These days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a stanza by Wallace Stevens in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

 I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendos,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.  

All this pandemic armchair birding means that I’m seeing a lot of birds, but also a lot of non birds. Most of what I see contains no birds at all. Often, I see the telltale sign of a shaky tree limb that tells me a bird was just there but has taken off. Had I only been a little quicker.

What I’m left with is a lot of tree, a lot of ground, and a lot of sky. The world just after the blackbird sings.

Unlike Stevens, who cannot decide between the two, I find myself preferring the world with the blackbird. But why? Why do I prefer the tree with the bird over the tree with no bird? Is there not something beautiful in the movement of the limb from which the bird has just alighted? The gentle or sometimes violent arch. A newly cast light or shadow. A sense that something was just there and now is not. This is a kind of beauty, is it not?

If your answer is yes, then from there, it is only a short distance to appreciating the tree upon which no bird has ever sat. And once I got there, I understood this: the more we insist that the bird has the power to define our world, the more we rob the world-that-is from being just what it is.

Wasn’t this just what I was doing with the pandemic–fretting over the shaky limb of a world I used to know instead of embracing the world I have now–the world from which a pandemic-free life has just alighted?

The world we have now may not be a beautiful world. It casts a different, darker light. But I don’t want to miss it searching for the world-that-is-not.