by Brooks Riley
First, the jungle out there:
Sound familiar? Hint: It’s not the clatter of journalists in a feeding frenzy over the latest insanity to emerge from the White House. Just an ur-Twitter storm here in Mitteleuropa at 4 in the morning, recorded from my balcony.
Ever since November 9, 2016 I’ve been looking for distractions. On that fateful day after, wading through the tsunami of reactions to the US election results, I found what I was looking for: Alex Ross’s absorbing New Yorker article on Death Valley (no irony intended), a bone-dry place to get lost in and never come back. This was my oasis manqué–a desert so quiet, so neutral, so pure, so inviting, so nearly absent of humanity with its messy societal occlusions and noisy fallacies, so mesmerizing in its own right, with a breathtaking geological exegesis that shut out all the flak flying through the airwaves.
I’m not the only one looking for distractions. In an essay on this site last week, Elise Hempel described munching on a coriander leaf, while ‘thinking of everything not Trump’.
I wanted more than that: a parallel universe that could be explored without any reference points to a reality I know all too well. Something immersive, challenging, ongoing, but above all distracting. And presto, the genie of nature answered my wish. On the morning of March 15, I was awakened by birdsong outside my bedroom window–not just any old chirp-chirp, but the loud crystal-clear melody of a turdus merula or European blackbird. The concert season officially began that day, and will last until mid-July. Curtains up on a parallel civilization right outside my door.