Accipiter novaehollandiae
Like many cities (though fewer
and fewer every year), Melbourne
has two daily newspapers: a tabloid and a broadsheet. The broadsheet is called the Age, and in the Saturday edition of that
paper there’s a “lifestyle” lift-out; lifestyle in this case encompasses
everything from reading books to going to movies to eating at cafés. Last Saturday the cover story of this section
of the Age was about bird-watching:
coinciding with a panel at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the story dared to
suggest that bird-watching had somehow become cool.
Bird-watching will never be
cool. It may be accepted; it may be
pursued more broadly and more openly than has usually been the case; but it
will never be fashionable. Still, that
shouldn’t concern us – by ‘us’ I mean those of us who can in an instant
identify any small bird that flies across our field of vision; I also mean,
broadly, people – as there is very little in human life that is more useless
than the concern with what’s “in” and what’s “out” at any given moment.
Nonetheless, we all trade in
guilty pleasures. In an age of
mass-market irony and insincerity, the idea of taking genuine and undisguised
pleasure in something is unsettling, for ourselves and for others. Yet it’s wearying, this constant watching of
our backs, this looking over our shoulder to see if anyone’s laughing at our
joy. I’m going to be thirty-three in a
week’s time; I’m tired of underselling my love for the various idiosyncratic
pieces of cultural flotsam and jetsam that make up my particular emotional and
intellectual landscape.
As a child, of course, I didn’t
have nearly such a thick skin when it came to other people’s bemused or
disapproving responses to my enthusiasms.
When my classmates asked me, with a tone somewhere between confusion and
astonishment, if I was a bird-watcher, I’d always downplay my answer: sort of,
sometimes, not really. I was, though:
for a long time in my childhood there was nothing that gave me greater pleasure
than borrowing my father’s pair of Zeiss binoculars, putting my copy of Simpson
and Day’s Field Guide to the Birds of
Australia in a bag, throwing the bag over my shoulder, and disappearing
into the bush for several hours. I can
still remember vividly the sensation of picking grass-seeds off the thick
knitted cotton of that bag.
More than anywhere else, this
passion manifested itself at Brogo, my parents’ holiday house, about which I’ve
written many times before on this blog.
I’d sleep on the window seat in the sitting-room of the house, even
though it meant having to pack up my bedding each day and remake the bed each
night, because by the windows there I’d get woken up by the rising sun, and I
could rush out of bed, hurriedly get dressed, and head out up the road through
the forest as the birds around me began to awaken.
The road was ideal for
bird-watching not just because it provided easy access to the forest, but also
because it went through a number of habitats: it skirted along the top of a
rainforest gully in which could sometimes be seen shy but beautiful Wonga
Pigeons (Leucosarcia melanoleuca); Satin Bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus
violaceus); even Spotted Quail-thrushes (Cinclosoma punctatum); near the gate it passed through a patch
of dry acacia forest which, though less rich in birdlife than other habitats,
was more open and thus provided better lines of sight.
Most of all, though, the road
passed through – and still does pass through – wet sclerophyll eucalypt forest,
which covers the great majority of the property. The tall, thin trees of this forest hosted
innumerable birds (I eventually catalogued nearly one-hundred species across
the whole property) from Crested Shrike-tits (Falcunculus frontatus) to
Varied Sittellas (Daphoenositta chrysoptera) to Honeyeaters (Meliphagidae) of all kinds – but there was one bird
that I saw in those early years of my bird-watching life that though it had no
markings at all was as beautiful a bird as I’ve ever seen. It was as pale and as silent as a ghost, and
it haunts me still.
It lived in only one patch of
forest, or at least I only ever saw it there, and I only ever saw it in the
early morning. It was a White Goshawk, a
name as evocative as it is simple: in the muted, toned-down colours of the
Australian bush it shone as brightly as a beacon, and thinking back to the bird
now I wonder how it ever managed to catch and eat another creature at all; it’s
not so fanciful, recalling the astonishing sight of it, to imagine that animals
were simply mesmerised by its beauty.
