The Cardinal and the Dawn Chorus

It was almost dawn.

From the window where he was standing, he could peer between the curtains and look up the wet lawn to where the gardener was hunched over flowerbeds at the boundary wall. Involved in some indeterminate activity perhaps fresh from the beehives, his shoulders were great sturdy chanterelles in the swirling mist, beside a wheelbarrow of cuttings.

He had been lying in bed in the118 dark listening to the birds singing the light up. One by one, golden threads of sunshine and birdsong widened the stomata of the trees and plants all around to coax as much of the dew settled before sunrise on every leaf and blade of grass into hungry xylem mouths. In spiral patterns his ears picked out one-by-one, the space for every vocalist. Voice by voice, bird by bird, enchanting life, building the world.

That was the moment of no difference and as it descended onto him, light as a feather, he found himself suddenly out of bed and on his feet at the window, vibrating like a cello full of resonance, in the brightening blue.

The mist was not swirling, it was he who was swirling, and there was no difference. The mist was still as a sparkling array of shiny buttons, and he held his breath, as waves spiralled up through the great echo chamber of his insides, fractal and beginningless. And, clear as an Alpine lake, it dawned on him, as he and time stood still, that there was no time. It was all he could do to remember where he had come from most recently in time, from the familiar warmth of the bed, the yielding grip of a night’s deep sleep, how he had come to be in front of the window, how the birdsong had revealed him.

Comment ça va ton reveille? How was it, your awakening, your revelation? A voice within, to himself. What baffled him in standing still, was not that he could only remember what had happened a moment ago, but how he could not remember what happened next. This gave him pause and seemed anathema in his current point of reference; surely if one can remember what has happened, one ought to also be able to remember what happens next. Was that right? Had he lost his mind? If time were indeed an Alpine lake, clear and still, with the promise of ripples at any movement, and he couldn’t see them in front as well as behind, then that must mean that there was no time. If there was no time, then where did that leave him?

There is no time, he thought. Not now, not ever.

He wondered then what on earth he would do next if he couldn’t remember. How would he know what to do? Was it ever thus? Surely where time was concerned (if it ever existed), it ought to be as possible to look forward to your future as it was to put your past behind you.

Or was it the other way around? He sensed that he was reading reality differently this morning. Something to do with the kinship expression he felt with every shimmering particle around him. These new acquired sensations he had never felt before were familiar, yet the idea that future-time was invisible to him from this vantage point, felt uncanny and as if he was missing an old friend. Like when you forget to put your watch back on after washing your hands and you feel the lack around your wrist like a scald. He wondered where the owl was and hoped to see her, with an urgency unlike any he had felt before.

Looking back over his still-ruffled bedsheets, a give-away of the immediacy of his cued-by-birdsong release from the couverture, he saw that the noise had opened him up somehow. He had unconsciously thrown back the covers to let it all flood in. As he looked back from the bed to where he had landed, right in the thrall of the singing, he found he was breathless and with tears in his eyes, pyjama-ed and alone.

Before that, he remembered that silently in the darkness, the first photons of daybreak had come dancing over the horizon in activation, thrilling the syrinxes of the skylarks, then the song thrush, robin, blackbird, each one unfurling syllables like dandelion clock seeds into the strata of the morning. The awakening had seen him too crescendo into standing tall by his curtains, strong like a mushroom, and he wished he could sing his own sleep-clearing wake-up call to add to the acoustic levels settling over the landscape like mists which gather and rise with the heat of the sun. But this deluge vibrato was an onslaught of sensation within which he could only flail and observe, drinking through every pore and synapse the significance of the music, and feeling a light tingling fullness and warmth in the hands and the feet, the arms and the legs. Prickles of awareness from the top of his head to the tips his toes drifted in endless swirling sensations ruffling subatomic particles which shimmered in reply, enchanted, enchanting, enchanté.

“Fiat Lux” he whispered, as his mind thought “I come to be” and in an infinite expanding awareness, augmenting and growing, he remembered what he was supposed to be doing that morning, whereupon the moment of non-difference escaped him, and he fell to his knees on the floor.

The elation knocked out of him, the only echoes of reassurance were the voices of the birds dispersed into the wings of the scene, the window removed from his sightline, his vision pure carpet, his ears picked out the wood pigeon, the wren, the warbler as the light increased in lumens from blue to silver and gold.

