Just Feathers and Bones

by STEVIE BELCHAK

At its heart, this is a story about birds. About their feathers. And their bones.

And, trust me, we will get there, but to get there, we must first talk about the trash.

Made of scrap metal, glass, and other base materials, Dutch artist Diet Wiegman’s intricately formed yet irregularly shaped “shadow sculptures” turn themselves on a pedestal in opposition of a fixed light. Their shiny limbs catch the glint. Their totemic bodies act as grates through which light passes on its way to a distant wall.

Throughout most of their journeys, these carousels transmit garish silhouettes. They are wild-haired, wild-handed forms—and then suddenly they slip.

Like a phoropter lens loosed upon an unsuspecting patient, the meaninglessness comes into meaning. Shapelessness takes shape.

Contrasted with the light, their at-one-time amorphous shadows turn into perfectly projected Renaissance masterpieces and playfully cast pop icons.

The David.

The Venus de Milo.

Michael Jackson moonwalking.

This week, T writes me from sea with the subject line, “Ocean.” His email echoes this header. Spare. Heavied by white space. Emptied of finer details.

As a partner of a military member, I’m asked to not ask for more information but to find shape in the shapelessness. And, I do. I shake meaning from absence. I knot arcs in tension, ensure narratives give rise from pressure—words blooming recklessly into myth.

In this email, T writes of a sunfish, orca, and shark. The parallel structure insists on the import of the first animal, of which I have never heard. I make a mental note to google the fish.

When I do, I smile.

The oddity of the sunfish would be something we would share a mutual love for. In some photos, it looks like one large, sideways palm—its unleavened back calloused like a flattened pastry. In others, it looks like the skeletal remains of an oyster. And, in a photojournalist’s series, it flips its stunted pectoral fins, gazes out with bulging eyes—looking perpetually scared, helplessly childlike, infantile.

I read on Wikipedia more about the sunfish and learn that it swims on its side, on the surface of the water. Its profile presented like a wide coin turned up to the sun.

Later, T will write again—not of the sun, but of smoke and of fog. At first the two words knock against one another for comparison’s sake, then they are swapped once, twice, three times—creating a disorienting effect.

In a third email, bedtime comes early, which means the seas are impossibly big.

In a fourth, he signs off, “Standard operations.”

At home, everything is anything but standard.

There is a call for patriotic education. A Supreme Court justice who stood for equality dies. I pull a tarot card with a red heart being stabbed indefinitely by three swords.

And, then, there are the birds.

The dreams started after I read an article about birds dying during migration. In New Mexico, warblers, swallows, and bluebirds seemed to be falling out of the sky.[1]

Found on hiking trails and dotting missile ranges, the birds were dying by the hundreds. Their deaths were linked to the wildfires, to cold weather, to climate change.

For one week, tens of articles were published theorizing what could be causing such a die-off, and every one of those articles shared a similarly haunting image: eight little bodies in a tight line like eight little spears threaded through a necklace. Seven were bundled in tawny coats. The eighth was the color of citrine. A wide gold coin turned up to the sun.

While the story was alarming, it was the image that echoed in my mind. At first, the eight little birds reminded me of the sea glass and coral I collected as a child: crab-legged, three-limbed, and jagged-winged at my window. And then the glass and coral reminded me of my incessant need.

My need to count things, to keep things, to consume even more. Each original item acquired to fill a want, each subsequent item creating a distance from that original desire, feeling, thought.

A shadow of a remnant of a sliver of a shell.

Like my dreams each night, becoming sparer. Whiter. Emptied of detail.

In the first dream, I see a mother albatross feeding her babies. A gauze mask. A disposable glove. The fine wires of a fraying adapter.

These items read like pieces of bread or actual worms, and then suddenly they slip. Each shiny limb catching the glint, and then the shine falling—into a crook of wing, the frost of a beak.

In the second dream, T and I are returning from Mt. St. Helens, driving to the Wahkiakum Ferry which carries locals from Washington to Oregon. The late-afternoon sun is cutting itself on the pines, the gorge glistening under the heat. We are steeped in warmth when it hits with a thud. The four-foot wingspan of a bird hugging our windshield. Each lady finger of its wing unwrapping and vibrating, playing a staccato.

