A Murmuration Interpreted - Imagination as the translator of Nature

“Thus there are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all, those that never saw him in the one have discovered him in the other: this was the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens… and surely the Heathens knew better how to joyn and read these mystical Letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless Eye on these common Hieroglyphicks and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of Nature.”

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

“There are, it may be, so many kinds of languages in the world, and none of them is without significance. Therefore, if I do not know the meaning of the language, I shall be a foreigner to him who speaks, and he who speaks will be a foreigner to me. … Therefore let him who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret.” 1 Corinthians 14:10-11, 13

Inspired by the Puritan authors I’ve read, I’m going to go in reverse order from how I typically write. I’m going to give you the “doctrine” or assertion first and then attempt to show the truth of them.

Assertion 1 – Beauty is Nature’s language  

Assertion 2 – Imagination is the interpreter and translator of this language and helps us understand “these mystical Letters” so that we can “suck Divinity from the flowers of Nature.” 

Assertion 3 –  We can participate in the translation work of Imagination when we try to artistically express, or creatively narrate, our experiences in Nature. 

Observation – Our experiences of Natural Beauty must not only be observed with attention but meditated on after they have ceased and then expressed in narration, preferably creatively or artistically, so as to move past sensory details and vague emotional responses to the meaning within the language. This is the only way to make truth, goodness, and beauty a part of us. 

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Beauty as Language - a Quiet Murmuration

Earlier this week, my kids and I piled into the van and headed north to visit some good friends. Google Maps gave us assurances that it was only a 90-minute trip. But I’d driven this route before and knew it could double or triple in time at any point.

Sure enough, as soon as we passed Tacoma, brake lights began to flash. We passed the airport and started slowing down significantly. And as we crested the hill that gives the first view of the famous Space Needle and the Ferris wheel and Seattle proper hunched up against the water’s edge, we began the Seattle Crawl.

The rain fell as it so often does in Pacific Northwest Februarys – hard, heavy, and unrelenting. At least the wind had stopped gusting, I thought, as I inched forward on the gridlocked interstate. We had been making good time but now we came to a stop just as we entered the grey corridor of concrete running alongside the road. The rain kept beating down.

The van was quiet. My cd had just stopped and I didn’t feel like starting a new one. The kids were asleep or listening to audio books on their discmans (yes, dear child of the 90s, you read that right; we withhold phones and give our tweens cd walkmans). The only sound was the constant drumming of rain on the windshield and the rhythmic slap of the wipers, hard at work. 

The rain began to ease a bit and the line of cars crept forward a bit. I watched the ETA on the app slowly tick up, adding time to our trip. I sighed and hunched over the steering wheel, staring at the brake lights as they would flicker and hold, flicker and hold. 

The grey was everywhere and unending. It was like driving through Lewis’s picture of Hell in The Great Divorce. 

As we crept further into the city, the rain eased some more and slowly stopped. I inched out from an overpass into the pale light. We came to another stop and I glanced above the tall grey buildings lining the roadside at the dark green fir trees just behind. They were taller and seemed more solid than the buildings, maybe because they were the only non-grey thing in sight. The tattered threads of clouds split and unwound on their sharp bristling arms. That was nice to see. Maybe the sun would break through soon, I thought. I looked back at the road.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a massive black shape erupt from behind the trees. I actually gasped; it was so unexpected. The shape twisted and undulated and folded and swelled up into the sky, expanding so that it was no longer a single mass; you could see that it was a cloud made of birds! A murmuration of starlings!

It was a good thing traffic was at a standstill. I was actually glad of it. I watched the form rise into the sky and expand to the point of splitting. A small group tore away and flew to the left as the rest of the flock flew right, spilling across the sky. But then, at the same moment – at exactly the same moment – the two groups turned back and flew into each other, reuniting and collapsing, bending, folding, then expanding again. The murmuration rose into the air, folded on itself once more, fell behind the trees and was gone, as suddenly as it appeared. I saw the brake lights flash. Traffic moved forward. The world moved on, apparently unchanged. 

