On Becoming Bird

When I was a hatchling, my brother stood up on the dining room table with a pair of fan blades in his hands, and then he flapped his wings. For a moment, it seemed he might just rise into the air and vanish like a skylark. But gravity has a way of keeping Earth boys earthbound. After a few minutes of flapping, Daniel stepped down from the table and jotted a few things in his notebook. His science fair presentation was titled, “How Birds Fly and Why Boys Can’t.”

For as long as I can remember, I have wished that I could fly. I used to visit the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Kenosha, Wisconsin every summer to converse with court jesters and go bungee jumping. At the crescendo of each bounce, my heart would flutter with the sensation of flight, and in these moments, I felt like some great hawk-god. Once, my friend Sabrina wrote me a letter to be read on an airplane. As though to offer some sort of consolation prize for not being born with wings, the letter reminded me that I was, in fact, flying across the stratosphere.

My brother studied the intricate mechanics of bird flight while I was drawing, writing, singing about birds possessed with ancient, mystical knowledge. But no matter how deeply we wondered and dreamed, it was difficult for us to imagine what it was actually like to be a bird—to open your wings and to rise, breathlessly, into the frozen air.

When I was diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition called Stargardt’s Disease, I longed more than ever for a different body, one that could spot insects from ozone and weave pathways with wind. I took the name of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Greek mythology, to transform this degenerative circumstance into a source of creative power—mystical insight, even. That Tiresias was one of the most liminal and transgressive figures in all of ancient myth—blind and seeing, man and woman, mystic and mortal—made me feel that I, too, could become a generative paradox, a prism. That Tiresias had a special kinship with birds—having understood their language, and possibly invented the practice of augury, whereby oracles foretell the future based on flight patterns and birdsong—made me feel a special kinship with Tiresias. I discovered drag as a queer art of transformation, and I began to realize strange, larger-than-life visions for live performance. As Tiresias, I was becoming more-than-human; I became a shapeshifter. At night, when I closed my eyes, I imagined what it might be like to have wings.

I read a New Yorker article, titled “Why Animals Don’t Get Lost,” about the ability of some animals to navigate using the Earth’s geomagnetic field. The fact of magnetoreception stretched the outer limits of my imagination. How on Earth could the Arctic tern or the leatherback sea turtle or the rock lobster sense these invisible magnetic vibrations? Their journeys, achieved without visual cues, struck me as odysseys of Homeric proportion, epic and vibrating with untold magic. Sensory biologists believed that the magnetic sense had something to do with a tiny photoreceptor called “cryptochrome”—“hidden color,” in Latin—and upon learning this I knew that I had begun an odyssey of my own.

In his seminal philosophical essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Thomas Nagel argues that it is functionally impossible for a human to imagine what it is like to be a bat. He cites, among other factors, the “phenomenological features” of subjective experience; humans do not possess the sensory faculties required for sonar, for example, and thus can only hope to understand its mechanics and material consequences. The question of a bat’s conscious, sensory experience was out of the question for homo sapiens. For me, the essay raises broader questions about the limits of human empathy and imagination, and makes me wonder whether it’s impossible to ever truly know what it’s like to be any other living thing—including other humans.

But artists live in the domain of the impossible. And while Nagel’s questions about consciousness and subjective experience have vexed scientists for decades, here was an opportunity for deep imaginative exploration. I sought to understand these other ways of being, knowing, sensing, and perceiving. And I began to realize that there were realms of scientific inquiry that required the imaginative work only an artist could undertake.

So I set about writing cryptochrome, a sonic odyssey and ritual meditation that invites audiences to imagine themselves in the sensory worlds of other living things. I had an inkling that it would be an evening-length solo performance with live piano accompaniment, scored from beginning to end with both songs and spoken text. I knew that I wanted to set a relaxed, meditative atmosphere, giving audiences permission to let their minds wander, to close their eyes or even sleep. In contrast to my typically more extravagant visual aesthetic, it felt important to de-emphasize the visual dimension of cryptochrome, opting for flowy black garments, which practically disappear under stage lights, and a single black ravine—or river, or branch, or hypha, or other such quantum thread—drawn onto my white-painted face. Relative to the big, feathered headpieces and giant artificial puppet limbs I sometimes perform with, this was as stripped-down as I could imagine the Tiresias persona. In cryptochrome, Tiresias was not so much a character as a heightened self-representation, both exposed human performer and mystical ferryperson transporting wayward souls to distant imaginative shores.

I hoped that in making a collective effort to understand what it was like to be other living things, we might cultivate a greater sense of care for these other lives and act in accordance with these understandings.

I began to weave an interlocking sequence of lives across the animal kingdom: a hawk, a snake, a mole, a lineage of dragonflies, a lobster, a whale, a bat, an orchid, a beetle, a pinecone, and a human being—me. Each section began with an invocation: You are a dragonfly, and then I would set the audience buzzing across the wine dark sea. The “characters” of cryptochrome were critters summoned in the mind; cryptochrome, in other words, was a “play” for the theatre of the imagination.

You are a hawk
soaring over the wine dark sea
You collect the salt wind in your wings
and let it buoy your flight

Perhaps Nagel was right, and we could never truly know what it was like to be a bat or any other winged creature. But even if absolute understanding was beyond reach, surely we could exercise our imaginative faculties and unearth some insight in the process. I hoped that in making a collective effort to understand what it was like to be other living things, we might cultivate a greater sense of care for these other lives and act in accordance with these understandings.

As an artist approaching blindness, I longed for sensory alternatives to human sight. Here, then, was my opportunity to tune and sharpen my inner vision to imagine alternative modes of sensing and perceiving in the more-than-human world. I found solace in the underground pathways of star-nosed moles, whose natural blindness was no obstacle to flourishing. And sometimes, when I imagined what it was like to be a bird, it felt like I was becoming one. 

