Bird Watching

C.S. Lewis compared his writing process to watching birds. For Lewis, writing came to him in pictures. Ideas settled before him like sparrows. 

 

To me it seems a very vivid way to describe the process because it suggests that there is something at work that is beyond you; a silent sort of being that lives on a different schedule, in a world so secluded from yours, it is like another world entirely. Picture it: you sight a bird, the very image of an idea, once there, up high or down low, then gone with the rise of the wind, the sound or smell of invention still in the air. But the bird flies away, moving at a pace apart from yours, flitting in and out of contact with you.

 

 

 

The more time you spend in a place the more you get to know the birds that live there. You see them often enough, if you look out for them. Other than the spiders, they might be your closest neighbours, for they build their nests in your trees and on your rooftop. Like ideas, birds weave their way in and out of our lives, aloof and stunning, but sometimes they make close contact, such as when they don't know you are watching them from a window. 

 

I made rather close contact myself this summer, but without the glass, for I spent some time napping in a hammock strung from two trees in the middle of August. It was wonderful, for even as I drifted into a light sleep, I could hear the world around me, the wind and the sound of the lake more real than the sun streaked black behind my closed eyes. Yet my favourite part of the nap was the end of it when I would awake silently and the birds, wholly unaware of me, were all around me, living their secret lives as if still completely unobserved.

 

 

 

Like bird-watching, writing comes on a schedule wholly disconnected from your own daylight hours. It awakes long before you do, and so, it sees so many things you do not, for it knows the world before it awakens. Writing feels that way sometimes: Like the start of a day or a story in which no one yet knows what might occur, and so it meanders, flowing slowly into happenings. 

Like a desire for writing, birds come and go, adorning our lives with their needlework each time they appear, for even throughout the day, they move through all the unseen corners around you, passing in and out of sight, slipping into tree tops you never reach, hopping into the shadowy kingdoms under brush and root where only the small critters live. 

 

Yet as with birds and pictures for writing, some people simply do not notice them. They are just mundane enough to not interest some, feeling so like a day dream that many do not take the time to speculate. Many do not ask: What if this was part of a story? 

 

 

 

Lewis saw such pictures. As a young man he saw a Faun with an umbrella beneath a snowy forest. He knew the Faun was carrying parcels, and though Lewis did not know why, he thought it looked like a story. Today almost anyone shown a picture of Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow would be able to tell you where it came from. 

Still, it is important to remember that at one point Lewis himself did not know. I suppose Mr. Tumnus was very much like a bird in that way, for Lewis did not get to see where Mr. Tumnus went after he'd been sighted (or who he met along the way). He had to come with that part himself.

 

Another author I greatly enjoy said something else about ideas and the art of having them that seems fitting to share. When asked how he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman said that when it comes to having good ideas there is only one big difference between writers and ordinary people: writers notice when they're having them. It is like the gift of being able to remember your dreams; like an awareness for critters, some people notice it, and some people don't. But anyone can, if they try.

Indeed, like bird-watching, writing can at times be tedious and uneventful. After all, a Faun walking through snow with an umbrella is not a story in and of itself.

But it only feels that way so long as you are expecting something to happen. Birds do not lead lives of drama, not to the unimaginative eye. But when the bird takes off and flies away and you can no longer see it, some people simply keep dreaming and drifting. Few take the time to wonder where the bird goes and what it does before the next time it is seen. 

Tom the Oldest

Tom Bombadil is a being so powerful and strange that even his creator did not know what to make of him. 

 

While fans and scholars have speculated and disputed his nature, they neglect to consider that the man who discovered was himself wise enough to refrain from doing so. Tolkien respected the mysterious nature of Tom Bombadil. He did not fret with Tom but simply left him be in his corner of Middle Earth, a corner which by Tom's mere presence is perhaps the most unusual and miraculous of that map. 

 

Since I am rather well-read in Middle Earth lore, casual Tolkien fans sometimes ask me if I know who or what Tom Bombadil is. But in all my years of enjoying Tolkien's lore I have never found an explanation concerning Tom Bombadil that satisfied me, but one. 

 

 

It seemed a fact not worth mentioning that the character of Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll that belonged to one of Tolkien's children. While this may go so far as to explain some of the very specific and colorful attire Tom is known for wearing, such as his yellow boots, as well as Tom's carefree and almost childish nature, it does not at first glance say much else about the ancient figure; till you learn that Tolkien used to tell his children stories about that doll.

 

While reading Tom's own songs about skipping through the trees and along river beds, one can almost picture Tolkien bent over his children's beds, the shadow of the doll cast across the bedroom wall as he animated it with his hands and his voice, bringing it to life with his stories. 

