Dawn Chorus
THE BEAUTY AND DISCORD IN WHATEVER MYTHS WE TELL
Finalist Curt Johnson Prose Awards | December Magazine
Sunday afternoon, she sits small and straight on the piano bench, at a concert grand stretching nearly nine feet across the stage. Outside, the Florida sun shines hard. Inside the 113-seat hall, the lights are dimmed for the next performer, the girl in the flowered dress with hands on her lap. A woman’s perfume wafts, bodies rustle in the quiet whispers of the audience. The girl with the dark curls, made against nature by her mother’s pale hands, shifts, lifts her fingers to the keys. The lights rise, and sound breaks into the silence. The soft tinkling of keys falling and returning beneath her fingertips, gathering speed as they prance through Bach, a prelude to a fugue. Her body held rapt with focus, taut at the possibility of a wrong note, as she risks discord for beauty.
A prelude is a short introductory piece of music or something that comes before and leads to something else. A fugue is a complex musical composition in which one or more themes are introduced and developed in recurring, interwoven parts. A fugue is also a state of lost awareness of identity, a flight from one’s usual environment. Often, during a fugue, a new life begins.
~
At daybreak, with the rising of the light, when the wind is hushed and still, birds sing. Even in a storm. Lying in bed, I listen to the chirps and trills as the sky brightens outside the windows, a slow dimmer switch on a new day. Lightning flashes and fades and rain spatters steadily through the trees. Distant thunder rumbles as if the world awakes hungry.
The girl at the piano sleeps a floor above me. I wonder if the storm will wake her. If I will run upstairs to comfort her, out of habit. She is 12. She no longer wakes screaming in the night. She knows what lightning is and thunder. So do I: electricity and air. But I can hear the gods.
I recall the myths, the perfect logic for sounds in darkened clouds, magic fire in the sky. Zeus wielded his thunderbolt. A hot-tempered Norse god rode his chariot over the skies. Many cultures of the world created stories to explain the origins of natural forces, to make sense of the observed and incomprehensible. In Chinese mythology, a black demon beat a spiritual hammer on a string of drums. A female divinity, the mother of lightning, held a mirror in each hand—one for yin and one for yang—and when she rubbed the mirrors together, flashes of light emanated. Oh, China, your myths haunt me most of all.
No one really knows why birds sing at the start of a day. Ornithologists say maybe to find a mate, a song to find each other. Birdsong varies in rhythm and pitch, sequence and combination of sounds from simple to complex, comparable to piano notes. Taking their cues from the light in the sky, birds sing heartily at dawn when the wind tends to still, when sound carries farthest.
~
The girl at the piano flurries her fingers over the keys. The bright, harmonious notes begin to turn melancholy, harsh. Bach, the famous fugue composer, often changed key in the middle of a piece. Bach was renowned for his skill in counterpoint, combining contrasting elements to form new melodies. The girl misses a note on the second page in the third measure. She pauses, no more than a breath, and plays the next note. I hear it, the almost imperceptible imperfection. I do not care that she dropped the note, I care that she plays on.
Before the girl at the piano existed, I was pregnant with my second child. And then I was not. As distinct as a breath, a dropped note. I lay there in the stillness of darkness staring at the shadows made of moonlight on the ceiling, wondering at existence, and its counterpoint.
Myths, our human tries to make meaning of mystery.
Modern people, we can allow the ancient misunderstandings of thunder and lightning; perhaps we can rationalize their stories of demons and mirrors, how they leapt to legend using the frames of reference they had. But we know better now, what is real, what is true, do we not? Socrates came along and told us a god-held thunderbolt was really a “vortex of air.” Sir Isaac Newton suggested mathematical laws were how we would understand forces of nature. Even more recently, scientists have proposed that lightning, striking a warm pond like a sort of primordial soup, caused a chemical reaction, which begat life itself. So, where then are the ends of truth?
Back then, when I was too briefly pregnant, my four-year-old told me where babies come from: “God sends down the ingwedients,” she said in her lisping voice, “and you and Daddy mix them all up.” Catching her bright eyes in the rearview mirror, thinking her theory sounded more like baking a cake, I wondered if I should tell her about science, about eggs and sperms and wombs. But what she said held elements of truth, bespoke human and divine, like all myths do. And, it seemed to me there must be some secret, essential spark needing to be folded into the batter of biology for a quiet gathering of cells to become a life.
