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A Shared Reading group reflects on 'The Owl Bander' by Jeanette Turner Hospital.
Failure is one of the things we fear the most. Failure at a job, a relationship, at life itself. The word ‘naughty’, with which we brand children when they don’t comply, has roots with the word nought and means ‘come to nothing’ or ‘having nothing.’ It is a very real symbol of failure in our culture to have nothing. Destitution is a very real fear.
It is even a more profound concern than that of suffering some physical privation. It seems to be about our character. If we have ‘nothing to show’ for our lives then who are we and what was the point?
This is the struggle that Nick, the protagonist in J H Turner’s story The Owl Bander is experiencing. Ejected from the board of his own business empire, we find him at a crossroads. His identity crisis is one that we can all recognise at a time of transition. For a long time we have been known and seen ourselves as one thing, or as a pattern of behaviour.
Nick is a businessman, but the same applies to any title that we give ourselves: Mother, partner, teacher. These are all sources from which we draw knowledge of ourselves. It’s comforting, to assert our purpose in the world in this way. It stops us from the anxiety of wondering who am I beneath all this?
Group members recognise parts of Nick’s struggle. Whether they are men or women, they identify with the emptiness and uncertainty in his situation. They recognise that he is blind in his new environment.
Nick, who has tasted financial successes beyond the imagination of most of us, has now taken a job at the insistence of his son, banding Owls. The work is routine, earthy, and solitary. A far cry from the frenzied and ruthless world of the boardroom.
There is grief for sure. But not really for life he has lost. More prominent is Nick’s grief for what he sacrificed during that life. It is his strained relationship with his family that keeps emerging in his mind alongside fragments of poetry and axioms of his father and grandfather.
He is wondering how he got to where he is. Now that is relatable. That is something that all group members have experience of. How did this end up happening? How did I not see what was occurring? It is only when we pause that we can take stock and navigate. Is this why so many so-called breakdowns are followed by rebirth or rediscovery?
The pressure we are under in our lives to make something of ourselves is truly astonishing and people will go to great lengths to preserve the self-imgae of a person who is getting ahead. They will pursue a life that in most ways is absolutely miserable in order to achieve something. It is an existential howl ‘I am here, I exist.’
But Nick’s dilemma is not a bad one, even though he appears disoriented and somewhat fragile and confused. Many people recognise the grounding nature of the work. It leads to reflections on the ordinary magic of the natural world, and the healing properties of spending time in it. Nick is with the owls, and they’re his teachers.
Through them he comes to realise a longing not for more knowledge, but for mystery. He starts his job by reading ravenously about the Owls. Then he starts to understand that it is better not to know, that in some way knowing about a thing is killing it, and only unknowing can nurture real life. He starts to murmur to the owl’s instructions to avoid being caught.
His rebellion is against the precise world, the measurable world that humans believe. He is advocating for something unknown and perhaps unknowable. He is starting to see himself in the same terms. He questions the value of his name. The one defining symbol of his entire life, emblazoned in neon across the country on top of the restaurants he owned. He wonders what it means in the darkness and silence of life with the owls. He wonders what names add to life.
His breakdown is all of our break down if we have the courage to look, or more appropriately, the misfortune to need to look. It struck one of the group members that nobody would choose the transformation that Nick is undergoing here. Nobody from the dizzying world of success and high finance would even be able to see the world that Nick ends up in.
The opportunity that Nick now has for reflection and recalibration came to him initially as a disaster. It is one of those painful moments that seem to make no sense when we’re in the midst of the suffering, but when we get a little distance, with some luck, we can find our way to gratitude that they happened, for they always allow us to find a part of ourselves that we never knew was there.
Think about every painful event you have experienced. Did it leave you with something? Something that you didn’t need to achieve or follow rules to acquire. In actual fact, something that you never could have understood if you did.
You can download 'The Owl Bander' by Jeanette Turner Hospital here...
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Thanks Chris for your thoughtful reflection on this wonderful story. Coincidentally, I read this last week with two of my groups! There was much discussion about where Nick would proceed from this point in his life. We were struck by the final line, with its suggestion of new life emerging from a kind of death.