Murmuration

 

Hospital in May

Day 3 of hospitalisation was my birthday, the seventh of May. That’s the day when my cardiologist said “we are looking at 30 years here. We’ll talk again soon.” Bridie gave me new Derwent pastel pencils in a tin box, a packet of Smiggle twin tips, and two drawing books. Carol’s present was another kind of book, ‘Hungry Heart Roaming : an Odyssey of Sorts’ by the Cambridge Shakespeare scholar Charles Moseley. We had been enthusing about this book before any of the heart business started, so the title was apposite, not some secret message. It’s a memoir based entirely on travels he has made through his long life. Site-seeing is almost redundant, Moseley’s interest being in the meaning places gave him at different ages, personal connections rather than a pack of wow moments. The first hundred pages, for example, recount his honeymoon in Greece, sometime in the early sixties, interest being in personal encounters and the handmade past of word and construction, speaking to the present. Early on, he says that he had for a while considered an alternative title for his book, ‘Murmurations’. One description goes: “Then: across the level vastness of the Fen, against that bright sky, sudden, first one black speck, then another, then a whole cloud, like crowding thoughts, swirls and swoops, swift, now dense black … billowing as thundercloud … thousands upon thousands of starlings.” Day 25 of hospitalisation finds me in Rehabilitation on a picturesque hilltop of eastern Melbourne. At least two nurses have said I have the best room in the hospital, secluded and with vistas across large back gardens towards Kinglake. Both picture windows afford views all day, much to my surprise and delight, of smaller and larger murmurations, parading across housetops and treetops. I am not going to try and draw any of these murmurations, as their large curving shapes change so quickly in the air it is impossible to capture even an outline before the birds have glided into a new formation. Smiggles might make a nice abstract out of dot points, maybe, while the phone cannot get closer than the windowpane to catch the scale and movement of dozens of birds together in group flight. Instead, I prop my phone against the glass in hope of getting at least one fuzzy, nay thin, representation. More fun is playing what’s that bird. My Melbourne hilltop affords a sight of shape-shifting flocks of black wings, same as anywhere in the world. Cockatoos? Galahs? Pressing myself close to the window, I occasionally get lucky with identification. Moseley says: “The single starling never sees the dance of the murmuration. Just so, I, like a starling, know there is a dance out there but can only know the steps I myself take. So let me tell my story, my memory …”