If one is an English speaker, and one elects to study classical Chinese, one typically encounters some version of the following fable:
On a blustery evening, when heaving trees are beginning to throw random shadows around the courtyard, the birds become restless, and a crow calls from one of the treetops. A boy, hearing the crow, picks up a stone and throws it at the cawing bird, causing the bird to fly to the top of another nearby tree. The boy’s father sees this and emerges from one of the houses surrounding the yard. Going to his son, he demands of the boy, “Why did you just throw that rock at that crow?”
The boy answers, “People say that the cuckoo’s call predicts good fortune, but that the crow’s cry bodes misfortune. The bird that just cawed was a crow, so I threw a rock at it.”
The father says, “But humans have a much greater knowledge of the world than crows. If a human can’t tell in advance what might be lucky or unlucky, then how could a crow possibly know such things?”
Fair enough perhaps. Yet, we often still heed omens, assigning meanings to sights or sounds, or divining the future based on the colours in the sky. We seek to perceive the flow behind the stream, the movement of stars beyond the heavens. And who is to judge? Who can say whether or not such things may or may not be so? Divining the future by reading entrails? By falling leaves? Drinking tea? Cloud trails? Pathways in the sea? Perhaps we only lack the perspective, intuition, understanding, or accumulation of joss to read such signs properly. Or perhaps some of us can. Any such knowing lies beyond the ken of some simple blog post.
Like the boy in the story, our collective cultures have long found meaning in the cries of various birds. As Macbeth murders King Duncan, who is his guest, Lady Macbeth waits outside the king’s guest chamber:
That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold;
What hath quench’d them hath given me fire.
Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night. He is about it:
The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms
Do mock their charge with snores: I have drugg’d
their possets,
That death and nature do contend about them,
Whether they live or die. (M.2.2.1-11)
Here, the owl fulfills its customary office as a supernatural messenger of death, but it is not the same kind of portentous messenger that many of Shakespeare’s ghosts seem to be. Here, the owl seems to provide a simple marker of a time, like stopping a clock at the time of someone’s death. In many cultures, as this blog has noted in the past, the owl represents death and nature not in contention, but embodied in a single winged creature.
Not that they can’t seem ominous as well. For those who have not heard an owl in flight, you never will. They fly absolutely silently, another echo of death that so many cultures have seen in these nocturnal predators. Not such a stretch to think of death as something at least vaguely predatory, coming to steal our lives away on silent wings in the night.
Moments after Lady Macbeth hears the owl, Macbeth himself enters, carrying two daggers in his bloody hands:
Macbeth I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?
Lady Macbeth I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
Macbeth When?
Lady Macbeth Now.
Macbeth As I descended?
Lady Macbeth Ay. (2.2.20-5)
The owl’s scream has been joined by the finality of crickets, crying out or weeping. Finished, as is Macbeth’s descent. His fulfillment of that descent will take the rest of the play, but not only has he descended her, but Lady Macbeth has also recognised that. Nature’s orchestration. Nature’s punctuation. Romeo and Juliet gently arguing about whether the singing bird they hear is the nightingale or the lark, these are Thomas Merton’s birds of appetite. Wanting one thing, then another.
Any knowing we have of the birds remains an old one. In the Qur’an, it says:
And Solomon inherited David. He said, “O people, we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been given from all things. Indeed, this is evident bounty.” 27:16
Knowing or understanding would seem to walk hand in hand with plenty. Yet, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth hear the owl, but they seem to largely dismiss its potential significance. And perhaps it all comes too late. Plenty for them seems to have fled with an earlier bell, inviting Macbeth and summoning Duncan. Or perhaps the plenty here is merely an abundance of miserable descent.
The famous Persian work The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar (c. 1145-1221) recounts the quest that the different birds make in order to find their ruler. The journey takes them across seven valleys: seeking, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, wonderment, and poverty. A metaphor for a mystical trajectory, with an objective of knowing beyond knowing, the birds’ journey parallels the steps of mystical experience. Interestingly, the title may also be translated as The Speech of the Birds, a fable in which the birds eventually discover that their ruler is themselves.
This beautiful and balanced outcome seems to be the result of genuine seeking–a different thing indeed from ruling like a mob boss or a thug. Agents or progenitors of forced authority rarely meet good ends, be they Shakespearean characters, or actual despots in any sense of that term:
But man, proud man, Dress’d in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d– His glassy essence–like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep. (Measure for Measure, 2.2.143-8)
In angels’ tears lies the unsettling of the world. One wonders if old adversaries ever cried in frustration at missing their own enlargement of the world. Dancing skeletons, waltzing bones rattling into skyscrapers of a red and falling world. Sitting down and weeping because there are no more worlds to conquer, or because we have conquered worlds more beautiful than any we might imagine making.
Perhaps in the first story, the boy’s father is right to dismiss his son’s superstitions. Perhaps he is wrong. Or perhaps he is only partly right. Right in a singularity, in one context. Whatever link between our understanding and the language of the birds remains a constant, however much it may couch in the collective background of our awareness. Hearing the ‘owl scream and the crickets cry’, did we listen? ‘Did not you speak?’ Did not they speak as well? Are they not speaking to us now?
Birds are mentioned throughout the works of Shakespeare. In fact, they are plentiful in all our stories, verses, plays–in all the literary and other creative expressions of the fabric of human experience. Paintings, dances, musical compositions, all of these bring us multitudinous birds. Still, the best way to really hear them may be simple. Maybe if we take a walk outside, someplace where it might be quiet enough, we might be able to listen and to hear.