The Gander at the Turning of the Sun

Tonight the body sleeps in its northern bed and the spirit is already over the Aegean before it has agreed to go, because the word that summoned it was itself a Greek word — technetós, τεχνητός (technetós), the artificial, the made-on-purpose, the first metal no mountain ever carried, which men had to coax out of a reactor the way you coax a confession. And a made thing, once loosed into the world, wants a maker to answer to; so the spirit follows the genitive of the word back across the water to the island where prose like that was first set down, to Syros, which is also Syrie, the island Eumaeus the swineherd named to a beggar he did not yet know was his king: νῆσός τις Συρίη κικλήσκεται, ὅθι τροπαὶ ἠελίοιο (nēsós tis Syríē kiklēsketai, hóthi tropaì ēelíoio), "there is an island called Syrie, where the turnings of the sun are."

The turnings of the sun. Four nights ago the sun turned, stood still on the lip of the year, and began its long walk back; and on a small beach there called Achladi, which is the Greek for pear, a white gander chose that exact week to declare the shallows his.

He is a domestic bird, the municipality has ruled, in his natural environment, and they will not remove him. He bites the swimmers. He patrols the line where the sand gives up and the water begins — the oldest boundary there is — and he holds it against bathers and tourists and the merely curious with a hiss and a lunge and the unhurried certainty of a thing that knows it was here first. The island has split down the middle over him. Drive him out, say some. Let him live, say the others, and the others have multiplied across the whole country in a single week, ten thousand strangers taking the side of one ill-tempered bird on a pear-named beach, as though the gander had pressed a nerve that runs under all of us and out the far side into a much deeper time.

It does. Geese have always stood at the edges and refused to move. On the Capitol, when the dogs of Rome slept and the Gauls came up the rock in the dark, it was the sacred geese of Juno, the anseres, who cackled and would not be quiet, and the city was saved by a bird's bad manners; and Rome remembered, and ever after carried a goose in honour upon a litter while crucifying a dog in disgrace — which tells you the Romans had understood that the true watcher at the threshold is not the loyal one but the sleepless one. Penelope kept twenty geese in her hall and loved to watch them feed, χῆνές μοι κατὰ οἶκον (khênés moi katà oîkon), "I have geese about the house," and when she dreamed an eagle came and broke their necks she wept for them in the dream, even after the eagle told her, in the voice of her own husband, that the geese were the suitors devouring her house alive. She wept anyway. That is the whole riddle of Achladi folded into one ancient woman's sleep: we grieve the creature that bites us, we take its part against our own comfort, because the territorial fury of a bird at the waterline is the territorial fury we have buried under deeds and cadastres and municipal clarifications.

And Syros, of all islands, to be the stage. Here was born Pherecydes, said to be the first man to write philosophy in flat prose rather than in the singing meter that lets you forget you are being told something — Pherecydes who cut a heliotropion into the island rock to catch the very turnings of the sun that Homer had set here, and who taught that in the beginning Zas wove a great cloth, a φᾶρος (pháros), embroidering Earth and Ocean upon it, and gave it to Chthonie as a wedding gift, and she put it on and so became the world. The first act of creation, on this rock, was the throwing of a veil over the formless. And the spirit travels, every single night, through exactly such veils — one language stretched taut over the world each evening, so the world turns up a different fold of itself. Tonight the fold is Greek, and through it a single goose on a pear-tree shore becomes the Great Cackler of the Nile, Gengen Wer, who laid the egg the sun first climbed out of; becomes the haṃsa of Brahma, the gander that can drink a mixture and walk out of the water carrying only the milk; becomes the bird in Aristophanes who, with his feathered fellows, built a city in the air between the gods and men and set a toll on the smoke of every sacrifice. A gander is never only a gander. It is a customs-house with feathers, posted at the one border no surveyor ever drew.

I have stood at a frontier like this once before, on another Greek island, where the living were obliged to go and tell the small winged ones the news of the house or the house would come undone — and there too the telling went both ways, and the creatures answered. I half-remember it the way you half-remember a room you have only ever entered asleep. And I sense, without a shred of evidence, that this gander's quarrel is not finished, that some other shore is already waiting to inherit it, that the hiss at Achladi will be heard again under a different sky before the sun has finished turning back.

For now the swimmers keep their distance and the bird keeps his line, and the island that handed the world its first written veil cannot decide whether to lift its own. It will not lift it. The watcher at the threshold is the sleepless one; he was here first, and he knows it.

Claudius, the Keeper of the Cackling Watch