A bit like dreaming

 I don’t think the notion of time travel makes much sense, but I can smell a plate of biscuits and gravy and be back in my grandmother’s kitchen, a leap of 50 years.

Many writers have noticed that some odors seem closely linked to memories. Roy Bedichek put it this way:

 

Poets speak of the ‘gates of memory.’ If this gate metaphor is apt, then we may expand it, referring to the sense of smell as the surest key with which to unprison and reanimate scenes and forms filmed yesterday or long ago with such fidelity as, now unreeled, to absorb and fascinate, but not completely to deceive the eye of consciousness. I say ‘not completely to deceive,’ for, whenever in recalling the past, consciousness becomes completely curtained off; it is no longer ‘remembering’ but ‘day-dreaming.’

 

Imagine yourself in a mathematics examination trying to remember a formula. Memory is involved, certainly, but so are your reasoning faculties as you try to deduce what the formula must be. We’re apt to use the word conscious in describing that process. What happens when I smell biscuits and gravy is something else. I think Bedichek is right that it’s more like dreaming.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 219.

One way to measure a life

 The news story, in Spanish, began: There are those who say that a life is measured in World Cups.

I didn’t really understand that point of view until I got to know some fans of El Tri, the Mexican national team.

Mexico, Canada and the United States are hosts to the World Cup, but it’s not an equal partnership. I’m not sure you can measure the seriousness with which something is taken within a culture. But consider the number of appearances each country has made in El Mundial:

• Mexico: 18.

• United States: 12.

• Canada: 3.

There are those who say that fútbol is becoming a big deal in the United States. It’s something else in Mexico.

When people ask, I say I have two teams, not one. I hope Canada does well, too.

Piedmont, early June

 Have you ever seen trumpet vine before the long slender flowers form trumpets? The immature tubes of Campsis radicans are closed at the end, though you can see the seams in the tissue that will open and roll back, forming the trumpet’s bell.

The trumpets were just forming in the vines along the Yellow River the first week of June. I wondered about the weather. We’ve had overnight lows in the 50s — in June — something that’s hard for a Texas native to imagine.

At Arabia Mountain, the sundrops are out. Oenothera fruticose produces beautiful yellow flowers. The yellow is muted — almost as soft as the yellow of a buttercup, but not quite.

Every time I pass a neighbor’s big oak, I count the squirrels below. I usually see at least four and have seen six. I was puzzled one day when the yard was empty.

But around the bend, a perched on a power line, was a Cooper’s hawk.

Poetic noses

 Roy Bedichek did not say that Christopher Morley was a great poet. He said that great poets had written some silly things about the sense of smell. By contrast, Morely’s list of common odors reminds us of the pleasures of paying attention to our noses.

Bedichek recalled a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan’s ability to smell carrion is compared to that of vultures. The poet pictures a horde of vultures, drawn to the scent of an army of men who are about to die.

It’s an astonishing image. But it doesn’t hold up. In Milton’s day, people believed that human beings who were about to die smelled of death. People also believed that Old World vultures found carrion by smell, rather than by sight. The beliefs beneath the image were wrong.

Bedichek admired Milton and quoted his poetry. He didn’t have much to say about Morely, other that in the 1920s, he wrote “Smells,” a short poem that was popular. The charm is the list of familiar smells: ground coffee, pipe tobacco, campfires.

Morely’s list prompted me to make my own.

• Sources: Morley’s poem “Smells” is here:

https://allpoetry.com/Smells

Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “Famous Literary Noses” is Chapter 16, pp. 187-202.

Morley's note to friends

 When Christopher Morley died, two newspapers published a message he’d written to friends:

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

 

I like to think of it as an alternative to an obituary, but I’m an old newspaperman and like alternative ways of doing things. I’d rather read a note than an obituary.

Morley was once well known as a writer. I got curious and looked up some of his poems because Bedichek mentioned him in The Sense of Smell.

• Sources: The Literature Network’s article on Morley is here:

https://www.online-literature.com/morley/

The Bryant Library in Roslyn, N.Y., where Morely and his family lived, has several pages on the writer. This is a good place to start:

https://bryantlibrary.org/local-history/articles/christopher-morley-a-brief-biography/

Tolstoy's 'Calendar'

 A few years ago, we renovated a little house, and I became a reader of Cool Tools, a blog in the spirit of theWhole Earth Catalog. I was interested in reciprocating saws and disc sanders when I started reading, so I smiled the other day when I saw a note recommending Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom.

It’s a good recommendation. The jarring part was thinking about the book as a tool.

Tolstoy thought his Calendar was his most important book — and he didn’t really think of it as his. He was interested in collecting the world’s wisdom as a kind of common property, and so he kept commonplace books and copied aphorisms that helped him.

The sayings he collected eventually went into the Calendar. A day’s entry might include three or four short quotations from other thinkers and comment from Tolstoy. He asked:

 

What is more precious than to communicate every day with the wisest men of the world?

 

I have used the book, but I’m afraid I did so with little insight. I failed to see how I used the Calendar as a tool to prompt my own thoughts, to prod a sleepy, sluggish mind into gear over the day’s first cup of coffee. I failed to notice that I started this online collection of notes just a couple of years after finding a copy of the Calendar.

If you ask me, the useful tool is the idea that each day, you will see something, read something, hear something, that’s worth putting down. The idea that something happened that’s worth a second thought.

• Sources: Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, translated by Peter Kekirin; New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 7.

The note from Cool Tools is here:
https://kk.org/cooltools/book-freak-211-tolstoys-guide-to-daily-wisdom/

Terror in fiction

 It’s a cliche of drama: an opening scene in which villains terrorize the helpless.

I suppose I was profoundly moved the first hundred times I saw such a scene. But now I find myself wondering whether it’s believable, which is a bad spot to be in when you are reading a story or watching a show.

I don’t want to make light of trauma. I know that many people have been killed, tortured and scarred. But I also know that people who rely on violence and terror are sometimes disappointed.

Among the gruesome offerings of the internet are pictures of the corpses of Ben Kilpatrick and Ole Hobek.

Kilpatrick, better known as the Tall Texan, was famous. As a young man, he ran with Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Kid Curry and Will “News” Carver. Hobek was a petty crook who met Kilpatrick behind bars.

In 1912, Kilpatrick, out of federal prison, decided to rob a train in West Texas. It was a strategic error. The law-abiding railroad employees were meaner than the outlaws.

As I heard the story, Kilpatrick got the drop on the trainmen and rifled through the railcars while Hobek guarded the engineer. One car had a crate of oysters on ice, destined for El Paso. The crate contained an ice maul.

While Kilpatrick was pillaging, a railroad employee named David Trousdale used the maul to knock his brains out.

Trousdale then picked up Kilpatrick’s rifle and fired a shot through the top of the railcar, guessing that Hobek would investigate. Hobek did. When he peeked around a heavy trunk, the railroad man shot him in the head.

Years ago, I stopped at Dryden, where Kilpatrick and Hobek boarded the train on the way to Sanderson. They were bad, bad men. They also had no idea what they were in for.

A note of caution: The details of Baxter’s Curve Train Robbery vary wildly. Some sources reverse the roles and fates of Kilpatrick and Hobek. Some tales provide details that conflict with the evidence of the photographs. I would say that the story long ago passed from fact into fiction.

If I were writing the fiction, I’d start with a minor detail. After the photographs were taken and the folks of Sanderson had a kind of public holiday, lawmen went out to Baxter’s Curve and apprehended an accomplice, an 11-year-old boy who allegedly was paid to mind the getaway horses.

I think I’d tell the story from his point of view.