Just past dawn in the fourth month of what an exhausted Italian doctor on the BBC pronounced the Plague of Corona, I looked out the kitchen window to see a very large fox standing on a cantilevered part of the stone wall near some apple trees. It was making that signature, harsh air-cracking bark of foxes, and right out of Abenaki folklore, ravens were responding across the field. I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve been listening to Bach, Satie, Chopin, and Messiaen in the middle of the night and typing letters.
We all are eminently locatable to anxieties; they will find us no matter how we attempt to fend them off with meditation, cooking, ironing shirts and blouses, reading books, chronicling regrets in a diary, watching old movies, talking to friends in varied international time zones on the telephone, whatever run-of-the-mill or artful strategies we hope will alleviate despair during the Plague of Corona. And yet, the sight of this beautiful sentient being, out there in the chill morning air, this healthy, alert, beautiful fox was a reprieve from all ghastly things in the world. The fox allowed the gift of being in the moment.
And then I checked emails and found that a friend, Giovanni, an acoustical ornithologist, had, at age 69, succumbed to the Covid-19 virus in Venice. His wife Alessandra, a lecturer in Sanskrit literature, had emailed me this news. I stepped out onto the back porch of my family’s 1850 farmhouse and sat in a chair and mindlessly stared in the direction of the fox, but it was no longer there. Morning birdsong was eclectic as ever. To hear it overall seemed best, to allow it – as Edward Lear wrote in his Corsican journal – to be the foreground of existence and everything else to be the background, and not attempt to differentiate one warbler from another warbler. The sun had broken through clouds, and the pale moon was still visible. I thought, well, the more ancient harmonies are intact, and yet this vivid and wonderful man so full of life was gone.
I saw Giovanni last in 2016 in Bologna, where he had generously traveled to hear a lecture of mine, “Public Recognition and Private Response: Natural History Art of Edward Lear, Ito Jakuchu, Elizabeth Gwillim,” presented at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, where the painter Giorgio Morandi had taught engraving for more than 25 years. A few hours later, we sat together at a long table of post-lecture guests in a restaurant constructed in 1680. Full of good wine and food and the pleasure of his company, I heard Giovanni declare, “I often hear birds in my dreams.” I felt happily envious, because at that moment I realized that for Giovanni birdsong was an intense and abiding source of introspection. It connected his inner and outer life, in essence making him a complete person.
For most of his ornithological career Giovanni had concentrated his studies on hooded crows, completing his doctoral fieldwork in Scotland. He liked that the Germans referred to this species as “mist crow.” He told me that he had originally intended to study philosophy, but soon became interested in all the new technology for recording birdsong and began thinking about birdsong “not just as mating and territorial imperatives but as part of the whole lyrical erudition of a given ecosystem. So, you see, my interest in philosophy could be applied. How does the world really work?” In his doctoral thesis he was allowed to weave in a meditation on the specific compositions of Oliver Messiaen, which, using faceted harmonies and palindromic rhythms, tended to stylized birdsong, sometimes to the point of ecstatic cacophonies. Messiaen himself often used theological language to describe his music, contending that he found his “salvation” when he discovered how to compose music that allowed the closest distance between his emotions and birdsong.
Giovanni carried a stanza by Cécile Sauvage in his wallet because it was known to be of importance to Messiaen: I enter the meadow beside the hills / Where the fern casts its net of foliage. / And I hear speaking the soft, divine voice / Of calm nature, the milieu of birds. “I sometimes argue with Messiaen’s more florid statements about birdsong,” Giovanni said, “as if it enters his soul like sun streaming through the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chappell, where Messiaen worshiped as a child. But when I listen to his Abime des oiseux (Abyss of birds), or, of course, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time), I can more comprehend the spiritual element of birds for Messiaen.” Famously, Quatuour pour la fin du temps, in which birdsong makes haunting cameo appearances, was written and first performed in a German prison camp where Messiaen was interned in l941. In fact, scholars of music history often suggest that Messiaen’s last estimable work was Petites esquisses d’oiseaux (Little sketches of birds).
“Messiaen tried to compose nature in certain ways,” Giovanni said, “whereas I just listen to it. Nature, God, love – yes, true, when I listen to hours of birdsong, I do think about such things. But I consider myself a traditional field biologist. I am more devoted to science than theology. But like Messiaen, I, too, am most deeply affected by the less melodic of birdsong. I can’t always say why. It’s a mystery.”
Eventually, acoustical ornithology became Giovanni’s specialty, and at the time of his death he had archived recordings of more than 500 birds from around the world. His wife Alessandra said, “Do you know that my husband once wrote a letter to the director of Teatro all scalla in Milano, suggesting they play recordings of owls, doves, and cuckoos during the intermission of Verdi and Puccini operas? What’s more, he offered to provide the recordings.”
Giovanni was a prolific writer about hooded crows. “That is my modest contribution,” he said. And he never stopped reading in philosophy. Alessandra’s anecdote about birdsong and opera reminded me that on occasion in his writings, Giovanni’s vocabulary – borrowed from musical composition – had an almost formally poetic eroticism to it, and this was a source of teasing, delight, and even admiration among his academic colleagues. “On a given morning here in Venice, a mated pair of turtledoves exchange contrapuntal moans,” he wrote in a lecture. When she read this passage, Alessandra said to him, “Oh you are so optimistic about marriage!”
Just two mornings ago, I drove on mud-rutted back roads to the Adamant co-op to pick up my telephone order of groceries. Boxes are set out on the side porch for customers. Through the door window the staff, each wearing a mask, could be seen moving about as if in a silent film strip of a bank robbery. Yet I recognized Rick and Andrea – and was that Janet, recovered from her broken leg? No mask can completely obfuscate other familiarities.
When I stepped onto the porch, to my immediate left I heard a deep guttural clicking, followed by a rasping aawwk, and a loud rustle of wings, like a blanket being snapped in the air before being folded and placed in a wicker basket. A truly enormous raven sat atop a plastic-wrapped loaf of challah – on my box of groceries. It was amazing enough to be in close proximity to such an impressive bird, with its startlingly black sheen and its head seeming to rapidly nod in the affirmative, let alone realize that had I not arrived to the co-op for another five minutes, this raven likely would have absconded with the challah, perhaps carrying it out over Sodom Pond just across the road. In the least it would have torn the loaf into individual portions, quite a feast. I backed away slowly, though I had no concern about interspecies social distancing, as the raven continued its enunciations: cackles, almost spitting coughs, a sequence of clicks in the manner of Morse code, a kind of throaty gargle, and several shockingly amplified caws.
When it glided away from the porch, I felt surprisingly bereft. How to say this? Life on earth now felt almost too quiet. In the way disparate thoughts and feelings suddenly are organized into elegy, I said to myself, Giovanni would have loved this. The raven’s wild, spontaneous composition. In Giovanni the raven would have struck deep chords.
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