3. Goose Love Letter
Plus beautiful art by my friend and labmate, Zoe Weeks.
Note: This story has been sitting on my computer since 2022, which is also when the adventure described therein took place. But my main motive for posting it now, in 2024, is (1) as cowardly distraction from the raw pain of the 2024 US election results and (2) because I wanted some words as a ‘side dish’ to accompany some gorgeous hand-drawn illustrations made specially for this Fig Two substack by my friend and labmate, Zoe Weeks. She’s actually Dr. Weeks now - she recently passed her PhD viva (also known as a ‘thesis defence’, for Americans) in plant biology - and works by day as a full-time research scientist investigating genes in moss and how these genes direct/regulate growth in this ancient class of plants. But for as long as I’ve known her, she’s also had keen artistic instincts. Unfortunately, Zoe is one of those people who seems to think even mentioning her talents to others is a form of bragging, so she never calls attention to the things she makes, and she’s certainly never referred to anything she produces, however beautiful, as ‘my art’. But wherever there is visual beauty, there she is, getting it ‘all over [her] face and hands’ (as Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden). In the lab office, waiting for a PCR reaction, she’s usually knitting something multicoloured or finding the edges of a 5000-piece puzzle. In the evenings, casually killing time before bed, she tends a garden of indoor plants and sketches things in ink, charcoal, oil pastel…So, for the next few weeks, I’ll be delighted to share a mini-series of her fig drawings alongside new instalments of Fig Two. (As for Zoe: she’s a bit private about her artistic life, but you can find her intermittent professional updates on Twitter at @Zoe_Weeks_.)
Illustration by Dr. Zoe Weeks.
And now, the story.
*****
Goose Love Letter
It is 3am when we pile into the car and leave for Stonehenge to see the sun rise on the longest day of the year. It’s Ravindra, me, and two friends. We are only four, and not more, because Priya has exams and can’t come and Aalia was supposed to come but when we rang in the middle of the night she didn’t answer.
Ravindra, Priya, Aalia and I are the Wild Geese. We are called that because of a Mary Oliver poem that ends:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.[1]
We all like Mary Oliver. And also because, behind the house where we hold Wild Geese meetings, there is a view onto a big grassy field that officially belongs to the university but really belongs to the geese. Every morning, a groundskeeper comes to trim the grass. Every evening, a flock of Canada geese, black and white tubs with graceful handles and webbed feet, plod single-file onto the lawn from the edge of the woods or the water. They advance until they have spread out across a big patch of lawn. Then they settle down in the grass, feeding and primping, for hours, while a few sentinels stand guard and honk at each other.
In the house we watch them, also for hours, and read poems together. A selection of poems we like, over tea, first in English, then in other languages. The first time we did this I got worried, because I’m the only one who doesn’t know any Hindi or Urdu. No fair, I said. It’s ok, they said, first we will read it aloud, and then we will translate. I close my eyes and catch loose words like usakee and tareef and sambhav nahin and main theek hoon. And then the three of them grip me by the hand and hoist me up in clarifying, magical translation. (Again, again! I beg, like a child.)
I don’t know why I am here – at Oxford, in the world, still in my twenties, but somehow already older than I wanted to be. Sometimes in the lab I am fine, pipetting, and then it seems that someone has pressed my power button and reset me. When I power back on I remember that I am supposed to be a PhD student and I have to start over: how did I get here? You were raised by scientists so you became one and then one day you flew on a big plane and landed in England. I remember that a big curtain fell, and on this side is me, and on the other side – my childhood bedroom is still the way it was, my old notebooks haven’t yet been thrown away, and my mother is still alive. And I remember that so many things used to hurt me with their beauty but now they don’t penetrate the curtain. So in a larger sense I do know perhaps why I am here, why we are here. We are here to relearn the technique of pressing on bruises until we can exhale with relief: good, I can still feel it.
