MAGPIE

Corvidae. Frantic, jumping around fields then
forming great clouds in the sky. Recorded early, 5 a.m. (Compare with recordings from Bitterroot National Forest, Custer National Forest, Helena National Forest.)

I DRIVE SLOWLY, obeying every signpost. I hear the lurch of the engine fan despite having taken the key out of the ignition. The seat skates backward, bumping up against the worn leather of the backbench when I remove the cuttingboard. I pull myself out of the car gripping the cool metal at the top of the door and shiver at the dawn air. Age makes you sensitive as a Geiger counter.

When I slip the key into the lock, the door is already open, which stops me. I know I left it locked. The American insists there are thieves, though I question what exactly they would want from her overstuffed shelves full of cheap crockery. It looks like the work of a magpie. The love of small bright objects that compel it to steal, with all the associated risks and triumphs.

Magpies are one of the few animals that can recognize not only themselves in a mirror, but that what they are looking at is a mirror.

I remember once aiming my microphone at the sky and picking up thousands of their flight calls, the black-and-white bodies across the landscape like writing. They have the ability to mimic and layer sound. One shiny black head darted through the foliage startling me, calling, Kill her! Kill her! Well not exactly. But I had a nervous energy. I’d left the house with my nightgown tucked into my jeans. I had just heard that my first cymatics paper would be published, and I had received more funding from the university for the sound lab and field research. It occurred to me that I might be a magpie too. But the thrall of accomplishment can fill you the way love does. Still, there were rewards and no one to tell. I put the headphones on. The recorder picked up the bumping sounds of a tractor rolling downhill in the distance. There was a slight buzzing sound that released something in my throat.

In Mexico, the journalist had the bad luck to arrive on a day I wanted to see no one. I was in the middle of the cymatic translations. I had been offered a research residency through the Library of Bird Sounds in Mexico. I had been using a metal plate with a thin layer of sand hooked up to an amp and speaker. The conservatory had dispatched a crew and we had been photographing and filming the patterns for the past ten days. The whole setup filmed from above with a copy stand. They had all left the night before, and I was looking forward to being alone.

There is a dampness to every object. All my books are beginning to smell of mould. I lay them out on the grass in the sun.

The journalist was sent to interview an illustrious biologist but instead comes upon a woman in bare feet knocking sand out of her boots outside a wooden cabin with a corrugated metal roof. Books are spread everywhere in the grass. She asks me, Do you know if Dr. Ivory Frame is staying here?

The journalist’s name is Marisol. She was born in Paris to a Mexican mother. It’s a story for a magazine in New York that Valentina says is read by everyone.

I instantly bristle. It’s not scientific.

Relax, Ivory. They have a wide readership.

Tell them I’m a hermit, I say to Valentina. When I am interviewed, it is always Paris, the famous artists, that people are most interested in. Why? I think irritatedly. It is so utterly unrelated. Besides, it is always something ridiculous. How they heard a woman say that when you made love with Brancusi you absolutely were not allowed to touch his beard. Or that Picasso incessantly wore shorts because he thought his legs his most beautiful part.

It will be good for the project.

When Valentina says good, she means money.

Marisol is embarrassed by her mistake. You don’t look like your picture, she says, shading her eyes with her hand. I’m sorry, is this a bad time? She offers to come back later.

I squint at her. She has thick black hair cut to her chin, tucked behind her ears. She wears a white Edwardian blouse, army pants, and a white-patterned kerchief knotted at her neck like a cowgirl. She looks much younger than she probably is. It must have taken her hours to get up here. She looks nervous. Her lovely thick Spanish accent makes it impossible to be angry.

Okay, okay. I wipe my hands on my shirt. You’re here. You might as well come in. Would you like something to drink? Coffee?

Yes. Thanks. If it’s not too much trouble, she says, following me through the screen door that slaps shut behind us. Will you go out in the field later? I was hoping to—

I’ve been back for hours, I say, not turning around. I like working when my shadow is ahead of me.

