Starlings

Everything is your purview and your scope

Photo by Johann Schumacher

Two houses down the neighbors have a colossal dead tree still standing in their backyard. It’s the only house on the block where I don’t know the occupants and so have no idea what plans they might have for taking down such a hazard, but it’s been dead for as long as I’ve lived here, closer now to three years than two.

This tree has my attention most mornings not because of the hazards it poses but because of the life it supports: an innumerable horde of starlings.

You’ve probably seen plenty of starlings yourself—European starlings, to be accurate. From a population of 60 birds introduced in New York in the 1870s they have grown to blanket the North American continent, with population estimates reaching 150 million in recent years. They are hardy and resourceful and outcompete many native species. It’s a shame that they’re basically invasive; they’re beautiful birds. Their glossy coats of night play host to the splashes of white pinpoints that surprisingly have nothing to do with their name, and I think we only underrate their charm because of their commonness.

But what really interests me about starlings is their stunning mimicry.

Starlings, like their relatives the mynahs, will learn and repeat sounds from their environments, and (as you can see in that second video) can be trained to emphasize human words and phrases in their vocalizations. They can start doing this after hearing a sound just once. I’ve never heard the ones in our neighborhood speak, but they regularly pretend to be red-tailed hawks. Whether this is at all conscious on their part I can’t say—birds are thought to engage in predator mimicry both as a means of deterring those same predators and to simply enlarge their vocal repertoire to impress potential mates—but it is always a treat to hear the familiar scree of the hawk folded into the ceaseless jabber of chirps and whistles.

Mimicry, parody, pastiche, imitation: whatever you want to call it, starlings have a talent for borrowing material from their environment and layering it together into something at once both recognizable and new. And this is so fascinating in the starling because it feels like human behavior. Not the use of words, I mean, but the practice itself. We are always, whether we like it or not, remixing and redeploying the stuff that surrounds us into our own material.

I tell my first year writing students this constantly. The trick is not in being wholly original, an uncompromising standalone genius, but to go looking for what moves and interests you and to mimic that stuff until it has transformed into something that is at once old and new, theirs and yours. And it’s not just for beginners! The professor of the graduate creative writing seminar I’m taking this semester has framed the course around the “imitative impulse,” a phrase taken from a wonderful essay by Jessie Kindig about Thoreau’s “Wild Apples,” over the course of which the author herself becomes more and more Thoreau-like.

Kindig writes;

If you are guided by the imitative impulse, everything is important, from the new buds of spring to the first winds of war; everything is your purview and your scope. You, apple, common ordinary person in the common ordinary heroic age, realize you are already divine. Divine as mud. Divine as a daisy chain.

People in every line of work, people of every interest and hobby and talent, first (and often always) take hard the realization that they are not original. But that’s the good news: no one is. And the even better news: it means that no one is alone.

This past November, and again over the weekend, some of my talented musician friends hosted a night of live band karaoke: we requested the songs a few months in advance, they learned them, singers showed up to practice once or twice, and then everyone took their turns on stage (in this case a living room floor) on the big night.

Karaoke fascinates me. Some people are completely transformed up there, from meek or passive or deferential to a wild showman, a rockstar in miniature, a hidden vocal talent just waiting for permission. Others can’t sing a lick but can still spellbind a room just by caring about what they’re doing. And some are expert mimics, the kind where if you close your eyes you can be fooled for a moment that it might really be Queen or Fall Out Boy or Muse or or The B-52s up there performing.

In each case the song becomes something else. It’s not just the lyrics or the instruments, not just the performance or the passion, but a new thing entirely, given meaning by all that it has enfolded: yes, the lyrics and the instruments, yes the performance and the passion, but also the transformation of someone the crowd thought they knew into someone who is more and different than that. Also the crowd itself. Also the moment, the ephemerality. That this particular imitation will never happen again. The knowledge that all of this really is For One Night Only.

It creates, in other words, a night of starlings. Karaoke does. To take the raw stuff of someone else’s song and belt it for the world to hear, and in so doing, to make it your own. Divine as mud. I hope it never stops.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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