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Bird Calls & Summonses
William Graddy on Seeing with a "Devout, Intransitive Eye"
I'm going to start by sketching three brief personal experiences. Each, though literally true, is also parabolic of basic claims about art or creativity once thought axiomatic but now generally resisted when considered together.
The Two Birds
Here is story number one: One recent Tuesday morning I walked before dawn from our house to the nearest Starbucks for breakfast. Though light was still an hour away, most of the songbirds in the neighborhood were already in full voice, chirping and warbling as if each already had garnered its full provision of bugs, worms, or seeds for the day, and as if each had all of Chicago for its audience. One call in particular caught my attention: its three distinct pitches were wide in range, the second two notes so high and clear that they seemed to rinse the ear with their repeated showers of sound.
Half an hour later, when I passed by the same still-darkened house on my way back home, the same bird was still at it. By now, though, just enough light was filtering up into the horizon to outline the faint shape of the tiny singer perched on a chimney top. I noticed, too, that he had added something to his ceaseless and formerly unvaried three-note song: a series of low, coy-sounding chirps, very soon followed by those same lovely but incessant calls, now seemingly louder than ever. Then they stopped for a while. In the gap that at first seemed silent by comparison I could hear other neighborhood birds vocalizing, and I realized that this feathered chorister was not just singing; it was calling. And it wasn't just calling; it was listening for a response.
I wilted and winced a little as I realized after this moment of morning magic that I was back in biology class. A couple of blocks away the review lesson was confirmed. I heard the same call coming from another chimney or tree branch. However much I would have liked to conclude with Shakespeare's Duke Senior that I was hearing "tongues in trees . . . / Sermons in stones, and good in everything," I had to admit the cruder truth as well. Territories were being marked, and avian male potencies were being declared. It was still too early and dark for plumage -displays or mating dances, but allurements were proceeding just the same. Birds do not live by worms alone.
Story number two, shorter but also about a bird, took place on another morning almost 25 years earlier. I was walking along the North Shore bicycle trail, a paved path stretching from Chicago to north suburban Lake Forest. Again, a birdcall caught my ear, filling the air with another, but very different, cascade of extravagantly pure sounds. This time I was carrying binoculars, and the bird was sitting on a power-line pole, so I had a close, unobstructed view.
Now, though, my surprise was neither in the song nor in the intermittent silences. It was in the sight. I expected to see the bird's beak open, and then move in subtle ways to help it articulate that complicated stream of notes. What I wasn't prepared to see was the outsized distention of the bird's throat every time it called. Over and over, repeated for every cry, I saw through the field glasses the grotesque expansion of what in humans would be the larynx. To sing at that pitch and volume required a coordinated but strained effort of every muscle in the bird's body. What my ears heard as effortless music, limpid and sweet, my eyes revealed to be the product of an all-out, almost convulsive, effort. Poet Thomas Hardy, startled one cold New Year's Eve in 1899 by a similar call from an aged thrush, wondered why the bird "had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom." Song: Is it the spontaneous expression of natural beauty? Is it convulsive bodily effort? Is it soul-flinging?
The Granite Couch
My third experience is from still further in the past—no, not before 1899. In July 1977, I was backpacking with friends in Washington state's Cascade Mountains. The timber line in that part of the Pacific Northwest sets in at a little over 5,000 feet, so well before we made a base camp, we had climbed into a spare, clean world of granite softened only by occasional patches of wildflowers and snowfields.
On Sunday morning I awoke to amazing scenery . . . and altitude sickness. I suppose I had been too tired and busy helping make camp the previous evening to notice, because when I crawled out of my tent that morning I was startled by the stark, almost otherworldly beauty around me. Naturally, I wanted to hike and explore, but nausea was too much with me. I didn't want to eat; I was too sluggish and dizzy to walk very far. My soul told me I ought to worship, and my heart was agreeable, but my flesh was sullen.
William Graddy taught literature and writing at Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois, for 38 years. His work has appeared previously in Touchstone, several other journals, and the Eerdmans’ Handbook to American Church History.
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