***
Ravindra likes to point out that he and I actually live in the same house. Officially we are neighbours, but our units are semi-detached, half a house, and the other half is the other person’s house. There is a door in the common wall on the top floor that is locked most of the time but sometimes, inexplicably, gets left unlocked. On those days Ravindra likes to text me. Alison! Alison! Alison! They have opened the door between us! Come check out now! We live in the same house with a make-believe boundary in between! It’s imaginary you know, these borders between us. Come, the portal is open!
Once Ravindra and I ended up cycling next to each other down a city lane at 1am on our way home from a movie. What could be better than this? he said as we coasted, barely peddling, while the breeze ruffled our clothing. The world was warm and quiet. Do you feel oppressed? I said, though I already knew the answer would be, was always, yes. In fact it is the defining feeling of his life, so he is always flooding the senses in order to escape it, or maybe to grasp it more fully. Ravindra is enthralled to the three dimensions of the world: he sits on tables, climbs on ledges to shout declarations, jumps out of trees, runs, swims, hikes up and down mountains. And he revels in extremes of sensation: bitter cold and late hours – working, working, typing standing up so as not to fall asleep – and big scoops of chilli oil onto rice and the thunderous rain of monsoons.
I love trees, said Ravindra shortly after we met. Because even as seeds they know what they are going to be, and they don’t try to be another type of tree. Also they are just beautiful. They reach toward the sky in that meditative state which is hopeful yet accepting.
                                            Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.[2]
That’s my favourite tree, he says, pointing to a young bushy one. When I first got to this new country and they quarantined me for two weeks, I would escape here by the water and find this tree and say, Hello, tree.
***
Today in the car on the way to Stonehenge we pass truck after truck and listen to music as the sky turns. For a while it is black, a velvety skin studded with white (stars) and flecks of red and green (airplanes). But then the dawn starts to lift, first with blue cracks around the rim of the sky, then little pools of gold that mix in at the horizon. Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, sing the Beatles over the radio. It’s all right…
What exactly is the deal with Stonehenge again, says one of our friends Ahmad, who is driving. Our other friend Gio looks up the details on his phone and reads aloud to us. They are big slabs of stone arranged in concentric circles, erected five thousand years ago (but maybe not?), probably used for ritual purposes (but maybe not). Some of the stones weigh over twenty tons, and prehistoric people somehow dragged them there from hundreds of kilometres away. The more he reads the less we understand until we give up and marvel that we can be speeding toward some big ancient thing whose basic facts are still unknown, clouded by mystery and time.
Who built you, and how, and why? Historians think Stonehenge was used for sun worship because, on sunrise at the summer solstice and sunset at the winter solstice, the stones align with the sun so that a beam of sunlight cuts directly through the centre of the structure.
But when an animal looks at itself in the mirror, does it recognise the thing in the mirror as itself? To answer this, I once read, you can put a red dot of ink on the animal’s body, on some body part it can see only in the mirror but not by inspecting itself – for example, its face. When the animal looks in the mirror and sees the dot, will it try to rub the corresponding place on its own body? Just because it did, would you know that it recognised itself? How would you ever break into the black box of its being and say for certain that you understood why it did what it did? How much can the alignment of sun and stone tell you about a people – who they were, what they wanted?
Look! says Ravindra, pointing. Behind us, to the north and east, is Oxford. From the same direction, out the rear window, we can see the nascent sun. We seem to be fleeing it.
***
I fled too, said Priya when we were first getting acquainted over chicken sandwiches and tea. I mean, I do like Law, but I was also running away from family, so when it was time for university I said What is the longest possible degree and that’s how I chose my undergrad subject. I peer into her face and I can see – behind the eager cheeks with dimples, the cute chin, the flowing hair that frames her – an ignition behind her eyes that gives her away. Here, still, is the same child who snuck all the sweets meant for her father’s boss and then hid as the search party closed in; here, still, is the teenager who crawled out of a window and jumped down into the street so the boy’s parents wouldn’t find her in his bedroom. She can study for a year straight without stopping, she can argue all night long about beauty and women’s rights. But she can also spend a whole day in bed if she has food and books and paintbrushes and pens, she says. Why not?