You are a large, heavy land bird
so you cannot stop to rest or feed on the water
You must fly hundreds of miles without rest
A single degree in the wrong direction
could mean the end of you

For as long as I can remember, my mother, a printmaker and multimedia visual artist, has been making etchings and lithographs and encaustics depicting birds on telephone wires and mid-flight and transposed onto images of my brother and me bungee jumping at the Renaissance Faire. In these images, we become entanglements of arm and leg and wing and rope and wire. Often, the birds—condors, hawks, seagulls—fly free while we are bound by bungee cord.

At the heart of cryptochrome is the story of a hawk with a snake in her talons that collides with a telephone line and starts a forty-acre wildfire—a real-life event I read about in Newsweek. Sometimes, interspecies entanglements such as this collision between animal lives and human infrastructure are lethal and even catastrophic. Theatre in the age of climate change is challenging to make because pointing fingers rarely, if ever, changes hearts and minds. With cryptochrome, I hoped to render this grisly scene like a Euripidean tragedy, a sequence of extreme events that did not tell you how to feel about them.

While I was writing cryptochrome, I read an article about “vagrant birds”—the wonderful name scientists have given to birds that stray from their usual range or migratory routes. Some biologists believe that these birds are charting new migratory patterns in the age of climate crisis. Here was a glimmer of hope for a multispecies future. So I wrote an alternate ending for the hawk; instead of collision and wildfire, the hawk—a vagrant bird—strays from her ancestral pathways. By most accounts, such a bird has become lost.

But what if you are not lost

What if you are responding to a world in flux
charting new cartographies for your species
A lone agent risking your feathers to weave
new ways forward for yourself and your kind
Your world has been irrevocably altered
Lands, skies, and seas
You stray from the flock to forge
New avenues, new adaptations
to stretch the whole vault of heaven

You are an avian vagrant
An accidental
Drawing new maps
etched in slime, intuitions refined
Whisperings of destination and the divine

As the hawk refined her instincts and wove new pathways, I knew that I was writing about vagrant birds and also that I was writing about me and also that I was writing about queer people and endangered species and so many other living things adapting to a harsh and fast-changing world. I realized that we might not be able to avoid mass extinction—it is already underway—but we might cultivate new entanglements between feather and flesh, and we might weave new ways forward that allow for new forms of multispecies survival and flourishing. I often return to Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer use—“when things are used for purposes other than the ones for which they were intended”—in which she celebrates birds that take up residence in mailboxes. We cannot disappear the detritus of human industry and infrastructure, telephone lines and all, but we can creatively adapt to make a changing world more habitable. We can also use stories about ecological devastation to tell stories of adaptation, transformation, and renewal. Ahmed attaches a handwritten sign to her post box that says, “BIRDS WELCOME!”

And perhaps this is the tension at the core of living among other living things on planet Earth: that we are all made of the same carbon and stardust on a pale blue dot hurtling through the universe and that each of us is an entire phenomenal universe unto ourselves.

It could be said that birds fly and that boys can’t. Or, it could be understood that flight is both a metaphor and not a metaphor, and in this sense, my brother and I have been finding ways to fly all our lives. Our instruments of scientific and metaphoric inquiry may be crude and imprecise, but they allow for some insight into the worlds of other living things. And perhaps it is in this middle distance, between knowing and not knowing, that empathy lives. Empathy, after all, passes between one subject and another, so, as Nagel reminds us, that implies some imaginative limitations. In other words, empathy is always, at some level, a speculative unknowing. I might be able to “put myself in your shoes,” but we acknowledge that they are your shoes.

And maybe this leads us to one of the stranger and more miraculous facts of theatre: even as we gather to experience something together in real time, we recognize that no two audience members will have the same experience. It depends on where you are sitting or standing, on your tastes and frames of reference, on what you ate for lunch, on your particular neural arrangements. For me, this variability of experience has never felt more palpable than while performing cryptochrome. Each night, I wondered what prismatic vistas were being spun into being, what it felt like for each voyager to scuttle across the deep sea as rock lobsters do, and how they imagined evoking a sense of the world through echolocation. There were as many odysseys as there were minds to imagine them, and there was also the odyssey we undertook together, concerning the hawk and the snake and the mole and the dragonflies. And perhaps this is the tension at the core of living among other living things on planet Earth: that we are all made of the same carbon and stardust on a pale blue dot hurtling through the universe and that each of us is an entire phenomenal universe unto ourselves.

Some birds—such as lyrebirds, bowerbirds, parrots, starlings, jays, mockingbirds, thrashers and catbirds—are able to mimic not only the sounds of other birds, but also cats, dogs, frogs, crickets, humans, motorcycles, car alarms, and water sprinklers. I don’t claim that in singing Lady Gaga or demanding potato chips an Amazon parrot knows what it’s like to be human. But I can’t help but wonder whether, in this reaching across the species divide, these birds are performing a vital form of cross-species empathy and imagination.

The truth is, I don’t know what it’s like to be a bird and a bird does not know what it’s like to be me. And while the subjective distance between us may be easier to bridge, you and me, we don’t know what it’s like to be one another. Yet I know we are lost if we do not dare to do the impossible work of imagining beyond ourselves, imagining what it’s like to be creatures who are not us. In the imaginative realm, we can become other living things. And in that process of becoming, we cannot help but come to care in deeper and more tangible ways for the other beings with whom we share a planet. When we return to ourselves—fleshy and earthbound, without wings, subject to gravity and longing—we might not know what it’s like to fly like birds, but we renew our commitment to a world where we might all find our wings.