Essay #4: on mimicry

There is an unseen bird outside my kitchen window that sings a symphony every morning.  For a long time I thought there were several birds speaking to one another in lilting timbre, for it was inconceivable that such variety of sound should emanate from a single creature.  One moment the bird croons a deep, slow tenor.  The next moment it pipes a shrill warbling blast into the sun.  Oh? the bird asks no one in particular, as if expressing incredulity at some outlandish claim.  Hmmmm! it says, coming to know some universal truth. Pootweet! it says, delighted.  I know now that there is but one bird, alone, crying into the leaves of the lemon tree.  What a rich conversation it has with itself.  If you listen hard enough, you may discern a common quality to its reverberations, just as you might recognize a voice actor’s true voice among his many characters.  A common thread weaves the multitude of personae together.

I watched a spider die yesterday.  It was unreasonably hot; the ground was too hot to touch. The spider came tumbling down from the awning over the hammock in which I lay. It landed in a ball, shriveled and dry, but its eight legs twitched and it rocked laterally on its torso, like a baby reaching for its mobile.  I watched as it rocked itself onto its belly; then it collapsed and stopped moving.  I might have averted my gaze after this final act, this magnum opus to the spider’s repertoire.  I continued to watch the shrunken spider corpse; I could not tell you why.  Perhaps it has to do with impermanence.  I watched as ants marched towards the spider in two columns – one from each end of the garden.  I wondered how they knew so quickly to schedule a funeral march. 

When they arrived at the Sight of the Deceased and without hesitation (there is no pause button on an ant), they swarmed the Deceased.  They covered every surface of its hazelnut body.  They crawled between its six armpits; they dipped their toes into its eyeballs.  They even pinched the hairs on the spider’s legs with their convulsing mandibles.  I could not tell you if the shift came from within or without.  I watched as, incredibly, the spider reanimated.  One leg twitched and straightened out gently, then another followed suit.  The body inflated; the eyes blinked on like buzzing CRT monitors powering up.  I watched the spider prop itself up and begin to move across the concrete slab.  I rubbed my eyes and considered smoking a less potent weed.

Am I, I wonder, a mimicking bird?  Is the idea of self an arrogant supposition?  What, after all, is self if not an amalgamation of suggested ethical codes, a pastel Bristol board stuck with magazine cutouts and disjointed echoes of words uttered in infancy?  I believe, I think, that I have integrity, that there is a whole that transcends the aggregate of my parts, but I cannot prove this.  I am, in truth, but a mishmash of discordant pieces, a cobbled-together collage of papier-mâché newsprint; the balloon that once acted as its framework has long deflated and disappeared.  I fear that when the flimsy starch holding the papier-mâché falters, when the newsprint peels and flutters to the ground, empty space will greet the viewer.  What a terrifying thought.

I wish that I believed in God so that I might fill that emptiness with exaltation.  Unfortunately, the very existence of that wish precludes the possibility of its coming to fruition.  One cannot impress a belief upon oneself.  One must simply believe.  Or so I believe.  But I see in others the hopeful expectation, the skyward gaze, the seeking of paternal approval that fills the entirety of the self.  None of the discordant thoughts matter; the foundation is sound, it will not crumble, it cannot shatter from the seismic tremble of self-reflection.  The many competing selves beget but an unsubstantial woven tapestry, a thin quilt thrown haphazardly over a solid bronze statue of God, his stern eyes gleaming reprovingly.

The ants were the key, it turns out.  The spider was indeed dead.  No thoughts flickered through its microscopic brain.  (Do spiders have brains?)  But, in their grief, the ants built an effigy of the spider; they cast it in bronze and wiggled their limbs into it and brought it to life. There is only one life in all the world, they said, let us share it.  Vitality is a finite resource, it turns out, and the self must therefor perish within the whole.  But entropy laws only apply within a closed system.  The self is not a closed system.  It turns out it is fed by the sun’s rays.

The lyrebird’s capacity for mimicry is unrivaled in the animal kingdom.  It uses the sounds of its surroundings to assemble a songbook from which it draws to call out to its mate.  The lyrebird mimics anything: other birds, other animals, and man-made sounds.  It’s even been known to mimic the very chainsaws and heavy equipment that destroy its Australian habitat.  In 1969, Neville Fenton recorded the sound of a lyrebird in New South Wales singing a very odd flute-like song.  The song, it was discovered after some sleuth-work by Fenton, had come from the lyrebird’s previous owner, a flute player who lived on a farm adjacent to the park.  The owner had been gone for a long time, nearly forty years, but the echoes of his flute continued to resonate through sub-alpine woodland and over marshes, from the mouth of the lyrebird.  The man, long dead, carried forever in this tiny bird.  Of course, the lyrebird did not know that it carried a tune in memoriam of its fallen owner.  It simply heard and mimicked and acted as sonic park historian.

The flute-song the lyrebird lilted was an odd one; Fenton eventually sent it off for analysis to sound expert Norman Robinson.  Robinson discovered that lyrebirds can actually sing two songs simultaneously, and that the odd melody was exactly that – a combination of two tunes from the 1930’s, Mosquito Dance and The Keel Row.  Two songs, distinct but superimposed by a creature with just one beak.  Inconceivable, one might think, but there it was.  Inconceivable, one might think, that we are a grab bag of mimicked melodies.  Impossible, you think, that all you know is a hodgepodge of hymns, echoes of long deceased ancestors reverberating through the generations, a dead flautist whose ashes have long ago scattered but whose lilting flute song persists in the mouth of the lyrebird.

I wonder what sound the lyrebird makes in complete silence.

photo by Alex Simand

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Alex is a Creative Writing MFA student at Antioch Universtiy Los Angeles and a Canadian expat living in San Francisco.  He writes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.  He sometimes shares his musings and meanderings on his blog.