IT happened in December, when the wind was cold and strong, but I remember it now, in April. The day was crisp and I was up early to feed the birds. Not the ones in cages, but those flying about. Ordinary birds, regular flying beings, darting in and out of the window, buzzing close to the screen doors of our home.
I was the first to develop this habit. It came when I began to listen to the cries of the birds. Or were they songs? I am not an ornithologist but my instinct was to feel the hunger of these creatures. The decision: I would intervene with nature.
Would I feed them with grains of milled rice, fresh and raw from the container in the kitchen? Or, would they want the cooked varieties? My good grades in six units of Readings in Physical Anthropology back in graduate school urged me to go for natural selection. Their beaks being small could only prepare them for soft seeds or softer rice.
From the leftover cooked rice I gathered a spoonful and placed them on a plastic cover of a discarded container. On top of the head of the small posts that served as foundation for the fence I placed them. It took a while for the small birds to notice them. But soon, they were droning above the food, pecking tiny morsels and flying away with them.
As I was doing this, I did not notice that my sister-in-law, Ate Naomi, was looking down amused at this act of mercy on my part. It was the height of the pandemic. We were all locked down. She understood the insanity of our conditions. It was only when I would wake up late and the birds were anxiously (or so I assumed) anticipating their feeds that Ate Naomi reminded me to place first thing in the morning, the food for the birds. She, too, had been lured into this business of feeding birds—the brown maya and sometimes the bigger, rowdier Pied Fantail.
It was in that month, deep in the habit of breaking the cosmic flow of the surroundings, that I almost went blind. I am, of course, exaggerating the way I had embellished my role as the custodian of nature by designating myself to be the feeder of free, untamed birds.
It was late afternoon. There were more birds than usual filling the spaces above our house. They could be hungry, I told myself. There was also anxiety: have I induced an imbalance in their world, where, far from rice fields and forests, I have provided them with a surplus of food, much greater than what the avian universe afforded them to have. When no man was there to attribute them the qualities of want, and provide an anthropomorphism of poverty.
But I needed to feed them. It was no more what these birds wanted (at this point I had not yet tried to read the minds from those infinitely tiny heads) than turning my humanity into a performative act.
The scene was quick, as unpredictably swift as any accidents. Like the freak ones. A thin branch swung and I felt a sting on my right eye. I squinted. The instinct to protect was there but it was milliseconds late. A smarting pain was driving across my conjunctiva (I still have the time to be pseudo-medical), deep into my nose. Even my forehead sensed the dangerous hurt. I thought of the lens implanted on my eye. I returned to that magnificent operation where, after the drilling of the cataract on the right eye was finished, the very same right eye I though by now had been damaged, I saw the light above and the rush of clouds on the bluest of skies through the window.
Would I go blind? Would my vision return to blur?
But a good doctor was around to save my eye, the eye that received a huge amount of medical redemption some three years back.
When the swelling had subsided after a week and the redness had vanished, I was back to feeding the helpless (again my human bias at work) beings. During the days that my eyes were healing, however, Ate Naomi took over the task. She was more generous, leaving mounds of rice on top of the fences and fattening a population of birds.
She was, like me, getting to know more about the birds. In those moments, we were, in our humble assessment, better humans; otherwise, why would we appropriate for ourselves this chore of helping out those in flight? Maybe we were marking out our territories against these birds by feeding them, and bringing them into our world. Perhaps, that was not kindness. Perhaps, that was our own loneliness.
In her moving book, Living as a Bird, Vinciane Despret, the Belgian philosopher of science, constantly revisits the notion of territories for birds: “If there are territories which are bound by song, or more precisely, territories which are bound by the power of a simulacrum of presence, territories which become bodies and bodies which expand to become living spaces…there are undoubtedly many other ways of being, many other ways of inhabiting a territory, all of which may give rise to many different worlds.”
Back to the porch of the home I shared with Ate Naomi, came the thought that by feeding these birds that did not need feeding, we were freeing ourselves from the fears of the global infections. We were learning about ourselves from the birds not by being inspired by them or being pushed to joys by their songs (for they were not even songs but whimpers) but because we were learning another dimension in the universe. “Our task should be to multiply worlds rather than to reduce them to our own,” Despret speaks.
In the house I am staying now, for the moment, I have no chance of feeding the birds. There are three huge trees in front of my gate. Up there, the birds have their own world. Dear Ate Naomi is not with us anymore. Death is the simplest explanation to her being gone. But I have learned from birds and their use of space, which is also Time. I think of her as being somewhere. In the multiple realities of this world, she could be in territories unseen, feeding more birds, or softly blowing the wind away from their wings for fear that she could go blind to the beauty of their songs and dreams.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com