The Wing-Beat

To Laura, age 5 1/2:

I saw a wonderful thing this morning! Just as the sun came up, I was walking on the meadow path by the creek. It is down the hill from my and Mimi’s house. A hundred blackbirds ate their breakfast in the meadow grass. As I walked toward them, the birds closer to me flew up and settled on the other side of the flock. They did so continuously. They were a rising and falling wave of black birds against the green-brown field.

At once they decided—all together, as if they had the same mind—to fly to a tree. They rose in a wavery but true sphere of black bodies and wings toward a tree. It is winter, still, and the tree has bare branches. The tree has a teardrop shape, rounder at bottom, narrower toward the top that ends in a point. How marvelous!

As the ball of birds flew upward it took the shape of the tree, but larger at first, and then shrank to the size of the actual tree as the birds lighted on its branches. It was wonderful to watch this happen with the grey sky in the background. The tree seemed to have black leaves, too, but just for a minute.

So, blackbirds are artists in a flock! This morning they also reminded me that God is an artist. He makes art together with his creatures. Now, how wonderful is that? What a beautiful thing I saw this morning! I thought of my granddaughters, right then and there. I wanted you to know about it too. – Papa

Update, May 25, 2011.

David Lyle Jeffrey remarks on the poetry of Richard Wilbur in the June/July 2011 issue of First Things and mentions a poem on the birds.  Of course Wilbur’s observation recalled what I saw and reported to Laura.  He wrote,

As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,

A landscapeful of small black birds, intent

On the far south, convene at some command

At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone

With headlong and unanimous consent

From the pale trees and fields they settled on.

After a paragraph or two of Jeffrey’s comment, another stanza from Wilbur reads,

Delighted with myself and with the birds,

I set them down and give them leave to be.

It is by words and the defeat of words,

Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,

That for a flying moment one may see

By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

Downhill from the house, in the creek bottom next to the walking trail, the wild persimmon lives from ground level upward, trunk-to-trunk with the oak.  Their branches and leaves intermingle.  The hard persimmons on the tree’s north side hold tightly to their stems, waiting for their process from tannic tartness to fruity sweetness.  Softer, most of the fruit on the south side have almost arrived.  A few have released their hold and made twilight snacks for returning coyotes and deer whose signature tracks remain.  The deer–and at least one human passerby–have also plucked the sweeter, low-hanging fruit.  It is the season of waiting, ripening, and the harvest’s first-fruits.  By mid-November persimmons throughout East Texas will lie rotting among fallen leaves, their sugary, alcoholic aroma proof of abundance, more than deer, coyotes, and others need.  Yet that is no waste, but evidence of a superabundant, normal order of providence beyond mere reason.  What intoxicating extravagance!

Buzzing swarms, snatched crisp;

Sing! Swoop! Swish! Wing syncs with beak,

Swallows’ dusk sortie.

-js

Some loved ones create delight by keeping their bird feeders stocked (with the avian-approved, “good stuff”) and waiting for the delight.  Hours of it come in flashes of cardinals, blue jays, orioles, finches, variegated blackbirds, black-capped chickadees, mourning dove, sparrows, and the seasonal many others.  They are delight on the wing, “wingborne” snatches of a common grace present in the general environment but focused at the feeders.  Yes, there are the fat squirrels and the after-dusk racoons, interlopers in something not intended for them, but who are they to turn down a good deal in that extension of common grace?  All are distinctive, and all take part in what is offered.

That wingborne delight comes from the givers’ provision.  The “good stuff” is not cheap, nor is it second-rate, the kind some birds turn away from–they understand stingy giving and simply choose something else.  The givers give for the sake of present and anticipated joy, liberally, and they get to share in grace redoubled.  It all comes from a life-attitude, not a singular, selfish desire just to enjoy the local wildlife, but to show they share somehow in a common life borne of a common provision.  It is so with the birds and is potentially true for all their relationships!  As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. 

The Father provides, and so do his children.  Grace is a gift received and given.  Providence is divine, but people pass it on to others.  It is not only spiritual or only material, mostly these are inseparable in the gift.  Either way or together, through the Spirit there is provision and there is delight.  It is the wingborne foundation for a life of joy. 

Our international culture lore and our use of domesticated birds abounds with the birds and the “wing-beat” of their work and significance:  storks bring children to parents; the hummingbirds–Mayan divinities incarnate–do they not sip the gods’ nectar?  The gospel dove descending upon the Son of Man (or in gospel songs on people as the Great Speckled Bird or the Snow White Dove); the swallows heralding spring at San Juan Capistrano; the American Bald Eagle, bird of peace first, then war; the albatross of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; the California Sespe condors–a weak flock though they are outsized fowl.  The pampered peafowl of India.  Moving closer to our hearts, and table habits, the Thanksgiving Turkey (the wild turkey does indeed fly, yes, Sir, Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia and the Pilgrims of Plymouth!), and, just as with the chicken-domesticators of the Indus Valley, 6,000 b.c.e., do we not all (well, most of us) partake of the yardbird, aided these days by the Arkansas Tysons and the Texas Pilgrims?  And eggs, too. 

