The Ornithologist (excerpt from FEDBOOK)
I found Paul an atheist in regard to political ideology. This relieved me, but it didn’t stop me from unconsciously talking about cops after we’d been stuck on an empty road with a low speed limit, and he’d gotten the car running above 70. I regretted how naturally the bait sprang from my lips.
He didn’t care one way or the other about following the limit but would accept a speeding ticket without forming a vendetta against police. He believed the Law did what it could, and he certainly didn’t conceive of its enforcers as class enemies. He didn’t even think that groups, in general, should be instrumentalized for political ends. I stopped the conversation as soon as I could.
When we returned to our apartment, Paul walked to the couch. He checked his phone, and I stood back in the kitchen. A row of cabinets was suspended on drywall at about my eye level.
He slid his phone into his pocket and frowned before speaking again. “Okay. I feel like I’ve nailed what I believe.”
I didn’t say anything and forgot what he said. I stopped listening. I didn’t care what he believed, and I felt I had made myself dirtier speaking too much over the course of the afternoon.
“People need to detach and realize they are manipulated to deny their common humanity by, the media, the Party, even advertisements. We’re all just people, and ironically, the only way we realize that is by not attaching ourselves to the designs of other people.”
“That makes sense.” I tried to tune out again.
“Yeah. The Buddhists say it’s good to live life like you’re a stone. Whether you get rained on or snowed on or broken up to be put into a cement mixer, you’re supposed to just take it all as it comes.”
This seemed laughable to me. I reengaged. “Maybe. There are different beliefs. Some people might say that kind of approach is apathetic and allows people to do all sorts of evil without anyone lifting a finger to stop them.”
“That’s sort of the thing, if you are perfectly detached you won’t really care about what the evil people do. You won’t suffer.”
“What if that just makes you evil though?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if you actively aid and abet evil by not doing anything about it?”
“It’s different. You’re taking the perspective of somebody who isn’t detached.”
“Most people aren’t.”
“Right, that’s because, spiritually, it’s really difficult to do. I mean, these monks spend years perfecting their detachment. They don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they don’t take visitors. They meditate almost constantly. It seems harsh without spiritual training, but if you perfect it, you hurt others far less than you would otherwise. You hurt fewer people than would be hurt by retribution against the so-called evil people. Practically speaking, the evil people keep society running on the rails.”
I chuckled a little bit. “Maybe so.”
“What is evil anyway? Is there anyone really evil?”
“I don’t know. A painter named Adolf would come to the minds of most.”
“As soon as I asked, I knew you were going to say that.”
“I am taking the role of Devil’s Advocate here.”
“Well, they say he had an abusive dad and flunked out of art school, so maybe that had something to do with the route he took.”
“Too bad nobody told the Red Army that when they encircled Berlin.”
“I’m just saying that Tibetan monks weren’t worried about Hitler, they were meditating.”
The two of us laughed for a moment, and I told him thanks for taking me to lunch. I didn’t say anything about the Nazi ornithologist’s expedition to Tibet that had popped into my head. The idea was so foggy and half-formed that it seemed to me I had read the factoid in a dream.
I imagined that man, only a fellow traveler to the Nazi party, peddling theories of Tibet as the cradle of Aryan civilization, just so he could pursue his passion for birds in a faraway land, unreachable at that time without the infrastructure provided by a totalitarian state. Perhaps he was forced to bring some Ahnenerbe men with him. Maybe he wasn’t forced. Maybe he enjoyed their company.
His party walks into a cold primitive village, a smattering of huts on the crest of a great hill at the base of the still greater Himalayas. They enquire about provisions in the first hut they find. Inside is an old man, seated on a hay cushion reading some old scroll. A teapot whines on a wood stove nearby. The floor is dirt. The old man looks up at the sound of the swinging thatch door. Tall white men with beards stand at the step with their hands in their pockets and cast bespectacled glances around the hovel and an interpreter speaks to the old man concerning their queries. The ornithologist is struck by the old man’s eyes, black and dark, his skin weathered and beaten, and they leave when the old man answers the interpreter that no he unfortunately has no food to spare, but there is a well nearby. Before they leave, the old man stands to look at their coat lapels and the symbol on them. He nods and returns to his cushion and his scroll.
Later the ornithologist, his stomach grumbling, sees those birds in the cold, thin air. Was he elated? Did he feel free? Did the weight of history bear down upon him as he lay still in the scrub of the Tibetan highlands with binoculars to his eyes, a leather notebook and pen at his side?