6
AIR
Swifts
Some humans think that they can write about swifts, dogs and termites. Here some reasons why they might think so, and some facts:
In a famous set of experiments, a robot’s movements were determined by a random number generator. But the chicks who saw the robot as mother wanted it to be near them. They were separated from it by a barrier. And yet they could draw it nearer. They psychokinetically overrode the controls. A control set of chicks, not imprinted with filial love for the robot, could not.
These are facts about swifts because they are facts about the world, and swifts are part of the world, as I am. The facts indicate that no qualification other than occupancy of a shared world is necessary for me to write about swifts. That is a great relief, because swifts are the ultimate other. I can write about them only because I’m other too or (depending on my mood) because nothing is other.
✴ ✴
Sometimes they are not so far away. Just now, a few feet from my head, a swift has struck straight up – as straight as a plumb line, without braking or stalling, into the roof; as fast as thought, though bolder. If something is only as fast as thought, perhaps thought can keep pace. Yet thought cannot snatch the blueness of the height or know that the whole life of each swift is a gasp.
This swift, which was bringing a ball of 500 insects, bound with saliva, to bald nestlings in a hot vent in the eaves, screams down our street at the level of my upstairs study. It looks in at the making of books, people and tea; on flowery duvets, Edwardian plasterwork, fake baronial panelling, rows of monographs on the glories of the quattrocento; on bears, skulls, Tibetan masks, psychotic dolls and a lot of polite desperation. It screams up and down for no reason except that it is good to scream, and because the day deserves it. It’s not hunting for aphids, airborne beetles or sex.
I can join it in the pointless scream.
✴ ✴
This swift hatched in Oxford, four years ago. For six weeks it swelled like a boil. Then it toppled out towards our dustbins, found its wings before it hit the railings, roosted that night in the air, a couple of kilometres above Oxford, flapping occasionally into the wind and circling slowly up, and then, two weeks later, started on the journey to Africa.
It came back the following summer, circled our house, didn’t breed, went again, again and again to Africa, came back to Oxford and then found a hole in the house and a home for its semen. Until it flew into our roof above my head, it hadn’t touched the ground, or a tree, or a building, or anything but insects and the air in four years.
✴ ✴
There are two classes of words commonly applied to swifts: words about ethereality, and violent words. They are not contradictory. The violence makes the ethereal accessible. Swifts lay open the sky so that we can go there. They slash the veil.
If the swifts didn’t come, we’d be stuck with what we’ve got.
They were very late this year. I panicked. I’d get up very early, thinking that I’d heard a scream, and rush to the window. There was nothing there but pigeons as ponderous as I am: pigeons who sleep in trees and squat in the dirt.
And then, as I was lying on my back, they were suddenly there.
‘Why are you crying, Daddy?’ said Rachel, who was watching my face instead of the sky.
‘Because it’s all right’, I said. ‘Because the world still works.’
‘Okay’, she said.
They’re always suddenly there or suddenly not there.
✴ ✴
The air crawls. Up there, like plankton, there are live things drifting in the wind; aphids, other bugs, spiders, beetles. An aphid might be sucked from a grass stem in an English wood, up a gurgling plughole in the air, across the Pyrenees and the Strait of Gibraltar and into the crop of a Zitting Cisticola at an oasis in Mauritania.
I’ve tried to map the vortices. It’s best done from quite tall, bald trees with lots of footholds on which you can stand at many heights. It’s a happy, mesmeric way to pass the day.
Airborne thistledown’s the best marker of the vortices. Each seed probably doesn’t weigh much more than an aphid.
Near the ground the thistledown is tentative. It moves from side to side, as if testing the worth of all the possible air channels. By four feet up it has decided where to go, though a fleck of down that started in the same flower head might well have chosen differently.
In a wood or above a field, the vortices are an unseen forest of tangled chimneys. The chimney walls are quite hard. Not much escapes from them. They’re often very close together, but they’re rarely exactly parallel, and they sometimes even cross. Each has a tight centripetal glug, but they don’t just channel straight up. Each has tides and eddies. Bugs and seeds bounce off one another and off the walls: they somersault and arabesque. An aphid that almost made it out beyond the canopy might be blown back down by the fat cheeks of the summer and pass one coming up that started its climb from the under-growth an hour before.
At the top of the treeline there’s a tangled delta. The chimneys swell, start to knot, and spill into a flat bowl which spins them together. The flotsam gathers pace; the streams are wider and denser.
