"H Is for Hawk"

[fiefoe]

Helen Macdonald is a hell of a writer. As with Bruce Chatwin, she possesses a fine vocabulary for nature that would surely give occasional headaches to its future (?) Chinese translator: taiga / vermiculated / badger’s sett / vivaria.

• overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with something like microwaved aluminium foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks.
• even more gruesomely – a disarticulated beak, a house-sparrow beak top, or bottom, a little conical bead of blushed gunmetal, slightly translucent, with a few faint maxillary feathers adhering to it.
• but like the deer, I was in the grip of very old and emotional ways of moving through a landscape, experiencing forms of attention and deportment beyond conscious control.
• Tonnes of land shifted, moved, dropped. Brandon was encircled by sand; Santon Downham was engulfed, its river choked entirely. When the winds stopped, dunes stretched for miles between Brandon and Barton Mills. The area became famed for its atrociously bad travel: soft dunes, scorching in summer and infested with highwaymen
• a ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness. It’s rich with the sense of an alternative countryside history; not just the grand, leisured dreams of landed estates, but a history of industry, forestry, disaster, commerce and work.
• Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.
• But they were loving the space between each other, and carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances.
• Time passed. The wavelength of the light around me shortened. The day built itself.
• the bloodorange and black where the sun slapped crazy-paving shadows across pines.
• I can’t, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don’t make a story.
• That he didn’t mean to leave the car there but he died. That he really didn’t mean to leave it. Lunatic sentences, deadpan, cut from rock.
• The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world.
• Or that grief comes in stages that can be numbered and pinned like beetles in boxes
• the discovery that the English Channel was carved out by the bursting of a giant superlake millions of years ago.
• and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud.
• She disappeared over a hedge slant-wise into nothing. It was as if she’d found a rent in the damp Gloucestershire air and slipped through it.
• There was something of the doomed polar expedition about it all, a kind of chivalric Edwardian vibe. No, no, you go on. I’ll only slow you down. The disposition of their hawks was peculiar.
• Falcons were the raptors I loved: sharp-winged, bullet-heavy birds with dark eyes and an extraordinary ease in the air.
• took me years to work out that this glorification of falcons was partly down to who got to fly them. You can fly a goshawk almost anywhere, because their hunting style is a quick dash from the fist after prey at close range, but to fly falcons properly you need space:
• He is a splendid chap; a carpenter and ex-biker, solid and serene as a mid-ocean wave
• The falcon. There he was, an impossibly beautiful creature the colour of split flint and chalk, wings crossed sharp over his back, his dark, hooded face turned up to the sky. He was watching the Spitfire overhead with professional curiosity.
• to dislike this grown-up and consider him a fool. It’s painful to recall my relief on reading this, founded as it was on a desperate misunderstanding about the size of the world. I took comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small
• At eighty thousand feet the world curves deep below you and the sky above is wet black ink... Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading The Once and Future King, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right... Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude. And the solitude of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading The Once and Future King fifty thousand feet above the clouds
• For White made falconry a metaphysical battle. Like Moby-Dick or The Old Man and the Sea, The Goshawk was a literary encounter between animal and man that reached back to Puritan traditions of spiritual contest: salvation as a stake to be won in a contest against God.
• with a pride that holds within it, cupped like a small bird in the hand, his abject terror of failure.
• ‘You will be sympathetic to his character,’ Michael Howard informed her. ‘If it is a sufficiently bad character I should certainly be sympathetic to it,’ she replied.
• Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.
• He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.
• For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence.
• Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, from the Latin tertius, for third.
• miles and miles of sky where the sun spreads on dust and water and illegible things moving in it that are white scraps of gulls.
• Everything about this second hawk was different. She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.
• But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.
• What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we’ve learned from the world...  It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch?
• And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. {New born babies does this too.}
• And what you hope is that she’ll start eating, and you can very, very slowly make yourself visible. Even if you don’t move a muscle, and just relax into a more normal frame of mind, the hawk knows. It’s extraordinary. It takes a long time to be yourself, in the presence of a new hawk.
• Above them both was a vast tracery of ice-rings and sun-dogs in a wintry, hazy sky. A 22° halo, a circumzenithal arc and an upper tangent arc, the sun’s light refracting and cutting the heavens into a complicated geometry of ice and air and fire.
• The forgetting was delightful because it was a sign that the hawk was starting to accept me. But there was a deeper, darker thrill. It was that I had been forgotten.
• And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her...  The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away
• as the light deepens and the late swifts outside ascend on flickering wings to bury themselves in the sky,
• me with a slow, sickening disorientation that makes me fasten desperately onto the sight of the hawk to drag me back into a world with no ash in it...  The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

__ Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, for example: the tale of a lonely man on the Scottish coast with an Iraqi otter on his sofa.
__ they conduct their courtship, like Pyramus and Thisbe, through the gap in the wall,