Bird of prey, bird of prey, flying high, flying high. Am I going to die? Bird of prey,
bird of prey, flying high, flying high. Take me on your flight."
This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
I don't know if entitled opinions is a form of avian life, a winged creature of some sort.
I don't know if it's a UFO. I don't know if it's a chariot of empty hazelnut drawn by a team
of little enemies through the moon shines watery beams. Thank you Mercusio.
Maybe it's just an aerial migration of thought or a little gnawetic dust from a nearby galaxy
or a canary in Jupiter's sulfur mines. One way or another this program takes to the air when the
season comes around. We lift off from our dish at KZSU into the planet's thermal currents,
riding the airwaves, following the contours of the continents, searching you out until our airborne
embassy, alights in that little ear of yours, and sweeps you up into the ether of another episode
of the radio program you cannot live without. I mean you friends, the friends of entitled opinions,
you the thoughtful ones, you the expectant ones. You who wait for this paragrain raptor to reach you
from its Stanford perch wherever your outpost may be on this, our fair earth. This, our third stone
from the flaming sun.
You may have guests that I have flight on my mind today. Some days it's the earth that calls
on others, it's water, every now and then fire. But today it's the air or better yet the sky.
That's because on our show my guest and I are going to be talking about one of the great poets
of the sky and modern literature, J.A. Baker. Baker doesn't just depict or represent the sky,
he gives us an ecstatic phenomenology of its ruffled, rippling, plasmic field, and reveals it for
what it is, the living membrane of this, our third stone from the sun.
Let's get his biography out of the way so my guest and I can concentrate on his astounding
prose. J.A. Baker was a native of Essex County, he came from a lower middle class British family,
finished school at age 16, and a few years later he settled into a job as regional manager of an
automobile insurance company, although he never learned to drive himself. We don't know much about
him except that he was an amateur naturalist who spent as much of his free time as he could,
wandering a patch of the Essex countryside around his small rural hometown of Champsford.
That patch included the Chelmer Valley to the east and the confluence of the Chelmer and Black
water rivers to the west, with Danbury Hill, the highest ground of Essex at its center,
at its edges, the dark silts of the north seas edge. This rectangular patch of countryside
now lies within a commuter belt less than an hour from downtown London, but in his day it was
a quiet rural area that Baker traveled by foot or by bicycle until rheumatoid arthritis got the
better of him in the 1970s. He eventually died of cancer caused by the toxic drugs he was taking
for his arthritis. That was in 1987, he was 61 years old.
Baker is the author of only two slim books and a couple of essays. His whole output amounts to
350 pages of prose, the most remarkable English prose of the 20th century, in my opinion.
Certainly the most remarkable in his genre, which we could call nature writing. One of his books is
the Paragrene published in 1967. The other is the Hill of Summer published two years later.
His last piece of writing is a short essay called "On the Essex Coast," which he wrote for a
local magazine in 1971. Our show today is devoted to Baker's The Paragrene,
dedicated to his wife, the book deals with Baker's obsession with rare Paragrene Falcons that
withered in Essex in the late 50s and early 60s. Baker spent 10 years following them around the
countryside and his book, which takes the form of a journal, offers a fiery but meticulous
poetic account of what its author observed about this endangered species, the Falcon,
which captivated Baker's soul and dominated his life for more than a decade.
And in England in those years, the Falcon was a highly endangered species, due to the
agrochemicals that had caused the population to crash. Fortunately, they were able to make a comeback
after those chemicals were banned. The year it was published, again 1967, the Paragrene One
England's prestigious Duff Cooper Prize. Not long after that, it faded into oblivion,
but like the Paragrene, it has since made a comeback thanks in large part to the New York Review
Classics book series, which republished it in 2007. It was then reissued in England by
Collins along with the Hill of Summer in 2011, and I'm doing my share to help the comeback,
having conducted a public conversation about the Paragrene with filmmaker Werner Herzog
in February of this year. We aired that conversation on entitled opinions very recently,
and today I'm devoting another full show to Baker's book.
I'm joined in the studio today by my friend and colleague Andrea Nightingale,
who was well known to the entitled opinions for Gaid thanks to prior shows I've done with her,
either on Epicurus, Plato, and Moby Dick. Andrea is a professor of classics at Stanford.
