The White Pigeon Brings...What?

The bird shown here is a white pigeon that appeared outside my front door this past Sunday morning. 

It turned out to be in some distress and stayed in the area just outside my door, in the fenced-in semi-courtyard, for hours. It would not fly away. Then at some point, it managed to move out onto the sidewalk in front of my house, but there it remained with its head lowered into its feathers, unmoving. It stayed upright and was clearly still alive, but I figured that out on the sidewalk, past the courtyard fence, it was vulnerable. There are cats in the neighborhood, for one thing, and I could just imagine what a cat would do seeing an unobservant, in some way weakened or dazed or ill bird. Finally, I put some gloves on and decided to gather the pigeon up, and I put it in a cat carrier I have. I brought the carrier out to my backyard and set it on a table. At least the bird would be safe for the night here, I thought, and maybe by morning, if he was recovering from a collision with a window, for example, he would be more alert and in better condition. Come morning, the bird remained in the same condition, however, and I decided (this was Monday morning) to bring it from my house in Brooklyn to New York City's one bird rescue place, which is in Manhattan. I brought the bird in the cat carrier to the rescue place, and there after giving a description of how I found the bird and what I did to try to help it, I dropped it off for the bird doctors. I asked the volunteer who did the patient intake whether she thought the bird may have flown into glass in the city, and she said that usually when a bird cannot hold its head up like that, it means it has an underlying illness. But the doctors, she said, would work on it. And so I left, told that I can email in a week to find out how the bird did. Hopefully, whatever the cause of its distress, it recovers. 

My life continues after this unexpected ripple. Nothing in my existence was destabilized by my interactions with the white pigeon.

But the encounter with the bird put me in mind of a number of stories in which an encounter with a bird does bring uncertainty and disruption to a person's regulated life. I'm not talking about "The Birds" here, the great Daphne Du Maurier story adapted into the Hitchcock film. I mean stories where a person's equilibrium is upset by their encounter with a single bird. I can think of three novels I've read where this confrontation with an avian creature is a central element in a person's unraveling, though I'd be remiss of course if I didn't first mention Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", from which all three books I'm about to mention draw inspiration.

But anyway, for those looking for tales involving creepy encounters with a single, and singular, bird, here are a few I've enjoyed.

The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (1936)

This book is considered one of the greatest in 20th century Iranian fiction. The narrator is an utterly isolated soul who tells us that he "came to this understanding that there existed a dreadful chasm between myself and others". Despite his alienation, he feels an intense desire to tell his story, if "only to introduce myself to my shadow -- a bent shadow on the wall, and is as if the more I write, it devours it with an even greater appetite -- It is for him that I wish to carry out an experiment: to see if we can come to know each other better..."

With the mention of his shadow, the motifs of doubling and repetition are established, and the nameless narrator then embarks on a hallucinatory monologue replete with mirrors, reflections, and twins. There are dead bodies that appear alive and live people who look dead. His is a tale of madness, and through it all, he is tormented by the figure of a blind owl, real or imagined, who he says is in his room. His shadow, he says, resembles this owl, or his shadow is the owl, pitiless and mocking. Either way, the bird torments him. Its very presence intensifies his madness. Hedayat read and admired Poe, and you can't but think of Poe's raven as you read The Blind Owl. In the West, the owl often represents wisdom, but in Iran, it is a bird commonly associated with bad omens. 

The Cormorant by Stephen Gregory (1986)

This is one unsettling and gorgeously written book. It's set in Wales, and the main character is a man, a teacher, who moves with his wife and young son to a rural cottage he inherited from his uncle. To take the cottage, though, he has to accept his dead uncle's pet cormorant. He does, thinking the inheritance request strange but not much more than that, and afterwards, by degrees and with great insidiousness, the cormorant casts a malignant influence over his entire family. The Cormorant is a psychological horror story that has a feeling of looming disaster throughout. And ever since reading this book, whenever I've seen any cormorants, like on Prince Edward Island in Canada, I've never not felt a chill. Uncanny dark-plumed birds!

The Pigeon by Patrick Susskind (1987)

The Pigeon is Patrick Susskind's follow-up to Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, his historical fantasy masterpiece. While not up to the level of his first book, it is still an enjoyable one, and it has the benefit of being quite short, something you can read in one sitting.

Set in then contemporary Paris, The Pigeon tells the story of a solitary bank security guard who lives a repetitive and very orderly life. He does his job well and is nearing retirement. He has no desire to make strong connections with other people. As a character, and since this is France, he may remind you of many a Georges Simenon character, the sort of lower middle class man who keeps to himself and seems tranquil but who, very possibly, holds turbulence within. One day his tidy life is thrown off-kilter when a pigeon appears and starts to roost in front of his apartment door. He has a one room apartment, and small though it is, he loves it. It's his retreat from the world, his sanctuary. When the pigeon shows up and makes his leaving and entering the apartment difficult, it upends his world completely, setting off what can only be called an existential crisis. From this point on, precisely because of this pigeon, his behaivor changes, both outside in the world and within the one space, his apartment, where he felt totally safe. But is the pigeon linked in some way to his past, to the unhappy childhood he had? Sometimes, maybe, the intrusion of disorder can lead to a healthy transformation. 

So those are three books that I was reminded of when I came across the white pigeon outside my door a couple of days ago, but as I say, in my case, the pigeon did not foretell anything bad. And I felt good trying to help it.

But was my action the wise one? Why am I sitting here writing this hearing a clucking outside my window? And the beating of those wings...I thought I did good helping the pigeon. Was I wrong to do so? Through the window I see the same white pigeon I took to the bird rescue place. It's definitely the same bird. It recovered already and came right back here? How? And how come its eyes, through the window, are glaring at me?