The day before Seth and I departed for a 2.5 week trip, a robin began building a nest on the porch light inches from our front door. When we returned, the nest was built and the eggs were laid. Quite possibly, the baby robins were already born—it was too high to see inside, and although I often considered setting up some sort of mirror contraption, I never got around to it. Besides, doing so would feel like an invasion of privacy. In fact, every time we opened and shut our front door felt like an imposition; mama bird would always flap away and chirp at us angrily as I cried, “Sorry!” but she wouldn’t understand. So we stopped using our front door and started using the garage. But our garage got filled with kayaks and garden tools so we ended up using the back door instead.
Still, I had things to do in the front yard, big gardening plans,1 so I couldn’t avoid the birds entirely. The mother robin and I made an agreement. She begrudgingly allowed me to garden near her nest—always giving me a death-glare from the nearby electricity wire—and I got to peek at the hatchlings when their tiny heads breached the sides. I think she understood that my gardening was for everyone’s benefit. Healthy soil meant more worms, more worms meant happier babies.
Was I named after a robin, or was a robin named after me? Turns out, we were both named after some English guy named Robert. Which Robert? Don’t know. All Roberts. Robin was a nickname of Robert, and Robins with an “s” meant “son of Robin,” and Robins became Robbins because no one could spell back then. So my ancestors in the 1200s were the sons of a Robin and now I am the daughter of a son of a son of a son of a Robin. Then, in the 15th century, people in England began nicknaming the songbirds. So every sparrow was named Philip, every wren named Jenny, and all parrots were Polly (and still are).2 What we now know as a robin was called a red-breast until it was named Robert Red-Breast, then nicknamed Robin Red-Breast, then red-breast became redundant, even though its breast is not red, but orange, but the English didn’t have a word for orange until the fruit arrived later.
Elsewhere during the 15th century, Leonardo Da Vinci was born. I’ve been thinking about Da Vinci a lot lately, although I’m not sure why. I’m in a funny beginning-phase of a new novel right now, where every idea in the world feels possible, yet also very far away. Sometimes I pull up my old stories that didn’t go anywhere and wonder about them. That’s how I rediscovered one about Da Vinci. A few years ago, I decided to write 30 stories inspired by 30 different climate change technologies, and when I picked concentrated solar power out of a hat, I stumbled on the fact that Da Vinci sort of invented it. Meaning, he conceptualized giant concave mirrors that could heat up a swimming pool. It was never built, but now we have giant CSP plants springing up in deserts around the world, so. Good job, Da Vinci. I glanced at the old story—which I never finished—but put it away. I’m not in the mood to do the research required to write 15th century historical fiction right now. Yet the idea of him stuck in my mind. Da Vinci, Da Vinci, Da Vinci. Not just of him, but of the Renaissance in general. The feeling of it. One of complete openness and exploration. Everyone inventing and re-inventing everything. Trying to understand all of life itself.
So I picked up Walter Isaacson’s Da Vinci biography. I found myself more interested in his childhood than his later years. Little Leonardo wrote fables about moths and trees. He put on plays and played music. He studied animals and humans with no end goal in mind, measuring everything he possibly could. The length from a nose to a mouth, a mouth to a chin. He tried to turn a circle into a square. He watched water move through a river. He may not have had a word for orange, but he understood it nonetheless. He wanted to map out the human body, the animal body, the body of a river. He thought that understanding one thing could help you understand everything—and then he studied everything else anyway.
Imagine a world where nobody had a word for the color “orange.” When it was possible for an individual like Da Vinci to break ground on so many topics. By himself, he was able to gather a world of information and make sense of it. Mostly. Some of his theories were wrong (that stars don’t emit light but reflect it from the sun; that water flows upward from the ocean to the mountains), but many were correct, or on the path to being correct. These days, all of the simple ideas have been discovered. What is left? Ideas that are so beyond the average person they can hardly be described. Ideas about black matter, mathematics, AI, microbiology. Have you ever seen a cell? Have you ever seen an atom? If you want to discover something new about science, you must spend first years reading and understanding scientific literature as a starting point. And then spend years at a computer. And then maybe you get somewhere.