Sitting at the table, she aims the recorder toward me and says, When the red light goes on, if you could state your name, profession, location, date—

The kettle whistles. I get up to switch off the burner. Sunlight finds my hands as I pour the boiling water. The thick melodious screeches of parrot-infested trees outside. Willing my attention back toward her questioning.

Ivory Frame. Acoustic biologist. Outside of Las Pozas, near the village of Xilitla, Mexico. 1982. July. Not sure which day. I watch the familiar whorl, the needle bouncing to my voice—tape-recorded like all the other animals.

I am obsessed with language obsolescence. Threatened languages have a right to be protected. The Conservatory for Extinct Animals is affiliated with the university in Oslo and works in a number of areas, including habitat restoration, educating citizen scientists toward land management, analyzing data for shaping future conservation. And then there is my strange branch of bioacoustics and the dictionary.

When did it begin?

Well I acquired my first tape recorder in 1953 and have been recording animals ever since.

Why?

When the last speaker dies, it’s as though the language never existed.

The project gave you agency.

What do you mean by agency?

There is the slow blink of the metal fan blades that Marisol will hear when she plays back the tape in her cramped apartment in Tribeca.

Why are you using cymatic imagery now?

It means I can work with a solid, reproducible image, not a fleeting noise, which was all I went on before. I can see the imprint of the animal’s sound on air, in water. It helps with deciphering their languages, like the low-pitched ruffle of a peacock’s tail or the echolocating clicks of dolphins.

Can you explain cymatics?

It means wave in Greek. Founded by a Swiss scientist who was a disciple of biology’s Nostradamus, Rudolph Steiner, famous for his 1923 bee lectures—the hive is permeated by love. He also wrote about the power of symmetrical images of sound waves. The patterns can be explained with classical physics, but it promises something else. A way of gaining a deeper understanding of communication—affirming the substance of the unseen.

Can you give me an example?

The forms of snowflakes and faces of flowers take on their shape because they are simply responding to sounds in nature.

She asks about all the usual things. We discuss endangered species, conservation, my fieldwork. She edges in closer, I see the flicker in her eyes. Do you ever feel you’ve had to sacrifice your personal life for your work?

Woman scientists who marry don’t stand a chance. Men can get married. They can have children and go right on being scientists. Though this is not what I say. Instead I pick up her recorder, walk over to the window screen, and hold it. Through the cathedral-like, broad-leafed trees, the vociferous sounds of birds, frogs, and insects fill the room. The roar of bottle-green parrots like a waterfall.

I place the recorder back on the small table. These sounds are languages being communicated that we all might be able to learn from, they can show us a kind of cultural evolution. But most of the time we are not paying attention. We should be worried because unless we control our activities, we will lose all this, I say, gesturing outside. You ask about personal sacrifices, and I don’t really know what to tell you. I know that love has a language that starts, and stops, but these languages. They ask for nothing. They fill you full of wonder. They hold you like a spell.

You’ve been cited as a protester because of your activism on certain issues. Does that bother you?

I prefer interventionist. Protesting is far too submissive a word. It implies that there is something to protest against. I’m the conservative here. I’m conserving. It’s the radicals who are destroying the earth.

Marisol slips her shoes off her feet and perches on the chair, resting her chin on her knees. Her view of me has already shifted. She feels that any work that leads someone to a place like this, with its dangling charms, is worth the price. She has read of the nearby Las Pozas where the eccentric British aristocrat rumoured to be the illegitimate son of a king of England spent his fortune creating a surrealist Xanadu up here in the rainforest high in the Sierra Madre. He is half the time unaware that there are parrots perched on his head and arms as he races around conceiving and constructing. She had planned to spend time there before heading back to Xilitla, but feels the pull of the work, her subject. Her editor had told her that no one has ever got the biologist to speak about her past and thinks that Marisol, with her degree from the Sorbonne, her three languages, and her disarming approach, can.