T slows down to throw the bird, but it is caught. He speeds up. Thud. Slows down. Thump. Speeds. Slows. Speeds and slows again.

The bird is lodged between the roof rack and our blue-backed Civic like a note caught gapped between two teeth. Leadened. Unmoving. And, likely, dead.

T picks up speed again—rapidly this time. The animal’s arms snag on the air like lifeless branches. And, then, we brake. Quickly. The bird slides off the glass, and then—as if by magic—flies straight into the air.

Shapelessness taking shape.

A wide gold coin.

At this point in the dream, we breathe a collective sigh of relief. 

And, then, we see animated waving. 

Two women in plastic lounge chairs on the side of the road. Two messy top knots, two frumpy shirts, one shared bottle of vodka. The women are shouting something about blood. About guts. About slits of fur, ruler lengths of hair.

And, then, a piece of cheek—my cheek—slides down our windshield.

Myth blooming recklessly out. 

In the third dream, I am at my own sky burial.

My chest is covered in a blue PVC breastplate, my legs in shiny cerulean vinyl. My arms are colored fuchsia by a rainbow of bangles. I am like some futurist’s garden—plastic abundance resting on wooden stilts, a stretch of cloth. 

Then a shadow grows in size over me, like pebbles or stones walling one by one at the mouth of a river. And in an instant, the water pushes where the cold breaks—the shadow caving in on my body, coming into full view.

What looks like a bird is actually a man hovering above me. He wears a host of surgical tools as appendages. Speculum, forceps, vise, retractor. A tiny scalpel as a fingernail. His hands and feet clamp down around me, begin to pull me apart wildly yet precisely—tendon peeled back from muscle, tissue torn from tissue, bone taken from bone.

And then I am stuffed. Roughly. With something like the past. With my grandmother’s beads and feathers, my mother’s long threads and closet of fabrics, her fear of crossing rivers. And then I am sewn back into myself, full of this longing.

My spine is stitched at my nipple, a tooth is pressed down into my aorta, my hands—cut at their wrists—are planted along my gums: a vase of red-stemmed roses.

And then the man peels back with a smile, is somehow pulled off of me.

That’s when I see it: a flock of birds—real birds—taking form in the distance. They gather like a mouth of arrows, a needlepoint bleeding black in the sky. And then they descend. Slowly.

Like sorrow.

Like snowflakes fattened by time, by the prospect of arrival.

And as they slow, their feathers come undone and escape them.

Confetti floating in fistfuls.

Samaras wafting on air.

And my eyes begin to cloud over, taken by the sedate chaos, the violence of the scene’s leisure.

A phoropter lens loosing a colored bead.

I learn that sky burials have been practiced for thousands of years but that in some places this longstanding ritual is under threat.  

In India, the Parsis consider water and land to be sacred, a dead body too large of a pollutant to be cast out to sea, buried in the dirt. And so they have built structures of excarnation.

In their Towers of Silence, corpses are laid out in three circular wells. A ring for men. A ring for women. A smaller, inner ring for children. After providing food for the birds, the bones of the dead are collected in another well at the center of each respective tower. The remains set to mingle with lime, then with charcoal, sand, soil.

Several of these towers still sit tall in Mumbai. Open amphitheaters wreathed in bodies. Bodies waiting to be taken to the sky.

And the bodies continue to wait.

The vultures have all but disappeared. From the city. From the state. Over the last thirty years.

Their disappearance is likely due to the introduction of diclofenac. A painkiller designed to ease the suffering of diseased cattle, it has proven deadly—specifically to vultures. These birds’ beaks and hunger now have to be replaced: by chemicals, by solar reflection panels, and, in some instances, cremation.

A shadow of a remnant of a sliver of a shell.

One piece of plastic, two pieces of plastic, three dead birds.

As I write this, it is the year 2020.
A pandemic is spreading.
Fires are burning.
Birds are dying.