The swifts graze the streams. Perhaps there’s another delta and another flattening further up. Certainly by an altitude of 100 metres (328 feet) or so the pickings are thin. Yet swifts are often very much higher than this, where they’re unlikely to be feeding.
It’s different in open country. There the sun sucks up the earth hard. Banks of wind surf roll across the land, hit a wall, a ditch or a ripple and surge up, becoming mushrooms. The stalks of air are huge, writhing rivers of tiny spiders and aphids, sometimes hundreds of yards wide, racing in tumbling spate from the fields to the high clouds. They rasp a hand plunged into them.
The summer sky is usually a rigidly stratified bird sandwich. The swifts feed at the top; the martins are below them; and swallows wobble the top of the grass with their wake. But the swifts sometimes slice down into the martins’ patch, and when the sky is heavy with wet electric power they’re pushed further down, among the swallows, to the fields and the lakes.
Swifts are selective, fastidious feeders. Although they catch 5,000 or more insects a day, and though they have wide gapes like the mouth of a trawl net, they don’t usually trawl. They go for the big stingless insects. You can see them swing off their course to get them. And their discrimination is nuanced. When they hunt bees, they take the stingless drones selectively. Try telling drones from workers at a speed of fifteen metres (forty-nine feet) a second. They’re not just responding crudely to insect warning livery: they take plenty of stingless bee and wasp mimics. We don’t know how they tell the difference, but it must be visual.
They are raptors – aerial gaze hounds – snapping like terriers, and so they have two foveae: a shallow, monocular one, and a deep, magnifying one. This deep device probably gives them some binocular vision, used for computing the distance of speedy insects. They’re like cheetahs or peregrines. When a swift first spots a likely kill, it’ll be at a similar distance from it, relative to the size of the prey, as a peregrine would be from a pigeon, a cheetah from a Thomson’s gazelle, or I from a deer far across the hill. Identical visuospatial problems have to be solved in each case. Like a peregrine, the swift nods its head as it bears down, switching between devices – between the big picture and the detail. Both are needed for an efficient kill that won’t leave a sting in the mouth.
Though they’re mainly trophy hunters in the sky plains, swifts are not above a gulping, glutting feeding frenzy if the chimneys are serving up a fresh hatch.
I was once in the middle of one of these kill orgies. I was dragging a very small child along to nursery to be contained for a while, when the air above a wood by the road exploded in black, screeching sparks. The swifts were among a new hatch rising from the treetops; not bothering with hairpin turns, just ploughing through, jerking open-mouthed heads from side to side to hit the areas of deepest density.
We ran across the road. I told the three-year-old to wait in the nettles and scrambled up a tree as high as I could get. That was quite high. I swayed in a fork just below the top and pushed my head out into the killing zone of the delta.
I saw a tongue, squat, grey and dry; I saw myself, pinched and saucer eyed. I felt the cool electric grace of a downstroke on my face. I snapped a mouthful of nymphs and spat them on to the roof of a brand new Merc dropping off a child from a house 300 yards away.
It was the closest I ever got.
But becoming a swift? I might as well try to be God.
✴ ✴
I strapped myself into a harness and was tugged by a parachute into the sky. It taught me the taste of height – but the taste to a palate designed for six feet above the earth, not six thousand. It taught me about the roar of the wind, but the roar in flapping ears fixed on the sides of a big crude block of a head, forced under a gushing tap. It didn’t teach me how the temperature changed as I climbed: my face was too flushed with fear and thought to notice, and the rest of my body was wrapped in wool and nylon.
Swifts feel the ground by the shape of the breath it exhales. They smell their way through the scent columns. They hunt in a reflected image of the earth – an image as dense and sticky as a toffee apple.
I looked down at woods and fields and saw woods and fields. For a swift, woods and fields are pizza home-delivery joints. You never go to one of those. You just call and speak to a disembodied voice. You don’t really have much of a picture of what’s there. You’ve never thought about it. You probably know vaguely where it is. If pressed, you might use its location as part of a set of directions to somewhere else (as a swift may use some terrestrial signposts for navigation). But it has no intrinsic interest other than as the source of your pizza. The swift stays at home in the air, and the earth delivers.
It’s not surprising that poets get all ethereal about swifts. If anything can be literally ethereal, swifts are.
The main problem with turning myself into a swift, though, isn’t that it’s an air thing and I’m a soil thing. It’s speed. I’m a terribly slow animal. The difference between our relative perceptions of the texture of the air is vast, but it’s as nothing compared to the difference in pace of our lives.
In terms of longevity, a swift is comparable to many humans. Swifts have been known to live to twenty-one. It’s the amount of living that they put into each of the years that’s the real difference.
