I’ve been reading a book called Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens for mostly two reasons. The first is that I was curious about the zeitgeisty approach of mindfulness as a way of managing stress and anxiety. I have them, and yep, I’m up for anything useful. The second and more important reason is that I have an overwhelming infatuation with chooks. This is no exercise in flavour-of-the-month hipster sustainability – I’m subject to those too and can tell the difference – this is an abiding love for ridiculous birds.
I have a picture somewhere of me at nineteen; messy blond hair and bare feet, utterly delighted to be holding a random West Hobart hen in the rental front yard of some girls we knew. I’ll go on about chooks like some people talk about their kids. My friend Robbie told me to get a dog, but dogs don’t lay eggs, and they don’t have feathers or wings. I’ve looked.
Anyway, I’ve not found the book to be so useful. I’ve pressed on because the author regularly describes stuff a chicken does and I like reading about that. But she also seems to have pretty lofty expectations for chooks so far as personal transformation is concerned that I find hard to connect with.
I will agree that there’s something more to chooks than mere scratching and flapping. Sarah Day has a lovely poem, ‘Hens’, which captures well the ‘atavistic sense of well-being’ they provide. I think that I try to preserve this well-being in a kind of bubble universe of identity, unsullied by the grasping, weary and cruel elements of my life – chickens as life-rafts for innocent delight. And it’s interesting that I don’t write creatively about the chooks.
There may not be any clear reason behind this. But I wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right when he observed that ‘Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager’.
There are many ways this might be understood, but one explores how life can feel reduced to something like a tool. Even if writing is also a way of preserving and remembering, it can be difficult to avoid a creeping sense of utility and its concomitant breeds of alienation when you’re constantly pillaging experiences for content.
It’s likely there are other brittle realities that I am shoring myself up against with this avian bliss, and they may well be more important. After all, here I am writing about my birds, and I don’t feel so bad right now.
But it does make me curious about what we think our writing will demean or reduce, rather than feature or exalt. What personal holy grounds do we choose to back away from in the flight from literary colonisation? Is it an effective maintenance of self, or are we left with idiosyncratic, expanding ghettos?
Ben Walter is a Tasmanian writer and poet. His work has appeared in Griffith Review, Island, The Review of Australian Fiction, The Lifted Brow, Cordite and a range of other magazines and journals.
Read more from him on his website
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