Birds Art Life Death: The Art of Noticing the Small and Significant. Kyo Maclear
his mid-thirties, had found he could not always cope with the pressures and disappointments of being an artist in a big city. He liked banging away on his piano like Fats Waller but performing and promoting himself made him feel anxious and depressed. Very occasionally his depression served him well and allowed him to write lonesome songs of love but most of the time it just ate at him. When he fell in love with birds and began to photograph them, his anxieties dissipated. The sound of birdsong reminded him to look outwards at the world.
That was the winter that started early. It snowed endlessly. I remember a radio host saying: “Global warming? Ha!” It was also the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn’t know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should. I watched those around me who were still successfully carrying on, organizing meals and careers and children. I wanted to be reminded. I had lost the beat.
My father had recently suffered two strokes. Twice—when the leaves were still on the trees—he had fallen and been unable to get up. The second fall had been particularly frightening, accompanied by a dangerously high fever brought on by sepsis, and I wasn’t sure he would live. The MRI showed microbleeds, stemming from tiny ruptured blood vessels in my father’s brain. The same MRI revealed an unruptured cerebral aneurysm. An “incidental finding,” according to the neurologist, who explained, to our concerned faces, his decision to withhold surgery because of my father’s age.
During those autumn months, when my father’s situation was most uncertain, I felt at a loss for words. I did not speak about the beeping of monitors in generic hospital rooms and the rhythmic rattle of orderlies pushing soiled linen basins through the corridors. I did not deliver my thoughts on the cruelty of bed shortages (two days on a gurney in a corridor, a thin blanket to cover his hairless calves and pale feet), the smell of hospital food courts, and the strange appeal of waiting room couches—slick vinyl, celery green, and deceptively soft. I did not speak of the relief of coming home late at night to a silent house and filling a tub with water, slipping under the bubbles and closing my eyes, the quiet soapy comfort of being cleaned instead of cleaning, of being a woman conditioned to soothe others, now soothed. I did not speak about the sense of incipient loss. I did not know how to think about illness that moved slowly and erratically but that could fell a person in an instant.
I experienced this wordlessness in my life but also on the page. In the moments I found to write, I often fell asleep. The act of wrangling words into sentences into paragraphs into stories made me weary. It seemed an overly complicated, dubious effort. My work now came with a recognition that my father, the person who had instilled in me a love of language, who had led me to the writing life, was losing words rapidly.
Even though the worst of the crisis passed quickly, I was afraid to go off duty. I feared that if I looked away, I would not be prepared for the loss to come and it would flatten me. I had inherited from my father (a former war reporter/professional pessimist) the belief that an expectancy of the worst could provide in its own way a ring of protection. We followed the creed of preventive anxiety.
It is possible too that I was experiencing something known as anticipatory grief, the mourning that occurs before a certain loss. Anticipatory. Expectatory. Trepidatory. This grief had a dampness. It did not drench or drown me but it hung in the air like a pallid cloud, thinning but never entirely vanishing. It followed me wherever I went and gradually I grew used to looking at the world through it.
I had always assumed grief was experienced purely as a sadness. My received images of grief came from art school and included portraits of keening women, mourners with heads bowed, hands to faces, weeping by candlelight. But anticipatory grief, I was surprised to learn, demanded a different image, a more alert posture. My job was to remain standing or sitting, monitoring all directions continually. Like the women who, according to legend, once paced the railed rooftop platforms of nineteenth-century North American coastal houses, watching the sea for incoming ships, hence earning those lookouts the name widow’s walk. I was on the lookout, scouring the horizon from every angle, for doom.
It was only later, when I read C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, that I understood grief’s many guises and iterations. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear … Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense,” Lewis wrote. “Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down.”
The grief I felt was not upending my life. It did not, for instance, prevent me from socializing and exercising and tracking down orange blossom water for a new cake recipe. It did not prevent me from lying in corpse pose in a crowded yoga studio, simulating my own proximity to the void. But it unmoored me and remained the subtext of my days.
One night I looked in the mirror and noticed my eyebrows were aloft. I tried to relax my face, make my brows those of a different, more carefree person. The next day, while sitting on the streetcar, I watched a woman whose eyebrows had been carefully pencilled in and thought how cartoonishly worried she looked with those skinny, fretful arcs. Like me, I thought, like everyone.
The worry was heavy and I tried to put it down. I tried to read my way out of it. I tried to distract myself from it. I tried to write my way through it. Ordinarily my art could withstand the pressures of life, the demands of young children and aging parents. But that year when the snow came early I discovered I had a wan and flimsy art, one that could be smacked down like a cheap sidewalk sign with the slightest emotional gust.
Or maybe I discovered something more fundamental: worry is a constriction. A mind narrows when it has too much to bear. Art is not born of unwanted constriction. Art wants formless and spacious quiet, anti-social daydreaming, time away from the consumptive volume of everyday life.
My relationship to time, my attitude towards it, grew fickle. I wanted an expanse of it. I wanted just a little. It moved too quickly. It crept too slowly. It was overly determined by forces outside myself. It overwhelmed me if I was left to define its shape. It was best late at night after my village slept. It was only good in the very early morning before the village awoke and the hours and minutes were set.
I had grown so accustomed to being interrupted by emergency calls and hospital news, I began interrupting myself whenever I sat down to work. I leapt up from my seat every half-hour as though an alarm had sounded. Time used to be deeper than this, I thought.
I studied the eyebrows of writers and artists I respected. I researched famous eyebrows. Frida. Audrey. Greta. Groucho. “Brows may be a map of the psyche,” reported one fashion magazine. I looked for the secret recipe (impeccable elegance, theatrical boldness, unkempt creativity, flirty merriment) that fed people and made them flourish. I wanted a road map back to my art and equanimity.
One morning while standing at a café counter staring at the magnificently thick brows of the man making my coffee, I discovered one should not gaze too long at faces unless one is prepared to fall in love again. As I watched the warm air of the coffee machine steam his eyeglasses, as I noticed him squint behind the fog, as he made a flower pattern in the foam of my coffee, I felt overcome with love. Faces have a near-unwatchable intimacy, particularly in a world in which everything perishes in the end. It is difficult to look as we choose, without emotional consequence.
Like me, the man looked very tired. What had he lost? What was he about to lose? Was he trying to get his grieving done ahead of schedule?
A few days later, I was charmed by a man at the gym and the thoughtful way he wiped down the treadmill for me. I was charmed by a chiropractor and the way my body flooded with endorphins when he leaned into his adjustment. I was charmed by the kindness of a stranger who let me slip in front of her at the grocery checkout. The professor, the café manager, the dog walker—I ran away with each of them in my mind, and this scared me because I come from a long line of philanderers. “Be careful,” whispered the guardian angel on my shoulder. “Remember how much you love your husband.”