But we all have the opportunity to create little scientific experiments of our own. Like with the garden. And, for me, with the birds. Right now, rain or shine, I always walk around the neighborhood with an umbrella. I don’t care about rain. It’s to protect myself from the red-winged blackbirds. These birds’ wings really are red, but if you can see the red, you’re too close. It’s nesting season. AKA blackbird attack season. Last year I got scratched on the back of the head twice. This year I’m smarter. I bring my polka dot red umbrella and swirl it around until it scares them away. The other day I saw an old man running with a giant stick in his hand, held straight up above his head. I see you, old man. I see your blackbird scarecrow. Attack the stick, not the man. I’m getting smarter about the birds. I’m also getting smarter about the garden. Last year, we had no idea what we were doing. We planted twenty-four plants and half of them were eaten by rabbits, and the other half, we thought, died. Turns out, they simply fell back for winter. But the rabbits are still a real threat. This year I have rabbit fences galore, way taller than they need to be. And I’m letting the weeds grow and identifying them slowly to figure out which ones are good and which ones are evil. I found a wild strawberry in my lawn. Then I learned it was a false strawberry. I know that I have ditch lilies, which apparently are not real lilies, but just learned that I also have tiger lilies, which are real lilies. I went with a friend to a field full of what I thought were sunflowers, until I learned they were “false sunflowers.” But actually, sunflowers themselves are not flowers but a composition of florets. Yellow ray florets rim around tiny disc florets in the head. So shouldn’t the “false sunflowers” really be called “real sunflowers”? Around my neighborhood there is a prairie named after “Shannon Prairie” and a fishing spot memorial named after “Mildred Fish.” Who is named after what?
I like knowing the names of things. I am not one to name things; I name everything “Fred.” The robin mother’s name was Frederica. The father was Frederick. The three babies were all Freddies. People like to say that no one knew the color blue in the time of ancient Greece. Maybe they were color blind. Maybe they could only see black and white and red, red, red. Blood was everywhere, blood and death. They called it the “wine-dark sea,” which brings to mind an ocean of gore. But the Minoans and Egyptians were painting with real blue pigment far before that. Wine-dark maybe meant something about the texture—the ocean as a raging drunk—or maybe it meant “wine-eyed” and referred to the blue haze that would overcome an alcoholic after they became blind. Or maybe the wine was actually blue! Even if there was no word for blue, there was blue. Even if they had a smaller vocabulary to describe things, the things still existed. I’m reading the Iliad, and on every other page, warriors are described as lions. Achilles was like a lion. Menelaus was like a lion. Hector was like a lion. Every random Joe was like a lion. Leonardo, by the way, means “hardy lion” (and, if you’re curious, “Da Vinci” simply means “from Vinci,” the place). There were no oranges in Europe but there were red-breasted robins with their orange feathers everywhere. Somebody somewhere has already named every flower and weed I can find in my yard, but for me, it is enough to discover those names for myself. To learn what’s known as “fake” or “real” and why.
The robins have now left their nest. It happened on a day our cat Mondo got out. This happens a lot; he just likes to crawl under some bushes and make us drag him out, claws deep in the soil. But this time he hid underneath the car as Frederick and Frederica yipped at him angrily. Then, they were all gone. I feared Mondo scared the baby birds away before they were ready. Then I did a little research to find, no, actually, this timeline was just right, in fact, they should have left two days prior. So maybe our cat was the final push. To push those little birds into a world where they could begin discovering things for themselves. Maybe they will tell each other fables about how the world works. Maybe they will put on plays for one another. Measure the length of the worms they eat, map out the best feeding. Or they will simply live, with life as a discovery itself.
-Denise
Miscellanea
Book news
The Unmapping recently celebrated its one-month birthday! If you’ve had a chance to read it, I’d love for you to post a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon.
Also, the e-book is currently only $3.99! Tell your friends!
The Unmapping was listed #2 on People Magazine’s “Most Anticipated Summer Books.” Pretty cool getting texts from friends who read People and were excited to find my book listed there!
Check out this review from the extremely intelligent John Pistelli who connects The Unmapping to the growing movement of mixed-genre novels:
The literary landscape, too, has become unmapped. If The Unmapping has the pop factor of brisk narration, suspenseful pacing, and mostly likable and relatable characters, it is most the literary novel (most committed to at least unsettling if not shocking the bourgeoisie) in its magical realism, its persistent refusal—reminiscent of Kafka or Borges or García Márquez or Saramago—to reduce its titular event to scientific explanation, even as it goes into impressive and thorough detail about the practical consequences such structural motility would entail, as for instance, when an unmapped building’s severed gas line causes an explosion or another building threatens to shift into the East River.
Seriously, the whole essay is worth reading:
Other things
I wrote a piece called “What to read when life is in chaos” for The Rumpus
I interviewed Aram Mrjoian about his gorgeous new novel, Waterline, for the Chicago Review of Books
And Madison author Lauren Myracle about her fun thriller, Plays Well With Others, for Cap Times
My review about Margo’s Got Money Troubles was published in The Metropolitan Review:
Cat
A wildflower labyrinth! We are currently 1/10th of the way there.