On chance encounters, the pleasures of hawks, and the sublime
Music to die for
One hill I'm prepared to die on, is that the main theme for the film The Theory of Everything called The Arrival of the Birds is the most beautiful cinematic piece written. It is in no way diminished by the fact that the film is not, of course, 'about' birds, even if at some point in this article, I will return to the subject. It is moving because the final montage tracks the history of the love and friendship of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde, his first wife. We see them as students meeting for the first time, his illness, her support, their marriage and children. It is a shared story - not perfect, but all the more human for the suffering and solace. The montage of key moments in their relationship set to the sweeping score is a paradigm for many marriages - an aural and visual album of memories which flicker in the mind from time to time, but especially as one gets older and more sentimental perhaps.
Shared histories
Both Stephen and Jane grew up in St Albans, my own hometown. That I met my own wife, also called Jane, while we were both at school there, is a coincidence which I'd not encountered until I started researching and writing this blog. There are sliding door moments in any relationship - my own, a last minute and somewhat reluctant decision in 1978 to meet a friend at a local disco taking place on a Sunday night at a hotel at the end of my road. The friend brought Jane - and although my wife tells me she found me grumpy and not particularly cool (an observation confirmed by much of our married life), clearly a spark was lit.
All this is a roundabout way of exploring the mystery of brief encounters, and what it is that sparks between people or, in this case, people and the natural world. We can trace something of this back to the idea of the 'sublime', first articulated in Greek drama and later codified by Edmund Burke and others as the awe-inspiring effect of both great art and great nature. We see it in Wordsworth's evocation of the landscapes of the Lake District and their mystery, and in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and others, for example in his work 'Wanderer above a sea of fog'. Indeed, the theme 'Arrival of the Birds' is perhaps the modern equivalent of a melody reaching for the sublime, the soaring peak of the notes not dissimilar to the summit upon which Friedrich's climber stands.
A different sublime
However, the Instagrammable sublime - the selfie perched on a rock above a waterfall, or even the shared intensity of a headlining set at a music festival, is not what moves me so much now. I have mentioned in other posts that Robert Macfarlane came to the realisation when writing 'The Wild Places' that the 'wild' is by your back-door under a stone, or in the hedge - the teeming, untraceable life of things; the vivid mystery of the smallest ant or leaf turning to gold.
I thought of this when walking near Rye this weekend, on land I volunteer on as a National Trust Ranger. My wife and I were by a wide canal when up ahead we saw a woman looking through binoculars at a tall hedge with a small bird perched at the top. As we approached, the woman asked what I thought it was. Looking through own my binoculars, I saw a small hawk, smaller than a kestrel and despite being silhouetted against a clear blue sky, with a white-ish breast. I ventured my opinion - 'A hobby?'. She concurred and we discussed the bird as it sat, entirely unconcerned, perhaps thirty feet away.
She and we all agreed that we'd never seen a hobby. Or at least, if we had, we'd not known it as that bird. This moment of connection, both the pleasant conversation my wife and I had with the visiting bird-watcher, and the connection with this mystery, is my version of the sublime. A mystery because while there were abundant numbers of dragon-flies and damsel flies for the bird to feed on, beyond that we knew nothing of its provenance - where it had come from, or how long it would stay. As if reading our mind, and confirming its identity, it took wing after a few minutes, dipping along the canal bank before settling on another shrub further upstream, inspecting the menu for the rest of the afternoon.
Singing a simple song
The arrival of this bird wouldn't really fit the theme by the Cinematic Orchestra. Small, unspectacular and - at the moment we saw it limited in its range, a flute or pipe solo would have been more apt. An old English folk reel, perhaps. But in the face of terrible climate news, the arrival of the hobby is a good news story, if not a momentous, thrilling Cop-24 announcement more in-keeping with dramatic revelation. This good news is that there are now 2,800 breeding pairs of hobbies in the UK, according to the RSPB, with populations stable or increasing. The downside might be that the expansion in their range - with some now found further north and west - might also be due to warmer climate.
These small moments of connection are the basis for relationships which stand the test of time, encompassing the rough and the smooth - the good and bad news. My own montage for that day: the azure sky, cloudless and serene; the winding path by the canal; Jane chiding me for not listening to something she told me earlier; a birdwatcher stock-still watching a hedge with a small bird; me with my binoculars to my eyes, the lens framing the little hawk as it looked down, an invisible line of connection running through the air between us.
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