Being a Beast (22 page)

It's not surprising that poets get all ethereal about swifts. If anything can be literally ethereal, swifts are.

The main problem with turning myself into a swift, though, isn't that it's an air thing and I'm a soil thing. It's speed. I'm a terribly slow animal. The difference between our relative perceptions of the texture of the air is vast, but it's as nothing compared to the difference in pace of our lives.

In terms of longevity, a swift is comparable to many humans. Swifts have been known to live to twenty-one. It's the amount of living that they put into each of the years that's the real difference.

Some arithmetic, because there is a type of truth in figures:

Each spring and each autumn they travel around 9,000 kilometres (5,592 miles) between Oxford and the Congo: that's 18,000 kilometres (11,185 miles) every year – which doesn't begin to account for the flying that they do in their ordinary lives. That's spread over around 66 days in the autumn (30 days of travelling, 36 days of stopover) and 26 days in the spring (21 days of travelling and 5 days of stopover).
*
In autumn they average around 300 kilometres (186 miles) per day towards the 9,000 kilometres (5,592 miles) and in the spring 430 kilometres (267 miles) per day. Let's assume that on the migration stop-overs they do 75 kilometres (47 miles) a day feeding, soaring, sleeping and exulting. Let's say that in the rest of their lives they're doing 100 kilometres (62 miles) a day.

Thus:

For twenty-one years that's 1,015,875 kilometres (631,235 miles) – about 1/150 the distance between the earth and the sun and 2.6 times the distance between the earth and the moon.

Swifts are about 16.5 centimetres long. I'm about 183 centimetres tall – about eleven times their length. If I were to walk proportionately as far in twenty-one years, I'd have walked almost 1/13 of the way to the sun and twenty-nine times to the moon. If I kept up the same pace and lived to eighty-four – a realistic equivalent for that long-lived swift – I'd have walked a third of the way to the sun and 116 times to the moon.

But it's not all travelling and killing (though think of the millions of individual, assessed, intimately targeted head turns and snaps there will have been). That twenty-one-year-old may have bred nineteen times. The average number of nestlings might be as high as 1.7 per season. That's thirty-two in its breeding lifetime. Multiply that by four for me: 128.

That's what they do with their time. But what about their perception of what they're doing? If (and yes, it's a big if) they're watching, as we do, a film of their own lives, how fast is it moving? And how frantic are those snapping heads?

If those questions mean anything at all, they must relate in some way, however crudely, to the speed of perception.

Snails move very, very slowly. Only if events are more than a quarter of a second apart will a snail perceive them as distinct. If you wave your finger in front of a snail four times or more a second, it will see a single, stationary finger. Sloth freezes movement: it blurs, simplifies and integrates, and in integrating loses a lot of the whole. It obscures the distinct parts of things, if time is an element of those parts, and concocts the lie that it sees things as they really are. It drains time out of our vision. Oversimplification is deceit.

Whereas speed, if you're up to it, can tell you the value of time; can let you see your business with the due contribution from time's perspective; can inject complexity and nuance. If, like many birds, you can hear sounds separated by less than two millionths of a second, you'll know the baroque complexity of apparently bland birdsong. If you're a human hearing that, you'll fall on your knees. Wonder is a function of the degree of resolution – in birdsong, in optics, in philosophy, in theology. Only those blind to the velvet flow of a caterpillar's legs and deaf to the grunt of a crocus as it noses out of the earth don't worship, and often they can't be blamed.

Another way of putting this is that really fast hardware and software can effectively slow down the world. The acutely discriminating bird hears what I'd hear if I turned the speed of the birdsong right down. I can probably hear two sounds as distinct if they're around two hundredths of a second apart. The bird's getting in one second what it would take me about 2¾ hours to hear.

If the rest of the bird's tape runs at a similar rate and the bird (let's call it a swift) lives for twenty-one years, then, since it has done 10,000 times as much living per unit time as me, it will die at a real age of 210,000 years – the distance separating us from the time when the first modern humans evolved in east Africa.

Now let's try this with physical speed – which of course entails a lot of attention in many different neurological modalities. The snail can get by as a woefully crude visual discriminator because it moves over ground at a top speed of a metre (3.3 feet) an hour.

The highest migration speed recorded for swifts over a long distance is (a plainly wind assisted) 650 kilometres (404 miles) per day. The average for the spring migration is 336 kilometres (209 miles) per day. Measured by tracking radar, the flight speed of swifts on spring migration was 10.6 metres (35 feet) per second, which, if maintained over 24 hours, would be 916 kilometres (569 miles) per day. The fastest human runner, Usain Bolt, clocked 12.4 metres (41 feet) per second over 100 metres (328 feet). Then he stopped, panted, was wrapped in a blanket, handed an energy drink and carried shoulder high around the stadium. The swifts continue 3,360 times further per day for the best part of a month, catching their own food and navigating across deserts, seas and mountains. We, at our very best, are snails.

Of course there are obvious objections to all these nerdishly arithmetical types of comparison. I've been making them myself as I've tapped away. I agree with them all. But even if the comparisons are wholly worthless, it's worth making them to demonstrate their worthlessness and so clear the ground for something else.

The figures might be the grammar of swifts. Grammar is necessary but not sufficient for poetry.

I've tried to be prosaic, because when it comes to swifts, all poetry fails.

✴ ✴

I can't follow the swifts into the air. I'm less like them there than when I'm on the ground. Planes, of course, aren't about the air at all. You're furthest from swifts in a hurtling tube full of flatus. The view's disembodiedly cartographical.

The air, for me, is necessarily about buckles and ball-crunching harness. I lurch, swing and churn. At best I'm a huge aphid – a drifting piece of swift food. At least on the ground I can dodge and roll for whole seconds at a time, and on a mountain in a gale I can feel secure when wind is blowing round me at the same speed as round the head of a migrating swift. When I stripped off my clothes at the top of our moor I got feedback from my ruffled body hair that was not all that unlike the tingling from the touch receptors of the swift's filoplumes – minute, hairlike feathers that lie alongside the contour feathers, moving with them and letting mission control know where each of the big plumes is in space.

Water's better, I suppose, but still remote. There I'm as buoyant as the swift when it's sleeping 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) above the sea. My legs could be its forked tail: they do the same job. I can angle my arms like its sabre wings, and they take me down or up. But the water takes away almost as much swift life as it gives. It takes away speed, and therefore swift time. A slow swift is perhaps even less of a swift than a stiff swift.

I'm best at being a swift when I'm on the ground. At least then I can see and smell the source of the air rivers the swifts are fishing, hear the thrum next to my ear of the wasp that will be broken 300 metres (984 feet) up and slap a fly on my arm at more or less the same speed as the swift's stubby neck would turn and its mandibles close on it.

✴ ✴

Sitting on a bench in my Oxford garden, I followed the swifts with my eye, despairing as they climbed up to roost in the air, beyond all eyesight, beyond all sense, sensibility and words.

When they left I couldn't bear it. I followed them across the Channel and across France, noting down slavishly – like a bereaved disciple looking for relics or holy places – the things that the swifts might have seen or smelt or heard as they came this way. It seemed to matter that the smell of a Picardy bonfire was rendered right in the notebooks: the birds might have caught beetles that the fire hoisted into a cloud. The chatter in a Pyrenean café was relevant: the same phrases were likely to have been used a fortnight before, at the same volumes and at the same tables, and so to have ricocheted off the same mildewed whitewash and up into the air over the mountain at the same angles, contributing to the same hum and throb that the swifts knew and giving a floating aphid the same sort of jerk that caused a swift's head to turn. The wine that night in an Andalusian courtyard had to be described exactly, because nitrate from swift dung might have coursed into the grapes and because insects that fed on the vines might have spiralled up in a fog of lemons and rotting shrimp and been taken by you know what. Or you know
who
.