Some arithmetic, because there is a type of truth in figures:
Each spring and each autumn they travel around 9,000 kilometres (5,592 miles) between Oxford and the Congo: that’s 18,000 kilometres (11,185 miles) every year – which doesn’t begin to account for the flying that they do in their ordinary lives. That’s spread over around 66 days in the autumn (30 days of travelling, 36 days of stopover) and 26 days in the spring (21 days of travelling and 5 days of stopover).* In autumn they average around 300 kilometres (186 miles) per day towards the 9,000 kilometres (5,592 miles) and in the spring 430 kilometres (267 miles) per day. Let’s assume that on the migration stop-overs they do 75 kilometres (47 miles) a day feeding, soaring, sleeping and exulting. Let’s say that in the rest of their lives they’re doing 100 kilometres (62 miles) a day.
Thus:
Spring migration: |
9,000 km (5,592 miles) + 375 km (233 miles) on stopovers |
Autumn migration: |
9,000 km (5,592 miles) + 2,700 km (1,678 miles) on stopovers |
Remainder of year: |
273 days at 100 km (62 miles) per day = 27,300 km (16,963 miles) |
Total for year: |
48,375 (30,059 miles) |
For twenty-one years that’s 1,015,875 kilometres (631,235 miles) – about 1/150 the distance between the earth and the sun and 2.6 times the distance between the earth and the moon.
Swifts are about 16.5 centimetres long. I’m about 183 centimetres tall – about eleven times their length. If I were to walk proportionately as far in twenty-one years, I’d have walked almost 1/13 of the way to the sun and twenty-nine times to the moon. If I kept up the same pace and lived to eighty-four – a realistic equivalent for that long-lived swift – I’d have walked a third of the way to the sun and 116 times to the moon.
But it’s not all travelling and killing (though think of the millions of individual, assessed, intimately targeted head turns and snaps there will have been). That twenty-one-year-old may have bred nineteen times. The average number of nestlings might be as high as 1.7 per season. That’s thirty-two in its breeding lifetime. Multiply that by four for me: 128.
That’s what they do with their time. But what about their perception of what they’re doing? If (and yes, it’s a big if) they’re watching, as we do, a film of their own lives, how fast is it moving? And how frantic are those snapping heads?
If those questions mean anything at all, they must relate in some way, however crudely, to the speed of perception.
Snails move very, very slowly. Only if events are more than a quarter of a second apart will a snail perceive them as distinct. If you wave your finger in front of a snail four times or more a second, it will see a single, stationary finger. Sloth freezes movement: it blurs, simplifies and integrates, and in integrating loses a lot of the whole. It obscures the distinct parts of things, if time is an element of those parts, and concocts the lie that it sees things as they really are. It drains time out of our vision. Oversimplification is deceit.
Whereas speed, if you’re up to it, can tell you the value of time; can let you see your business with the due contribution from time’s perspective; can inject complexity and nuance. If, like many birds, you can hear sounds separated by less than two millionths of a second, you’ll know the baroque complexity of apparently bland birdsong. If you’re a human hearing that, you’ll fall on your knees. Wonder is a function of the degree of resolution – in birdsong, in optics, in philosophy, in theology. Only those blind to the velvet flow of a caterpillar’s legs and deaf to the grunt of a crocus as it noses out of the earth don’t worship, and often they can’t be blamed.
Another way of putting this is that really fast hardware and software can effectively slow down the world. The acutely discriminating bird hears what I’d hear if I turned the speed of the birdsong right down. I can probably hear two sounds as distinct if they’re around two hundredths of a second apart. The bird’s getting in one second what it would take me about 2¾ hours to hear.
If the rest of the bird’s tape runs at a similar rate and the bird (let’s call it a swift) lives for twenty-one years, then, since it has done 10,000 times as much living per unit time as me, it will die at a real age of 210,000 years – the distance separating us from the time when the first modern humans evolved in east Africa.
Now let’s try this with physical speed – which of course entails a lot of attention in many different neurological modalities. The snail can get by as a woefully crude visual discriminator because it moves over ground at a top speed of a metre (3.3 feet) an hour.
The highest migration speed recorded for swifts over a long distance is (a plainly wind assisted) 650 kilometres (404 miles) per day. The average for the spring migration is 336 kilometres (209 miles) per day. Measured by tracking radar, the flight speed of swifts on spring migration was 10.6 metres (35 feet) per second, which, if maintained over 24 hours, would be 916 kilometres (569 miles) per day. The fastest human runner, Usain Bolt, clocked 12.4 metres (41 feet) per second over 100 metres (328 feet). Then he stopped, panted, was wrapped in a blanket, handed an energy drink and carried shoulder high around the stadium. The swifts continue 3,360 times further per day for the best part of a month, catching their own food and navigating across deserts, seas and mountains. We, at our very best, are snails.
