Starling
Starling started as a conversation and it became a 5 minute audio-video collage projected on 5 separate screens, simultaneously. The film’s soundtrack is music by Jerry Gordon (aka Moontriangle) with a voiceover of a cutup poem from a page of a Michael Ondaatje novel. In hindsight I can say it is about grief.
My partner had found a female starling on the path in the garden. She was hurt, we didn’t know what had happened to her. I suspected that she had flown into a window. I watched her chest rise and fall heavy with every breath. She started to move and I felt hope for her recovery. She was so beautiful, such subtle glows of colour, this young, female starling. I looked down into the box and witnessed her last cry. I watched in awe and sadness as the life left her body.
I decided to bury her in a raised bed of flowers. I felt so reluctant to put earth on her perfect form. I carefully closed her eyes and thought about the flowers she will become, and all the summers of this old world, and how many summers I have left.
I told a friend about it. Jerry in Osaka, and he told me some stories:
”I remember walking to work a long a small rain drain on July 7th 2005 (the day of the London subway bombing). As I walked along thinking about the tragedy, I found a dead sparrow perfectly placed on a small mound of green moss that had built-up in the concrete gutter. It struck me and has stayed with me until now, 17 years later, that it was positioned so perfectly, as though its posture in death figured as some element of value in the world– which I very much think it does.”
Jerry asked me to honour the starling in some way, and I told him I will bury her next to another bird amongst the marigolds in my garden so I can keep an eye on her and plant more flowers above her. I tried to close her eyes. I thought about the flowers she will become. I remembered a quote I had read from Eduard Munch, one that the Munch museum in Norway had found scribbled in one of his sketch books:
‘From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.’
I took photos and sent them to my friend and he told me another story:
“I was living in Osaka and it was after the 911 attacks occurred, so must have been 2001 or 2002. It was the day on which George Bush and the US started the 2nd war on Iraq. It was in the morning and I was feeling pretty depressed by the whole bullshit of my country beginning such violence upon a country that so obviously seemed to have no connection to the 911 attacks. I was against invading Afghanistan as well. It made no sense to me. As horrific as the 911 attacks were, if they were criminal acts by a terror network, then that is no reason attack or invade another nation state.
Anyway, that was the morning’s context.
And on that morning I had to go to the super market. I rode my bike over. I remember is was a somewhat sunny day. As I came to the front of the market, I heard a sound of ZZZZAAPP. An sudden but not loud electrical buzzing. And to the ground fell an electrocuted pigeon. It landed near the market’s entrance, right beside a trash can. I looked at the dead pigeon and my mind turned to the bombing of innocents in Iraq, the useless destruction.
The bird looked so heavy and so calm and so quiet on the black top. And, then an older Japanese woman, just a simple housewife type, walked up to the bird. She had obviously seen it fall dead as well.
We stooped down and picked it up. It body was slack in her hands. And I thought that she was going to toss it in the trash can that was right there, but she didn’t.
She placed it carefully on the top of a rectangular concrete parking curb–transforming the curb into a bier. It felt like just an act of honouring the dead, to convey some immediate sense that the dead are not garbage and that there is an entity inhabiting the meat we call a body, that may need to figure things out, and thus needs a slightly protected perch from which to determine its next move.
It was one of the most sincere acts of humanity that I have ever witnesses, so direct and formal and respectful and instinctive.”
That was Jerry’s story.
And so the young female Starling became the focus of our conversations.
I felt reluctant to put earth on her
I tried to close her eyes
I thought about the flowers she will become
I found comfort in that she isn’t suffering any more
I laid moss and lichen on her
I sowed seeds above her bones, for her and all the relationships that tie us to this world.
I think she might have broken open a hard shell of grief I had been carrying for years.
Time has passed since then but as I write this and the world is reeling from the mechanisms of that endless, unfolding horror we call empire.
The 5 screen film Starling was shown MIIT house tiny video festival in Osaka, Japan, 2023.