The world was a web, fine as gauze, woven of causes – each cause connected to the others and each traceable ultimately, if you followed things carefully, to the swifts. I suppose I was a gnat's breath from psychosis.

It wasn't good. The swifts were alpha and omega, and that denigrated the rest of the alphabet and truncated my vocabulary. I obsessed like this for years. Sometimes it was an exhilarating game, which in my more pompous moments I dignified as a thought experiment: ‘How do swifts connect my tennis elbow with the collapse of an Icelandic bank?' I'd ask myself. In the few blessed moments of self-mockery, I reminded myself of the story about the Fundamentalist Sunday school:

Teacher: ‘Caleb, what's small, furry, eats nuts, has a long bushy tail and leaps from branch to branch?'

Caleb: ‘Well, I know the answer must be “Jesus”, because it always is, but it certainly sounds like a squirrel.'

In my case the ultimate answer was always: ‘Swifts'.

Then, overlying and consolidating this primary pathology, there was a second generation of weirdness. Just as pilgrims revere the footsteps of the disciples who revered the footsteps of the Master, so I followed in my own swift-following footsteps. In the spring I'd sit watching the Strait of Gibraltar in the same bar, in the same seat, drinking the same sherry, because that's where I'd been and that's what I'd been drinking when
they
first made landfall. I'd ask the musicians to play the same tunes that had brought them in before. At the very end of April and the start of May in Oxford I'd keep my eyes fixed on the ground until I got to the end of the road where I always see them for the first time – fearful of seeing them elsewhere.

This sounds like (at least) severe personality disorder or OCD. Well, perhaps. But a kinder word is ‘habit'.

I'm happier with that. Indeed I'm excited about that. Habit might be a way into the swifts. All other portals seem to be locked and double bolted.

Although they often seem to refute it, swifts are subject to the same laws of nature as I am. However strongly they taste of immortality, they die. Gravity doesn't mean as much to them as to me, but they're not immune to it. We share a jurisdiction and hence a passport. We can live together; we can travel together; we already have some shared habits, and we can work on acquiring more.

Laws of nature, according to the biologist Rupert Sheldrake (who collated many of the facts at the start of this chapter) are like habits. They tend to be true because that's the way the universe has become accustomed to behaving. Sodium and chlorine atoms naturally adopt the configuration that they do in the structure of salt crystals because they're used to it; it's been done trillions of times before; the template's established; the electrostatic grooves are nicely chamfered; things slide neatly together because practice makes perfect; habit is the line of least resistance; and habits have evolved because they work, and been maintained because they keep working.

As anyone who's just taken up running or dieting will know, new habits are hard to develop. The universe is a hard surface on which to engrave new patterns. But once something's been done once, it's a great deal easier to do it again. Think of the chemist's beard and the rats in Oxford and Sydney. Once it's been done a thousand times it'll be easier still. No wonder the history of evolution so often looks jerky: nothing for many millions of years, and then a huge stride.

My fingers stopped growing because their tips hit the boundary of a remembered pattern. That was habitual behaviour. It's what fingers do: they obey that pattern. The young cuckoos were drawn to Africa by a memory, ingrained into the cuckoos' collective unconscious, of what cuckoos habitually do. Jung got it right for cuckoos, fingers and salt crystals.

This entails a lot of mystical talking. Sodium has to talk to chlorine; embryonic fingers have to talk to some sort of ideal finger; young cuckoos have to talk to their dead ancestors. The whole massive enterprise of migration becomes one vast Ouija board. It's creepy and Platonic. Swifts are tugged at 6,000 metres (almost 20,000 feet) by an impalpable tide generated by millions of dead swifts. They're corralled by dead sky shepherds across the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the western edge of the Sahara and into the Congo.