Of course there are obvious objections to all these nerdishly arithmetical types of comparison. I’ve been making them myself as I’ve tapped away. I agree with them all. But even if the comparisons are wholly worthless, it’s worth making them to demonstrate their worthlessness and so clear the ground for something else.
The figures might be the grammar of swifts. Grammar is necessary but not sufficient for poetry.
I’ve tried to be prosaic, because when it comes to swifts, all poetry fails.
✴ ✴
I can’t follow the swifts into the air. I’m less like them there than when I’m on the ground. Planes, of course, aren’t about the air at all. You’re furthest from swifts in a hurtling tube full of flatus. The view’s disembodiedly cartographical.
The air, for me, is necessarily about buckles and ball-crunching harness. I lurch, swing and churn. At best I’m a huge aphid – a drifting piece of swift food. At least on the ground I can dodge and roll for whole seconds at a time, and on a mountain in a gale I can feel secure when wind is blowing round me at the same speed as round the head of a migrating swift. When I stripped off my clothes at the top of our moor I got feedback from my ruffled body hair that was not all that unlike the tingling from the touch receptors of the swift’s filoplumes – minute, hairlike feathers that lie alongside the contour feathers, moving with them and letting mission control know where each of the big plumes is in space.
Water’s better, I suppose, but still remote. There I’m as buoyant as the swift when it’s sleeping 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) above the sea. My legs could be its forked tail: they do the same job. I can angle my arms like its sabre wings, and they take me down or up. But the water takes away almost as much swift life as it gives. It takes away speed, and therefore swift time. A slow swift is perhaps even less of a swift than a stiff swift.
I’m best at being a swift when I’m on the ground. At least then I can see and smell the source of the air rivers the swifts are fishing, hear the thrum next to my ear of the wasp that will be broken 300 metres (984 feet) up and slap a fly on my arm at more or less the same speed as the swift’s stubby neck would turn and its mandibles close on it.
✴ ✴
Sitting on a bench in my Oxford garden, I followed the swifts with my eye, despairing as they climbed up to roost in the air, beyond all eyesight, beyond all sense, sensibility and words.
When they left I couldn’t bear it. I followed them across the Channel and across France, noting down slavishly – like a bereaved disciple looking for relics or holy places – the things that the swifts might have seen or smelt or heard as they came this way. It seemed to matter that the smell of a Picardy bonfire was rendered right in the notebooks: the birds might have caught beetles that the fire hoisted into a cloud. The chatter in a Pyrenean café was relevant: the same phrases were likely to have been used a fortnight before, at the same volumes and at the same tables, and so to have ricocheted off the same mildewed whitewash and up into the air over the mountain at the same angles, contributing to the same hum and throb that the swifts knew and giving a floating aphid the same sort of jerk that caused a swift’s head to turn. The wine that night in an Andalusian courtyard had to be described exactly, because nitrate from swift dung might have coursed into the grapes and because insects that fed on the vines might have spiralled up in a fog of lemons and rotting shrimp and been taken by you know what. Or you know who.
The world was a web, fine as gauze, woven of causes – each cause connected to the others and each traceable ultimately, if you followed things carefully, to the swifts. I suppose I was a gnat’s breath from psychosis.
It wasn’t good. The swifts were alpha and omega, and that denigrated the rest of the alphabet and truncated my vocabulary. I obsessed like this for years. Sometimes it was an exhilarating game, which in my more pompous moments I dignified as a thought experiment: ‘How do swifts connect my tennis elbow with the collapse of an Icelandic bank?’ I’d ask myself. In the few blessed moments of self-mockery, I reminded myself of the story about the Fundamentalist Sunday school:
Teacher: ‘Caleb, what’s small, furry, eats nuts, has a long bushy tail and leaps from branch to branch?’
Caleb: ‘Well, I know the answer must be “Jesus”, because it always is, but it certainly sounds like a squirrel.’
In my case the ultimate answer was always: ‘Swifts’.
