Thursday, September the 29th, 2005

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Cemetery Birds

In Tantarabim, the lopwit is known as the Cemetery Bird. By law, all graveyards in that land are situated at the seaside, so one might expect gulls or guillemots or other seabirds to be most associated with the tombstones. Yet it is the lopwit, small, tufted, brightly-coloured, that is invoked in the funeral practices of the people of Tantarabim. Why?

As so often, we can turn to the out-of-print pamphleteer Dobson to help us answer this question. It is true that, throughout his copious writings, he never addressed the subject directly. True, too, that his knowledge of ornithology was paltry and lamentable, and more often than not wholly inaccurate. With Dobson, it is a case of knowing where to look. We will not find a pamphlet called Why They Call The Lopwit The Cemetery Bird In Tantarabim, but now, with the long overdue publication of Aloysius Nestingbird's Mighty Concordance Dobsoniana, we know that the answer to the question can be pieced together from a number of sources. There is that impertinent little footnote in An Essay About Bowls, Dishes And Pots. There is a majestic, sweeping paragraph in A Pamphlet Of Majestic Sweeping Paragraphs. There is a ham-fisted pencil drawing in the appendix to Why I Smashed My Copy Of “Thick As A Brick” By Jethro Tull Into Twenty Thousand Pieces With A Geological Hammer And Then Glued It Back Together Again. And, of course, there are the famous lines hidden away in Dobson's so-called Überpamphlet, in which he writes:

“Lopwits flock to the seaside cemeteries of Tantarabim in search of spurge and sukebind. They munch these plants greedily, if one can use the word munch to describe the way they tear savagely at the foliage with their beaks and swallow each beakful whole, having no teeth, for I can now reveal that, in common with other birds, lopwits are innocent of teeth. Would that I could say the same of myself.”

Commentators have long been amused at Dobson's presumption in claiming to be the first person in history to point out that birds do not have teeth. Less remarked is the fact that he is completely wrong about the lopwits' diet. These birds—which are small, tufted, and brightly-coloured, as we have seen—eat neither spurge nor sukebind. If they did so, they would surely die of poisoning, for they do not produce the enzymes necessary to break down and digest these particular plants. You can look that up in the most basic encyclopaedia of avian digestive systems. Who knows why Dobson could not be bothered to do so?

The propellers on the aeroplanes in the airfield across the road are making a terrible racket and I am finding it difficult to concentrate. I think I will cram some cotton wool into my ears.

Dobson would often bang on about his devotion to research. It made him something of a trying companion, for it was not beyond him to regale a tavern's worth of peasants with a harangue. “Do you people realise,” he might shout, apropos of nothing, “That before writing my pamphlet entitled Notes On A Shelf Of Test Tubes Containing The Blood Of Squirrels I read fourteen different encyclopaedias from cover to cover, together with the collected works of Emily Dickinson, T Lobsang Rampa, and Harold Pinter?” Of course, in remarks such as these—which have been reported to us by Marigold Chew and others—Dobson unwittingly makes clear that his understanding of “research” is, to put it kindly, somewhat witless. If he genuinely intended to say anything meaningful about the blood of squirrels, what perverse impulse would make him think he could find any useful material in, say, the works of a grumpy bespectacled north London misanthrope? And yet this was always the way he worked, with his magpie mind, to the despair of some and the delight of others. That is why this new Concordance will prove such a boon to scholars. If you want to know what Dobson had to say about the cemetery birds of Tantarabim, there is no point looking in any of the eighty-nine pamphlets which mention birds in the title, nor in either of the two monographs on Tantarabim-related topics which Dobson wrote while holed up in that milk of magnesia warehouse in Winnipeg. Similarly, should you want to discover what the great pamphleteer had to say about obsolete punctuation marks, it may come as some surprise to find that there are at least twenty pages of pertinent remarks in the virtually forgotten early pamphlet Observations On Cows From A Great Distance, In The Rain.

Speaking of cows, it is worth mentioning here that in addition to the seaside cemeteries with their allotted lopwits, there was, in old Tantarabim, a single inland cemetery, far from the sea, known as the Graveyard of Cows. On this occasion we need not consult Dobson, for the story is well known. Cows grazed in the Graveyard of Cows, to keep down the grass, and when they died, the same cows were buried there. The mezzotintist and amateur historian of Tantarabim, Rex Tint, unearthed a mezzotint which showed the big signboard which stood at the graveyard gates, and translated the notice engraved thereon:

“Hey there, passer-by in the day or night, stop now! Rest your weary legs and know that ye stand at the gates of the Graveyard of Cows. This plot of land was given in perpetuity to cows alive and cows dead by order of the Grand Plenipotentiary Vizier of Old Tantarabim according to visions which beset him as he knelt in his hanging gardens pruning his laburnums. No laburnums must grow in the grounds of the Graveyard of Cows, nor cinquefoil, nor rhubarb, nor lupins. Nay, thou shalt find in this field only towering hollyhocks among the grass, and cows feeding upon the grass, and the cows shall feed upon the grass among the hollyhocks of these fields until such time as they perish. And each time a graveyard cow leaves this mortal world, six villagers shall come unto here and use big spades to dig for that cow a grave beneath the grass. Two villagers shall be named Ned. Two shall be blind. One shall wear the hat of Boohoocha. And one shall be a puny person. And they shall dig the grave for the cow in the night time, under a black and starless sky, and bury the cow by morning. Now move on, traveller, wherever you are bound, but remember always the cows of Tantarabim as long as you ever shall live.”