H Is For Hawk

 

In these days of climate change and wholesale destruction of nature, we hang all hopes for the future on nature’s resilience.  That resilience is the theme underlying Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is For Hawk (Grove Press, 2014).  Hers is a triangulated story shifting from her father’s death to the life of Arthurian legend writer T.H. White to Macdonald’s training of Mabel the goshawk, the medium-large raptor Accipiter gentilis of the title.  If these seem like strange bedfellows, Macdonald makes these transitions smoothly and by the end of the book, weaves a story of personal redemption and self-discovery that is both wise and profound.

T. H. White also wrote a book about raising and training a goshawk, and Macdonald turns to the celebrated author’s book as a guide for her own journey with Mabel.  He was not as prepared as Macdonald, and therefore his account is more fraught with difficulty and disappointment.  Yet he is a touchstone for Macdonald, a connection to an experience with an animal who has as much to teach her trainer as her trainer has to understand this predatory bird.  With a goshawk, however, there is no taming her nature; Macdonald, with great difficulty, simply trains the bird to follow her own instincts as a hunter of prey, and human and hawk learn to work as a unit on the hunt.

Macdonald’s father was a photojournalist who died in 2007.  She recounts his passing while on the job, and how she had to go with family members to pick up his belongings and find his car, which had been towed away when he did not return to pick it up while covering his final story.  Macdonald was very close to him, and the loss is almost overwhelming.  Part of her own training is to learn to live with loss and grief.  She recounts how her father taught her patience as the most important virtue.  He tells her that one must be willing to stay still and wait for her moment, much like a piece of reindeer moss can survive “just about anything the world throws at it” and remain resilient.  It is ironic that she finds herself staring at the moss when her mother informs her of her father’s passing.

The life of an Astringer—a solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks—is a lonely one, and Macdonald describes her daily life and routines with Mabel in poetic and deeply harmonic language.  The setting of the book is the Brecklands, a place known as the broken lands, and the area lives up to its name.  She clings to the words of Marianne Moore:  “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”  She tells us she has learned to hold tight and survive, much like the security of the jesses, leather straps that bind the hawk to the Astringer.  Her twin brother did not survive the difficult birth that brought Macdonald into the world.

 

Macdonald is so good at distilling the wisdom she absorbs from training Mabel.  She tells us there are two things she has learned about training hawks:  the Astringer must learn to become invisible, and the way to a hawk’s heart is through positive reinforcement with food.  Hawks are not social animals like dogs or horses.  They are predators, and their predatory nature is bred in their bones.  She equates training goshawks with “white-knuckle jobs” as described by her father.  These are dangerous journalism assignments.  Her father’s defense against the fear is to “look through the viewfinder” and stop being involved.  Instead, become the witness.  “All that exists is a square of finely ground glass and the world seen through it,” he tells her.  His advice in stressful, dangerous situations is to be mindful of “exposure and depth of field and getting the shot you hope for.”  Macdonald sees her father’s work in each photograph as “a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Rooted in her father’s philosophy is one that Macdonald also discovers in nature when training Mabel.  The world is forever; we are only a blink in its course.  Macdonald references Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great French street photographer, and his photographs of a decisive moment.  A good photograph means being open to all life offers and in an intuitive moment, click the shutter to capture.  If one misses the moment, it is gone forever.  Our lesson is to live in that moment—no past, no future, only the here and now.

Throughout the book, Macdonald’s writing is poetic and beautiful.  She writes:  “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things.  And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all.  You see that life will become a thing made of holes.  Absences.  Losses.  Things that were there and are no longer.  And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

 She also does not neglect the mythological elements of hawks and falcons, one that has played out over millennia:  in ancient shamanic traditions in Eurasian cultures, “hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.”  Mabel comes into Helen Macdonald’s life right at a time of need, and in working with this intense and intelligent animal, she finds peace and purpose in her life.  She illuminates a culture that most of us never experience:  training a fierce and intense goshawk to hunt with her human counterpart.  In the end, Macdonald comes to understand the overwhelming grief and loss inherent in this life.  Her story is extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful.

 

Poor Banished Children of Eve

 

It is the dusky shadows of an ancient September.  My grandmother sits on the porch of her house, reciting the rosary in monotonous, sepia tones:

“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.  To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve…”

I was often pulled into this ritual.  She would hand me one of her spare strings of beads, and I would take my seat in the autumnal twilight, sinking into the recitation, the circular rhythm.  In the span of my childhood, I went from not understanding the words I breathed, to comprehending their significance, to finding them anachronistic.  Yet, there is a comfort in prayer, a reassuring spirit in following through:

“Glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

Except worlds do end, and begin again.

My grandmother is gone.  The house is unrecognizable, altered by another owner.  And I am middle-aged.  The ritual remains lodged in the shrouds of memory.  Yet, it is once again September.  In September, we use to go to play at my grandmother’s house after school.  That, too, is a strand of memory broken.

