That’s How Wrong My Love Is
A while back I read an essay titled, That’s How Wrong my Love Is, by Lynne Tillman. (The Happy Hypocrite: Hunting And Gathering; Issue 2, Autumn 2008) and in it she describes how she watched a pair of mourning doves in their nest everyday: ‘witnessed the entire cycle of a nesting mother and father, a chick’s beak cracking through the eggshell … the baby’s first flight’; in New York, in the backyard of a group of smaller apartments which are often ‘quiet, untrafficked, almost bucolic settings’.
The essay moves to talk about how she feeds the doves over a period of five years and becomes intimate with every detail of their existence; how the doves become to a great extent habituated and dependent on her, and how she by turns becomes habituated to them; how she feels guilty about not feeding them when she is away, ‘not doing my duty to them’, but telling herself that there is plenty of food on the streets of New york, and on her return, continuing the habit.
I suffer from the same feelings of guilt when I leave home and similarly console myself with the thought that—for most of the year—there is plenty of food in the fields and fruit bushes around my ‘almost bucolic’ garden for the playful and colourful finch’s, blackbirds, thrushes, tit’s, woodpeckers … I spend my time with, and who visit the bird table near the Catriona’s.
Pidgeons—‘ugly’ big members of the same family as doves—start to congregate at Tillman’s window and ‘greedily consume all the seed’; frightening off the doves and complicating her pleasures, in the same way as grey squirrels do for mine. Tillman’s essay is essentially concerned with ethics, or how living ethically is necessarily a conscious endeavour. She writes: ‘I love animals, I am an animal, I’m a mammal, a human being, I like most people, love many, despise one person, though I don’t want to hate anyone. I am also selfish and want what I want. My greatest and most enduring problems in life are ethical … Not feeding the mourning doves regularly is wrong, but I generally give myself a pass. My not feeding the pidgeons because I find them big and ugly is unethical’.
