What Sound Does a Bird Make?

Wading gradually into Finnegans Wake, supplied by several commentaries with some concepts. and in the absence of money to buy the book of annotations (because virtually every word in the Wake is a pun, often several, and frequently in two or more languages--like I said last time, this book is complicated), an online annotation which helps unravel the puns and the many languages and layers.

Joyce being Joyce, there is humor in every word and every pun. Joyce views the human tragedy of life and the many kinds of violence humans execute on one another through the lens of all humans being psychologically the same. Therefore we humans do violence only on ourselves, and this violent, tragic life becomes a rough comedy, a hurly-burly. The violence humans perform on themselves is a necessary part of pent-up energy being released and helping to create more life. Humans are humans like, for Red Sox fans of the aughts, Manny was Manny. Self-destructive behavior is not universally destructive but is, rather, the means toward more life (or, in Manny's case, more clutch baseball).

So the book is filled with references to sex, whether between husband and wife, or adulterous, or cross-generational, or incestuous, and every reference is humorous and tinged with a sense of nature, of inevitability (like how hurricanes are statistically inevitable in the Gulf of Mexico). The sexual humor is wry and incessant. From the online commentary I'm relying on comes a note concerning a Japanese element ("kaminari", thunder) in the text: 'Joyce asked me "Aren't there 4 terrible things in Japan, 'Kaminari' being one of them?" I counted for him: Jishin (earthquake), kaminari (thunder), kaji (fire), oyaji (paternity)." And he laughed - Takaoki Katta, 15 juillet, 1926.'

That snippet is a' propos of nothing except that I found it funny. Even from the land of zen and dour samurai we have paternity jokes. I suppose we humans are alike after all.

I'm posting more now because my spirits have risen considerably over the past week or so. In no small part this is because I'm finally on a regular income (though small) of unemployment payments. I'm not proud of that except that it enables us to pay our bills, which had been piling up unpaid for nearly two months. Add to this that spring is definitely approaching--not even another blizzard or two will undo the thaw we've had--and today was (Surprise!) daylight savings day. I woke to our automatic clock, which reads the time through the power grid, telling me that it was nearly nine.

So much for an early start to the day, eh?

But now it's nearly seven and twilight still hangs in the air. And that's good. Trees are now filled with twittering birds so that Eva constantly points them out when she can hear them from inside the house. Morning and evening she points toward the window and says, "Bud-dy."

The return of birds and the noise they make makes me think of when I first moved away from New Hampshire, down to Boston to live and work with my cousin Drew. We lived on P Street in South Boston, still the Irish end of town then (nearly 20 years ago), and one block from Columbia Park which looks onto the bay and the old revolutionary fort which guards Boston Harbor. The tip of Southie, which sticks like a thumb out into the harbor, is a mile or two across the water from Logan Airport, and when the wind is out of the southwest, we were under its takeoff pattern. This made for noisy evenings.

(A side note: commercial airports double as gigantic weathervanes. When I saw eight planes stacked up on their landing approach to the south, I knew that the wind was out of the north-northwest, and we were in for good weather for a while. Anyhow...)

So Southie was loud, between the family upstairs (and the father, falsely claiming medical disability like half the other people I met in that neighborhood), the caterwauling tomcats all night outside, the passersby in the street, and the planes overhead. And no birds.

Oh, there were some seagulls, and perhaps a crow or two, but certainly no songbirds. Nothing you'd want to open up a window, sit down with a cup of coffee, and listen to. Just city toughs getting along, like all the other animals (including humans and insects) there.

I moved down in February, in the midst of a very snowy winter (and I learned just how territorial and irrational these folks could be when it came to claiming and defending parking spots). I didn't visit my parents in Moultonboro, on the northern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire until mid-June. I drove up one Friday evening, opened my bedroom window open because it was really hot, hopped in bed and went to sleep.







The following morning, around 5:30 AM, I was awoken by a screaming clatter like I'd never heard in Boston. "EEAAHWRAAKKEEII-NAKAAWEEEIIKKIEEAAWRAAAAEEIIKIIEE!" and on and on and on.











The birds.









It was as if 10,000 birds were sitting outside my window, and suddenly on cue, began screaming at maximum volume in one deafening chorus.

(Calvin and Hobbes has long been my favorite cartoon strip, occasionally displaced by Doonesbury and The Far Side. But Snoopy is unassailably my favorite character. Can't touch Joe Cool. He's as elemental as anyone in the Wake.)


Back to the startlingly loud birds. I jumped out of bed, pretty scared, until I realized about five seconds later what the noise was. Of course I had a good chuckle at myself but there was no way I could go back to sleep so I just went downstairs and joined Mom for a cup of coffee.

Fast-forward to today. That story about the screaming is one of the ones I've told Kate three or four dozen times. On account of the sudden influx of songbirds, and the (still leafless) treetops filled with chattering flocks in the twilight, tonight was one more. And I added the sound effect, "WRAAAAEEEAAAGHH!"

Kate, generally more attuned to these things than I am, commented, "You're startling Eva."

So I turned to Eva. "Birds," I said, "go WRAAA." and bugged my eyes out. Eva reacted with her startled, fearful laugh, and her answer said it all: "Bankie." (Whenever she's dismayed or scared her first thought is for her blankie.)

Kate, not pleased, objected. "Birds go tweet-tweet-tweet." And she made the ASL sign for a bird, thumb and forefinger opening and shutting in front of the lips.

I made the same sign and insisted, "Birds go WRAAA."

Eva wasn't sure who to pay attention to, but she was showing signs of maybe wanting to start crying, so I backed off.

But later on, as Kate read her a story before bed, the story mentioned a crow.

"Wraa," the baby said, and looked at me.

Hyah!