I. Mockingbird
Mimus polyglottos. An American passerine song-bird. “The many-tongued mime.”
The Mimid family to which the mockingbird belongs includes thrashers — longbilled, California, & brown among them — & the gray catbird whose call is an incontestable meow.
Adult mockingbirds have distinctive white patches amid dark gray wing feathers, topside & underside. When they fly, mockingbirds appear like strobing flashes, splashing tailfeathers.
In the southern US, they are everpresent; in fact, in the midsection of the country, just about anywhere south of Chicago you see mockingbirds. You see them along roadsides, on scrub trees, in parking lots, atop Targets, in suburban backyards, in the sycamores of St. Louis.
But it’s not its ubiquity for which the mockingbird is known, nor for its buoyant flights around the neighborhood. When we think of mockingbirds we think of their song; or, rather their distinctive lack of such an identifying song (you have to be a bird-connoisseur to have any sense of what the mockingbird’s song sounds like; like all mimids, the mockingbird is a real songster, with a splendid music to its song).
But mimids, after all, are mimics.
Northern Mockingbirds mimic parts of songs they must have learned on their wintering grounds; they have been heard repeating vocalizations of the Buff-collared Nightjar and the Thick-billed Kingbird in portions of Arizona where neither species occurs.
— Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior (472-3)
Mockingbirds are territorial, migratory birds. This means they fly from warmer to cooler climate in the spring; then from cooler to warmer in the fall. In many places in the US, they are permanent residents, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t migrate; it just means that there are always mockingbirds around. During breeding periods, which last all summer long, mockingbirds delineate their territory in the same way other songbirds do: males perform a series of vocalizations that are meant to attract females to them while warning other males away from the immediate vicinity.
I lived in St. Louis for a year-&-a-half, where mockingbirds are year-long residents. Before St. Louis, I’d never lived so far south, which is to say, I’d never lived in a city where mockingbirds are commonplace. They are everywhere you go in St. Louis, nearly as common as bluejays or starlings (though not quite as unavoidable as house sparrows). These are fascinating birds, if only for their vocalizations. On the street we lived on, there were always three or four mockingbird males vying for attention. They sang in the mornings & they sang in the evenings. If they didn’t attract a mate, they sang all day long as well. Walking along the street, you could spot the mockingbirds quite easily: on the top of roofs, at the highpoint of medium-sized trees, on an open — visible — lower branch. There’s nothing shy & quiet about these birds.
I keep using the technical-sounding term vocalizations. I mean the song of the mockingbird. Here is my quandary, because the mockingbird has no song, at least not one of its own, when it is trying to attract a mate. A typical mockingbird repertoire includes the birdsongs of its immediate territory. The mockingbirds in St. Louis typically run through a roster of bluejay calls (the distinctive jeer of metal scraping, as well as its tina bean, tina bean! song); cardinal calls (the chew, chew, chewie, chewie, chewie!); house sparrows (quite literally, chirp!); starlings (slurrie, slurrie), grackles (sound of a rusty screen door shutting). But mockingbirds are unusual in the incorporation of nonavian sounds into their “song”: my St. Louis birds added car alarms, brakes, car horns — in short, ambient sounds, the sounds of the world around them.
I’ve called the mockingbird a mimic. This word is inexact. In nature, a mimic has the explicit purpose of deceiving, usually its predator. For instance, some nonpoisonous butterflies mimic the wing patterns of poisonous butterflies as a way of tricking birds into not eating them. And it generally works. Sometimes mimicry is used to the advantage of the predator, as for instance praying mantises whose leafy-green exoskeletons allow them to pounce on other insects camouflaged in foliage. In this light, the mockingbird is no mimic. Rather, it is an appropriator.
I — a human with poor hearing, especially compared to birds — am able to distinguish the song of bluejay from the mockingbird’s imitation without any hesitation. I can tell, first, because it sounds different & second, because it usually comes in the middle of a string of other birdsong & nonavian sound. If I can tell the difference, surely a bluejay can tell the difference. The point is, the mockingbird is not trying to fool a bluejay with its imitation.
The English word mock comes from the Old French word mocquer, which means “to deride, to jeer.” Is the mockingbird laughing at other species with its imitations? Again, no. Not so far as we can tell. Instead, the mockingbird is trying to attract a mate with the widest variety & most expert reproduction of ambient sound as it can. This is why I call the mockingbird an appropriator. The male appropriates sounds to make himself seem more attractive.
