Green Mimesis: Girard, Nature, and the Promise of Christian Animism

Abstract

Today the wood thrush returned to the Crum Woods. I have been waiting for this event for months. I moved to a house in the woods three years ago, and at that time I heard a strange and wonderful bird call in the forest. The song of the wood thrush is a melody unlike anything I had ever heard. Liquid, flute-like, perfectly pitched—the thrush vocalizes a kind of duet with itself in which it simultaneously produces two independent musical notes that reverberate with one another. I have read that Tibetan monks can also sing two notes at the same time, a baseline and a melody line in contrapuntal balance, so now I think of the wood thrush as the singing monk of the forest. In the spring and summer I wake up, and often go to sleep, to the vocal pleasures of a bird that I cannot see but whose delicate harmonies pleasantly haunt my dreams. Like God’s Spirit, I know the thrush is there—I hear its lilting cadence from dawn to dusk—but I’ve only seen one wood thrush during the time I’ve lived in the Crum Woods. I creep around the forest floor looking skyward, hoping for a sighting, but it always escapes my gaze.