Then, overlying and consolidating this primary pathology, there was a second generation of weirdness. Just as pilgrims revere the footsteps of the disciples who revered the footsteps of the Master, so I followed in my own swift-following footsteps. In the spring I’d sit watching the Strait of Gibraltar in the same bar, in the same seat, drinking the same sherry, because that’s where I’d been and that’s what I’d been drinking when they first made landfall. I’d ask the musicians to play the same tunes that had brought them in before. At the very end of April and the start of May in Oxford I’d keep my eyes fixed on the ground until I got to the end of the road where I always see them for the first time – fearful of seeing them elsewhere.
This sounds like (at least) severe personality disorder or OCD. Well, perhaps. But a kinder word is ‘habit’.
I’m happier with that. Indeed I’m excited about that. Habit might be a way into the swifts. All other portals seem to be locked and double bolted.
Although they often seem to refute it, swifts are subject to the same laws of nature as I am. However strongly they taste of immortality, they die. Gravity doesn’t mean as much to them as to me, but they’re not immune to it. We share a jurisdiction and hence a passport. We can live together; we can travel together; we already have some shared habits, and we can work on acquiring more.
Laws of nature, according to the biologist Rupert Sheldrake (who collated many of the facts at the start of this chapter) are like habits. They tend to be true because that’s the way the universe has become accustomed to behaving. Sodium and chlorine atoms naturally adopt the configuration that they do in the structure of salt crystals because they’re used to it; it’s been done trillions of times before; the template’s established; the electrostatic grooves are nicely chamfered; things slide neatly together because practice makes perfect; habit is the line of least resistance; and habits have evolved because they work, and been maintained because they keep working.
As anyone who’s just taken up running or dieting will know, new habits are hard to develop. The universe is a hard surface on which to engrave new patterns. But once something’s been done once, it’s a great deal easier to do it again. Think of the chemist’s beard and the rats in Oxford and Sydney. Once it’s been done a thousand times it’ll be easier still. No wonder the history of evolution so often looks jerky: nothing for many millions of years, and then a huge stride.
My fingers stopped growing because their tips hit the boundary of a remembered pattern. That was habitual behaviour. It’s what fingers do: they obey that pattern. The young cuckoos were drawn to Africa by a memory, ingrained into the cuckoos’ collective unconscious, of what cuckoos habitually do. Jung got it right for cuckoos, fingers and salt crystals.
This entails a lot of mystical talking. Sodium has to talk to chlorine; embryonic fingers have to talk to some sort of ideal finger; young cuckoos have to talk to their dead ancestors. The whole massive enterprise of migration becomes one vast Ouija board. It’s creepy and Platonic. Swifts are tugged at 6,000 metres (almost 20,000 feet) by an impalpable tide generated by millions of dead swifts. They’re corralled by dead sky shepherds across the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the western edge of the Sahara and into the Congo.
‘You don’t need to invoke any of that stuff to explain migration’, said a well-known zoologist. ‘Orthodox biology does the job perfectly well. The birds have a genetic map. That tells them roughly where to go. Then there are all sorts of mechanisms that could fine-tune the process. Magnetite crystals in the head, perhaps. Internal clocks and the position of the sun by day; using cloud-penetrating UV light if they have to.’
Really? Is it so easy? It was this conversation more than anything else that propelled me into Sheldrake’s arms. Terence McKenna sprang to mind. ‘Modern science is based on the principle: “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest”’, he said. That comment was in the context of explaining the natural world as a whole. He went on: ‘The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.’ Similarly with all the uncomfortable facts in the opening list. Give us the laws governing the tendency of genetically identical cells to conform to an invisible blueprint, and a mechanism for encoding the tendency and enabling the conformation, and we’ll write papers describing what happens, using terms like ‘predetermined somatic differentiation’ to try to conceal the fact that we don’t have the first idea how it’s done. Instil in young cuckoos a desire to go several thousand miles, without a guide, to the places in Africa where they’ll bump into their genetic parents, and we’ll speculate intelligently about how, once they’ve been there once, they might use magnetite to chart a more nuanced route back. Is a ‘genetic map’ any less mysterious than the collective unconscious? But without the explanatory power. Isn’t a genetic map, indeed, just one small manifestation of the collective unconscious …?
You might doubt the explanatory power of Sheldrake’s hypothesis or question his empirical underpinnings, but he’s doing science a lot more satisfactorily than someone who doesn’t see that there’s a problem with cuckoo migration that demands an answer more fundamental than an internal compass.
Sheldrake gives the name ‘morphic fields’ to the forces that tug swifts and cuckoos in migratory tides, finger cells thus far and no further and makes atoms lie obediently in a customary lattice. The strength of a field, he postulates, is partly a function of alikeness. Theoretically, I suppose, everything in the universe is bound together by some sort of field, but family resemblance increases the strength of the field.
