Hawk-hunting sharpens vision. Pouring away behind the moving bird, the land flows out from the eye in deltas of piercing colour. The angled eye strikes through the surface dross as the obliqued axe cuts to the heart of the tree. A vivid sense of place grows like another limb. Direction has colour and meaning. South is a bright, blocked place, opaque and stifling; West is a thickening of the earth into trees, a drawing together, the great beef side of England, the heavenly haunch; North is open, bleak, away to nothing; East is a quickening in the sky, a beckoning of light, a storming suddenness of sea. Time is measured by a clock of blood. When one is active, close to the hawk, pursuing, the pulse races, time goes faster; when one is still, waiting, the pulse quietens, time is slow. Always, as one hunts for the hawk, one has an oppressive sense of time contracting inwards like a tightening spring. One hates the movement of the sun, the steady alteration of the light, the increase of hunger, the maddening metronome of the heart-beat. When one says ‘ten o’clock’ or ‘three o’clock’, this is not the grey and shrunken time of towns; it is the memory of a certain fulmination or declension of light that was unique to that time and place on that day, a memory as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium. As soon as the hawk-hunter steps from his door he knows the way of the wind, he feels the weight of the air. Far within himself he seems to see the hawk’s day growing steadily towards the light of their first encounter. Time and the weather hold both hawk and watcher between their turning poles. When the hawk is found, the hunter can look lovingly back at all the tedium and misery of searching and waiting that went before. All is transfigured, as though the broken columns of a ruined temple had suddenly resumed their ancient splendour.
J.A. Baker, ‘Beginnings’, The Peregrine, 1967
Here we have a man who speaks for the bird, having studied and learned the mode of the bird, and a man who speaks of his place, rural Essex in the mid-20th century, before it was concreted over. A man who, firmly grounded, has learnt how to fly. Not by flapping any wings but by close, devoted observation, expecting nothing in return, gaining all his rewards from the sighting. And – it seems at some points – from the recognition given him by the bird, its acceptance or even (maybe?) its growing accustomed, or (really?) its coming to wait for him. He has two gifts: that of sight, discrimination, resolution, recognition, and the love that they demand but return manifold; and that of putting the crux of it on the page in prose that illuminates the reader in some way as the first sightings were luminous to him. His writing (the quality of which is evident from just the paragraph above) has attracted poets, nature writers and those whose sense of ‘England’ or ‘English’ is no banal nationhood but the stuff of a Blakian Jerusalem, the outbound image of the inner vision of the heart. Not only that, but each sentence can be taken individually as a piece of insight or wisdom.
What or who then is the ‘hawk’ here? To the ornithologist, of course, it is literally a hawk, and that was Baker’s purpose. Yet I can’t help – encouraged by the sentiment of his observations – going beyond the first layer of meaning. What is sought here is not only for birdwatchers. Surely the thing that is sought, glimpsed, desired is the image of the grail, the pearl of great price, the thing we seek at all costs, and in this one paragraph Baker gives a map of the terrain, drawn from the topography of a now built-up corner of Essex in south-eastern England but applicable universally. Who does not know the North, the South, the West and the East of their own landscape, inner if not outer? Who does not seek their true orientation within them, grounded and present, mind poised to capture the streak and flash of seeing, of insight, ‘as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium’?
Here we have a man whose pursuit of the peregrine had an urgency owing to the increased use of agrichemicals in the 1960s and the resultant catastrophic loss of bird and animal life. Other than mentioning this once in his introduction, Baker does not speak much about the socio-economic and ecological crises about to be visited on his region. He was perhaps spared the worst – the monstrous explosion of roads, cars, house-building and unbridled consumption that came in subsequent years, or the hollowing out of country life as urban dwellers bought up the housing. Nor was he obliged to reduce the multi-dimensioned data he gathered with such care, still dripping with both the meta-speech of the land and his own poetry, to the lifeless and anonymous bytes of processed digital data. Nor yet did he have to suffer Nature’s response, the climate breakdown and catastrophic heating that is an imminent threat to human continuation and much of life on Earth. Did he foresee these things? He was a gentleman, a man of tact: he did not raise his voice. And yet, he was a man, and unable to step out of the tide that was already drifting in that direction. Still, he stood rooted in his Essex valleys and woods, one of few, calling out, alone in the sky, for us to look up, to look through the ‘angled eye’ that ‘strikes through the surface dross as the obliqued axe cuts to the heart of the tree’. One could hardly do more.
(Baker revealed little about himself, and many admirers have tended to put words into his mouth. At the risk of doing so as well, I suspect he would be appalled at what has happened to his world – though also delighted that the peregrine has made a remarkable comeback since his day. He may sympathise with the champions of economic development, for all the harm this causes to the natural world, seeing it as man’s attempt, however flawed, to reach for the sky. It is useless to speculate. What matters most however is the uniqueness and originality of Baker’s voice and appeal, his relationship to place, his devotion both to the bird and to the word.)
Be all that as it may, Baker nails something of true encounter, which is perhaps the high point of a human conscious life. It is telling that for him, both the hawk and the watcher are hunters: the watcher hunts a hunter in the act of hunting. And he waits with immense patience in his place, or moves about it, with an attention that changes the way he sees. As he says elsewhere, ‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.’ Again, this resonates beyond birding. Both in his seeing and his recording, Baker invokes the creative Imagination that first, sees, once the eye has seen, converting optical sight into conscious vision, and then raises it to symbol, to image, to meaning. He does not need to say what is being symbolised. That is there for the taking: once the creative Imagination is invoked in the writer, the reader’s Imagination cannot but follow on. His service is in capturing the bird, the vocabulary of its flight and its ways, and putting it into language as vivid, as subtle, as indigenous as the country itself, and by being true to its place and time, it is true universally.
Notes
J.A. Baker (1926-1987) lived all his life in Essex. He did not mix much in literary circles, and came to birdwatching, the framework for his work, relatively late in life. His work was ‘re-discovered’ relatively recently by the likes of Andrew Motion and Robert McFarlane. He lived a life of what seems to have been deliberate obscurity, while tracing the paths of the local bird-life – and the variations of the land in all its ways – in insightful, visionary detail.
I found a copy of The Peregrine, which also contains J.A. Baker’s other writings – The Hill of Summer and some surviving diary entries – while staying in the house of an ornithologist friend. Drunk on the text from the first page, I told another friend, who obtained a copy of the book for me. It is a book for birdwatchers, it is a substantial study of bird life, particularly of birds of prey; yet the sentiment and scope, and richness of language, make it suitable for any reader.
J.A. Baker: The Peregrine, pub. Collins (HarperCollins), 2010
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