In Praise Of Birds Vahni Capildeo In praise of high-contrast birds, purple bougainvillea thicketing the golden oriole.

In praise of civic birds, vultures cleansing the valleys, hummingbird logos on the tails of propeller planes; in praise of adaptable birds, the herring gull that demonstrates its knowledge of how to use a box junction, and seems to want to cross the road.

In praise of birds eaten by aeroplane engines; in praise of birds trained to hunt drones; in praise of birds that, having nothing to do with human processes, crash aeroplanes.

In praise of suicidal birds, brown ground doves forgetful of wingèdness, in front of cars, slowly crossing the road.

In praise of perse birds like fish smashing out of a bowl.

In praise of talk being cheep, and in praise of men who shut up about birds.

In praise of birds of death and communication, Garuda the almost-but-more-than-an-eagle vehicle of the darkly bejewelled and awfully laughing Lord of Death.

In praise of badly drawn birds.

In praise of white egrets, sitting on mud, hippos, and lines about old age.

In praise of Old English birds of exile, the gannet’s laughter, swathes of remembered seabirds booming and chuckling, the urgent cuckoo blazing on about summer, mournful and mindblowing, driving the sailor over the edge towards impossible targets, scornful of gardens, salty about city life – I can’t stand not setting off; far is seldom far enough.
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Iain Bamforth When I was small and Biblical and made to realise that my Brethren parents saw no nuance in the matter of salvation – either you were swallowed whole by giant belief or spat out among the unsaved – I was irresistibly drawn to the story of Jonah’s going down to the lower deck of the ship taking him from Joppa to Tarshish. He is trying to reach the latter place, which present-day historians believe to have been the city of Carthage or a port on a trading island in the western Mediterranean, perhaps Sardinia, in order to avoid the divine command to get up and go to the glittering capital of the Assyrian empire, Nineveh – ‘that great city, and cry against it’. Nineveh lay overland, in the opposite direction altogether.

Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, Jonah is trying to hide ... read more

Diana Bridge

‘twittering ghosts’

Months ago, reading a review of William Empson’s The Face of the Buddha in the pages of this magazine (PNR 232), my eye was caught by an excerpt from the book that should have been Empson’s third but was eventually published seventy years after it was completed. Empson wrote of a ceramic luohan (saint or sage in the Buddhist pantheon) observed at the Royal Academy in 1935, that the figure ‘seemed…so much alive that it turned the people looking at it in the London Exhibition into twittering ghosts’. In his review, Mark Thompson suggested that Eliot’s ‘twittering world’ stood behind Empson’s response and connected it to the language and ambience of Burnt Norton. Empson’s China background brings up a possible additional source.

Empson used the arresting phrase when revising the manuscript of his book in the 1940s, ... read more