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Apr 25, 2001
Whipped
Bone tired.Out at dawn, I tarried for a Whip-poor-will at dusk, and tuckered myself out.
With daylight approaching fourteen hours, seeing both ends gets to be a bit much, but I was whipped into a frenzy, taking in all the Spring that could be seen. A Whip-poor-will I'd never seen, so I wanted to make the most of it. I've seen Nighthawks, which are somewhat similar, but they, despite the name, often fly by day, (which is how I've seen them), while the other Nightjars are strictly nocturnal, and a rarer sight. But here was one roosting in a Cherry tree, sleeping the day away, as is their habit. You couldn't say it was perched, exactly, as it basically lay lengthwise along the tree limb. Best known for its eponymous song, the Whip-poor-will is a cryptically patterned bird, and usually escapes notice during the day, often roosting on the ground without incident. This one was unusually conspicuous, low down in a small tree, where it was relatively easy to spot, at least if you knew it was there. Whoever it was that first found the bird, their identity was lost by the time I saw it, but word had passed among the birders in the Ramble, and a steady stream of observers passed by for a look, just as the Gill flowed continuously past the foot of the tree.
Despite the fine view, you had to know what you were looking at in order to know what you were seeing. With its eyes closed, and its big head sunk into its breast, it might have been just a bump on the limb. Binoculars revealed details of the mottled plumage, and even its whiskers(!), but you had to wait for dark, when it finally opened its big eyes and roused itself, to verify that it was indeed a night-flying bird.
And fly it did, into the deepening shadows, and out of my ken. I was left to negotiate the Ramble in the dark. Still the site of some curious human mating displays, the Ramble is less dangerous than it once was, but confronted with the piercing searchlights of a roving police van, I was almost wishing for the bad old days. A nocturnal bird might have been blinded, or perhaps revealed, but whither the Whip-poor-will had wandered was a question that went unanswered.
You might think that barely seeing a dun-colored bird take wing at evening is hardly worth the effort and endurance it entails. I'm whipped, no doubt, to use the vernacular, and not by any Whip-poor-will (or plain Poorwill, for that matter), but by the great green Goddess Herself. I insist here on the feminine, if only to refute the unwholesome implications of the term "whipped". "Pussy-whipped" is the full phrase, I'm afraid, and it tells much about our awkward relationships, not just between the sexes, but between all of us and Nature.
A man is pussy-whipped when he does obeisance to the Feminine. Or at least when he does so for the sole cause of obtaining sex, regarding any other expression of the attitude as a betrayal of his masculinity. At best, the term denotes an unbalanced interpersonal relationship; at worst it points to a larger pathology, for it ill suits us to resent the native ways of Love. Nor are such ways diminished if we refer to them as "mating behaviors". With birds, it’s generally the male that puts on the display, but no sweet song, no florid hue, can in itself insure the survival of the species. Having won her favor, he still must serve the female and her nest. And he does so, without apparent embarrassment (or scorn from other males).
As for us, our Maleness suffers an agony of contradiction between its premise of power and the necessity of its subservience. If Men have erred on the side of maintaining control, they may be forgiven.
But only by Women.
How deep this runs may be seen in the ballad of the Bitter Withy, a folk expression of the Western deity's formative years. Jesus, the putative Prince of Peace, drowns the neighbor's children because they treat him with just the sort of cruelty that children are so accomplished at. This seems rather harsh, and it should be said that such apocrypha are not endorsed by current Christian authorities, but their popular appeal during the heyday of the religion may reveal something of its psychology.
Even a Christ child can't be allowed to get away with murder. He deserves a spanking. That's where the Feminine power comes in, wielding a fistful of Willow twigs, or withies: a switch with which to whip a naughty little god. The telling part is that our hero is hardly contrite. Rather than accept his punishment, he vents against the innocent Willow, cursing it with an early death.
Based on his later career, (though maybe not his coming one), I suppose we are to assume that Jesus eventually learns his lesson. But the fact that a Christian audience could endorse such behavior: the flouting of the Feminine; the insult to her instruments of action, is indicative of the cult's inattention to our need for goddesses as well as gods. The bad-boy hero is still with us; sometimes rebuked in pious tones, but more often acted out by the true disciples of our mythology.
