Birds Art Life Death: The Art of Noticing the Small and Significant. Kyo Maclear
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I don’t know what else was said over that epic surge of water, but when she hung up the phone, a decision had been made. She asked the babysitter to take a single photo of us standing by the Falls and then we boarded the bus back to Toronto.
As an escape it was small and brief but it left an impression.
I learned then or later that although we may wish for limitlessness, we may opt to cling to limits, choosing known unfreedom over the waterfall of unknown possibility.
In reading about Phoebe Snetsinger, I have discovered she did not actually pursue her bird passion fervently until a doctor diagnosed her with terminal cancer when she was fifty. The diagnosis was premature, and she ended up living nearly twenty more years, but it gave her the impetus and permission she needed. I hesitate to call illness providential, but sometimes it is the only way out when you are a mother, when embracing freedom from domestic expectations is perceived as irresponsible, even monstrously selfish. For Phoebe Snetsinger, melanoma was an appalling portal to a larger world.
By the time she died in 1999, at the age of sixty-eight, killed in a bus accident during a birding expedition in Madagascar, she had seen and recorded 8,398 bird species, more than anyone in history.
I don’t know if Snetsinger’s children resented their mother’s frequent absences or the unquenchable passion that came to rule her life. What I do know is that three of the four are now bird researchers in the United States.
I recently found the photo of my mother and me standing by Niagara Falls. She is forty and dressed in a black blouse and a white vest, facing a complicated middle age. I look uneasy in a pale yellow poncho. I look worried that I may billow over the falls. She is holding the back of my poncho with her hand. What I understood as a child was that she needed me close by and grounded. What I like to think now, as the mother I have become, is that she wanted us to take off together.
Now that the musician and I were both standing outside the aviary looking in, the birds were considerably less frazzled. A diamond firetail swooped into the birdbath. Another hopped on the food table. If we had turned off the lights, they would have gone quiet as if the sun had gone down.
The musician removed his nitrile gloves with a snap, tossed them into an overflowing garbage can. I followed suit. The finches were singing, and as the music softened the room’s hard edges, I noticed the musician’s expression soften too. I could see he wasn’t really angry at his father so much as concerned about the wrong-headed ways we approach the things we love.
For many years I told myself a story that painted my mother in tragic terms, as a woman who had made unhappy sacrifices, who had accepted wifely duty over artistic fulfillment. Within that mythology, the journey to and from the Falls became the emblem of my mother’s capitulation and failure. I quietly blamed her for giving in, for not trying hard enough, for allowing her creative dreams to be thwarted.
But that was my story, not hers. It was a story that clung to an artificial vision of what it meant to be an artist, a story that allowed me to imagine myself as freer (better, stronger, less frustrated) by comparison.
In fact, the opposite may be true. Another story might be that my mother did not feel thwarted or locked out of opportunities or locked into obdurate habits or locked on to a quest that would require too much. At my age, she did not feel caged by the obligation to follow a passion that would not necessarily make her happy. She loved art but was fine without it. It did not mark her. There were long stretches when she lacked the time or inclination to look for beauty in the world, and that was okay. She didn’t berate herself or feel she had somehow failed or proven herself unworthy if she didn’t feel like painting. She made her art lightly, suspending the pursuit of perfection. She made art when there was no one waiting for her to produce. She made art for herself.
The truth probably lies somewhere between these two stories.
My mother is a mystery to me. Between us is a barrier of language and disposition. She does not divulge or publicly introspect. She is easily riled, so I have learned to keep conversation breezy over weekly meals that I prepare. I will never know if there was a moment before the photo was taken when she enjoyed a kind of giddy happiness as she imagined a fresh start and a new life. I will never know where or what she was running towards and what clinched her decision to return, to keep living in the same house, the same life. Beyond her need to maintain appearances and stability, or some enduring tenderness towards my father, I cannot guess exactly what kept her.
Still, I have held on to this photo of us at the Falls as evidence. The photograph says: there will be times when an impulse to flee and a desire for freedom may tug at you and take you to the watery edge, the insoluble boundary between your needs and others’ needs. Keep sight of the Falls.
I used to think that freedom was a hidden object. I stalked it through the house of my life, imagined that I would find it, rolled away under the bed, tucked there behind a chest of drawers.
I used to think that freedom was a simple matter of release, a door to be opened, the inside let out like a caged bird or a wish made true.
But not all birds choose to make great sky-loops of their freedom.
Now I know that the truth about freedom is that it’s a practice and not a permanent condition. “It actually takes a daily effort to be free,” writes Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage. Freedom is not a great leap or a definitive jailbreak or “the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed.”
What can you do within these narrow lines and this limited time? Who or what is stopping you?
When I look back on the time my friend and I ran away as teenagers, one thing stays with me: we ran as if we were being pursued, but if we had turned around we would have discovered that no one was following us. We had internalized our discipline and our jailers. We were good girls who could not afford to believe that flight could be so easy, so unpunishable. After all, if there were no fixed obstacles, what but ourselves kept us in place?
The finches kept singing as we left the aviary. It was possible that they were singing for distant and unseen cousins in Australia. The sound travelled in all directions. It moved through and around objects. As we walked down the corridor, I could still hear it passing through the walls.
On the satisfactions of small birds and small art and the audacity of aiming tiny in an age of big ambitions.
I work at things. I try to do what the pigeons do when someone drops a loaf of bread to the ground and work larger pieces into a manageable size. I do this with tasks and crises. I do this with chores and meals I prepare.
The musician did this with nature.
His approach, enjoying small spots of nature every day rather than epic versions of wilderness and escape, made sense to me. Big trips were the glaciers, cruise ships to Madagascar, the Verdon Gorge, the Cliffs of Moher, walking on the moon. Small trips were city parks with abraded grass, the occasional foray to the lake-woods of Ontario, a dirt pile. Smallness did not dismay me. Big nature travel—with its extreme odysseys and summit-fixated explorers—just seemed so, well, grandiose. The drive to go bigger and further just one more instance of the overreaching