H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

spectacularly impassive

Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.

It is a face in desperate need of safety, with certain knowledge that there is none.

laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill. But later these misapplied instincts stop being funny.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost.

The coffins, like the tie, made the small loves of life ridiculous in death, the business card made the memorial mundane. The laughter was because there was no way of incorporating these signs of life into the fact of death. I laughed because there was nothing else I could do.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories

It was more like gambling, though the stakes were infinitely bloodier. At its heart was a willed loss of control. You pour your heart, your skill, your very soul, into a thing – into training a hawk, learning the form in racing or the numbers in cards – then relinquish control over it. That is the hook. Once the dice rolls, the horse runs, the hawk leaves the fist, you open yourself to luck, and you cannot control the outcome. Yet everything you have done until that moment persuades you that you might be lucky. The hawk might catch her quarry, the cards might fall perfectly, the horse make it first past the post. That little space of irresolution is a strange place to be. You feel safe because you are entirely at the world’s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return.

Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds’ lead-time before despair crashes in.

And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything. It’s like living without sleep; eventually it will kill you.

In Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology he’d found a whole chapter on homosexuality. It held that the attitude of homosexuals was ‘that of people desirous of interfering with the flight of time’. Adler thought homosexuals were irresponsible because they refused to develop into heterosexual adulthood. But interfering with the flight of time? Words once read run deep.

I am convinced that if nobody had ever invented knots, nobody would ever have imagined magicians.

I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love. I tucked the card back into the bookshelf. ‘Love you too, Dad,’ I whispered.

Because she is not human. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.