robert ward / essay

Fluttering

[E]very word has three modes of existence: as written, as spoken, and as subvocalized.

-William Gass, “Transformations”1

Still that summer, there are hummingbirds. Two, perhaps three. Fluttering alongside the pink snowballs of the Mimosa and the yellow butternut blooms. We are deep into July, in the morning, and I picture myself mindlessly doing nothing on the back porch. Maybe there is coffee, hot toast with salted butter and peach jam, Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty, when the hummingbirds appear in my garden. As the sun dips behind the ever-graying clouds, which casts a pall over the mood of the day, one flies suddenly to my face. Its seedling eyes tipped slantwise, like a green vial in a spirit level, before settling. Ruby throat, ash belly. Its wings, not unlike the wings of sylphs. Open. Spread. Fluttering. Like the speeded up hands of a clock that I often saw in surrealist films of the 1920s. Around and around and around.

By his own admission, Martin Johnson Heade, formerly Heed (1819-1904), suffered monomania over hummingbirds. They were gems and jewels, indigoes and hickory browns. From his notebook: “For one in the least degree attuned to poetic feeling, they have a singularly fascinating power which the subtlest mind is unable to explain.”2

And there, in the rainforests of Brazil, filled with a Victorian’s sense of wonder and capture, he paints “Hummingbirds and Passion Flowers” (1875).

Where is the eye drawn? Where is the poetic feeling? In the flora’s aquamarines, turning luminous with cloud-forest weather, the carmine petals, the mist glazing in dapples. Black-eared fairy, Heliothryz aurita, on a stem bending downward, gazing up at the pistil, Passiflora coccinea.

Is there a storm coming? It is an interior weather, says John Updike, portraits of human moods. 3

As I walk through my garden of summer squash, runner beans, winberries, strawberries, and blackberries, I am suddenly overcome with mourning for my mother, who had died thirty years earlier from the complications of Alzheimer’s disease and, ultimately, pneumonia. I sit on the red metal bench by the double-lilac trees, brimming now with mauves and creams, and I notice the lines etching in my palms. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. A landscape of the past has opened up and it is large, larger than anything that I have ever seen or heard or felt. Over there, a Common Grackle, Quiscalus quiscula, flutters the beads of its braid and prim, before tearing a worm from the dampness of the soil. And I realize, now, how ill I have become. And I realize, now, that this will be my beginning. This will now be my beginning. 

As I write this, I’m wondering what’s left to be said about hummingbirds. There are the facts, of course, which appear in the thousands of ornithological studies of the species over the last two hundred years, most notably Robert Rideway’s 1911 volume of The Hummingbirds, an extract of which also appeared in the Report of the US National Museum in 1890, and anatomical studies, most notably Frederic Lucas’s “On the Structure of the Tongue in Hummingbirds,” published in the same source in 1891. The ruby-throat, Archilochus colubris, arrives in Rhode Island during the springtime from the warmer climes of the southern tropics, where they return in late summer. Theirs is a three-thousand mile journey, flying singly, low to the ground. Death is common during these migrations, either by storms, pesticides, tiercels, or glass windows. There are also old wive’s tales, of course: The ones that do make it, return to the same place, the same tree, the same branch, and there make the tiniest, most fragile nest you have ever seen, of grass, of moss, of lichens, of strands of hair, sequins of spider’s silk. And in that nest, past twilight, they fall into a slumber from which some never wake.  Fall into silence; into stillness. 

