On Good Friday, 21 March 1913, the writer Edward Thomas sets off on his bicycle from South London in pursuit of spring. In a downpour of rain he shelters under the canopy outside a bird shop beneath the meagre chirps of chaffinches in the row of tiny cages overhead. The “battered ones” cost a shilling; the sprucer ones, 1s 6d. Through the window he can see linnets (2s 6d) dash themselves against the bars of their six-inch cages. As a knowledgeable birdwatcher, Thomas would have known that March was an unnatural time for a goldfinch to lose feathers – which normally happens in late summer after breeding – nevertheless, “house-moulted” goldfinches are 5s 6d. By now, three other shelterers have joined him under the canopy. One enters the shop. The proprietor comes out to fetch down a chaffinch cage. A few minutes later the customer comes out with “something fluttering in a paper bag”, and with the rain now stopped, leaves on his bicycle. Thomas also leaves, cycling in the same direction. The man ahead stops halfway up the street by a garden. Thomas watches as he opens the paper bag to let the cock chaffinch fly away into a lilac bush. The liberator of the chaffinch shadows Thomas on his spring odyssey in both body and mind. Half-admiring, half-despising, Thomas crosses paths with this Other Man again and again. The man who freed the chaffinch. As Thomas had not. Or had he? Was the man ahead of him the “stranger-self” Thomas was pursuing? There is an unease in these encounters which suggests the Other Man might be a trope for us all. The self we want to be. The caged self we would like to free.
Being human in a bird world stirs our admiration of how hard it is to be wild, the icy wind picking through our feathers
Never was the battle of human nature against wild nature more brutal, more visceral, more exhilarating, than in “The Madness of Sweeney”, Buile Suibhne, the ancient Irish tale of the Celtic king turned into a bird by a vengeful Catholic missionary. I was in my twenties when I read Seamus Heaney’s translation from the Gaelic, Sweeney Astray, and in my own exile in Ireland living on a cliff in a place as wild as I’d ever been. What fevered my young head, and still does, was the actual becoming. Sweeney’s mind rends apart, his fingers stiffen and his arms begin to flap dementedly. A king is emptied into a bird. In a wild flurry he coils into the air. From human to wild creature. The hollowing of bones, the toughening of skin, the contractions of harsh necessity. A raving, owl-eyed, sharp-beaked man-bird. It is supposed to be a curse. We are taken to whistling branches at the tops of trees where we must consider what it is to be wild and are imagined into creatureliness. We fly from crag to brook to glen to estuary to island. We perch with Sweeney in the howling gaps of tangled branches. We tremble with cold. Hunger howls within us. Our world is no longer the human realm, but the brute realm of bitter winds, of combing the forest floor, of roosting in ivy. We flee in fear at the slightest thing. That is what got me.
But here’s the thing: while Sweeney pines for his lost kingdom and suffers great hardship, he is nevertheless beguiled. The curse intended to diminish him to a birdbrain instead awakens a raw elation in the power of wild places. Sweeney’s rebuke is the view of the gods. Flying over an incantation of Irish mountains and over the wave-smash, Sweeney tastes a pristine world of cold rivers and moonlit nights. Our imagination is strung between rapture and misery. Being human in a bird world stirs our admiration of how hard it is to be wild. The icy wind picking through our feathers. Sweeney takes me to the owl on a cold night, to the red kite’s hollow-boned frame in the cold dawn, to the kestrel’s sharp gaze on the thermal.
And I wonder. Are we humans now too weak to be wild?
Keggie Carew is the author of “Beastly: The Epic 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us”; she co-owns Underhill Wood, a nature reserve for flora, fauna, and the education of young people