The White Goshawk is a mutation,
of sorts, but it’s not an albino: it’s a variation, a sub-species of the Grey
Goshawk. It’s the only all-white raptor in the world –
the kind of fact that is simultaneously useless and captivating. Being the same species, Grey and White
Goshawks interbreed freely, and after observing the White Goshawk for years I
started to see a Grey Goshawk, too; but it was never as entrancing as its white
cousin. There’s a particular brightness
to the white feathers of birds – perhaps it’s because birds are so meticulous
about bathing (they have to be: there’s scarcely a more favourable habitat for
parasitic lice and ticks than the warmth beneath a bird’s tightly-packed
feathers), but the white of a bird is unlike the white of any other
animal. It’s astonishing; it’s dazzling. When the White Goshawk shone from its perch
on the branch of a thin eucalypt it was instantly noticeable, even if it was
still, and silent, and watching.
Whenever I raised my father’s binoculars to observe the bird it always
seemed to be watching me back, with eyesight that was so keen as to be beyond
my imagining.
Children are scattershot in their passions, but wholly devoted to them
while they last: like the white beam of a torch their minds focus on one interest,
examining it thoroughly, before moving onto the next; and the next; and the
next. I was an avid bird-watcher for
many years, but eventually, in my late teens, I drifted away from it. I can’t say why; I don’t love birds any less
now than I did then – I suppose I found other things to maintain my interest. It’s only when we’re adults, I think, that we
develop the ability to balance our passions alongside each-other; to pursue
various curiosities with equal attention.
But I suspect that most of us never quite recapture the intensity of
those youthful fascinations. I love few
things more than reading, but I don’t read now with anywhere near the intensity
that I read in my childhood and my teenage years, when summers would pass spent
prone on the sofa, reading for five or six or seven hours at a time; when books
would be finished in a day. (It’s not
entirely a bad thing that my reading habits have been tempered with age: back
then, in the manner of children, I prided myself more on the volume of books
read than the degree of appreciation or understanding I got out of them.) Likewise, though nowadays I’m still given to
periods of passionate devotion to particular books or films or bands or
hobbies, for the most part those passions are gone in a few days or a few
weeks, leaving only a faint but lingering glow in my mind as any evidence of
the bonfire they once lit in my imagination.
I noticed when I saw the Grey Goshawk, but when I stopped seeing the
White Goshawk I didn’t notice at all. We
don’t think of the lives of wild animals; we don’t stop to imagine that those
lives must end. By the time the White
Goshawk disappeared – silently, unobtrusively – from the forest around my
parents’ holiday house I’d already moved onto the next bird, I was determined
to build the list – and then by the time I started to drift away from
bird-watching I hadn’t thought about the White Goshawk in years. I’d almost forgotten that it had existed at
all, that bird that had so dominated my imagination just a few years before.
I was growing then, and changing: hurtling along that unmappable road
from childhood to adulthood. I was
discovering things that are defining parts of my life now: music, in
particular, and cooking. I’d never had
the slightest interest in cooking as a child, and then, in my teenage years,
suddenly something clicked. Perhaps it
was simply that I cooked a meal, and enjoyed the process; but I began to love
cooking. I began to become incapable of living
a life that didn’t involve cooking dinner every night. I enjoyed nothing more than spending two
hours in the kitchen, when my family had gone out for the night, and cooking an
amateurish curry while listening to music turned up so loud that I could barely
hear the sound of oil sizzling in the wok.
I’d discovered music some time earlier than I discovered cooking, and
by the time I began cooking in earnest I’d discovered – through reading a
review in the newspaper of his album Fairytales for Hard Men – the
Scottish singer-songwriter Jackie Leven.
A bought only a few albums of his – I had almost no money, and all of it
was provided my parents ostensibly so that I could buy clothes, and Leven had a
bewilderingly large discography of which only a small amount was available in
Australia back then, in the nineties – but those few albums I came to possess
dominated a period of my life and, I realise now, changed who I was and
influenced who I became more than any other musician has been capable of doing
before or since.
Through Leven’s habit of featuring poetry readings on his albums I was
pulled deeper into a love of poetry that had already been created by exposure
to my fathers’ books; many of the poets Leven featured or mentioned in his
liner notes and who I hadn’t previously heard of became favourites, such as
Anna Akhmatova; Osip Mandelstam; James Wright.
