I should not have shared my unusual discoveries that day or the day before. But who chances upon bird’s feather on four separate occasions? In one’s apartment, with all doors screened? The first time I saw a tiny feather, I ignored it. The second I swept into the toilet drain. The third made me think. Nothing transcendental or mystical. But then it would not stop: a fourth, rounded feather appeared on the floor. Even for a non-ornithologist, I could say it did not come from a single winged creature.
My first impulse was to check the surroundings. For rats. For other creatures created to eat helpless birds. But, why I asked, would I consider birds with their natural capacity of flight to be weak and vulnerable? And why race to the conclusion of rats and mice as default murderers in a household meant for humans? Incoherent thoughts were beginning to overwhelm me. One thing for sure, nothing about the extraterrestrial or out-of-this-world was ever in my consciousness.
It was time to share my find. It was meant to be for friends who would understand why I would do the quirky act, which was to post a series of photos of the feathers seemingly appearing from nowhere. Whether intended or not, the feathers became significant items. For some, they were signs of something else that, in fact, rendered my initial assessment of a rat vis-à-vis a bird encounter inherently cruel, if not unnecessary indulgence in irony.
I have to admit I was just too much the “objective” one, baiting those who cared to read and view the images of a feather without the avian structure. Or was I scared of the conclusion people would reach with regard to the instability of my mind? Was I defensive of the vulnerability of the flightiness of this my mode of communication?
Pop psychology and Jungian exercises were beginning to threaten me. Should I delete the photos? But then the responses to my presentation started to ring in like a frenzied, happy but nervous cash register:
Someone is communicating with you?
Angel watching over you…
Lucky charms
As the fourth feather appeared:
Wow, you have many angels up there…
Others were more specific:
San Gabriel—the Archangel
Contrarian:
Must be from an Aswang (Witch)
Channeling Dorothy Parker:
Adding another feather to your cap?
Pragmatic like a workshop director:
Do absurd fiction!
Another good friend sent in Mary Oliver’s poem, with the lines about the “feathers of some unimaginable bird/that loves us,/that is asleep now, and silent.”
The feathers were assuming the power of a Rorschach inkblot test: it was not anymore the found feather but how they, my friends, looked at these objects of surprising presence. Mary Douglas the anthropologist behind Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, would make sense. We have to rationalize the feather because not to do so would disturb our world of reason, order and coziness.
We can look back to Douglas’s concept of “dirt” or “pollution”. She says: “If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place.”
It is not about clinical or moral impurity; it is about something that is not expected to be there.
How to explain a feather inside a house that had not seen or felt any wing slicing its space? Where did it come from? The most difficult query comes last: what does it mean?
The meanings are not mysterious. Easily, we could look for a dead bird. Or a lost bird. Or one whose wings had been clipped between the screened door. Or, be like me, and search for the murderous mouse or wretched rat.
There are other responses, of course, and they should not be doubted upon unless we want to cast aside our faith. These are the angels. Guilt for a wingless Angel or Archangel can be set aside, after all, there are only four tiny feathers in our exhibit. These powerful divine beings could have used the friendship of birds that fly around our homes.
What was that old theory about man creating the gods and separating himself from the divinities only to engage the services of birds to connect him again to the fount of his soul? It can work here. Why not.
Or these feathers could be a boon given to us humans when sadness and isolation that are seemingly wider and more pervasive than the sky above and greatly more earthshaking than the quakes yet to be born from the ground have become too much for us. The world need not be rational, rationality being overrated. It could be like love, tender but unrated, buried at times somewhere and floating up, a feather without the motion of flying but nevertheless able to carry one’s heart up to a place where happiness and consolation—ephemeral, imperfect—promise a break, a tentative respite, from this deep valley of tears.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano