What can you do but sing? (II)

To understand poor Yunus’ words, 

you have to love very much.

It’s like the language of birds

- what can you do but sing?

Yunus Emre, Hazreleteri

TWO

Where song in the human experience - its ability to both carry and engender love - continues to be a source of the deepest personal succour, this year has also marked some reflection upon birdsong. As a child I was taught that birdsong was a form of dhikr - remembrance of God - and that all birds had their own special type of dhikr, each praising the Creator and the beauty of creation with their own song. This too was a lesson from my grandmother who was particularly attentive to ensuring that food and water was left out for birds; a task sometimes requiring attention multiple times a day. The focus wasn’t on working out what the birds were saying, but on the continuous repetition of sounds the birds made - that was their dhikr. The one in love cannot but make mention over and over again.

In a devotional culture, it is natural that birdsong, like everything else, has a higher purpose. Like everything else in creation, it is sound in love and adoration of the Creator. Yunus Emre Hazretleri says:

Her bir çiçek bin nâz ile öğer hakkı niyâz ile

Her murgı hoş-âvâz ile ol pâdişâhı zikreder

Every delicate flower glorifies Allah with great fervour.

Every bird with a lovely voice also recalls the Sultan [God].

Evvel bahâr olıcak agaçlar tonanıcak

Gör niçe medh iderler bülbüller gül üstine

First there will be spring; the trees will be dressed in their clothes.

Then you'll see how nightingales praise the roses.

Slowly, as one falls deeper and deeper in - the more one grows in love - the more attuned one becomes: now able to see the spring, to see the ‘clothed’ trees, to see the flower's fervour - and able to hear the nightingale's song. To the attuned human being, in love and adoration of the Creator, all the created world mirrors his love, and equally, its beauty is blaze of the Eternal Beauty. Such a lover see all creation in every instant every time as if for the first time: each sound is a song of longing and love and each sight is a reminder of the Beloved.

Outside of a devotional culture - the culture of love - such poetic view of the world of birds and flowers may be scoffed at as romanticised anthropomorphism. Scientific theories attribute birdsong to biological needs such as establishing territory or attracting mates, although in fact scientists have yet to determine or reach consensus on exactly why birds sing. Still, there lingers much resistance to reductionist Darwinism and its dismissal of birdsong simply as romanticised anthropomorphism. In his book Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song*, David Rothenberg writes:

"One of the questions that won’t go away is this: can any explanation for beauty be satisfactory? Despite all we have uncovered about how evolution is able to produce marvellous bird songs through generations of slow transformation, no knowledge tempers our joy. No theory makes the music go away. Nature is always wonderful, however much or little you know about it. What fascinates me most about this question is how it illuminates the disparities among the many human ways of knowing. Information does not really touch experience. Birds may sing to find love and to find home, but these reasonable purposes do not deny joy. If science is to comprehend happiness, then it should employ the skills of musicians and poets who have used different human abilities to find meaning in the natural world."

Rothenberg’s book is a fascination exploration of birdsong "using all the tools available for human inquiry” rather than just scientific theory, and he appears to suggest that even where theories offer plausible explanations - they remain but theories. These do not mean that birds are not singing because, he says, they love to. Rothenberg also dedicates a chapter to the nightingale. He writes:

"The nightingale in the Persia is ‘the bird of a thousand stories - hazâr dastân, singing turn by turn, rad bâ rad, always changing its song. Calling a musician a nightingale is the highest form of praise—the greatest often have the word bolbol added to their names as an ultimate honor, and the bolbol is the master bird who never repeats himself, always coming up with new names for God.”

I have dipped in and out of Rothenberg’s book over the past year whilst turning once again deeper, with urgency, to the need within for song, which has remained for me at many times the last stand of safety, sanity, serenity. Yet, the year has also involved an inevitable return to a question which would often hover over me once the war in Syria began after my return from Damascus. Would ordinary life, learning, work still give rise to song through each day I'd wonder, as it had in my day-to-day experience? The past year's return to this question is from a numbed and distanced witnessing of the monstrous unceasing onslaught of merciless assault upon Gaza, the peak culmination of many decades of hateful occupation and oppression. Do sounds of love, songs of love, persist amid such indescribable hate and terror? Can the birds still sing?

In Rothenberg’s book, he makes a particularly poignant reference to the sound of nightingales heard against the bombing planes of World War Two. He writes of the experience of a British cellist of the 1920s who, upon playing outdoors in her garden, and found that nightingales began to join along with her: they would ‘burst into song’ to match her. She secured a BBC broadcast - the first outdoor radio broadcast - the subject of which would be her playing along with the nightingales song. Rothenberg notes that she received fifty thousand letters of appreciation from listeners and the recording became popularly loved:

"The cello-nightingale duet was repeated live each year on the BBC for twelve years, and afterwards, the birds alone were broadcast until 1942, when the recording engineer making the show heard a strange, unmistakable droning sound which turned out to be the beginnings of the “Thousand Bomber” raid heading via Dover to Mannheim. He quickly shut off the sound, having the sense not to broadcast such a sound during wartime. The recording was preserved, and you can hear it today, this strange soundscape of menacing bombers and incessant nightingales, singing as they have always sung even in the midst of human destruction and the violence that comes with civilisation. The airplanes could not silence the nightingale. Here is a bird who cares nothing for the whims of men and the great noises we produce.”

From October 2023 to April 2024, it was estimated that Israel had dropped at least 70,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip, exceeding the bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined during World War Two. By December 2023, in just a span of two months, analysis of the scale of destruction suggested that Gaza would henceforth be a place name denoting history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns. Though this has characterised the lived experience of over two million people, the cumulative sound of such unfathomable mechanised hate still challenges the limits of human capacity. Is it possible to conceive of the sound of love amidst it; of songs of love? Do the birds still sing?

In February of this year, the following story captured the small role which some songbirds continued to play in Gaza.

How The Songbirds of Rafah Help Palestinians Cope with the Terror of War

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/17/how-the-songbirds-of-rafah-help-palestinians-cope-with-the-terror-of-war

Abu Jazar says: 'The songs of the canaries can shield any space against the terror that comes with the violent sound of shelling…'. This makes me think of Rothenberg’s reference: ‘the airplanes could not silence the nightingale…here is a bird who cares nothing...’. The stories in this article are nonetheless astonishing, albeit accenuating the unsus: there is no trauma support here. How can the sound of canaries - soft, gentle, tender trills - shield against the sound of ceaseless bombs - heavy, harsh, brutal, aggression personified? Looking onto the sight of relentless hateful destruction upon destruction of an entire people, is it possible to experience still a new spring within? Is it possible view a landscape of rubble and still note the fresh 'clothes' upon trees; to think of the love of the nightingale for its rose? The relenetless resistance of the long-opressed - to live, to love, to show grief, to have joy, to supplicate and remember - suggests that it could be.

The nightingale's song has long been a personal lingering fascination, heightened through discovery of its symbolism as the untiring, unabashed, yet ultimately unfulfilled lover, in perpetual pining, hurt upon the thorns of his beloved rose yet ceaselessly devoted. In reading Attar’s Conference of the Birds in early adulthood, the nightingale’s song was memorable - unflinching unfazed passionate devotion, seemingly undefeatable. A love so powerful, powered from beyond just the human realm, that the utmost limit of human-created hate and destruction still can not drown it out. A love so powerful...what can you do but sing?

“The amorous Nightingale first came forward almost beside himself with passion. He poured emotion into each of the thousand notes of his song; and in each was to be found a world of secrets. When he sang of these mysteries all the other birds became silent. ‘The secrets of love are known to me,’ he said. ‘All night I repeat my songs of love. Is there no unhappy David to whom I can sing the yearning psalms of love? The flute’s sweet wailing is because of me, and the lamenting of the lute. I create a tumult among the roses as well as in the hearts of lovers. Always I teach new mysteries, at each instant I repeat new songs of sadness…. If I am parted from my dear Rose I am desolate, I cease my singing and tell my secrets to none….”

The Beloved Prophet ﷺ would often pray:

"O Allah, I ask You for Your love, the love of those whom You love, and the love of actions that will bring me closer to Your love."

Read

Rothenberg, David. (2005) Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song. Basic Books.

How The Songbirds of Rafah Help Palestinians Cope with the Terror of War

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/17/how-the-songbirds-of-rafah-help-palestinians-cope-with-the-terror-of-war

Listen

Displaced and Bereaved People & Journalists Singing Praises upon the Beloved Prophet ﷺ in Gaza: