Jesses Term Analysis

As a child I learned to love falconry’s disconcertingly complex vocabulary. In my old books every part of a hawk was named: wings were sails, claws pounces, tail a train. Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, from the Latin tertius, for third. Young birds are eyasses, older birds passagers, adult-trapped birds haggards. Half-trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak. When they defecate they mute. [...] On and on it goes in a dizzying panoply of terms of precision. The terms were precise for a reason. Knowing your falconry terminology attested to your place in society. […] But the words weren’t about social fear when I was small. They were magic words, arcane and lost. I wanted to master this world that no one knew, to be an expert in its perfect, secret language.

It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace, even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behaviour as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother, who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight. Perhaps those jesses might have been unspoken attempts to hold onto something that had already flown away. […] I had a twin brother. He didn’t [survive …] When I found out about my twin many years later, the news was surprising. But not so surprising. I’d always felt a part of me was missing […]

Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on-tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand. This makes me feel guilty. There’s a long vein of chalk-mysticism buried in English nature-culture, and I know that what I’m feeling, standing here, partakes of it. I’m guilty because I know that loving a landscape like this involves a kind of history that concerns itself with purity, a sense of deep time and blood-belonging, and assumes that these solitudinous windswept landscapes are finer, better, than the landscapes below.