Birds have a unique place in our cultural imagination. Observing their habits, our ancestors learned about home building, foraging, and partnership. Their presence inspired our earliest art forms and culture.
Today birds still teach us about sorrow and death, love and joy, and the beautiful power found in song, in singing. We’re also learning new lessons from birds, about intelligence, cognition, and language.
“The Nightingale” is one of Hans Christian Andersen lesser-known stories. It’s quirky and funny and an interesting reflection on the difference between art and artifice, nature and culture. I hope you enjoy the story.
“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”– Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Transcript of Celebrating the World: “The Nightingale” by Hans Christian Andersen
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
Don’t worry about a thing, every little things gonna be all right. And I’m gonna stop there because I don’t want to leave you with a terrible ear worm. But I couldn’t resist starting this episode with a little bit of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Reggae always makes me happy for one thing. And if you’re familiar with that song, you know that it’s called “Three Little Birds.” There are three little birds pitched by his doorstep, singing sweet songs of melodies pure and true, saying this is my message to you whoo whoo- don’t worry about a thing.
Now in the last couple of episodes, we have been looking at the prominent role that animals play in our mythologies. The stories that we tell about the other-than-human world, reveal our ideas about our own nature and our complicated relationship to our bodies and instincts and our mortality. These stories contain valuable information about the other-than-human world, and also about how our ancestors learned to live from the others and define what is human. In short, it is the world itself that is the basis for our ideas and theories and feelings in art, practical and poetic.
In today’s world, we are so immersed in centuries and centuries and centuries of human elaboration, that is human culture, that the natural world, the source of all of this, is relatively distant. And I think that’s one of the reasons that being in nature brings us a particular peace of mind. It’s not artificial. And in these times to be with what is natural, is refreshing.
I started with Marley’s song because I want to talk about birds. Birds are everywhere. And no matter where you live, you can spend time with birds and with bird song. I think bird song is a particular form of magic, magic for the heart and the soul.
In his marvelous book Becoming Animal, An Earthly Cosmology, David Abram writes about the fact that birds are always with us through their song. And he notes the nearly universal tendency of birds to sing at dawn and at dusk. He combines this behavior with the spinning of the world and observes that at every second some part of the world, some part of this beautiful planet is moving into dawn or into dusk. I have to share this passage with you. I think it’s so beautiful he writes, “Such is the strange world we inhabit: an immense sphere around whose surface two long lines of birdsong are steadily sweeping–always opposite one another, two breaking waves of vocal exuberance rolling ceaselessly around the planet.”
Ceaselessly around the planet. The Earth is continuously bathed in birdsong. I’ve been thinking about this because I moved to Fort Collins a few months ago, and I’m currently enjoying my first springtime here, and the walk that I take almost every day goes past some thickets of bushes and banks of trees that have been so full of blackbirds. Redwing blackbirds, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with their call, but I find it so extraordinarily cheerful and uplifting. The song of the blackbirds was the starting point for this episode.
Now, I went to a story source book that I have, and it’s a reference organized around different indices, ways that storytellers categorize stories by motif and by subject. And it’s a good resource to find stories, but also being kind of a story geek, I just find it interesting in and of itself. Anyway, I went to the subject index, to look for stories about birds. And I discovered that there were literally nine pages of stories about birds. So let me give you a little context for this. First of all, the index includes a very wide range of topics. For example, watching, cooking, the sun, water, pitchforks, humility, flower, corpse, you get the picture. Lots and lots and lots of subjects, and many animals, of course.
Now, what surprised me is that none of these topics, and none of the other animals come close to having the same volume, the volume of stories that have been inspired by birds. Dog, for example, has about one and a half pages. Ditto for the snake. Cat, bears, wolves, spiders, turtles– those all had one page of story references. And I was very surprised to find that the deer, which has been incredibly important to the human species and to human culture, only had about a half page.
Now, I’m not just talking about bird generally, I’m talking about types of birds as well. Nine pages that encompassed stories about a wide range of birds, from black birds and canaries, crows and ravens, ducks and geese, herons, kites, peacocks, owls, pigeons, eagles, robins, sapsuckers, swans, and sparrows.
Birds have a particular place in the human imagination. And one of the through lines, one of the important– maybe the most important– part of our relationship with birds is through their song, the conversation between birds, and between a bird and human listener.
