<b>Nilanjana S Roy:</b> Where the wild things are

Kyo Maclear's <i>Birds Art Life</i> is such an unusual memoir

This week was unsettling — it brought reminders from friends both of the sudden sweetness of life, its unexpected blessings, and the other, far grimmer side. 

I was unable to settle to the usual pleasurable round of reading the bestsellers of the day, and went looking restlessly for something else. There is, in truth, very little about reading that is comfortable, no matter how much we like to talk about “comfort reading”. Most books bring solace not by offering wisdom, but by unsettling you, taking you outside your own experience and sideways, perhaps, closer to moments of surprising understanding, where you least expected it.

Kyo Maclear’s Birds Art Life is such an unusual memoir. I almost passed it by, because every second book written by a woman on a love for wild things and the wilderness these days is compared to Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. I used to work in publishing, so I understand the temptation to blurb books in this fashion — “if you liked x you’ll love y”, “a second J K Rowling” — and have done it myself, but it’s dreary, and misleading. Readers who loved Helen MacDonald’s 2014 memoir, of grief, and training falcons, and falling slowly out of depression, loved it because it reminded them of nothing but its own vivid, strange, intense self. 

I tend to duck books that are supposed to be exactly like H is for Hawk to avoid the disappointment that inevitably follows, but something about the first chapter of Birds Art Life pulled me in all the same. “One winter, not so long ago, I met a musician who loved birds,” Maclear writes. The musician, like her, lives in a big city; he lived alongside his anxiety and depression, until he fell in love with birds and began to photograph them. “The sound of birdsong reminded him to look outwards at the world.”

Maclear’s life unfolds gradually, in her precise, thoughtful paragraphs. She writes children’s books, is married to a musician, a composer of film music. Her father has been ill, she’s spent time in the greyness of hospitals and recovery centres. “It was also the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn’t know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should.” 

I thought of how often this happens to creative people across many professions (the arts, but also the sciences, sometimes entrepreneurs), and of Georgia O’Keeffe’s crackups and crises of health, those cycles of an intense dry winter of decimation and breakdown followed by months and years of a return to the self. Maclear’s province is not the terrain of the epiphany, the sudden vision that reveals a map for the future or a moment of blessed illumination — far from it. 

Birds Art Life begins in Winter, with chapters titled Love, Cages, Smallness; moves into Spring (Waiting, Knowledge, Faltering), and so on until it returns to Fall (Regrets, Questions, Endings) and Winter again. 

Maclear is my kind of seeker, yearning for grand expeditions that she is unlikely to embark on. This is a condition common to readers of exploration literature, who share the thirst of the true explorer but not their single-minded focus, their ability to create a life built on journeying and adventuring. 

Unable to get away from the weight of her worries, suspecting that even her art is a “wan and flimsy art, one that could be smacked down like a cheap sidewalk sign”, she shrinks from the possibility of an affair, tries but fails to take art lessons, makes awkward duckling waddles towards the possibility of redemption.

Then, in Toronto itself, she discovers its birds, through the photographs taken by this other musician. “These birds lived in gardens of steel, concrete, glass and electricity… The birds were doing ordinary bird things, perching, flying, preening, hunting, nest building — but there was no doubt that they were of rather than above the mess and grit and trash of the world.” 

One of the many things that makes the reader trust Maclear is that she’s wary about seeing nature as her “own personal Lourdes or healing wilderness”. Instead, she asks: “What did I know of the wild world and what did it know of me?”

It’s a question that many more are asking these days. I wonder whether we are finally beginning to yearn for wildness, even as we accelerate extinction. Perhaps as cities grow larger and denser and more choked, a small but growing minority might start to turn their backs on these human versions of ant colonies, seeking something closer to the earth. 

The poet Mary Oliver wrote: “It is one of the perils of this so-called civilized age that we do not yet cherish enough… this connection between soul and landscape. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy and surety.” 

Maclear bumps up against much else in Bird Art Life — the tangles of love and marriages, the inescapable facts of illness and impending loss, her own disappointments and hopes. But at the heart of this memoir is the pleasure of someone who had lost her spirit finding it again, re-forging that link between “soul and landscape” as she watches, and learns to see, the smallest of wild things. 
 

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