Published on 2024-11-03
The cry of a certain bird (I do not know its name, though I wish I did) has so thoroughly colored my experience of this land, that now every time I hear it is an anxious reminder that I will, in the not so far future, finally take my leave of this place.
But every day I am so busy. I still remember the first morning I awoke here, in January of 2023. I was surrounded by that bird's endless ullulations, mixed with all sorts of other sounds, which made it feel as though I had woken up in an enchanted forest.
I was listening to this sonic feast as I lay awake in bed, one window behind me, one beside. The curtains were drawn, but the sun was leaking in behind them, and the sounds crept in with the sun. It felt as though the cries of the birds and beasts were originating just beyond those thin gray curtains, even though this is a residential district.
But at that time, my presence here was conditional. I was here on holiday. It had not yet been decided that I would spend a full two years of my life here. In fact, the possibility of such was, at that time, merely one of many. It did not even feel like a likely one, yet in retrospect it turned out to be inevitable that I would live here long term.
But in the two years since, I have never quite heard that bird's call exactly the same way I heard it during the holiday.
Did the conditionality of my presence here at that time make the bird's cry all that more enchanting? How I long to hear it with that same ring of magic again.
Now I hear it almost every day, and as for the other sounds, perhaps I have gotten so used to them that my brain filters them out, because now the mornings seem so much quieter than that first morning. At least the bird's cry remains, if in this faded condition.
Is it all the fault of the familiarity with which I have come to know this place over the past two years? But knowing (intellectually, at least) that I will soon leave this place, and once again, just as before, have nothing to do with it, shouldn't its bewitching ring return? Why doesn't it?
These are questions addressed to no one in particular, nor are they asked with any special goal in mind. It would simply be nice to know where that bird has gone. Whether it still exists in this world.
I am willing to bet it still is extant in this world, only it has temporarily migrated to another land. Whatever is the nature of this migration, it cannot be captured by something like what we would call 'seasonality', at the least if by 'seasons' we have in mind the four somewhat arbitrary pieces we humans divide the year into for the sake of our own enterprisal convenience.
Whatever 'season' this bird migrates in keeping with, it cannot be a period of time any human being has ever been made aware of. A period of time, after all, in order for us to recognize it as such, must involve some easily discerned phenomenon which repeats with regularity. The rising and seeting of the sun, or the waxing and waning of the moon. Without these signposts, what we call time simply wouldn't exist.
That's what I believe anyway.
And I hold fast to this belief on account of, among other things, my experience with this bird and its cry, and how they have so cruelly eluded me over the years. Certainly, there is something I heard this morning, something I could hear tomorrow or even twenty years from now, that was the same as what I heard on that morning in 2023. Certainly, it was the cry of that bird, with the same timbre, the same pitch, the same pattern of oscillations and contractions.
And yet, something had been different. Which might suggest (although it sounds utterly ludicrous) that a part of the bird remains even as a different part of it has absconded, and the reason it seems to me now that that bird (the real bird, the full bird) eludes me is that the part of it that has gone has taken with it an essential part of what makes the bird, the bird.
If that is true, then I must resign myself to the fact that the bird and its enchanting cry I may only hear again in dreams. That is how fleeting the charms of a finite life are.
The other day I watched a sunset in spite of the clouds that had been colluding to suppress it. After the sun had gone down, I walked the dog. I was not about to go on a real walk around the neighborhood when it was dark like this, because if the dog made any messes I would be responsible for picking up, it would be almost impossible to see. So I walked around the front, side and back of the house instead.
This patch of land, small, and crowded both by the house that stood on it and by the other houses that towered around it and hemmed it in, nonetheless felt vast. The darkness certainly made it seem bigger than it actually was, as darkness tends to do to things. You could still see some clouds in the sky, even as the advancing night was causing their already dull textures to fade.
The sounds I heard were remarkable too. Standing at the edge of the backyard, under a tree, I heard the plucking of a certain musical instrument. What instrument it was, I had no clue. Even the identity of the scale it played dashed my attempts at categorizing it (and I'm not a stranger to music theory). The faint twang of those strings was hard enough to hear, why, on top of that, did they have to play something so bewildering?
From another house, this one located on a diagonally-position plot, the sound of a more familiar instrument, a piano, could be heard. It was faint too, but, well it was a piano, there was no mistaking a sound like that. Its volume would swell from time to time, only to recede.
I then realized, it must be the hour when parents make their children practice musical instruments.
Return