 

Tolkien told his children stories long before he ever actually completed writing one that satisfied him; and so, one can know with certainty that Tom came along long before Bilbo or Hùrin, or even Gandalf. 

These were only shadows cast big and small, vague impressions in Tolkien's mind left by the lore he loved and the legends he read. Names of characters he later wrote about can be found in obscure Norse fragments we know Tolkien used to study. Images resembling Tolkien's own line some of the Fairie realms he once dwelt in.

 

But Tom Bombadil was there, real, tangible, childish, put forth with the easy flow of a narrative told for one's own children, living up only to their whimsical standards, and not Tolkien's own. Tom offers us a glimpse into what those stories might have been like, there in the bedrooms of his children when he did not burden himself with self-doubt and a work beyond imagining in the course of an evening. 

It is strange that something that at first seems so easy should puzzle readers for so very long. Tolkien did not wish to understand Tom Bombadil. Indeed, while most everything else about Middle Earth is rich with history and thought, Tom Bombadil exists outside of that, he escapes that, in more ways than one.

We must decide that Tom Bombadil must simply be left be. 

 

 

 

In the end, the only thing that has ever made any amount of sense to me about Tom Bombadil was what Gandalf says about him. At the Council of Elrond, he tells that Tom "is oldest." 

Tom is older than Middle Earth both inside Tolkien's works and outside of it. Indeed, out of all the vivid faces and scenes that linger when I reflect on all I have loved in Middle Earth, I know Tom Bombadil has been around the longest. He was around long before any of Middle Earth's histories were written, for he lived outside of them once. He knew Tolkien before he was weighted by success and immense writings.

I know only that Tom Bombadil is so ancient that the only origin I have ever traced of him in all my Middle Earth wanderings is the curious and puzzling figure of a Dutch doll in yellow boots. And where that came from, none but Tolkien need ever know. Though I greatly doubt that he himself would have been able to remember. 

Margaret Atwood and the Art of Switching Heads

Some books take longer to digest than others. We read them, and something once buried gets dug up inside of us, grimy and sordid, half rotted, like a book buried in the earth for too long. Usually we cannot quite make out what it used to be, much less what it used to say. 

 

But then, a little time and a little rain later, we find the thing baked and parched in the sun, left to dry out where it was found. This time it looks more familiar. 

 

In Cat's Eye the fictional Elaine remembers; she reflects on a once forgotten childhood with all its excruciating details. Atwood etches it in deep. At times reading it was painful, particularly in the soles of my feet when I read about how Elaine used to peel the skin from them. I read, trying to rush to the adult chapters, searching for solace, for an out, or a revenge, a realization or a consoling revelation. I got none of it. 

 

Instead, Atwood lets Elaine forget. She washes away the harshness of childhood with all its articulate deep cutting details into a dim adult life and a woman who is little more than a little bit of each phase of her life, all the cutting edges softly blurred away into forgetting.

 

When I finished reading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye I did not think I would end up writing about it. The book was far too complicated, at times as ambiguous as it was realistic.

But still, the book inexplicably and inevitably opened up in me a train of thought, first as frail as a nicked thread on an old sweater. Soon, memories started to unravel. 

 

I read the book, slowly at first, but eagerly. I knew that with Atwood all it took was one good line to twist you, or rather, to twist the book in your hand, so that suddenly one reads it out of the back of one's head, disturbed, bewitched, entranced all at once. In her books one look's into someone else's mind so closely, the words written so dark and daringly, as perfectly stitched as an incantation. 

But like a master surgeon or a trickster or some kind of wicked goddess, Atwood does a switch. It is never entirely clear when she does it, much less how. But at some point throughout, when the book is closed and you are thinking about her words and the images they have given you, you will start to wonder why looking into fictional heads makes you look so much into your own.

 

When was the switch done? Whose head is whose? When was one snipped off and replaced with another?

At some point after the book was finished, I caught myself wondering how Elaine could have forgotten Cordelia's cruelty so quickly in the adult half of the book. In the midst of it all, Cordelia felt at times like a character wrought clean from horror. 

Stephan King, I thought, would not have let Elaine forget. He would have created some terrifying means of revenge for Elaine to inflict on Cordelia later on in the plot. If anything, Cordelia should have been the one to forget. It would make the severe twist at the end of the revenge tale that much more exciting and satisfying when Cordelia remembers her sins too late for forgiveness. It would have augmented Elaine's anger that Cordelia could have forgotten when she could not.

 

But Elaine forgets Cordelia's cruelty. She never gets her revenge. Cordelia even becomes a person to pity, and it makes me pause. 

