A Convergence Of Birds (4 page)

Until abruptly the children’s “play” is over. In dispirited columns they shuffle back through the slot of a door. Someone must have called them, or a bell has rung. A matron in a dark coverall appears in the doorway, commanding the children to hurry. How strangely obedient they are, trooping back into the warehouse within, a house of unwanted wares; the emptying playground releases them without resistance. Yet, bravely, the Blond Child continues swinging, pretending not to have heard the summons. She’s flying, kicking, bucking, jets of blue flame leaping from her eyes, more recklessly than ever. The matron shouts at her what sounds like, “You! Get down.” For another few seconds the Blond Child dares disobey, then she too gives in. Like a bird wounded in flight, she returns quickly to earth.

How forlorn, her abandoned swing.

The pathos of the vertical, stilled swing.

Indistinguishable now from the others—how many others, resigned, slump-headed in their faded-blue orphans’ issue—the Blond Child disappears into the red-brick Los Angeles Orphans Home. My fingers continue to snap the camera’s shutter as, after the death of its brain, a body may continue to thrash, to quiver, to pulse for a brief while. But at last I stop. Shaken and exhausted. My soul seems to have drained from me. Quickly, fumbling with my car keys, I prepare to leave; in a sudden terror that the matron has seen me. As in the past, not frequently but sometimes, occasionally, vigilant parties, invariably women, have called the police to report—What? Who? What crime have I committed, with only a camera? The Box Artist is bound by no local law in the execution of his exacting art.

As I drive away in the 1928 Ford I peer anxiously into the rearview mirror. Seeing only a dust tunnel raised in my wake.

My defense would be The child knew me, as I knew her.

For hours that evening, and then for days. In the dank earthen-floored cellar of the bungalow on Sacramento Street, East Los Angeles. A shabby house surrounded by palm trees, crude sword-shaped leaves rustling in the ceaseless maddening wind. The whisperings and murmurings of strangers Look! look! look! look! Look what his life is.

Yet unhurried, I develop my film, precious to me as my very soul. My pulse quickens as I contemplate the miniature images, I feel almost faint, the Blond Child so captured, so my own. I prepare the Box; the Box I have chosen for her measures approximately thirteen inches by nine by five; an ordinary wooden box you would say, and you’d be correct; stained from use, oil smears in the wood slats; a box scavenged by the sharp-eyed Box Artist out of a mound of trash in a drainage ditch out behind this bungalow. Eagerly then, and in excitement and fear, I select my artifacts. In honor of the Blond Child I must choose well; if I fail, she will be lost a second time.

This is my body, and this is my blood. Take ye and eat. The secret wish of all who live in their art.

After several blunders, and sleepless nights, I step back to discover that I have created a Box landscape of uncanny subterranean beauty! Coarse, earthen, primitive; of the rich sepia hue of memory. Tiny snapshot-images of the Blond Child are secreted in the Box’s dark corners and beneath a heart-shaped rock covered in dried dirt that I brought back from beside the mesh-wire fence. A vividly yellow bird, canary or goldfinch, purchased from the taxidermist from whom I purchase all my creature-artifacts, is placed on top of this rock, tiny talon-claws secured by glue to the rock. With tweezers I have managed to lift the little bird’s wings from its body so that it appears about to fly away; its pert little tail feathers are at an upward angle that, too, suggests imminent flight; but never, never will the little yellow bird fly out of my Box, as the Blond Child will never fly out of my Box.

Of your fleeting and unloved life I make you immortal.

Of your broken heart, I make art.

Out of that lost day have I plucked you, and myself

Yet, you are alone in the Box. I, doomed to invisibility, am forbidden to take my place beside you.

Joseph Cornell

GRAND HOTEL DES ILES D’ OR

1952

10.75 x 6 x 3 in.

box construction

Diane Williams

Oh well, my life—or so I must have one—is very crackalured and thin-shelled, encrusted with gold and carved walnut on a moonlit evening, in the warm light, as if in a lukewarm fire, where no actual cruelty occurs. When I say which night, or the year this is, or the name of my mother, I have more sympathy for her.

The strand of havoc-rendering beads Mr. Wang gave to her hangs around her neck for what good that will do her.

She is well-known and she lives in New York City. It is well-known she is meant to be kept safe. She bestows blessings and she will come easily to the lips. In my life, she smiles.

I train myself to forget all that. I used to be so worried. I think I have not been good enough yet. You know the men I like won’t fuck me.

I am now officially rippling, some of the time optimistically, for I am a trained girl.

I forget to care about my leg, though.

“You go in there. Go in there.” I go in there. “In you go again. Do you have to sit in the—what is the opposite of sun?” the mother says.

