Notes on Nesting
There are several stuffed bags under my bed with decades of notebooks. As a writer and also a perennial scrapbook keeper, a jotter, a scribbler, somehow the fragment of a thing, the scraps, all collected, feel like something I could not fabricate on my own. In a way my notebooks are my nest. The collection serves as fuel for future work, so the collecting acts as a layering effect for the writing process. The book matters in the same way the nest matters: both everything and nothing.
A collection of nests came to me through conversation over the last several days. One was with an interview with an author whose writing nested stories within stories. It seemed important for one narrative to be able to hold many.
Before beginning my journey, officially, into nests, I acknowledge the calming effect of knowing one thing fits into another, videos like this one are a type of amateur porn for these kinds of things.
Growing up it might have been why I liked Matruyska dolls. Each on slightly small and painted exactly the same: delicately with the traditional black hair and roses on her dress. The satisfaction of that nesting was the entire motive of the game, to take it all apart just to put it all perfectly back together.
But nests are not to be permanent homes. While listening to Robyn’s Monument, an anthemic work of electronic dance, I think about nests in terms of casts, that is made to create a dedication to the development of memories of one moment. But this doesn’t feel right. Rather than a reminder, the nest is a tool. A nest is grown out of and so defined by a specific time of growth. It is meant to protect, not for the sake of preservation, but emergence and nourishment.
Nests can be tight collections formed by the near surroundings, from sticks and mud to bits of paper and plastic the bird finds useful.
If protection is a kind of nest, what is at the cost of its holding? The nest implies its own emptying for the sake of growth. So perhaps the nest itself is only ever temporary, which is why it is made of many parts. It will disintegrate or its purpose will be recycled. Sometimes nests are crevices or holes made in the dirt. Many birds return to their nest year after year for the birthing and learning process of their young.
In the summer of 2018 I was in denial about tiny bites on my toes as we walked to a lake on the 4th of July. It was only when I sat the old my floral pillow once I got home that I felt a small circle of movement on my back and discovered the bedbugs that had found their way into my room, either from the other side of the wall, or from my own clothes. The internet prompted I . When I took the sheets off the mattress there were familiar dark splotches from my online searches about bedbug nests. They collected and spread like a rash on the mattress. Nests are concentrated seats of power, entangled traces of life. When building a fire with a tinder bundle the materials act like small nests for the flame to grow out of, as it slowly consumes the easily flammable tinder to the dense wood. It was the phoenix who rose from the nest of flames.
Through the architecture involved in nest building, the shape upholds the type of family structures the creatures value. They are large enough for all of the young during their experience of learning the fly. Whether they be warm places, high places, or low. The nest is often rounded, to provide as much space for less material.
My partner and I visited his family over Thanksgiving break. They are a large family that lived on a hill. Having their children gone, they are, what is commonly known as empty nesters, the house is large, echoing from memories that are filled again each time all the children return.
I went to the New York Botanic gardens the other day to do some research on the old growth forest there. The forest is a scrap of “original” forest from before the Bronx became the Bronx. The Thain family named it and it has been kept it and protect it by nested into the botanic gardens. But in this case, the forest is the monument. The monument is surrounded, it’s borders defined by strict measures, meant for the outside to observe, rather than the inside to grow. Even while this monument is alive it also becomes dead space, as it remains in constant youthfulness.
Perhaps a nest honors ancestors more than a monument might, in the way that it centers the bodies from which it came, does not define the moment to be in one location, but spread, growing, left, and perhaps returned to. Michael Taussig, an Australian anthropologist wrote about Field Guide Notebooks. A certain phantom emerges out of the first note, and continues through the pages. Nest-making evokes the past in a way that includes the world of its own surroundings and provides fuel for the new life that has been created inside of it.