I was doing some idle task today when I wondered briefly how Elaine could have forgotten. Then, with a thought that felt like the oncoming of a scary revelation, I thought of how quick I was as a child to brush cruelty under the rug of memory in favor of an opportunity at friendship, in favor of a lighter life. When a bully's face turns friendly, there are few children who will not want to see a friend. It is easy to wish away a tormentor, and so, when a mean person starts playing nice, hesitantly and then all at once, we as children enter the path of forgetting.

Still, it was not this that disturbed me in the end. It was the memory that I had entirely forgotten. I remember only its shadow. I remember one day when, upon mentioning to my mom a friend from school whom I felt I had known for ages, she asked if I really wanted to be friends with that girl.

I was confused. I did not remember this friend being cruel to me. I still do not remember. But my mom did. She remembered me being quite distraught about it.

I remember later hints of it when I was old enough to realize it and distance myself. 

Other memories followed.

I wondered whether the reason I had always disliked a different girl in high-school was because deep down I knew that once on the playground in the second grade she had hit me with the skipping rope. 

I remembered how it felt to be horribly conscious of your body and how you were holding it when certain girls were present, in a way totally different than certain boys. With some boys, it felt more like your curves got in the way; you wanted to be smaller and stop bumping into yourself. With girls and their peering eyes it felt more like your bones were too heavy, your limbs clunky, sticking out at all your edges. It felt like you wanted to fold yourself up. 

But only with certain girls. 

Still, the strange part is I never remember them once saying anything to me to make me feel this way. I think it was their eyes that did it. But how can I know for sure?

 

 

 

How can one forget? It is not merely because we do not wish to remember, because, after all, the instances in which we felt the effects of the unremembered acts of cruelty do stay, clear and heavy, easy to recall, easy to recognize in the little things we don't like about ourselves without ever questioning why.

Everyone knows little girls can be mean. But the mean-girls depicted in most other works of fiction are so obvious, so easy to recognize, so two dimensional; not at all life-sized. In real life the mean girl's face always melds. Its all part of the head switching game that Atwood writes about so well.

A little girl can put on a new head, like a barbie doll whose head has been popped off, a new one screwed on at the plastic joint. A girl's body is already changing about her, skin shedding, personality morphing, mixing and dabbling with the ones they have seen others use. It is just like the snipping Elaine does with her friends when they cut women out of magazines, gluing in cut outs of a life around her. And, if they don't like the head, Elaine tells us, they simply cut it off and replace it with another. 

All in all, it really isn't so hard. And when one head comes off, the cruel sneer still lingering on the lips, its taunting tongue tucked away, it is hung up by the hair inside some closet. The other, new head might have downcast eyes, the suggestion of a shy countenance. Or it might have hard daring eyes, unloving to women, possessive to men, quick to rebuke and to insult. 

It is when Elaine forgets that she moves on, but it is also then that she stops understanding herself. She has removed herself just enough. She does not know why she resents Cordelia, just as she never realizes why she hates other women, even when she is kind to them, she feels a repressed contempt for them. From childhood onward, Elaine recreates herself, she watches herself from the outside just like Cordelia and her friends used to watch her so that they could correct her, rebuke her and fix her to their liking. Elaine watches herself from the outside, and she makes adjustments when she doesn't like what she sees, and so, little by little, the inside goes unnoticed. The inside, the larger than life parts of her, get ignored. 

It is hard to say when Atwood does her switching. She switches Elaine with Cordelia, and that one can follow, mostly. But perhaps that is the trick. We think we know what she is doing. 

I didn't. Until, I read about how Elaine used to peel the skin off the soles of her feet at night, biting into them just deep enough so that the peeling would hurt. No one, she says, ever looks at your feet. 

Perhaps that is where it always starts. At the soles, where no one ever looks. The skin starts to shed like an out-of-fashion outfit one no longer wears, deteriorating from your wet, growing flesh, and then the girl wonders, what else can I take off? What else can I change? 

It is like we forget with the changing. No one wants to stay nine forever, no one wants to be the always-abused. So, some shed skin, others turn to other means. The easiest way to forget is to change. The easiest way to learn is to adapt.

 

Girls change so fast, after all. It is only later that grown women look back and try to figure out what happened. What is left of the original girl and what is borrowed? Some can pinpoint it into one moment or another, one alternation in something that made them feel self-conscious, and so the cycle starts which turns them into such a capable changeling. Few can name their bully and tell what they did. 

 

Still, somehow, we know at one point in the past we all knew some form of Cordelia. 

We just lost track of her in all the head-switching.