She and I share a passion for Baker's the Paragrene. It's a pleasure to welcome her back to the show
Andrea thanks for joining us today. It's great to be here Robert. What is it about J.A. Baker's
the Paragrene that makes it such a special book for you? I see it as an experimental piece of writing,
piece of nature writing, and I'll explain why. In most cases of nature writing, and here I'm
going to leave aside scientific texts or bird guides, but the nature writers tend to put themselves
into the book, so you immediately confront the persona of the writer, and your experience of
that book is going to rise and fall with whether you like the writer. So, for example, there are a
lot of people who do not like Walden because they find the row his persona annoying. Another writer
that comes to mind is Edward Abbey, a lot of people just find him off-putting, but Baker does something
very different. He does not put his own persona or personality into the book, and indeed he more
or less depopulates the whole book taking all humans out of the book, leaving, of course himself in,
as what he calls the "watcher." Now, be given that he tells us so little about himself. There is this
sense in which the reader is trying to gain purchase, right, and it doesn't really have a human to
rely on, and he's doing this for a very specific reason. First of all, as we'll see later on, he was,
I think it's fair to say, "Miss Anthropic," so I think taking all of the humans out of the book, and this
also includes place names, that sort of reflection of his misanthropy, and so he really just gives us
the bird world. Now, I should mention that the area that he was bird-watching in is about an hour west of London.
It was rural, it had towns, it had plenty of people. He has taken all of those people out. So the place
that he is representing for us is partly fictionalized because indeed he had to take all the people
out. Also, he takes ten years of bird-watching and puts it into one year. By year it's actually simply
the fall and the winter and the coming of spring, which is when the paragrins were in that area.
So there is something you could say, partly fictionalized, and yet the book comes across,
as offering you this very realistic portrayal of birds. It's done in diary entries, which last
maybe three or four pages, and you see the same thing happening again and again every day, right? He's
there looking for paragrins and sometimes finding them, sometimes not, watching all of the birds,
describing them all, and then finally the paragrins, which is sort of the apex of his day.
And this happens day after day in the diary entries. You'd think this book would get very boring,
right? There's very little reference to himself, and I could add actually that this book could
have been written by a woman. That's how little he tells you about himself. In fact,
he signs the book J.A. Baker, given that the book was almost lost, Robert. This could have been
written by a woman. The only reason I mentioned that is not because I want to somehow
feminize the book, whatever that would mean, but simply make it clear to the listener that we don't
know much at all about the watcher, as he calls himself. So as I say, you have the same thing
happening day after day, and yet everything seems different and exciting all the time.
So somehow he's bringing this bird world to the reader while eliminating as much as he can
the human world. I agree that the human world has been put into brackets or into suspension,
and that even the watcher is rendered anonymous and somewhat abstract. At the same time,
let me read you what he says in the beginning pages of his book about what his ambition was in the
paragraph. And he says, "I have tried to preserve a unity binding together the bird, the watcher,
and the place that holds them both. Everything I described took place while I was watching it,
but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behavior of the watcher
are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded." Now I have a strong suspicion you'll agree with me
that indeed the emotions and behavior of this watcher are truthfully recorded.
Yes, yeah. Even though it doesn't take on the form of a personal subjectivity.
That's exactly right. You do get a lot of his emotions, the wonder, the joy, the ecstasy,
obsession that comes through on every page. And I think that carries the reader in a lot of ways.
I'd like to make one more comment about this passage that you read. There's this opening section,
very short, called the beginnings. It's a short chapter, offering a certain number of programmatic
statements, and one of them is what you just read. He's trying to preserve a unity binding
together the bird and the watcher. A few things he also says in that same passage is first of all,
he doesn't want to sentimentalize the birds in the sense that he will leave out the killings,
right? And so he does offer us many scenes in which you see the paragon, stooping,
and flying down in a kind of nose dive and killing a bird of prey and eating it. So he does preserve
the killings of the paragon. He also mentions in that same short chapter the fact that human beings
are killing the paragons because of DDT and the pesticides, which you mentioned earlier.
So you have these two killers that are presented very early on and two very different kinds of
killers. I think this is important that the bird, of course, the paragon is killing to eat,
whereas the human beings who are destroying the land are killing in a different way.
So that's just one programmatic point. Notice also Robert that he says binding together the bird,
the watcher, and the place. I was mentioning that the place is partly fictionalized. What do you
think? Well, I think the place is fictionalized in the sense that you wouldn't be able to
necessarily recognize where in England or even on the continent it would be because as you said,
there are no place names and except for very few exceptions, any particular human constructions that
would identify it. And yet the place as a place of nature, I think, is extremely present.
