Do you ever have the creeping realisation dawn on you that you know about all kinds of things that do not matter and very little about the things that do? Personally, I know all kinds of little factoids and bits of trivia but worryingly little about the world that is immediately outside my window. I can do pretty well in a pub quiz but I know virtually nothing about the flora and fauna that I encounter on my daily walks. To be a flaneur is a good and noble thing but at some point you have to transition from looking to seeing and lastly to knowing1.
Take, for example, the birds. As I type these words sitting on a sofa in my dressing gown I can hear through the wide open window of this third floor flat the lapping wave-like sounds of continuous light traffic, occasional sirens and the counterpoint of two different birdsongs- one is a quiet and high chipchipchipchipchip and the other is a lower and more sonorous woo-WOO- woo- woowoowoo, the end of the call trailing off as if the embarrassed bird had said something that he regretted in the moment, something he knew was boring and so ended up mumbling to hide his awkwardness.
When not plugged into computers and headphones and an infinite playlist of songs and videos and white-noise loops and binaural beats2 these diegetic sounds are freely available, and beautiful, though not within our control. Perhaps this is why we so often choose to overlook them3. But who are these birds that make these calls that soundtrack my days (when I am aware enough to pay them attention)? How long do they live, how do they spend their days, do they fly south for the winter or remain local year round? I have no idea. But I now feel compelled to find out.
The other day I was walking home from having done a little food shopping in the city centre. I had a bag of grocery in each hand and the late lunchtime sun was beating down surprisingly fiercely for England. I took a somewhat longer route around by the city library and some back streets and cut-throughs so that I might cool off in the shade. By doing so I walked through a series of metal seats and benches which are the haunt of office workers, and Pret-A-Manger sandwich inhalers, and yellow fingered smokers and the semi-destitute who are not old (though weathered in the face) and still possessing the energy to conspire and scheme and laugh disproportionately loudly or to squabble endlessly, depending on how the daytime cider is hitting them at that particular moment.
As I walked through this area I saw a lone woman standing with her palms by her hips pointed up to the sky. She was perhaps in her forties but gave the impression of being someone who had not had it easy, who had seen some things. She had long black hair streaked with grey and her unseasonably thick red overcoat looked tired and well worn. And she was surrounded by pigeons, dozens of them, pecking around her boots, perched on her shoulders and head, each taking turns to land softly on her wrists and peck the crumbs she had in her outstretched palms. The beating of the wings was surprisingly loud but she was still and her face was beatific. She seemed to radiate. I did a double take, my brow beaded with sweat, grocery bags digging into my palms. The red overcoat woman knew something the rest of us didn’t. She had something that no one else there had.
Sometimes you have to use technology to escape technology. Vestiges of folk wisdom whose intergenerational transmission were blocked by the advent of the rat race can still be found on forums and blogs and wikis, can still be had in the form of YouTube videos and PDFs and zip files. And so it is with the birds. It turns out that there are others who feel like me and so there is now a market for apps that can identify bird calls and give you information about the warbler in question. Or you can combine YouTube videos of birds in action with library books on ornithology to piece things together yourself. It goes without saying that I prefer the latter two options.
So my research tells me that the woo-WOO- woo- woowoowoo that I mentioned before is the call of a wood pigeon and the higher sound is a finch of some sort, possibly a female chaffinch although I’m not sure. I’m also starting to see- if not hear- the odd swift darting around which means that it is summertime. They are a breeding summer visitor so I have learnt with the less frequently seen types being classified as ‘rare vagrants’ a phrase that has a certain romance to it, at least for me.
The birds I have learnt, cannot be unheard or unseen once their presence is realised. Since beginning to draft this essay last week I have stood still for a full five minutes (usuallly with bag of shopping in hand) gawping at a murder of crows who were pecking around a peeling-paint bench and some bare grass on a housing estate. I have likewise stopped to listen to a charm of finches within the bushes while cutting through my local park. And I now know that the cluster of pheasants I have spied while being a passenger driving down country roads are called a bevy or a bouquet. I aspire to one day see a parliament of owls4 or a drumming of woodpeckers. Life has become just a little more poetic, a little more enchanted as a result of devoting a small amount of time to the here and now and real rather than to the abstract and hypothetical and fanciful5.
I now can’t help but conclude that our immediate environment- no matter where it is- is teeming with enchantment if we can simply retrain ourselves to not be blind to its beauty and dead to its music.
But I may well change my mind about this the next time a seagull swoops down to intimidate me while I’m eating my lunch6.
This progression marks the approach that I take to these essays- I try to be receptive to the world as I go out into it- and once I encounter something that begs to be known then through the process of writing about it find out what it is I think about it. They say you should write about what you know, but I’ve always found it to be that you can only know about something through the very act of writing about it.
Remember when they were all the rage?
Diegetic music is a term in drama that refers to music that originates within the scene itself- like when a character puts a record on the turntable or a band in the scene start to play- as opposed to a soundtrack or score that exists outside the scene, which we the audience hear but the characters do not. I have a theory that as society becomes increasingly self-centred and alienated we resort to the non-diegetic scoring of our own lives (via perpetual earbud wearing and personal soundtrack curation) so that we may feel like the main character in our own personal dramas, complete with our own O.S.T.
This observation doesn’t quite have enough legs to become a full essay in its own right which is why it has been relegated to a footnote. But be my guest to take it and run with it.
I was originally going to say I wanted to see a committee of vultures because I like that collective noun but on reflection seeing them would be disconcerting.
Not that these things can’t have their place.
A final thing I learnt: ‘Seagull’ is only a colloquial and not an official name for gulls. Not only is there no species called a seagull, many of these gulls live far away from the sea.
I remember reading Ada; or, Ardor by Nabokov and he had a description, I've forgotten its exact context, of the protagonist reading books on horticulture and ornithology. That scene had happened just shortly after I noticed that Nabokov used very precise descriptions of the flora and fauna in the environment around the story and I grokked that one of the interesting boundary lines between what we often call "pre-" and "post-War" (War = WWII) literature is the switching of a common language and understanding of things like types of plants, bugs, critters with the common language and understanding of parts of machines, office accoutrements, computers.
Simply noticing is the beginning of art, and, possibly, enlightenment