H Is for Hawk

This story on Ms. Macdonald’s brought me back to a time in my childhood, roaming about fields, forest, and river with no one around for miles, to the magical places she mentioned. Only on another continent. It was a salve for the distance between now and when my father died and the memories he left for me. Those I’ve been able to decipher properly and those still an enigma.

"Hunting with a hawk took me to the very edge of being a human, then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn't human at all."

A five star read to start the year: the writing is beautiful, the emotions true, the thoughts deep. Having recently lost my own father I understood her words of grief, but this is not a sad story. MacDonald's is a tale of her singular way of dealing with grief - falconry.

"The cure for loneliness is solitude."

Returning to nature is common after loss. As a child she bird watched with her father and felt an almost religious awe when looking at raptors. Her teacher told the class no one knew why ancient people worshipped them. MacDonalds response:

"I was indignant, I knew exactly why, but at that age was at a loss to put my intuition into words that made sense even to me."

Little Helen MacDonald read T.H. White's The Goshawk. She read many animal books as a child, The Red Pony, Old Yeller, Charlottes Web, but in all of these the animals die. Gos did not and she clung to that hard. It left such an impression that MacDonald chose the same bird and devoted half of her book to White's life and how it affected his goshawk.

Her goshawk consumes her life. All her time and decisions center around it. To train the raptor she dulls her humanity and welcomes that yellow eyed otherness, a state of extreme awareness and feeling that has nothing to do with her loss.

"Instantly I feel that terrible blow, it is a killing blow but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive."

"The world with a hawk in it was insulated from harm and in that world I was exactly aware of all the edges of my skin."

Understanding her love of the goshawk a peculiar one she discovers that many animal writers, like White, were gay, expressing their socially unacceptable love through a medium. As White was also a sadist trying not to be a sadist this was a little hard to read, such people should never have pets.

I thought the most interesting part was her observation that the historical relationship/portrayal of goshawks to men mirrored that of women to men.

MacDonald used the hawk to escape but it's eventually what brings her back to people, both in terms of the falconry community and the many people who stopped to talk to the lady with the hawk, as I would have.

"I'm begging to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope, and home, and heart."

I don't think I'm doing this book justice with my review. The writing takes you along, sometimes it feels a shade beyond lucid, to the world of an English professor, a hawk, of everything as text and context. There's not a point to this book but it's not pointless.

"Hands are for other human hands to hold they should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks."

After the father's death, the author of the book decides to train a hawk. At no point does the expert falconer intend to establish a power relationship over the animal. Her goal is to be an integral part of the hawk's reality, that is, not to interfere with its nature. To achieve this, the first step in training is to eliminate her human presence and become a mere support for the bird. Then, she gradually introduces movements to get the animal to tolerate her human interference. The first step, in which she makes the human presence disappear, becomes dangerous in her state of grief because she considers the wild perspective of the hawk to be her own. But the relationship with the animal is a way to make the pain less oppressive and piercing. A way to survive. When she reaches the end of the process (of mourning and training the bird of prey), she understands that animals should not become natural models since they act driven by values different from ours.

A couple of years ago, when I had to face the same grief, I bought this book along with all the others I found about loss. After reading the first one, I understood that each person has their own suffering, incapacitating and depriving. I also realized that a bad book about grief filled with depressing images was just adding drama to what was already dramatic. So I stopped reading. This book would have helped me because it is measured and fair, without overflowing. Good literature soothes. (Translated from Spanish)

Helen Macdonald narrates autobiographically the difficulties in training a goshawk, as a personal escape forward due to the loss of a loved one. A hybrid of a treatise on falconry and the psychology of grief. I found it hard to finish. (Translated from Spanish)