“Shade,” I say.

“Shade,” she says. “If you want to sit in the shade, there are lots of places to sit. Do you like it? You don’t like it. It looks as if you don’t like it.”

“I like it. What would we do?” I ask her.

“We will play and we will work.”

“Will we fight?”

“Not very much.”

“You know so much,” I say, so next week I will do that. No, I won’t. This is a very busy time for me. Perhaps after the new year. I kiss her lips.

What I have done is fabulous. I seem to be getting a little emotional. I keep pointing upstairs. I point upstairs again. I don’t know if I will ever give a little chuckle. I plead in the corner. I was quite favored about a mile away from India. I asked Edward if he wanted more than anything not to be unkind to me, that was how coldly and calmly I was determined to be passionate.

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED {OWL WITH MOON}

c. 1945

22.875 x 12.875 x 5.6875 in.

mixed media box construction

Howard Norman

SINCE I COULDN’T SLEEP, I toured the farmhouse. There was little new in this. Tea would’ve been better, but I percolated coffee, then drank a cup, an accompaniment to being awake, not the cause. The night would be less wretched because I’d learned to consider insomnia an expertise. The farmhouse was built in 1847. I got up from bed; out the second-floor window there was a startlingly moonlit field. “Flooded.” The crabapple tree could be seen almost in its entirety. My wife was asleep. My daughter was asleep in her bedroom, with its view of the barn awash in moonlight. I was wearing boxer shorts and a black T-shirt. It was a balmy summer night, 3:00 a.m. I had never kept a Journal of Insomnia. In this situation, my friend, DM, would have brewed tea. I felt like meeting DM in The Village Restaurant in Hardwick, but at this hour I couldn’t by all etiquette telephone, though DM would’ve embraced the reason. Crickets were thrumming in the mudroom. Its broken ceiling, mouse entries, torn screen door made it “open to the elements,” both an interior and exterior space. Like a Joseph Cornell environment. The inside crickets duet with the garden crickets faintly contributed to by the staccato hoots of a saw-whets owl. In the trees the owl’s call was ventriloqual; I couldn’t say exactly where the owl was located. A summer earlier I’d taken a night-long course, “Vermont Owls.” I’d bought a new flashlight. One man had strips of glow-in-the-dark tape on each wrists. I couldn’t figure out his need for these distinguishing marks. When it comes to coffee, I thought, “percolated” isn’t a word much used these days. In the downstairs rooms, it occurred to me, on most every wall was a bird painting or print. In this respect, the house was like a historical aviary. The presence of these works was the result of the only form of acquisitiveness I was not ashamed of, except the beloved house itself. It was in 1973 that I purchased my first bird art, Bengal Crow, 1785, by Aert Schouman (1710-1792), at auction for $2,400. That sum comprised roughly one fifth of my income for the year. In 1979, I sold Bengal Crow, under sad duress, for $8,500 to the exact same person who’d auctioned it off in 1973. He had written to me, “I’ve thought from day one it was a mistake to ever let it go.” I needed the money; I also acquiesced to his regret. Eventually, I used part of the money to pay rent, travel to the arctic, put a down payment on Parrot, by Edward Lear, to a private owner in San Francisco. Once you put your name out there, notices of bird art come in fairly often. In a 1984 catalogue from a famous auction house, I saw Bengal Crow again. On auction day I phoned in a bid, but Bengal Crow had been sold minutes before—it went for $13,000. I wondered if ill fate had befallen the seller, and, if so, what sort. I wondered if in years to come he’d write another letter.

One night, very late, reading The Cryptogram, a play by DM, in the guest room so as not to disturb my wife, I heard a car go past, “Duke of Earl” on its radio. The song drifting out. I wondered if the saw-whets owl heard it. The song brought back some memories, from even before it had been recorded. Like of my older brother’s girlfriend, her name was Paris, who, in 1959 often wore a T-shirt that read EXIST TO KISS YOU. She owned a pet parrot. My brother had fixed a hook to the ceiling of the car over the back seat of his 1948 Buick, so that Paris could hang up the parrot’s cage while they were cruising around Grand Rapids, Michigan, a hell-hole. The parrot’s name was Screwloose. The Buick, a black hippopotamus of a car, had the word Turboglide in beautiful, silver cursive letters flowing across the dashboard. Metal letters. The car had a gray plush interior, armrest ash trays, fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. I was having great, embarrassing difficulty learning to write cursive in elementary school. Paris suggested that I take a pen and paper, sit in the front seat, and, using the word Turboglide as a model, practice my handwriting. So I did that. (I would’ve done almost anything Paris suggested.) Whenever I saw the car in the driveway, I’d get my pad of paper, pen, and the two-page guide called, “The Cursive Example.” My teacher used that phrase for our weekly handwriting assignment: “Time for our cursive example, students.” One time I filled up a dozen or so pages, Turboglide, Turboglide, Turboglide, and so forth, right while my brother and Paris were making out in the back sear. Finally, I got an A minus on my next cursive example, improving up from a C minus. (In retrospect, I think this allowed me to think of the act of writing as having erotic possibilities.) In the rearview mirror that warm evening, I saw that my brother and Paris had their shirts off.