This is really another way of talking about habit. Swifts share habits with swifts. Habits entrench habits, which in turn entrench habits. But we don’t share habits just with other members of our own species: we share them with all other cohabitees. We become like our dogs and our dogs like us. If we live in a wood we acquire the accents of the trees.
It should be obvious that we don’t learn just from things that are biologically alive – whatever that means. Learning anything from anything is a clairvoyant exercise. I got my Greek from a live man who got it from lots of dead ones. And my teacher mediated it to me using genetic bequests which, for all I know, he got from Goths and Berbers. Certainly he, like me, shares much of his genetic coding with dead chimps, lemurs, newts and fruit flies.
✴ ✴
All this was exciting and promising, for I had some swift habits. Expensive, long-standing, deeply ingrained ones that took me on trains, boats, planes and paths to pubs, gardens, old girlfriends’ sofas, lighthouses, park benches, the edges of places, insurance company towers in Tel Aviv dressed in mirror glass, a primary school in Berlin and dusty corridors beneath suburban eaves, full of bat shit and fibreglass.
I shared some swift habits and habitats already. And I had the desire to be one. Surely intention counts for something in the mathematics of morphic resonance?
✴ ✴
There’s a gay Lebanese hairdresser in a thumping west African town. His salon is a temple where he worships a gently demanding goddess. He would call her ‘Beauty’. Others would call her kitsch, and would be wrong. He’s brought here everything he thought was best from the nations through which he’s wandered. From Paris there are curtains so flimsy that a determined mosquito could headbutt through them. From Italy there are mosaics in distressed high-density polyethylene. But he had chosen to stay in west Africa, and the things he thought best from there were gravid mother goddesses which crouched beneath his jacaranda with their hands on their bellies and antelope horns springing out of their foreheads, frowning eyelessly, their breasts always distractingly asymmetric.
I was in his courtyard with my mate Nigel, who sells Iron Maiden T-shirts from a barrow in Glasgow. We were fanned by fruit bats the size of cats, cicadas made a near perfect major fifth with the purring air-con, and the hairdresser poured out a bottle of Château Margaux.
Halfway down the second bottle he began to trust us.
‘Come here’, he said, beckoning.
We ducked through a tunnel made by two kissing Bombax trees and came to a shed, painted gold. The hairdresser unlocked several padlocks, touched a mezuzah screwed to the door frame, opened the door, lit a hurricane lamp and waved us inside.
The shed was carpeted with freshly cut leaves. The walls were bright blue and, except at the far end, empty.
At the far end there was a stone table. On it was an incense burner, and immediately above was a picture, draped with red and yellow plastic carnations from a Brahmin’s wedding.
‘Fucking hell’, said Nigel.
Well, quite. It was a common swift.
✴ ✴
The photo had been taken a long way upriver. It was blurred and stained. It showed a single bird against the sky, well off the centre of the picture and apparently above a grove of mangroves.
The hairdresser genuflected, lit some joss sticks, genuflected again and walked backwards to the door, pushing us behind him. He fastened the locks in silence, chivvied us back to the courtyard and topped up our glasses.
The swift wasn’t mentioned. We turned to the downside of raw sewage in the bay.
When we left, late that night, Nigel said: ‘We’ve got to go there, don’t you think? Upriver?’
‘I think we should’, said I. And so we did.
✴ ✴
Nigel had never knowingly seen a swift, although their screams must have ruffled the water-lily pond of satellite TV dishes that was the roof of his native Lambhill, and he’d never shown any interest in any bird that didn’t come in a skirt or with roast potatoes. But now he was a man possessed.
‘We can leave at 3:30’, he said. ‘It’ll be cool then.’
‘It won’t be cool at all’, I replied. ‘Might as well leave it until six. The heat’ll be easing off then.’
‘In the morning, I meant.’ And he laughed fanatically.
‘There’s no hurry’, I said. ‘There really isn’t.’
I said that with complete confidence. I wasn’t sure where the confidence came from.
‘There are plenty of swifts around’, I added.
This, theoretically, was true. It was early September. Oxford swifts should have been passing through on their relatively leisurely return to the deep heart of Africa. But that’s not why I’d said there was no hurry.
Nigel wouldn’t be contradicted. We left at 3:30 am, hung-over, unshaven, unbreakfasted and, on my part, resentful. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind at all.
Nigel drove manically through the dawn. We stopped only when a dog died loudly under the front wheels, again so that I could throw up under a baobab, and when the axle snapped.
