Birthday of the world

This morning the male Blackburnian warbler brought one of his chicks down to a low branch of the yellow birch outside the dining room window. His softly blended orange-on-white throat looks like a bit of flame dancing along the branch. The fledgling was tiny and shabby by comparison. I hear the male’s thin song around the cottage every day until mid-July, but they seldom descend low enough to see, so I was delighted to show dakoopst.

This afternoon the bird reappeared outside the living room and flew repeatedly into the high-arched windows. He didn’t hit hard, just a faint brush of feathers and delicate beak on glass. He must have seen his reflection, and kept coming back. I tried to get close enough with the camera, but every time I climbed upon a chair he would notice me and leave off his fruitless challenge [Next day he began visiting the bedroom window, where I was able to photograph him].

I have been reading The Birthday of the World, a book of short stories by Ursula K. LeGuin, devastatingly beautiful. Using science fiction as a medium, she writes about human sexuality and intimacy from so many insightful directions, it blows me away. For example, one story revisits the world of her famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, where dwells a race of hermaphrodites. But in this case she actually enters the kemmer houses where people go once a month when they become sexual responsive, manifesting either male or female sexual organs. Gender is not a choice, but it turns out that sexual preference is.

I have loved both men and women emotionally, physically and romantically. For the past 12 years I have identified almost exclusively as gay. Nowadays I am only interested in sex with men, but find the affectionate and emotional sphere far more important. In that respect I am fortunate to have at least one profoundly kind and affectionate man in my life, but relationships with women can be especially satisfying. I don’t know what it all means. Le Guin’s explorations of relationship and affection touch me more deeply than any fiction I’ve read in years, and I’m grateful.

I felt ambivalent about her novel, The Telling. That was a few years ago. I found it almost devoid of imagery, couldn’t picture the characters or places. In fact LeGuin doesn’t use much imagery.

In The Birthday of the World it doesn’t matter. Her exploration of the psychological worlds of her characters is utterly compelling. In the story "Old Music and the Slave Women" she describes a slave world shattered by a liberation war. An extraterrestrial ambassador becomes a war prisoner of the old regime. He is tortured. LeGuin describes the experience convincingly, astoundingly. How can she know what it’s like? How can she write that? It is searing, excruciating. The reader perceives something new.

Today was sunny, warm and breezy, one of those perfect cottage days. Diving into this lake is the moment I most look forward to every year. I opened my eyes in the cool golden light. I surfaced and whispered “Happy birthday Canada!” to the trees, the sky, the lake, our raft in the middle of the bay. Later, while Stephen and I were lying there in the sun, a loon kept surfacing nearby, peering around, and diving again.

Tonight is near the dark of the moon. Mom departed during an eclipse, four-and-a-half cycles ago. She reappears with the full moon, but I love moonless nights at Lake Fletcher. Stephen and I carried life jackets and paddles down to the dock before dusk.

The clatter and retort of a few festive fireworks resounded across the lake, through the screen door into this softly-lit room. Now evening has fallen silent. In a few minutes we will guide the canoe to the middle of the lake and lie under that vast blanket of stars. I know no sight more beautiful. Here there is no light pollution. The Milky Way is no pale blotch on the heavens; it appears a mind-bursting glow, some hundred thousand light years across—I can’t remember the precise figure. Gas clouds shrouding its brightness show up black, more intensely black than the depths of intergalactic space. Fields of dark and light spread hundreds of lifetimes deep. Vega stands out incredibly bright, half a galaxy away, impossibly huge. Words become meaningless. Unspoken meanings become unspeakably profound. I lose my way in the maze of distance and time.