Max Porter - Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? Where are the strangers going out of their way to help, screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us?

There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat.

There were no crowds and no uniformed strangers and there was no new language of crisis. We stayed in our PJs and people visited and gave us stuff.

Holiday and school became the same.

In other versions I am a doctor or a ghost. Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God. I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.

I was, after all, ‘the central bird … at every extreme’. I’m a template. I know that, he knows that. A myth to be slipped in. Slip up into.

Inevitably I have to defend my position, because my position is sentimental. You don’t know your origin tales, your biological truth (accident), your deaths (mosquito bites, mostly), your lives (denial, cheerfully). I am reluctant to discuss absurdity with any of you, who have persecuted us since time began. What good is a crow to a pack of grieving humans? A huddle.

A throb.

A sore.

A plug.

A gape.

A load.

A gap.

So, yes. I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death, mock the starving homeless, misdirect, misinform. Oi, stab it! A bloody load of time wasted.

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.

I’ve drawn her unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones.

I’ve written hundreds of memoirs. It’s necessary for big names like me. I believe it is called the imperative.

Once upon a time there was a blood wedding, and the crow son was angry that his mother was marrying again. So he flew away. He flew to find his father but all he found was carrion. He made friends with farmers (he delivered other birds to their guns), scientists (he performed tricks with tools that not even chimps could perform), and a poet or two. He thought, on several occasions, that he had found his Daddy’s bones, and he wept and screamed at the hateful Goshawks ‘here are the grey bones of my hooded Papa’, but every time when he looked again it was some other corvid’s corpse. So, tired of the fable lifestyle, sick of his omen celebrity, he hopped and flew and dragged himself home. The wedding party was still in full swing and the ancient grey crow rutting with his mother in the pile of trash at the foot of the stairs was none other than his father. The crow son screamed his hurt and confusion at his writhing parents. His father laughed. KONK. KONK. KONK. You’ve lived a long time and been a crow through and through, but you still can’t take a joke.

Soft.

Slight.

Like light, like a child’s foot talcum-dusted and kissed, like stroke-reversing suede, like dust, like pins and needles, like a promise, like a curse, like seeds, like everything grained, plaited, linked, or numbered, like everything nature-made and violent and quiet.

It is all completely missing. Nothing patient now.

My brother and I discovered a guppy fish in a rock pool somewhere. We set about trying to kill it. First we flung shingle into the pool but the fish was fast. Then we tried large rocks and boulders, but the fish would hide in the corners beneath small crevices, or dart away. We were human boys and the fish was just a fish, so we devised a way to kill it. We filled the pool with stones, blocking and damming the guppy into a smaller and smaller area. Soon it circled slowly and sadly in the tiny prison-pool and we selected a perfectly sized stone. My brother slammed it down over-arm and it popped and splashed, rock on rock in water and delightedly we lifted it out. Sure enough the fish was dead. All the fun was sucked across the wide empty beach. I felt sick and my brother swore. He suggested flinging the lifeless guppy into the sea but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it so we sprinted back across the beach and Dad didn’t look up from his book but said ‘you’ve done something bad I can tell’.

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.

I will stop hearing her breathing.

We found a fish in a pool and tried to kill it but the pool was too big and the fish was too quick so we dammed it and smashed it. Later on, for ages, my brother did pictures of the pool, of the fish, of us. Diagrams explaining our choices. My brother always uses diagrams to explain our choices, but they aren’t scientific, they’re scrappy. My brother likes to do scrappy badly drawn diagrams even though he can actually draw pretty well.

Head down, tot-along, looking.

Head down, hop-down, totter.

Look up. ‘LOUD, HARD AND INDIGNANT

KRAAH NOTES’ ( Collins Guide to Birds , p. 45).

Head down, bottle-top, potter.

Head down, mop-a-lot, hopper.

He could learn a lot from me.

That’s why I’m here.

There is a fascinating constant exchange between Crow’s natural self and his civilised self, between the scavenger and the philosopher, the goddess of complete being and the black stain, between Crow and his birdness. It seems to me to be the self-same exchange between mourning and living, then and now. I could learn a lot from him.

Dad has gone. Crow is in the bathroom, where he often is because he likes the acoustics. We are crouched by the closed door listening. He is speaking very slowly, very clearly. He sounds old-fashioned, like Dad’s vinyl recording of Dylan Thomas. He says SUDDEN. He says TRAUMA. He says Induced … he coughs and spits and tries again, INDUCED. He says SUDDEN TRAUMA INDUCED ALTERATION OF THE ALERT STATE.

Dad comes back. Crow changes his tune.

CROW

Gormin’ere, worrying horrid. Hello elair, krip krap krip krap who’s that lazurusting beans of my cut-out? Let me buck flap snutch clat tapa one tapa two, motherless children in my trap, in my apse, in separate stocks for boiling, Enunciate it, rolling and turning it, sadget lips and burning it. Ooh, pressure! Must rehearse, must cuss less. The nobility of nature, haha krah haha krap haha, better not.

(I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him. I think he thinks he’s a little bit Stonehenge shamanic, hearing the bird spirit. Fine by me, whatever gets him through.)