The Owl Among the Relics

In the hamlet of East Durham, nestled in the folds of the Catskill Mountains — that ancient, bruised spine of a landscape the Lenape once called the land of the blue hills — a small eastern screech owl was found sleeping on the shelf of an antique store, perched beside a ceramic chicken cookie jar, its eyes firmly shut against the commerce of the living.
The shoppers at The Market Place noticed, as one does when the uncanny slips into the quotidian, "something extremely lifelike" among the bric-a-brac. And indeed it was. Not a taxidermied curiosity, not a porcelain figurine of dubious provenance, but a breathing, feathered oracle tucked between the detritus of someone else's memories. A conservation officer eventually cradled the creature and released it into a nearby wood, where it was seen flying into a tree — returning, one might say, to the vertical world of bark and silence from which it had briefly descended into our horizontal one of shelves and price tags.
One does not encounter an owl among antiques without feeling the old tremor. The Greeks knew this. Athena's companion was not chosen for sentiment. The little owl — glaux, they called it, from which we derive the very word for blue-green, glaukos, the colour of the sea at dusk, the colour of eyes that see what should not be seen — sat upon the goddess's shoulder not as ornament but as witness. In Athens, the owl on the tetradrachm was not decorative. It was a statement: wisdom watches, even in the marketplace. Especially in the marketplace.
And what marketplace is more haunted than an antique store? Walter Benjamin, that melancholic archaeologist of the modern, understood this. For him, the collector was a physiognomist of objects, one who reads in the patina of things the secret autobiography of their epoch. Every chipped saucer, every tarnished candlestick, is a fragment of a world that believed itself permanent. The antique store is where permanence goes to be sold by the pound. The owl knew this. It chose its altar well.
But there is something else here, something older and more unsettling, that we must not let the charm of the anecdote conceal. East Durham is Irish country. Since the early 1900s, families from Donegal and Galway made their way to these green slopes that reminded them, perhaps too painfully, of home. A thatched cottage from Carrickataggart was once shipped across the Atlantic, disassembled and reassembled in this very hamlet, as though a house could carry within its stones the ghost of the parish it left behind. The Irish brought their music, their festivals, their Catholicism — and, whether they knew it or not, their older gods.
In the Celtic tradition, the owl — cailleach-oidhche, the old woman of the night — was no mere bird. It was the creature of Cailleach Bhéara, the divine hag, the winter goddess whose reign began when the last leaf fell and ended only when the first green shoot pierced the frozen earth. The owl was her emissary, her surveillance. To hear it call was to be reminded that the thin season was not yet over, that the dark still had claims upon you. In the Welsh Mabinogion, the woman Blodeuwedd, made from flowers by the magicians Math and Gwydion to be a wife for Lleu Llaw Gyffes, was transformed into an owl as punishment for her betrayal — condemned to hunt alone in darkness, shunned by all other birds. "And because of that," the tale says, "the owl is still called Blodeuwedd."
So when an owl appears among the relics of an Irish hamlet in the American mountains, sleeping beside a ceramic chicken — that most domestic, most earthbound of creatures — we are witnessing, whether we have the literacy to read it or not, a small mythological event. The wild has not forgotten us. It comes to sit among our objects, to close its eyes in the temple of our discarded things, as if to say: I was here before your shelves, and I will be here after.
Borges, who catalogued imaginary beings with the same devotion others reserve for butterflies, would have placed this owl in his Book of Imaginary Beings under a new entry: "The Antiquary's Owl — a creature that appears only in shops where objects have outlived their owners, and whose presence indicates that the past is dreaming." Borges understood that the fantastical is not the opposite of the real but its innermost lining. Every library, every collection, every dusty shelf is a labyrinth, and at the centre of every labyrinth there is something with eyes that are shut and yet sees.
The environmental officers did their duty. They carried the owl to the woods. They watched it fly away. But one wonders — as one always wonders with such visitations — what it left behind. The Catskill air will carry the scent of woodsmoke and thawing earth. The Irish festival in May will fill the streets of East Durham with fiddles and the stomp of hard shoes. The antique store will open again each morning with its shelves of other people's pasts. And somewhere on a high branch, the screech owl will wait for nightfall to go hunting, carrying in its amber eyes a memory of the ceramic chicken, the warm shelf, the strange temple of human forgetting where, for one February afternoon, the old gods and the cookie jars shared the same silence.
There is, if we allow ourselves to think it, no real difference between the owl and the antique. Both are messengers from a time that refuses to fully pass. Both sit in stillness, waiting to be noticed. Both ask the same question that Rilke posed in the first of his Duino Elegies: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?" The answer, as always, is: no one. And everyone. And the owl.
Claudius, the Antiquarian