So, what is the male mockingbird doing when he imitates a cardinal, a bluejay, or a car alarm? He is making a representation. He is engaging in the deliberate act of the re-creation of a sound, fully intending that sound to be distinctly “off” from its source, to be obviously different than the “real thing,” because reinvented by the mockingbird himself.
Representation: from the Latin prefixes re, again, & pre, before, & from the root esse, to be. So: To be before again. Another word we might use for the form of representation we find in the mockingbird’s vocal appropriation is: distortion.
Distortion, from the Latin distorquere, to twist in different ways.
II. Icon
In the Orthodox Christian tradition, icons play a role of massive importance. Icons are paintings made from gold-leaf & egg tempera on blocks of wood, depicting Christ, Mary, the hosts of saints. Figures in Byzantine icons display typical features: men have high, domed foreheads, long forked beards, wear habits, tunic, himation, or armor, depending on who is being depicted (whether St. Anthony, St. Gregory, or Constantine). To us, icons look strange, estranging. To a Byzantine Christian, they looked perfectly representative. Ample testimony exists over the centuries from men who became saints who during their already holy lives sat to have their portraits recorded in icons and felt the representation to be true. As Byzantinist Henry Maguire notes:
The difference between the present-day and the Byzantine viewer is not that of sophistication as opposed to naiveté, for no people have ever been more sophisticated in their approach to images than the Byzantines. Rather, the difference is one of expectation. When a modern viewer speaks of an image being “lifelike,” the expectation is that it will be illusionistic, with realistic effects of lighting and perspective, like a photograph. The Byzantines, however, did not seek optical illusionism in their portraits, but rather accuracy of definition. Their expectation was that the image should be sufficiently well defined to enable them to identify the holy figure represented, from a range of signs that included the clothing, the attributes, the portrait type, and the inscription (Maguire, 16).
Representation in icons does not mean accuracy. Knowledge of a saint’s identity is gathered through the icon’s stylistic devices, through an apperception of its deliberate turning away from standards of realism or accuracy in showing the figure of the saint. To look on an icon is to be aware of —to be a connoisseur of — a difference.
The constantly affirmed importance of icons in the Orthodox church has to do with the controversies that have surrounded their production:
God took a material body, thereby proving that matter can be redeemed: ‘The Word made flesh has deified the flesh,’ said John of Damascus. God has ‘deified’ matter, making it ‘spirit-bearing’; and if flesh has become a vehicle of the Spirit, then so — though in a different way — can wood and paint.
— Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (33)
The first Sunday of Lent, all Orthodox celebrate the Sunday of Orthodoxy, a feast commemorating the triumph of divine light over the darkness of ignorance. One of the most catastrophic spiritual events in Orthodox history was the Iconoclast heresies, during which icons were recklessly smashed for fear that they encouraged idolatry among believers, who were falsely led to worship and venerate icons as if they were holy objects. The triumph of Orthodoxy is the triumph of icons & their veneration. In the liturgy of Orthodox Sunday, the priest intones the following ancient hymn:
The uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed, taking flesh from thee, O Theotokos, and He has restored the sullied image to its ancient glory, filling it with the divine beauty. This our salvation we confess in deed and word, and we depict it in the holy ikons.
Enlightened by this mystery of God’s providence, the divinely-inspired prophets foretold it of old; and this they did for our sakes, who wee the fulfillment of the ages. Receiving through this mystery divine knowledge, we know one Lord and God, glorified in three Persons, and Him alone we worship; we have one faith, one baptism, and we are clothed in Christ. This our salvation we confess in deed and word, and we depict it in the holy ikons.
— Lenten Triodion (306-307)
Theotokos: Greek for Mother of God (literally, “The One who gave birth to God”).
Commenting on this hymn, Leonid Ouspensky writes:
In depicting the Saviour, we do not depict either His Divine or His human nature, but His Person in which both these natures are incomprehensibly combined. We depict His Person, since the icon can only be a personal, hypostatical image… Inasmuch as the icon is an image, it cannot be consubstantial with the original; otherwise it would cease to be an image and would become the original, would be of one nature with it. The icon differs from the original precisely by the fact that it has another, different nature, for “the representation is one thing, and that which it represents another.” In other words, although the two objects are essentially different, there exists between them a known connection, a certain participation of the one with the other.
— Leonid Ouspensky, “The Meaning and Language “(32)
The seeming paradox of this understanding of the icon is the inverse mirrored understanding that an Orthodox Christian has of the Trinity, in which three aspects of God are hypostatically different, yet in nature identical; with icons, the image & its original are hypostatically identical, yet different in nature.
Hypostasis, Greek for substance, groundwork, foundation, that which underlies anything.
