Why birds sing

December. In the Orne again. Long walk in the mornings, past frozen fields with pools of ice with swirling amoeba patterns in them and trees bare and floret-like against the sky. My head buzzing with ideas. Mind both expands in the open and at the same time narrows, there what I become interested in is the tactile physical stuff.

It is just replacing one culture for another. Was studying some trees, how their shapes interrelate against the sky. The natural canvas. It’s all aesthetic. No different, I suppose, to doing the same thing with a painting: movement, thrust, colour, interrelationships. I continually wonder what it is we need in nature, why it quietens our mind. It is so much more, so much bigger, than what we are ever able to create ourselves.

Been reading David Rothenberg’s Why Birds Sing. It is about just that, and packed full of wonderful ideas. Recommend it to anyone with the sense to step away from the computer and get outside in the open air for half an hour: Listen up. Listen well. It makes the thoughts in my head chatter as excitably as those starlings on the telegraph wires. I sing therefore I am.

I sing because I can. On the Poitiers–Ruffec road the day before New Year’s Eve. 11.30 at night, icy, pitch black. We were driving at a speed well below the route nationale maximum when two tawny wild boar suddenly materialised just in front of the headlamps. Prehistoric shapes. Impossible to stop. I turned my head from the inevitable impact, and back again to see it – for it seemed, as these things will, to happen in an intense slow motion. The impact for ourselves was extraordinarily slight – I jolted forward only an inch or so in my seat as 400 lbs of boar came hurtling over the bonnet and off into the verge. Yes. 400 lbs. Car was a write-off. The poor beast was nearly as wide as the vehicle, putting out both headlamps and tearing the bumper away with his great carcass, embedding his flesh in it. The ramassage driver, as we later rode to his garage in the front cabin of his tow-truck, phlegmatically remarked that accidents happen all too often with the sangliers (who, unlike most animals, seem to have no road sense, and, I thought, why should they?). This was was of little comfort, knowing we had, to judge from the wreckage, almost certainly killed the wonderful beast, who disappeared into the night as suddenly as he’d appeared. It was a curiously surreal incident; H said, like one of those scenes with the eye in L’Age d’Or, his own looming huge in our consciousness as he eyeballed us seconds before the impact. An odd association but I knew exactly what she meant. So my toast this New Year was not only for my friends (and we four in the car who were lucky and grateful to be alive) and for the world in general, but also for this poor, thwarted, unroadworthy creature. Ugly, hunched, harried, hunted, and majestic, surely, at times, even the wild boar sing.

~ by inbetwixt on 5 January 2008.