And in fact, let me, let me read you a sentence or two from the last thing you ever published,
which is that essay on the coast of Essex that I mentioned. And he says the following, "For me,
the wilderness is not a place. It is the indefinable essence of spirit that lives in a place,
as shadowy as the archetype of a dream, but real and recognizable. It lives where it can find
refuge, fugitive, fearful, as a deer." So on the one hand, I would say, yes, it's the place as such
as fictional. But if we're talking about the spirit of a place, I think the spirit of this patch
of countryside in Essex is very present. No, I really like your point because I'm not even
fully comfortable with fictional. That doesn't even quite work. I do think that there's something
fugitive about the place and that there's a spirit that he captures. And you know that he was
doing this very deliberately as a writer and an artist to leave the people out so he could capture
that spirit. So I like, I prefer this way of putting it.
And do you find that that place comes alive in the prose, but primarily because he tries to describe
the landscape and the sky and the sea, not so much from the human perspective, the way a human being
would see it, but really from an aerial perspective, almost like the bird, the bird is in touch with
north and south. It understands the coast where the sea meets the land. It knows valleys, it knows
mountains and hills. And so much of the description of this place seems to have the generic
perception of a bird in flight looking at the land from a kind of panorama that is usually not
accessible to us as human observers. I mean, it's so interesting because this book is a kind of
meditation on seeing. He says at one point the hardest thing of all is to see what is really there.
And he's very, very interested of course in the paragraph, it's ability to see which is,
you know, well beyond anything we can see. And sometimes he does adopt the viewpoint of the
paragraph. But a lot of times he will be watching a paragraph appear and also disappear. I think
the disappearances are very, very important. It's not like watching a nature TV show where you see it
and you just keep seeing it. No, it's this way in which a bird or bird appear and then disappear.
And this is from the perspective of somebody who's really inside that world. But if I can just say
one quick thing about seeing, this is a passage that talks about the very first peregrine that he
ever saw. He says that he came late to bird watching. And he then says, "This was my first peregrine.
I've seen many since then, but none has excelled it for speed and fire of spirit. For 10 years,
I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and
violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For 10 years, I've been looking upward for that cloud
biting anchor shape that crossbow flinging through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks.
It clicks towards them with ecstatic fury, just as the hawks eye swings and dilates to the
luring food shapes of gulls and pigeons. So I think that it is very interesting that he
is saying that his own eye is hungry, it's insatiable for this food, but of course the food is
the vision of the birds. So he often links himself together with the peregrine as a hunter
or even occasionally as a predator, but it is important to emphasize that he is simply a hunter in that
he's hunting with his eye. And he's not hunting, of course, the way that the peregrine is hunting,
but he does identify himself with the peregrine as a kind of hunter.
You see, for me, that passage that you read it, also it's almost like an allegory of
the expression, love it for sight. He is telling us what his subjective investment in the peregrine is,
and it is he fell in love with this bird that first time. And the eye becomes insatiable for hawks.
It clicks towards them with an ecstatic fury. And like most lovers who, if you're a medieval,
as medieval as like me, if you read the treatises like from Andreas Kapilano, he says that love is
a melody that begins through the eye. It happens through the eyesight. And then what does the
lover want from, he wants or she wants acknowledgement from the beloved? And my sense is that this
whole journal, if there is any kind of plot or there's not much plot at all, but if there is something
that sustains it from beginning, middle to the end, it's his attempt to hunt the peregrine
through his eye, see the peregrine, but also to receive acknowledgement from the bird in these
privileged moments that he describes of having his gaze returned by the bird.
It's true. I mean, he doesn't say that early on that he's hunting for this
acknowledgement, but late in the book, he gets very excited when he sees the peregrine looking at
him and sharing that view. It doesn't dominate the whole plot, but I think that what you're saying,
because of course there really isn't a plot. There are just these characters, the watcher,
the hawk, and the prey, but the love that you're talking about is on every page.
It's a kind of long love letter for the peregrine. Definitely. And it's a love that's a love of
perception as well. But remember, at the end of the book, I think it ends where he follows the
peregrine who's just about to take off for the continent because it's a month of April,
and he sees him going towards the sea coast and rushes over there by bicycle, and then there's a
wall, and he looks at the peregrine as they're very close in a person on a tree, and they just look at
each other. Yeah, that's the ending of the book. Yes. And so that is... Although interestingly, Robert,
he is feeling quite miserable because he knows that the peregrines are leaving.
So he almost never makes a religious reference, but he does talk about the peregrines as
departing gods at this point when they're about to migrate. So just before the beloved is about to leave,
he gets very close to it with this last moment of togetherness.
