When the Bird Sings

I realised something had changed—or rather, ceased to change—when, on my twelfth day of lament, I sat in my living room, a lark singing on my windowsill. Unable to work that morning, I sat motionless in my chair, gazing at shafts of sunlight tracing their way across the wooden floor. To fight the dark grief enshading my heart I watched the burn of ordinary beauty, light doing its work of making lambent days that would otherwise be black or grey. If I could only be like that, I thought—the light raking across the ground, a melody unfurling from a lark’s mouth, something that was without justification—all would be okay.

        The future disappeared that day subtly, gradually. I suppose the cars that trawled the highway first went quiet. Maybe the sylvan sounds of the nearby forest—leaves shifting as they reach after the wind that comes and goes too soon, the coos and cries of creatures traversing, entering, leaving life—were then silenced. But I noticed nothing until the veil drawn around the present hemmed in my immediate world.

        At some point, I noticed that the columns of light before me no longer flickered at their borders. Nor did the dust do its aleatoric dance, battered by motes of air. The din outside was reduced to a soft drone, an ovum-sized slice of sound stretched somehow into a passage of indefinite length. The lark’s once-quivering body was snared in the caesura between heartbeats. Most disconcertingly—given that brutal judgments about our world had defined my saturnine mood—the clatter of language within me stopped. Words slimmed first to phonemes and then to shreds of sound without meaning.

        Time had become a single, repeating moment. Enambered in this fragment of day the world vibrated but slightly. The birdsong, collapsed to its quantum and repeated without end, remained a sound of sorts, but not a noise of this earth as I had known it. Within, those strange and foreshortened thoughts that ordinarily flit about the borders of consciousness—the rustle of leaves in the imagined trees that shake in the distant hinterlands of dreams—dominated my mind. Stranded on my isle of repetition, the most larval impressions—the trace of a concept, the hint of insight—would vanish as rapidly as they appeared into the abyss of the unspoken. Recalling my most intimate history brought forth disconnected images as if I had opened a stranger’s disordered photo album. Occasionally, a memory might dredge up the very edge of a wider network of impressions. In my chair, I might remember my mother and receive at the same time a chord of associated thoughts—the first prick in a stab of pain, a snatch of music, death’s shadow on her face. But all this would fall away like decaying lace, disintegrating in stale air. I would then find myself returned to my present, a bereft and shuddering amnesiac.

        One might imagine that a man would feel terrible anxiety trapped in this interstitial abyss. Or if he had longed for death as, shamefully, I had in recent days, he might feel some relief, anticipating that his desired future may arrive soon. Yet I could feel nothing—neither hope nor fear. My grief was cancelled before it could begin.

        That day—if it is correct to speak this way, if words enslaved by time don’t simply disfigure this state—I was sundered, somehow, from the movement of time. The fragment of time I inhabited—unaging lark, sliver of sound, swarm of half-thoughts, swelter of sunbeams on the floor—soon shrank to its minimum. The birdsong, now an endless loop of an ever-smaller scintilla of sound, lost all hints of rhythm. Thought and selfhood disappeared. A near-fixed image of pure intensity, meaningless but present, occupied my entire attention. Soon enough my retinas could not even register successive beats of light, my brain could not process one iota of sensation, and I entered a state deprived entirely of difference and succession. Everything ceased its vibration.

        Finally, I entered a state of pure timelessness. Eternal. Aterminal. Not alive, not dead. No content, but the form of time. Being without becoming. Divided by nothing. Undefined.

        Somehow, in this place without difference, of indifference, my mother’s presence. Sheltered from the rip of moments, the time that tore us apart, we unite once more. A boundless instant in the same space together, embraced, without the cleave of coming seconds, the years to break us apart.

        For an eternity, no time passed.

        But then the birdsong returned. The future and the past rushed back in, ripping me from the abyss of the present. Air rushed into my lungs. The dust moved, the lark sang, blood flowed, and my mother was gone once more.

        When the sun resumed its fated passage across the floor, and the lark ceased its song and alighted from my windowsill, I realised my despair had lifted. Tears soaked my cheeks and the world burned with light and sound. I felt a love for the movement of time, the traipse of moments; I saw how much passion I have for passion’s possibility; how terrible the loss of loss could be. And as each moment was broken open by the future, and the seconds passed, and music and memory returned, I knew I would one day die but that I now wanted to remain, to mark the time in between, just like bird that seeks reprieve from flight and, resting upon some branch, opens its mouth to sing.