Here is one of the most heartbreaking short short story that I've ever read. William Maxwell would be stunned, Aimee Bender would love it. Does it tell about the failure of verbal art?
The Birds Began to Sing
Janet Frame (From the collection The Lagoon, 1951)
The birds began to sing. There were four and twenty of them singing, and they were blackbirds.
And I said, what are you singing all day and night, in the sun and the dark and the rain, and in the wind that turns the tops of the trees silver?
We are singing, they said. We are singing and we have just begun, and we’ve a long way to sing, and we can’t stop, we’ve got to go on and on. Singing.
The birds began to sing.
I put on my coat and I walked in the rain over the hills. I walked through swamps full of red water, and down gullies covered in snowberries, and then up gullies again, with snow grass growing there, and speargrass, and over creeks near flax and tussock and manuka.
I saw a pine tree on top of a hill.
I saw a skylark dipping and rising.
I saw it was snowing somewhere over the hills, but not where I was.
I stood on a hill and looked and looked.
I wasn’t singing. I tried to sing but I couldn’t think of the song.
So I went back home to the boarding house where I live, and I sat on the stairs in the front and I listened. I listened with my head and my eyes and my brain and my hands. With my body.
The birds began to sing.
They were blackbirds sitting on the telegraph wires and hopping on the apple trees. There were four and twenty of them singing.
What is the song? I said. Tell me the name of the song.
I am a human being and I read books and I hear music and I like to see things in print. I like to see vivace andante words by music by performed by written for. So I said what is the name of the song, tell me and I will write it and you can listen at my window when I get the finest musicians in the country to play it, and you will feel so nice to hear your song so tell me the name.
They stopped singing. It was dark outside although the sun was shining. It was dark and there was no more singing.