On the wall next to the piano is Head of a Flamingo, by Mark Catesby. It was drawn circa 1740. Catesby did not, as Audubon did, only replicate what he saw in “the natural world.” Catesby combined disparate elements into mesmerizing tableaux. He floated the flamingo’s head, for example, in front of a branch of coral which normally be found underwater. In his bird drawings, Catesby offers an “ornithological expression,” rather than merely an “ornithological experience.” A very dear friend prefers to sit facing away from Head of a Flamingo, because, she says, “I invariably dream about it.” I have two heroes: Mark Catesby and the Japanese writer Ryonosuke Akutagawa, who wrote Hell Screen and Rashamon, among other works. “What good is intelligence,” Akutagawa asked, “if you can’t discover a useful melancholy?” I often see Catesby’s entire Natural History oeuvre as being underlit by a kind of melancholy, in that even bird art can be autobiographical in tone. Catesby, painter of birds, fish and flowers, never left a self-portrait. Testimony as to his demeanor is scarce. However, his friend, Emanuel Mendez de Costa, left a verbal sketch of Catesby: “… tall, meagre, hard favoured, and with a sullen look—extremely grave or sedate, and of a silent disposition; but when he contracted a friendship was communicative and affable.” Catesby was also severely nearsighted.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Mason & Dixon, deals head-on with the haunting levels of loneliness born of long years in the early American wilderness. One of the powerful aspects of this inimitable work, is that Pynchon engenders an empathetic loneliness of uncanny dimensions in readers—in me, at least. Of epic loneliness, historian D.L. LaPorte writes: “Mountain men are good examples, but there are other examples of commensurate import—long-time wilderness experience is what draws in eccentrics, and also creates eccentrics of a more extreme sort.” I think that DM might agree that Jaime deAngulo would be one of those. Rogue ethnographer/linguist/poet, deAngulo lived in Northern California in the first half of the twentieth century. He spoke at least a dozen California Indian languages and all but invented anecdotal linguistics, that is, autobiographical linguistics. DM and I have exchanged books by deAngulo, and while I’ve never asked him outright what he thinks, I know he admires the writing, which is really all I need to know. On crows, deAngulo now and then offers a disquisition: “… well, first of all, they walk on two feet. You could see that as a mockery of humans. Also, crows could be considered the first linguists, at least in Northern California cosmology—they spoke every human and animal tongue, plus crow-talk, naturally, and they equally mocked all inarticulate gesture, whether in humans or animals, or themselves. I one said to Jung that crows were self-reflective. He didn’t even feign the slightest interest.” DM has a lovely pond out back on his property. Standing next to it after swimming in it one afternoon, I mentioned to DM that a neighbor was about to hire someone to shoot a great blue heron who, most every day that summer, arrived to her pond to eat frogs and fingerling trout. “It’s eating all the fish,” that neighbor said. I said that in my view her pond had been anointed. “She should provide for the Gods,” said DM.

On the wall opposite a quilt that my wife made, is the Inuit print, Laughing Gull. The title is a literal interpretation of the action: the gull is indeed laughing. However, flying out of the gull’s throat is a naked Inuit man, followed by items of clothing, such as mukluks, mittens, parka, and assorted spears, knives (ulus), dog sled reins, other implements of quotidian life in the arctic. Laughing Gull is composed in the simple, almost hieroglyphic manner of the earliest Inuit drawings allowed for public and commercial presentation, which would be roughly from the late 1940s or very early 1950s. In the autumn of 1977, I was living in the Beluga Motel in Churchill, Manitoba, a town located at the mouth of the Churchill River on Hudson’s Bay. I was mainly engaged in translating stories about Noah’s Ark as told by Mark Nuqac, an Inuit elder. One day, there was a break in the weather and I propped open a window using a Gideon Bible. I left the room to get breakfast at the Tundra Hotel and when I returned, a gull was perched atop my old Underwood typewriter. The gull had already unraveled the ribbon, was maniacally squalling, its muddy footprints all over the table. Later, I mentioned this to Mark Nuqac. “Any tracks on the floor?” he asked. None, I said. “It flew directly in through the window, eh?” he said. When I got close, the gull scattered out through the open door.