A scientist on self-assessment

 When E.O. Wilson was studying biology at the University of Alabama after World War II, he read an article about how European runners were better than Americans. They trained harder. Their disciplines were tougher. You could bet on it: Europeans would dominate the 1948 Olympics. A European would break the 4-minute mile.

Wilson bought a pair of surplus Army boots and started running. He thought the heavy boots would make him faster. He didn’t tell anyone about his inspiration. He just ran — for hours at a time.

 

It was my kind of activity: do it alone, avoid the drag of teams, have no one witness your trials and failures, until you can accomplish some exceptional feat.

 

Months later he tried out for the track team, lacing up spikes for the first time. He ran a mile, timed by a coach.

He wasn’t close. Determination and discipline are wonderful, but being an elite athlete is more about heredity.

Characteristically, Wilson thought about it:

 

The experience has often made me think more objectively about my own limitations and more generally about those of the species to with I belong. For the obsessed and ambitious, the only strategy is to probe in all directions and learn where one’s abilities are exceptional, where mediocre, where poor, then fashion tactics and prostheses to achieve the best possible result. And never give up hope that the fates will allow some unexpected breakthrough.

 

I’ve often wondered about education — what a good education would look like and what good educational advice would sound like. I think Wilson is right. If you are looking for a way to assess yourself, the agony of defeat is as important as the thrill of victory.

If you’re wondering what Wilson meant by “prostheses,” he had collaborators who helped with math. He was one of the most influential biologists of the 20^th century, but he needed help in working out the mathematical models for his own ideas.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 118 and 121-2.

Guineafowl as psychic wounds

 Crows and their kin have big brains. If you make a graph comparing the weight of various animals’ brains with their total weight, you’ll get a line that Darwin would recognize as the story of evolution. Some of the more primitive animals don’t really have brains. Mammals have larger brains. Corvids are a flier on the graph.

A guineafowl, by contrast, is a big bird with a small head — “a walnut on top of a watermelon” is the way country folks usually put it.

My grandfather kept guineafowl, and I had to help him in the seemingly hopeless task of trying to keep them alive.

The birds would walk out to the road in front of the house and be astonished by the view. No tall grass to hide food or predators. They’d stand in the road and look one way and then the other and would still be looking when they’d be flattened by a truck.

It was a dismal job for a boy, collecting the carcasses. Sometimes a big truck would take out half a dozen birds.

My grandfather was hardheaded. He kept thinking the birds would pay off, despite the losses.

Guinea hens have a two-note call, described as “pot-rack” in the South and “buck-wheat” in the North. The hens begin squawking and then slowly synchronize the two notes until they are in unison. It’s loud and unnerving.

It’s also a behavior that keeps them alive. Grandfather’s birds roosted in a chinaberry tree. No two hens would face in the same direction. If anything moved — a stray dog or a leaf blowing in the breeze — the birds would raise the alarm. They were more alert than any watchdog.

During the years my grandfather kept guineafowl, no one ever slept through the night.

Perhaps in compensation for being so helpless, these birds evolved strange superpowers. I’ve never seen anything so efficient at killing snakes. Coyotes are good. But the guineafowl exterminated snakes wherever they ranged.

The hens would be so excited when one blundered across a snake in the pasture. The word would spread, and instantly the whole flock would descend on the poor reptile.

The guineafowl were also incredible eaters of grasshoppers. I came see that the guineafowl had evolved like the prairie chicken. They were creatures of the grasslands, and the pastures of East Texas suited them.

The big grassland birds evolved to eat the insects. The plagues of locusts that destroyed crops on the Great Plains occurred after hunters killed off the prairie chicken, shipping hundreds of thousands of carcasses a year to the East Coast and on to Europe.

Texas had plenty of grasshoppers, and so my grandfather was right. The guineafowl found their niche and survived.

Greek myths and yardbirds

 I’m at the point in the Greek myths where Deianeira makes her entrance. She’s best remembered as the woman who was the end of Heracles.

She loved him. He had rescued her when her father was planning to marry her off to the river God Achelous, he of the (literally) flowing beard. Deianeira imagined the wedding night as something akin to waterboarding and was praying for death when Heracles, in need of a wife, knocked on the door.

Achelous was a shapeshifter, but he only had three shapes: bull, speckled serpent and bull-headed man. Heracles didn’t have much trouble with any of those forms.

Achelous slunk off minus a horn, and the happy couple went off on their honeymoon. The newlyweds were stopped by the River Evenus, which was flooded.

The lusty Centaur Nessus was there, claiming to be the gods’ ferryman, having been awarded the post for his noble character. He promised to take Deianeira across. Heracles would have to swim.

When Nessus got to the other side and put his hands on Deianeira, she cried out, and Heracles shot Nessus from the other bank. As Nessus was dying, he told Deianeira to collect a vial of his blood as a potion. If Heracles ever had eyes for another woman, Deianeira could put the potion on his shirt and she would never have to complain about his behavior again.

Sophocles did wonders with that story.

That’s the famous story, but I got derailed by an earlier one.

Deianeira was one of the sisters of Meleager, one of the argonauts. When he died, the sisters cried so loudly that Artemis turned them into guineafowl. The goddess later relented and returned Deianeira and Gorge to human form.