Our rituals have all been broken.  This only adds to our feeling that the world has turned upside down.  We do not leave our homes now.  We avoid contact and protect ourselves.  My ritual is to rise in the morning, go to my desk, bring up a student’s face on my screen, and work with her for an hour on her essay.  Later, I will pull up another face to discuss her struggles in her classes, the learning strategies and work-arounds that will help her get back on track.

Despite all our devices, our methods of communication allowing one person to see another in pixels on a screen, we are lonely still.  It feels as if the world is ending, but as my friend, William Michaelian, wrote recently:

“The end of the world is a strange and beautiful place. It keeps growing, and it keeps ending. And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

To do this, we may have to let go of cherished rituals:  family dinners, baseball games, the rhythms and milestones of the workweek, the long walk at twilight.  We must adapt and change our colors, and recognize that we see the world differently now, and there will be new rituals to embrace.  “And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

I do not pray anymore.  Mumbling words without the strength of conviction is an exhausted ritual I can do without.  I love silence.  If she were still alive, I would gladly go sit on my grandmother’s porch with her.  I would tell her how the world has changed.  She would tell me the torch has been passed.  And then she would say her prayers while I take in the gloaming in silence, feeling the wind on my face.

I have been dreaming of her lately.  Or, I should say, in the dreams, she is dead as she is in real life, but I dream of her house.  I am there again.  The house is empty, but the same as when I last was there.  I am responsible for repairing and renovating it, for keeping it preserved.  There are the gardens, the fruit trees, the lawns, the two-story house itself.  I rise every morning at dawn to walk the property, a single house on three connected lots.  I water the vegetables and flowers, mow the grass, prune the trees and shrubs in season.  If there is something to repair, the materials appear, and I can put it right again.  There are no other people in this dream.  I am the sole survivor of some colossal ending.  It is strange and discomforting.  I do not leave the property, and a ten-foot wooden fence protects the place from intruders.  I can see only the sky above.  Nearby houses are shadowy and undefined.  What kind of dream is this?  Purgatory?  Heaven?  When does solitude become loneliness?

There is no one left to perform the ritual, no mumbled prayers to Mary, the Mother of God.  I am not interested in continuing the nightly prayer.  I am more interested in the Orthodox Jew, swaying back and forth in prayer.  I am more interested in the Buddhist, in the lotus position, humming, gone into another plane of existence.  I am interested in the Muslim, on his knees, facing Mecca, which may be a million miles away on the other side of the globe, yet he is tethered to it by a strong and indestructible fiber of the heart.  Finally, I am the one who spans the distance and lands somewhere between agnostic and atheist.  I know the world is a sacred place.  I know that divinity lives in all things.  And I know that we do not end.  We are transfigured at the moment of death—we become light and air.

So I am thinking of past Septembers.  We just observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a moment we should all reflect upon, not just our friends in Judaism.  The world needs to recognize the pain and suffering we cause each other, the way we are hell-bent on destroying who we are and what we have built with our own hands as well as the pulsating Earth beneath us.

My grandmother, in an afterlife of her own construction, is probably sitting on her porch in some other unreachable dimension, mumbling her prayers and letting the beads slip over her fingers, keeping count of decades and prayers.  That is her path now.

I stay up late into the warm fall night, remembering all of it, the way we live, the poor banished children of Eve.

 

Random Notes On a Summer Night

It is absolutely quiet with only the sound of the city rumbling in the distance.  Then the siren, the horn, somebody is in jeopardy somewhere.  The walls pop and crack as the heat escapes and is vented into space.  Outside the kitchen window, an opossum stares at me intently, resting on the top of a fence layered with ivy, wondering who I am and why I am standing in my kitchen looking out at him.  His eyes glow in the dark.

I read and read.  I journey into the darkness to find the light.  I marvel at the ideas, the insights, the communion with the mind of the writer across time.  This book is about murder, about disembodied voices, about unexplained noises on the street or in the alley.  There are those who prowl the night like predators, but my doors and windows are locked.  The A/C is on and for a brief moment there is no pandemic, no uprising, no unidentified forces taking people off the street.  I am alone in the night.

I never feel entirely safe anymore.  I trust no one.  I marvel at the strangeness of the times in which we live.  We whisper about the new normal.  Will the pandemic die out?  Would we take the vaccine if one were available?  I would be hesitant.  Again, the trust factor.

Should I try to sleep?  I have appointments with students in the morning.  I must sit in on a Zoom meeting with others from the university.  I need to be fresh and focused, but here in the middle of the night, my mind is running through the past, the future, and back to the present, all jumbled together.  What do I know?  What do I know?

I know this is all not business as usual.  What will happen in the months to come?

