our backs. The life of a fly is short and carefree, with minor variations on its one theme, its necessary strangeness to the world. The essence of 'flyness' is to not stick around for too long. But since its mind never reaches that second degree of thought, that stepping away from its life into the shadows, it probably doesn't mind that too much. No fly has second thoughts. No beast cooked a meal (Samuel Johnson). No fly parts with such sweet, deep sorrow.

The swami finished cutting the lawn. It was time to pack the bags.