You're right. There are not a lot of religious references per se, orthodox ones anyway,
but do you find that there's a religious, let's say, a spiritual fervor in there that takes on
this ecstasy that we associate with states of spiritual rapture?
I don't know. I think the word spiritual might work. I think he was very deliberately trying to keep
religious discourse out because if you look at 19th century, nature writing, early 20th century,
there were a lot of references to the Bible or to various sorts of religious states of ecstasy,
he definitely has that spiritual ecstasy, no question, but I find it interesting that he is not
going to use the discourse of any given religion. It's sort of as though it's his own private
religion, in a way. I mean, notice that he doesn't even want to say to the reader,
you too can come and do this with me. It's very much a kind of solo act.
Yeah, so there's a Christian way of religious references that there's very little of that, for sure.
There's also a more pagan religious spirit that he might be more comfortable with and so far as
it's more based in the world of nature and in the world of appearances. I think so.
But this condition of rapture, which I find even though he never connects it with that word,
I don't even know if he ever uses that word once in the book, but for me, his relationship to the
rapture, the Falcon, is one of a kind of rapture and he's always on the look for,
or not just a sight of the rapture, but that experience of being swept away,
of being ravaged by its spectacle. That seems to have a religious fervor to me,
of his own kind of religion. No, I take your point because he does
normally put himself in the position of the hunter, right? The watcher is the hunter,
but at times, I think what you're saying is that he's also maybe more subtly setting himself up as
the prey in the sense that he wants to be. Well, that's exactly. And raptured by the bird.
That's what I brought this up in my conversation with Bernard Herzog
back on February 2nd. It didn't get very far because we moved on to other things, but it's,
if you look on page 154 in our volume, no, this is a New York review
issue, if I can read that he's speaking about the, the Falcon, he says, "After two minutes of
uneasy glaring, he flew straight at me as though intending to attack. He swept up into the wind
before he reached me and hovered 20 feet above my head looking down. I felt as a mouse must feel
crouching, unconcealed and shallow grass, cringing and hoping." And then he says, "The
hawk's green bladed face seemed horribly close." And this, to me, indicates that
as you said, there was a desire perhaps to be caught up in the talons of this bird. And we know
that there is a myth in the tradition you're very familiar with, the Greek mythology,
where this, in fact, does have a religious aspect and I'm thinking of Ganymede. I brought this up again,
the Ganymede complex, maybe that's being too, uh,
- Oh, interesting. - reductionistic, but nevertheless, who was Ganymede? He was the son of
Trose after whom Troy is named. Young, beautiful boy caught the eye of Zeus, and
Zeus takes the shape of an eagle and grabs him from Mount Ida and takes him up into the sphere of
the gods to be the cup bearer of the gods. And I'm going to add another religious reference here
to which is Dante's version. But before you get to Dante, we do need to at least point out that
that was a rape, right, that Zeus was raping. Well, rape and rapture had the same
- that's true. - Yes. Make that point.
Yeah, it's true. When you get to Dante, it's, it's, um,
- de-sexualized. - Well, I'm not sure. So let me read you what Dante has a dream in Purgatory,
and let me read this. He says, "In a dream, I seem to see an eagle hovering in the sky with
golden feathers and open wings intent to stoop. And I seem to be where his people were
abandoned by Ganymede when he was carried off to the highest
consistatory. The highest consistatory would be Mount Olympus.
Then it seemed to me that having wheeled a little, it descended, did the raptor bird.
Terrible as lightning and carried me off up as far as the fire. There it seemed that the bird
and I burned, and the imagined fire was so hot that my sleep had to break.
It's amazing. I think that's a sexual, that has a lot of
s-heroic intensity. Very much so. It's definitely erotic.
That idea of burning in the circle of fire, which would be the sun, it would be,
I mean, is Dante being, uh, merging with the fire there? I'm just curious.
