In April of 2020, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, I saw a bird I didn’t recognize. I don’t recognize most birds. I don’t remember or keep track of my non-recognition of most birds. But something about this one—its large, wet, black eye, its sharp and tiny figure, and above all its coloring, like a common brown moth had been dipped momentarily in yellow-green Easter-egg dye—made me want to know its name. And something about April of 2020 made me want that, too. The internet is full of Brooklynites who list all the birds they’ve seen that day, so I sat down with the longest of these lists, then began looking up pictures of each entry seen that week, hoping for a match. I couldn’t find my parkmate there, however. That I had paid no attention to what it ate or sounded like certainly didn’t help. Nor does my utter inability to estimate lengths and weights.

At the time, my only sustained contact with birding was a birder-adjacent relationship I’d had in college. I had been flattered to join the 2006 Christmas Bird Count atop a mountain in New Hampshire, where a binoculared human flock annually scans the sky from dawn to dusk to count everything that’s there. I learned that turkey vultures, or “TVs,” are overcommon and unimpressive. I learned that birders don’t get cold or bored. I learned that I am not a birder. I spent much of the morning hiking up and down the mountain on its empty paths, where I couldn’t see birders or birds through the screens of hemlock and spruce. By midday my boyfriend and our host had taken me home, though I insisted, perhaps unconvincingly, that I was happy to keep walking about through the afternoon. (Now I feel terrible for not sitting still and learning something.) I pointed out a few chipmunks here and there as we headed for the car. Chipmunks were not our object.

It is a universal law that wherever one falls on the spectrum of nomenclature propensity, one despises every other point along that spectrum. The existence of careful, separate columns for the white-breasted nuthatch and the red-breasted nuthatch irritated me. Binoculars themselves irritated me—their mediated and wonky way of seeing. Better to look things straight on! I crowed, as with my own astigmatic eyes I called the Christmas counters’ attention to one more airplane or turkey vulture that I believed to be a possible hawk. Now, over thirteen years later, I have the contrariwise problem, and it maddens me that when I tell my partner some object can be easily spotted “next to the oak” or “right by those lilacs,” he’ll likely as not turn to the nearest beech or honeysuckle. I once line-edited a short story of his in which I took issue with a character wearing “cloth shorts.” Cotton? I said in red pen. Linen? Nylon? Silk? I don’t get asked to edit much anymore. On the other hand, I can’t get much further than “red car” or “blue car,” and most celebrities are for me “the guy with the teeth” or “the funny one.” People who can name these things think I am a fool, and I think the same of them for caring. When it comes to our varying thresholds for specificity we are completely unable to please each other.

But the absence of the Brooklyn bird’s name rankled me out of proportion. I think it was the times. All through spring and summer last year, every Friday in the hospital where I worked then and work now as a doctor, the staff of the COVID-19 palliative and hospice ward would assemble with our chaplain. She would ring a bell and call out the names of those who died that week. There was always a short prayer to the “Spirit of Life”—whom perhaps no one else in that room was on a prayerful basis with, at least not by that name—but it was during the naming of the particular dead that I would feel, much more than I expected, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “instress”: the energy coursing through all things when, and because, we pay attention.

Last spring, I tried working with other employees of the hospital to institute the weekly practice of naming and mourning, thinking we could disseminate it as a practice to every ward of the hospital. I failed, perhaps mainly because I couldn’t decide where or how the naming would start or stop. It became something of a mania. Weekly? Why not daily? Why not constantly? Our chaplain would intone the first names and surnames. Why stop there? What about middle names, maiden names, names pre-immigration and pre-anglicization, what about kin, demographics, other facts? I realize now that what I wanted was a near-endless proliferation of naming and counting and mourning, something large enough. Enough for what? I’m still not sure.

Meanwhile, our clinical researchers were, and still are, doing the same thing in their own way: scouring, naming, listing, counting. Endless tables and statistics, the equivalent of every conceivable shade of nuthatch, columns which we hoped and hope will tell us who and why. Why some fell ill, and which ones, and why which medicines worked and didn’t, and the why and who of death. Such columns and tables will tell—have told already—a good deal. Much of what they say is “turkey vulture” stuff, relentlessly commonplace and perhaps unimpressive to those glutted on the horrible surfeit of such data: that poor people are more likely to die because of the murderously expensive or employment-tied nature of most health insurance here. That the names mount in bitter reflection of what and whom we value. We knew this long before the first spike protein picked apart a cell membrane and before the first siren wailed. And it is another turkey-vulture truth that Black Americans, and people of color, and people new to this country, among others, are the disproportionate casualties in these swollen lists of names.

A secondary function of all our work of naming, counting, graphing, and tabling, I believe, is the way that all of these tasks give satisfaction to our acute craving to be scribes in moments of loss and its aftermath. In this sense, much human research amounts to the recitation of a beloved and well-trod grammar exercise: We are here. You are here. They are here. We were here. You were here. They were here. If we were here. You would be here. They would be, being here.