The shift in reality left him looking at his own hands for clarity. If he wasn’t a part of everything around him anymore, how could he be sure he was a part of himself? Where did that leave him? The first precipitous moments of this new reality unfolding were therefore spent wondering where he had gone. Every rising feeling having passed, he felt the absence of feeling even more keenly than the presence of emotion he felt in being sung into existence by the light, not even twenty minutes ago. He had gone from the lark ascending to the soothing conscience over his head of the wood pigeon reminding him, “you poor thing you, you poor thing you”. He heaved himself up to the windowsill and peered out again, resting on the crook of his arm that was grasping the ledge.

Who was he this morning, other than a man now faced with the possibility that if he could do it all again, he might live another life entirely? Though if every step he had taken on his path led up to this one moment of clarity this morning he wouldn’t exchange it for the world. Cut down and estranged as he now was, a willow branch sprouting, he wondered what other thoughts he might be thinking right now, if only he had new thoughts to think them with. This morning he was scheduled to appear as the honoured guest on a panel of speakers discussing the recent riots in central London. From his inertia on the carpet of the floor of the bedroom of his home - where he knew from routine it would take nearly three hours - first step by step (shower, getting dressed, prayer, breakfast) and then by car, to get into town, he also knew that he really ought to be on his feet already and on his way by now. But every fibre of his being told him to stay put and bask in the echo of understanding as it faded.

On the one hand, every step toward the talk he would give today was a step away from what he had most recently experienced and in his heart his pure intention was to cherish it. On the other there was no escaping reality, and this self-indulgence would only make it more complicated in the long run. This solid, resigned, immutable thought was the calcified sensation of what he might henceforth consider his “old self” returning.

“Come on then old engine.” He said to himself, but as he hauled his body up from its splayed-out kneel, using his hands on the bed frame and sill for strength and balance, thanking his limbs for the effort, he heard the screech and looked up. Panda.

She soared silently across the wide frame of the morning, a little flame, the sunshine glinting off her like a knife cutting through butter. He remembered the second time they had rescued her, as the hearing of her face located him, looking right into the depths of his eyes and beyond, and how she had stayed a fortnight in the little box inside the cellar door, convalescing from the presumed concussion they had found her with. How he had checked on her every day, and even though he knew the owl man was right and they could never keep her, he had wanted to. And how he never imagined she might nest so close to the house and stay the rest of the summer letting him look over the hissing chicks and their gannet mouths while she and her chap went out hunting night after night. It was his favourite summer, and it spurred him on to face whatever was coming next in the day.

He rose in height to standing, his senses rising to the top of his head like an air bubble in a spirit level, and in his still wobbly thanks, he asked his brain where it would like to go, if not to the shower. That question taken literally by his Labrador puppy brain saw the spirit bubble of intention change direction, and pulse a pathway straight to his heart, which throbbing jubilantly with palpable love, saw him say to himself in genuine amazement “my brain is in love with my heart”. And he watched the thought unfold in silent slow motion, like the wings of the barn owl taking a few almighty beats, before he staggered a few paces forward and beatifically passed out.

…

A silk smooth-polished aeon some twenty hours later and he was back in the blue light of dawn, an altogether more clinical blue light, waiting to hear the first birds again, from the crepuscular nest of his hospital bed. Wired up and rhythmically beeping were new sounds about him, and he could already hear in the dark violet pre-dawn, the first syrinxes tentatively enquiring after the quantum tremolo of an encroaching sun. He wondered how it felt to have a syrinx and to warm it up ready for syllables to cross the tight drum of resonance there in the back of the throat between the head and the heart. In humans that was near the reptilian brain centre, the one dealing with fight or flight, and he wondered if birds having been dinosaurs - if that was the same for them.

He thought about how dry his throat was and wondered if their throats ever felt like his did now. In sensation, his throat recalled one of those days in which you speak to no one, committing to an unintentional vow of silence through lack of phone calls and minimal interaction. Those days when with a stagnant larynx, you have an idea on the tip of your tongue so potent you could cry it, no reason to say it aloud and a cramped sort of staleness preventing you.

He looked back over his day, how he had been taken care of, how everyone had stepped in. How grateful he was to have not been on that panel! Interrogated by earnest worshippers on whether their daughters could attend protestant piano recitals or whether that would earn them hellfire in the hereafter, when the issue that ought be on the table was whether love could ever come to humans as equals, during our lifetimes, or whether we would continue to make an obdurate mess of things. What a blessed relief to not have to tell people what to do and to not have to be the middleman in what in the end is an interminable internal quest.