The hypocrisy is the more pointed in that here we have missed a chance to find a better metaphor. For the Willow, though it does indeed fall earlier than other trees, does not just rot, but from its stumps and fallen trunks puts forth new shoots, filling its former abode with clones. What better picture of rebirth?
Still we mistrust such wisdom, if distaff.
We have turned our backs to the Goddess and Her trees, leaving Her the Moon, and when it sets, the darkness, full of perversity and fear. The creatures of the night belong to Her, and them too, we have decried. Night-flying birds are viewed with suspicion, the Whip-poor-will being no exception. Its family is known as "Goatsuckers", owing to a false belief that they act as milk vampires, attaching to udders, and draining livestock in the dark.
Such strange ideas flourish in the dark. Darkness softens edges, of sight and rationality. At least the night is soft; softness too is Hers. Which summons up another felinomorphic sex organ, one that's also another face of the Willow: the Pussy Willow, with its “furry” flowers. A whipping with the likes of these is no punishment, but a caress of Spring.
Whipped? No, not I, but grown, grown with a certain inclination towards Her will. No poor thing that, yet no more than the will of a wisp of Pussy Willow bloom, blown by an evening breeze that carries, too, (listen close), the whistled notes: "whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will".
Apr 15, 2001
To Rise Again
Horizontal Winter holds its breast against the groundGravity insists on nothing more than down
Prone or supine, we lie in wait
At most, in hope, we lie
In hope once more to rise
To rise again
Alive again
As Spring derives from Winter
And if it happens yet again
It happened once to start with
The miracle is never less
For all its repetition
What happened once, all Time ago
Still happens every moment
Spring is just a season;
Easter but a day
The Force that fosters Life extends
Beyond the bounds of Time
The Thing that started everything
The Thing that Spring remembers
Has linked our moments each to each
Defeating Time’s dispersal
We rise again
Alive again
Now, Then, and Ever After
The recognition in itself
Certifies our Blessing
Apr 09, 2001
Hawking My Wares
Apr 1, 2001
Being a Fool
As I stand here, looking through the binocular, contemplating such deep philosophical questions as “what’s that?” and “just how much like itself should any given thing be expected to look?”, it occurs to me that I am a fool. That this condition is widespread is of little consolation, and perhaps it’s no mistake that April Fool’s Day typically falls during Lent, a season that exposes our shortcomings. Turning the tables on common sense can open the path to insight, and a joke on one of us is a joke on all. Sometimes it seems that existence itself is a sort of monstrous prank, though whether we are perpetrators or victims is hard to say.Our best jokes are played upon ourselves, though not without some help from Providence.
I had the fortune to see the first swallow of the Spring. A Tree Swallow it seemed to me, seen near Balcony Bridge, on the 18th of March. Everything agreed with that identification, except that the color was rather dull, for which reason I reported it in the Log Book as a female bird. Thinking too much and not enough all at once is a habit of mine, and considering the matter later on, I realized that there was something strange, in that male birds typically lead the migration. They return first to the breeding grounds, where they establish territories from which to woo the later arriving females, so it’s unusual for the first sightings to be of anything other than adult males.
Doing a bit of research, I found that Tree Swallows are indeed the first swallows to return in Spring. Alone in their family, they eat fruit, as well as insects, which allows them to winter in North America, and to make their migratory move earlier than species strictly reliant on a good supply of bugs. These facts at least suggested to me that it was not inconceivable for a stray female to have found it’s way here. At least the timing was right, and it was more likely than in the case of a species that wintered only in the tropics.
I needed that much reassurance, despite the evidence of my eyes, in case anyone challenged the veracity of my report. Of course, if I’d just listed the species, without the sexual qualifier, there wouldn’t be a question, but that’s what I mean by thinking too much and not enough together. I was afraid of being exposed for the fool I am. As it was, nobody wrote any comment on the point, and the sighting showed up in an online summary, so I guess it was considered credible.
