to acquire a goshawk is a major decision
I finally read The Goshawk, T.H. White’s terrible, spectacular remembrance of the time he “lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird.”
he leapt into this project “because the faculties exercised were those which throve among trees rather than houses1, and because the whole thing was inexpressibly difficult.”
it sounds like such an obscenity, to catch and train someone like this. maybe it was once a necessary obscenity (man’s gotta eat!) (and moralizing is not my point here!), but it’s still wretched with envy and awe and ridicule and fear. he was hurting this goddamn hawk so much, in part by mastering it and in perhaps larger part by botching the job. and he was flailing around only sort of seeing the actual goshawk along the way
“At one time he would be a maniac, his eyes sunken and glaring, his brows frowning, his mouth open, his expression that of a crazy archduke in Bavaria. At the next, beak closed, brows raised, eyes normal, he was nothing more formidable than an infant Gos, ridiculous, inquisitive, confiding, almost a despicable pet.”
ah sorta like my old cat, who was absolutely a person except sometimes I’d blink and she’d become alien and terrifying and unknowable to me
“The Taming of the Shrew2 was pure hawk-mastery and must have been a play of enormous vividness to a generation which understood the falcon. It was as if a great dramatist of today were to write a play in which, by subjecting her to the applied laws of tennis, or golf, or cricket (or whatever footling theoretical game might be said to be the public favourite nowadays), a woman were brought under her husband’s government. Petruchio tamed his Kate as an austringer did his hawk, and he was conscious of the fact.”
(rule 34 implies someone has already thought of this but for pickleball (I swear I wrote the preceding sentence before googling around and discovering Dinkers Taming Bangers (this is not porn)))
this has all been rattling around in my head with old memories of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which in some ways is the same story told from the perspective of the hawk (if the hawk was a young woman living quietly alone with her magic and mythical beasts, that is). There, when the king’s wizard takes her name and is poised to control her thoughts, she asks:
“‘Leave one small place for freedom in my mind.’
‘To love?’
She lifted her eyes. ‘To hate,’ she whispered. Her fingers circled the cup, kneading the wrought silver. ‘In that one small corner I could breed such a hate that would tear Eldwold apart stone by stone and leave a wasteland for the Sirle Lords to bicker over for centuries. I would bring that King to his knees as he brought me to mine.’
- Patricia McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
“As I put Gos to bed in the darkness, a new thought emerged. This time it was a quotation: To scorn delights and live laborious days. But it presented itself the other way about, saying: To live laborious days for their delight.” (emphasis mine)
I love the way he describes enjoying the difficulty and the detail of the work, and what it means to just want to do a true thing in this world.
“It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant3 only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter... Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality4. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship… it was the human contribution to the universe… to say Yes when it was, and No when it was; to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race... Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.”
And yet — “I could never make up my mind whether I was the master,” White says. Even beyond the bit where hurt people hurt people birds, I wonder if he just couldn’t hold both truths in his mind at once - that you can never fully control another being, and that it can be done well enough anyways but only if (as with any farce) you’re prepared to fully commit to the bit
there’s a whole sidequest we could go on here about the value of committing to the bit in other contexts and how to trick yourself into doing things, but just to choose one thread of that, I love this article where the author decided to take advantage of “the ironic-action-to-default-thought-process pipeline” to become a gym bro:
“I would simply go [to the gym] ironically! I would embody the bro lifestyle, culturally appropriate their happiness, and then I would become both swole and happy.”5
- Kelsey McKinney, Bro Summer Waits For Us All
this approach tends to work out pretty well for me, too
stumbling back into the light out of my time living in this book, I’m of course tempted to claim that someday when I have time I’ll obsessively learn and then give falconry a whirl myself. And who knows, maybe I’d succeed - I’m pretty good at getting really intense about something for a few months and making it work. But what then?
As Stallman says, “to acquire a goshawk parrot is a major decision”
“There was a bas-relief of a Babylonian with a hawk on his fist in Khorsabad, which dated from 3000 years ago. Many people were not able to understand why this was pleasant, but it was. I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line… I grasped that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well defined as the nutty calf of his bas-relief leg, across the centuries.”
That image, of a long line of connection back through his predecessors, made me think of Liebling’s description of being connected to a great lineage of boxers throughout history by way of a series of punches to the nose.
“It is through Jack O’Brien, the Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae, that I trace my rapport with the historic past through the laying-on of hands. He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons, from whom he won the light-heavyweight title in 1906. Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan, with the bare knuckles, and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose.”
- A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science
and oh, like a cat or a baby (do you also get those moments when you catch yourself really vividly noticing knowing that there’s a whole other mind in there?), he does at times seem to get that part of the joy of the work is the opportunity to really learn to see and love a complex being outside of himself
“It was drowsy in the kitchen, with the music and the rain outside. I was stroking a murderer, a savage… A homicidal maniac: but now he was enjoying to be stroked. We were again in love.”
Bonus facts & phrases
Even black holes need to take a nap after a big meal sometimes (ScienceDaily)
The first true millipede wasn’t discovered until 2021 (Natural History Museum)
(obviously Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk is worth reading, too)
there exists a Japanese tampon named after Anne Frank
“I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are.” - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Addenda
You may recall that hard ticks (family Ixodidae) are named for ἰξός (Greek for birdlime). Birdlime also got mentioned in The Goshawk, because White tried using it to trap blackbirds:
“Since it is only illegal to take birds with bird lime, but not to manufacture or to advertise it, I can offer the experiences on this subject without fear of the dock… The secret was to spread it on straws or any small twigs [which] would catch on various parts of the bird, sticking from leg to wing and so forth, until he became too hampered for flight.”
(this stuff sounds AWFUL, horrifying that he can understand how it works and still decide that yeah, this is definitely one of those laws worth breaking) (I remember using glue traps for mice as a child AND THEN I GREW UP)
I love stories of living alone in the wilds! My Side of the Mountain, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The Golden Key… maybe Boxcar Children even counts, sort of
god I hate this play
Product manufacturers are required to consider all reasonably foreseeable uses and misuses of their products in order to avoid liability for unsafe design or failure to provide sufficient warnings or instructions.
“Funny feeling, isn’t it, when you bust a tough one? Triumph, sure. Maybe a little secret relief that you pulled it off. But there’s a fine sweet sadness in there, too, because now the golden moment is behind you. For a moment in there you were God… and now you’re just a guy who used to be God for a minute, and will be again some day.” –Spider Robinson, Callahan’s Lady
assisted by other solid bro advice, eg “If you feel bad, you're almost certainly hungry! Have a snack! See if that helps!”