A great opportunity has come your way: the chance to stay at home. There is a fine line between feeling suffocatingly housebound and being filled with relish for your domestic surroundings. Fortunately, such lines are mere mental chalk and are utterly traversable. The way you see the world is up to you.
It’s one of the most basic teachings of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and the other classic endurers of difficulties: “It is not the things themselves that disturb people, but their judgments about those things.” Or as one well-known Danish philosophy student summed it up, “nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and so while he could be “bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space,” instead he felt himself imprisoned, so little to his liking were his surroundings.
Are you enmeshed in unending war with Germanic barbarians with no one but that nutter Commodus to defend civilization after your departure? Have you returned home to the hospitality of a treacherous fratricidal usurper? You may well be experiencing some real worries and difficulties, but that has largely been the norm of human existence, often in much more severe forms. Today, we also have various fancy counterweights that have not been previously available, even for emperors and princes: technology, medical knowledge, grocery stores, and so on. For many of us, our chief immediate affliction is the limited one of Staying at Home.
Are there broader downsides and long-term dangers in a pandemic? Certainly. But in this moment, if you are feeling trapped, confined, or deprived of accustomed variety – that you can simply stop. Denmark is only a prison to those who think it so; our modern California would be to many a paradisical destination. There are undiscovered riches in the mundane. It’s all in how you look at it.
Quand on n’a que l’amour
Pour meubler de merveilles
Et couvrir de soleil
La laideur des faubourgs…
When we have nothing but love
With which to furnish with marvels
And cover with sunlight
The ugliness of the suburbs…
[then we’ll make do with that and it will get the job done with astonishing plenitude!]
– Jacques Brel, “Quand on n’a que l’amour”
The best of all places to begin the reenchantment of your everyday world is with the birds outside your home. And with which backyard bird should you begin? With the most backyardy, with the housiest: the house finch, the brilliant scarlet singer, the California linnet. These are brilliantly colored and jubilantly melodious birds – if they weren’t so familiar, we would seek them out. But commonness is no reason for dismissal, and a great mark in their favor in these stationary days.
The home that is not surrounded by an investing halo of linnets, I hold it to be unblest. They are the bread-and-butter of the bird feast which life daily spreads before us.
– Dawson, The Birds of California
Take another look: your prison is blest and your neighborhood companions invite you to a daily feast that continues unabated despite our human worries. When you are housebound, look out your window. When your movements are constrained, be glad of where you are. There is a halo around your home, a wreath of singing scarlet. And in spring’s cloud of song, you may find that forbidden shops and the call of outlawed crowds lose their urgency and luster.
Linnets and Californians Go Together
You probably know this bird as the house finch. Which is a perfectly reasonable name that points out this bird’s proclivity for human habitations, their comfort and familiarity under our eaves and in our gardens. But if we want to start investing the everyday with depth and old acquaintance, sometimes it’s good to step back from modern classification and savor the names our mouths have gotten used to for generations: the faded hardcovers call them linnets, a traditional name of the Old World.
The most esteemed contemporary poets of California uniformly opt for this term of address. Gary Snyder describes a scene where “linnets crack seeds at the feed tray” and Robert Hass is struck by that most vivid red of the California skyscape when he sees the air full of “linnets like wounds.” Would you like to be a poet, someone whose words are charged with meaning, who sees the world not in dull prose but as a deep and endless chain of image, metaphor, and memory? Offer some sunflower seeds to the linnets and watch them. All the material you need is there.
You won’t have much trouble finding them. Ubiquity is perhaps the linnet’s most outstanding characteristic from our perspective. They are abundant in suburban neighborhoods and fairly ready colonizers of the truly urban, lagging only house sparrows, pigeons, and blackbirds in their tolerance for sparsely vegetated concrete. Hang up that feeder of sunflower seeds and it will be the rare offering that does not find house finch favor within the week.