That doesn’t mean that somebody out there didn’t shake their head over my foolishness. The Log Book has its share of errors, and not all are subject to correction. That’s par for the course in birding. Observers of varying skill are out there, and sometimes it’s the least of us that are most eager to make report. The log at Point Pelee is nicknamed the “Book of Lies”.
I’ve never told you a lie, but I’ve certainly made some honest mistakes. Looking back at my earliest entries here, I’m appalled at my ignorance, especially in the matter of birds. After a year and a half, I feel like I’m making progress, but that mostly means being more humble about a slight decrease in the depth of my ignorance. So, if posts from early 2000 betrayed a woefully inadequate understanding of the complex process of molting, or mistook migrating Red-tailed Hawks for descendants of our local pair, I hope that these errors of fact did not detract from broader points I was making, regarding names and privacy. I don’t think anything I’ve written is so compromised, but maybe I just haven’t realized it yet. I reserve the right to make deletions or corrections, and I apologize for not actually putting much time into doing so. If I were to prepare the material for republication there are a few things I’d change, but as it is, I have a relatively harmless record of my own path towards greater understanding, and maybe that’s not a bad thing either. I should probably add some asterisks, with links to corrections, and I’ll do that, just as soon as...well, I’ll keep it in mind. In the meantime, double-check before you use any of these gems in cocktail party chatter. If you don’t know better yourself, who’s the fool?
You and I are not the only ones. Sometimes a little foolishness is a good thing. The post on names focused on the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, a bird misnamed, because, as any precise birder will tell you, it does not suck sap by suction, but laps it with a bushy tongue. But the poetry of the old name prevails, and a Yellow-bellied Sap Lapper just sounds silly.
I want my words to sound, not silly, but not so much authoritative, as merely true, with as much humility as truth deserves. Trying to express joy and wonder in technically precise terms will surely teach humility. What’s important is not to lose the ecstasy of the endeavor among the details of discipline. Ideally, the demands of the one should focus our appreciation of the other.
That did happen to me with the swallow.
The next of the new arrivals was the Eastern Phoebe. The Phoebe and the Tree Swallow do not look much alike, except when they do, and that’s the problem with birding: a lot of obvious things are not always so obvious. After I’d seen a few of the familiar Phoebes, I found one that perched in a slightly atypical pose, leaning forward, rather than it’s usual upright posture. In this position, the bird suddenly reminded me of the Tree Swallow, which had briefly perched in a similar attitude, and I had a moment of gut wrenching doubt. Had I actually seen a Phoebe? Could I be that foolish?
The birds are quite different in detail, but they are basically dark above and light below, of similar size, and both are, well, birds, so there is some similarity...
Awash in the presence of the bird, everything else seems to disappear. It’s hard to do anything but look. That’s what I mean by ecstasy, and that’s where the discipline comes in. Looking is not really passive, and by systematically examining details, ordering them within an overall impression, and maintaining a comparative context for the information, we can quantify our ecstasy in a manner that allows us to extend it beyond the moment, even if we lose some of the sheer existential fire in the process. And when that fire is lit again, we will recognize it.
The presence of the Phoebe drove the experience of the Swallow from my mind, to the point where I doubted its existence. This is no more than the foolishness that binds our limited perception. Luckily, I had learned enough about observing to satisfy myself that I had indeed seen a Tree Swallow. I had even made a couple of sketches, which help to cement fugitive memories. I could support my identification based on details of shape, pattern, and behavior. The bird swooped like a swallow, had the pointed wings and small bill, even the little bit of white just behind the wings, visible from above as it banked and turned. Any given detail is subject to individual idiosyncrasy, or perceptual distortion, and preconception can cloud our observations, but the range of evidence has convinced me of the bird’s identity.
As for the sex and color, well, I guess there is a modicum of doubt, and perhaps any doubt is too much. Life feels that way sometimes, and birding even more so, but I’ve been known to say that doubt is always reasonable, so feel free to disbelieve in my swallow if you like.
But I did see it.
And that’s no fooling.
At least I’m pretty sure.
Take it from a fool.