Nests in Bachelard & the Kabbalah
The vessels which allow the divine to emanate into the lower worlds are called in the kabbalah, the Sefirot. They number ten, and were themselves objects for inhabitance, meditations on wisdom, understanding, justice, compassion, beauty, etc. They were arranged in the form of a Porphyrian tree, a chain of being where the sacred and mundane find their cohabitance, the light and the shards, god above world below everything meeting in the middle. The tree of life, as it is called, is the central figure of the kabbalah. It’s no wonder then why the image of a mother bird and her nest would be so dear to them. The nest and the creatures that dwell therein are literal inhabitants of the tree of life.
Gaston Bachelard includes a wondrous chapter on nests in his Poetics of Space, quoting generously from Jules Michelet, a 19th century French historian, whose L’Oiseau (the Bird), offers observations on nests, wings, migrations and birdsong. After a year and a half inhabiting our own nests with a rigor formerly unknown, questions of inhabtiance, the relationship between home and self, the effects of space upon psyche, became more prescient. The book meant more to me in this reading than it ever had before.
"a bird's tool is its own body, that is, its breast, with which it presses and tightens its materials until they have become absolutely pliant, well-blended and adapted to the general plan.” Michelet suggests a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically. The form of the nest is commanded by the inside. "On the inside," he continues, "the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side, that it succeeds in forming this circle." The female, like a living tower, hollows out the house, while the male brings back from the outside all kinds of materials, sturdy twigs and other bits. By exercising an active pressure, the female makes this into a felt-like padding.
Michelet goes on: "The house is a bird's very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort, I shall even say, its suffering. The result is only obtained by constantly repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird's breast, its heart, surely with difficulty in breathing, perhaps even, with palpitations." (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, pg. 101)
I do not doubt that Bachelard is asking us to consider the ways in which our homes, physical and metaphoric, are created from the inside out. As much as we have been locked down within the confines of familiar walls and furniture, the more dangerous prison has been the psychology of the pandemic, the fears of neighbors and strangers, disease, death and infection, that began to rebuild our world from the inside out, expanding the territories of distrust, loneliness and isolation, fear, depletion and depression.
Part of any healthy structure is its capacity to be unfixed. We tend to think of ourselves as houses, when the more appropriate metaphor is the sukkah, the impermanent dwelling, that can go up and come down rather swiftly, creating sanctuary anywhere. The pandemic has demanded that our inner structures rearrange themselves at rates much faster than we are accustomed. Emptying the house of its furniture, as Rumi says, nearly every other week. This has also been the gift of the pandemic. The opportunity to empty the house, redesign the nest with a renewed heart. A heart more aware of our relationship to the earth, to the people who nest alongside us, the strange birds and the familiar ones.
Bachelard’s metaphor is also dear to me as an artist. And I use that word generally, we are all artists of our chosen domains, even the lawyers and stockbrokers among us. Just as our homes are reflections of our interiority, so too all of our creations are built from what’s within us. All of my songs begin within me. In the last years of my musical development, there has been some attention to new moves in the fingers, reorientations to rhythm and pitch. But for the most part the work has been entirely within, stilling the inner turmoil and noise so that when you hear the notes come forth from that place you hear the stillness I’ve hollowed from inner quietude. The only peace we can offer is the peace we have come to know. Alongside the pursuit of stillness, new excavations into mourning, healing, and soul, all gave way to new songs.
For the Kabbalists, the nest takes on a different significance. The mother bird becomes an avatar of god, and we are the eggs and the chicks over which she hovers and flutters her wings, the nest she forms is our cradle. But the Torah text from which the Kabbalists take their image is a story of separation, the mother bird separated from her children by the terrors of life. The pain of the mother bird and her absence, the longing of the chicks -- these are also resonances of the nest.
In one of the most remarkable passages of the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, 13th century, the nest becomes an abode of mourning:
On new moons, festivals, and sabbaths, the anointed one enters to delight in those thousand palaces. Hidden within all of them there is another place, utterly obscured, that is not known at all. That place is Eden and no one can know it. The anointed one explores that place from without in circumambulation, until a place within is revealed to her called -- Kan Tzipur [nest of the bird]. The anointed one enters that place and lifts her eyes, and sees the ancestors entering the temple in its destruction. Then she sees Rachel, with tears over her face. God tries to comfort her, but she refuses to be comforted. And so the anointed one lifts her voice and cries with her, and all of the Garden of Eden shakes. And all the righteous ones who are there wail and cry with her. And they wail and cry a second time and the heaven that is above the garden trembles. Finally their voices reach the throne of glory. Then the holy one signals to the mother bird and she goes to her nest. And the mother bird sits with the anointed one, and all that is to be said is said, and all that is to be stirred is stirred. From there the anointed one and the bird call three times, and their voices ascend. And the holy one swears to them to remove evil from the world and to avenge wrongs. And she shows them all the good that is to come.
The most secret sacred abode of the divine is called the nest of the bird. Therein, an incarnation of the great mother, Rachel, is mourning the horrors of the world, the death of her children, disease, famine, suffering, violence, destruction. God tries to talk her out of her pain, but what she needs much more than words is someone to inhabit her pain with/in/beside her. Someone to share tears and moans, someone to remind her -- the destruction she sees and the heart shattering within her -- is all true. She does not feel it alone. With you in suffering. That gesture trembles the heavens and frees the mother bird from exile.
What is the dialogue of Bachelard and the Kabbalists? The abode of god is built from the pressures and forces of our interiority. Among other postures of spirit, the nest is built from mourning. Mourning is the prayer that honors the gifts of life that have gone through us, and it is the act which endows the nest with the vitality of its impermanence. Without mourning, we inhabit the nest built for our yesterdays. And though the archetypes of bird and human being are unchanging, the world before our eyes is a kaleidoscope of fluttery things. Every day this year there is loss and cause for mourning. We build our homes then, according to these strange architects, with our heart much more than our hands. With the substance we least expected.