Birdsong on Acid
Ever since I dropped acid in the Tiffany Bottoms bird sanctuary where the Chippewa river delta meets the Mississippi, birdsong has become otherworldly. I often times have the feeling of hearing it elsewhere than wherever it is that I am, transported in an instant to some magic realm way outside of modernity (even under the auspices of LSD, this most modern of drugs).
Acid is often described as a non-specific amplifier; that is, whatever you encounter in your acid trip will be amplified by the acid. Phishheads are phishheads, not because of any specific quality in the acid, or in Phish for that matter, but rather because they did acid at a Phish concert. If some of perception is unconscious—highly-filtered by an over-zealous ego—then acid can remove these filters, some of them permanently. So, with my whole brain exposed to this bird symphony on the river in May of 2019, I have become a birdhead. I am by no means a birder for I am not particularly interested in bird knowledge, or even in seeing birds. Rather I am a birdhead in the sense that when I hear birdsong it feels like the top of my head is coming off.
Birdsong invokes a whole landscape in me, or to be more precise, a treescape, a birdscape, the cathedral realm just above the land, those arboreal vectors to which the songbird’s song gives definition, reverb, and high-fidelity. Bird song allows you to hear these high spaces in a literal sense, by echolocation. This realm is more imaginal than real, though I hear this space, the space that I feel is not where I am. It feels like I’ve been transported inside the song.
The brightness and quickness of these songs is the scene. Airy lofty, flitting from here to nowhere, transient and transitory, a crystal stream, radiant jewels of tone that open up magic doorways onto perilous seas in faery lands forlorn, is how Keats put it. (I am likewise thinking of the Swedish faery story, Birds can Kill People Too, about song birds that fly down the unsuspecting victim’s throat). There is a hardness to birdsong, like glass, or diamond, that is contrary to the fragility and barely-thereness of the actual bird. My interior world is susceptible to being torn or pierced by the diamond hardness of these tuh-weets, coo-coos and chirrups. Manic joy is the affect. Being too happy in thine happiness (Keats again); the naïve happiness of dawn and daylight. While nature may be recalcitrant to admit joy, birdsong seems an apotheosis of joy. Clearly this joy is compulsory but what joy is not compulsory?
The ornithologist may accuse me of anthropomorphizing. That’s fine. Honestly, I don’t think we anthropomorphize animals enough. The heretical power of Darwin’s Descent of Man is the observation in animal behavior of those higher virtues that had once been confined to humankind: reason, imagination, love, play, magnanimity, faith, poetry and so on. But let’s be real, of all the creatures of earth, only man is capable of destroying the biosphere.
The ornithologist will likewise claim that birdsong is territorial, like graffiti (but is there not obvious joy in graffiti?). We might add to this that graffiti, like birdsong, announces presence; it says “here I am.” And no wonder poetry is so obsessed with it: birdsong is the first and original poem, the phatic function par excellence. Hearing these songs in the forest, then, has the effect of that whole forest-world saying “here I am.” Birdsong is the expression of the biome.
When I hear the diminishing birdsong here in Manhattan—where millions of birds continue to die flying into the glass towers—It is as if I am hearing the failing echoes of the old forests that once crowded this island. The growing silence of birdsong then becomes ominous and terrible, the silent spring of ecological collapse; like the refrain in that other Keats poem, La Belle Dame sans Merci: “and no birds sing.”
See also:
Eating the Ortolan Bunting
Housecleaning on Acid
Grandfather Rattlesnake
Swallow and Camellia, printed 1900, cut 1771, Itō Jakuchū
