The Mother Swan
Tonight I paddled around to the far side of the island and saw the mother swan sitting on her eggs. The father was off fishing so I skulked around the back side and coasted by the tall reeds, with geese landing and barking, ducks meandering, and red-winged blackbirds clutching the reeds and calling hoarsely. The swans' nest was a tamped down clump of reeds. I passed within ten feet, and as I did the female lowered her head demurely on her back and watched me in silence. Demurely my foot, I said to her, you would tear me to shreds.
I circled around to watch her. A cardinal chirped in a nearby tree, my favorite sound of May. As the wind pushed me away from the scene I wondered how a swan engineer could know how build a nest out of reeds and how even a female swan could know a good nest when her suitor showed her one of his own making. Maybe she stomped around on it to test its feel, but still, what good would that do if she had never seen an egg before? What must it be like to accomplish an engineering feat with no consciousness of what one was doing?
The instinct of a scientist can be no different. The male swan hypothesizes that one small reedy corner of the natural world is in alignment with his desires, and he proceeds to demonstrate the validity of his hypothesis. The female swan then hypothesizes that that same reedy corner, now squashed flat, is a suitable place to sit and wait for whatever may happen in a week or two, and so she tests her hypothesis by sitting and waiting. So the scientist, confronting his own corner of the natural world, must look inside into a place of desire and instinct and drag out from that place a hypothesis, a wish, that this piece of himself will look the same, will be in happy accordance with that piece of the world that he encounters.
While the female swan was occupied with these thoughts I rounded the near side of the island. The male, surprisingly, was not disturbed into protectiveness by my loitering. On the contrary he swam on ahead of me, farther from the nest. Maybe he was wondering what he had gotten himself into, taking the opportunity for some solitude, while every few minutes another pair of honking geese, audible a minute away, came in feet first on the water to join their noisy buddies on the island. It is possible, I thought, that some of the droppings on the lawns lining the pond are swan droppings, but there are just so many geese, and so many geese droppings. The swan continued swimming away from his mate, who knows, maybe looking for somebody younger. I passed near a goose on my way into my inlet. He honked. I honked back.
I circled around to watch her. A cardinal chirped in a nearby tree, my favorite sound of May. As the wind pushed me away from the scene I wondered how a swan engineer could know how build a nest out of reeds and how even a female swan could know a good nest when her suitor showed her one of his own making. Maybe she stomped around on it to test its feel, but still, what good would that do if she had never seen an egg before? What must it be like to accomplish an engineering feat with no consciousness of what one was doing?
The instinct of a scientist can be no different. The male swan hypothesizes that one small reedy corner of the natural world is in alignment with his desires, and he proceeds to demonstrate the validity of his hypothesis. The female swan then hypothesizes that that same reedy corner, now squashed flat, is a suitable place to sit and wait for whatever may happen in a week or two, and so she tests her hypothesis by sitting and waiting. So the scientist, confronting his own corner of the natural world, must look inside into a place of desire and instinct and drag out from that place a hypothesis, a wish, that this piece of himself will look the same, will be in happy accordance with that piece of the world that he encounters.
While the female swan was occupied with these thoughts I rounded the near side of the island. The male, surprisingly, was not disturbed into protectiveness by my loitering. On the contrary he swam on ahead of me, farther from the nest. Maybe he was wondering what he had gotten himself into, taking the opportunity for some solitude, while every few minutes another pair of honking geese, audible a minute away, came in feet first on the water to join their noisy buddies on the island. It is possible, I thought, that some of the droppings on the lawns lining the pond are swan droppings, but there are just so many geese, and so many geese droppings. The swan continued swimming away from his mate, who knows, maybe looking for somebody younger. I passed near a goose on my way into my inlet. He honked. I honked back.
posted by David Gillman at 6:44 PM
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