Bending for Feathers 

I bend to pick up a feather on a dirty London street. It is becoming a thing. I would call the primitive accumulation of feathers a collection, but it sounds trite and colonial—never mind the act itself, so stigmatised. A tacky start to multispecies relations, perhaps, but I cherish the performative lowliness of bending.

My bends are achy, stiff, hesitant, shifty, self-conscious, yet determinate. In gratitude for eye–hand coordination, this prayer is for you, the aged. Vroom vroom, past ghosted hospitals, community centres, parks, children’s playgrounds, libraries, post offices. My future is reflected in the glistening eyes of the dying welfare state.

Like anyone cares, you’d think. Still, a few passers-by look back at my pickings, necks flicking—wondering if they might have missed a banknote. A free cup of coffee hailing a new fiver. This is how much coffee costs now. Those who spot the feather nod in resignation, like, whatever—nothing to hate or like (binaries are the lowest form of writing): a feather. Useless for the socials. Acting non-controversial is new for me. I write benignly, induced by hormone replacement gel absorbed through the soft inner thighs, a juicy pacifier that makes mood swings blend and bland.

His neck turns, and 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.’ Though I have lost any sense of what better means over the past two years. This world can’t be made better; it will need to crash first. But he is lugging two heavy decorators’ kits on wheels, hands full, hair brushing the thoracic. With consent, I would tuck the feather into a paintbrush. A gift, an afterimage, like telling a funny story.

It is a brief no-data encounter, an acknowledgement that we are both on a short break from work. He is moving between jobs, and I am doing something legal, but opaque.

He reads as discernible yet anonymous in a public-sector uniform, the hi-vis vest hanging loosely from his back pocket. The impression conjures a 1970s North American queer-archive image of cruising. I drift: the yellow bandana once coded for piss or water sports. The acidic yellow of his vest reminds me of the hydrated tones on online urine charts.

No-data encounter is a clumsy term I coined to describe spirit encounters, or forms of existence that envisage other modes of sharing with minimal to no data exchange. The flaw is that my work has already leaked everywhere.

Rummaging online for the colour of your urine is disempowering. You run a bath with fresh rosemary (anti-inflammatory), picked from someone’s garden, to cleanse the techno-hypnotic dust. Resetting. The rosemary (bone health) smells crisp; you breathe in and out, clearing the density. You search for the sun at your genderless core, then inside the makings of others, until the suns overlap into one. This can become a ritual—and a chore.

We keep reinventing, with others, what belonging might be, and this becomes a fugitive practice. We study aliveness in a video from Gaza: a Palestinian boy feeds an emaciated kitten canned peas during enforced mass starvation, so traumatised that her spiked fur resembles a cartoon of an electrocuted cat. How cruel that children must create content to survive in the rubble of new shapes. A permanent sense of home is unreachable; instead, we seek sanctuary—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 has something to do with love, joy, care, fatigue, unpredictability, and chaos. We remember what once stood for truth and acknowledge the potential of lies, which—unlike fiction—are devoid of surprises. Describing the situation can feel as empowering as asking questions. We learn from the intelligence of insects, who reinvent themselves with each updated cycle of insecticide: smallness, in numbers as resistance.

Bees lug water in their honey stomachs to make the architecture of the hive solid, mixing it with sugar, beeswax, and other substances. The bee spaces between the combs and hive walls are crucial for air circulation. The stickiness makes the hive harder for beekeepers to penetrate.

A close friend by my side cringes when I pick up a feather on a dirty London street. They remark that it is off-putting: ‘it is a pigeon feather, nothing special; you could catch something from it, like bird flu—this is not a countryside pigeon’. They ask how long I am planning to continue collecting feathers. They half-offer hand sanitiser, and we are catapulted back into the pandemic.

The part of my brain dedicated to self-doubt (a flight response) begins computing a response in real time: does collecting feathers make me a Sunday artist? A hobbyist? Am I irrelevant? (Irrelevance is the worst insult currently circulating on social media; it hurts.) Did anyone ever get sick from a dirty feather? Maybe if you stroked the inside of your eye with a pooey one. The image makes me queasy. Over the past two years, when I am queasy, I am flooded with brutal screen sequences of people being tortured. Even being handled gently by the mouth at a private dentist brings up those bodily sensations.

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

Months later, writing and rewriting results in my stopping the collection of fallen feathers. When does collecting parts of animals becomes problematic? Can parts of animals be possessed? It is legal to collect fallen feathers—but what are the limits of wildlife legislation? How can we be with wildlife beyond the paradigm of protection or harm?

The bus driver stops and hops out into the road for some reason. ‘I had to save them,’ he says when he returns to his seat.
‘Who did you save?’ I ask, imagining he has brought a small bird onto the bus.
‘I moved the bread from the side road—pigeons go for the bread and get killed by motors.’ I am moved. When much of what we do is to destroy, there is not much left to do apart from saving and imagining.