The Slow Flow of Glasgow: The Birds of Glasgow

The City of Glasgow did not have a Coat of Arms until the middle of the 19th century. The Lord Lyon King at Arms gave approval for one to be adopted in 1866, which incorporated a number of symbols and emblems that were assocciated with the legends surrounding St. Mungo, namely bird, tree, bell, and fish.

The bird commemorates a wild robin that St. Serf, Mungo's old master, tamed, and which would eat food out of the Saint's hand. When Serf recited the Psalms the little robin would perch on Serf's shoulder and flap his wings.

The robin was allegedly killed by Mungo's 'classmates' who blamed Mungo whom they considered something of a 'swot' and 'teacher's pet'. When Serf confronted Mungo with the dead bird, Mungo took the robin in his hands and prayed over it, whenupon it was restored to life and flew chirping to its Serf.

If you go down to Fairlie (not far from Largs), to the Parish Church there, you will see a stained glass window of Mungo (aka. Kentigern) reading to the gulls on the shore. It's a wonderful depiction of inter-species communication and of the self integrating itself into its wider domain. Mungo (Kentigern) wasn't the only saint to be associated with birds. There was St. Columba and the heron, the wren nesting in the cloak of St. Malo, St. Werburga and the goose, and of course St. Francis and the sparrows.

Whether real or not, these stories (or parables) reveal the lightness of the saints in question, their lightness of living, of heart, of spirit, the capacity to elevate their selves above the grim reality of mere survival. Birds were so highly regarded in certain cultures (Egyptian, Persian, Mayan, Greek and Roman) that it was thought that they could traverse between the two realms of heaven and earth. The Romans even named hell after its birdlessness. They called the watery entrance to the Underworld Avernus (from Greek, a-ornus meaning 'without bird'), thus a tenebrous place without soul, heart or light.

It is thus that birds (of any city) bring it one step closer to heaven on earth...

THE BIRDS OF GLASGOW

Bird by bird I have come to know the earth. Pablo Neruda

Ubi aves, ibi angeli (Where there are birds there are angels). St. Thomas Aquinas

The pigeons of George Square

       The starlings of Asda Ibrox

                The gulls of Govan Cross

are all primally Glaswegian -

   The Yoker swans

          The Kelvin herons

                 The blackbirds of those interstitial spaces -

are all fundamentally seasoned

by this west-coast air.

An understanding of these birds,

    The geese of Glasgow Green

           The falcons of Finnieston

                The crows of supermarket car-parks

The magpies!

is crucial to my understanding of Glasgow -

the visiting redwings

the elusive waxwings

the whooper swans

and pink-feeted geese

crucial

to my understanding of world -