Revised August 1, 2022
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Our first mockingbird in several years arrived this spring. I want to say I missed him, which I did, but of course, the one we now have isn’t the same one from before. Still, like his predecessor, his call is a many-splendored collection of other birds’ songs that is delivered in a loud voice for a bird the size of an American robin. The repertoire usually starts with that robin’s song. Then a cardinal gets thrown in. There are other songs I don’t recognize, perhaps original to him. Lately, he’s added a Trini Lopez-like trill, which has me idly speculating that he’s spent some time in the tropics. Each stage of his call is staccatoed out at a furious cartoon-like pace.
Gray with white highlights when perching, his underside white when flying, he’ll flit from building to tree, all the while repeating some or all of his repertoire. From my own perch on our ninth-floor terrace, I usually hear him first one block over to the right by the street named Columbia Heights. He’ll come a bit closer, staying in the southern half of that block. Then he’ll cross over our street to dash around the southern half of this block, with our terrace as the northern edge and Hicks Street at the east. He’s clearly claimed these two half blocks between Columbia and Hicks as his territory.
Laura, my wife, has worked out that he probably nests near the redwood tree a few buildings down from us. Presumably he shares the nest with his partner, but we’re not sure we’ve either heard or seen her. From what I’ve read, the female’s song isn’t nearly as elaborate, so I’m confident in referring to our bird as “Mr. Mockingbird.”
The name “mockingbird” is curious. A more accurate name would surely be “mimicbird.” To mock is to make fun of. Long ago, there must have been a consensus that this bird was, indeed, making fun of other species. “See,” they must have figured he was saying, “I can do your song, and your song, and yours too, and I can string them all together to make my own song. I’m a modern-day music sampler, more original with your songs than any of you.”
It’s hilarious to listen to him joyfully go through his sequences as he hops from tree to rooftop to fence post, as if all for my entertainment and that of any other human who chooses to tune in. But, of course, he isn’t singing for our entertainment. Maybe it was once his seduction call, but surely he long ago found his mate. By now, what to me is entertainment must be for him a life-and-death struggle to protect his territory.
Woe betide another mockingbird, and even certain other species, that dare to trespass. I’m guessing these other species include the robin and cardinal, since their songs are in Mr. Mockingbird’s repertoire. When he’s not around, I don’t hear those other birds. Even when he’s quiet, they’ve been a lot less vociferous this spring and early summer than in the recent past. They must know mockingbirds fight for real. Mockingbirds are so aggressive that if they see themselves in a window, they might attack the reflection.
On the other hand, Mr. Mockingbird doesn’t imitate our local blue jays or crows, predatory birds against which he must know he hasn’t a prayer. If he included their songs, they might come after him to claim their own territorial rights. He’d lose.
The mockingbird’s selectivity of songs suggests they aren’t the fruit of pure instinct. Rather, they imply intelligent choices in a harsh, mockingbird-eat-mockingbird world that is, nevertheless, beautiful.
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This troubling paradox, that nature can be at the same time beautiful and harsh, brings to my mind the age-old question about God: If God exists, and if God is good, how can there be such abominations as mass murder, slavery and torture?
I tend to approach this question as a hypothetical, grounded as I am in the physical world and skeptical of all things mystical. But I don’t share an atheist’s certainty that the physical world is all there is.
Although I didn’t give it a name, I was an atheist throughout my childhood. That changed the day in my high school junior year, around the age of seventeen, when I concluded that the existence of God can neither be proven nor disproven. Agnosticism acquired more substance when I considered the impossibility of something coming from nothing. This impossibility rendered inexplicable the origin of the universe, or multiverse, or whatever other “something” physicists might theorize. I’ve read that physicists claim to have solved the mystery, but, admittedly not in the least qualified to analyze that level of science, I remain unpersuaded. Something from nothing simply makes no sense. And yet it evidently happened.
If one phenomenon can’t be explained, it’s entirely possible there are others equally beyond our ken. In that case, how can we reject out of hand the possibility of the existence of God or some other intelligence behind nature? I don’t pretend to know either way. However, uncertainty causes me to take seriously such questions about how a benevolent God could permit suffering.
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I got a fresh perspective on this conundrum from a 2009 podcast that I just heard for the first time. In it, National Public Radio broadcaster Robert Krulwich reflects on Genesis 22, where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. If you are a literal reader of the bible, this story has to disturb you: How could God possibly justify tormenting Abraham, whose devotion he’d already tested, or even worse, inflicting such trauma on a young boy? If you read the bible as history, myth or parable, you are left wondering what possible lesson could lie beneath a tale of such brutality.
