The Birdsong in our Lungs

Maybe it’s not about the art we make or the songs we sing or the birds at dawn. Maybe it’s just about us telling the universe that we’re still here.

Almost every morning with the rise of the sun, the birds will sing without fail. Whether its rain or shine, hail or snow, the birds will always call, creating a distinct art form of their own. I never questioned why they sang because it was just there as nature’s natural alarm (that I would usually sleep through) bringing the world to life. But then a little birdie on the internet told me our avian friends sing at the crack of dawn to tell their family they’ve made it through the night. They’ve endured the darkness and uncertainty of the late evening hours, returned to their nests safe and sound. The more I thought about this mystical natural phenomenon, the more familiar it sounded because in a way…that’s what we do too.

As humans, we yearn to be understood. But sometimes we struggle to understand ourselves so how can we possibly expect others to do so?

The art we create are attempts at cohesion. Attempts to organise our thoughts with each loop of a letter and etch of a pencil. They are outlets for our emotions and records of our lives to make ourselves feel less alone. “Think of this-” A.S. Byatt said in his novel Possession, “-that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other”. Possession follows a grand tale of two young scholars who follow a string of pretentious poems, letters and journals that lead them on a mystery to uncover the lives of a pair of Victorian poets before their time. As the reader follows the scholars and the clues left in the Victorian’s poems, they come to realise how important their own art is. That we create art to leave remnants of ourselves for others to find. To pick up all our loose shards and piece them together like bluebirds making a nest to call home. It’s the way we remember ourselves and console each other, sharing a mutual loneliness through our creations. The way we interact and share ideas and create memories embedded into an invisible timeline that makes us human.

Art is uncomfortable. It hurts our throats to sing. Strains our wrists to write and draw. But we do it anyway. To purge the pain onto a blank canvas. Sometimes we hate ourselves so loudly. We hate ourselves so viciously with terror and fear, so relentlessly that we forget how to truly live. As if the sun exploded within our hearts, obliterating everything inside us until only ashes remained.

But from the ashes, a phoenix will rise.

Creations born from the heart have the power to save us. We learn to use the blood from our scars as ink and the ash from burned remains as paint. We speak in haunting brushstrokes and strangled words. But it’s art, nonetheless. A particularly memorable example of transforming carnage into art is Studio Ghibli’s timeless classic Princess Mononoke. The film is an intricate masterpiece of a raging war between gods and humans. Darkness and uncertainty shroud the audience as they watch the gory horrors of this film, gods perishing before their eyes and the characters they root for face death too. The audience begins to wonder, who do you pray to when there are no gods to listen? The bittersweet ending doesn’t give an answer because “there cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans” and the audience is left there dumbfounded and tearstained as the post-movie feels start to hit.

“Yet even amongst the carnage and hatred, life is still worth living,” said Hayao Miyazaki, one of the creators of Studio Ghibli. “It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist” like Princess Mononoke’s undying love for her forest spirit friend Shishigami, enduring the wrath of gods with him till the very end. Even amongst the carnage and war and bloodshed, there is still the solidarity of human relationships and the courageous spirit of battle to share with the world, acknowledging that even in the darkest times there is still something worth living for.

Humans are like the birds that flock the sky, each one able to send ripples across the universe in explosions of birdsong and hope, echoing their songs miles and miles away. It’s easy to feel small in an infinite world like ours but our creations, both beautiful and bloody, tie us all together as a unified melody of life.