Little Altars Everywhere

When I was a young boy of 8 or so, a whole gang of us used to run around the streets, woods, and empty spaces of our little bit of town, mainly playing shoot-em-up games that went on for entire summer days, until, by some mysterious telepathy – none of us owned a watch – we were all "called in" for our tea*. We were probably the last generation to play unsupervised in streets still relatively free of traffic, and without constant parental worry about "stranger danger". Grazed knees, bruises, and the odd chipped tooth were the marks of days well spent, not neglect or abuse.

That was us, the boys. The girls, too, played all day, but had their own mysteries. There were elaborate skipping games with chants passed down for who-knows how many generations, and self-induced trances of make-believe that animated dolls and soft toys, and – well, actually, I have very little idea what they were up to, in those giggling, shrieking gatherings. Occasionally, though, when laying an ambush in the woods, or looking for a tree to climb, you might come across a solemn little group of girls gathered around some tiny corpse, generally a bird, which they were ceremonially burying, covering the site with grass and flowering weeds, and marking it with an improvised cross of twigs. Who knows what sort of hedge-witchery was being rehearsed there, but it always made a deep impression on me.

Something of the sort may lie behind these bird altarpieces I have been making. Dead birds do have a strange quality about them; that something so nervily restless, so ready to fly away, should have become so still, such that the beautiful subtleties of the plumage of even the plainest bird lie open to close inspection. And, if you dare to handle some dead thing, how oddly light they weigh in the palm, as if made of some paradoxical substance like polystyrene rather than flesh, bone, and blood. It's not surprising that people have always reached for bird metaphors when trying to account for death and the flight of the "spirit". One fine day, I'll fly away...

* For non-natives: "tea" is how Brits from the lower social strata in the south of England refer to their main evening meal. "Dinner" is the midday meal, as in "free school dinners". It was a primary marker of my giddy rise through the social ranks when I started, rather self-consciously at first, to refer to "dinner" as "lunch" and "tea" as "dinner" (although in this classless bohemian household, we tend to refer to "what we're having to eat this evening"...).