"H Is for Hawk"

[fiefoe]

I picked up a used copy of "The Once and Future King" after college but never made much headway into it. Wonder if I'm ready for it now.

• The first few days with a wild new hawk are a delicate, reflexive dance of manners. To judge when to scratch your nose without offence, when to walk and when to sit, when to retreat and when to come close, you must read your hawk’s state of mind.
• the hawk finishes eating, lifts herself into a vast, frothy mop of feathers, holds them there for an instant and shakes them all back into place. A rouse. It is a sign of contentment.
• the word hood like a hot stone in my mouth. Burqa, the word in Arabic. Hood.
• She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth.
• An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played.
• Looking at Mabel I can see she’s reached her flying weight: it is as obvious to me as a change in the weather. Agitation, nervousness, a tendency to bate from her perch when she was bored: all these are gone at two pounds and one and a half ounces, are replaced by a glassy calm, a flow of perfect attention as if everything inside her were exactly aligned.
• Everything here is built from things pulled from dreams. A few weeks earlier scores of bay trees in pots were set out all over the college for an Alice In Wonderland-themed Ball;
• There is no hesitation. There is a scratch of talons on wood, a flowering of feathers, one deep downstroke, the brief, heavy swing of talons brought up and into play and the dull thud as she hits my glove.
• There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning...  All the trust I had left in the world rested in the fact that the hawk wanted to fly to me.
• Her chicks follow her desperately, six ungainly clockwork dinosaurs.
• Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement.
• The bare field we’d flown the hawk upon is covered in gossamer, millions of shining threads combed downwind across every inch of soil. Lit by the sinking sun the quivering silk runs like light on water all the way to my feet. It is a thing of unearthly beauty, the work of a million tiny spiders searching for new homes. Each had spun a charged silken thread out into the air to pull it from its hatch-place, ascending like an intrepid hot-air balloonist to drift and disperse and fall.
• But the narcissism of the bereaved is very great. I thought that the reason the hawk had flown to me was because I had confessed how bad things were.
• tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away.
• world in which you write a letter to your mother in India enclosing your school photograph, and she writes back to tell you that your lips are ‘growing sensual’, and that you should hold them in, with your teeth if necessary?
• There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
• And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?
• Then for a moment everything becomes dotted lines, and the hawk, the pheasant and I merely elements in a trigonometry exercise, each of us labelled with soft italic letters.
• Everything the hawk saw was raw and real and drawn hair-fine, and everything else was dampened to nothing.
• he and his family had lived under the bombers streaming over in stacked formations, cut with searchlights at night or in scrawls of ragged contrails that glowed in the upper air by day.
• Because the hawk could not dissemble he was a ‘tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart’.
• Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human. Kneeling next to the hawk and her prey, I felt a responsibility so huge that it battered inside my own chest, ballooning out into a space the size of a cathedral.
• The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things. .. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
• Rooks on their way to roost passing over us in moving constellations of small black stars.
• And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.
• morning dawned blue and shiny as a puddle.
• The light today is beguiling. The rooftops and spires seem within a hand’s grasp; a chess-set town glittering among bare trees, as if I could pick up the brute tower of the university library and move it six places north, set it down somewhere else... The maritime light of this island, set as it is under a sky mirrored and uplit by sea.
• It is very strange watching a hawk chase a land animal in a high wind. The hare has purchase: its claws and furry pads dig into leaves and mud, and it uses the ground to propel itself against. But the hawk moves in air alone. It is like watching one element against another.
• She is building a landscape of magical places too. She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again.
• Mabel has been eating nothing but quail for a week, and it’s made her a hot-tempered, choleric, Hotspur-on-coke, revenge-tragedy-protagonist goshawk. She is full of giddy nowhere-to-go desire.
• Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on-tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand. This makes me feel guilty...  There’s a long vein of chalk-mysticism buried in English nature-culture
• Collected anything: shrapnel, cigarette packets, coins; mostly things that came in series. Things that could be matched and swapped; sets that could be completed. Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war.

__ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/rapt