Murmurations

It’s windier here in the mountains than it used to be. For a long while there it looked like A. and I would become wind chime people. We even had a wind chime story. Here it is:

Once, early in our homeownership, we went to a local plant nursery called B.B. Barns to outfit our new yard. B.B. Barns is not the sort of place that caters to the thrifty. It’s a long drive and you’ll spend money. We were very much working class at the time, so the trip represented something of a splurge. In that spirit, we decided at the last minute to add a $75 wind chime to our cart.

It didn’t get rung up. The cashier overlooked it amid the welter of starts and saplings and soil amendment. I did not overlook it. I saw the whole thing happening and said nothing. After we’d made the thrilling trek through the door and across the parking lot and achieved the asylum of our car I affected a kind of whistling Can you believe what we got away with? thing and A. was startled to learn we’d pinched the chimes.

I wonder if there is a term for this variety of theft (besides chime crime)—executed in public with only passive subterfuge. A larceny of omission rather than commission. There were three of us involved in the transaction, but I alone was in on it.

Anyhow, it didn’t keep. In order for the open wound of a sin to scab over and disappear you have to forget about it for a stretch of time. Wind chimes don’t permit such a luxury. They’re uniquely suited to the freshening of guilt. Even the slightest, most delicious summer breeze occasioned remorse. The chimes were a tell-tale heart thumping in the shade of the porch until I drove to B.B. Barns, admitted my “error” and paid for them.

I liked this anecdote for what it said about me. He’s a sly boots but he has a good heart. You’d better keep your eye on him. But the story dropped out of circulation, how they do, and I don’t believe I remembered it upon removing most our wind chimes from the porch a couple years ago. By then we’d accumulated an additional four or five in a range of sizes and moved to the house next door, which had flipped our front porch from east- to west-facing. I do not pretend to understand the meteorological factors at work, but the chimes were all the time batshit with wind.

Do our neighbors hate us? I remember asking one time from the tranquility of our living room as a steady wind battered the outside. Is this nuts?

I left two hanging—the largest and the smallest of them—and stashed the rest in the crawl space. I’m thinking about this today because it stormed here this morning and A. and I had the rare small hours talk in the howling dark. Did you hear that wind? she asked. And I thought about how I could swear it didn’t used to be so windy.

The one that got away was at the Screen Door, the antique store a mile down the road. A wind chime serves a specific, singular purpose, but this piece was art, or a joke. It hung just inside the front door: an immense object, architectural, exuberantly vast. You’d rent a flat bed truck to get it home if you couldn’t afford a helicopter. I had a relationship with this “wind chime.” It belonged on the prow of a battleship or festooning Lady Liberty, so I liked imagining it at Tallboy. What did it sound like?

Among the flotsam of descriptions that surface now and then in the briny pudding of my brains is one belonging to the author Neal Stephenson, who characterized the sustained and solitary bonging of a large bell over a flat gray coastal European landscape as “gravid with doom.”

I could never bring myself to test its sound. This is a regret. It’s too late now. After 26 years in business the Screen Door sold to an apartment developer. Just high enough on the hill to have escaped the ravages of Helene with a commanding view of the flood, it was razed shortly thereafter.

I have deep ambivalence about the Baby Boomer generation nowadays, but I’m haunted by the prospect of their having to watch, in the eleventh hour of their lives, the world’s unraveling. (Just high enough on the hill to escape the ravages, razed shortly thereafter, etc.)

A friend and I were discussing the frog in boiling water metaphor. Many people seem to be waiting for climate change to happen as if it is an event that will crush us within the time constraints of a news cycle. Every news cycle that passes without our annihilation can then be tallied as evidence against its being an actionable crisis. But we’ve been conditioned by discount rates and news cycles and dopamine fixes to be terminally shortsighted. The crisis is hidden in its slowness. Inexorable, elephantine, geologic, irreversible. As with any other process that unfolds beyond our conscious control, as with falling asleep or waking up, we will arrive at our destination without having been aware of the transit. I suspect this is also how we’ll realize we’ve died.

This will hopefully give you some idea of the size of the wind chimes in question.

Fragment written in notebook after Helene: “The idea that God is a storm.”

I’ve been much distracted by the concept of murmurations recently. A. got me a book of photography for Christmas, all murmurations. black sun, it’s called, by Soren Solkaer. Birds in enormous swarming clouds, page after page of them. Searching for an analogy just now for their sheer numerousness I thought of cities—Phoenix in particular. Ha. Because the brain is a murmuration, too. Studying a dreaming one you could be browsing Solkaer: how it lights up all over in cascades of synaptic communication.

We took a walk in February on the Biltmore grounds and were blessed to share the day with a murmuration of red-winged blackbirds. They streamed murmuratingly onto a fallow corn field, an airy river of wings, flows of red-splashed black pouring onto the ground, silent with nibbling before, as one, pouring up and streaming murmuratingly into a particular tree, shards splintering off from the mass according to no discernible math, alighting elsewhere, often correcting their mistake after a time to merge with the larger group. We stood dumbstruck watching, trying to time their spates of eating and rests. In the video A. took on her phone you can hear us exclaim as the cloud rushes over our heads. It is one thing, and myriad. A fog that is also a symphony. My hunch is that in murmurations we are given a glimpse of a bottommost truth of existence.

Weather systems are murmurations. We understand areas of high and low pressure, can scry several days out with an accuracy that would’ve been considered deistic for most of our history. But the vectors and variables involved are too integrated, too multifarious for our grasp to exceed the superficial. We are dots in matrices of incalculable complexity, raising wetted fingers into the air.

First the wind gathers, then the storm falls, then your life is different.

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I don’t want to invoke his name, so I’ll just end like this: Originally this was a post about calling your representatives. I called mine yesterday. Two senators and a congressman. It was a snap. I left querulous messages.

“Think they will care?" asked a friend of mine, who did it too.

I suggested that if enough of us make ourselves heard it will become easier for them to do the right thing. And that’s true. Imagine a murmuration of regular citizens making calls, a simple task taken up all of a sudden and en masse. Imagine the pressure of it funneling into a single area code in D.C.

But it’s also true that, since we are every day constructing a past we will never be able to change, doing something today, however small, beats sitting at home fretting while the wind picks up. We’re all in on this transaction.