And, I am alone—reading.

I read about a model trying to buy back her image.[2]
I read that women are now commodifying their bodies for social media.[3]

I read about social media.

I read that social media is actually “an economy of the self.”[4]
That sharing a selfie is a transaction.[5]
I read more about selfies.
Then I read about self-control, self-restraint, self-discipline.

I read about self-care.

That self-care was once seen as an act of political warfare.
That it is now something to be bought and sold.
I read about buying essential oils.
I read about buying mindfulness kits.

I read about meditation apps.

I read these apps’ websites.
One says I can find my focus.[6]
One says it’s possible to “increase [my] capacity for joy.”[7]
One says I can join Gisele Bündchen to “reignite hope.”[8]
For just ten days and under $9.99, I can stress less, breathe easier, and sleep better. 

I read about sleep.

I read that it is now a multi-billion-dollar industry.
I read that once a necessity, sleep is now a luxury.[9]
I read that our lack of sleep is a slow form of self-euthanasia.[10]
So, poor people are killing themselves.

I read about euthanasia.

I read about the history of euthanasia.
I read about the etymology of euthanasia—stemming from Greek eu meaning “well” and thanatos meaning “death.”

I read about death.

I read that death is a big business in America.
I read that there is such a term as “funeral merchandise.”
I read about the cost of said merchandise.
I read how there are regulations about remains and how they are handled.
That even death is standardized.

I read about what is not standard.

I cannot have a sky burial.
I cannot have a funeral pyre.
And in some places I cannot have an eco-friendly box.[11]

I read about the cost of boxes.
I read about the cost of cremation.

I read between the lines.
To finally rest I am expected to pay in full.

And then I read what I think is about death in a book of poems.
I read Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake.

The first poem in the book, “January”, ends:

I guess mostly I think
about how people
turn back into objects
and how we don’t know
what to do with those objects,
so in the end
we pay someone
to put them somewhere else.

And this makes me think.

I think of the ways boundless beings become bounded by a body. How a little yellow bird becomes a cold yellow gem.

I think of constructs and definitions, of shapeliness and our need for it.

I think it is no coincidence that our fear of death rose with industrialization, peaked with commodification.

I think we let death’s formlessness bloom recklessly in our minds.

That we have a fear of that which can’t be put into a box or put “somewhere else.”

A fear of all things transgressive.

My mother’s fear. Sewn into all of us.

The fear of crossing rivers.

Marie Curie once said, “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

Riddled by fear for most of my existence, I have worked to make a life out of trying to understand.

This past year, with a second major surgery on the horizon, I was cloaked in terror and so I did what I do best. I pored over medical literature. I contemplated every step of the procedure, ruminated over every detail of what happens when you are “put under.”

In my compulsion, I learned that any sudden movement made by the patient—a twitch, a hiccup, a sneeze—could prove fatal on the operating table. That, to combat this sort of mishap, paralytics are used.

Designed to relax all muscles including the diaphragm to the point of immobility, use of paralytics also demands the use of a ventilator, a breathing tube being placed. 

I’ll never forget the first time the hollow plastic was inserted inside me. I had just begun to count backwards, when the anesthesiologist pressed his thick fingers hard and fast to my windpipe.  My last memory before the amorphous black was of the immense pressure, and the thought: “He’s choking me.”

Still, it wasn’t this memory that propelled my ravenousness but rather the thought of emerging from darkness frozen yet fully conscious.

Doctors don’t prepare you for the possibility of waking up from sedation. Yet, for every thousand surgeries, at least one patient will become fully aware mid-procedure.[12]

Some of these patients have brief, vague recollections of themselves in their laparoscopic beauty. Others remember specific moments, recalling their surroundings in precise detail. Most say they experience a feeling of pressure, and all are unable to move or communicate when they surface from their deep sleep.

I imagine the feeling of startling awake on a cold table to be similar to that of being buried alive. Or picked apart mid-air.

Tools gathering like a mouth of arrows above. And, then descending.

Like birds.