I hear muffled footsteps outside and go to the window to see what is happening.  A man is jogging down the street in the darkness.  I wonder about his intentions, but it does make sense to be running at this late hour:  no need for a mask and no encounters with other people.

In the distance I hear fireworks or gunshots again.  They had tapered off after the fourth of July but every night a few small explosions in the distance, ominous and muffled.

The refrigerator hums and periodically drops ice into the reservoir.  The yellow light from my lamp falls all around me, concentric circles of shadows flow from my fixed position in my reading chair.  I harness the artificial sun over my shoulder to illuminate the page.  I am reminded we have had two power outages since the stay-at-home orders were put into place.  More than a few times, the internet has gone down.  These failures take on ominous pretensions in this time.  When the power went out on the first occasion, I could not find my keys and began scouring the apartment.  I never lose my keys.  I have never lost my keys.  I simultaneously try to reassure myself and chastise myself.  How could I have been so careless?  But my entire daily ritual and procedure has been thrown out of whack by this pandemic.  I panic.

I open the door and go out into the night.  They cannot be outside.  It is an impossibility.  I notice the hot wind has picked up a bit.  I go to my car and shine the flashlight around the driveway.  I spot something near the driver’s door:  my keys.  I stand there in the darkness, mesmerized.  How did they get there?  I do not even remember going outside before this moment.  It is an unsolvable mystery, but I am relieved to have my keys back and my car secure.  I go back inside and deadbolt the door.

Several times over the last month, I pass a room in my apartment on my way to the kitchen or to check the street and I see my father-in-law standing in my den or sitting on a couch in the living room.  I don’t see him clearly; he exists in my peripheral vision.  If I look right at him, he is not there.  I am not scared or creeped out.  I know he is trying to figure out his status, his new existence as memory and shadow.  I am reminded how much I miss him.

Do I see the soft glow of light beginning at the edge of the window?  Is it morning already?

The mourning dove begins the day with a sad song.  Outside the kitchen window, the opossum is gone, off to raid an uncovered trash can.  Squirrels begin to poke their heads out of the ivy and junipers that run along the driveway.  More joggers materialize.

In this night-into-morning, everything happens and nothing.  The universe did not pause.  The stars kept whirling around in the sky.  They are composed of dead light—some of them have already burned out and the light I see in the sky is only their light echoes through time.  I am only now getting the news that the star is dead and gone.  For now, the light remains in the heavens, a reminder.

And dawn comes.  The world awaits.  I close my book and put it aside next to my chair.  I will revisit it again in the night, when all is silent, and I can focus on the circle of light and the print on the page.  In communion, I am alive in the darkness with the dead, the memories, and the future, all at once.

"At The Center Of All Beauty" by Fenton Johnson

We are living Yeats’ prophecy:  things are falling apart and the center cannot hold.  In this time of chaos and pandemic, Fenton Johnson, in his book, At The Center Of All Beauty:  Solitude and The Creative Life (Norton, 2020), argues we need solitude.  It is fundamental to our ability to address this crisis in our culture and country.  He examines the lives and philosophies of people he calls “solitaries,” such as Henry David Thoreau, Paul Cezanne, Emily Dickinson and Bill Cunningham, and how being alone offers us a way to live life on our own terms while fostering art and human understanding.

We come into this world naked and alone, and we will leave the same way.  Johnson says our finite existence adds impetus and poignancy to our days.  He writes that “infinity draws me onward, the earth draws me back to the stardust from which I am made.  In my deepest heart I long to be one with the One; death along with birth is only a particularly striking milestone on a journey that, properly understood, has no beginning and no end.  Time, as the quantum physicists tell us, is an illusion; and if time is an illusion, then death is an illusion.  All moments are present to this moment…”

Solitude is not loneliness.  Johnson posits that solitude is a necessary part of every life, and our creativity, our sense of self, our relationships to other human beings all depend upon our level of comfort with being alone.  If we follow through and learn to be solitary, only then can the right action and thinking be possible.  Wisdom will come, argues Johnson, when we seek out and experience solitude.  We have much to learn from the “silent, solitary disciplines of reading and writing.”  We must revel in “the consciously chosen, deliberately inhabited discipline of silence.”  Johnson professes admiration for the life of the monastery and the monks who live in the moment, open to all the beauty of the world.  Fenton grew up near the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and knew the monks there, including the most famous monk in residence, Thomas Merton.  He uses the Trappist word “solitaries” to designate those who seek solitude.  Solitaries are those writers and artists who do not impose harmony, but through their solitude, come to an understanding of the harmony naturally present in this world.  We lose sight of such harmony because of our need to have material comfort and avoid the obligations that come from embracing a life alone.  The Buddhists believe in the imperfection of existence; we must learn to live with that imperfection—it may even be a source of beauty to the ascetic.

