Detail Diary, Vol #8
Rooks, éclaircies, birds dreamt into being
January 16 - 28, 2024
Dear friend,
I’ve become a little bit obsessed with rooks, or at least the ones who live in a noisy, lofty crowd in the plane trees near my office. For some, rooks are harbingers of darkness, a storied superstition1 I can only sort of understand; I have trouble seeing them as anything other than my gregarious neighbors absorbed in family life, play, chatter, nest-building; hiding nothing.2 Every time I hear them rise in a raucous cloud from the rookery or wing in garrulously from some other corner of the sky, I wonder what they’re up to, what they’re saying to each other. When I see couples tumbling expertly between branches I wonder what a lifelong pair bond feels like to a rook; is it safe and comfortable and right; fizzing and overpowering; dutiful and neutral? When I hear jackdaws sharing the trees and peppering the clamor, I think about tolerance and security and what it takes to be at ease in your own beloved territory.
I think, too, about how intelligence and social values in a bird draw it closer to my human heart, and wonder whether that’s silly of me, that bias toward likeness. Birds, these fragile, scaly creatures, are so different from us, and yet we recognize so much in them. We’ve learned their stories as well as we can, living as neighbors, retelling and rewriting them as humans are wont to do. I do it every day.3
Meanwhile, January has marbled from gray to blue to gold, from crystalline to balmy. The male blackbirds have already begun their countersinging.
And (after a three week hiatus) I passed 100 entries in the Detail Diary. Hurrah!
P.S. there’s good stuff in the footnotes this week.
Here is your usual reminder that this post is best viewed on the web or in the Substack app! Clicking on a Note will also take you to the browser to see its full text and additional photos.
A bonus poem:
Full text:
Last night before bed I read this poem by Pattiann Rogers about birds being dreamt into existence.
“You even wake one morning / To discover that the lark bunting has been nesting / Under your knuckles just as you dreamed he was.”
I thought then, This is something I’ve felt myself come very near to doing. And yes, when I went to sleep, I dreamt a boy on a bus with a zebra finch tucked beside him, and a glimpse of a macaw in flight outside the window.
Neither bird was there when I woke up.
But, I must add, so many others were.
(If the moon is cropped out of the second photo, take this as your sign to click on it.)
To make up for my camera’s utter lack of skill for delicate birds in trees, here are someone else’s goldfinches in Liquidambar. I also learned/was reminded that the collective noun for goldfinches is “charm.”
Exemplified in The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper, in which rooks are the servants and symbols of the Dark. Perhaps because I read that atmospheric book for the first time only a year ago, and it wasn't part of my childhood psychic landscape as it is for some British bookworms, I had forgotten this detail when I first became neighbors to the rooks, and I hadn't cast any sinister aspersions on them, and still haven’t managed to. It seems a little too convenient to cast them as Dark servants just because they happen to be dark in color, and I suppose because their clamor could be construed as rough and dark-throated. But corvids are generally misunderstood, and I don’t blame Susan Cooper for likely drawing on a long tradition of folkloric superstition. And as
proves with her book review and goregous linocut, you can love both sides of the story.Others begrudge rooks for their racket, which is fair enough. But I’m fond of it.
I love this piece
I absolutely adore a pink feathered cloud...