How on earth had he ever come to be a cardinal, when he could just as easily have been a songbird pouring his heart out - he shook his head internally - an imagined action since his head better not actually move for wires, and in the shake of dismissal thought at once of his own father.

Pansy, fairy, useless – that head-shake of near disbelief – shall we take you as a faggot o’ kindling and throw you on the fire to keep warm perhaps? The old man had such a way with words, and his son’s awkward and gentle ability, perturbed him into callous acts of discipline. What was it about the sensitive side of the spiritually inclined that was so dangerous, that it could set the world in archaeological layers against it? Even more humorous then, that there should be no female cardinals, when femininity and sensitivity were so necessary in the successful delivery of his daily duties. They had stolen femininity from the females and rendered it hollow, he thought, and he was reminded of Panda the owl again.

...

He had met first her when she was an owlet, stranded on the floor, below the nest, during his morning constitutional. They say you must pick up barn owls, if you find them, as they won’t survive long without being placed back in their nests so he tried to use the hems of his garment to wrap around her, but they weren’t long enough. He took a risk with his bare hands as her feet were chaotically scratching at the air for something to cling to, but he wrapped thumbs and fingers around the fluffy down of her lower wings, and long gangly ankles, and picked her up.

“Hello little one. What have we here? Long kicking legs and nowhere to go. Where is your nest, my dear?” he stepped cautiously from one foot to the other, wondering which tree might have been hers, and why he hadn’t heard the chicks hissing, or the mother screeching before now. He realised, after shuffling about for some time, that her tree was a little further off, and that she had fallen from higher than he would have imagined, and that he would need a stepladder. Between going to fetch that, and gently juggling the baby owl, and resting the ladder against her tree, he had time to ask her about how her formative days were going, and whether she yet had an appetite for prey that hadn’t been pre-shredded by mother.

“I expect you swallow down everything your father brings you do you? I shall call you Pandemonium, after Milton. Since you are a demon owl, as they say, and since you can fly everywhere. I’m sure that Milton would appreciate the joke.”

He placed her into the nest, his heart beating a steady thrum of appreciation for their encounter, offered her a hale and hearty “Salutations! Grow well, Pandemonium, little Panda.” and wandered off into the rest of this blessed morning, expecting to never see her again, much less nearly a year later, neatly concussed on his lawn. Even though he knew he could never really befriend a barn owl, now in his hospital bed, at the bottom of everything, she was the one he missed the most.

...

So there had been no big trip into town for him, no panel, praise be, but instead an evident relocation to the strip-lit sterile spaces of the district emergency room, none of which he remembered from the point of view of his journey or transition to being there, only the light in his eyes as the doctors told him and his housekeeper, and his personal assistant, what had happened in the interim.

“You suffered a silent heart attack.” said the cardiologist, now sitting across from him in his room. Serious and considerate in manner, she explained that not all heart attacks involve chest pain, and when he mentioned the tingling in his fingers and toes, she said this could be indicative of the circulation being compromised most likely by a blood clot, and that they would need to do more tests.

“We’re quite close in name, you and I.” he told her, smiling, eyes sparkling, and he watched the brain inside her cranium relay a signal to her face to raise an eyebrow, in quizzical amusement. He opened his papery hands and noted the blue of his veins like the colour of dawn that he longed for in this most indoor and brightly cold environment.

“My name means hinge, whereas your name means heart, which shares a root with credo or creed, meaning faith, confidence or devotion, a statement or formula of belief, or to “put one’s heart” to something.” He smiled at the increase in her smile, and his voice trailed off a little as he added fondly, “so maybe you are the real cardinal.”

“I didn’t know that my title had so many meanings attached. Thank you.” She said, placing her hand on her own heart in reverie, as his voice and his mind warmed and intoned;

“Credo or creed from Old Irish, Creidim. Welsh Credu. French Croire, croiser to cross. Croix. Cross over.” he said these last few more to himself. “the creed and the church. I suppose it all has to come from somewhere, even if it feels distant now.” another smile, another wave of the hands to indicate distance; incroyable, incredible, uncrossable.

“What do you mean that your name means hinge?” she asked, in spite of herself. Reassured that she was actually interested and this wasn’t only an impeccable bedside manner, he thought for a spell to recollect, and clearing his throat said “let me see...” before looking to an imagined horizon in the upper right corner, and answering her slowly, in recital.