The axle brought out the best and the worst in the man. He was tyrannically masterful; indefatigable; brutal. My memory insists that he stopped another car, extracted its axle and left a family of nine weeping in the bush on the side of the road beside their wrecked vehicle. Though that can’t be right, it’s how it felt. Whatever happened, soon enough (too soon) we were drinking beer by some mangroves, Nigel was scanning the sky with huge naval binoculars, and I was checking the departure times of buses back to the coast.
There weren’t any. I had to stay with him and watch him watch. He listened too, for the swift screech he’d read about, until I told him that common swifts are silent in Africa. That helped: he’d been jumping up whenever a door squeaked or someone trod on a cat.
Usually he paced up and down by the river, stiff-necked, squinting at the sun, expecting swifts to burst out of it. He’d be up as soon as it was light (though swifts are relatively late risers), drinking black coffee to keep his reflexes keen, changing position in case the swifts were hiding behind a tree, sometimes hiding himself and jumping out in case it was some sort of catand-mouse game. As the sun set he’d cradle a mournful glass of duty-free Johnnie Walker, watch nightjars and look cheated.
There was no hurry. They weren’t going to come just yet. There was time to watch the postcards curl, and the tree with human fingers form a fist, and the premature patina of decay inch over the thatch. The whole place was waiting for a storm, and had been waiting since the last storm. Waiting is what it did.
Everywhere there were wooden masks with slit eyes, and I don’t believe they’d been deconsecrated. We were hundreds of miles inland, but there was a good yard and a half of tide. There was no sign that the sea and the land were negotiating. The sea didn’t have to make any concessions at all. Grey-headed gulls fought, like my children with spicy chicken wings, over the bald leg of a Guinea baboon. The head of the femur glistened like a pearl. Big, old things with moustaches slank in the mangrove arches and were sometimes dragged out, not complaining much, clubbed and overcooked to kill the spear-headed worms that moved in and out of their bowels.
‘We’re not going until we see them, you know’, said Nigel after a few tense days of this.
‘Of course not’, I said.
The next day we drove out into bristling bush, away from sleek mud and menace. Here little brown things started up and sprang into the blue or into dark thorn tunnels. The only dead things were white and dry. The worst threats are always moist, and so this place, precisely because it didn’t throw out its arms in perspiring welcome, was kinder than the river.
I was tired from watching Nigel’s watching. I took off my jacket, propped myself against a tree, counted ants and went to sleep.
I must have slept for half an hour. I slumped sideways. And then, suddenly, I was awake and on my feet, shouting, ‘They’re here, they’re here.’
Nigel was fast asleep too. I kicked him awake. I pointed at the sky. For a moment there was nothing there but a sliver of cloud. And then they were there as I knew they would be, seven of them, screaming silently, straight from Oxford and the throne of heaven, high and then low, hunting the wind, ploughing through a thermal which must have been whirring a thousand feet up like the fan on an old bus, trawling a whole weather system because they’re birds of the whole world.
‘Fucking hell’, said Nigel.
Well, quite.
✴ ✴
A beetle caught by a swift over the Pyrenees might still be alive over the Gambia, twitching in the throat pouch, and its carapace might arc down in a mote of dung over a contingent of child soldiers in the DRC. The carapace might deflect a bullet aimed at the head of an enemy. You never know. But you don’t need a fanciful account of benign causation for swifts to matter.
I can travel the same route as the swift, though not as ecstatically and not as influentially. I’ve tried. Their annual migrations, crossing and recrossing the equator, stitch the two hemispheres of the earth together as those shuttling badgers joined the underworld and the overworld. They stop the two halves falling apart. It’s practical, surgical tikkun olam. When we use violent words for swifts we’re describing scalpels and needles. When I cried with Rachel on their return, it was relief that the world was going to hold together for another year.
The other sort of words – ethereal – are really high-priestly. The swifts are doing something on our behalf. Their motion is redemptive. They move constantly so that we don’t have to. A badger can be local, living in a hole in a Welsh hill, because there are moving things – supremely, the swifts – that do the movement that’s necessary. They’re the throbbing hearts and tidal chests. They keep the bellows of the world working, enabling slow things to sleep without dying. They keep oxygen bubbling through standing water, so that other things can breathe. To be still is to die. Moving things enable stillness: the exuberantly international enables and legitimises the parochial.