Dude, your girlfriend is so woke! Ahmad, who is still hurtling us down the motorway, says to Ravindra. Almost true, I think to myself, only not so much woke as awake, in the old sense, alive to the world and its possibilities. One time the Wild Geese were hiking in the woods and Priya pointed toward the sky and said, do you notice how the tops of the trees seem white where the sunlight hits them? I examined the oaks around us – balding now, having already flung down curl after curl of papery leaves in protest over imminent winter. Their trunks were indeed strangely painted everywhere the light touched them. Water pooled in the dirt paths wherever the ground dipped, but nothing like the way it did every late November back home, when cold rain fell for weeks and rills of water ran down all the walkways as you trekked upstream toward your house. In a clearing Priya was still appraising the trees. How beautiful, she was saying, with laughter.
***
The land gets hilly. Our car headlights bite through the mist, and through the fog we can see some other vehicles deliberately strewn on the roadside – something coming, a grand cracking-open! People are hatching out of their cars. They walk confidently into the fog, all in the same direction as if pulled by a magnet. We feel it too, something tugging at our stomachs. Let’s ditch the car and just walk from here, says Ravindra, wiggling a bit in his seat, craning to see all the people.
Instead we park in a big field and stretch our legs. The air is heavy with mist, so soupy we are practically drinking it, yet somehow the grass is still dry, and has the same colours as the sky: green, gold, grey. The field is big before us, on all sides open plain. We jog a bit through it. After a short stretch we get to a big sign that says WELCOME TO SOLSTICE and as the stream of people thickens, so does the scent of herbs and smoke and something burning and we can feel it in our blood now, we are underway, on this pilgrimage. So many people are already here; clumps of them are even filtering back in the opposite direction. Gio muses: They must have already seen the first part of the sunrise.
We are late, we realise. We should have camped here for three days, counting down to this morning. We should have slept on the ground and drunk coffee from thermoses and contemplated all questions, no matter how answerable, on the off chance they might be clarified or desiccated in the sun. Why does the world keep turning? Why do we get more chances even after we have made a big mess of each day? What would you do if you only had one day left on this earth? My mother spent her last day sleeping, and then she died on a Thursday. But look, we’re all still here and the world is still beautiful. At the end of the world, then, on the last day, what should we say to each other?
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?[3]
***
In the winter Ravindra organises a Poetry Night for the students in our college which draws a small crowd. The Wild Geese stand by to help. In a large room, half full, we dim the lights and set out snacks in big bowls. We push the couches into rows so people can spread out into them, so it seems like we are all passengers on an airplane, journeying somewhere together. Then we begin. At first a few people stand up to share poems they brought with them, reading carefully from the earmarked pages of a favourite book or scraps of paper onto which they have copied out these delicate ethereal poems. Between lines they glance nervously at the crowd of gathered strangers, and the crowd stares nervously back.
Then Priya and Aalia stand up and each, in turn, begins to do what the Wild Geese have always done: Aalia reads a funny poem in English about a mango; Priya reads a sweet poem in Hindi, first in the original, then once again, this time translating on the fly. Gradually the air changes. More and more people are scrolling urgently on their phones, looking for something and then, as if bewitched, they stand up one at a time and begin to read from their phones: poems they didn’t intend to share, poems they suddenly remembered about after years, poems they wrote themselves, poems set to music. Wonderfully, they begin to speak and sing not only in English but also in Bangla and Arabic and Portuguese and German. Speaking and singing not out of deference to the lingua franca but in whichever language is closest to their hearts.
