Bird-Gods.

As well as the glints and grassy strands in the landscape that we pick up to use in our fictions we also, invariably, have voices in our head: voices of our characters and also voices of other writers and birds, nest-builders, their phrases and warbles and cadences guiding and providing the aerial standards by which we measure our success or failure. Roberto Calasso, the incredibly brainy and poetic Italian polymath, has described all this as a process of triangulation, in that there are three actors working together with us as we make our imaginative word-field –

I read this as being ‘god’ in the 18^th century sense, that enervating substance that can be found under no microscope but that fuels no vainglory or war, the god or spirit that nevertheless ticks the little birdheart of creation over and over to the next fluttering beat. In my case it could be a little blue wren god or a brolga god or a powerhouse gannet god of the sea, they being three of my companions in the landscape here, but whatever they are I believe that the great Calasso bird is right. Long may he fly. He also said that to make art is ‘to fashion a cow from the cowhide’, ie: to take a found thing, a scrap, a nesty remnant that has some tenuous vestige left of the world we want to live in, and to somehow make that world anew. Well of course that’s a high falutin’ thing to achieve, a true magic act, a real rabbit out of the hat, and for those of us who attempt it the trick is to surrender to the hop of the rabbit and, yes, at the same time to hold onto your hat.