In Montaigne's essay ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’ he recounts an anecdote from Plutarch about a magpie's facility for mimicry. A captive magpie is sitting in a Roman barber's shop, and in the street outside a group of musicians pass by, ‘blasting away on their trumpets’. The effect on the bird at first seems traumatic. The magpie appears ‘pensive, mute and melancholic’, and onlookers assume that it has become frightened and confused, ‘making it lose both hearing and song at the same time’. But then, after a day goes by, the magpie begins to reproduce the sounds of the trumpets perfectly, replete with their pitches and timing, and ‘quit with disdain all that it was able to do before’, including its stock of imitated speech. In the bird's silence, it turns out, is no simple mimicry, but a form of meditation and ‘apprenticeship’, an ‘inward’ preparation of voice. There is something virtuosic invested in the magpie's reproduction of passing sound. Later in the same essay, Montaigne returns to consider the trumpet itself as an instrument. Just as a tree routes moisture through its roots to manifest variously in trunk, leaves and fruit, he suggests, the singular nature of air is analogously ‘diversified into a thousand kinds of sound’ by the trumpet. Is this a property of the ‘fashioning’ of the senses, or of the object itself? Montaigne asks. There is a parallel here between the captive magpie and the philosopher, in that black-box gap for thought notated in the fermata of my title, in the process of hearing and recording a sonic complexity through the senses.

I begin with this anecdote not as an entry into Montaigne's understanding of the human and the animal within Renaissance natural theology, but as a way into thinking the relation between writing and field. By ‘field’, I mean not simply field recording, with assumptions about its mimetic practice and faithfulness to the capture of sound in particular locations, nor solely in a delimited conceptual sense, field as relating to ‘event’ as it is explored in John Berger's 1971 essay, but field as the space of a milieu, where nature interferes with nature, in Foucault's terms.