Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris's Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged – The Marginalian
“Split the Lark – and You'll Find the Music,” Emily Dickinson mocked the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?”
After the On the Origin of Speciesthe poet understood that in all its beautiful revelations, science did not tell us anything about the soul of the creature—the difference between scientific truth and poetic truth, between the ways of looking and the styles of seeing, Ursula K. Le Guin would capture the era later with her wise realization that although both celebrate what they describe, science opposes the external matter, while science opposes everything by describing it through poetry to describe it inside, and life is a world of servants.
In his short, hot insistence on the subject in the picture, Dickinson was warning us that despite all the truths we may discover about birds in the future – we now know how they fly and how they see and what they dream – the truth about them, the poetic truth we might call the spirit, will always remain elusive, unstoppable, unattainable only by love. A century after him, Rachel Carson – a scientist who wrote as a poet and sparked the modern environmental movement with her prophecy, poetry. Silent Spring – we can emphasize that the indestructible sense of wonder is our most powerful antidote to silence the birds that show the natural erasure. We forget, and need constant reminding, that the fruit of the miracle and its fulcrum is not knowledge – nothing we have discovered has kept three billion birds from extinction between Carson's lifetime and ours – but love.
Love from the pages of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris The Book of Birds (public library) – a passionate and intense submission to the wonder of wings, seven years in the making, part guide and part ode, animated by an I/You relationship that includes both reader and learner by speaking to each bird directly as a subject instead of describing something. In this bright lacuna between preservation and sanctification, emerges the spirit in the species, the multiplicity of the word called, isness in the itness.
Prologue casts a spell and gives a summons:
What is lost when the birds are lost? Above all, the creatures themselves, with their beauty and goodness. And for people – language, story, beauty, possibility, imagination, spirituality, ways of being otherwise. Birds are our place makers, memory keepers, calendars and clocks. They connect parts of the world: land to sky, river to forest, mountain to sea, land to land, hemisphere to equator.
According to their culture Lost Spells again Lost Words (one of my favorite books of all time), lyrical essays — tender as a song, urgent as a warning bell — are accompanied by paintings that are almost unbearably beautiful, springing from a photorealistic reverence and iconoclastic fidelity to a poetic truth beyond physical reality.
What David Whyte did for words, Robert Macfarlane did for birds; what Rachel Carson said about the sea – “no one can write the truth about the sea and leave poetry” – can be said, it must be said about the birds, and no one has expressed their poetry more truly, more tenderly than Robert Macfarlane, whose rhythmic words call the birds one by one, subject by subject, in all their weakness, anger, difficult anger, equation”; the avocet, “which he sees in the sunset in silhouette seems to be blown by glass – as if the wind the one who breathes will leave him in his lap among the reeds”; the bar-tailed godwit who crosses six thousand kilometers between Alaska and Australia in a “miraculous flight”; the black-throated diver who calls out the “mist-born thunder” of the former; the eider, “who can fly as fast as a cheetah's run” with wings so delicate that they “make the angora feel as thick as lead”; the red owl, whose eyes are “in the pure night, two barrels with twelve fruits, two shadowy planets.”
Writing these love letters to a variety of the seven wonders of the bird world – Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight, and Migration – each contains a revelation between science and spirituality. Through it all is a plea to see the world from the bird so clearly that you love it deeply:
Awareness is the first step in naming; knowing is the first step to knowing both things and the relationships between things. Information may cause surprise, surprise care, care in action, action to change. But this is a fragile, easily broken chain – its links must be re-strengthened and re-assembled, again and again.
How lucky we are that there are still those people who have not stopped working – stubborn enough, passionate enough – who continue to strengthen and connect a chain with more beautiful links, lasting longer than we imagined, who glow with that sense of indestructible wonder in which only our salvation lies, where our eternal song is heard.