Their flexibility in acceptable nest sites contributes to this adaptability: a tree will work, but so will a ledge under an eave, a wreath on a door, a flat-topped patio lamp, or a hanging planter (those are a particular favorite). One nest that perennially tickles me is seen in this local photo, cozily established in a rolled-up window shade. You can see four of the little horned dinosaurs here, but there were in fact three more tucked in the shadowy depth. They don’t want to be on the ground, and they want some support underneath, but beyond that they will take what they can get.
The eastern population has even taken to using enclosed cavities and nest boxes, which our finches don’t do. Those eastern house finches are a rather odd branch of the family: historically, this is a western bird. Some old books even call them “California linnets,” since we are actually the capital of their empire, along with the southwest states. But, as I said, if you didn’t have house finches in your life, you would want them. And so they were imported to the east, brought in cages from which they escaped, growing from that small introduced population to cover the entire eastern two-thirds of the country where they previously did not occur.
Such introductions often have unintended consequences. In this case, there were two. One was that they displaced their relatives the purple finches in some areas. Another was that the low genetic diversity of the eastern population made it vulnerable to disease, especially a form of conjunctivitis sometimes known as “house finch eye disease.” Now that was an epidemic: for a time in the 90s, it seemed like the majority of eastern house finches suffered from this sickness, which caused crusty swellings over the eyes that led to partial or complete blindness, often succeeded by starvation, violent death by predators, or other fatal terminations.
The disease has since moderated from those extremes, after a crash in eastern populations, but it continues to be seen regularly, now across the entirety of the house finch range. It is still less common in California than in the eastern states, but if you observe linnets with regularity, you will inevitably see it from time to time. Generally speaking, there is little we can do. It is most often spread through direct contact between birds (infected surfaces like feeders are not the primary mode of transmission) and is now consistently present in the population. You can take down your feeders for a bit if you’d rather not see it, but such birds will appear again. It is not your fault.
California is where the linnets belong. Here they need no cages to bring song into your home. Even further: the linnets feel they belong in your very backyard, graciously accepting your furniture as a benevolent gift useful for laying eggs and raising babies on. Many animals rightfully feel they belong elsewhere than where people are, or perhaps that we do not belong in what was previously their home. But to linnets, human cohabitation is natural, instinctively right, desirable. Who am I to argue with them?
Are Your Eyes Closed to Colors? Do You Sleep Through Song?
I’ve established that these birds are abundant and familiar: they are tied to our human habitat to the point of being called house finches, tied to our traditions of human culture to the point of being dubbed with the borrowed old name of linnets, and tied to our own state to the point of being specified as California linnets. That quality of simply being inextricably present in our lives is their preeminent trait that goes before all others.
But imagine for a moment that linnets were not so ubiquitous. Imagine that house finches were instead like their cousins the purple finches, for instance – an occasional meeting in the woods, a rousing song in the spring madrone-tops. Or substitute any other bird that’s locally scarce enough to be notable, but present enough that you can vividly imagine it in your life: consider the frequency of black-headed grosbeaks, western tanagers, or lazuli buntings. All stunners, to be sure, and memorable singers that we are glad to encounter when we do.
If linnets made such intermittent appearances, we would watch out for them too. We remember and seek out the orange birds, the yellow birds, the blue birds (except for squawkers – many locals disdain them too, partially because of this same prejudice against the common). Linnets are our reddest birds. True, they aren’t the shocking block of red of a cardinal or scarlet tanager back east. But they are the red we have.
We don’t have the autumnal splendor of a northeastern hardwood forest, but when the poison oak leaves turn red, I drop all such futile comparisons and consider the scene before my eyes. There are many shades of red, and each one is vividly itself. Remember how Hass put it in his early collection Field Guide.
The air was thick
with birds, linnets like wounds,
slow towhees, dumb earth-colored birds,
hawks overhead riding in the wind.
The eucalyptus leaves I crumbled
smelled pungent lemon in my hands.
