The Emperor’s New Bird

Noel Reynolds, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 I love the notion of per­formed spon­tane­ity, in that it gets at the fact that what seems nat­ur­al, or impro­vi­sa­tion­al, is still a prod­uct of deci­sion mak­ing, and still leads to a con­scious­ly made thing—a mechan­i­cal nightin­gale rather than the real bird that hap­pens to fly in the window.”

Diane Seuss inter­view with Jesse Nathan in McSweeney’s https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/diane-seuss

1) The mechan­i­cal bird per­forms. Poets perform—mostly on the page. But there is some­thing about hear­ing the music of the poem out loud that will always bring me more than the writ­ten word on the page.

2) Only the unpaired male nightin­gale sings at night. Though so often in poet­ry it is the female bird who is invoked. A mis­at­tri­bu­tion that con­founds the usu­al (mis)assignment of female voic­es to their male counterparts.

3) Have you ever seen a real nightin­gale? It is a dull brown, mid­dle sized bird whose only out­stand­ing asset is its song. When the males sing at night, it’s a macho thing: call­ing all the girls. “Come fuck me, come fuck me.” In the fairy tale when the ser­vant girl takes the court to see the actu­al nightin­gale they are dis­ap­point­ed to see the dull lit­tle bird. One of the ser­vants opines that sure­ly see­ing all of the won­der­ful, pow­er­ful peo­ple of the court must have fright­ened all the col­or out of the actu­al bird. Because, don’t we all get fright­ened out of our col­ors sometimes?

4) I sing my wild­ness like that lit­tle mechan­i­cal nightin­gale. It is love­ly per­for­mance. But every moment of it is cal­cu­lat­ed with an eye towards safe­ty. A mechan­i­cal nightin­gale will give a per­fect per­for­mance. As long as you don’t ask it to fly.

5) machine (n.) “an appa­ra­tus that works with­out the strength or skill of the work­man.”
Which can’t be said of poet­ry? Or can it? Is poet­ry a machine? If it is, what is it a machine for? Does a machine have to have a pur­pose? Are machines with­out pur­pose art? What does this machine do for me? This machine makes… mean­ing? But does it make sense? How can the machine of poem makes sense? What does it make sense of? Why is this frag­ment all ques­tions? And no answers? Or mean­ing? If there is any mean­ing? I guess.

6) A machine allows you to repli­cate a thing. A screw, a table leg, a bird’s song. But a repli­ca­tion is nev­er a new thing. Not entirely.

7) Bird songs are hard to rep­re­sent in text. Various field guides use var­i­ous meth­ods to depict the songs. Some use descrip­tives, some use mnemon­ics, some use a vague­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive spec­tro­grams. The Sibley Guides use descrip­tive words like: trill, buzz, upslur, downslur, musi­cal, rich, thin, full, and squeaky. The Audubon web­site likes ono­matopoeia: “soft thwacks,” “coo­ing,” “zip-zabbling,” and “chan­nel­ing car alarms and baby bab­bles” and mnemon­ics: “who cooks for you” and “wichity-witchy-woo.” Though they are increas­ing­ly just putting up audio files and you can lis­ten for your­self with out the inter­me­di­ary of the attempt to sig­ni­fy in text.

8) I won­der about the impos­si­bil­i­ty of spon­tane­ity in a machine. Does this imply an impos­si­bil­i­ty of spon­tane­ity in poet­ry? In art in gen­er­al? If we are mak­ing machines to make mean­ing, or con­vey emo­tion, or state facts even, can we be spon­ta­neous? I don’t think so. We may use arti­fice to make it look spon­ta­neous but it is nev­er past the first draft spon­ta­neous. Is even a first draft spon­ta­neous? We are, from the out­set, arrang­ing the words and their mean­ings in con­scious pat­terns, even at our most free form. We are mechan­ics. Our tools are syn­tax and arrange­ment, our mate­ri­als are words. We build a machine with hope. Though what we hope for is not always clear.

9) The last frag­ment that I meant to write was about the won­ders of the mechan­i­cal, the lack of a soul in the won­der­ful mechan­i­cal, and how easy this makes it to see the whole of the works. I’d only imply the con­verse: how dif­fi­cult it is to under­stand the liv­ing (souled) when so much is hid­den from us. But I was too busy won­der­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a mechan­i­cal bird that sings as well as the real thing.
————

End Note:
Hans Christian Andersen wrote a fairy tale called The Nightingale (In Danish the less love­ly sound­ing “Nattergalen”) About an emper­or and the song of the nightin­gale… about a real bird and a mechan­i­cal bird.

Wikipedia dry­ly describes the charm­ing sto­ry thus:


The Emperor of China learns that one of the most beau­ti­ful things in his empire is the song of the nightin­gale. When he orders the nightin­gale brought to him, a kitchen maid (the only one at court who knows of its where­abouts) leads the court to a near­by for­est, where the nightin­gale agrees to appear at court; it remains as the Emperor’s favorite. When the Emperor is giv­en a bejew­eled mechan­i­cal bird he los­es inter­est in the real nightin­gale, who returns to the for­est. The mechan­i­cal bird even­tu­al­ly breaks down; and the Emperor is tak­en death­ly ill a few years lat­er. The real nightin­gale learns of the Emperor’s con­di­tion and returns to the palace; where­upon Death is so moved by the nightin­gale’s song that he allows the Emperor to live.

You can read the whole of the sto­ry with love­ly pic­tures by Edmund Dulac here.

In Autumn

yellow moon
	becomes
amber mum
	becomes
question of bridges that go nowhere
	becomes
smell of paper, hot out of the printer
	becomes 
something golden that 
was alive just yesterday
but today smells newly, richly dead.

First pub­lished in Door is a Jar