Well, you know, it's hard, it's hard to say what this would consist in. It would consist in
some kind of ultimate self-immolation. It was in a certain sense. And people have read
Baker's, the pair of green. I'm thinking of Helen Mcdonald who has been getting a lot of
attention lately because she wrote a book last year called Ages for Hawk and everyone loved it
because it's not just about the bird, but it's also about her human experience, her
lost her father, the grief. In a certain sense, you could say that that book by Helen Mcdonald
is where Baker says that the emotions and behavior of the watcher are also facts and they must be
truthfully recorded. She records those facts of her own life and the birding are two different,
well, they're connected, but they're very, very different. Yeah. And she actually
has a few statements in her book about Baker where she said,
"I saw in the paragrene the writer's awful desire for death and annihilation. A desire disguised
as an elegy for birds that flew through poisonous skies. I was frightened of Baker and what he
meant. In Baker's book, I saw no hope at all and his hawks were icons of extinction,
hours, theirs, and his own." She actually later recanted that in an interview and said,
"All I could see in J.A. Baker's a paragrene at the time was a desperate desire for death and
extinction. A hopelessness I found chilling. I read it again recently and that is and how it seems
at all." The point being, when you asked, what would it mean for Dante to be
seared in the fire in the divine fire, it might mean a certain kind of death of
a sludge or getting at is a kind of Baker's attempt to at times to merge with the bird,
right, which of course isn't impossible for a human person to do, and yet he seems
so eager to almost become the bird. And at times it almost feels like he's succeeded,
but he's always very clear that he is earthbound, so you have the aerial and the earthly.
But I do agree with you Robert in those sort of moments in the book where he is almost merging with
the bird, you would end up with him being extinguished. And so is it a death wish? I mean we should
perhaps talk about the mesanthropy because maybe that can help us with this question about the death
wish. Well, first thing, do you believe is a death? I don't believe it's a death wish. I actually do.
I think it's a wish for a certain kind of transcendence. Me too. It's static transcendence, but
oftentimes you carry that it's what Jacques de la Colle would call the jouiseus if you can have your
foolish wish we saw us, that does mean death. It does. And so I mean, but yeah, perhaps, I mean,
the only I do not see this as a death wish. I'm really responding to McDonald's point here
and saying that of course any nature writer who attempts or writes about an attempt to merge with nature
is already in some sense volunteering for a kind of departure from human life.
For sure. But the reason I wanted to bring in the mesanthropy is that there does seem to be
this sense that he is incredibly ashamed to be a human being. He thinks of the human species as
effectively a failed species. And he calls them killers. I'll just read a few lines here.
Here's one passage. I've always long to be a part of the outward life to be out there at the
edge of things, to let the human taint wash away an emptiness and silence as the fox sluffs his
smell into the cold unworlyness of water, to return to the town as a stranger. So the notion of the
human taint is desired to be a part of the outward life away from humans, not to be almost non-human.
And elsewhere he says we are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us
like frost. We cannot tear it away. Now when he's using the word killers there he's really talking
about, he's not talking about the fact that we have to eat to survive, but the fact that we are
dominating the earth and destroying it, killers in that way. So I mean some people have suggested
that this desire to merge with the bird is fueled by the mesanthropy. I don't really agree with that,
but it has been said. Yeah, and merging with the bird, the element of fire is, for me,
crucial in the notion of being wrapped up into heaven, because it's not only in the myth of
Ganymede, you have it in the Hebrew and Christian traditions. No, the day of rapture is exactly what
is going to happen where we're going to be carried up into the heavens, which is identified as the
sphere of fire, you know, by Dante. And how many times does Baker associate the Falcon with fire?
I'll just give you a few sentences, 135. The paragrene hissed among the golden plover like a
burning brand. A page later, the paragrene hurled toward the gap of light that was the sea
ricocheting across the green land like a swift rebounding flame. Also she was holy of the
sun, the wind and the purity of the sky. So this association of the bird with some fiery element
would mean that the becoming the bird would be a wave of accessing this sphere that we will never
ourselves, because we are earthbound. It's true. And I do think that he feels, I mean, he talks about
the fact that he has to plow through snow and go over fences and get on his bike with his clay
feet as he refers to them while the hawk gets to just fly. So he feels, and in fact, at one point,
he compares himself to Caliban with the Falcon being aerial. And of course, Caliban being a
very negative character in the Tempest. So he wants to sort of depart from the earthly and the
terrestrial, but he never can. So I think that what you're saying is that he's able to, at times,
have that sense of rapture which lifts him right away from the earth for a time.
And I believe that he does that also in the way he writes this book, that the only form of soaring
that he can enjoy is really soaring in his prose in the poetic transports where he can lift us along
with himself into the air through the power of his poetry.
Absolutely. So writing becomes a form of aerial transcendence for him.
I mean, one of the things that's interesting is that at times he, you know, has that sense of rapture,
and at other times he feels that he almost got it, but he didn't quite get it. So I'll just read a
passage here. Here we have a case where you have a female peregrine who stoops and then disappears.