– “Lines on Last Spring”
(And, in the same volume, to underline how he and I feel about bird name selection:)
I have believed so long
In the magic of names and poems
– “Letter”
The classic house finch red is indeed a dab of sanguine paint upon the backyard landscape, a rent and tear in an otherwise unpunctured scene of tranquil greens and browns. If your backyard was a painting by Turner or Cézanne, then that linnet, that little smudge of stand-out red, would be the most interesting thing on the canvas. So if that image framed within your window grows stale, abstract yourself from reality a little, squint your eyes into an impressionistic filter of our oversharp existence, and watch those red splotches turn from mundane birds into the peppery dashes of color that enliven the whole scene. Or just murmur the phrase “linnets like wounds” to yourself in a portentous whisper and feel your life temporarily imbued with an air of heroic weariness to beguile the hours of more banal forms of tedium. (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend living in that mindset, but I like to dip into it occasionally for dramatic variety.)
I should also clarify – to instill some trace of actual natural history in this hedonistic tale of painters’ palettes – that “the classic house finch red” is subject to variation. While some pigments are created through internal biological means, there are colors that are found only in certain food sources (like the waxy red combs of waxwings, discussed in my last essay). In linnets, the consequence of this means of color production is that the exact tint of red is determined by the individual bird’s diet at the time of growing the feathers. While there is indeed that classic bloody red of a textbook house finch, it is also normal to see some birds that are distinctly towards the orange or apricot end of the spectrum. There is some evidence that this departure from the normal well-balanced diet is somewhat detrimental to their mating success, as females select for the healthiest males as evidenced by lustrous redness.
The other domain beyond brilliance of plumage in which birds compete for female approval is of course song. It’s worth noting as a subject of perennial interest that these displays of biological fitness, these proofs of health evolutionarily driven by the mate selection process, are also what draw us humans to birds. We love the bright and colorful, we love the loud and melodious. This is no accident. Color and song are effective biological proofs because they demonstrate health, both directly (since genetic or dietary deficiencies are revealed) and because they make the bearer more conspicuous, which is to say more vulnerable to predators and thereby implying a greater fitness as he continues to thrive despite these self-imposed handicaps. Color and song make birds stand out and grab our attention, precisely because that is their function. They are big waving flags of “look at me, I’m not afraid.” They are calls for the world’s attention, and we are part of that world. We are not the linnets’ primary audience, but color and song are universal languages.
And this song is a notable one. Linnets sing for much of the year, peaking as with most birds during the spring nesting season of say March through July, but they can be heard essentially anytime and anywhere. This is one of the most ubiquitous voices of spring: walk down a suburban street, or even in the newly uncrowded parking lots of our shopping centers, and you will hear this rich, musical warble that proceeds at a lilting, relaxed, and conversational pace. It’s also an easy place to start learning birdsong, since phrases often end with a highly distinctive note, a loud burry “veeeer!” that slurs upwards like a long zipper accelerating to its zipped-up consummation.
That ending zipper (often but not always present; present only in the first song on this recording) is the easiest way to begin identifying their song. With practice, you will learn to distinguish it even in unzipped examples from the somewhat similar tones of the warbling vireo and the purple finch of our local woodlands.
The general similarity is illustrative of the high quality of the house finch song, easily overlooked because of its commonness. The warbling vireo, after all, was named for its musical talents, which handily exceed those of most vireos. And the purple finch’s performances are much loved and celebrated, as in this passage from Thoreau’s Journal:
Going down-town this morning, I am surprised by the rich strain of the purple finch… the hearing of this note implies some improvement in the acoustics of the air… they advertise me surely of some additional warmth and serenity. How their note rings over the roofs of the village! You wonder that even the sleepers are not awakened by it to inquire who is there, and yet probably not another than myself in all the town observes their coming, and not half a dozen ever distinguished them in their lives.
The house finches of Marin are sufficiently abundant that I feel confident that we have exceeded the half dozen citizens of Concord who picked out the purple finches, but the disparity between song quality and listener quantity is still greater than it could be. The music of house finches is of much the same genre as the purple finch, improving our air with warmth and serenity, and yet many sleep through it, even when they are walking beneath sunny skies with their eyes wide open.