Afterwards the Wild Geese are hot and amazed. We can hardly believe what we have done. But later, we start to think—of course this is exactly what happened. This is what poetry should do, this is what life should drive you to. We should always walk through the world shouting, in confident declaratives, exactly what we mean. And only afterwards translate, as carefully as we can, so that we can be intelligible to one another.
All through Poetry Night, Aalia plays the moderator, the great encourager. She announces each reader and reflects aloud on everyone’s poems; she reads a poem that moves everyone or makes everyone laugh, whatever is needed in the moment. Aalia herself writes poems too, they come to her in Hindi or in English, usually when she is working, stressed by a deadline, and when this happens she understands that her job is to sit very still and not tremble from the stress and let the muse work. Aalia has a sweet alto voice and high cheekbones and an easy smile that reaches all the way to her big dark eyes, which almost always seem to brim – with affection, worry, joy. One time she said Let’s meet in the park and then when we did meet, I was late so I had to run toward her. Later we sat on a bench, surveying the sun-soaked puppies and children around us, and while we were discussing childhood and the sadness that comes with dating boys I thought, why isn’t this the way we always approach each other? We should always run toward one another like the world is ending. It should always be a sunny afternoon and the summer should stretch on and on without end, and we should grow older only at exactly the pace we can handle.
That day Aalia had Mary Oliver’s Collected Poems tucked under her arm, and in fact she walks around with that book, she doodles her own poems in the margins and on scraps of paper hidden in between the pages. How else should we behave in the presence of beauty? Tuck it under your arm and, whenever you can, emulate.
***
On a faraway hill we can see Stonehenge rising out of the mist. We have slowed to a walk but now the view hurts us with its beauty and we resume chasing it. Looking across the grass it is as if we are peering not only across space but through time, and if we would only penetrate the mist we could learn something important.
The cluster of stones on the distant slope surprises me with its smallness – twiggy grey gravestones on a big open field. But maybe this view was true to the scale of life back then, when people still felt the reality of their finitude, their insignificance against the vast landscape of the world. Maybe the ancient Druid priests stood quietly on such a hill at sunrise and thought, what a lonely beautiful place, and who knew it could be so beautiful, who knew that the sun could come up a perfect orb, bloody and golden in a way no one has ever seen before. It is right that we should build it something here, as big as we are able. And once a year the sun will acknowledge us back, it will rise and see what we have made in its honour and reach with its light precisely through the heart of our monument, like a promise fulfilled.
A throng of people passes us, solemnly pulling a giant sedan chair through the mist. The chair is tall enough for four people to stand in, one on top of another: a chair for a small god. People are wearing purple robes and flower crowns and rainbow flags adorned with dragons and horses and fish. They have drums and tambourines, they are chanting and smoking. Aalia, you poet, I wish you could be here and have this indescribable feeling, but I’ll save some for you, it’s like this – remember that night when none of us could sleep so we went to the river and looked at the moon and felt very close to the wild origin of things? Ravindra is scooping up mementos left and right, trying to capture the feeling of this day. He reaches for a solar blanket before its rightful owner sees him and glares. He pulls up an odd daisy growing in the field, he touches someone’s billowing cape, he snatches up a colourful flag with stars and waves it in the air. Finally he picks up a pillow that someone has abandoned on the ground. It is midnight black, with moons the colour of suns embroidered on it, and still wet with dew. Can we keep this for Priya? he says, handing it to me.
I will save something for Priya too, but it doesn’t exist yet: a memory from the future, from later in the summer. Priya – will you remember? That afternoon in the park under the willow trees by the water. Under a willow curtain we had our own private chamber where we read and drew, where time was fat and lazy. That day I felt drunk. I wanted to tell you so many things. This willow is my grandfather. How I love you. May time never pass. And do you remember? How everything was backwards: the water was greener than the trees, and the trees with the wind blowing through them were more liquid than the water.