But I was not the same. My mood had changed. My perspective had changed. The world around me had changed. I had to wipe a tear away. The whole thing had taken maybe seven seconds, but in those seven seconds I had been lifted out of my van, out of the gridlock, out of all the grey domination man had inflicted on this corner of the world, and I was airborne. It reminded me of the poem, “High Flight” my John Gillespie McGee: “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…” Except I needed no airplane to achieve it. A flock of startled starlings was all it took. 

The traffic began to move again, and the brake lights eventually flickered less and less. We rolled out of Seattle and picked up speed as we crossed Lake Washington. The ETA on the map ticked back down. We would still make it to our friends’ house in good time. But that wasn’t in my mind at all anymore. If anything, I wouldn’t have minded if the trip took longer. The rest of the drive, and in every free moment for the rest of the day, I was remembering, reimagining, re-seeing that entire seven second show. I savored it. I slowed it down and delighted in the liquidity of it, the soft curves and rounded folds, the sudden coordinated expansions and retractions, all done with the flawless beauty that makes a murmuration so marvelous. (As in “marvelous: adj 1: causing wonder; astonishing 2: miraculous, supernatural 3: of the highest kind or quality; notably superior” – all of which apply here.) It looks like a carefully choreographed performance, rehearsed to detailed perfection and then performed with the easy grace and confidence that only hard, consistent training can produce. But this was raw Nature; this was starlings doing what starlings do by instinct alone. Marvelous. The beauty I witnessed communicated something beyond itself, as a spoken language does. It is because of this that I think we can say Beauty is Nature's native tongue.  

Interpretation through Meditation

During the experience, I felt a pain so intense it might have been physical. This was Joy as C.S. Lewis describes it in Surprised by Joy - part happy wonder, part yearning to be a part of what I wondered at. The pain comes from the awareness that I cannot have what I long to have, not as in a possession but as a part of myself. In this case, as Lewis notes and as Jason Baxter in his book Why Literature Still Matters expounds, the pain comes because I know I cannot participate. I am excluded. As much as I felt like I was up there with the starlings, I was not. I was a spectator when I wanted to be a participant:

“When we encounter Beauty, it is almost always accompanied by a strange note of sorrow, a sorrow that arises because beauty feels like something over there, something external to me. And in my gazing upon [beauty], what I find myself wanting is not just to see beauty by to be beauty, to make that which I see or hear or read become a permanent part of my being. …As one of my teachers says, ‘I don’t want to just see beauty, I want to eat it. …the good news is that I can, to whatever extent, close the gap between myself and the beauty I see out there. I can, to whatever extent, get it – a little bit – into the marrow of my bones. I can, to whatever extent, eat beauty.
“And how?
“Through literature, of course! And painting, and architecture, and music. And liturgy.” Why Literature Still Matters, p.32

We can participate in Beauty through Imagination. Indeed, it is the only possible means of participation. In each of these activities Baxter lists, and I think in liturgy especially, our whole selves are actively and physically participating through Imagination. In each of these experiences, the Imagination raises us out of our physical surrounding and enables us to participate in intangible realities beyond ourselves. Imagination is the door. It is our ears to hear Beauty speak, and it is the language of translation, the interpreter, the organ of ingestion, digestion, and assimilation of truth and beauty and goodness, of all those experiences that move us so intensely we have physical responses. Imagination is how a field of flowers for Wordsworth becomes a feast, a source of joy, a place of repose for not only Wordsworth but for us as well. When a vigorous, healthy imagination is given beauty, it opens its mouth wide,  swallows, and asks for more:
“Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn’t escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. And the imagination won’t stop until its swallowed everything.” – Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination 

From Meditation to Expression – Narration Opens the Door for Imagination

It’s often the case that when we experience something profound in Art or Nature, we stop at observation. We savor the beauty in the moment, endure or enjoy the longing, and move on, a bit wistfully perhaps, but still, on we go. But what if we stayed in the experience and let the longing move us to action? What if we gave it voice? What if we came back to the experience and listened to it's language again? What would it say to us, and how would we translate that for others to hear? Imagination is the bridge between my experience of Natural Beauty and the meaning I sense within it. It is also the bridge between my experience and other people, between my inner life and theirs. Imagination breaks down boundaries of time and space and speaks mind to mind, making external beauties internalizable, not only for me but also for those I share it with. Baxter agrees:

“To some extent, to some measure, we can overcome our time-bound mortality in the effort to draw closer to eternity. Literature – and her sisters arts – is driven by the secret desire to close the gap between myself and that beauty out there, to get that into me, to make beauty not something I simply gaze on, but something I feel palpably, sensuously, tangibly – something that is weighty and heavy and embodied and feels slow and spacious and still and suspended.”