Flying home to Wales, after so many years—could it be twenty?—wracks the nerves. Everything seems so—what would be the word?—delicate. The old miners’ back-to-backs, coiling up the valley fach like elflock. That vase of fake tulips in the netted window. Bethesdas and Babels, their tiny gravestones blotted with moss and mold. The tumps of slag, slate, and shale-spoil, rising above the pubs and dingles, gleaming. The widow in curlers and apron, puffing on a woodbine, hanging her stockings to dry on the window sill. Dust inbreathed was a house, isn’t that what Eliot says?4 Those middle-aged men in raincoats, coughing dust, wheeling their mothers to the afternoon shops, which at the time of writing now consist of a butcher’s shop, an ironmonger’s shop, an Everything for a Pound shop, a carpet shop, a Children in Need shop, several empty shops, a chippy, two hair and nail emporiums and, at the very end, a newly opened Morbitorium, which advertises its “decades-long obsession with horror, the occult, supernatural and the macabre to provide you with some of the best (and affordable) products around.”5 And then it happens. The heart flutters, and is lost somewhere. As if on a keel, caught up in a storm. As if on a shell, dragged down in a gulsh. Two hundred and fifty beats. Around and around and around. It feels like the spread fingers of a hand are pushing out from the interiors of the chest. You are drowning. You can’t breathe. You can’t breathe. You slide down to the curve of the curb. And you hear the world here. Cars cawing cars. Leaf blowers billowing billowing. Gossip in the street about Olwyn, or was it Owen, “As if,” says Philip Larkin, “the name meant once/All love, all beauty.”6 And you realize, right then, that this will now be your end. This will now be your end.

The variety of trochilidae is vast, ranging from two to three hundred species, depending on who you read and when. Amethyst woodstar, angela starthroat, black-eared fairy, black-throated mango, crimson topaz, forked-tailed woodnymph, frilled coquette, garnet-throated, goldenthroat, gorgeted woodstar, hooded visorbearer, horned sungem, Langsdorff’s thorntail, Peruvian sheartail, plovercrest, purple-backed thornbill, racket-tailed coquette, red-tailed comet, ruby-throated, ruby-topaz, rufous-crested coquette, sappho comet, snowcap, streamertail, stripe-breasted starthroat, swallow-tail, Cora’s Shear tail, tufted coquette, violet-capped woodnymph, white-necked jacobin, violet ear.7 “I enjoy making lists,” says Susan Howe, to remind you, the reader, how words supersede and displace the reality of an object sensed in space and time.”8

As 1863 became the spring of 1864, Heade sails from Rio de Janeiro to London with a sheaf of notes on the colors, courtship, nesting, and diet of the hummingbird species, at least forty finished paintings, and numerous anatomical pencil sketches. He plans a book, The Gems of Brazil, one more focussed than John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, published in 1838, and one more physically present than John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidae, published in 1861, though appearing today only with the more sellable of its subtitles, A Family of Hummingbirds.9 Now in London, Heade commissions the chrome lithographers, Day and Company, to turn his paintings into colored plates. When they come back, they will look artificial, wrong. In the Spring of 1874, he writes to John Russell Bartlett of Providence, Rhode Island, the compiler of the Dictionary of Americanisms (1874) and, more importantly, a friend, to say the plates “are very well when re-touched by hand, but I want to get rid of the necessity of that.”10 Worse. He couldn’t raise the funds needed for the project to reach publication. Worse still, perhaps for his own sense of self esteem, was the draft introduction to the book, which can now be found online at the Smithsonian, which is badly written, full of “littles” and “angels” and “darlings” that could too easily be brought to mind by late Victorian sentimentalists.11 As I write this, I picture him, funds and spirit exhausted, wandering through the streets of this city, a landscape so incongruous to the environs of passion flowers and orchids that he had left. And it is here, on these streets, that he changes his name once again, to the one he will now use to sign many of his paintings and correspondence. Didymus. Didymus. From The Gospel According to John, chapter 11, verse 16: “Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow disciples. Let us also go, that we may die with him.”12 

In Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov, whose pen name, incidentally, was Vladimir Sirin, the bird-woman, the siren of Russian folklore, reflects on the terror of seeing oneself unborn: “man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”13 

On leaving hospital, after a night of tests on my heart, pharmaceuticals to slow the rate of the heart, and little sleep given the cries of anguish from some of the other patients on the cardiac ward, I suddenly feel an urgency to define the word chronophobiac, which, as I write this, does sound like the word Chromolithograph. The former word, or so I thought incorrectly at the time, doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor Webster’s, nor Collins, nor Chambers, nor Encarta, and the word intrigues me the more I cannot find it. The word, from the ancient Greek, has two parts. Kronos, time. Phobia, fear. A fear of time. A fear of the passing of time. Although, passing of is such a waste of words.

