Grief is a cave in the middle of the sky

Thoreau and the art of losing

Zenaida macroura (common names: mourning dove, turtle dove) pair in winter. Photo by Hardyplants, CC0.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. —Thoreau, Walden

The other night I had a dream, brief and twilight-toned: Stumbling into a darkened room, I felt a feral presence—something lost and creaturely, throbbing with a frightened ferocity. I moved toward its vague shape in the corner, but it was only an empty cardboard box, which I blundered into and demolished. I still felt the presence, which now had shifted to another corner; moving there, I found a thick blanket strangely mounded into a kind of pile or pyramid. I sat down cross-legged and wrapped myself in it.

The distance between ourselves and our losses can be measured in emptiness or intimacy.

That evening, I had rewatched Werner Herzog’s 2004 film The White Diamond, about the trial flights of a small, teardrop-shaped dirigible designed by aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington to access the rainforest canopy for research and exploration. To test the craft, Dorrington has brought his crew to Kaietur Falls on Guyana’s Potaro River, a seam of froth and thunder splitting the forest. Dorrington is possessed with a wild urge to fly; it thrums him like a restless leg, a caffeine buzz that won’t stop buzzing.

The artist Lena Herzog, the filmmaker’s wife, was present during the filming of The White Diamond, and she marveled at Dorrington’s obsession. “Graham has to fly,” she observed for The Paris Review. “But he also has a scientist’s mind, which gives texture to his fantasies…. collecting life from the jungle’s canopies is not only the airship’s formal purpose—it has now become an integral part of the airship’s engineering. And this all makes Graham’s dreams ever more beautiful.” (The Paris Review piece is paywalled; Herzog shares some of her remarkable photographs of Dorrington’s craft on her web site).

And yet Dorrington’s drive is knottier than this. Like Thoreau-the-traveler, his peregrinations are shot through with loss. A few years before the flights documented in The White Diamond, his friend, the nature filmmaker Dieter Plage, had died when an earlier version of the airship crashed in Sumatra. Throughout the film, we see the physical and psychic effects of Dorrington’s grief go to war with his deep desire to take flight. This febrile enthusiasm possesses him like an allergy to gravity itself; he trembles with it—his face a twist of smile, his eyes rolling skyward, he hops up and down like the very earth nips at his feet. And then he speaks of Dieter and he darkens, crumples, his face hollowing, grieving at his smile.

And all the while, great flocks of white-tipped swifts career back and forth across the falls’ thundering expanse. Herzog’s camera drinks them in as they surge and flash in the sky above. The swifts roost in a great cave behind the falls which, Herzog tells us, has never been entered by humans. In the final shot of the film, we’re looking down the great nape of the falls, into the chasm enfolded in the water’s bright gown, as the swifts fling themselves at full speed into the caves. By the thousands, perhaps the tens of thousands. A river of birds flooding into that insoluble dark. It’s a long shot, braided with composer Ernst Reijseger’s brooding, polyvocal setting of the Kyrie, eleison, and it tears at the heart.

Later, I read that the nests of these swifts (Aeronautes montivagus) have never been described due to the difficulty of reaching their sites on inaccessible cliffs and cave walls.

What does Dorrington’s restless, insurgent grief have to do with Thoreau’s fable? In Bird Relics, her beautiful book about grief in Thoreau’s life and work, Branka Arsić suggests that the fable “depicts a grief intensified by time to the point of obsession, as the mourner identifies his whole life with it”—a mourning which, “far from suspending life into a melancholic stupor, in fact refreshes it, energizing the mourner with strength to keep on traveling.” Along the way, the mourner meets others who have caught a glimpse of the departed creatures, have wondered at them, even loved them. Arsić writes:

In Thoreau’s democratic view … to actually participate in the grief of others—to mourn their losses—is the way to reach them. Thoreau’s wager, supposed to rebuke hopelessness without cheering us into hope, is this: as long as everybody is on the trail, something will be recovered by somebody.

I imagine Thoreau in a democratic airship, lofting along Concord’s byways, hailing passing strangers as he seeks his lost menagerie.

I tripped over Thoreau’s fable while I was trying to learn a little bit more about mourning doves (Zenaida macroura), one of our most common birds, which Americans of Thoreau’s time called “turtle doves.” (The “turtle” comes from turtur, an old Latin onomatopoeia for the cooing calls of doves, which I’m hearing even now). Along the way, I learned that nearly 70 percent of adult mourning doves do not survive the given year. In every moment, these most quotidian of birds navigate a chasm as unfathomable as the caves behind the falls.

But what of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle dove themselves? What do they mean? Elsewhere in Walden, Thoreau warns that “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor.” Thoreau’s story is no metaphor, I think, but a koan, in which each thing is entirely itself and the face, the presence, that lives in us.

I went looking for a song in this koan. Thoreau’s litany has a rhythm in it—the rhythm of a joke, maybe (a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove walk into a bar…); or that of a fable, the shape of a tale that begins familiarly, then opens into mystery. The beginning of a beautiful friendship. These creatures, so close to us, who also reach beyond—into sense, into speed, into flight… but there I go chasing metaphor. Better to turn to the Kyrie, eleison, the prayer that is a koan of petition and praise, that wraps the flight of swifts in its embrace. I’ve included a sketch of the song here, although it’s still got a lot of traveling to do.

What have you lost that you can’t name? “Practice losing farther, losing faster,” writes Elizabeth Bishop. The catalog of the losses we can name is ever expanding: a key, a continent…. And yet there are no disasters! Beyond mastery, Bishop knows, the mystery abides. “As long as everybody is on the trail, something will be recovered by somebody.”

The distance between ourselves and our losses can be measured in emptiness or intimacy.