"The Sure Way To Lose Is To Have To Win"

(Alicia Sings A Song)

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Birds have been a recurring theme for me this summer.

It’s July 27, 2024, and I’m typing these words on a covered porch in the mountains of North Carolina, near Brevard.

Birds keep buzzing by my head.

There are two liquid sugar and three seed feeders hanging within twenty feet of the outdoor couch on which I’m sitting. The seed-eating birds have been sharing quite nicely. We’ve been seeing a lot of chickadees and titmice. A cardinal just visited. But there is one hummingbird who keeps chasing all of the other hummingbirds away.

The mean hummingbird sits in a nearby tulip tree, watching. Whenever another hummingbird tries to take a sip from either of the red feeders, mean bird swoops down and attacks, fighting off all who dare to approach. Then mean bird drinks greedily, before returning to the tulip tree. This cycle happens just about every twenty seconds. I want to tell the mean bird it wouldn’t need so much nectar if it would only stop quarreling with all the other hummingbirds. Brawling burns a lot of calories. The whole dance seems pointless and absurd. A total waste of sugar water. And yet it goes on and on.

Sometimes, another hummingbird will sit above me on a ceiling fan blade, while the mountain breeze blows him around in a slow circle. This one will watch for an opportune moment. I root for tricky bird. But whenever tricky bird zooms down and tries to take a sip from the feeder, mean bird launches from the tulip tree like a missile and chases fan-riding bird away. It’s been a week-long masterclass in resource hoarding.

As research for a film project I’m working on, I recently watched the 1984 adaptation of William Wharton’s novel, Birdy, starring a very young Matthew Modine and an even younger-looking Nicolas Cage. I had never seen it before. So I was shocked to discover that the film is—in some ways—a sort of pre-existing mash-up of my last two novels, as it deals with PTSD from the Vietnam war and a struggling teenage boy who makes a suit out of feathers. It’s also set in Philadelphia and Wildwood and other places from my literary and autobiographical past. These little synchronicities made the Jungian in me curious. So I bought the 1978 National-Book-Award-winning novel of the same name and read Birdy on the covered porch here in Brevard, NC with all the aforementioned birds flying around me.

Turns out Wharton was also from Philly. Like my grandfather, Wharton fought in WWII. The book is semi-autobiographical and, therefore, takes place during the World-War-Two era rather than the Vietnam-War era. The cover boasts a blurb from the late great Toni Morrison:

“A writer’s triumph and a reader’s delight.”

There are fantastic pull quotes from all the right major newspapers on the back too.

The internet tells me Wharton didn’t begin publishing until he was in his fifties. He was a painter before that. Somewhere I read that he believed the best way to be a writer was to not think of himself as a writer, which sounds correct to me these days.

I fall deeply in love with the book, even as I wonder if it would be publishable in today’s marketplace. It’s an almost plotless character study of two teenaged boys who ultimately are forced to become soldiers. The odder of the two, nicknamed Birdy, is obsessed with birds. Pigeons at first and then canaries. Birdy begins breeding canaries. He builds an aviary. He tries to figure out the secret to flight, going so far as to concoct wings for himself and bodybuilding up the flapping muscles he believes he’ll need to beat gravity. As his best friend becomes interested in girls and sports, Birdy becomes more and more obsessed with his birds, to the point where be begins dreaming he literally is a bird mating with his favorite canary in the aviary. In these dreams, he has a bird family and does everything that a male bird does in real life. He can see his human form in the dreams, but is completely severed from it. Soon his waking life and dream life begin to blur. Things in the dream world seem to affect the waking world and vice versa.

Much of the book is descriptions of canaries. How to take care of them. How they fly. How they communicate. How they reproduce. I’ve never been particularly interested in birds, but I found these sections fascinating. It was a little surreal to read about all of this with the birds flying around my head here on the covered porch in Brevard, NC.

Birdy says that canaries have been in cages for so many generations that they have forgotten how to exist without human assistance. Birdy has to choose the matting pairs and separate them from the other birds. He has to protect the eggs. He has to make sure the hatchlings aren’t killed by their parents. At one point, he tells us that canaries have been in cages for just as many generations as humans have been in the cage of civilization. He talks about how humans have forgotten their instincts. Most of us would not survive outside of our civilizations, without the help of social, societal, and governmental structures. We’ve forgotten what we were made to do. We have forgotten how to metaphorically fly.

In some ways, the inciting incident of the novel hovers in the margins like a ghost, as we jump back and forth from the post-war asylum where Birdy is locked up, pretending to be a bird, and the pre-war Philadelphia, where we see Birdy becoming more and more obsessed with canaries. The physical and emotional scars with which the two boys return from war hint at the horrors of combat, which are finally revealed at the end of the novel. But most of Birdy’s psychological trauma seems to have happened before we even meet him, off the page, long before the war. And we never really get to know why or how he became so untethered from so-called reality. This omission feels intentional. And maybe underscores the point of the novel.

