Resurrecting Birds

The subject of my last post led me to anthropolgist Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence's 1997 book Hunting the Wren: Transformation of Bird to Symbol. In that book, which sadly is out of print, Lawrence does an outstanding job of tracing as much of the history of the wren hunt as can be reconstructed, and of exploring the dense symbolic networks surrounding it. She examines various latter-day interpretations of the practice in relation to totemism, the dying-and-resurrecting god motif, Christian iconography, and so on.

One of the most interesting aspects of the wren hunt is the suggestion that the "king of all birds" must be not only killed and paraded about but actually cooked and sacramentally eaten. (Some of the songs associated with the hunt make humorous declarations about the vast amount of food provided by the body of the tiny bird.) Although Lawrence doesn't discuss the Grimm Brothers' tale of "The Juniper Tree," which I briefly alluded to in my last post, this passage about the ritual cooking of the wren in a pot or pan immediately brought it to mind:

[...] the wren is destroyed and dismembered but will be miraculously reborn. Through immersion in the cauldron the bird is resurrected, and with it those who partake of the ceremonial feast will be themselves renewed and reborn.

For those unfamiliar with "The Juniper Tree," it concerns a little boy who is murdered by his stepmother, dismembered, and cooked into a stew that is fed to his unknowing father. The boy's half-sister, who has witnessed the dismemberment, gathers up the bones and sets them beneath the titular tree, out of which a brilliantly-plumed bird magically resurrects. The bird then sings a beautiful song, which it will only repeat if given a gift. After collecting a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a millstone, it bestows these gifts in turn on the father, the half-sister, and the stepmother (who is crushed by the stone). Interestingly, a gold chain turns up in one verse of one version of the wren song:

God bless the mistress of this house,
A golden chain around her neck,
And if she's sick or if she's sore
The Lord have mercy on her soul

Here it's the mistress, not the father, who receives the chain, but that wouldn't suit the narrative of "The Juniper Tree," since the mistress will receive a fatal punishment instead of a reward.

Another interesting case of the resurrection of a bird by eating it turns up in Peter Blegvad's song "Chicken," which describes how a man and a woman go for a walk carrying a chicken "in a gunnysack." After the man ("Frank") mysteriously disappears, the woman eats the chicken, gathers up the bones (accidentally overlooking one "finger bone"), and throws them down a well.

She calls "Come back, Frank, and find your wife."
When the sack hits the water it comes to life

The woman takes the handle and she turns the crank
Up comes the bucket and there sits Frank
He says "There's only one thing I don't understand."
He says "Where's the little finger of my left hand?"

In a live performance of the song ( St. Ann’s Church, Brooklyn Heights, NY, March 14, 1992) Blegvad introduced it by reading from Sigmund Freud's discussion of the case of "Little Arpad," a young boy who was bitten on the penis by a chicken and thereafter developed an obsession with the bird. Blegvad did not, however, mention that (according to Peter Gay) Arpad reportedly also said "One should put my mother into a pot and cook her, then there would be a preserved mother and I could eat her."

The King of All Birds

Ideally I should have posted this on St. Stephen's Day (December 26th according to the Western Christian calendar), but the elements didn't come together until this week.

Back in December my wife and I went to our local music venue for a performance by two Irish-born musicians, John Doyle and Mick McAuley. The concert was billed as "An Irish Christmas" and was accompanied by a CD entitled This Christmas Time. At one point early on in the evening one of the two men (I think it was John Doyle) joked that birds were going to be mentioned in every song that night, and while this didn't turn out to be literally the case there were in fact two notable songs about wrens, specifically, about the Eurasian wren (Troglodytes troglodytes), which we don't have here.

The first song, "Gleann na n-Éan," was a Doyle original, although the story it tells dates back at least to Plutarch (who attributed it to Aesop). The birds gather to choose a king, the crown to be awarded to the bird that can fly highest. The boastful eagle outlasts all the other contestants, but just as he proclaims his triumph the wren, who had ridden to the top concealed on his back, proclaims that he in fact is the highest.

