They say the algorithms are dumb and mechanical, but sometimes they have an uncanny beauty, a mystery. I’ve experienced these synchronicities many times before. Who knows, perhaps it’s only me filtering simple coincidences through the lens of an expectant, questing mind hungry for meaning. Maybe I’m just searching for signs from the universe that there’s coherence out there, some benevolent principle or force organising my experience. What else can one hope to believe in, living in these times?
I saw the news item on social media, several technological steps removed from the event - someone’s screenshot of a Twitter post, copied over to a Facebook group of which I may or may not be a member, or perhaps it was just ‘suggested for you.’ With great sadness it could be confirmed that Bruce, the black swan of Hollow Ponds, had died peacefully of avian flu. His magnificent body, with its blood-red beak and feathers as black and glinting as coal, had been retrieved from the pond by the rangers of Epping Forest. They laid him upon the ground with hands gloved against the virus, laid him alongside the bodies of the snow-white swans who’d shared the water with him in this corner of East London.
Some of the photographs of him, of which there were many online, showed him swimming alongside his friend, a small black white-billed coot that nobody’d seen fit to name. Bruce was the celebrity, a ‘sassy’ swan; the coot was merely his hanger-on. I’m not sure how Bruce’s sassiness was discerned, any more than anyone could know his death was peaceful. I hope both things were true.
I feel saddest when I think of the coot. I think of him swimming alone, and confused, searching. I anthropomorphise, which does me no favours. I cannot really afford, at 3 am, to be shedding tears over the presumed loneliness of a coot.
Or maybe this sentimentality is a blessing, a good thing, a sign that I am still connected to the beauty and sadness of life, and cognisant that loss is the price we all eventually pay for love.
Image credit: Phil Newson
Soon my daughter came home from school. That very afternoon, during a walk with her classmates in the shrubby pine forests around Hollow Ponds, she and her friends had seen a white bird in the water, ailing or dead. They were saddened, and wondered about Bruce.
‘I wonder if he’s still alive,’ my daughter had said. ‘I wonder if he’s dead.’
She didn’t like it, the uncanniness of this coincidence. Two hours earlier, she had dared to think he might be dead, and now it transpired that he was. By calling Death aloud, by his name, perhaps she had killed the swan.
I looked for a time stamp on the article, hoping to reassure her that she had not caused this, that Bruce had gone already at the moment she expressed concern about his fate. It was an odd strategy for reassurance. Why did I not just say, we can’t make animals or people die by thinking about death? But I didn’t go with that. Instead, I looked for the time stamp, just to check she hadn’t actually been responsible. It doesn’t make sense.
Sill later that day, there was another post on my timeline on social media. This time, it was a post that was ‘Suggested for You.’ Perhaps the algorithmic powers that be intuited that I had snapped a photo of a now-dead swan, that I had sent it a friend or two from a messaging app also owned by Meta, saying what a shame it was about the elegant, irreplaceable Bruce. The suggested post was about a book that I have on my shelf somewhere. It’s called Duck, Death, and the Tulip, written and illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch.
When Death arrives, clutching his black tulip, Duck is wary and afraid. She asks if he has come to take her, but he provides her with what, at least at first, appears to be cold comfort. He says he is not newly arrived, but that he has been there with her for her entire life: she simply has not noticed him.
After a while, Duck becomes curious about Death. They become acquainted, even friendly, exploring Duck’s environment, playing together amongst the water and trees. They talk about what happens after you die. Duck tells Death she’s heard stories about what happens to ducks who die, that they become angels in the sky if they’ve been good, and are roasted underground if they have not. Death does not confirm or deny it, has no comment. Clearly, there are no easy answers. Duck learns to live with this not-knowing.
They could see the pond far below. There it lay. So still, and so lonely.
‘That’s what it will be like when I’m dead,’ Duck thought. ‘The pond alone, without me.’
[I think about the coot and want to cry.]
Death sometimes reads minds. ‘When you’re dead, the pond will be gone too - at least for you.’
All that summer, Duck and Death spend quality time together. As autumn arrives, Duck begins to feel a chill. She does not remember having felt a chill like that before at the change of the seasons. One evening, she asks Death if he will lie with her, just a little, to warm her.
In the morning, she is still.
Death carries her in all tenderness to the pond, sets her body on the surface of the water, and watches as she floats away. Into my mind the mirror image springs: the rangers in Epping Forest removing the swan from the water, Death returning Duck to it.
But I imagine that the rangers did what Death did, before they said goodbye: stroked the beautiful feathers back into place. The moment is held in suspended time, a moment of perfection and honouring, before the decay sets in.
It is autumn. I have just today finished the draft of my latest book, which is a great personal victory, one I did not expect to see. Over this next fortnight, as the leaves fall and the evening chill sets in, I will smooth it into perfection.
I was about to say to you that I cannot account for my mix of feelings: I am proud and joyful at the achievement, I am relieved, and yet I am sad. I work so hard for these accomplishments. I build up all these things, do the hard graft, strive so continuously for whatever success is.
Maybe it’s the age that I am, or maybe it’s because it is autumn, and the black swan is gone. The older one gets, the more autumn puts one in mind of these things. When I’m dead, the books will be gone too - at least for me.
At least for me.
O death, O death - won’t you spare me over ‘til another year?
A STUNNING piece of writing, Elaine. Happy feather-smoothing over the next two weeks!