You need not sleep any longer. The curtain lifts, the linnets are singing, and it is time to awaken.
The reenchantment of the world begins at home
Linnets are birds of color and song that would be more celebrated were they not so familiar. To our good fortune, they are exceedingly common, and are in fact the most essential and dependable companions of Californian domesticity. The trick then is simply to change our way of looking at the world, to dismiss our unconscious prejudices against our own homes and towns in favor of better marketed destinations, and to consciously embrace what is right here.
With a change of aim… wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich,– in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.
– Emerson, “Domestic Life”
The higher perceptions find their objects everywhere. That is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of the naturalist, and of this little library of essays. And it is a lesson that is increasingly valuable as we find our movements curtailed, our circle of activity confined within a shrinking circumference. Circumstances are indifferent if you know how to perceive the riches of the world. And as the former objects of our attention diminish in relative importance, then a good share of our normal economic activity may in fact start to feel rather superfluous, and whole new worlds of possibility open up.
To keep my mind open and flexible, I like to counterbalance the standard popular discourse (and my own commercial activities) with the radical arguments of degrowth economists. Suddenly, their ideas are not thought experiments, but our present reality. There is substantial logic and evidence that workaholism and consumerism are detrimental to both climatic stability and our own happiness, but scientific argument is not enough to give satisfaction to lives suddenly unoccupied with the habits we’ve been used to. Would we know how to live in a world where we all worked less and shopped less? What mental shift would be needed to enable such shifts in our systems?
Without a reenchantment of life, degrowth would be destined to failure. We would still face the need to restore meaning to our liberated time.
– Serge Latouche, Petit traité de la décroissance sereine
We readily admit that it is necessary to reenchant the world, that we need to add elements of a spiritual nature to our philosophic and scientific arguments, but it seems to the advocates of décroissance that poetry, aesthetics, and a concrete utopia are enough to make us dream.
[Not a quasi-religious nature worshipping, just Nature in Novato-style practical aesthetic enrichening, in other words.]
– Vers une société d’abondance frugale
As I write this, the shops are closed and the highways are vacant. The air is measurably cleaner and emissions are in steep decline. I see more people biking and walking all over town. These would be unequivocally good things, were they to take place in different circumstances. Deprive us of market activity and high-speed travel and we revert to non-consumptive, low-speed pastimes. Could we do it without a crisis? Can we do it after this one?
If you wish to reenchant your surroundings, then song and color, poetry and possibilities are the tools to do so. Specifics of circumstance are relatively indifferent; the most common of birds add more beauty to life than the finest furniture, cars, and gadgets.
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
– Blake, America: A Prophecy
There is song all around us, and there are many who have spent years not hearing it, never knowing the music of linnets, the red in our skies. But you are free to step out into the bright air: there are no chains or doors that bar you from this chorus.
Header photo by Michael Janke
Truly rewarding read! Thank you.
Really lovely, Jack! I’ve been admiring the linnets coming to my feeders, including one I call “Peaches” because of his atypical coloring. Thank you for this ode to avian joy!
Jack–Your essays are always like stones cast on bright water–with concentric shimmers of meaning that send me to my bookshelves as well as my backyard. This time it was to Robert Hass’s Field Guide, which volume I bought in the 1970’s when he was a guest poet/reader in Sacramento, where I taught. I haven’t opened this particular volume in a while–so thank you for reminding of this lovely collection. (I think it was his first?)
The house finch/linnet is a housemate at our address. And since as retirees we are so often at home, even when not in “quarantine,” we are daily audience to his chorus. But his song has been especially sweet these past weeks. As the roses have seemed especially bright. Silver Iinings, of a sort.
Thank you once more,
Stephanie P
Beautiful 💗
Thank you Jack, this was wonderful.
Thanks everyone!
Thank you, I appreciate your point of view. I have been listening to the early morning bird chatter particularly these last few weeks. Such an encouraging sound!