Hunt and Peck
A lyric essay about fingers, thumbs and pigeons
Dickie Birds
You probably started the same way – two little Dickie Birds extended over the keys, striking down onto a letter after an eye snags onto it. In my case there was the satisfying snap of the electric typewriter, but I had to go extra slow because an error meant having to start again from scratch. Not an issue for poets but a bugger for wannabe Tolstoys. Then, by their own seeming volition, the fingers got a little bit faster. The circling became a jittery pause before the strike of the key and then it became hopscotch – two fingers leaping from square to square, or note-to-note like the Chopsticks scene in Big. Then the other fingers started to join in, the middles and then the rings. The thumb claimed exclusive rights to the space bar. It was still jittery, with little pauses here and there as the QWERTY topography didn't yet live in memory. That came later, when they eye tired of flicking from the screen to the keys and back again. So those two little Dickie Birds nested down on the F and J keys and the other fingers crept in to learn their jurisdictions. For the slightest of moments it was like those first days with the electric typewriter, the hesitations and complete halts, but this time there was no sheet of paper to ball up and toss. The mistakes could use up all the pixels they wanted before something clicked and each familiar word became a kind of dance and the individual letters became a kind of background code, rendered invisible behind a slick user interface. If the words didn't come then that was the whims of the muse or the poor beleaguered brain for the fingers could dance to whichever tune was fed to them. They spoke as well as the mouth could, sometimes better.
Bird Brains
When I was at art college I found out that one of my lecturers only made paintings of pigeons, which rendered me incredulous because I was young and stupid. The only other person I knew of at the time who loved pigeons was Mike Tyson. Pigeons catch a lot of flack which is fair enough considering the flack that we catch from them. Their crap is part of our day to day life – staining our structures and pattering our heads. The same could be said of seagulls but they command a grudging respect from the ferocity of their raids on al fresco diners. But the pigeon simply converges about the crumbs we drop about our feet, where they scan the stained concrete for specs of sustenance before dashing for the occasional lobbed crust. It could be the contrast between the laser focus on each cobble and slab and their peripheral hair trigger to take flight for a few yards before the allure of further specks and scraps brings them back down. But if they stay on the wing they attain a sudden state of grace, with those outdoor tables and plazas shrinking to a grey blur as their focus is now sky-wide and their plump bodies swoop and glide with no threats from above. But we never see them like this, we only see them in a world that renders them stupid, like the birds we bred the flight out of so that we could steal their eggs and fatten their breasts. Our world.
Dead Birds
Remember that thumb that found its vocation by smashing the space bar, thumping back the percussion of negative space? It got another job, a bigger job. It became the digit that lightly pressed against the bottom of a sheet of glass to flick upwards, summoning new thing after new thing. It could also register its desires by jabbing any summoned item that caused a little spark in the place behind the eyes where all those words happen. The brain was like a pigeon that didn't have to inspect the paving slabs beneath dining tables. It could stand before a constant deluge of crumbs and the thumb was the beak that kept darting into it. Schopenhauer spoke of the need for information eclipsing the need for the thing we really needed: insight. The room that one sits in is a plethora of information and the world beyond that room, even more so. Much like the paving slabs that become a slight grey blur when the pigeon is in its true element, the six-inch sheet of glass is also capable of becoming something immense, but only by diminishing the mind that seeks that immensity. There are billionaires that believe you can upload your soul into this rectangular world and so they embarked on the work of making the soul more rectangular. The pigeon in flight has no thoughts of immortality or its opposite. Its grace comes from the sky that speaks through it.
Other things I wrote this week:
I watched the women’s Euros final and felt a familiar feeling of revulsion when Sweet Caroline boomed over the stadium PA. I then wrote a prose poem about my feelings for that song. You can read it here.
I’ve been wary of using the term “lyric essay” for a while, partially because I’ve not been able to find a decent definition of what a lyric essay is. Some have pointed out that the term has come into service because the definition of an essay has been narrowed to that of the academic critical essay. While recent posts on Rusty Niall haven’t necessarily been rigorous academic screeds, I have certainly moved more towards something that relies on argumentation, a tone of persuasion that’s aimed at the reader.
When I first started writing poetry as my main means of artistic expression, there was an element of the frustrated filmmaker within my work. I wanted my poems to be like little films in my head that could be played back in the heads of my readers. The great thing about poetry was that there didn’t need to be a plot or a compelling character arc, the images were enough.
One thing about writing this latest lyric-essay-type-thing is that it has reminded me that I tend to think in images rather than arguments and how imagery can follow its own kind of logic. A dream logic, perhaps?
So, as obsolete as the term “lyric essay” might be, I think it fits well enough here. The thing that holds the images together is not a line of argument but something more inherent to the images themselves. I hope you enjoyed it. There might be a few more in the future.
Thanks for reading this,
Niall
If you enjoy my writing and would like to support my work or just want to read more of it, please consider being a supporter for £3 a month (there are no percs or paywalls, it’s just an automated tip cup), buying me a coffee or paying a visit to my digital garden.