“If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, at least, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be.”
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

Experiences of natural beauty require from us the same imaginative activity as experiences of literature – they require reflection and expression. I was drawn up into the murmuration not as a starling, but as one who can see beyond the starlings. I could have stopped at merely observing the murmuration and feeling the longing to be a part of what I could never join – or I could try to translate the murmuration  by the active exercise of Imagination. Narration, and I think especially creative narrations through artistic expression, is how we do this. After I experienced the murmuration, I meditated on it. I enjoyed it again and again, and this became part of what I wanted to express. How could I express it, I wondered? Should I write it in a poem in the style of Wordsworth’s Daffodils? I thought of a few lines, mentally scratched them out, replayed the murmuration in my mind, delighted in it again, composed a few lines again, and so on. In this activity, I stood on the bridge of Imagination, between myself and the experience, and as I tried to think of how best to share the experience, it becomes more a part of me than before. The murmuration I described for you is more mine now than when I first saw it. And yet, it is yours now, too. The poetic vision of the murmuration lifts it out of one person's experience and shares it with whosoever will participate in it.

Chapter two of WLSM is an example of this. In that chapter, Dr. Baxter tells the story of a near-death hike he attempted (and survived). The experience fed his Imagination and now he has communicated it to us in literature so that we can have a poetic vision of his actual experience. The act of writing it out, editing and rewriting, required him to revisit the experience again and again, to get at the particulars and details, to see the whole experience from above and beyond himself, not just within himself – those barriers of time and space were broken down. The imaginative mastication allowed the experience to create points of connection between itself and other gathered truths in his Imagination. In first meditating on it, his Imagination was able to dive deeper into the experience. This meditation moved him to imaginative action, to write this beautiful chapter, eloquently narrating his experience so that his readers could participate in his experience through our Imaginations and then go on to make connections between his poetic vision of Sardinia and our own personal experiences of truth and goodness and beauty. He has interpreted the meaning in the uncouth vernacular of Nature and his experience of it, and translated it into the language of Imagination that we can all understand. 

Art and Literature and Nature are not secondary things. They are not optional or ornamental or mere pleasantries with which to occupy non-work time. They enrich life to the point that if you take them away, you have nothing but a grey Hell left. But it is not only the thoughtful enjoyment of beauty that is necessary to make beauty a part of us. Along with the experience of these things, we must exercise our perception of them, and the best way to do that is through narration. Narration is essential to the internalization of truth, goodness, and beauty. In narration, we reach out with our minds and attempt to find the best words to fit the content. But in creative narrations and artistic expressions, we attempt to interpret the meaning of our experience as beautifully as we can, in words or shapes or colors, with an eye to inviting others to receive it and share it with us. In creative narration, we attempt to translate our experience into a poetic image. Whether or not we actually share our attempts at this translation is secondary; practicing the skill is the main thing. When you see a beautiful thing, express it somehow, in writing or a sketch. Write a bad poem about it. Paint a picture Bob Ross would be proud of. Again, the skill of execution is secondary for the amateur – the lover. In attempting the skill, we see what we love more clearly, more completely. We understand it in ways observation alone can’t get at because we are attempting to understand well enough to translate the sound and sense for someone else to take in. It works the muscles of perception. Perhaps, though, if we practice long enough, we willimprove in our ability and someday  ltranslate our experience as eloquently as Dr. Baxter did into the shared language of the Imagination. As Frye says, “In ordinary experience, we’re all in the position of a dog in a library, surrounded by a world of meaning in plain sight that we don’t even know is there. …[And] if we shut the vision of [literature – that is, the imaginative vision] completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it is really important to keep alive.”

“Now nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature; they being both servants of his providence: Art is the perfection of Nature: were the World now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one World, and Art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God.”  Sir Thomas Browne