"Bending over in a splendid arc she plunged to earth. My head came forward with a jerk as my
eyes followed the final vertical smash of her falling. I saw fields flash up behind her. Then she
was gone behind elms and hedges and farm buildings, and I was left with nothing but the wind blowing.
The sun hidden, my neck and wrists cold and stiff, my eyes raw and the glory gone.
So there's an example of where he's starting to kind of have that moment, but it doesn't quite happen.
But at other times he most certainly does in some of those stoop scenes.
And don't you find that the peregrine arouses not only him, but it arouses the whole place,
the whole environment, and especially the other birds, the birds that are going to be the
prey of the falcon. When the falcon appears on the scene, there's an agitation in the whole
environment, and birds take to the sky, or that all of a sudden there's an arousal and the sky
is animated with some spirits, fiery spirit, and it's destructive, it's threatening, but it's
alive as it can be. Yeah, I mean it is clear that the birds of prey feel an enormous amount of fear,
fear is important in this book. And so he'll have this scene where everything is kind of calm,
and the birds are doing their normal thing, and all of a sudden a peregrine comes, and the whole, as you say,
the whole area is animated, partly by fear, and the other birds are fleeing or trying to get away,
and the peregrine is there as this being that has transformed all of the other birds, and certainly Baker
has spent a lot of time watching the birds in order to find the peregrines, right? In other words,
he can't always see the peregrine, but once he starts seeing this agitation among the birds,
and the kind of terror, and then he knows that the bird is there somewhere.
Yeah, in fact, I think he loves the prey as much as he loves the falcons in his other book,
the Hill of Summer, it's really about the birds of Essex, the other birds, not the falcons.
That's why I said he's a great poet of the sky, because the sky is the element of the birds.
Actually, our friend, Christy Wampol, who was a production manager of entitled opinions a few
years back now, it's Professor of French at Princeton. She actually turned her onto this book, and she wrote
something that has yet to be published because it's just recently written. But let me read to you
what she says about how Baker describes the sky. She writes, "His chronicle is as much a biography
of the sky as it is of the falconer's journal. If the land and the birds were stripped away,
the sky alone would provide ample marrow for his manuscript. For him, the firmament is never
an afterthought. His pen warps the usual behavior of light, of meteorological phenomena with clouds and
sunlight that tend to flake crumble, bleed, and pulse at times. Light is granular at other times,
aquaists, moonlight prisms through clouds, their edges sing by fluorescence, iridescence,
phosphorescence, and so forth." So these qualities of the sky that come alive through the process
in the way he talks about the sky as an element. So different than the one we actually experience,
we just think of sky as open air and maybe they're cloud, so that changes the sky. For him,
the sky has crevices and caverns and lagoons and all sorts of different ways that the birds
claw the air and rip the air and perch on the air, so the air becomes this element that we normally
do not experience. Exactly. It becomes plasmic. It does. And so I think he does help us to see the air
in a whole new way. There's just no question about it. Even if you take the birds out, you would
still the way he talks about the air and also just the quality of light changes the way everything
looks. So he has all of these descriptions of the sun. I think on the solstice he says the sun was a
withered apple. But I do, he is a poet of the air. But again, there is this kind of tension between
the aerial and the terrestrial, he being an earthbound creature. Here's a passage that shows how
the prey, the birds of prey get agitated as you say, get aroused as it were, and the way that the
paragrin effectively changes the whole scene. The paragrin was clearing the entire hill of its
pigeons, stooping at each wood in turn, sweeping along the rides, flicking between the trees,
switchbacking from orchard to orchard, riding along the rim of sky in a tremendous celebration of
rebounding dives and ascension. Suddenly it ended. He mountain like a rocket curved over
and splendid parabola, dived down through cumulus of pigeons. One bird fell back, gashed dead,
looking astonished, like a man falling out of a tree. The ground came up and crushed it.
The ground comes up. I mean, it's fascinating the way he's playing with.
He's put himself into that bird's body. He has. And that's, as I said, the only aerial
transcendence available to him is through his prose. Yeah, I mean, he does really give a new
meaning to the winged word, that's a Homeric phrase. His sentences and his prose capture the motion of
the flight when it's going quickly or slowly or moving in circles. The rhythm of his sentences
capture that. And if we want a sense of what it means to be earthbound, like a human being is,
unlike the birds, there's that there's a passage that I drew attention to in the
here's our conversation about the mouse. And he mentions that at the site I'm reading at the
site of the lane to the fort. I found a long-tailed field mouse feeding on a slope of grass.