As I left Wales to head back to our home in Rhode Island, I did so with a sense of doom. My heart was volatile, ranging from 140 beats per minute when I felt anxious, which was pretty much most of the time, to under 40 beats per minute when resting. In the 2013 issue of Heart Rhythm, Mitchell Faddis, MD, suggests a correlation between a resting heart rate and mortality in human beings. In his view, the higher the resting heart rate, the more risk there is of premature death. Faddis calls this the “hummingbird effect.” “The hummingbird has a resting heart rate of about 250 beats/min and lives up to 12 years. The bowhead whale has an impressive resting heart rate of about 10 beats/min and can live beyond 200 years. A natural extension of this observation is the possibility that there exists a finite number of heart beats that define a lifetime across species.”14 To my untrained ear, the correlation sounded spurious. I wasn’t afraid of death, anyway. Like Woody Allen, I’d just rather not be there when it happens. Anyway, with a resting heart rate around 40 beats per minute, perhaps I should just change my name to Methuselah, and be done with it; or, worse, Keith Richards. But the feeling of doom wouldn’t leave me and now gives rise to the question of my writing. How do you tell a story from the heart?

Perhaps here. He was the only god of the Greeks to die, although that in itself is disputed. A god of the shepherds. Half man, half goat. A god besotted by nymphs, seducing them with the calming sounds of his pipes, made from water reeds. A god that is so in love with the pastoral, that he becomes inextricably part of it, and dies. It’s a love story of the earth itself. But there’s also the other Pan, the Pan more of the Romans than the Greeks, the Faun, the goat man; Bacchus, whose melodies bring fear; a god that will steal away your soul and your body in a moment.15 A story of the heart, then, is also a story of this fear. Panic: a noun associated with the natural grasses of the genus panicum (16th century). A verb, Of fear, terror: sudden, wild, or unreasoning. And here’s another word. Flutter. To be borne or lie tossing on the waves; to float to and fro. Obsolete. circa. 11th century. Of birds, etc.: To move or flap the wings rapidly without flying or with short flights; to move up and down or to and fro in quick irregular motions, or hang upon wing in the air. (circa, 11th century). To move about or to and fro with quick vibrations or undulations; to quiver. Of the heart or pulse: To beat rapidly and irregularly. (circa. 16th century). To throw (a person) into confusion, agitation, or tremulous excitement. to flutter the dove-cot(e)s: to alarm, or cause excited discussion among, quiet people (circa. 17th century). Listen: Flute, flutter, flutter, flute. Little sound poems, filled with gaiety, all by themselves. 

In “Assurances,” Walt Whitman writes that “interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have/their exteriors, and that eyesight has another/eyesight,/ and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another/Voice.”16 As I write this, I picture myself as a child, gazing at the apotropaics forming amongst the coal embers. A redwing. A blackcap. A robin redbreast. A few days later, I visit my mother in the psychiatric hospital. I see it quite clearly now. It has white and pink cherry blossoms blowing through a field. And then I go to stay in a trailer on the mountain with my mother’s church friends. At dusk, in the stillness, the valley’s grasses cleave and the nightjars fidget in the oak. 

