The Merlin (Surprised by Joy)

An attempt to rescue a raptor opens the door to the way in which grief and joy are so bewilderingly intertwined in our hearts.

BY DEREK FURR

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AS I WALKED UPTOWN for a break from work, a wren sang, or more accurately, trumpeted. Perched on a service line, his whole body flipped a quarter turn clockwise with each blast, as if Shelley’s skylark were reincarnated on the corner of Warren and Wall in Kingston, NY, autumn, 2024. The singing jarred me out of my habit of brooding as I walk. It was impossible not to smile. That wren embodied its song in the way that musicians attest to being one with the music in the moment of performance.

There is a 1962 recording of Leontyne Price performing “Ancora un passo or via” from Madame Butterfly. A friend of mine once posted it on Facebook in a video with the score and wrote, “honestly, that performance feels ‘wonder of the world’ level, in terms of human achievement.” Feels is precisely the verb needed. The aria ascends through multiple chromatic key changes first to B-flat two octaves above middle C, descends and reascends to end on B-flat a full octave higher. It’s Puccini’s vision, but the realization of it… could he have heard this as he composed, or felt it in his body in the way that we feel Price’s voice? Butterfly sings with joy about love, and the commonplace that we don’t need to comprehend the language of opera’s lyrics to understand an aria is illustrated by what Price makes us feel. Having fully mastered the technical, formal demands; having been gifted by the gods with a voice (an instrument that all of us have, so we can imagine its possibilities, but ours with rarest exception could never ever do what hers did); having become one with the moment, character, and music; Price embodies joy, and hearing her, our bodies vibrate in sympathy.

So it was with my wren on that autumn afternoon. Surprised by joy, I was braced for the next experience, of a different kind. Three blocks on there was a merlin, flat of his back, wings splayed to the overcast sky, his chest moving just enough that I knew he had survived whatever recent trauma had sent him crashing to the sidewalk. “Is it an owl?” asked a man standing nearby. He had just returned from a gathering of local democrats who, for good reason, feared for the fate of our democracy. I said, “It’s a merlin, I’ll try to find out how to help him.” I messaged a birding group on WhatsApp, most of whom don’t know me, but we share a need to notice the world we inhabit. I was urged by several to text Annie, “because she will know what to do.” She promptly phoned me, instructed me to wrap the bird to protect and comfort it, and said she was on her way in a pickup truck. She said, “If you’re near the post office I should be able to find you.”

“There was a merlin, flat of his back, wings splayed to the overcast sky, his chest moving just enough that I knew he had survived whatever recent trauma had sent him crashing to the sidewalk.”

I flipped the tiny raptor over with the brim of my cap, so that he could at least crouch in dignity as he tried to reorient himself. But his eyes closed, his breathing was shallow, he drifted as if toward sleep or oblivion. I took off my sweatshirt to wrap him, but my fellow democrat offered newspaper instead. Slowly I draped it over his body and swaddled him. He came to me without a struggle. I walked to the post office rendezvous point, next to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, across from the Old Dutch Church, under a grey sky.

The first of many people who stopped to ask questions and observe and express hope was a woman who called herself “Peace,” though “Grace” was tattooed on her neck. With her, a little girl on a scooter whom she introduced as her neighbor’s daughter was named, “Liberty.” Fond as I am of an allegory, I am not making up these names for effect. It’s simply the case that on an autumn afternoon, I stood between churches, visited by Peace as I held a creature struggling for its life. Peace appreciated the species name, “merlin,” and declared that she believes in magic. I allowed as to how some might be necessary for our friend to survive. She lifted up her hands and, as she put it, “prayed to the universe” as she and Liberty went on.

I told our merlin that help was coming. He weighed nothing. His fierce face recessed into the newsprint like a turtle. His beak would open periodically, soundlessly. I could see his small pointed tongue. The yellow of his beak crept into the tiny feathers on his brow and faded. His eyelids were catkins. I longed to stroke his forehead, but that seemed too forward, too presumptuous. I did lean close to whisper, though, that he should hold on because help was coming.

A woman paused on her way to mass. She asked to peek at him, then told me of a small bird that had crashed into her patio window, lay stunned for five minutes, then flew away. “You are a good person,” she said. “I hope he makes it.” My goodness is questionable and inconsequential, but the merlin’s well-being overwhelmed me. I fought back tears.

The pickup arrived. Annie explained that the gasping could indicate organ damage, from which our merlin could not recover. But that was the worst-case scenario. She would give him medicine for pain, check for breaks, and if there was no improvement by morning, take him to the vet. With the confidence of an expert, Annie slid our merlin into a cloth carrier. We spoke about the pros and cons of living in town. I’m in favor, Annie preferred the country. I asked her to let me know the merlin’s outcome. By the morning our merlin had died.

“That joy seems so often inappropriate may be its fundamental power.”

Writing about joy is more difficult than about sorrow. As the Buddha taught, dukkha—broadly translated as “unsatisfactoriness”—is the first “noble truth” of life. Scan the range of conditions included in “unsatisfactoriness”:  from disappointment to regret, frustration, anger, grief, they’re too many to enumerate, various in seriousness and intensity. Are you furious or just miffed? Is your regret wistful, or do you self-flagellate? We have a vast vocabulary for the unsatisfactory, but in the midst or at the margins of all we wish were otherwise, joy arises. It is the wren’s quarter turn, the merlin’s soft eyelid.