Some of the writers and artists Johnson examines are well known for their solitude.  Such is Henry David Thoreau, who voluntarily withdrew from society to live in his cabin at Walden Pond.  He was interested in getting to a deeper truth in life.  For others, the contemplation of solitude is the contemplation of death.  Emily Dickinson knew this contemplation intimately.  In many of her poems, she dwells in death.  Johnson cites a snippet of her poem, “#1515”:  “The Things that never can come back, are several—/Childhood—some forms of Hope—the Dead.”  Johnson describes both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as mystics, but he cautions that that word is a way to contain and dismiss those who understand the true nature of reality.  The artist is rewarded with wisdom and beauty but suffers the consequences of one who holds back full participation to observe the world.

Solitude, as a spiritual practice, has much to offer as a conduit of insights into this existence.  It would be a shame to give up the perspective to avoid loneliness.  On the contrary, solitude offers riches of which many of us are oblivious.  We fail to step back and see the world.  Johnson quotes Rabindranath Tagore:  “In order to know life as real one has to make its acquaintance through death…”  He notes that like a river to the sea, the soul flows toward its destiny.  Water becomes energy.  He sums up the predicament we find ourselves in today with the pandemic:  “Americans want direct action, but direct action is seldom the best means to the goal.”  What we need is patience, “to let the matter reveal itself for what it is.”  It seems these days that impatience and a lack of concern cripple us.  We have lost our way.  Solitude may be our only salvation.

Fenton Johnson cuts into the ego, the self-serving behavior, the narcissism and self-indulgence we find today.  We run and run to keep up, to avoid a solitary moment where we might consider our lives and the lives of others.  He makes a powerful case for solitude.  This does not mean loneliness or isolation—one can be a solitary in marriage, in daily life, in the middle of a crowd.  It is a mental state, a way of seeing the world.  And in this time of plague and uncertainty, we need it more than ever.

How to Be Happy In Isolation

Susan Smillie was an established journalist and editor at the British publication, The Guardian, when she gave it all up and went to sea alone on a small boat.  She wanted a simpler life, she says in her essay “I Live Alone At Sea.  Here’s How To Be Happy in Isolation.”  So she “ended up crossing the Channel to France, sailing down the Atlantic coast to Portugal, into the Mediterranean, through Spain and Italy to Greece.”  Even though she thought she had her dream job at the newspaper, her new life on the ocean was “magical” and “nourishing.”  She realized, early on, that people can change their behavior; in fact, it is easier than one might think.

A sailor alone on the open sea faces myriad dangers, but there are secret and profound joys:  the first cup of tea in the morning; the light at sunset; a good dinner.  The biggest challenge in her isolated existence, for Smillie, was boredom.  However, she relished her small cozy sleeping cabin below deck, especially when the wind was howling outside and rain slashed the decks.

One surprising discovery involved limiting internet use.  She knew that too much screen time was bad, so she would only log on briefly for news reports, social media, and streaming music to lift her spirits.  Increasingly, she spent the majority of her downtime on “nourishing things that can’t fail—books, cloudspotting, writing, growing herbs…and exercise,” mainly stretching because of the cramped space.  She also embraced the joys of cooking and experimenting with the ingredients she could procure.

“I have become my own living proof that you need very little to be extremely happy,” she writes.  “We humans are incredibly resourceful and we do adapt.  Fear and its symptoms—panic and anxiety—are normal responses to danger and uncertainty.”  Instead, Smillie relies on gut instinct and intuition.  She learned to react quickly to a storm front blowing in and whitecap waves rocking the boat.  When we are in a crisis, she says, “we cope, recover and learn.”  She cautions us to pay attention, especially when our normal routines are upended.  She advises us to “see clearly what’s important and…disregard irrelevance.”  In the end, we will be surprised at what “we can face, with grace, courage, humor…”

Because we can only communicate over a wireless connection with those we love who live elsewhere during the COVID-19 experience, we must seize upon and find comfort in the smallest human contact.  Smillie says to never underestimate that—the sound of a voice over the phone is now precious to us.

Quitting one’s job, or worse, being furloughed or fired, means reduced financial well-being and threats to health and welfare.  Smillie knew she would be facing reduced circumstances when she left the paper.  For those having to survive on less, she has important advice:  “Things will be tight for many of us newly without income.”  She advocates reducing spending and breaking down our “addiction to consumption.”  But she believes “We have the reserves to adapt and find happiness.”  Out on the open ocean, she revels in the beauty of nature—“the birds that fly around the harbor at sunset, the fish nibbling the quay, the crabs scuttling below.”

Probably the most positive change she sees in this pandemic is the natural world reasserting itself due to reduction in our activity:  lower pollution levels, less traffic, more time to spend with families.  “We are becoming aware that this is a chance for real change,” she writes, “and that is the biggest positive of all.”