He was eating the grass seeds, holding the blades securely between his skinny white front paws.
I could have picked him up, but it seemed wrong to separate him now from the surface he would never
leave until he died. His life is eating to live to catch up to keep up, never getting ahead,
moving always in the narrow way between a death and a death, between stotes and weasels,
foxes and owls by night, between cars and custrels and herons by day.
So that sets a desire for this rapture of being ravaged by the taken up to the other sphere could be
a deliverance from this fate of those of us who are earthbound, which is in between one death and
another always in this narrow lane where death is in any case going to come and put an entry.
I mean he does treat water and air as the kind of primary elements where he takes earth to be
a kind of lesser place. It does not catch us when we fall, he says. So I think he does want deliverance,
but there are two ways to be delivered either for him to identify with the peregrine as a hunter,
right, when it stoops or as you're pointing out to identify himself with the prey who's being
eaten and or lifted off into the yeah or transfigured perhaps, but although I think he takes both positions.
And what you said about the earth and the other elements, I have a quote that confirms that. He says,
"Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, he's speaking about a seal here,
like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no
element. Nothing sustains us when we fall." Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? I mean one of the things that
I find interesting is that many people have bird envy. By that I simply mean that we want to fly,
not in airplanes, but you know with wings. And he definitely has something of that kind,
but he seems more interested in the fact that the falcons can see in ways that humans can't see. He
really seems more excited about seeing than about flying. So for example, here is a passage about
freedom, the freedom of the bird, which I think is bird envy is that they have this freedom that
we don't have, but for him it's the freedom of the eye. Like the seafarer, the paragon lives in
a pouring away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting of sinking planes of land
and water. We who are anchored in earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The paragon
sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist. The neat squares of Orchard and Woodland,
the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields, he finds his way across the land by a
succession of remembered symmetries. So here he's talking about being anchored in earthbound
and that the bird is free, but it also has this freedom of the eye.
Exactly. To see the world the way the bird sees it, he tries. He does his best to imagine it.
And therefore the paragon is full of these projections beyond the actual perception into a
conjugation of perception with imagination. Yes, absolutely. And this might be the source of the
many so-called factual inaccuracies of the book which have been pointed out by ornithologists
and other experts on falcons that many of the observations that Baker claims who have made,
you know, with the eye witness are highly unlikely that his falcons oftentimes behave in ways that
no one else has seen behave, that sometimes their flight patterns don't correspond and certainly the
behavior of the prey, the suicidal behavior of some of his prey, birds of prey. So he has been
a question if not sometimes outright attacked aggressively for factual inaccuracies, but
again, this is something we discussed with the hairstyle. It depends on what you are trying to be
true to. That's exactly right. He has a much richer, thicker sense of the notion of the fact,
right? For him a fact, you know, includes the behavior and the emotions of the watcher, but it also
he's really getting at a truth that is deeper and therefore is not going to be
accurate in a scientific sense in every single case and I'm not even convinced that
the scientific errors that the errors that the scientists find are necessarily errors. He could
have seen those things, in fact. He could have. It's hard to know. Let's say that they were misperceptions
or the thing about science is that in order to see the world scientifically, namely objectively,
you have to break the spell of the phenomenon. That's exactly right. You have to be
distant, can't exactly detach from it. Yes. Does the exact opposite? And so you can see why scientists
don't, or at least some don't approve, but kind of going back to your sense of baker projecting
himself into the bird world or a given bird. Let's think about this passage where he starts as the
watcher and then he projects himself into the bird, right? So he's sort of leaving that subjective
position. I found myself crouching over the kill like a manxling hawk. My eyes turned quickly
about alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk
as in some primitive ritual, the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood.
In a layer of shadow the paragrin was crouched, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch.
We live in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun man. We hate their suddenly
uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic, scissoring gate,
their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces. So there he goes from the eye
to the we, we himself and the bird projecting himself into the subjectivity of the bird as it were.