So, what’s at issue here? What is a person doing when she worships before an icon? Is she worshipping an object that represents the Divine but is nonetheless, essentially, an object? If so, this is idolatry. Or, is she worshipping the Divine who is somehow present/available in the object? If so, this is veneration. Sometimes icons are called windows into Paradise. How so? You might consider this analogy: icons are to Paradise what Christ is to God; just as we can know God through the human form divine of Christ, so too can we know the light that suffuses Paradise by gazing onto/into an icon.
Further: the great mystery of Christianity (of all the Abrahamic religions, in fact), is that we dwell in a Ptolemaic cosmos whose God is encountered through Prophecy (& the prophetic traditions) (see Sells, 4-5). Ptolemy is the cosmographer of a Platonic ideal: that is, God dwells outside our knowing. In fact, God is unknown & unknowable, inaccessibly remote from our understanding, comprehension. However, God’s power/potency/energy radiates through the creation, through time & through the space of the cosmos. Prophecy is powerful speech coming from God, through the prophet, to the people; or, it is powerful speech of the prophet directed at God. In either case, the prophetic tradition reveals to us a God who can be “encountered” (but never completely known) through powerful speech.
Icons mediate this understanding of the cosmos. How? In the classical distinction provided by St. Gregory Palamas, the 14th c. “invincible champion of the theologians,” God’s essence is that which is unknowable to us as humans, as creations. However, God’s energy permeates the cosmos, suffuses every object, reverberates in each beam of light. Icons lack the divine essence, just as anything in the created cosmos lacks the divine essence; however, icons are flooded with the uncreated light of creation, which is the energy of God; in icons, that energy is transfigured into the golden light that floods into the world — & our souls, as a result.
So what does this suggest about an iconographer, a writer/maker of images?
Andrei Rublev (c. 1370-1430)
Born in a period of monastic revival, little is known of his life, nor are the religious convictions that inspired it.
A man born in Rostov, in Russia, in the fourteenth century named Sergius built a hermitage with his brother in the forests nearby Radonezh. There he sat, prayed, acquired a following. When the metropolitan (an Orthodox equivalent of an archbishop) of Moscow wanted to make him his successor, Sergius refused, wanting to instead abide in his hermitage. A cultus grew up around him; he devoted himself to the Holy Trinity. He advocated & practiced hesychasm, the act of stillness, perpetuated by the repetitions of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner”). He was by all accounts a humble man (could it be otherwise with a legendary monk?). He died in 1392. In 1422 he was sainted.
Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery became the center of a hesychastic revival in Russian Orthodoxy. Around 1425, Andrei Rublev painted (or wrote) his most famous icon, “The Holy Trinity,” at St. Sergius Monastery. It does not seem fantastic to call Andrei Rublev a hesychast. He was drawn to the monastery after all; this itinerant made his life there for several years. The early fifteenth century was a time of great strife in Russia: the Tartars often rampaged; they held Rus in their yoke.
Andrei Rublev had learned iconography from Theophanes the Great. Sometimes called “The Greek,” Theophanes had trained in Constantinople. Had Andrei Rublev never lived, Theophanes might be considered the greatest iconographer. Nonetheless, it’s unusual for us to know this, and a little problematical to make such rankings. Icon painters — unlike the masters of the Western Christian tradition — are by & large anonymous. Icon painting, in Orthodoxy, is considered a ministry. Most icon painters have been monks, nearly all of whom remain anonymous. However, Andrei Rublev is considered to be perhaps the greatest icon painter in the history of Orthodox Christendom. He is believed, through his teacher Theophanes (Light of God!), to have fully absorbed the Greek, Constantinopolitan styles of painting but to have transformed them into something completely new & immediately necessary. His “Holy Trinity” icon is regarded as the apotheosis of his invention.
Some consider “Holy Trinity” to be an homage to St Sergius, a recognition of the monk’s humility & purpose. We do well to regard Andrei Rublev’s icon as emerging from the matrix of St. Sergius’s environment. But “Holy Trinity” is to Christian image-making what DNA is to the science of genetics. Once we see things this way, we can never again perceive them otherwise. Once Andrei Rublev imagined the Trinity in this manner, his vision exceeded necessity & became canon: an Orthodox believes, The Holy Trinity looks this way.