Heade “made pictures seized by stillness,” writes Richard Paul.17 Take “Ruby-throated Hummingbird,” which Heade carried with him to London. The painting is trademark Heade, a symptom of his monomania. We see the male and female of the species, the fingers of the branches gothic and more prominent against the dappled light and the shiftiness of the clouds. At its center is the nest, which despite the fragility of the branch, looks secure, though tiny. Beautiful, though still. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the hollow tones of reeds being played, one by one. And in that moment, perhaps, perhaps, you can choose whether to interpret that sound as the sound of fear or the sound of calm, of stillness. I wish my mother had had a sense of that dual interpretation, though she did have her own way of dealing with panic. It involved opening the King James Bible, finding a verse by chance and, for the rest of the day, being guided by its words. I admit that I don’t believe in a god, at least the god that I was taught, nor do I believe in an afterlife. I don’t open the Bible and, finding words, become guided by them. Except, perhaps, this once. For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of olive oil, and honey. (Deuteronomy, 8: 8-9).

It’s all in the ear, isn’t that what Williams says?18  Still: a) To quiet, calm (waves, winds, etc.); b) To subdue, allay (sedition,, tumult); c) To relieve (pain); d) To assuage, allay (an appetite, desire); e) To keep back, repress, desist or refrain from (words, tears); f) To keep (one’s tongue) still. Obsolete; g) To quiet, calm (a person’s mind); h) to subdue (agitation, emotion); i) To lull, soothe (a child). I have loved this word since finding it whilst out looking for others. A word with five small letters, monosyllabic, introverted, quiet, motionless. Old English, Germanic, it carries old worlds within it, and nesting words of till and ill. The s brings the tongue to the roof of the mouth. The t feels like a stile at first, but we clamber over, bringing our tongue to the back of the front teeth for the final ll. In Welsh, we would pronounce the final ll with a chlaa sound, originating in the back of the throat, rising to touch the palette. As in Llonydd, meaning in English to still and be still. To induce (a person) to cease from weeping. Obsolete.

In his sermon, “Circles,” Emerson reflects on the attempts of nature to form concentric patterns, like the windmill rotation, rather than the flapping, of a hummingbird’s wings, or the gorgeous luster of oils on the gorget of the hummingbird’s throat, or the increasing circumference of the lower part of the beak, the mandible, for stability and movement, or its higher and thinner part, the maxilla, which allows her to reach deep into the corolla of a blossom, or the tongue, unfolding like, to use Lucas’s words, a “spiral spring” to trap and absorb its nectar, or, if they could only became visible, the cartographic lines of its migrations, crisscrossing, etched somewhere in the air. Perhaps narrative sounds can work like that, inevitably returning to similar narrative sounds, in what Virginia Tufte, in her Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, calls an echo; as if words ruminate on their sound relations with other words, as if words just want to return home.19

Heade eventually gave up on his book The Gems of Brazil, though not of course his painting, and also his monomania with hummingbirds and flora, which provided him with some income, though no fame, until his death, apparently, of heart failure, in the late summer of 1904, in Saint Augustine, Florida, where he had set up home with his wife, Elizabeth, three years prior, and which you can read about, if you wish, in the biographical and critical writings of Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr.20 

Sometimes, when I am bored or find myself with time on my hands, I like to imagine Didymus painting our summer garden. The summer one, that is, with winberries, blackberries, and strawberries, with lily of the valley, jasmine, and bluebells; and he will merge it with the gardens of the past, brimming with magnolia, passion, and cherry. All still in the summer sunshine, all gleaming. 

And perhaps this will be my end, after all. Except, a few summers later I find what I think is a Bewick Wren, Thryomanes bewickii, in my kitchen, named after the noted English bird engraver, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), buckling its alder plume against the ceilings and the walls. Frantic, her little heart was pushing out from the interiors of the chest, all eyes popping, as if to say to me, make room.21 I watched her for a moment, still trying to summon up the courage to act, and in that moment I didn’t think of WG Sebald’s view of Nabokov’s unknown species: Just as they appear to us,. Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose.22 No, that came much later, in my drafting, as did the realization that the wren was probably the more common, though equally as beautiful, Carolina variety, Thryothorus ludovicianus. I took a breath, opened the window screen, and watched her flutter out into the air.

