Painting by Paul Vesely

Singing A Bird’s Song

Begin.

Never ask where a call ends

and a song begins.

Before the sediment of the west

pulls down the sun,

sing until your feathers burn.

So you have only five notes:

try purity of tone.

Sing the weight the moment

of a single branch can hold.

Don Welch

There’s is much to be said about purity of tone, about singing the weight the moment of a single branch can hold. I’ve seen this truth play out in many ways, through many means. The painting above gives testimony to the weight of a single-haired brush and the purity one can find in the remarkable tone of oak and paint.

My husband paints ducks. With the tiniest, finest brush imaginable. One stroke of oil paint at a time, each stroke laid lovingly beside and layered purposefully upon others until a mallard drake and hen take shape. He knows the anatomy of a duck: the particular way a wing looks folded or in flight, the just-right green and iridescence that plays around the neck, the browns that hunker down into the brush, and the watchful, wary eyes. There are no details he misses as he works from blank oak to duck.

Here is a love that passes understanding for most of us who can appreciate a fine piece of art–a creature so keenly captured in paint–but who cannot begin to know or feel the very essence of all that makes a duck. But herein lies one paradox of purity: in its singleness, it speaks largely. Paul understands this, for his ducks take on the weight the moment of a single branch can hold. And yet, they take on a larger life that speaks of beauty and movement and instinct.

Native American poet and journalist, A. D. Posey, writes: At the end of your story, you get down to the purity of it all. It’s like distilling something. In a world gone macro, a world in which most move quickly, washing theirs and others’ lives with broad strokes, the distilled thing has become increasingly rare. To get down to the purity of it all? This would suggest that there is something precious to be found in distillation. And sadly, many have turned up their noses at such work, preferring instead, the quicker, easier work on the surface of things. The purity and depth to be uncovered with single-haired brushes is foreign to such folks.

When you can only sing five notes, however, for some, purity may give way to obsession. Yet another paradox of purity is this: that the love of a single thing or person can be both wonderful and terrible, both life-giving and life-taking. In Old School: A Novel, Tobias Wolff writes:

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

Purity’s roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self? Such is Alymer’s love of Georgianna in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.” Alymer is an older, reclusive scientist–clearly not ideal husband material for the young and beautiful Georgianna.  Her beauty is nearly flawless, but for a tiny hand-shaped birthmark upon her cheek. Alymer is fortunate to win her hand in marriage. That is, until he comes to regard her birthmark as a slightest possible defect, a visible mark of earthly imperfection. 

Preoccupation with his wife’s imperfection leads to obsession. Hawthorne writes:

. . . he [Aylmer] found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamped ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.

And so it is that Aylmer, armed with obsession for purity and devotion to science, offers to remove his wife’s birthmark, her fatal flaw of humanity. Out of love and unwavering belief in her husband’s scientific prowess, she consents. Ultimately, Aylmer prevails, and the birthmark fades completely. But so does Georgianna. The death of his now-perfect wife leaves him awestruck and alone. Hawthorne leaves readers with this insight into Alymer:

Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

Alas, to find the perfect future in the present! The pursuit of purity demands a profounder wisdom, a wisdom that, tragically, Aylmer and Adolf Hitler did not have. Their eyes were locked on the perfect, Aryan future, and in pursuing this, they forsook their hearts for their heads. Committed to a single purpose, they pushed towards a pure ideal, leaving lives in their wake.

This profounder wisdom is one that Olympic runner and missionary, Eric Liddell, understood as not crushing the instincts but having the instincts as servants and not the master of the spirit (The Disciplines of the Christian Life). Both Liddell and Henry David Thoreau understood that the master of the spirit was not man, but God, and, as Thoreau writes, that man flows as once to God when the channel of purity is open (Walden).

If you only have five notes at your disposal or you only desire to sing five notes, there can be wonderful, life-giving purity when your eyes are fixed on the master of the spirit. And whether this comes from a stroke of a paint brush or a word, this distillation may reveal the essence of something both singular and universal.

Bring your best eyes and ears, bring your heart and soul. The channel of purity is open for those who will enter.