The Monocle Of A Mockingbird

Flakes are sadder than knots. Snowflakes, for example. They fall mournfully from the sky. This isn’t an emotion they actually have, it’s an emotion I have that I’m giving them. Which has the greater reality? Snowflakes, or emotion? Why should things appear that they have any kind of emotion? Why should a flake appear sadder than a knot? Knots always appear angry. You have to fight them to get them loose. They secure things, but they also trap things. Knots, in and among themselves, are neither good nor bad. They’re beyond good and evil. Sometimes they’re agencies of good, and sometimes they’re agencies of evil. Which makes one wonder what’s actually good and what’s actually evil? Can something be equal amounts of good and evil? This is convoluted. This is a knot. I have tied you in a knot of words.

Our cat has developed an almost supernatural attraction to a library copy of Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. She keeps sniffing it, rubbing her head on it and nibbling the cover. We had to put it up high on one of our bookshelves to prevent her from ruining the book. We can’t smell anything on the book. We have no idea what it is about this book that has so obsessed her. It could be worse. It could be a copy of Charles Bukowski, or Cioran. It seems oddly appropriate that our cat is so attracted to Simone Weil.

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity,” she begins. “Grace is the only exception.”

That’s quite fantastic.

Gravity is an invisible force. It is linked to other forces, such as energy-momentum density and the curvature of space-time and my body reclining on the bed writing this.

Grace is a freely given power that exists outside the framework of a mechanical universe. It is supernatural. It is a twin to gravity in its universality and invisible quality. It is an opposite to gravity in its liberating capacity.

Is this what our cat senses? The smell of salvation? The balm of a divine presence?

There’s a frog on the kitchen window sill with his mouth wide open. He appears to be singing. But no sound is coming out. Why would it?  It's a ceramic frog. The idea is to put things in his mouth. Pencils, screws, a set of keys. Anything that is part of the community of things that serve a small purpose, fulfill a modest goal. I feel a cold draft on my hand and my arm. It's late April, but it's very cold. The polar jet stream is broken. It’s weak and wobbly because the Arctic is warming. The jet stream is driven partly by the temperature contrast between masses of icy air over the North Pole and the warmer air near the equator. Now that the air in the Arctic is warming faster than the air to the south, the polar vortex – all that swirling cold air – is reduced in strength. The diminished force of the jet stream droops and meanders dragging the colder air to the south. A trough of cold air squats over the Pacific Northwest. The kitchen window is open a crack to lessen condensation, water dripping down to the glass onto the wooden sill. The air speaks to my skin in the language of pure sensation. A song.

I listen to Éclairs sur l’au-delà, Olivier Messiaen’s last completed composition. It translates roughly as “Lightning Over The Beyond,” or “Bright Glimpses of the Beyond,” Messiaen poured it on thick. The work is scored for an orchestra of 128, including piccolos, flutes, oboes, English horn, two clarinets in E-flat, six clarinets in B-flat, bass clarinet, three bassoons, a contrabassoon, two trumpets in D, three trumpets in C, three trombones, two tubas, glockenspiel, xylophone, crotales (antique cymbals consisting of small, tuned bronze or brass disks) tubular bells and marimba.

Messiaen – who was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, a post he held until he passed away in April, 1992 – was deeply Catholic. When asked what expressions he wanted to champion by writing music in one of many interviews with Claude Samuel and collected in a book titled Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel, he responded “The first idea I wanted to express, the most important, is the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith. I have the good fortune to be a Catholic,” he continued,

I was born a believer, and the Scriptures impressed me even as a child. The illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and no doubt the most useful and most valuable – perhaps the only one I won’t regret at the hour of my death. But I am a human being, and like all others I’m susceptible to human love, which I wished to express in three of my works that incorporate the greatest myth of human love, that of Tristan and Iseult. Finally, I have a profound love of nature. I think nature infinitely surpasses us, and I’ve always sought lessons from it. I love birds, so my inclination has been to examine bird songs especially; I’ve studied ornithology. My music, then, juxtaposes the Catholic faith, the myth of Tristan and Iseult, and a highly developed use of bird songs. But it also employs Greek metrics; provincial rhythms, or “deçî-tâlas,” of ancient India; and several personal rhythmic techniques such as rhythmic characters, nonretrogradable rhythms, and symmetrical permutations. Finally, there is my research into sound-color – the most important characteristic of my musical language.

Messiaen was also an extremely methodical and careful ornithologist, painstakingly noting bird song, which he later incorporated into his composition. “It’s probable,” he said, “that in the artistic hierarchy, birds are the greatest musicians on our planet.”

“Personally, I’m very proud of the exactitude of my work,” he avows. “Perhaps I’m wrong…

…because even people who really know the birds might not recognize them in my music, yet I assure you that everything is real; but obviously, I’m the one who hears, and involuntarily I inject my reproductions of the songs with something of my manner and method of listening. All the same, I have to arrive at certain combinations. I’ll explain: it happens that one hears a soloist and, behind it (usually at sunrise), quantities of other birds living nearby. The ensemble might constitute a counterpoint of thirty to forty simultaneous parts! Well then, the epode of my Chronochromie for large orchestra contains a counterpoint in eighteen simultaneous parts, all of different qualities, rhythms, and modes; obviously I didn’t note down those eighteen voices all at once. I transcribed, for example, a blackbird, but I know that a chaffinch, a whitethroat, and a nightingale were singing at the same time; I indicate this on paper and note very precisely the song of this blackbird. Then the next day I come back to the same place to transcribe the nightingale, and so forth. Finally, after the event, I combine these five, ten, or twenty songs. So you see, the combination is realistic even if it isn’t exact.

Here’s something else I think about: the night The Rolling Stones woke Mary Clayton up to come and sing her part for “Gimme Shelter.” Pregnant, curlers in her hair, ready to go to bed. She gets a call from her manager: “there’s a group in town called The Rolling Stones. They need someone to sing.” So, two in the morning she goes to the studio in her silk pajamas and mink coat and a scarf on her head and sings along with Mick: “rape, murder, it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away.” They do a second one. This time she wants to blow them out of the room. And she does. She blows everybody out of the room.

In silk pajamas with curlers in her hair.

Birds have a vocal organ called the syrinx which is located at the base of a bird’s trachea. It doesn’t produce sounds via vocal folds like mammals. Sound is produced by vibrations on the walls of the syrinx (same word in Greek for the musical instrument called panpipes or Pan flute) and another organ called the pessulus (Latin for ‘bolt’), which is a delicate bar of cartilage connecting the dorsal and ventral extremities of the first pair of bronchial cartilages.

The nightingale produces far more notes than any other species. Much of this has to do with its neural biology. It uses its higher brain function – the cerebral cortex - to assimilate, invent, or embellish a song. They’re better at learning. Better at listening. Better at creating. Better at storing information.

Crows don’t sing, but I love them just the same. I like the crudity of their caws. I like that racket. That raucous funk of raffish insistency. Harsh, grating, calamitous. I like the way they take a position on the ground, tilt their head back, open their beak wide and let it all out: caw! caw! caw!

Crows aren’t musicians. They’re poets. They’re poets like me. I can’t sing worth a damn. I can’t make music. I can’t tell an octave from an octagon. I wouldn’t know what a semitone is if it was standing on my foot. I don’t know a C sharp from an E flat. A key is something you use to start your car or open a door. But I know that if you put your mind to it you can say something to make somebody’s head explode. I believe there’s music in language. Any language. Who needs melody when you’ve got thrombectomy.

Expectancy. Complexity. Open sesame.

The monocle of a mockingbird swimming in the ambiguity of a naked moment.