It’s been days since the headline fell out of the news, but I can’t help but revisit one particular article about the birds.[13]

This article reports that thousands in the Southwest had inexplicably died.

It claims the carcasses found had little fat or muscle mass, that many of the birds had appeared to have nose-dived mid-air.

“They’re literally just feathers and bones,” reads a quote.

The article, like so many others, tries on different hypotheses:

The birds were re-routed farther inland to the desert due to the coastal fires.

Drier conditions led to a decline in insects, a critical food source for the birds.

A September cold spell only made the conditions worse.

In the end, it couldn’t be helped: the wildfires damaged their lungs.

Two pieces of plastic. Two plumes of smoke. Two women waving.

I awake in the middle of the night sweating, again. 

Another series of dreams.

Mother albatross. Disposable glove. The gorge. The wings. The man. His glittering tools. And, I realize that the stretched cloth of my sky burial is actually an operating table, that this is my greatest fear.

Being in the light when I should be in the dark.

A wide gold coin turned up to the sun.

The next morning following my dreaming, I rise to my alarm. I make instant coffee and toast, then pull the Page of Swords. After, I see I have an email from T.

Another sunfish spotted—floating like a lily pad, recharging for a longer and deeper dive.

This is how they feed, he explains. 

Their totemic bodies acting as grates, transmitting garish silhouettes. 

Standard operations.

Endnotes

1. Simon Romero, “New Mexico Mystery: Why Are So Many Birds Dropping Dead?”
The New York Times, September 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/us/dead-birds-new-mexico-colorado.html.

2. Emily Ratajkowski, “Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her own image?” New York Magazine, September 15, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/article/emily-ratajkowski-owning-my-image-essay.html#_ga=2.47295143.1225535691.1621093808-278204806.1621093807.

3, 4, 5. Marcie Bianco, “Feminism’s greatest obstacle in the digital age is the commodification of women’s bodies.” Quartz, April 17, 2016, https://qz.com/658036/feminisms-greatest-obstacle-in-the-digital-age/.        

6. “Meditation and Sleep Made Simple.” Headspace, accessed October 1, 2020, www.headspace.com/.

7. “Mindfulness Meditation Courses with Dan Harris and Joseph Goldstein.” Ten Percent Happier, accessed October 1, 2020, www.tenpercent.com/.

8. “Hope In Times of Uncertainty.” Insight Network, Inc, accessed October 1, 2020, insighttimer.com/gisele/guided-meditations/hope-in-times-of-uncertainty.

9. Jacob Rosenberg, “A Solid Night’s Sleep Is The New Luxury Good. Have Fun Affording It.” Observer, July 31, 2018, https://observer.com/2018/07/wellness-boom-in-bed-sleep-new-luxury-good/.

10. Lindsey Tramuta, “How Sleep Became the Ultimate Luxury.” Fortune, May 31, 2018, https://fortune.com/2018/05/31/how-sleep-became-the-ultimate-luxury/.

11. Alex Brown, “More People Want A Green Burial, but Cemetery Law Hasn’t Caught Up.” Stateline | The Pew Charitable Trusts, March 8, 2021, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/03/08/human-composting-gains-ground.

12. “Anesthesia Awareness (Waking Up) During Surgery.” American Society of Anesthesiologists, accessed March 1, 2021, https://www.asahq.org/madeforthismoment/preparing-for-surgery/risks/waking-up-during-surgery/.

13. Phoebe Weston, “Birds ‘falling out of the sky’ in mass die-off in south-western US.” The Guardian, September 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/16/birds-falling-out-of-the-sky-in-mass-die-off-in-south-western-us-aoe.

Additional Sources

Karkaria, Bachi. “Death in the city: How a lack of vultures threatens Mumbai’s ‘Towers of Silence’” The Guardian, January 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/26/death-city-lack-vultures-threatens-mumbai-towers-of-silence.

Madievsky, Ruth. “January.” Emergency Brake. Tavern Books, 2015. 

Walker, Shaun. “The Last of the Zoroastrians.” The Guardian, August 6, 2020.