About the wing-beat, in another entry.

Franz Rosenzweig still challenges the West eighty-plus years after his death.  But as a teen-aged student, his often pithy diary comments suggested the later direction of his thinking and word-speaking.  Consider for example November 17, 1906:

Words are tombstones.

Words are bridges over chasms. One usually walks across without looking down. If one looks down he is liable to feel giddy.

Words are also boards laid over a shaft, concealing it.

To be a philosopher is to open tombs, look into abysses, climb down shafts.

Word-speaking, word-pictures — such as we find in his Star of Redemption later.

[from Nahum N. Glatzer (presenter), Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998]

Have you seen this?

Here and there, in the newspapers, advertisements, books, yes–in student papers–but even in publications from those folk who should know better, I find the expression, “As I was pouring over this idea,” or “I poured over his book,” or some whatnot . . . .

World, let’s not let the vulgar tongue take us down that trail!  One “pores” over something of interest such as a book; one does not “pour.”  The infinitives are, respectively, “to pore” as opposed to “to pour.”

There!  Now wasn’t that snippy of me?  Now, the interesting and instructive thing about these forms is that they both appear to come from the same Middle English “pouren,’ but somehow their spelling reflects a history of either transitive or intransitive usage.  Or they may be considered to have nothing to do with one another.  There is at least one instance of “pore” being used for “pour” in Chaucer.

I cannot resist musing about the avaunts in the concents of Stephenson’s Anathem who just might occasionally suffer from the acedia Kathleen Norris exposes in her new book Acedia & me:  a marriage, monks, and a writer’s life. Can you see, with me, the auts (avaunts) poking their heads out their doors and windows to see what everyone else is doing?

And among the four groups — the Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — does the denomination suggest its members vary in their ability to cope with “the noonday demon” called acedia?  Do the Millennarians, who are allowed to emerge once every thousand years, have a special gift of focused discipline that allows them to endure?  Or do the others do better?  How do they vary in their encounters with boredom, or depression, or apathy?  Stephenson may have some answers from the geek-sci-fi- side; I’m reading Norris for hers.

Opportunity abounds for historical perspective to triumph! At least in tiny cliques of the historically informed here and there, where the sages cluck their tongues and reiterate endlessly, “Here we go again!” I refer to presidential election politics, “of course.” Read more…

From “Goodbye to All That,” by Steve Wasserman www.cjr.org/cover_story/goodbye_to_all_that_1.php

– on troubling changes in the culture of literacy:

The “most troubling crisis is the sea change in the culture of literacy itself, the degree to which our overwhelmingly fast and visually furious culture renders serious reading increasingly irrelevant, hollowing out the habits of attention indispensable for absorbing long-form narrative and the following of sustained argument.” Read more…

Have you noticed some signs of our frantic times? Who hasn’t? Consider, for example, the ways we speak — I mean the way many people are speaking these days in the broadcast media. Where have the verbs gone? Living and thriving the participles (and occasional gerunds) . . . I mean to say, the participles dominate in spoken news reports: “President Bush arriving in Crawford, Texas, today.” “A massive earthquake in Peru killing hundreds today — officials desperately seeking to restore service . . . .” My guess is that this is “headline speech” converted to spoken newscasts, but then it does spill over into the broader reports. I don’t see it in written journalism and I hope I never do.

Such speech could be intentional but probably is not. The style heightens the sense of immediacy and urgency in speech and writing, but the frequent clumsiness in media speech suggests it is neither intentional or planned. The Greek style of the Gospel of Mark employs the technique effectively, though. Mark situates the life and ministry of Jesus in an active, brisk, sometimes breathless setting wherein his divine mission and human needs constantly intersect.
Some words, and some neologisms, get too much exposure; we use them too much. Here are some I could live without, at least in the senses and ways they are typically used:

incredible– It seems to be the omnicompetent adjective of the day and is rarely used in its literal sense. It seems not to mean anything, really. Or too much: despite the intended praise, who wants to be known as “an incredible human being”? Don’t we need more credibility?
in-depth — I weep for the numerous, more suitable adjectives scorned in favor of that awkward term.

impacted — there was a time when the term referred only to wisdom teeth and bowels. It’s still an unpleasant word, even for a universal, verbalized noun-cum-transitive verb. What and who isn’t being “impacted” these days by something or someone? Why, only the other day the local newspaper related how one car impacted another in a crash! Moreover, these days one must surely be most effective or influential when one is impactful.

I could go on, but I need to confess that as we Americans change our speech in ways alternatively annoying and delightful, people around the globe continue to outstrip us as they use and transform English. Someone said the other day that the global language is not English but broken English. I’ll not lament that a language that belongs to everyone must belong to none; rather, I am relieved that I do not have to conduct business and life using broken Chinese or Russian. But I am perhaps no richer for that and my being functionally monolingual. And so my respect for international friends and acquaintances who have made great efforts, successfully, to learn English grows deeper by the year.