When we reach the Sarsen Circle, the arena is full. People are climbing over the fallen bluestones, standing up carefully, trying to film the rising sun through their iPhones. By the ancient altar stone, some people wearing flowers and body paint are drumming a big drum and chanting in rhythm. A line of maidens, dressed all alike in flowing red robes and crowns of matching red flowers, gathers opposite the Sarsen Horseshoe and begins to sing softly, happily. Over their heads one beautiful woman who looks exactly like a Celtic goddess leads the singing. She is twice the height of everyone else – someone must be propping her up from below. Or perhaps, I find myself hoping, she really is a Celtic goddess, here to check on humanity and bless us for as long as we still notice beauty. Maybe she has come to Stonehenge every summer for the last five thousand years, riding in a giant sedan chair.
Everyone is in the same mood, almost vibrating. Ravindra can barely contain himself. He wants to hear the choir sing. He wants to drum the big drum.
Suddenly I realise
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.[4]
The fog enshrouds us, is lifting, is dissolving into the sun. Or, the fog is all around us and the sun is 93 million miles away, but today it has come to earth. Today is the longest day of the year. Today we get closest to the illusion that the day is infinite and the sun might never set, and therefore that there is still hope for us.
***
Later, Aalia will read me a poem she wrote on this day, after she woke up late and went to the park to console herself about missing the sunrise. Her poem is about alarm clocks and the feeling of Fuck! and walking in the park and a little bit about dogs, but somehow it perfectly describes what it felt like at Stonehenge on solstice morning.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.[5]
I marvel, then realise—of course. All this flows through her, or is generated in her, churning and churning in her poet’s imagination. In that deep inner sanctum inside each of us where the beauty of the world is magnified, sweetened, exalted.
***
I am so short, and Stonehenge is so crowded, that for a long time I can only see excited faces and legs and backpacks and feet. Ravindra and the others finally boost me up onto one of the fallen bluestones, already crammed with eager bodies. Why do we act like this is some unbelievable miracle? The sun always rises, the world keeps turning, but only today are we crawling over each other to see. I scrabble atop the cold rock, just barely finding a foothold, and at last I gaze in the same direction as everyone and I see it, this ancient, bloody, golden thing, glowing fuzzily, low in the sky but climbing every minute. It is framed by a pair of standing stones, like a gift. The stones forming an open gate through which the long-awaited sun is now stepping regally, like a queen coming home.
I stare dumbly into the sun and think of the Wild Geese.
My friends! I want to tell them. If I had all the beauty in the world I would keep heaping it into your arms until you couldn’t hold any more, until they were brimming like Aalia’s eyes, the way Priya heaps rice and dahl and Ravindra’s duck-egg curry onto my plate at dinner. We would eat together and listen to music and then we would go down to the river just like we used to do in the winter. We would sit carefully on the stone steps leading to the water, by then robed in ice. Aalia would pull tiny bottles of vodka out of her backpack, and we would drink and look at the moon and listen to the sound of the water. And then I would hand out my presents.
To Aalia I would give all the flurried motion of a bulldog digging and a pile of perfectly ripe mangoes and doting love in all its forms – dog kisses, grandparents, handwritten letters from old friends. To Priya I would give an endless supply of Friday afternoons – the infinite hours of a whole weekend stretching before you – and a big stack of drawing paper and paint so she could show us what the world looks like to her. And Ravindra, I would give him a big stand of aspen trees. I would take him to Utah where the big grove Pando stands and say, Look, it’s all for you. I would say, How many organisms do you think this is and he would say I don’t know, maybe forty-seven thousand? And I would say, no, they may look separate, but scientists say all these trees are genetically identical and connected underground by a giant root system we can’t see, so they’re all one organism. Just like all of us. All the imaginary borders between us. But come, the portals are open.
[1] Mary Oliver, ‘Wild Geese’
[2] Ada Limón, ‘Instructions on Not Giving Up’
[3] Mary Oliver, ‘The Summer Day’
[4] James Wright, ‘A Blessing’
[5] Seamus Heaney, ‘Song’