Eyes on the ground

 Walking through the woods after a storm, I was checking the ground.

Earlier in the spring, you would see lovely tulip-tree blossoms, which are apple green, yellow and orange. They’re mostly gone.

You always see pine straw. “Evergreen” is a bit misleading. Pines shed year-round. Falling needles get stuck in the canopy and then come down in bales during a storm.

I walked through dozens of downed limbs off boxelders. By contrast, it’s shocking to see a broken limb off a magnolia. It made me wonder if the boxelder, a member of the maple family, is the most brittle tree in the forest.

Foresters say the general rule is that the faster a tree grows the weaker it is. Acer negundo is fast growing, so the wood is light and weak. You can get a rough idea of the strength of a tree by looking at a forester’s chart showing the weight of a cubic foot of a log.

Boxelder isn’t really a forester’s idea of a tree, so it wasn’t on the chart. But maples were generally around 45 pounds per cubic foot. By comparison:

• Red spruce, 34.

• White pine, 36.

• Magnolia, 59.

• Live oak, 76.

My hypothesis that boxelders are the most brittle is not looking good. The possibilities for observer error are myriad.

A shelf of old journals

 My father read a quarterly journal called ETC: A Review of General Semantics. I remember, as a teenager, finally noticing dozens of them in his office and asking about his interest.

He’d read Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. Korzybski suggests that the conceptual framework we create with language is a map of reality, not reality. My father, who was drafted off a Tennessee farm and fought through the Battle of the Bulge, was interested in the mass movements of the 1930s. His unit liberated a concentration camp late in the war. He had a sense of how lives could be touched, changed and destroyed by propaganda — by bad conceptual maps.

My father was convinced that we have an obligation to look at the words and phrases we use to see where they come from. We should see if the language we use gives us a map that reflects the world we experience — or whether it reflects someone else’s prejudices, fears and grievances.

That inquiry is not etymology exactly, but something similar. It’s not like determining the provenance of a work of art exactly, but similar.

I wish we had a review of popular semantics.

Those who rule the symbols

 The council in Cork, Ireland, is considering building a statue honoring the mosquito that allegedly infected Oliver Cromwell with a fatal dose of malaria.

I know this because I read Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter The Fortnightly. Girdham cites the story as an example of how people can have a toxic legacy that endures for centuries.

I read the story is an example of how we use symbols to make sense of our experiences, especially the toxic ones. I thought of this line, which my father used to quote:

 

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

 

Since I live in a part of the world that is still debating Confederate monuments, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we took the statues off their bases and replaced them with figures that were, say, 5 mm high.

• Sources: Julian Girdham’s site is here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com/the-fortnightly

Liz Dunphy, “World’s Smallest public statue’ proposed for Cork mosquito linked to death of Oliver Cromwell”; Irish Examiner, May 14, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41844780.html

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelean Systems and General Semantics; Lancaster, Pa.: International Non-Aristotelean Library Publishing Co., 1933, p. 76.

Election Day

 Today is election day in Georgia. The primaries are making news, but Georgia also has judicial races — allegedly nonpartisan — that are on the same ballot.

Democrats are in court, arguing that judicial candidates should be labeled by party. It’s an argument for truth in advertising. I agree, but as a practical matter it’s not hard to figure out. Incumbents on the state supreme court tried to undermine the election in which Biden defeated Trump in Georgia. At least one candidate for appellate court was on a committee investigations legal action against people who tried to undermine elections.

If you know that, you probably know all you need to know.

I’m interested in all the elections. But I think that democracy presumes a judiciary. I don’t care much about the usual modifiers that suggest what kind of judiciary: strong, weak, activist. If we had any kind of judiciary, we wouldn’t be worried about the rule of law.

Having an instinct for it

 I used to have a dog named Satch who was famous for rolling in nasty stuff.

My friends often claimed that their dogs had the most revolting habits. But after seeing and smelling Satch, they had to admit that their dogs were amateurs. My oft-bathed dog set the standard.

The ability to find something horrific and then get it all over you is not an intellectual pastime — it’s an instinct. It’s not something that can be analyzed.

When I lived in Texas and was baffled by horrific events that I couldn’t understand, I’d look to some public figure who had an instinct for scandal and make sure I was on the other side.   

I’ve been horrified and fascinated by the Republican Party’s fight for the governor’s nomination in Georgia. A political action committee is running millions of dollars of ads accusing the heir apparent, Lt. Gov. Bert Jones, of corruption. The ads allege that Jones, who has been endorsed by Trump, used his connections to enrich his family.

Jones says one of his Republican opponents — Rick Jackson, a billionaire — is behind the ads. Jackson denies that and says that he would be Trump’s favorite governor. The political action committee that claims to be bringing transparency to Georgia voters is a dark-money outfit. People in Georgia who want to know who’s behind it found a lawyer in Ohio connected to the organization, but that was it.

Jones’s record for public service stinks. Jackson’s campaign stinks. The whole business of using dark money to make accusations stinks.

I can’t reason this out. I can’t rank the stink. I can’t say which is the lesser of evils.

I can only note that Newt Gingrich endorsed Jackson.

What I missed

 The Wise Woman saw a hawk rise out of the underbrush and sail off through the woods, a 4-foot snake trailing from its beak.

How did I, standing beside her, miss this wonder? Was I searching the forest floor for blooming vervain, in genus Verbena? Was I lost in thought?

Many notes in this collection are about paying attention and noticing things. Sometimes it seems a wonder that I notice anything at all.

Wittgenstein's cottage

 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously. In his last years, he was trying to get the manuscript into a form that satisfied him.

From November 1947 to June 1949, he was in Ireland. From April to August 1948, he was at a cottage in Rosroe, County Galway. The place was owned by the older brother of Maurice O’Connor Drury, one of Wittgenstein’s ablest students.

I have known some of that story since I began to read Wittgenstein in college. But I recently ran across a sketch by the artist Peg Smythies of “Wittgenstein’s Cottage” in History Ireland. The image delighted me. In the accompanying article, Professor John Hayes includes a description based on a memoir by Richard Murphy, a poet who rented the cottage three years after Wittgenstein:

 

Heat came from a turf fire. The fuel was stored in a galvanised shed in the backyard, where there was also a chemical toilet. Candles gave light after dark. Drinking water had to be drawn by bucket from a nearby well. The kitchen furniture was made of deal. The beds were of cast iron with horsehair mattresses.

 

I hadn’t realized the cottage was quite so spartan. But Wittgenstein’s accommodations were always spartan. He was not looking for comfort but for solitude.

• Sources: John Hayes, “Wittgenstein’s Irish cottage”: History Ireland, n.d. It’s here:

https://historyireland.com/wittgensteins-irish-cottage/