Birds Art Life Death: The Art of Noticing the Small and Significant. Kyo Maclear
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Pain?
Yes.
Where?
Here. Here. Here.
My father’s face was now ashen. I nodded at my husband: Time to leave. My father needed to rest. While he struggled to stand, I had a moment of clarity: I had just told my father, a man who did not have time to waste, that I was writing a book on something obscure and indefinable. Could I not, for his sake, choose a less artisanal subject?
I wasn’t too concerned. At a certain stage, these matters within families don’t get worked out, they just get half-heartedly poked at or ignored. I knew my father would choose to forget what I had said and ask me again a few days later: “So what are you working on?” And if the answer still did not satisfy, he would ask again and again and again.
I, in turn, would make things up in response, not because I am an admirable daughter but because I do not want anyone deciding for me what is big and what is little. I do not want fashion or fathers to decide.
Because it’s never that simple. I can pretend not to care and still be wishing for his interest, his engagement, his assent.
What is worth singing about? What if the song is too small? Books will tell you that birds sing for a number of reasons—to call to each other, to warn of predators, to navigate, to attract mates. But I wasn’t so much interested in what the books believed. I wanted to know what the musician believed. “Why do birds sing?” So at the end of our first bird walk together, I asked. I wanted him to say they sing because they have to, because they must, because it is part of their very essence, an irrepressible need.
“I don’t want to get all whimsical,” he said. “Anthropomorphism is a dangerous habit and a hard one to break.”
I hesitated, acknowledging to myself that it was possible and likely my habits of anthropomorphism were unbreakable. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
Slowly the musician nodded. Finally, he said,
I don’t know why his response made me so happy but it did.
On standing in a cage with captive birds and thinking about the daily effort to be free.
Love can be so glaring and fierce, so full of paranoiac energy, it will obliterate you. The pressure of being an only child, single and inescapably needed, the focal point of too much parental attention, made me want to bolt. As a child, I wished for the decoy of a sibling and the buttressing support of a large extended family. As a teenager, I longed to run away, uncage myself.
In the summer of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and ran across rooftops with my friend. A neighbour, believing there were robbers overhead, called the police but we kept running, sliding down a tree, clambering over fences while a siren wailed up the street. My friend (reader of Kerouac and Colette) kept running, her hair streaming through the night. I, on the other hand, lasted only an hour before heading home. I was worried about my indoor cat, about whether I had left the balcony door open. The feeling of ranging off without thought for my family did not sit well with me. It produced guilt and panic.
That was the day I discovered a truth about my temperament and circumstance. My freedom and creative work needed something to radiate against, some pressure to resist, some limit to be overreached.
From that point on, the question was not “How can I flee this situation and get someplace better?” but rather “What can I do with what I have here?” I stopped dreaming of what a person could do with limitless freedom, resources, and time and became more interested in what a person could do with relative scarcity, in what abundance could be generated with modest resources, in what a mind could create in cramped quarters.
And so, less Honoré de Balzac, Rainer Maria Rilke, Philip Roth. And more Charlotte Brontë, Franz Kafka, Tillie Olsen.
When I met the musician this question of how a person introduces space and distances within the tight confines of a life took on firmer meaning and sharper focus. That he had found spaciousness in our crowded city seemed miraculous. That he was willing to lead me through a year of bird-finding filled me with gratitude. He made a difficult moment seem more habitable. I was eager to begin. But the weather did not co-operate. We had a bird trip in mind but it was too windy. Too cold. Too rainy. So when the musician invited me to visit his father’s aviary of finches instead, I happily went.
The musician’s father, also a “birdman,” built his aviary back in 1998. With a little ingenuity and some wood and wire he transformed a one-bedroom apartment in a building he owned into a place where his Australian finches could fly freely.
The musician goes to the aviary three times a week to clean and to feed the birds. He has been doing this since 2009, when his father asked him to cover for him after he suffered a bad fall.
The musician became a bird lover at the aviary. He tells a story of holding a dying finch one day and feeling overwhelmed by its tiny heartbeat. He had never studied a bird so closely before, never observed its delicate and immaculate plumage, and the experience altered him. He bought a camera and a lens and learned how to use them by photographing the finches. One compulsion led to another, and by 2011 he had moved beyond the aviary and was spending as much time in the field as possible, creating an ornithological map of Toronto, studying the behaviour and habits of local birds in all seasons.
So I knew the aviary was important. What I didn’t realize was that his experience with free birds had made him a queasy aviarist. He had grown disillusioned with specialty, fetish birds. He disliked the pet trade, which was driving some birds to extinction by reducing wild populations that were already in decline because of deforestation. What started off as a temporary favour to his father had turned into a burden. But he wanted to be a good son, took this to be an inviolable responsibility, and this I understood.
When I ran away as a teenager I was running from ideas about my character and my future and purpose in life. I was running away from a story about dutiful daughters. I returned because I didn’t know where I would go or who I would be without these ideas.
“Please don’t be alarmed, I am wearing a sweater-vest,” the musician said as he led me into the building. I climbed the creaky narrow staircase behind him. The sweater-vest was part of an ensemble including a wool cap and plaid scarf that made the musician look like a man with Prohibition-era crime ties.
The apartment added to the impression of shady business. It was cold and spartan. There was a fridge and a long table and stacks of cardboard boxes but not much else. Where the bedroom might have been was an aviary about ten by twenty-five feet. We dropped our puffy coats on the table and the musician gave me a pair of blue nitrile gloves and led me inside.
The contrast between the cold, derelict room and the warm-blooded chaos inside the aviary was startling. It looked like someone had thrown handfuls of French bonbons into the air. Brightly plumaged birds were flying everywhere—back and forth and up and down. I counted twenty birds. The musician pointed out five different species of finches. There were star finches with bright red faces, diamond firetails with crimson rumps and dazzling white spots, chocolate-coloured Bengalese society finches, several gold-breasted waxbills and a female cordon bleu. Each one was