Leven’s music – yearning, heartbreaking, sometimes almost embarrassingly
heartfelt – touched me deeply then, when I was first starting to become aware
that the world was too often marked by disappointments; yet suffusing his music
there was also something that I’d never heard in music before, and have rarely
heard since, certainly not music in the broad field of “rock”: a strength and
resilience that came not from obstinacy, nor from stubbornness, but instead
from tenderness. Leven’s songs are full
of weary, broken-down, hard-won goodness that’s astonishing to encounter
in any work of art. The nineties was the
decade of the Sensitive New-Age Guy – they’ve become a joke since, but they
were a real and genuine cultural force back then – but Leven’s songs stood
apart from that sometimes feckless and easily maligned group; the kindness in
Leven’s music came from pushing through bitter experience and emerging on the
other side; to borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney, writing about the poet John
Clare: he “resolved extreme experience into something gentle”. I don’t think there’s a phrase I’ve ever read
that’s made a deeper impression on me than that phrase has: it elevates gentleness
to a position of nobility. Trying, in my
late teens, to figure out what it was to be a man, I discovered Jackie Leven striving
through his music towards the same position.
We live in an astonishing world, though, and there are more things to
discover and to love than we could ever exhaust in a hundred lifetimes. I loved Jackie Leven’s music deeply and
passionately and ravenously for several years, and then I moved on. I’d remember him every now and then, and feel
that I ought to listen to him again; but somehow it never quite happened. There’s nothing more difficult to recapture
than a faded passion. I continued to
love Leven’s music – but I stopped listening to it.
Then, last November, dispirited by a search for employment that had
gone on for six months, disheartened by the effort of trying to get a novel
about decency and kindness published in a harsh publishing environment,
flicking in boredom from webpage to webpage, I came across news that was
shocking, and heartrending, and saddening, not just because of the facts of
what I read but also because those facts conjured ghosts of memory that had
long since faded into the trees, their absence unnoticed. With a pang of nostalgia, sorrow for my lost
childhood, I read that Jackie Leven had died.
He’d had cancer. He was
sixty-one.
For the first time in years I went to my CD collection and I pulled out
my copy of his great album, Forbidden Songs of the Dying West. I had it on my iPod, too, but it was
essential to listen to it, after all this time, and in memory of the man, on
CD: to slide the liner-notes out from the CD case, as I had so many times all
those years ago; to flip that little booklet open and read again Leven’s impassioned
and direct blurb on the first inside page.
As Leven sings, in the second verse of the album’s opening song, “Lonely
in a café/Staring at an empty plate/In the sorrow of the traffic/I felt my mind
disintegrate”, I read once more his recounting of the news of the death of
Gerald Durrell, whose books I borrowed – stole, for I never gave them back –
from a girlfriend of my brother’s and read avariciously as a child:
I was listening to BBC Radio News, and the
man announced the death of the much-loved naturalist Gerald Durrell. He talked
about how Durrell had avowed that he preferred animals to people. Asked why this was Durrell said something
like this: ‘Well animals don’t drive cars, they don’t make nerve gas, but most
important of all, they don’t go to cocktail parties’.
This was at 3 pm. At 5 pm the news item was repeated but now
the reference to animals not making nerve gas had disappeared. Quite apart from why, where had
the nerve gas gone? Even in death, especially
in death, Gerald Durrell’s song about nerve gas had become forbidden – a
Forbidden Song of the Dying West.
I’d be lying if I said that in
the last ten months I’ve listened to no music but Jackie Leven’s; or even that
I’d listened to his music very much at all.
I listened to those few albums of his that I still possess, and I
searched the record shops near me for others, but he’s even less well-known now
in Australia than he was in the nineties; I could have ordered some online, but
I’ve never been overly fond of that; and besides, I didn’t have very much
money. But now that I’m older I find
that memories of my youthful passions appear from time to time, brightly, like
a white bird in a forest; like a message of tenderness in a culture of casual
fury. Whether we’re the sum of our parts
or more than that I don’t know, I’m still too young to say; but one way or
another those parts make us up. We move,
and move on, and move on again; we gather as we go. Many years ago, starting form little more than
an impulse, I gathered Jackie Leven’s music to me, and I’ll have it with me
always: from time to time I’ll raise my eyes to Jackie Leven, and I’ll find him
staring right back at me.
