'In and Out of the Light'
Thanks for the messages these last months. I’m in E.S, writing and waiting to see where life takes us all from here. Since leaving the island I’ve put up several posts but I need to step back a bit now and work tirelessly on the book. I’m sure I am not the only one disappointed with the last five or so months, with the unnecessary panic, and disproportionate reactions plus the removal of people's rights, to even work. I called it some months back a spiritual crisis. It still feels like that. Being silent though seems better than being part of the noise. Most things that I questioned, as an artist, as a person, seemed to have been confirmed. I wonder how many others are in the same state of darkness? I re-evaluate most things on a daily basis. It made me think of a song title: Re-evaluate the Evaluation. Maybe I dreamt that one up.
45.
When spring comes, the smaller birds in the town like the finches, siskins and sparrows lay where they can. They also need to be out of reach of the predators and protected from the wind. Most lay more than once. By the end of summer and if successful, a single pair have reared half a dozen infants. The young then have to find food through autumn and winter. Often none will survive.
In the overhang of the roof were nesting sparrows. They were called ‘paparazzo’, in Naples, Selena said. Sailors would choose the sparrow as a tattoo, according to her grandmother, as they caught the soul of a dying man and carried them off to the afterlife. 'Not even the sparrow falls to his death, without God’s permission,' she said.
Sparrows will mate for life. However, if either the male or female dies, they are soon replaced.
Around the south side of the guesthouse were building works. A nest had fallen between the scaffolding and the wall. The eggs were broken. The timber needed replacing or the sparrows would enter through the rotten wood. At the end of the garden were several trees. I had climbed up one, wedging the woven grass bowl between the branches. The workmen had gone for lunch. I sat on the scaffold, watching the birds come up under the roof. Beneath the tree was a cat sitting in the grass. It was now looking up at the nest.
Nothing in nature was random. Everything started and finished exactly when it should.
Harriet was writing a paper on migration.
The Hen Harrier, Whooper Swans and Starlings flew thousands of miles, leaving the Canadian Arctic and Siberian tundra at the end of summer. Some were diurnal and rested through the night. Others remained airborne. There were birds with ‘irruptive migration’ patterns, missing a year before flying south. The female Pochard flew further than the male, to winter feeding grounds. Swallows doubled their weight before setting off, flying two hundred miles a day as did the Redwing. Migration wasn't confined however to just the birds.
During winter, the monarch butterfly travelled nearly three thousand miles, roosting in the same trees they left in spring. There they waited, hanging with wings closed by the thousands, the trees pulsing with expectant life. Come spring as warmer air drifts through the forests, the male monarch spirals through the air in pursuit of female monarchs. Finding each other they then clasp together, before ascending in acrobatic flight to mate in the branches.
'Our relationship, with what we believe is going on (which is not a reality in itself but a representation of often staged events), dictates how we think.'
Re. E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (c. 1919).
Michael Moore responds to 'billionaire green' attacks on his anti-capitalist documentary 'Planet of the Humans.'
Anti-Lockdown march, Trafalgar Square, London, September 2020,
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