The earth sings, we listen
All living beings that co-create this world as a home, including birds, are creators and weavers of stories. One can immediately object that a ketupa, a puffin, a ring-tailed lemur or a kakapo do not tell stories in the same way and with the same means as we humans do. However, we do not have to grant birds the ability to weave stories in words, writing, painting, film, in the form of a heroic saga or a sweet-sour pop song, even if someone could easily describe bird songs as an analogue of love songs. They themselves, like any living being, even if quite mute, create stories simply by existing and doing what is theirs – that is, by interacting with the world, with other birds, with living creatures, in some everyday way. Whenever they search for food, leave tracks in the snow, whenever they hide hazelnuts or acorns somewhere, whenever they sit on a granite ledge with a caught mouse in their beak, whenever they resolutely take off towards the sun and start a song, then and then and then they co-create stories.
The world is full of an infinite number of similar micro-stories that constantly multiply and intertwine with others – the world is a vast crossroads of stories, woven from stories, small and large. And honestly, personally, I find few things as exciting as trying to gently grasp and unravel those story threads so that the overall picture they create doesn't fall apart under my hands. Maybe just by listening carefully.
Birds are sonic creatures, and some – like the tawny owl and other nocturnal owls – are even supersonic creatures, capable of seeing through sound (in short, part of their auditory nerve reaches the optic center of the brain, thanks to which what they hear also acquires a visual form for them). But even when they only communicate with each other in everyday life (look, rowanberries! are you there? watch out, marten!), they live through their voices, in their voices and songs – their vocal expressions are an extended form of their physical form, a hand extended into relationships that sometimes touches us as intensely as the claws of an attacking owl can wound us. It is therefore practically impossible to think of birds as story-making creatures without taking into account the role that various modes of bird sound and listening play in the stories that they play out with their lives. After all, anyone who has spent even a moment studying birds will tell you that most birds (and especially shy forest-dwelling songbirds) are more often heard than seen, which casts a somewhat dubious light on the fact that we call our casual interest in birds birdwatching. Oh, the eternal underestimation of the audible!
Not a day goes by when I listen outside that I don't wonder what birds are communicating to each other, even though to our ears, especially when we listen carelessly, their voices can sound like a constant repetition of the same thing. Consider how many subtle nuances can be hidden in a single word if you say it with different emphasis or emotion - preachy, imperious, kind, flattering, sly, apologetic, angry, worried or mischievous. So many different shades. So many variables - and therefore so many different possibilities for how our conversation, our meeting, will proceed. I have no reason to believe that it is any different with birds. Just think of all the fascinating discoveries in recent years. We know, for example, that the vocal repertoire of Japanese crested jays contains more than two hundred calls and phrases with demonstrably unique meanings - with many more still waiting to be described and confirmed. It is said that great white geese have at least ten different types of vocalizations depending on the situation – they make one sound when they are flying away, another when they are arriving, and another when they are greeting their fellows, and so on. Now, hold on: a similar variety accompanies the quiet sounds that birds use to communicate with their unhatched chicks in their eggs – it seems that each bird family has its own family jargon, a sound dictionary that the unborn chicks learn from their chirping parents.
But I am even more fascinated by the question of what all – what stories that cannot be put into words – birdsong holds for other birds, that supreme form of earthly musicality, which quite possibly gave rise to human musicality, and prompted us to it. I have never been a staunch supporter of the view that female birds choose a partner primarily based on the intensity and liveliness of the male's singing, looking for signs of his high physical fitness, i.e. a suitable genetic basis for resilient offspring – and, metaphorically, the view that this is the only and main thing that birds communicate to others through their singing. The way of thinking that the book led me to seems much more adequate to me. Living as a Bird Belgian multispecies thinker Vinciane Despret, to whom I was in turn introduced by multispecies musician David Rothenberg, for which I owe him a great deal of gratitude. Mainly because she also draws into the consideration of the meaning of birdsong the sensory and relational richness of the place from which the bird sings its songs.
If a songbird sings (and it does not necessarily have to be a male, because it is now generally known that singing is a phenomenon widespread even among females, especially among permanent species and populations in tropical and subtropical regions), it always sings in relation to a place – at least with regard to other birds in the given area, with which it harmonizes its singing in some way. Even defining a territory always takes place in a community, it is not only a ruthless and self-centered struggle for resources and an increasingly rare place under the sun, but also a form of tuning, a diligent search for anchorage in already established or in the process of being established, spontaneously regrouping relationships – entering the neighborhood. Note, by the way, that birds in a certain area have a similar color of song, a similar dialect. They do not all sing completely differently, unrelatedly. Their world, although clearly delimited into areas of influence, holds together. And it may not be the only factor that affects the singer's performance - the only flavor it carries.
Let's try to let our imagination run wild. What if the listener, through the song of another bird, also learns something essential about the sensory subtleties of a given place? About the quality of water, soil and light in a given place, about the species and pigments of local beetles, grasshoppers and spiders, about the way shadows stretch in a given place at dusk? What if the listening bird can enjoy all this – and much more – in the song of its counterpart? What's more, what if it considers this to be more important than anything else? What if the song of a singing bird is always also a unique musical portrait of the place that the singer has chosen as his territory, the center of his world? If it is possible that long-term preferred environments shape the form of birdsong across a long evolutionary time span, so that from just a short sample we can easily recognize that a given songbird is an inhabitant of the steppes or deep forests, why wouldn't it be possible that a place imprints itself on birdsong in the short term as well, and that a singing bird sings its chosen place consciously, with a completely unclear intention to us? Listen, this could be our home. There is plenty of food, water, and a place to hide where no one will find us. The climate is mild. We will be safe.
Again, you may rightly object that we can hardly prove such a thing. True, we cannot – we view the world with a human mind, not a bird’s. Depending on our cultural background or personal preferences, birdsong may or may not sound melodious to us, perhaps we can sense certain emotions in it (it is music, after all), but that is all. And apparently even the best technology and computer simulations will never allow us to fully cross the epistemological chasm that separates us from the fullness of bird experience. But I will not worry about that. I am not a scientist, but a poet – and as a poet I have the great advantage of not having to worry about being pilloried for opening my heart too much.
In the spring, I often go to listen to the larks on Prague's Bílá hora, my favorite place that opens up, from where the wider world opens up. When I listen to the larks' songs there, I try to perceive them as musicography - a musical imprint or a musical story of the relief, scents, reflections, colors and correlations of a given place. And sometimes, when light and wind come together at the right time, when clouds roll in a certain direction and speed and the earth exhales the deepest scents, when the leaves on the trees flutter as if touched by something outside of space and time, it seems to me for a moment that in the lark's song I really hear the earth itself, this place with all its densely intertwined relationships, that I am on the same earthly wave with the larks.
It only lasts a short moment, it is a mere happy grasp of something that in its complexity exceeds the possibilities of my ordinary perception, but long afterwards I think to myself: How wonderful it is that we live on a planet of sound! In an era of sound that has lasted continuously, albeit with quieter or, conversely, louder episodes, for so many hundreds of millions of years! And even more wonderful that of all the worlds, this one is created from so many winged and winging stories that we can listen to, that we can connect with the story of our own lives. That places can take on the form of heavenly music. And music the form of movement. And that few things can so perfectly relieve us of all heaviness, so perfectly ground us.
The text was originally published in the accompanying catalogue Early Winter in Autumn for the exhibition Music as Vast as the Universe, Wide as Noon.