The doctors said fetus and miscarriage. I said soul.
Many cultures have spun myths explaining how babies come to mothers: the stork delivers them. In Scandinavian lore, storks delivered babies down chimney chutes. In Slavic myth, storks carried unborn souls from mystical Iriy to earth. German folklore told of unborn baby souls found in marshes and springs. Egyptians linked the coming and going of souls to stork migrations. In the lore of mythology, souls could depart and return on the wings of a bird. A miscarriage was a stork dropping a soul en route. Rooftop-dwelling, marsh-wandering, migratory storks could find unborn souls and bring babies from faraway lands.
The girl at the piano plays with such precision, the fine, swift motions of her fingers echoing her far-flung origins. At age two, she wielded scissors adeptly, cutting out miniature paper skirts and purses in my kitchen, her skill recalling for me the ancient handicraft of Chinese paper cutting—those intricate designs expressing wishes and hopes. Paper ritualistically, delicately trimmed into Chinese characters such as Fu for blessing or Xi, meaning double happiness. Where do myths become true and truths become myth?
One January daybreak, in a dirt-road village in China, the wind lessened at the coming of light. Birds broke the silence with song. Beside a red-tiled wall, a newborn bundled with a bag of milk and a scrap of paper, she lay amidst the cigarette butts, food wrappers and leaves collected in the crevice on the current of the night. A slender man in slacks with a jangle of keys on his belt came by and stopped outside the gates locked closed against the fading darkness. He picked up the ruddy-cheeked baby, like a newspaper from a driveway, and carried her inside.
When birds sing at first light, it is called a dawn chorus.
~
As a young child, maybe eight, I had an instrument made of birchwood and metal, a thumb-size Bird Call promising to make realistic sounds of wild birds. I would sit at the open window, between the floral curtains made by my mother’s hands, and turn the metal ring. The wooden tool did mimic the squeaking chirps of the birds flitting tree to tree out back, and yet it took the magic out of birdsong somehow. I could make the sounds, but I did not know what they meant.
Music enters us beneath our understanding. Our senses capture the sounds and translate sacred meaning beyond our ability to comprehend. Music calms us, at a primal level. Human’s first language may have been songlike, a sort of humming, still extant today in the murmurs of a lullaby. Anthropologists think long ago we may have spoken to each other with contact calls, much like birds. A hum may have been a way of letting each other know we are safe, we are kin.
I heard the girl at the piano before she was born, a sound carrying far on the stilled wind, entering me like a song, deep beneath logic. Following the bread crumbs of coincidence more than 12,000 miles through the skies, I found her in a narrow room, in a bustling city in China. Nine-and-a-half months old, with intently dark eyes and matted hair, she sat on a polished bench playing with the tiny pink shoes on her feet. At the sound of my voice, she looked up and stared into my strange blue eyes quiet as a flower. When I finally lifted her into my arms, she ran her fingers along my whispering lips, translating me like braille.
I was so innocent; I only wanted to love.
Music can save us, bring us back from the darkness. Almost, says myth. In Ovid’s telling, Orpheus enchanted humans, allured animals and trees and rocks with his harmonious voice and sweet lyre. He sang his way into the underworld to restore his wife to the land of the living. Before he brought her all the way back, she fell again into Hades. Swearing off love for women, Orpheus angered the maidens of his earthly world. At first the enchantment of his music kept him safe, but the maidens drowned his music with the clamorous discord of their boxwood pipes, blaring horns and yells. The maidens tore Orpheus to pieces. He departed into the afterworld and thereafter folded his beloved wife in his arms at last. Discord united when harmony
had failed.
Myths guide and mislead. There is what we can explain by observation, and what we cannot.
They told me the story of the cold, quiet dawn and the wall, of the man who found her hours old. They handed me the note with scrawled Chinese pinyin specifying the date and time of her birth. They showed me photos of the strong arms that held her after day one. The details of truth, the myths I believed. When I stood with China beneath my feet, the man walked me to the wall, pointed exactly to where the baby in my arms had lain on cement. He remembered nothing more.
