I noticed something today that I thought was worth recording because I think it is indicative of something about the way the world appears to me.
I visited my parents' house in rural North Essex for my mum's birthday this weekend. In their garden, my mum has a 'bird tree', filled with a profusion of different nut-and-seed dispensing paraphernalia. The bird tree is regularly visited by a host of locals in search of a bite or two to help them through the colder days of winter. When I got up on Sunday morning, there were chaffinches, greenfinches and great tits. It's interesting watching the different ways they all go about the job of getting to the food, the different levels of tolerance towards one another (great tits arriving in a series of brief fluttering movements, quickly grabbing a seed or two, and then just as quickly leaving the scene to eat in peace and safety; greenfinches happily filling themselves with no regard for who else is around - or perhaps I'm unfairly reading an all-too human greedy pomposity into their faces ... what do you think, from a quick look at these?). A couple of robins put in a showing, studiously ignoring one another as they ate away, back to back, on two swaying feeders. And the local pair of collared doves shyly arrived a respectable moment or so apart and proceeded to carefully mop up whatever the greedy greenfinches had dropped (sorry - it was probably the chaffinches too, but they just looked to be using a touch more decorum when they ate).
An hour or so later, I glanced at the tree, and sitting proudly in one of the top skeletal branches was a pink-chested male bullfinch. (Until I inserted this link, I hadn't actually realised bullfinches were now on the red list of birds in declining numbers ...) Suffice to say that this particular chap's appearance caused something of a stir in my parents' house - he and his kind don't show up in the bird tree every day.
I dutifully checked him out in my dad's old Collins birdbook (and have since had another look in my slightly newer edition). And this is what got me thinking. My Collins bird guide covers birds of Britain AND Europe, including some species that are exceedingly unlikely ever to put in an appearance in Britain (let alone on the bird tree) - has anyone ever spotted an ovenbird or blackburnian warbler in the UK? But the birds that excite me - the ones I find myself flicking back to just in case I get the chance and need to be sure - are universally birds that might show up in Britain (if not necessarily on the bird tree). When I'm leafing through the beautiful plates in this book, it's the birds I might see that give me something of a thrill, not the ones I'll never see, the mongolian or desert finches for instance.
So why is this? Am I just a little Englander with limited horizons content to enjoy my tiny corner and ignore the rest of the world? I probably am guilty of enjoying the things I know more than the things I don't at times. But I don't think that really describes my feelings very usefully.
I don't like bullfinches any more than blackburnian warblers. I'm sure there are some very attractive and fascinating blackburnian warblers out there. And if by some freak of circumstance one did show up on the bird tree, and by some even greater freak of insight I spotted that the strange visitor was a blackburnian warbler, I'd be delighted (and baffled). It's not that I don't value the oddities and rareties; I just know that they're not going to share my parents' garden with me, so there's no point in investing any hope in them. Equally, I realised when I visited a bird of prey centre and saw a beautiful little merlin on a post, though I enjoyed the privilege of seeing her, it didn't begin to get rid of the gently bubbling desire to see a merlin in the wild. Delicately noble creature she was, and a fellow living thing with whom I enjoyed sharing a few quiet moments of mutual evaluation, but there was no sense of personal triumph, not the magical combination of chance and hope there will be when I finally see a merlin flying over a northern moor.
In the same way, if I'd seen a bullfinch in a pet shop, its pink puffed chest would have been every bit as pretty, but it wouldn't have made my day in quite the same way.
So what made that particular bullfinch such a special sight for me? I think in truth it was the depth of meanings, the history of thought and speculation, the allusion to all the other occasions when only greenfinches and chaffinches sat on the bird tree. A week before, my mum said that she'd not seen any bullfinches in the garden, whereas she remembered their being common when she was young. In the same way, it's only since house sparrows have declined so severely that I've noticed how striking the males are (not a single one visited the bird tree at the weekend). There was certainly, too, both the sense of privilege at seeing a wild animal just passing through, making its unique way in the world just as we are, and the sense of good fortune that such a wild animal had chosen to visit our bird tree just as we were watching for him. So it was our investment of thought and hope that meant that our bullfinch was a sort of symbol of the validity of aspirations against-the-odds; he even took in mum's childhood along the way. As I say, his value to me was as the complex fulfilment of previous moments, in addition to the bold and bright image he provided in that instant. He would have looked exactly the same without that history, but it was the history that gave him meaning. That's the problem with Juliet's claim:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.
Our bullfinch wouldn't have smelt as sweet ... OK, made such an impression on us if we'd not a history of meanings to map him into.
So far, perhaps, so obvious. But this made me reflect on a lot of other things too. I had a long conversation with Julian recently about the need for a story to understand the value of things. If I'm buying a present for someone, I'll wander in and out of shops, convinced that I'm waiting until I see the perfect thing. In fact, I'm mostly looking for a story to tell me what to buy; perhaps it's a recollection of a recent and related conversation with the presentee, perhaps it's a memory of an intimate moment shared years ago. But until I have that feeling, I won't buy.
And I think this is at the root of the instinctive distrust I always had at university of people who said that their hobby/passion/greatest recent experience was traveling. If someone was asked what they'd done with their summer, and they said that they'd always wanted to go fishing on a Norwegian fjord, that they wanted to get away from the intensity of the city and the pretentiousness of college life, and so they'd stayed in a small hotel on a Scandinavian lake, however, I'd have thought that was fantastic - because I'd have some sort of story and reason to love that dream or vision with them. But I found that all too often the traveling seemed to be the end in itself - the image of the thing without any of the allusions; something full of moments of colour but in a sort of postcard two-dimensions. Some people didn't understand why I didn't spend my long summers in far-flung parts of the world; I didn't understand what story they were trying to follow when their travels seemed so little a part of their lives that I saw.
I now have a similar distrust of new music until I have some frame of reference for it. Yes, occasionally something will just sweep me up with a moment of bass-and-bass-drum or the flick of a shiny reverby major 7th on a Fender guitar ... actually, even as I write this, I realise that these are things with histories for me - something on What's Going On or Hatful of Hollow, perhaps. Well, there are probably some moments when I hear a piece of music and I'm hearing more directly the sounds than the frame of meanings, but I think they're in the minority. That may be sad (I remember the horror when I thought that my English degree would mean I'd never read a book without trying to dissect it), but it's also life-affirming and exciting in its own right. (This reminds me of the discussion about naive vs informed responses to art on Helen's blog a while back.) I think it's also unavoidable - if we care about something like music, we'll invest time and emotion in it, and in doing so become more informed about the pattern of ideas that surround that next piece of music we come across. Our response will be less naive, but not less real or less powerful.
To try to avoid stuttering to a sort of conclusionless end, I think the danger of responding to meanings more than events is that the bullfinch becomes a tick in a box and not a real, vivid, precious moment when a living thing happens to coincide with us in time and place. I reckon that the most moving things occur when we are somehow alive to both the moment and, less consciously, the significance of the moment at the same time - when we really listen to the sounds on a record at the same time as feeling how they relate to other sounds we've heard, or when the sudden appearance of a bullfinch means a flash of pink and sharp black cap and a puffed out chest in a skeletal tree against a white January sky as well as a welcome visit from an unfamiliar stranger.
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