Bending for Feathers Fantasy

I bend to pick up a feather in a dirty London street. It is becoming a thing. I would call the primitive accumulation of feathers at my desk a collection, but it sounds trite and colonial.

My bends are achy, stiff, hesitant, shifty, self-conscious but determinate, far from seamless. Regardless, in gratitude God for the eyes that insist, the joints that figure, the memory that weeps over (the] what and (the] how. This prayer is for you.

Like anyone cares… you’d think, but few passersby have looked back at my pickings, exercising neck flicks. Wondering if they might have missed a banknote. A free cup of coffee hailing towards a new fiver. This is how much coffee is now. Those who spot the feather nod in resignation, like, whatever. No revelation or drama here, nothing to hate or like (binary is the lowest form of writing), a feather. Useless for the socials. Acting non-controversial is new for me. I don’t know what to do with it, so I write benignly, induced by hormone replacement gel absorbed through the soft parts of the thighs, a juicy pacifier that makes mood swings blend, or bland, and I am changed with it.

When his neck turns, I want to offer him the feather and say, trust me this is a beautiful one (they all are, the manky ones too], it will make your day better—help you connect and recall. I’m losing the sense of what ‘better’ means though, when I can smell smoke through my screen. He is lugging two heavy looking decorators’ kits on wheels, hands full, hair touching the thoracic. I would have to fit the feather in between his lips. In times your lips will become feathers, singing to the tune of the wind.

Bees lug water in their honey sack, to make the architecture of the hive solid by mixing the water with sugar and bee wax and other stuff. The stickiness makes the hive harder for keepers to penetrate.

It is a brief spirit data encounter; acknowledging that we are both on a short break from real work. He is on a journey between jobs and I’m doing something that is legal, but opaque.

In public-sector uniform, he reads discernible yet anonymous with the hi-vis vest hanging loosely from his pocket. The impression conjures up a 70s North American queer-archive image of cruising, but not white. I drift > yellow bandana was a code for piss or water sports.The acidic yellow hue of his uniform reminds me of the healthy-looking hydrated tone on the urine charts.

Spirit data is a term I coined to describe encounters or existences that envisage other forms of sharing with minimal-to-no exchange of data. The flaw is that my writing has left many leaks already.

Rummaging online for the colour of your urine is prepping for your GP to ask ‘what do you think you have? Doctors are overstretched and only get five minutes slots, you help them to help you. You run a bath with fresh rosemary (anti inflammatory) picked from someone’s garden to cleanse the techno-hypnotic dust off. Resetting. The rosemary (bone health) smell is crispy, you breathe it in > out, clearing the density. You search for the sun at your genderless core and inside the makings of others, until the suns overlap into one. This can become a ritual, or a chore.

We keep reinventing with others what unrestrained belonging might be, and that becomes a fugitive practice. We study aliveness in a video from Gaza, how a Palestinian boy feeds an emaciated kitten canned peas during an enforced mass starvation, so traumatised that her spiked fur resembles a cartoon of an electrocuted cat. How cruel is it that children have to create content amongst unimaginable new shapes of rubble in order to survive. A permanent sense of home is unreachable, instead we seek a sanctuary. Everywhere. A temporary place to rest and feel safe. In every situation we can find a refuge if we know the technique. Remaining open, usually, it is something to do with love, joy, care, unpredictability and chaos. We remember the value of truth and acknowledge the potential of lies, which unlike fiction, they are devoid of surprises. Describing the situation accurately, feels as empowering as finding answers. We learn from the intelligence of insects who invent themselves with every updated cycle of insecticide, smallness in numbers as resistance.

A close friend by my side is cringing in abjection when I pick up a feather in a dirty London street. They remark that ‘it is disgusting, it’s a pigeon feather, nothing special, you can catch something from it, like bird flu… this isn’t a countryside pigeon you know’. They ask (with care?]  –  ‘For how long are you planning to continue collecting feathers’. They half offer a hand sanitiser, and we are catapulted back into the pandemic.

Some part of the brain dedicated to self-doubt (as a flight response] is computing in no time, abiding:

I am collecting feathers = does that make me a hobbyist and not an artist. The feathers are not special = am I irrelevant (I enjoy Love Island terminology). The feathers are potential carriers of diseases = what’s the risk involved. Did anyone ever get sick from a dirty feather. Maybe if you stroked the inside of your eye with it. It makes me queasy. Stroking the eyelid on the outside with a feather is soothing and erotic. When I am queasy, or trapped in a dentist’s chair, or in the middle of the night, I am flooded with brutal sequences of torture from security prisons and immigration raids.

A memory smoke traces its way up to the surface and I regain ground against friendly accusations—hygiene regimes have been historically racist. Dirty things are tools for uncommercial rituals. A cleansed environment is simply gentrification. I am practically winning the argument.

I will bend for fallen feathers for as long as I need to— is my comeback. Let’s have tea was the retort.

Writing and rewriting months later, I wonder what it means to be with birds in sensitive ways. We taught pigeons to love us, and then betrayed them. Where do we go from here? If I collect feathers as an act of possession, does it remain a conversation between us? While it  is legal to collect fallen feathers — from the ideological loopholes in the UK Hunting Act, to the animal protection laws implemented as soon as the Nazis came to power (apart from certain insects who were doomed to chemical extinction), what are the limits of wildlife legislations? How can our bodies relate to wildlife beyond the paradigm of protection or harm? Do I continue picking fallen feathers?

The bus driver stops and hops out to the road for some reason. I had to save them he said back on his seat. Who did you save? I asked, thinking he brought a small bird in. I removed the bread that was left for them from the side road. Pigeons go for it and get killed. I’m moved. When so much of what we do is to destroy, there is not much breadth left outside saving.

*If pigeon feathers are naturally shed and not taken from a nest or from a killed or injured bird, collecting them is legal. However, there are warnings that it is difficult to distinguish pigeon feathers from those of protected birds, such as gulls.