Mockingbird Jazz
(and a Few Stunned Sketchings)
I slept later today than I have in probably year. Couldn’t fall asleep last night despite having kayaked in the bright sun yesterday.
I’m on Spring Break. Which means - What? - for a 50 year old man who teaches writing about place at a community college? It means planning to catch up on grading. It means putting off that dread task. It means further investigating the artist Memphis Wood, whom I’ve invited through me to write a story of her life. I did that last week, but so much more needs writing.
It means I’m sitting on my front screened-in porch, looking down at my QWERTYUIOP, and repeatedly stopping to listen to all the songbirds. I’ve been listening to birds differently lately. I’m sure the mockingbird has been falsely named.
The song of a mockingbird is a jazz composition. It deserves extensive listening. Like when I’m listening to Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, I can feel all the different moves the bird’s making etching new places in my brain.
The mockingbird’s Latin name is better: Mimus Polyglottis. The multilingual mimic as musician. And did I think of Ornette, in particular, because his name sounds like ornithology? And if so, why didn’t I first think of Bird himself, Charlie Parker, who recorded his bebop alto sax “Ornithology” in 1946, 13 years before Ornette made the record I mentioned?
The world needs no more writing; there are songbirds aplenty. But writing is intention and a need to connect and love. That’s why using using AI is not writing.
And to learn a friend from many years back has been “sketching” on her piano in her old garage in the mornings and composing riffs she’s been calling Waltz for a Psychogeographer! I feel dazed. It wonderfully stuns me.
Any day I’m not productive with my writing I feel off-balance, askew, out-of-true (as a carpenter might say). The weather forecasts predict thunderstorms. And now there’s a bluejay in the birdbath. The morning’s already afternoon and this seems to be its productivity.
Now more coffee. Now to work.
To repurpose a Charles Bukowski poem and book title: Mockingbird, wish you luck.
The scrub jay in the vanishing Florida outback, however, is our homie. Amy Tan's COVID year of bird watching in northern California turned up a Left Coast cousin of our scrub jay. Both similar in appearance to my untrained eye. Sonically, is the West Coast Scrub Jay more melodic and constrained in its phrasing than its Eastern peer -- more Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, less Bird and Lester Bowie?
I don't know. The scrub jay, which is said to befriend humans, is nowhere to be seen nor heard around here. And reports from the state's interior are that the population is down and declining as scrub -- once the refuge of native fauna and Confederate draft dodgers -- is paved over.
The cardinals sing up a storm during the day on my street; the pileated sapsucker makes a mournful last call to its mate when the clouds go crepuscular. Seagulls cry as they commute from ocean to marsh and back, and ospreys keen as they seek fish and small prey. One smaller nondescript bird that I haven't been able to identify with certainty is the loudest of all, pound for pound. A painted bunting comes to the feeder in the spring, usually with a shy female and chick, and, wisely, does not seek the human ear.
We hear an owl 'round midnight with its hooting tattoo, playing taps.
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