Peregrine Falcon (Falco Peregrinus)
Can’t stop thinking about the falcon in St. Louis Square. She’s been making cameo appearances in my dreams two nights in a row. It was early December, the morning before our annual holiday party, and we were picking out a Christmas tree from that sweet old man who sells them in St. Louis Square. We’ve bought our tree from him every year since Tristan made us parents in 2002: the year we moved to Montreal, the year, that is, that Christmas got fun again.
Snow was falling softly upon the Square. No wind. And the park was peaceful, eerily peaceful, like Times Square in a disaster movie. Conspicuously absent, of course, were the park’s perennially present pigeons, who hang-out, year-round, in a cramped claustrophobic crowd: gossiping and boasting, catching up and hooking up.
Then we saw the peregrine falcon: perched on a low-hanging tree branch, calmly tearing a pigeon to shreds. She was plucking out the feathers the way another gal might weed an NDG garden; clipping off pink feet the way a sensible suburbanite might take her shears to the rosebushes. The blood, the feathers, and the feet were strewn all over the pure white snow below. And it was beautiful, and sublime, the way that mushroom clouds are beautiful, and sublime.
But then Schopenhauer killed the mood, as pessimistic philosophers so often do, by calling into question the ethics of my aesthetics. Here’s what the grumpy German guy said, here’s what he whispered into my ear: There are those who say pleasure outweighs pain; or, at any rate, that there’s an even balance between pleasure and pain in this broken and burning world of ours. But we both know that’s bullshit. And anyone who doubts that it’s bullshit, should compare the everyday pleasure of the feeding falcon to the excruciating pain of the terrified pigeon who’s being, let’s face it, eaten. Alive.
But then I remembered the turkey waiting for me at Fernando’s. And I let my mind wander lazily up and down the holiday TO-DO list, until I could feel myself turning away—far, far away—from the horror.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016)