"Sparrow"
On birds, spring, and the cycle of life.
I do not like birds. Rather, it isn’t so much a dislike as a fear. An encounter with a beady-eyed, catarrhal cawing, black bird (species unknown) exacerbated this phobia. Living for two years in a Scottish coastal town where the seagulls gorged on abandoned fish & chips and swooped in on sandwiches carried by unsuspecting hands, and, as a result, ballooned into portly, airborne beasts did not help to assuage the phobia.
Yet, as summer approaches and the days eat into the nights and I take my walks, I notice birds everywhere. Chirps and warbles supply my mornings with a soothing soundtrack. The flit of red from a northern cardinal or the fluttering blue from a blue jay fills me with a childlike sense of wonder, that such vibrant colors can occur in nature and are not confined to the artificial pixelation of a screen. When I watch, from my window, a thrush probe the ground for worms, I think of the songbird1 in the opening credits of Twin Peaks. All around me, these once-petrifying creatures pull me closer to the bounties of earth and remind me of the glories of spring. They remind me, too, of a rapturous song: Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sparrow.”
Given the monolithic status of Simon & Garfunkel and how vital this folk duo is to the pulse of my spirit, I am always surprised to remember that they only recorded five albums, between 1964 and 1970. And yet, it seems that one cannot plumb their discography to its absolute depths. Even when listening to a song I’ve listened to a hundred times before, it is as though I am discovering it anew. Like a lasting novel, their songs evolve, morph into new entities depending on the circumstances in which you listen to them. Your age, your residence, your relationship status, the time of day—all are factors for how you will experience a song, which chords or lyrics will cause your ears to perk up. Perhaps this is true of all music, but especially so with Simon & Garfunkel.
Is it the somber, nostalgic qualities of their songs that, ironically, make them timeless? Yearning for something that no longer exists, grasping at a memory that is as immaterial as fog, suspends the music beyond the linear constraints of time. Instead, they occupy all points on the loop, at once past and future, part of the fleeting present that slips into past before returning to the horizon ahead (the semantics and logic of time are beyond the scope of this piece). Are we not all chronic nostalgics? To exist in the present is not our natural state—it requires an immense amount of mental training and mindfulness, for which many of us lack the patience and the longevity. No, we are beings with minds that are inclined towards regret, harping on the missed romantic chances, the failed tests, the lost tennis matches, the arguments never resolved. Rehashing those moments and inflating them with an importance that they don’t deserve transforms them into cages around our consciousness. Thus, we bind ourselves to the past, while the cycle spins forward, taking our bodies along with it but leaving our minds behind, minds that have deprived themselves of experiencing life.
This is taking a melancholic turn, which was not my intention. Don’t worry, I am going to end this piece on a note of hope.
Last weekend, my book club convened to untangle Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. Nearing the end of our discussion, we considered whether the novel offered any comfort about death, whether it was not as bleak as it appeared. I spent this time staring at the wall, searching for an answer I didn’t have. But perhaps now I do. Pedro Páramo does not adhere to a linear structure. Distinguishing between the living and the dead is a disorienting task. Death comes for the titular character in the middle of the book, but his narration continues and there are subsequent episodes in which he is alive. Perhaps this muddling of time accepts the notion that time is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. If so, then death is not one’s ultimate state. It is not the conclusion that we all so fear. Viewed as a part of life and not the culmination of life, death is stripped of its horror. Why should we dread something that is simply a step towards the next stage of life? What does this have to do with Simon & Garfunkel? How will I rein this tangent in and return to the task at hand?
To be frank, “Sparrow” is about life and death.2 You don’t need to be too analytical to realize that. The song tells of a sparrow—refused shelter by an oak tree, spurned by a swan, denied sustenance by golden wheat—who is finally given pity and love by the earth upon its death. For the earth sprouts everything and all that it sprouts returns to rest in its soil: “From dust were ye made and dust ye shall be.” Banish your fear of death is what I hear in the words and the galvanizing guitar, the building vigor of the vocals of “Sparrow.” We are all born from nature and nature will envelop us in death. As every spring ushers in a period of rebirth, so too do our souls inhabit new bodies, burgeoning again from that same nature, the eternal constant.
Spring is waning, yielding to the languorous, soupy, stultifying days of summer. In the seasons, we, too, see the transitions from life to death to rebirth. We don’t encounter this change with trepidation, though, because we know that next year, we’ll be welcomed by another spring. Why not view life through this same lens? Why not embrace the idea that we are not spiraling down towards finality but always circling towards new life?
Listen to “Sparrow,” to the twittering symphony at sunrise, and rejoice in the awareness that what you’re hearing, what you’re witnessing, is all part of a perpetual life.
One can find eight species of thrush in Pennsylvania, two of which are passage migrants: the Eastern bluebird, the gray-cheeked thrush, the Swainson’s thrush, the hermit thrush, the wood thrush, and the American robin. The bird in Twin Peaks is a varied thrush, native to the Pacific Northwest and thus unlikely to appear outside my East Coast window.
Is it any coincidence that “Sparrow” comes off Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., an album streaked with religious imagery?