William Wordsworth’s great sonnet on grief begins, “Surprised by joy.” The sonnet says nothing about what caused the joy, and there’s no attempt to describe the feeling, because the urge to share it with his daughter is the subject:

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I wished to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long-buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Catherine died at four years old and was, by all accounts, a source of joy. Thomas DeQuincy had been her tutor and was so smitten with her that the language of his memoirs reads uncomfortably like that of a lover. He recalls flinging himself on her grave and sleeping there for a month. Dorothy Wordsworth described her as “uncommonly quick and lively,” and in a different poem, William compares her to a crackling hearth that sparkles, “Not less if unattended and alone / Than when both young and old sit gathered round.” Wordsworth’s impatience to share his joy with this child might be explained by the reaction he could anticipate. Pure joy begets pure joy. Wordsworth was impatient for the joy he could give and sought to prolong the feeling. By line three we’re made aware of why the joy was surprising. It emerged despite Wordsworth’s grief, and the sonnet becomes a wrenching rumination on the guilt that comes as grief subsides, even momentarily:

…Through what power
Even for the least division of an hour
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?

The joy hardly seems worth such agony and shame.

And yet its return was inevitable. Nothing “beguiled” Wordsworth. The verb invokes the King James Version of the Eden story, in which Eve confesses that “the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Joy is neither the tempter nor temptation, any more than grief is overcome when its intensity wanes. The sonnet records a second surprise, after the joy. That is the sheer pain of the grief’s resurgence. If we take the poet at his word, joy sets in motion a process that ends in sorrow. Joy is felt and noticed, there is a desire to share it, the person who would be the recipient is gone, there is surprise that the pain of loss could subside, and suffering surges back.

 If life is dukka, joy is only ever the subject in opposition to the suffering that grounds human experience and art alike. Representing joy can be defiant, a disturbance. Consider joy’s fullest expression: laughing. In many situations, we laugh tentatively—a hiccup, a giggle—before we burst out. Should we laugh at that? Can we laugh here? At a wake, for instance: I’ve been to dozens, and at some point, there is always laughter. People reunite at a scene of emotional fragility, they reminisce. Tears are not the only expression we can expect. Still amid the suffering of others, after I’ve laughed with a friend over a memory, embarrassment and shame threaten. That joy seems so often inappropriate may be its fundamental power.

“For the stoic, joy is realized in detachment from desire. If it exists in a state of nature—if what I hear in the wren’s song is the bird’s joy, not just my own wish fulfillment—we won’t discover it by searching for it or catch it by chasing after it.”

When my sons were in elementary school, we watched Peter Sellers in Return of the Pink Panther. I had a hunch that the boys would enjoy Clouseau’s Chaplinesque bumbling and absurd voice. I underestimated the effect on my oldest. Clouseau’s mere appearance got him giggling, and from the first face plant, Sammy exploded into 90 minutes of uncontrollable cackling. He was eight years old, his brother Jacob was six, and that evening has become legendary in our household. Sammy displaced Sellers as the star: he would try stop laughing, fail, we would all laugh, repeat. We were a busload of Bozos, bent double and flailing, depleted by the time the credits rolled.

Laughter ends, often in exhaustion. Exuberant singing ends in breathlessness. To sustain us, joy must have deeper, heartier roots. In the third letter to Lucillius, the Stoic philosopher Seneca writes, “Real joy is a stern matter.” When it’s attached to such “external matters” as laughter or a song, joy will give rise to discontentment. Virtue is the root of joy, in Seneca’s analysis: “honorable purposes,” “right actions,” “contempt for the gifts of chance,” “an even and calm way of living.” All of these can be maintained in the midst of pain and scarcity, which is why Seneca urges Lucillius to cultivate them. It’s not the good moments that will sustain us, but the steadiness of a virtuous life.

For the stoic, joy is realized in detachment from desire. If it exists in a state of nature—if what I hear in the wren’s song is the bird’s joy, not just my own wish fulfillment—we won’t discover it by searching for it or catch it by chasing after it. There is a crucial distinction between being available to the joy in the wren’s song and going in pursuit of it. Seneca’s “even and calm way of living” is a good in itself—a good that is joyful for someone who has learned to feel it. This is a common paradox in religious and philosophical traditions alike, that to be surprised by joy, we have to discipline the craving for it. Accepting joy is not a denial of darkness, or it doesn’t need to be. It is a refusal to give suffering full command of the narrative. The wren often begins singing an hour before sunrise. His joy could set the tone, if I let it.

Even in darkness, joy; always after night, morning. Such platitudes could be equally true in reverse: even in joy, darkness, always after daylight, night. Joy flashed by Wordsworth’s mind’s eye and trembled across his limbs even in the midst of the worst grief. I stood with the merlin cradled in newspaper. I knew no one who stopped by, none of them knew me, but the merlin’s beauty and frailty, its ebbing life, was a nucleus. We were drawn and held for a short while. That state was a good, and even now when I am aware of the unfortunate outcome for the merlin, what I feel in recollection is joy.

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