When Krulwich recounts the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice story, he doesn’t seek to explain God’s behavior. It remains stark and frightening. What Krulwich does notice is that throughout, with the exception of three verses, no words are spoken. I’m reminded how what goes unsaid contributes to the bible’s frequent mysteriousness, if not obtuseness. In this instance, I hadn’t given any thought to the near absence of dialog. But, of course, Krulwich is right. Abraham seemingly saw no point in challenging God. He also couldn’t bring himself to tell Isaac his plan, which he studiously hid, and even lied about, on their three-day journey to the land of Moriah. The only dialog in the story exposes this lie:
22:7. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
22:8. And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
Abraham also lies to his servants:
22:5. And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.
When Abraham and Isaac reach the mountain that God has designated, Abraham says nothing as he ties Isaac to the tree. Isaac says nothing as he yields to his father’s terrifying betrayal. Neither says anything when God, through the “angel of the Lord,” relents and Abraham frees his son. They say nothing afterwards: no words to indicate that Isaac was traumatized or that his father felt anguished for him.
The suggestion Krulwich offers from these observations is that, as both Abraham and Isaac opted against protesting each step of God’s trial, they did, through silence, the one affirmative thing they could: They hoped.
The Abraham and Isaac story stays with us. In that sense, it is beautiful: beautiful in the way we are moved when reading about real historical figures going with dignity to their executions.
This is where “beautiful” departs from “pretty.” Prettiness needn’t have depth, which beauty must. Where there’s depth, there will be shadows.
I sit on our terrace, complacently wondering at myself for one moment admiring Mr. Mockingbird’s skills, and the next laughing because he’s so funny. All the while, Mr. Mockingbird is concentrating on keeping out intruders, knowing that if any does confront him, there could be a fight to the death.
The scenario is bewildering in the way that the Abraham and Isaac story is, only with nature substituting for God. Nature says: “Mr. Mockingbird, I command you to be an actor in this, um, morality tale, beautiful to those observing you but potentially deadly to you. Get over it.”
Like Abraham, Mr. Mockingbird doesn’t protest. True, he isn’t silent; singing is in his being. But he doesn’t argue against Nature’s injunction. On that he is, indeed, silent.
4
The chapter with the Abraham and Isaac story moves with the herky-jerky motion of the silent movies. Like so much of the bible, it evolved over the course of centuries. The result is many fragments pieced together by later editors.
With that process in mind, I offer a plausible alternative version. Abraham was prone to schizophrenic episodes. One day he heard a powerful voice telling him to sacrifice his beloved first-born. It must be God, he thought. How could he disobey? And so, keeping his own counsel, he took Isaac and two servants far away from home, perhaps to deceive his wife Sarah, however temporarily and ineffectively, to the mountain named by the voice in his head. He got so far through the preparations that he was about to stab his son when the voice in his head spoke again, this time stopping him as he praised his devotion. We could say at long last Abraham responded to his better angel.
In this scenario, it isn’t God who lures Abraham into this tragedy, but the voices that a mental disorder puts in his head, which is to say nature. The paradox of beauty and suffering meets that of a loving God and suffering.
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Mr. Mockingbird has no choice but to obey nature. He has his weapon, that marvelous song, and he wields it for all he’s worth. Otherwise he would become some other creature’s victim.
By contrast, I do appear to have some choices. I can reason away certain dangers. I can call on a doctor. I can summon the police. Or I myself could turn dangerous, perhaps compelled by that inner voice that drove Abraham to such an extreme. Then again, I would seem to have choices even here, beginning with the option to refuse to harm another. But in the end, like Mr. Mockingbird, I am a creature of nature.
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If when I find beauty I’m likely also to encounter its seeming opposite, then the converse might also be true: On encountering suffering, I may well find something beautiful and, to use a religious term, redeeming.
Why must this be? Beethoven asked this very question, “Muss es sein?” in the score of his last string quartet, which he would only ever hear in his head. It seems desperately unfair that nature granted him the power to create emotionally moving music but, as he got older, denied him the ability to hear it played. So there is a special poignancy to the words, later in that same score: “Es muss sein” (it must be).
Beethoven’s personal passage through this score tracks the emotional journey that Abraham endured in his silence. Although Beethoven broke that silence with his notations, after “Es muss sein,” silence prevails.
Why can’t beauty exist alone?
Why must there be suffering?
How could a benevolent God countenance suffering?
How can something come from nothing?
There appear to be no good answers. Only the hope, as Krulwich holds out for us, that there is a higher-logic explanation that we do not yet comprehend. To satisfy us, however, it would need to reside in justice. As Krulwich says, we are moral beings.
When there’s no answer, there’s only silence. But in that silence, there can, after all, be hope. And with hope, there is resistance.
Notes:
1. I previously broached the dark side of nature’s beauty in my 2016 essay, “Early Spring” and a year later in “More Thoughts on Early Spring”
2. Robert Krulwich’s podcast also covers Noah’s silence in the face of God’s exclusion of most animals from the arc. It is a deeply moving listen.
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