On the third day Marisol is here, I feel more open and unaware of the recorder. I am enjoying her company. She has scrambled through the forest with surprising agility, scaling the steep slopes without complaint. I can see scratches up her arms, insect bites on her neck. Her quick intellect and curiosity are the virtues of a promising scientist, though she seems to know a lot about art. She spent time in Paris, going to galleries with her father. He took her to see the thick black paintings of Pierre Soulages. She tells me she was a tomboy who shoplifted books and wore an orange string around her neck for a whole year. We talk about our favourite places in Paris. I show her how to work the cymatics equipment and I watch her grow quiet when she sees the striking patterns of the green-blue macaws. She says she began in film, but found it deadly boring, all the downtime. She worked with a famous director whom she overheard saying that he was tired of making movies. Most of the people who work in film are uneducated, he said. In another time, they would be called carnies. She says she is possibly not cut out for journalism though it is the only way, so far, that she has been able to make money from writing. In a story meeting, she pitched an idea about an elderly somewhat obscure poet she loved who had just died. All her editor said was, Death is not a story. Now if it happens in a way that is unexpected, that is a story.

That night, we drink good tequila she brought with her and I play the only music cassettes that still work in all the damp—Sidney Bechet, Edith Piaf, Patsy Cline.

I’ve got your picture that you gave to me

And it’s signed “with love” just like it used to be

The only thing different, the only thing new

I’ve got your picture, she’s got you

The darkness falls to a sliver moon and all the glittering southern stars, and the rainforest pitches readjust. A slow seep of warmth, that familiar languid buzzing. Marisol’s cheeks are flushed. The chair creaks loudly every time she shifts position. She tells me that most writers she knows in New York are odd. They can be smart and charming and then while you are talking to them, they suddenly bolt out of the room, like a cat. She says that she finds dancing spiritual. Her hair falling into her face. She laughs and says, This place is a dump.

Well Marie Curie discovered radium in an unheated shed, I say.

I need to know all the facts. I leave tomorrow so early.

Fact? Nothing is a fact. I inadvertently let out a huge yawn.

Oh I’m keeping you up.

Well I go to sleep and wake up with the light. Like a chicken.

What’s this one? she says, noticing a faint latticed coil of marks.

Monarch.

I love them, with their Halloween colouring. My mother always talked about the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City. How millions of monarchs would fly, without fail, to the mountains on that day. They believe they are the souls of the dead returned.

That makes perfect sense, I say as she refills my glass. Psyche, the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology, is depicted as winged like a butterfly.

Ivory?

Yes?

Tell me about Lev Volkov.

I swallow. There is a pause. I hear the click of the fan blades. I don’t talk about him.

When was the last time you saw him?

I fix my eyes ahead. Near the end of the war, I say dryly. Lisbon.

Was it war that separated you?

My body stiffens.

I read that you left him. But I also read that he became engaged.

Marisol. If you mention him again, I will have to ask you to leave.

This jolts her awake, shakes off the alcohol. She knows she’s done the wrong thing. And she will continue to; when her editor asks her for the Paris details she will write in as much as she can find. The truth is, she interviewed Lev years ago for an art magazine out of Paris and found him impossible. She thought this was the sort of thing she would talk about with Ivory. They would grow serious and laugh and find the heart of it. But now she realizes she was mistaken. She knows not to mention it.

She rewinds the tape and presses play. Why the dictionary?

I breathe out. In the work, I am calm. Extinction, I say. If we ignore the past, we are bound to make the same mistakes over and over again. The work is a protest against forgetting.

Forgetting what?

The animals came in singing and now they are silent.

Can you explain this link, the notion of loss and extinction.

I once researched the explorers who travelled along a river in what is now Venezuela, in a place of astonishing linguistic diversity, as the tropics are. There were two warring tribes. The one tribe had recently wiped out the other. The explorers walked through the jungle in a cloud of phosphorus-green parrots that spoke an unintelligible language. When they asked the surviving tribe what language it was, they shrugged and said it was that of the tribe they had killed off. These had been their parrots. The tribe was dead, they said, and their language would die too with the last of their birds.

