This time we're having a bit out of this interesting and thoughtful book of impressions and experiences ..... My " Camera ... Picture .... Loading it on here" system seems to have collapsed ... so I'm going to type it out myself ... you'll see that it is American in the very first sentence ... we've all been in this sort of situation ... It's autumn migration and watchers have much to see, mostly warblers, although in their duller fall plumage. Thursday's Children, having already seen a Lark Bunting this chill and foggy morning, are positioned on both sides of a stand of Monterey Cypresses, binoculars raised to the black canopy where movement has been noted.The fog has drained much of the color from the birds and they are so high up that likely only their undersides will show. Gradually other watchers arrive and take up positions under the trees. I lower my binoculars to see if I know any of them and also to give my back a rest.Everyone else seems to be concentrating on the birds and, suddenly, I feel alone or distanced from them, even members of my own group. My eyes stop at a man on the other side of the stand. He's a stranger to me, but a typical watcher, fiftyish, face weathered by sun and rain ( a "well-documented face" as one friend said of another) ,his loose-fitting garb brown and gray as faded fall plumage. He wears a visored camouflage army cap, and I can see from where I stand that his binoculars show the shiny scratch marks of much use. About him there is an aura of self-containment, of his own purposive, competent, and stubborn actuality. I am utterly excluded and remote from his life, and, as I look from individual to individual, from the lives of all the others here, some not three feet from where I stand. It is as though my mind were drifting in a sea of internal fog. It is as though all my own purposes were drained away by that fog as the outer fog has drained the colors from the birds. Epiphany, real presence, shock of recognition, reverence, intimations .... all the poetic terms for hopeful intuitions, now seem empty, frivolous, wholly beside the point, naming only what my ignorance has projected. Even while I am thinking all this, someone points up at what seems a little twitch of leaves flicked by wind .... no, I'm told, it's a female Black-throated Blue Warbler. I sort of see it. But I can also hear ( in my imagination) one of these watchers saying to another, " He doesn't understand. He just doesn't get it." And at this bad moment, I don't. I have no heart for more watching today. I go through the motions, but without joy or even pleasure. I say to myself " The poetry has gone out of it." But it's not that. It's the awareness that self-pity, what I am feeling now, is so powerful a drug. If I were a nineteenth-century poet, I would probably project the feeling onto a nightingale ( confusing its sex) and be done with it. Simply imagining that makes me feel a little better. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As I said at the start, most of us have felt like that at times, perhaps many times. And I think he expresses those feelings very well. Right .. 'tis music time, and my son messaged me this morning that he was watching top Welsh band "The Joy Formidable" ..... and he'd found out about them from my Welsh blog. But then, looking on youtube I found they have now got some acoustic versions of their songs, and this one is a right whizzer !
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
|