Sandra McPherson wrote the opening poem of her book Radiation (1973) after hearing an inflight message that her plane was perhaps too damaged to land in the normal way. I believe it might be the chronic human inability to “stick the landing,” to bring things to their worthy or commensurate conclusion, that keeps poetry in the business of enumeration. Her poem “Holding Pattern” begins: “Poetry is a way of counting,/sisters,/it is acquisitive.” And it ends:

“We have developed
A slight technical difficulty
and may not be able to land
Without a mechanic.”
We are in the habit of writing,
and any
Power
we may derive from each other’s company
will circle quietly
Over the page,
complicated as what we don’t see
but the pilot knows.
In whatever space
we fly by our own mettle
with words that count
Much as friends
and with a heightened sense
of where it all ends.

She survived and the plane landed, of course. We have the book to prove it. And in the poet’s (and by extension, reader’s) proximity to death—even a false proximity, as in McPherson’s case—we may become scroungers of life, “acquisitive,” totting up the piles of sight and sound around us. Naming, counting, writing, having. A bookkeeper’s list, the sense of “list” that means lean closer, and the “list” that means to want. “Whoso list to hunt,” says Sir Thomas Wyatt, “I know where is an hind.” I know how you can get acquisitive.

“Where it all ends” is how McPherson’s poem ends—and oh, may our ending not end just in piety. This need of ours to fill the air with name, number, and voice can be a funny and a wild thing, too. In the final pages of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which I encountered for the first time in the opening weeks of the pandemic, I was surprised and delighted by the brief appearance of two joyfully sinister “caretaker’s children” who arrive at the end of a grown-up party and are paid to sing for the company. They burst into a shared “shriek” of private language, designed to stupefy and confound:

Etho passo tanno hai,
Fai donk to tu do,
Mai to, kai to, lai to see
Toh dom to tuh do—
... The grown-up people did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Their voices were so harsh; the accent was so hideous.

And, within a few pages, The Years, the novel, is over. Whatever Woolf may have intended, those children win, I think: their ability to simultaneously do as they’re told and do what they want is almost literally the final word, the utmost that one can give and take from the “Spirit of Life.” We too need room to babble, to keen, to wail, to rib, to rankle. We need to maintain our right to be, at times, unintelligible, and rude, and loud, and fully alive. Sometimes, during those first pandemic months last spring, receiving thanks for being an “essential worker” made me want to blow raspberries or their original digestive counterpart. Too much righteous piety can be as overwhelming as too many blankets and pillows on an otherwise perfectly fine bed, and in fact I could fall asleep standing up. As overwhelming as too many binoculars, too many tools of elaborate and watchful attention, when at times I would prefer to be just the half-seen bird barely registered by the naked eye.

Like a much more boorish version of the creatures listed in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” I have wanted at times to sound my own being as loudly, crudely, and impiously as possible. I am just me! Laura Kolbe!

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

When I named the COVID-19 dead each Friday, and when I wanted them to be named every day and in every place, I realized even then that this was partly selfish transposition—that I myself want to be counted and named now among the living, and one day among the dead.

In medical school we are taught that every doctor is innately either a “lumper” or a “splitter,” either someone who sees many things as one, or someone who sees one thing as many. In my clinical life as a doctor, I realize now that I am a lumper who aspires to be a splitter. Neither type is necessarily bad, but unhappy are those who desire to be other than they are. As Isaiah Berlin wrote of Leo Tolstoy—a fox who wished he were a hedgehog, which is a bit like being a splitter-doctor aspiring to lump—his “agonized belief in a single, serene vision” rendered him chronically restless and deprived.

In my line of work at the hospital, empiric particularity will perhaps never come naturally to me as a reflexive way of solving medical cases, but because of this, the very idea is hazed over with longing and mystique. Why can’t I just notice more? Why don’t I know by now all the names of all the arteries and nerves? Why am I sometimes overwhelmed, rather than invigorated, by detail? Why does too much of my poet-brain shut down on the wards when I might have used it to help a patient?

During the “specificity revolution” of French biostatistics in the mid-nineteenth century, there was fierce debate between the epidemiologists, bent on discovering l’homme moyen, the “average man,” and the physicians, who noted—quite correctly—that if one made a shoe corresponding to the average shoe size of French citizens, it would fit very few of them. Jacques Lacan’s later quip on the matter, that “the average man does not exist,” is something poets have always known. I know that I will keep on at splitter’s work, even if I do it badly. (The bird may have been a waterthrush, though I still maintain it was skinnier, smaller, and greeny.) One of the great gifts that poets might give the world, within but also in addition to their poems, is a reminder of precisely this fact.

June 2021

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