“"...chief, pivotal," early 14c., from Latin cardinalis "principal, chief, essential," a figurative use, literally "pertaining to a hinge," from cardo (genitive cardinis) "that on which something turns or depends; pole of the sky," originally "door hinge,"” he said, looking at her directly, adding “which is of unknown origin. That’s taken from my dusty old etymology dictionary so I’ve no idea what that reference to ‘pole of the sky’ is, though perhaps it is nautical, as in, of a compass’ directions. I imagine it was “chief or pivotal, indeed essential” that they were going for when they named the ecclesiastical princes of the sacred college after the concept, though I rather like the ambiguity of being a sky-pole, or the mechanism that assists in opening doors. J’ouvert. I open.”

“That’s a beautiful idea.” She said trailing off to look out the window. “Well. I could listen to you all night. I’d love to speak with you more tomorrow if we have time, after the test results are back in…” Her breathing indicated some kind of subdued distress and a tacit feeling of flight. Maybe she was simply late for her next appointment.

He smiled and felt out a concluding pathway to give her an easy escape. Poor lady doesn’t know that there is no time yet or that it’s impossible to be late. “Ah yes,” he said. “The examination of my faltering engine.”

“Do you have a history of heart problems in your family?”

“My father had an arrhythmia in later life, but I’ve never been troubled by it, until now perhaps?”

“I’m sure we’ll find you’re soon to be right as rain. There’s no immediate evidence of damage.” She said. “Let me leave you to take rest.”

She stood, and left the room, the student doctor he hadn’t noticed the entire time leaving with her, and they switched off the light without asking as they went, leaving his small reading light glowing beside him. He placed his hands folded on his chest in a gesture of light prayer and hummed to himself as he closed his eyes.

And fell asleep. 

And now, here he was, in the blue light again, of a new dawn chorus, observing sensations in the gloomy and mischievous onset of day-gleam.

And what more was there to say than that he was tired. It occurred to him that if he had had these thoughts as a younger man, he might have had more time (there was no time) to inhabit them. Allow the fungal tendrils of exploration to uproot his undergrowth and pousser comme un champignon, grow and develop through new open doors. As it was, he felt that observing sensations was the most he could muster, and he’d had enough of those too, and though observing without reaction was a new and splendid endeavour, what if the wisdom he was seeking wouldn’t serve him this time. All very well to enter the castle, but if you are no longer a gallant knight, see that you don’t come out again.

Next time around perhaps he could encounter feelings and embody them not only above the neck. Lord I asked for complexity and you made me a spider in a cobweb, casting lines out into the unknown, I asked to be a ferocious animal, and you left me a polar bear leaping between melting icebergs. Who was that poem by he wondered? At a loss and lost in a feeling of reaching, he tried to let go of any request or demand upon the source of his query and tried instead to behold himself, ready for next time. Whatever next time was.

I don’t like leaving, he thought, observing his sensations throughout the mechanism. Like a long-programmed engine that can’t remember what it feels like not to thrum, how does anyone ever let go. The door shut, the window open, the birds began to sing, and unbelievably, the owl shrieked. He opened eyes that he hadn’t until that moment realised were closed in time to see Panda come to land upon his windowsill and wait there patiently.

“Hello old friend.” his breathing was barely there and his voice was a whisper. “Come to say goodbye have you.”

The owl stepped forward and back again affectionately and he felt his breathing calm and settle. My breath is my father’s breath, he thought. My heart is my father’s heart. And he remembered walking in the woods with his dad, when he was little, hoisted up onto shoulders to look at birds nests and squirrel holes, learning all the leaves of the trees and their peculiarities, and how animals must be talked to with feelings, and not behaviour. How his father’s stiff monosyllabic gruffness disappeared tickling trout, or fishing for eels, or following tracks in the woodland, and how he never hurt so much as a spider, unless he were hunting it for food, which he gave thanks for abundantly. Animals made more sense to him.

The palimpsest of birdsong behind the owl rose and crescendoed, and he felt himself rise with them, though this time his body remained in the bed, where it had meant to stay the last time this happened, but forgetting itself had automatically got up to follow wherever the sound was coming from and left him stranded by that window.

He could forgive himself that, and he thanked it for its long years of service, and he promised it a return to the nitrogen cycle its mother, once he was gone. Bury me in a cobweb of champignons, bury me at dawn in blue light and song, dig me a hole at the edge of the forest, where the mushrooms push up defiant and strong. And he found the space between the voices of the thousand tiny birds singing, the chasms of silence in the polyphony, a cacophonous highway of resonant strata, xylem to heaven, right in the bloody racket of the dawn chorus, and he cut the golden thread of understanding which tethered him to himself, and drifted out into the day.