January 27, 2008

LISTEN: just as there are Parsis and Parsis, so are there birds and birds. You don’t understand what I intend to convey from my present pons asinorum, do you? Well, years ago while avidly reading Framroze Punthakey’s The Parsis, I was warned by a friend, wise or otherwise, that there are Parsis and Parsis. ‘Yes’, I countered. ‘But so far I’ve only met Parsis.’ Same with the birds, in the sense that there are good ones and bad ones, and that within these arbitrary divisions there are many species appearing in various places, habitats and guises — birds both real, imaginary and mechanical. But by and large I’ve benefited from our association. Same with the Parsis, who have been immortalised not least in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Crow Eaters.

But what bird has charmed the poets of so many different civilisations more than the nightingale? And who hasn’t read Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’? In this, along with so many other exquisitely rendered sentiments, he surely strikes a chord in the hearts of those who, in this tumultuous day and age, view the plight of the refugee, the immigrant, the foreign bride or bridegroom, by suggesting that in this bird’s magical notes reposed ‘Perhaps the self-same song that found a path/ Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,/ She stood in tears amid the alien corn.’ He refers to the biblical Ruth, of course.

Among Greek and Roman literati nightingale lovers were Aristophanes, who even tried to reproduce its sound verbally in his play The Birds, and Pliny, who forsook his usual matter of fact style to praise it enthusiastically. In fact it was due to a mix-up in the minds of Latin poets that both they and English poets have given this creature the nom de plume, one could say, of Philomela. (An early type of pen was a sharpened plume or feather.) Shakespeare in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ says, ‘Come Philomel, that sing’st of ravishment/ Make thy sad grove in my dishevll’d hair.’ Actually the god Zeus, in their dire circumstances turned Procne into a nightingale and Philomela into a swallow. Even so Philomela has flown down to us as the nightingale.

Then there are famous instances of homo sapiens possessing bird-like features, as in Colleen McCullough’s description of Cleopatra in The October Horse, final volume of her eminently magnificent Masters of Rome series. This queen, says the meticulous researcher, was no voluptuous, Liz Taylor-style beauty. In fact, she was as skinny as a rake and possessed ‘a huge beak of a nose’.

And among English metaphysical writers centuries ago there were those who insisted that if angels were actually in the winged human form we prefer, then they would of necessity possess the same greatly protruding chests common to birds of flight. Otherwise, they ask, where would even a divine creature in human form hide the immense pectoral muscles required for their flight? Think about it.

In the Holy Bible, book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 10, verse 20, rests the origin of the expression ‘A little bird told me’, which we may use when asked from where we have found out this or that. Indeed, in literature birds appear as soothsayers, messengers, helpers and the like, as in the much hackneyed, done-to-death tale of Cinderella, particularly in my mother’s beautiful Grosset & Dunlap edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Here it was a bird in the hazel tree over her mother’s grave, not a fairy godmother, who supplied Cinderella with the gowns and slippers of increasing glory that she wore on her three fateful nights as a femme fatale.

But the real coup de theatre came while the prince was riding off to the palace with the first one, then the other ugly sister, who by cutting off a toe and a piece of heel respectively had each managed to squeeze a foot into the pure gold (not glass) slipper left behind at the ball. ‘As they passed the grave... two doves were sitting on the hazel tree crying, ‘Prithee (I pray thee) look back, prithee look back, / There’s blood on the track. /The shoe is too small;/ At home the true bride is waiting thy call.’ And as this true bride rode off with the prince, the doves settled and remained on her shoulders, maybe as guardian angels in disguise.

As to legends, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet the deranged Ophelia says, ‘The owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord we know that we are, but not what we may be.’ This exemplifies the wisdom sometimes found in insanity, since in Walter de la Mare’s truly fabulous anthology Come Hither, we learn that this utterance comes from a legend concerning none other than Jesus Christ, ‘who being footsore, weary and hungry, went one darkening evening into a baker’s shop and asked for bread’. The daughter, not realising who ‘this outcast’ was, snatched from her mother the sizeable piece of dough that she intended for him, and ‘cut it in half, and half, and half again.’ Seeing it rise into the most enormous loaf ever, she cried out, O Mother, Mother, Heugh, heugh, heugh:’ Then, ‘‘As thou has spoken,’ said our Saviour, ‘So be thou: child of the Night.’ Whereupon, the poor creature, feathered and in the likeness of as owl, fled forth in the dark towards the woodside.’ Perhaps the inference here is that the girl was spiritually dead, as the owl is often associated with night, darkness and death.

Now to the immortal phoenix. Modern naturalist Maurice Burton, quoted by Richard Barber in the encyclopaedia Man, Myth and Magic, reduces the mythical fiery death of the creature to ‘anting’, in which various bird species perform ‘a series of almost ritual movements, often involving glowing cinders or actual flaming twigs, (giving) the impression that they are using fire and smoke to drive ants out of (their) feathers.’ The real reason for this behaviour is unknown, according to Barber, ‘though a bird emerging from the flames in this way might easily suggest revival by fire, as in the idea that the phoenix rises anew from the ashes of its own funeral pyre.’

So many more candidates are chirping, trilling and preening in the wings, but sadly one can only touch the tip of the bird’s nest here.