My grandfather kept guineafowl, and if you’ve ever been around these birds, the memories are hard to get rid of. I have other things to think about, but my memory has been serving up nothing but guineafowl for days.

• Source and notes: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 190-5. For an earlier note, see ‘Sophocles: ‘The Women of Trachis,’ April 10, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/04/sophocles-women-of-trachis.html

A cranky old guy and American fiction

 I know that American fiction didn’t begin with Mark Twain, but that’s about as far back as I can go. 

I wish I could appreciate early American fiction, but I can’t. I’d love to read the great novel of the American Revolution written in the 1780s or the great Civil War novel written in the 1870s. I’d like to read the great American novel of our own troubled times.

This line of thought began with William Least Heat-Moon’s description of a cranky old man who told  about going on a covered wagon tour, a kind of trail ride that recreated the western migration of the 1800s. The cranky old man went with a group that included a historian from the East, a likable guy who could explain the competing theories about why sensible people thought they had to leave settled lives behind and get into a covered wagon.

But the historian didn’t know how to sling a wagon. Hardwoods needed to repair wagons were scarce on the prairie, so people cut and dressed lumber and slung it under the wagon. The professor didn’t know what trees would make a decent axle or yoke. He couldn’t tell one tree from another. He didn’t know how to pack a wagon or what people carried. He had no real sense of how people cooked the evening meal.

That might suggest what I’m missing. I’ve read the primary sources — letters, diaries, newspapers — of the periods that interest me. But I haven’t read a novel that gives me the sense of the trail.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 421-3.

‘PrairyErth: A Deep Map’

 I have been taking apart William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, trying to figure out how it works. That’s the same thing as wondering whether there’s a better way to write a book like that, and so anything I’d say about the structure of the book would sound more critical than I’d intend it to be. But no one spends so much time with a book that doesn’t intrigue him.

Least Heat-Moon called the book a deep map, and I think he delivers on the claim. It’s a map of Chase County, Kansas, which had a population of about 3,000 when Least Heat-Moon was exploring it in the 1980s.

The book has 76 chapters; 72 are in 12 sections of six chapters each. Each section is about a township in the county. Least Heat-Moon decided on that structure, following Thomas Jefferson’s plan of putting the country on a grid system.

That’s a call the next writer should second-guess. Some of the townships are more interesting than others. At least one of the townships is so empty that Least Heat-Moon fills the section with the tragic history of the Kansas, or Kaw, people, who were driven from the county to what’s now Oklahoma in 1873. That tragic story is one of the best in the book. But a reader might be aware that the story doesn’t exactly fit the structure the author chose.

Each section has six chapters, the first of which is titled “From the Commonplace Book.” Each is a collection of quotations from other writers. The introductory and concluding sections also have a “From the Commonplace Book,” along with one other chapter. So 14 of the 76 chapters, 18 percent, are collections of quotations and readings. That’s not a complaint. I thought it was closer to genius. With this kind of book, much of the story involves history. I liked the quotations from original sources.

The last chapter is a record of two friends, Least Heat-Moon and Clive “Scott” Chisholm, going on a three-day walk through the county, trying to find traces of the Kaw Trail. The trail was used by ancient hunting parties. Parts of it were incorporated into the Santa Fe Trail by people of European ancestry. And the trail was used when the Kaw people were forced to leave their homeland. It’s an interesting dialog that might remind you of the film My Dinner with Andre.

PrairyErth is a big book, 200,000 words, Least Heat-Moon says. Three times the planned length. Least Heat-Moon discusses choices he made in the writing, and he also has a section on the topics he left out. I wondered whether getting off the grid system would have allowed him to address some of them. I would have read about chiggers, dugouts and the farmer who refused electricity. I’d also like to know about hopper-dozers, Model A cars that were modified to scrape grasshoppers off crops.

If I ever get around to making a deep map, I might do a few things differently. But this is a book I admire.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.

Whom would you invite?

 If you could invite a writer from the past to write a piece about our times, whom would you invite? I was thinking about Ralph Ellison, who lived through a lot of outrage. He said: 

You see a situation which outrages you, but as you write about the characters who embody that which outrages, your sense of craft and the moral role of your craft demands that you depict those characters in the breadth of their humanity. You try to give them the density of the human rather than the narrow intensity of the demonic. That means you try to delineate them as men and women who possess feelings and ideals, no matter how much you reject their feelings and ideals.

 

• Source: Ralph Ellison gave an interview to John Hersey, who titled it “A Completion of Personality.” It’s in The Writer’s Craft, edited by John Hersey; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981, pp. 267-82. The quotation is on p. 281.

How naturalists are made

 A hawk, intent on a target in the borrow ditch, crossed the road in a dive, missing the windshield of my truck by a couple of feet.

He wasn’t big, so I’d guess young male. The Wise Woman and I saw plenty of red, so I’d guess a red-tailed hawk.

Red-tailed hawks can dive at more than 100 mph, so we barely got a glimpse. We looked at the other, doubting whether we’d seen anything at all. But when an animal that size sails that fast between the windshield and the hood ornament, all your mental notes from the walk through the woods disappear. All that’s left is awe.

Later, I thought about a remark E.O. Wilson made about how naturalists come into being. If you want to create young naturalists, put kids in front of an animal in the wild, he said. It doesn’t work if you put them in front of a textbook.