We’re all born in the cage.

Birdy justifies his aviary—and the associated costs—to his parents by selling his birds and making an impressive amount of money, almost as much as his father makes as the high school janitor. But Birdy hates selling the birds.

There’s a line that jumps out at me:

“Who wins? What’s winning? The sure way to lose is to have to win.”

The week before I read Birdy, I had a dream about the Arc de Triomphe. While analyzing the dream in session, my analyst reminded me that the goddess Nike is featured on the famous monument. He says that some people do well when possessed by the goddess of victory. But he says I am often made sick by her. When I feel I must win, I almost always lose. The above line from Birdy is exactly what my analyst was saying. The fact that I read the book immediately after my analyst said all that is another interesting synchronicity.

Nike is often depicted with wings. Winged victory.

Alicia and I are in Brevard for a week of hiking. Yesterday was our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. We’ve always loved hiking. Hiking is one of the very few things that has remained unchanged throughout our relationship. Whenever Alicia and I are on a trail headed up toward a summit, I think, This could be 1994. It could be 2000. Or 2008. Or 2017. No matter how many years pass, hiking always feels exactly the same.

Sometimes, when I am on a trail, I forget how old I am. Not literally. If you ask me for my age, I could tell you. But it’s almost like stepping back into a dream. A dream that began in the mid-nineties when this city boy took his first hike with his then girlfriend, who became his wife, and has now been hiking with him for more than thirty years. There are always rocks and trees and birds and insects and wind and sun and clouds and mountain air. Eternal things. Free things. Things that never change. Things that aren’t altered by the news cycle or what is trending on the internet. Things that seem to beat time. Things that seem to transcend us.

A few days ago, we were hiking down Looking Glass Rock when Alicia said to me, “I just read that birds only sing when predators aren’t around. And that’s why humans enjoy birdsong. Our amygdalae register it as safe. Birds singing means no threat present.”

Picture taken by Matthew Quick on the Looking Glass Rock trail 7/23/2024

Alicia takes her time on a hike. She likes to touch things as she passes, grabbing onto branches and fingering leaves and running her palms over tall grass. When she hears a bird singing, she stops and listens. If she can identify it, she becomes excited, yelling out its species, gesturing up. Sometimes I catch her humming a melody as we walk. I’ll ask what she’s singing and she’ll never know.

I look at my wife on the trail.

She’s eighteen. She’s twenty-seven. She’s thirty-nine. She’s forty-eight.

All at the same time.

We’re in France. We’re in Pennsylvania. We’re in Hawaii. We’re in Utah. We’re in South Africa. We’re in Peru. We’re in North and South Carolina. We’re in Zambia. We’re in Ireland. We’re in Ecuador. We’re in Arizona. We’re in Scotland. We’re in Namibia, New England, New Mexico, New Jersey.

We’re alive. We’re frozen in time.

We are man and woman. We are trees. We are rocks. We are clouds. We are mountain air. We are specs of dirt. We are hawks and owls. We are melodies we can’t remember. We are…

Wharton writes:

“I’ve got to learn to live with myself the way I am. The trouble is there are whole parts of me I don’t know. All my life, I’ve been building a personal picture of myself like body building in Strength and Health. Only I didn’t build from the inside, I built from the outside, to protect myself against things.”

I’m going to read more Wharton. I think I found Birdy at the perfect time. It seems as though everyone loved the novel in 1978. I loved it in 2024. But I wonder how many other people would love it today. It feels like something from the past. Something that might not be embraced by the current zeitgeist.

And yet it seems so aligned with the Jungian work I am doing.

At times I feel there is a mean hummingbird perched on the tulip tree of my soul. He is always ready to keep the rest of my internal hummingbirds from getting any nectar. I think mean hummingbird believes he’s protecting us the best he can, saving all the nectar for the part of us who is scared, the part of us who needs to win, the part of us who thinks there is a limited supply.

Alicia sings a song to that mean hummingbird inside of me. Her song says there is no such thing as victory for us; and my soul’s supply is endless and eternal, because it is connected to the divine. The mean hummingbird inside of me has been listening to that song for thirty years now. Sometimes he lets the other hummingbirds inside of me take a drink. Lately he’s been doing this more and more. But it’s hard for him. He’s been protecting the supply for so long. He’s been trying to keep us safe.

On the trail, when we are hiking, things are easier. The supply feels endless. It is everywhere. And there is a path. You just have to put one foot in front of the other and repeat, repeat, repeat. There are salted pumpkin seeds and protein bars and water in the backpack. The view at the top is eternally gorgeous and remarkably unchanged. And so we keep returning to the climb, again and again, year after year, for decades, and forever. We elevate ourselves. Chase clouds. Our souls sing to each other like birds. And, in this way, we keep the predators away the best we can.

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PS - Did you read the September 11th post? What's Next For Matthew Quick?(Making Unconscious Conscious)