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Ecotone Three: Field Notes
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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161 ecotone three The act of observation, be it of a micro-particle, a primitive society, or a stretch of deserted landscape, has already altered that which is being observed— altered it by the mere fact of the observer’s presence. – Dennis Lee, Savage Fields (7) FIELD NOTES I forget: why are there broken birds behind me; words, goddammit, words. – John Thompson, “Ghazal VIII” (114) If to record is to love the world, let this be an entry. – Roo Borson, “Snake” (24) The field guide might sometimes help with a species identification in the field, but often there isn’t time to flip, find, and identify in situ. Often the field guide is of more use after returning from the field. Once BC has had a chance to review whatever notes he’s made in the day’s margins, as it were. C. Bernstein advises the birder to “[c]ompare your sighting with books only after the notes are made. Having the book at hand during the note-taking will only interfere with the process.… The description often is that of the picture in the book, not of the actual live bird seen” (“Details” 2). Once observed, though, identifying characteristics—field marks—have a tendency simply to disappear, as memories often do. Something else is needed, BC thinks, to bring marks and guide together: call it, as Gabriele Helms does,“striv[ing] for affirmative praxis” by way of note-taking (46); embrace Ricou’s argument that “the act of writing, and rewriting, is essentially a mode of thinking” 162 • Ecotone Three (Arbutus 135). Making notes in the field enables a mode of thinking that destabilizes the imperial authority of the written word—and hence of conventional knowledge. Paradoxically, by making notes toward naming, BC engages a “radical process of demythologizing the systems that threaten to define” the natural world, effectively “uninvent[ing] the world,” as Robert Kroetsch would have it (“Unhiding” 394). For BC, on first arriving on the west coast, the idea of making notes was persistently absent, even when he consulted The Sibley Guide to Birds, which he’d purchased on a whim in Toronto. He made a mental note on the flight pattern of a bird silhouetted against a typical northwest coast sky (grey) and flying from treetop to treetop, the familiar level flight punctuated by brief flapping, with wingbeats almost entirely below the horizontal plane. Reaching page 351 in the Sibley guide, BC saw the Steller’s jay and the blue jay side by side for the first time, and saw too for the first time, on the Steller’s, that conspicuously ravenish hood—on the page and not in the field. Birds, whether on the west coast of North America or elsewhere, bring us, all of us, closer to the observation of natural life forms if we, all of we, so choose to be brought. This place, this bioregion, strikes BC as both a theoretically and a geographically significant marker of newness relative to human and geological history. Or, not newness exactly, but of the impulse to stop expanding and take a walk in a place newly acknowledged, to turn and look at one’s environment. Tues 17 Oct, walking dog after dinner, noticed long line of crows flying east— hundreds, too many to count; is this a usual occurrence? Wed 18 Oct, walked dog at same time as yesterday—saw crows again, tho not quite as many—where are they going? BC consults books, searching for a key or a legend—some piece of a map he doesn’t yet hold. He reads George Levine: “I take the arbitrariness of naming as part of the pleasure of birding, a continuing revelation of the ways in which ‘nature’ and human conventions and consciousness are always intermingled and never in entirely satisfactory relation” (Lifebirds 153). Identifying a particular bird correctly, as McKay suggests, does have “its indisputable satisfactions” as “one of the pleasures of system to which us big brains are addicted” (V 84), but the name addict might presume his pleasure is more important, ontologically, than it is. [34.236.152.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:41 GMT) Field Notes • 163 Sitting down in a small clearing, BC recalls reading Martin Heidegger in an undergrad seminar. Heidegger’s reading of Stefan George’s poem “Words” resonates here, albeit in tension with BC’s birding tendencies. George’s poem ends with the line “Where word breaks off no thing may...