The status of the wren (or in some cases the similarly sized goldcrest, which sports a gold "crown") as king of the birds persisted through the Middle Ages, and a peculiar custom developed of ritually killing a wren every year on St. Stephen's Day, parading it through town on a pole, and begging for money to pay for its interment. The second wren song performed that evening was thus a version of the ditty that was traditionally sung as the procession moved from door to door. (The practice of ritually killing a king at the end of each year did not go unnoticed by Frazer in The Golden Bough). The custom still persists in parts of Ireland, although thankfully no actual birds are now harmed.

Those two songs were still in my head when I came to the crossword puzzle in the New York Times for January 18th, where I found this clue:

48 Across: Avian symbol of good fortune in Celtic culture

It didn't take me long to fill in the four letters of the bird's name. And then I remembered another curious appearance of the Eurasian wren, in Elizabeth Hand's story "Pavane for a Prince of the Air" (from Saffron and Brimstone) which is set in Maine. Hand's tale follows the terminal illness and eventual death of a man named Cal, an old friend of the narrator. After Cal dies and is cremated, his grief-stricken wife and the narrator sift through his uncrushed ashes, picking out fragments of bones and the remains of trinkets that had been placed in the coffin. When they're done they go outside and shake out the sheet bearing the fine particles that are left behind. (The story makes explicit reference to "The Juniper Tree," where the bones of a murdered child are gathered up and placed beneath a tree, only to return to life in the form of a brilliant bird.) While the widow travels the world, scattering portions of Cal's ashes and seeking his next incarnation, it is to the narrator that the title "prince" or king seems to reappear, in the form of a bird not found in Maine at all.

Still, the bird is here. I researched it online, and in some books of folklore I have, and learned that the European wren is the bird that was the subject of the annual wren hunt, an ancient pre-Christian ritual of death and resurrection, still practiced in obscure parts of Ireland and the Isle of Man. It is a creature known for its cheer and its valor, its bravery suiting a bird of far greater size; and also for its song, which is piercingly sweet and flutelike, carrying for miles on a clear day.

As the narrator continues to write at her desk, the bird watches her work. The story concludes:

It sings, day after day after day, and sometimes into the night as well. I never cease to marvel at the sound.

Logbook: Porcupines

Moving to Maine has meant, among many other things, crossing into the range of the North American porcupine. We didn't see much of them for the first year, except in the form of roadkill, but this winter they've been very evident. I spotted the adult above high up in a pine tree in a little wood, and at first mistook it for an owl (which we also have here). With some difficulty I managed to get underneath it and take some photos; the animal undoubtedly knew I was there but showed no reaction.

The juvenile below showed up on the side of a mostly unused dirt road one day and lingered in the same spot for the three or four succeeding days. Porcupines may be slow to sense the presence of another creature, even one walking a dog on a leash, but eventually this one would move off. There may be sillier sights on earth than a juvenile porcupine waddling across a dirt road, but there can't be many.

In another location, probably far enough away to represent a different territory, I've been keeping an eye on an active den in a dead tree, which judging from the depth of the pile of porcupine droppings around it has probably been in use for some time. Porcupines will den up together, so it's hard to say how many occupants this one may have, but by getting a bit closer I can see that there's definitely at least one.

The Monster (Charles Dickens)

On a dreary afternoon, Harriet Carker pauses from her needlework to gaze at the scene outside her window.

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction—always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death—they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.

Dombey and Son

Resolutions for a New Year

(Since a certain public figure is distasteful to me, I refuse to refer to him by name. We all know who "he" is.)

Do something he wouldn't do.
Be something he isn't, and know something he'll never know.
Read something he'll never read. (That one is easily accomplished.)
Listen to music he'll never have the joy of. (Bonus points for live music.)
Care about something.
Care for someone.

Live in the real world.
Slow down. Unplug.
Go somewhere on foot. Look around.
Cook something from scratch.
Do something for the hell of it.
Live in spite of.

Tell the truth. Don't believe bullshit. Know the difference.
Know thyself.

Forget nothing.
Take the long view.
Don't expect things.