Footnotes

1 William Gass, Tests of Time: Essays of William Gass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 300

2 Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonńe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, 61.

3 John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on American Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, 55. 

4 Each time I read this line from Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” I am moved almost to tears. The South Wales Valleys, the coal dust inbreathed, the coughing, coughing of my father, the blackness in the air, suspended of course. Suspended now, for me, in my memory, as I write this.

5 I have taken the quotation from the Morbitorium’s website: https://www.morbitorium.co.uk. The list of shops are not in one place, but spread throughout the valley towns, as they are throughout most post-industrial landscapes these days. I use the list as a representation of this landscape.

6  From Philip Larkin’s poem “Dublinesque.” Collected Poems, London: Faber and Faber, 1988, 178.

7  I have borrowed, and added to, the list of hummingbird species in the index of Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonńe, 381.

8 Susan Howe, The Quarry. New York: New Directions, 2015, 19-20.

9 I should clarify. Audubon’s book, although a seminal contribution to American ornithology, did not focus exclusively on hummingbirds, as Heade planned to do. Despite his beautiful illustrations of hummingbirds, Gould had never actually seen one until 1857, when he traveled from his home in England to the United States. Heade felt that his project had the edge over those two books.

10 Stebbins, The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 74. The reader may also find the papers of Bartlett held by the John Carter Brown Library particularly helpful. These papers include several letters from Heade.

11 See Martin Johnson Heade Papers, 1853-1904, box 1, folder 9: Notebook on Hummingbirds, circa 1881, circa 1864. There is full access here.

12 Didymus, a doubting Thomas, reflects Heade’s mood at this time. Didymus means twin, a word from the ancient Greek, as the disciples commented on the likeness between Thomas and Christ.

13 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1999 (1947), 9. I was first introduced to Nabokov’s quotation in WG Sebald’s Campo Santo.

14 Mitchell Faddis. “Heart Rate: The Hummingbird Effect.” Heart Rhythm 10.8 (2013): 1159–1160. Web.

15 The view that there are at least two Pans with different personalities is put forward by Patricia Merivale in her seminal work, Pan the Goat God: His Myth in Modern Times. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. I have avoided taking the risk of adding the Green Man here, though his presence may add a sense of calm and welcome to the triage of figures and their meanings.

16 Walt Whitman, “Assurances,” from Leaves of Grass: The “Death-Bed” Edition, NY: The Modern Library, 1994. 554-55 (554)

17 Richard Paul, “A Neglected Painter’s Kingdom Calm: Martin Johnson Heade’s Perfectly Quiet Scenes Offer the Anatomy of Stillness.” Washington Post, February 13th 2000. P. g08. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-02/13/010r-021300-idx.html.

18 William Carlos Williams, “Facing the Universe of Sound: William Carlos Williams on the Art of Poetry.” The Paris Review, issue 32, summer-fall 1964.

19 Elizabeth Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire: CT: Graphics Press, 2007

20 I have read three of Stebbins’s books for this essay, which I would recommend to the reader wishing to know more about the life and work of Martin Johnson Heade. The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonńe, which I have cited earlier; The Life and Works of Martin Johnson Heade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975; Martin Johnson Heade. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1999. This latter book is particularly helpful, as it also has essays from other Heade scholars, including Janet L. Comey, Karen E. Quinn, and Jim Wright as well as the gorgeous reproductions of Head’s paintings.

21 I have borrowed these words from Walter Benjamin’s “The Destructive Character” because they reflected my depression at the time. Take another look at Benjamin’s essay and, also, his “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” and you will notice the analogy between the destructive character and birds, of things hovering, of wings spread, of mouths agape. It is a resonant image, though not one I wish to pursue, at least for the moment.

22 Sebald, “Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov,” in Campo Santo. New York: Random House, 2005. Trans. Anthea Bell. 141-49 (142)

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Robert Ward teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University. Originally from Wales, Robert moved to Providence with his wife in 2009. He enjoys teaching, writing, and gardening.