Memory is a Kingfisher

Friday Fireside #8 | Writers on birds and memory | A Tolstoy and Kafka listen-along for November

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Dear reader,

I saw a kingfisher today. Only for a moment, a flash of blue on black water, down where the river runs through the wood. Unmistakable.

I wanted to tell Mariam, asleep in the pram. But there’ll be time later for her to learn about these things. I looked again, and it was gone.

There’s a story that the kingfisher was the first from the Ark after the flood, rising high into a blue sky where its breast burnt orange in the drying sun.¹

This one flits fast to an overhanging branch in dappled light. The river's low but will be rushing soon. A storm blows in as we get back.

These are the halcyon birds, the feathered souls of lovers who called each other gods.² They were punished and then saved. And when the winter storms abate, they nest upon the sea. In those peaceful, calm and sweet "halcyon days" of old.

In Wolf Hall, Cromwell gives the girl Jane Seymour some needlework patterns, wrapped in bright blue silk.³ She edges her sleeves with the fabric to become the kingfisher at court. The fisher of kings. She calls them "Cromwell's sleeves."

These are just stories.⁴

Between the ages of three and thirteen, or thereabouts, I talked incessantly to myself. Out loud. I told myself stories and lived in them. I only stopped when I noticed others noticing me. After that: I began to write. So these, my halcyon days, are a prehistory with no written record. Memories as archaeological remains.

Curiously, I can remember the last world I created out loud. It was inhabited by birds. The heron and the albatross.⁵ The pelican and the swan. I don't remember a kingfisher. And a note to self: tell Mariam about the kingfisher when she grows up.

I want to time travel back and ask my former self about this world. What did the birds say? If they spoke at all.

A half-second kingfisher in the middle of the day. A gift from the shadows into the light.

In its afterglow, I sense this is a memory in formation. My nine-month-old daughter asleep, and the wind picking up. Her smile later as she wakes up. I'll try to hold it lightly, so it doesn't fly away. But it flits and flutters, and already changes shape.

A memory of a kingfisher in half a second of a day.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

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I clearly had birds on the brain this week. I read

Pamela Leavey

’s musings on dusk sky and geese, published on her substack but written in her Nature Writing Journal back in 2016, that most fractious and unstill of years. What were the geese above the river trying to tell Pamela? “Stop, sit, and listen. Be in the still.”

I also read

Chloe Hope

’s beautiful words on starling murmurations, the undulation of thousands of birds in the sky preparing to migrate. It is a joyful invitation, but Chloe asks:

…who am I to delight in this way, in the face of so much suffering, in the face of so much Death.

And the heart replies: “I must. I must.”

I was also thinking about memory, after listening to this fascinating episode of

The Matterhorn: truth in fiction

on the link between memory and novels.

And just by some happy coincidence, I am halfway through a re-listen of Wolf Hall, in preparation for our magnificent slow read of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy next year. Jane Seymour appeared in her kingfisher sleaves just after I saw the bird itself.

A few pages later, Cromwell is in Calais, enquiring after Giulio Camillo, the philosopher who created a “theatre of memory,” a system for remembering everything.⁶ He, Cromwell, wishes to acquire this theatre for his master, the King of England. But Camillo will never cross the narrow sea to an island “covered with witches.”

Today’s tangent was also inspired by

Anne Thomas

’s detail diary of things that have caught her eye, and chatting to

Alexander M Crow

about noticing nature. Both hang out on Substack Notes, where something I wrote went viral this week:

This is what the substack socials feel like: a busy workshop. And I am very grateful for this space for rekindling my enthusiasm for writing.

So: stories, memory, and birds. That has been my week. Tell me about yours.

Thank you for reading,

Simon

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News…

I am excited to announce that Audrey is running a listen-along next month of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I had the great privilege of being the Audrey guide for both of these novellas, creating multi-media notes to accompany the audiobooks.

Sign up to the listen-along here. This is a great way to explore these books, and I heartily recommend it. The listen-along schedule looks like this:

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In case you missed it…

Here’s the most recent War and Peace post:

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You’re reading a Friday Fireside letter from me,

Simon Haisell

. You can pick and mix which

Footnotes and Tangents

letters you want to receive by turning on and off notifications on your manage subscription page. By default, you won’t receive read-along updates unless you choose to join one of them.

1. This story appears to have been popular in France. Genesis 8 mentions a luckless raven and the iconic dove, but no kingfisher.

2. The lovers were Alcyone and Ceyx. According to one legend, they called themselves Zeus and Hera, attracting the wrath of the gods. They were turned into “halcyon birds” or kingfishers. According to Ovid, Aeolus locks up the winds for two weeks around the Winter Solstice so that his daughter Alcyone can lay her eggs in peace. The original halcyon days.

3. Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII and Queen of England, 1536 – 1537. She was born at Wulfhall, a manor house in Wiltshire. The Seymour home gives its name to the first book in the Cromwell trilogy.

4. For more stories of kingfishers, consult the Medieval Bestiary.

5. My child imagination seemed to be especially enchanted by the albatross, although I was not familar with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. My point of reference was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C S Lewis, where Narnia’s Aslan takes the form of an albatross to lead the heores out of a storm. Many years later I saw my first albatross on Isla de la Plata in Ecuador, the poor man’s Galapagos.

6. Wolf Hall is a book about memory. Mantel also refers to Simonides of Ceos and his “memory palace”, a mnemonic system that uses spatial visualisation. Mantel’s Cromwell uses this method. As does the BBC incarnation of Sherlock Holmes.