'I Like Birbs!'

This parable has a moral.

And God Confessed (1965) by Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly, 

I'm sad today. You said most things can be solved by feeling our feelings, but fuck me, there's a lot of them clamoring in my face and heart sometimes. 

Today I was hanging with my partner while he fixed his motorcycle and there was this fat, cute baby bird on the ground. It was adorable so I joyfully pointed it out to my partner. Unfortunately, he doesn't like that sort of bird ‘cause they're considered a pest (they are introduced and can kill native species). He caught it and wrung its neck despite my pleading with him. I immediately went for a big walk to try and sort my feelings out and then when I got home, I tried to talk with him about it. 

It didn't go well. He adamantly insisted that it was the responsible thing to do. He ended the conversation by saying I'd have to come to terms with it and be more resilient which I will, because I deeply love him. I know he feels like it was the morally right thing to do.

But I can't stop crying for that poor bird. I swear I'm normally more stable than this. My partner and I have mostly been amazing lately, despite us both being busy and stressed. But I feel so heartbroken and let down and I can't stop thinking about its little cries of panic before he killed it. 

What should I do? Just keep feeling a bit longer?

Birb Person

Dear Birb Person,

Your letter reads like a dark 19^th century short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville. The ethical implications of their tales are never easy to unpack. The chaotic whims of so-called savages are often revealed to be compassionate and attuned to the laws of nature, while the righteous morals and rules of civilized man are often exposed as savagery. And like great literature, your story unearths the complex contradictions of the human heart and mind, reminding us that honorable behavior can sometimes lack compassion and goodness is not always in lockstep with righteousness.

Anyone can view the murder of an invasive pest as ethical but still recoil at the brutality of a grown man wringing a baby bird’s neck with his bare hands. An author like Hawthorne or Melville wouldn’t be able to resist the dark romanticism inherent to such an action, not to mention the intense divide between traditionally masculine and feminine impulses highlighted in that moment. But whether the killing was portrayed as morally sound or repugnant by these authors, you can be sure that the purity of the murderer’s motives would be called into question along the way.

And if I were writing a short story about your very sad afternoon of bird murder, I would question more than just your partner’s motives. You pointed out the baby bird to him in order to share its adorableness with him. He immediately reacted by picking it up and breaking its neck in front of you. You pleaded with him not to do it. He didn’t hold onto the bird and pause to talk with you about it. He didn’t throw a bucket or a bag over it so he could address your desperate pleas. Even if you ultimately agreed that the killing was necessary, he could’ve listened patiently to your feelings and tried to understand your resistance. He could’ve given you the chance to go inside so you wouldn’t have had to listen to the bird’s cries.

And after the whole thing was over and you’d been on a long walk by yourself, crying and feeling absolutely sick over the whole thing, he’d had plenty of time to calm down. He could’ve reacted like an actual human with a functioning heart and assured you that he’d never take brutal action in your presence without talking it out first. He might’ve restored your faith in him by taking your understandable concerns and your sadness seriously, by listening to you, by soothing you — behaviors you might expect from a human being who has actual blood in his veins and not ice water or cold brew or motor oil in there.

The idea that watching him snap a baby bird’s neck shouldn’t bother you at all is absolutely absurd. His assertion that your distress over it means that you lack resilience is so ludicrous as to be difficult to address without sneering openly, shouting at the sky, punching my fist into the nearest wall, and kicking a can straight to the moon.

The word “partner” doesn’t apply to someone who refuses to take another person’s feelings into account, no matter how irrational those feelings might seem in the moment. The word “partner” doesn’t describe someone who always has their own rigid agenda, someone who not only can’t slow down for their one true love’s benefit, but also won’t even bother to pay lip service to how she must be feeling hours later.

You don’t have a partner right now, in other words. You have a lover who does whatever the fuck he wants and treats you like an unenlightened pain in the ass when you take issue with his actions.

You were the one who pointed out the bird, so it’s natural that you’d feel horrified to see it die in front of your eyes, a fate it might’ve escaped had you not mentioned it to your lover. And honestly, even the word “lover” feels a little too friendly here. Because a person who is incapable of addressing your feelings isn’t a lover or even a civilized man, he’s a savage who doesn’t deserve to occupy the richly romantic landscape of intimate relationships, where the complex contradictions of the human heart and mind are explored with patience, empathy, and discernment.

Even if you could convince me that not only was this bird’s death necessary, but this man had to seize the moment and kill it on the spot or a terrifying plague of birds would descend on the habitat and destroy everything in sight, you will never persuade me that a thoughtful, warm-hearted human would see the bird, ignore your desperate pleas not to kill it, and then rigidly deny any wrong-doing and (adding insult to injury) insist that YOU, the compassionate witness to an extremely upsetting event, are the one who needs to change.

So unlike Herman Melville, I don’t need to write thousands of words about compassion and righteousness and the finer features of the red-billed leiothrix who, like the pudding-headed whale, scraps his way up the evolutionary ladder, buoyed by the inscrutable tides of god. All I need to tell you is that it makes perfect sense that you feel so sad right now. That baby bird’s cries of panic and disbelief are echoing through your head for a good reason: You’re also filled with panic and disbelief right now. Some part of you is asking, “Is this how the man I love should treat me?”

This man needs to learn how to slow down and listen and respect your feelings if he wants to keep you in his life. He needs to show up for the full force of your passions and your personality. He needs to understand you much, much better. He needs to want to do so. He needs to get curious, ask better questions, and listen to the answers very closely. He may even need to grow an actual soul.

Until he does these things, I would proceed with extreme caution. I would hesitate to build a life with someone who can’t make space for your emotions and doesn’t even seem ready to try.

I feel for you. It’s not easy to see things you’d rather not see. This applies to baby birds being killed, and it also applies to the sudden realization that your partner isn’t a partner at all. As Melville put it, “There is a wisdom that is woe.” You’ve stumbled on some important information about this man’s character. Heed it, even though it hurts.

Listen to your heart and defend its imperatives. Insist that he discuss this with you again. Insist that he listen closely, and apologize. Insist, insist, insist, insist. There is no happiness here if you can’t stand up for how you feel. There is no partnership here if he can’t hear you. There is no love here if he doesn’t recognize that to love is to allow the vast sea of someone else’s emotions and desires into your heart and honor them as if they’re your own. The ability to do this is what makes love feel good and what keeps it alive. The inability to do this reduces love to a performance that isn’t real.

If you want something real, you have to insist on it.

Polly

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