Movement is built into all sustainable systems. God’s preference for the mover over the settler is clear and consistent. The shifting pastoralist is better than the static farmer, and the farmer, bitterly envious of his brother’s higher status, does his best in all generations to kill him. Cain’s doing a good job with the swifts. They’re declining fast, killed by the desire of suburban householders to insulate their lofts – to be warmer, safer, more settled. (This reduces swift nesting sites.) If the swifts go, we’ll go too.
It’s the people who really can’t move who know how much we need the swifts. The iconic human figure in swift literature is the MS sufferer in a motorised wheelchair, looking up at the wheeling swifts inscribing Platonic forms on a summer sky, and saying: ‘Yes, because they can move, and because I’m part of them, I can move too.’
I was woken at the foot of that tree in the west African bush by silent swifts that, at that point, were still a couple of miles away. It was an intimacy greater than I’d known with any of the other species, perhaps precisely because I knew that I could get nowhere near them by sliding or jumping or sailing.
There’s a power that comes with total surrender. Perhaps I could fly with the swifts only because I couldn’t otherwise move at all with them, or perhaps move at all. Yet the swifts had made Nigel move. Eventually they’ll fly him to a frustrated standstill. By then he’ll have the habits: he’ll be caught up in the net by the scythe-winged fishers of men; he’ll be held by the sticky tentacles of entangling Mind; he’ll be blissfully ploughed in the morphic field and can really start to grow.
✴ ✴
I mustn’t make it sound easy. You have to put in the miles.
Not long ago I sat in a hot tepee as a very pretty shaman in a vest top told us how we could meet our spirit animals.
‘Relax’, she told us. ‘Close your eyes. Then picture a hole. It could be a rabbit hole or a fox hole. Anything, really, but ideally going directly into the earth. Then imagine that you’re going down into it. Picture it as clearly as you can. See the tree roots. Squirm round them. Smell the leaf mould. Keep going down; always down. You’ll meet an animal. Greet it. It’ll be glad to see you. It’s there to help. This is its domain, so be polite: you’re the guest. It’ll lead you on; lead you down. Keep following. You’ll have adventures. And if you have trouble visualising a hole, just go down the plughole in your kitchen. It’ll take you to the same place.’
She began to beat a drum very fast, like a hamster’s pulse. Outside, people were being doused in gong showers, their chi was being lovingly realigned, and my children were hitting one another with tent mallets. We all dived into our holes. I got six inches, and my head stuck. It stayed there, sweatily, while the others, it turned out, were having a fine old time soaring, galloping and trotting through other worlds.
‘I met a wolf’, one of them breathily told us when we’d returned to the land of holistic massage and fratricide. ‘A big grey wolf with white flecks on his neck, and huge blue eyes with a golden core. I didn’t want to go with him, but he nudged me on with his nose, and his nose was so warm that I felt comfortable. He let me ride on his back. I sank into it and then began to feel pine cones underfoot – under his feet!’
We obligingly gasped and smiled.
‘We – I – went steeply uphill. I could smell deer off to my right, but I wasn’t hungry. I’d seen a cave through the trees, with some strange bones buried in the floor. I began to scuffle them out with my forefeet. And then I heard the drum calling me back.’
It was, he agreed, a much more intense experience than it had been last year.
Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe it. I don’t say he didn’t experience what he described. He was plainly honest and earnest. But this wasn’t shamanism, as experienced after arduous and painful apprenticeship; after exhaustion, fasting and huge doses of fly agaric mushrooms. It wasn’t this that they crawled for a mile in the dark along a crack in the rock to find. This wasn’t a world on the other side of a veil, but one inside a dreadlocked head. It’s just not so easy: you have to acquire the habit; you have to do the legwork or the wingwork. It’s not just about rightly directed imagination or good intention.
The Jewish prayer that’s said on first awaking declares that ‘all who fulfil His commandments gain good understanding’. You don’t start by understanding: you don’t start with an idea. In the beginning was the deed. In a material world – a world of earth, air, fire and water, with which magical alchemy can be done – you can’t grasp abstractions or ghosts direct, as they were trying to do in the tepee. They’re too slippery; too insubstantial; too contingent on glorious concreteness. You’ve got to get dirty in the earth, cold and fearful in the air, singed in the fire and seasick in the water. You’ve got to scratch, scratch, scratch the world with the same paw or wing movements as the creatures you long to know.
Swifts have the habit of flying. You’ve got to get the habit of the swift in order to fly.
Endnote
* Estimated from data on swifts that breed in Sweden, whose migration figures are: for autumn, a mean duration of 69 days (30–99 days) – 30 days of travelling and 39 days of stopover; for spring, a mean duration of 29 days (18–34 days) – 21 days of travelling and 8 days of stopover.