When I sit with the recording equipment the next morning, I have an odd intensity that sometimes happens the day after too much drink. The body more alive, more open, though there is a faint shrill pain under my skull. Marisol already on her plane has forgotten her notebook. I flip it open to see if there is a phone number or address.

FRAME PROFILE

Tropical rainforest high in the Sierra Madre.

The cabin is tiny, has crumbs around all the edges, filmy scraps of food on the floor, field books stacked, held together with rubber bands. Two buckets collect water that comes through the roof. Sand, recording equipment piled in every corner, stacks of cymatic images on letter paper – everything in a state of moisture.

The images are strange, compelling though – everything gets grouped in either EARTH/SKY/WATER. They read like a poem.

She seems to keep most of the information in her head.

She wears worn canvas pants and a blouse buttoned to the top, sleeves rolled to her elbows, old-timey lace-up boots. Magnificent mass of white hair in a loose Victorian bun. High cheekbones, deep eyes. Something startling about her looks. None of her pictures look like her. What is it? She always looks (in the photos) like something caught – prey (or is it just that she refuses to give parts of herself away?).

She often describes her body as having a buzzing almost mystic energy (she describes feelings as mystic) which she said a doctor tried to dismiss as a symptom from a parasite she picked up from contaminated water once.

She moves like a teenager through steep inclines of forest, I am breathing heavily, always behind her. Born in 1917. Sixty-six? (Check.)

Describes the jarring sound of a tropical bird (binomial Latin name, look up) as the sound of a child cutting a tooth.

The intensity of her gaze is almost impossible to withstand (where to put? beginning?).

Uses the word dazzle—as in, I have been drinking rosemary tea, hot water and herb, to dazzling effect.

Things she says that I’d like to use in a story: “uncommon energy,” “its beauty hurt me.”

She shows me her logs of recordings with field book marginalia. Ex: Lonesome elephant walking into a storm. Recording picks up wind rippling its ears like sails.

Times she withdrew from social contact altogether. She’s sane though. Her mind moves faster than mine, finding it hard to keep up. She said she went mad. She said it exactly like that, and then nothing more. Must find record of this. Is there a record?

She plainly prefers the company of animals to people.

She has the self-sufficiency of an animal. She has no need for society, the same as Volkov. What is the quote? “People who choose to be alone are either an animal or a god.” (Kafka? Aristotle?)

When I showed her a photograph of a black Soulages outrenoir painting, she said cryptically, “It was clearly executed by someone who understands winter light.” (Find quote of when he was drawing black lines of ink as a boy. Sister: What are you making? Pierre: Snow.)

Called artists aggressive competitive loners, but in the next sentence said how much she— (I can’t read this next line.)

Awkward coldness, nervous silence around anything personal. She has developed a kind of carapace of detachment.

Possessed.

Used to working without electricity. (Good with a cookstove.)

There is something around the dictionary of animal languages that she can neither explain nor control; it’s as though we are in the room with a live bird. She becomes rapt (displacement/cessation/trance—the state of being outside of oneself).

Her reverence for nature and animals borders on mystical.

When I ask her what her favourite animal recording is, she says, I don’t answer those kinds of questions. (She later acknowledges that in a woman, this kind of remark comes off as rude.)

Sometimes her responses are confounding: e.g., Me: Can you talk about this duty to archive?

Her: Somebody once said that every atom of our bodies was once inside a star. Maybe that is why I am collecting these sounds. Like starlight they give light, despite the black.

Bangs at the sink washing dishes as I transcribe. I’ve said the wrong thing. Cold fury at the mention of Volkov—after all this time. I don’t tell her about my interview with him in Paris. I mistakenly thought I would. She is careful. Her life is concealed. Even to her.

She is like a piece of lightning. Or an old saint. Wounded and then healed.