And if you take a passage like that and any number of other passages in the book, you say,
well, this is not technically and scientifically the way things are in themselves. There are no
white tombstones in the eyes. But this is like a vango if you were to tell vango that the night sky
never looks like the way you painted it. Well, clearly the exaggerated and expressive brush strokes
that someone like vango used was not trying to get at the factual truth of the world as it appears
objectively, but to do justice to the way that world appears to him in his own subjective
perception of it and trying to be and I think that's what Baker means by saying that one has to
the emotions and the passions of the of the of the water also have the status of facts. I'm not
the facts of that phenomenological perception are of a different order than the facts of the way
the scientists can can line them up having taken out as much as possible the subjectivity of the
observer. No, I mean, you put that very beautifully and I think that the fact that he decides to
eliminate every single human allows him to break through into that sort of phenomena, the phenomena
that he is representing, which are true facts to him. And in fact, for the reader come across as
at least for this reader as a as a truth and also just the way he captures this kind of
evanescence and changing and disappearing and reappearing of things that are happening all day long
to do that in language. It's astonishing. It's very difficult to do.
Right. Well, Andrea, we're getting to the end of our hour. I just wanted to ask you, you know,
by way of conclusion, you do you teach nature writing often to do environmental
eco criticism and other kinds of writing? Is there anything in your canon of works that compares to
the paragrain and that you know? No, I mean, Baker is really a poet. And I mean, one question
that I would ask you and we have little time here is that there's a passage about the beauty that
he sees in a killing. And so, you know, again, is he a set of sizing these scenes? I do think
that, you know, the behavior and the emotions completely change this book and take it out
indeed of nature writing in any ordinary sense. Yeah. I don't know. Do you want to maybe read that
passage? Sure. It's I think it's my favorite passage actually in the book because it goes to the
heart of this terrible paradox of the sheer beauty of the natural world when it is tied to the most
violent purposes, which is that of killing. And here he's describing not a paragrain Falcon,
but he's describing another hawk of Merlin and he says, the Merlin had seen the Lark go up and had
circled a gain height before making an attack from behind the Merlin's wings looked very straight.
They seemed to move up and down with a shallow flicking action, a feebrile pulsation much faster than
any other falcons. It reached the Lark in a few seconds and they fell away toward the West
jerking and twisting together the Lark still singing. It looked like a swallow chasing a bee.
They rushed down the sky and zig-zags and I lost them in the green of the distant fields.
Their rapid shifting dancing motion had been so deft and graceful that it was difficult to
believe that hunger was the cause of it and death the end. The killing that follows the hunting
flight of hawks comes with a shocking force as though the hawk had suddenly gone mad and had
killed the thing it loved. The striving of birds to kill or to save themselves from death is
beautiful to see the greater the beauty the more terrible the death. I mean that we're used to
nature writing talking about the sublime or something beautiful. This kind of beauty I don't find.
I mean he finds the beauty in first of all the striving of the bird to kill and the striving of the prey
to not be killed and that takes on all of these motions and these extraordinary odds.
It is a dance. It is a dance and he can't even imagine it as something that really comes down to
hunger and just something simple. Why is it so beautiful is the question?
And you know that's a huge metaphysical question. I know. I had to put that in.
If the scientists or the evolutionists are right then this overwhelming beauty of the planet,
the way we know it in all its subtleties and nuances and of the speciation and the
especially birds and the plumage of birds and that this unimaginable beauty has the most miserable
impoverished purpose which is to satiate hunger momentarily before it goes on absurdly
you know to the next meal and this procreation with it with that all this beauty could be rooted
in such absurdity is mind-boggling to me. It is. And Baker brings that out in a way that
you know the other thing I was thinking when the falcon disappears after the end of this season
all the birds in Essex are probably celebrating joyous. They are. He actually says that.
And yet were there not a bird of prey present in their evolutionary history they could never
be so beautiful. They could never fly in such metaphysical ways. They've co-evolved.
And that's why their dance is so beautiful because this co-evolution has made the mortal enemies
and this disconnect between the vileness of purpose and the sheer transcendence of the beauty.
I don't know what to make of it. It's astounding. Also just the fact that he likes to go and find
to the prey which the paragon takes the feathers and eats all the meat. He's actually hunting for
the prey as well. He clearly sees something beautiful in the corpses. Of course it's the dance ultimately
but he's seeing a beauty that most nature writers would refuse to see or would not want to see.
Yeah we might be able to end on a verse from a Wallace Stevens poem "Death is the mother of beauty and
from her alone shall come fulfillment of our dreams." I don't know if that applies. I like that.
Although he's really talking about human death things here. It's not it's bird death.
So Andrea I'm going to leave you with a track from a new album by the band Yes called Fly from Here
and remind our listeners that we've been engaged in a conversation with Professor Andrea Nightingale
who teaches in the Department of Classics here at Stanford. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled
opinions and we'll be with you next week and thanks again Andrea for coming on.
Thank you so much. This was so much fun. Bye bye.
[Music]
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