They told me of a one-child policy and girls given away so families might chance on a boy. How a girl was wanted, but a boy was needed for a family to survive. I had read The Good Earth. Thought I knew. They said a girl, around the age of the one at the piano, could be sent out of the orphanage and into a life of factory work or prostitution. They told me fact, story, myth.
The greatest of the myths may have been me.
~
The girl at the piano lets the notes resolve, descending into melodious contours and contrasting harmonies, things I do not understand, let alone know how to compose. Bach did. Bach, also orphaned as a child, knew to write in the discord, that somehow this would enrich the beauty.
It is Mother’s Day. I sit in the audience watching the lights rising and falling on the performers. Like the other mothers, during my daughter’s turn, I am holding my phone aloft, recording, keeping my arms steady through the notes. Seeking to hold the music, a moment, like sunlight.
I once tried to hold it all. I outlined, organized, matched up life to my small, tidy plans. When life broke, when a child lay alone by a wall before her first full day, I took what I could see and made a story of solace, a mother’s myth, out of the harrowing and beautiful strands of grief.
Lightning races to the ground 100 kilometers per second. There is not always time. We believe in the beauty. A child is home and healthy. She learns to trust a mother so different from her, light to her dark, near to her far. A mother, gentle and patient, cradles and comforts her with lullabies before bed. A child, curious and kind, grows up with two parents, a sister and a puppy. She gathers lucky beans and makes wishes on downy weeds and plays the piano. Harmony exists. Then, Socrates, Newton and little black volumes bring science to mystery. Our myths fall apart.
The slim black volume of facts came in the mail. Compiled data for my daughter’s orphanage promising to help me form an opinion on the veracity of her abandonment information. Coveting veracity, I had ordered this volume. The facts within these pages line up with the stories I have been told in the same way yin and yang mirrors align reasonably with flashes of light.
I see my daughter’s name noted in the neat black and white rows lined up like keys on a piano. I run my finger over her finding date as if it were real, the tiny number 1 indicating her age in days at finding, and her orphanage-given last name: Fu. Every girl at her orphanage has this name. Here, I am told, Fu may mean important person in honor of the director, not the cut-paper blessing of good fortune or luck. Like bird sounds I cannot decipher, meaning is lost.
The assembled facts—clustered findings in similar locations, low finding age and artificially high number of girls—lead to this conclusion: an 8 out of 10 on the problem scale. Ten indicates proven incentive programs or ethical problems. The facts blur into interpretations: She was found at the gates of the institution at one day old. A finding ad was placed; no one came forward to claim her. She may have been stolen. She may have been bought. I may have provided the incentive. I cannot breathe deeply for a while. The demon beats the drums.
My disassembled facts run counterpoint: She was born. She was left. There was a one-child policy, a need. She was a girl and would have been separated from her birth family with or without me. She would have lived in an institution with no mother at all. Who would have rocked away her tears and fixed her broken teeth? Scolded her for leaving socks on the floor? Bought her stashes of glitter? Told her to eat her broccoli and taught her to tie her shoes? Who would have taken her to piano lessons?
Myths explain and re-explain, again and again, like a vortex of air.
These are my myths: Maybe the stars sent her to me. Maybe there is more sadness and beauty than I can comprehend. I believe in the enchantment of music, the grace of a prelude, the refrain of a new day.
~
I lie in bed listening to the birds trading whistles and warbling cheeps amidst the pattering rain and brightening sky. I am thinking of ancient mother lightning with her mirrors, of facts in a slim black volume. I am stilled, pondering loss and myth in the morning lull of the winds. There is what I can see and all I cannot know. Am I accused? Am I forgiven? I did not mean to rescue or to harm. I adopted the girl at the piano, the girl sleeping peacefully now through the storm, because I was here and she was there, and birds sing at dawn. She was a child without a mother, and I was a mother, and the world wakes hungry.
Love is a force of nature we explain as best we can.
There is beauty and there is discord in whatever myths we tell.
Something comes before and leads to something else.
We lie in the dark and wait for the chorus of light.
~
The girl at the piano stills her fingers, drops her hands into her lap as sound echoes into silence. She rises and stands by the piano, the curls fallen into soft waves in her innately straight hair. Arms beside her, she bows to a thunder of applause, and the lights dim again.