Now the story that I want to tell you today is one of Hans Christian Anderson’s lesser-known fairy tales, called “The Nightingale.” Maria Tartar, who is the director of folklore at Harvard University, put this story on a list of fairy tales that she thinks deserve a wider recognition. And I agree. So I want to share that with you today. It’s going to be a little bit different because Hans Christian Andersen’s stories are what we call literary fairy tales, which means that we know the author, Hans Christian Andersen, and also that they originated as text. They aren’t text records of an oral tradition. The thing is, Andersen intended for his stories to be read out loud. So, I’m going to do that following Tatar’s translation of the story in her most excellent annotated collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales.
I invite you to relax and listen to the story. Notice the moment or the detail that catches your attention. This opening into the meaning of the story could be particularly useful for you right now.
“The Nightingale” by Hans Christian Andersen ….
There’s a lot to think about in Anderson’s little story. In particular, about the tension between human made culture and art, and the natural world that inspires it. I’d like to tell you, first of all, a little bit more about nightingales, and I’m referring here to Maria Tatar. The nightingale, which means “singer of the night,” is a song bird, reddish and brown plumage, found in Great Britain, Asia, Africa, and on the European continent. It has a very impressive range of whistles, and gurgles and trills. Although the nightingale sings both day and night, it’s the night song that is considered unusual because there aren’t very many birds that sing at night, most of them stop at dusk.
The nightingale has inspired a great many poets, and shows up in a number of myths. Most notable in the poetry category is John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Keats heard a nightingale singing in a friend’s garden a couple of years before he died at the age of 25. The poem “Ode to a Nightingale” is an extended meditation on death and human suffering, beauty and the enduring quality of art and nature.
One of the things that I love about this story is that the real bird, the real bird’s song has personality. That the bird improvises and sings from its heart. And that is, in fact, true.
There was and still is in some quarters, the misunderstanding the birdsong is genetically encoded. That birds don’t know what they’re doing, in other words, that they just sing as they’re sort of programmed to do. But that is not true. Every bird learns the language of its species, and it develops its own songs. And birds acquire speech very much like we do, in the same cognitive steps. In her book, The Genius of Birds, Jennifer Ackerman describes this process, which is called vocal learning. It is fairly rare in the animal world. But it refers to the ability to listen, remember, repeat sounds; to collect acoustic information and use it for your own vocal production.
And it turns out that there are remarkable similarities in the song learning process in birds and in the process of humans, learning speech, from the process of imitating and practicing right down to the brain structures that are involved, and the actions of specific genes. In fact, some songbirds have speech defects just like some humans do. They stutter. So, scientists are learning a lot about the neurological nature of our own learning from birds. Interesting, right.
Now, the other thing is that birds are very social, and they are in constant communication with each other. Many of their songs and calls are to share information about food or danger, or they’re part of the mating process. And by the way, researchers observed that when females choose the male bird with the best song, that this is an aesthetic choice and more. He is probably one of the smarter birds too.
Singing also triggers hormones. Again, like us, birds sing to comfort or warm themselves up, and for the sheer pleasure of it. The joy in birdsong is truly a pleasure shared by all who hear it.
I imagine that you can easily see the power of the metaphor in the courtiers and the music master, who prefer the mechanical bird with its predictability, over the improvised and heartfelt song of the real bird. And it makes me wonder about culture and art today. Do we value our response, what we create, so highly that we forget the muse? That we forget the source in the display and expression of our other-than-human companions, and the world itself?
Like Anderson, we live in a contradiction. Anderson is elevating and drawing attention to the natural, living expression of the bird. And he’s doing that by creating something fixed. He’s writing a story. And I think the question here is: can we do both? Can we hold both in mind, the value of our making, and also our original source?
In a podcast earlier this year, I talked about Hillman’s Terrible Love of War and our need to create a culture of peace. A culture that is so satisfying that we aren’t willing to destroy it through war of any type. I think holding this tension is an essential part of this culture of peace. As individuals, maybe this means singing your own song, and keeping the mystery in your life alive. We don’t want to find ourselves in a world of only mechanical birds, do we?
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In closing, a few words from Terry Tempest Williams, excerpted from her book When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. She writes, “Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
And that’s it for me. Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself. And until next time, tune in to the sound of the birds, and keep some mystery in your life.
A couple short articles about birds:
“More Birds Bring More Happiness, According to Science” by Julia Zarankin
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