The flight of migratory birds has, for millennia, held associations with boundless realms beyond the closed circle of socially defined existence. Wild geese and swans often appear in mythic lore as messengers from that vast unknown of which the soul knows itself to be a secret citizen.
In the ancient Greco-Roman world seers read the future in the patterns of their flight. The powers of the air (as Zeus) visit the Mycenaen queen Leda in the form of a divine swan. The power of this strange union is revealed in its time by the regal, unearthly beauty of Helen, whose face will 'launch a thousand ships.' Farther west and north, in the old Celtic world, swans and wild geese were believed to carry the healing energy of sunlight and the waters.
I can remember in my early years being impressed with the same sense of sacred significance that must have moved the ancients. Twice a year flocks migrating to and from Canada would pass through our local skies. The majestic birds in their 'suitcoats' of black, white and gray would appear from somewhere far off and unknown-- then be gone again. They carried the aura of distant places, and a vaguely melancholy restlessness with which I felt a kinship at the time. I understood, in this feeling, why my ancestors had called the exodus of Ireland's youth every generation, "The Flight of the Wild Geese."
Sometimes in the early evening, agitated by wanderlust, I would watch my father, then in late middle age, drifting into sleep over an open newspaper. I felt my own state as an unsettled contrast to his unconscious form, weighted with the gravity of a later stage of life. Beyond the four walls of our little porch-den the night seemed to me alive with the call of worlds yet to be seen. It was a call laced with both fear and joy, seductiveness and exile. It is perhaps what the poet Yeats meant by "a lonely impulse of delight."
I would sit in my room sometimes, in those days, poring over maps-- looking especially intently at the green swatches that marked areas still in a wild state, or following the course of rivers with my eyes. Under my desk lamp I covered vast distances. As time passed the swatches of green and blue and yellow, the dots and squares, became places, experiences and memories. The wanderlust of earlier years gave way to other feelings. I came gradually to appreciate the older man's perspective.
Now, a father myself, I have often witnessed the exuberant curiosity of my four year old daughter in contrast to the figure of her mother, slipping involuntarily into sleep. Like the ever repeating rhythm of the departing and returning geese, it evokes, for me, the perennial exchange of youth, maturity and age. As in the tale of the Pied Piper, the sound of the tune changes as we change.
Another of the sources from which the picture springs is hinted at by the open map lying across the woman's lap in the foreground. Karta Mira means simply "world map" in Russian ..
One of the places my travels have taken me is The Crimea. While taking part in
. .---. a seminar in the small city of Yvpretoria on the Black Sea, not long after the breakup of the Soviet Union, I met two friendly young students named Sasha and
Lubya. One bleak January afternoon they asked me to walk to the seaside with them to feed the swans which frequented the beach there.
Against a panorama of sea as gray and opaque as a printers stone, the girls stood flinging chunks of black bread out of their coat pockets to the circling flock. In spite of numb hands and stinging ears, I found the scene completely captivating.
The hovering and diving of the great white birds, the girls tossing up their offerings of bread to be snatched in mid-air, seemed like counter-movements in some primal dance. I was again reminded of Yeats. With something of a bittersweet recognition I remembered the "Wild Swans of Coole"-- untouched, after nineteen years, by all the changes that have since taken place in himself.
The sight of these 'snow maidens' flinging their scraps of bread to the elegant, winged creatures, brought memories of a younger, perhaps less compromised, self looking in wonder at the familiar 'V' wavering across the firmament. Many feelings; awe, a sense of loss for something unnamed and unnamable, a hunger for Iife-- both attractive and frightening, and the sense of connection to a greater being that pulled at my little identity with the lure of dim remembrance were once contained in that sight. The distant, plaintive cry of the geese was like the call of a great and fertile unknown after which I longed. Yet, what it all really felt like then, in those long gone, turbulent years, I can not quite call back to mind.
As Yeats muses in his poem, "Their hearts have not grown old."; not so for we human creatures whom time, like our fathers and mothers before us, pulls slowly earthward. Still, it is a gift to have the occasional vision of that mysterious something regenerated in young spirits. In them we see the inexplicable art of
r-' flight renewed. They are a reminder of that forgotten exuberance which once ran through us, the current that animates each successive generation-- the force of "life's longing for itself."