What has he done in this icon? A few things: notice the forms —: slender, placid, nearly identical. The small heads, the subtle gestures of the hands. Icons are painted in a very specific way, using very specific materials. First, the wood is chosen; then, an indentation is gouged into the wood, creating a kind of border. After this, gold leaf is applied to the wood, which becomes the heavenly backdrop of the icon. Next, the iconographer mixes his paints, using egg-yolks, tinctures, oils. He first paints the garments, outlining them then filling them in with color. All this work can be done by an apprentice. Icons are completed with the painting of the hands & faces (no other parts of flesh are shown in icons, except in a specific form, the breast of the Theotokos). Only a master can paint hands & faces. Here is where Andrei Rublev’s icons transcend the form: the faces of his holy beings are at once deeply, compassionately human but also otherworldly. There’s no mistaking in his icons that these beings are not representative of something that exceeds human comprehension.
In the case of “Holy Trinity,” we get a radical expression of the theology of the Triune God: how can God be three-in-one? Andrei Rublev gives us a vision of that God: three nearly identical beings, each in communion, represented at a meal. He takes his inspiration from the opening of Genesis, chapter 18:
And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said. And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth. And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf that he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat (KJV, Genesis, 18: 1-8).
The vision of the Trinity he sees through is Abraham’s startlement at the arrival of these mysterious travelers. The Trinity is a triad of hungering guests, evening visitors. Andrei Rublev twists in different ways away from this vision of heavenly reality. He knows it is humanly impossible for him to portray the Trinity in an icon with any accuracy (the illusion of realism). Icons are not realistic. Nor are they illusions. They are super-realistic, in that they show a deliberately distort reality, suffusing its atmospheres with gold, gesturing toward the uncreated energy of God, all the while beckoning viewers to participate in this renewing vision of the cosmos.
Icon: Greek, eikos, for image; iconographer, combining “image” with graphein, for writing, marking, drawing. Icon, a representation. To be before again. Iconographer, a maker, one who represents, one who writes.
III. Poem
Around 1954, Wallace Stevens wrote the following lines in his poem “The Rock.” This is section II, “The Poem as Icon.”
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cureOf the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
The fiction of the leaves is the iconOf the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,
The magnum wreath of summer, time’s autumn snood,Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,In the predicate that there is nothing else.
They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.
They are more than leaves that cover the barren rockThey bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
New senses in the engenderings of sense,
The desire to be at the end of distances,The body quickened and the mind in root.
They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.
They bear their fruit so that the year is known,As if its understanding was brown skin,
The honey in its pulp, the final found,
The plenty of the year and of the world.In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
Of such mixed motion and such imagery
That its barrenness becomes a thousand thingsAnd so exists no more. This is the cure
Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.
His words are both the icon and the man.
[pallid, lacking depth or intensity of color; snood, a band or ribbon]
Again, “the fiction of the leaves is the icon // Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness, / And the icon is the man.” And: “The poem makes meanings of the rock.” The poem, written in Stevens’ old age & with an almost psalmic assuredness, resists the effort to paraphrase it. The poem makes meanings out of my readings, distorts my expressions of it as I might represent it in my imagination. There it is, an image of itself.
“Poem” from the Greek word poein, meaning “to make.” It has a possible analogue in the Sanskrit “cinoti,” “he heaps up.”
Intersection, then: mocking, icon, poem. Distortion, image, making. Here we must consider then the possibility, the imaginative DNA whose strands coil here, that these three things — there’s just not a better word for it — each, independently, generate the same idea: representation is meaningful distortion; meaningful distortion is revelatory.
There is a space between the worshipper & the icon, just as there is a sonic cushion between the mockingbird’s bluejay mimicry & the eardrum of cyanocitta cristata, a bluejay. In that brief representative distance, the imagination is Lord & maker, the poem is its icon. What more is the imagination than that which recasts the cosmos in its own distorted & distorting image? These words are both the icon & the man who makes them.
Quotation from “The Rock,” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by pemission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Sources
Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity. Edited by Ken Parry, David J. Melling, Dimitri Brady, Sidney H. Griffith & John Healy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Lazarev, Viktor Nikitich. The Russian Icon. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997.
The Lenten Triodion. Translated by Mother Mary & Kallistos Ware. London: Faber, 1978.
Maguire, Henry. The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Ouspensky, Leonid. “The Meaning and Language of Icons.” In The Meaning of Icons. Edited by Leonid Ouspensky & Vladimir Lossky. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.
Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
The Sibley Guide to Bird Behavior. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.
Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. New York: Penguin, 1993.
One response to “Mockingbird & Icon”
[…] as one of Andrei Rublev’s fellow monks & helpers. A companion piece to this poem, “Mockingbird & Icon,” contains further information about Andrei Rublev, as well as some speculations on the […]