Paying attention

 In grade school, I had a teacher who thumped the ears of boys who looked out the window, daydreaming when they should have been paying attention.

I was thinking about attention — how we learn to pay attention and how we get distracted — when I ran across a story about how Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains taught their children.

Women did the harvesting, and they taught their children how to find prairie turnips. Pediomelum esculentum typically has several stems. Women taught their children that if they looked carefully at one of the stems and followed the direction it was pointing, they’d find another plant.

Of course the stems don’t grow in a direction that points to another plant. But if a child follows any direction, looking carefully, she or he likely will find another prize.

Different people teach children to pay attention in different ways. Fictions seem to work as well as facts.

• Source: The story was told by Melvin Gilmore in Prairie Smoke, published in 1929. I found it quoted in William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 218-19. The plant is also known as tipsin and breadroot. I’ve seen it in Texas but not in Georgia.

Evans Mill

 We stopped at the site of Evans Mill and hiked along Pole Bridge Creek, happy to get out of the house after the ice storm.

The enormous dog insisted on playing in the white water that once turned the grist mill. Ice still covered the creek in the eddies. It was a hard freeze, but the dog, a German, is oblivious to cold.

The trail climbs a ridge, a steep drop on both sides. The forest is typical of the Piedmont — oak, hickory, sweetgum and pine. We walked a mile without seeing a beech.

The mill was just south of Lithonia, which was once the center of the quarry business around here. It’s now a town of 2,500.

From roughly 1880 to 1920, the granite business was bigger than cotton. The granite in Lithonia is like the stone found around Stone Mountain and the other monadnocks but was easier to work. Some quarry owners brought in immigrants — quarrymen from Scotland and Wales. A lot of African Americans families were also in the business.

Village historians say that if you want to know what the stone is like, look at the campus of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A lot of it is there.

What a god was like

 Heracles, half-god, half-man, eventually became immortal. He’s a hard guy to admire, much less love.

Yesterday’s note on the rape of Auge is the kind of story that the ancient Greeks told about the heroes and gods. Heracles did a lot of good, but he murdered, plundered and raped as he went along.

As a schoolboy, I learned Heracles was assigned a series of impossible tasks to atone for killing his wife and children in a fit of madness. But the lesson stopped there. Had the story continued, I’d have learned that Heracles was slow to learn.

Having completed his labors, Heracles killed yet another man and, as penance, consented to be sold into slavery for a year. He was bought by Omphale, queen of Lydia.

She was looking for sex, not the usual labor that heroes provided. Heracles, being Heracles, rid the country of bandits and killed a giant, marauding serpent.

But if you were writing a biography of the god, this chapter would be “Heracles: the sex-slave period.” This chapter is not taught in schools.

I’ve been thinking about the gods, trying to find something in the world that I know that I could compare them to.

Greek thinkers had different views of the gods. One was that a god was a kind of force you neither loved nor hated but simply accepted because you couldn’t do anything about it. I heard Old Timers in Texas speak of the Neches Rivers that way. People lived by the river because they needed the water. But it flooded often, carrying away kin and cattle, and occasionally the house.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 162-8.

The silence of Telephus

 In ancient Athens, if you said something awful, you might get treated to “the silence of Telephus.”

It was a profound silence. Telephus himself was so disturbed he didn’t speak for years.

Telephus was the unwanted grandson of King Aleus of Tegea, a city unfortunately close to Sparta. Aleus was informed by the Oracle at Delphi that his beloved wife’s two brothers would die at the hands of her daughter’s son.

So Aleus had his daughter, Auge, appointed priestess of Athene, a position that required chastity. Aleus threated to kill Auge if she failed to keep her vows.

Heracles, drunk, raped her in the temple.

Aleus, blaming the victim when he noticed she was pregnant, asked a friend to drown Auge since he couldn’t muster the nerve to kill her himself. The friend agreed but planned to sell her, the market for slaves being what it was.

Before Auge could be sold, she had the child who became Telephus and hid him on a mountainside.

In Greek myths, kindly shepherds find all the children who are exposed on mountainsides and take them to childless kings. Telephus was raised well, but when he got older he wanted to find his parents. He asked the oracle, which sent him to Asia to consult a king. The oracle did not mention that Auge had fallen into the hands of this kindly king, who had married her.

On the way, Telephus got into a scrape with a couple of louts and killed them.

The day when Telephus found his mother was a day of great joy and a day of great sorrow. Auge was mourning the death of her brothers. That was the day Telephus retreated into silence.

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 186-90. The myth has many variations.

Learning about belief

 Robert Frost argued that poetry is central to an education. Thinking is learning to manage metaphors, and that’s best learned by reading poetry, he said.

He also said that the student of poetry will learn about belief. There are several species. Love-belief is belief in someone else. The relationship between lover and beloved is believed into something real.

That line is enlightening to me. A lot of love poetry has a peculiar sense of yearning. The poet wants something to be true or real and is writing as if it were. Regardless of how the poem is written, I tend to hear it in the subjunctive.

Frost’s take on self-belief is fascinating. He says that when a person is young, he knows more about himself than he can prove. His knowledge isn’t accepted by other people, especially adults. The young person believes that self into existence.

I’m not a teacher, but if I were, I’d want to talk about Frost.

• Sources: Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” is in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007. The parts of his essay discussed here on are on pp. 109-10.

For an earlier note on this essay, see Frost: ‘Education by Poetry,’ June 5, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/06/frost-education-by-poetry.html

The raid in Georgia

 If you’re trying to make sense of the FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in Atlanta and the seizure of 2020 ballots, it’s not about the 2020 election. It’s about this year’s midterms and 2028.

The 2020 ballots have been counted three times. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia. Everyone in Georgia knows about Trump’s calls to the state’s Republican leaders, ordering them to find the votes to make him the winner. He was rebuffed by the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

However, the State Election Board, which is allied with Trump, is seeking to take over elections in Fulton County, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. Just about everyone here believes the raid was staged to find a pretext for declaring that the Fulton County election office is “underperforming,” so that Trump loyalists can decide which ballots are counted.

An interesting detail: The head of the FBI’s office in Atlanta, Paul W. Brown, apparently left the agency shortly before the raid, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

News of an earlier day

 As a young reporter, I once spent 24 hours in a van with my friend and boss Phil Latham. We were parked at a motel at the busiest crossroads in Lufkin, Texas, a couple hours north of Houston.

Phil had wondered what kinds of things came through town on the tanker trucks that filled up at the refineries and chemical plants on the coast. Many of the trucks headed toward Chicago and the Midwest, meaning they came our way.

How many trucks came through town each day? What were they carrying?

We consulted state agencies. We asked the fire department, which was in charge whenever there was an accident involving a spill. When we asked how many tankers came through town, no one knew.

So Phil and I spent 24 hours in a van, armed with binoculars, reading the tags on the tankers that told emergency crews what they were dealing with. Each tag had a 4-digit code. We tried to stay awake so we could get two sets of eyes on each tag.

Hundreds of tankers came through. As you’d expect, most were carrying gasoline. But a surprising number were carrying industrial chemicals. Some were so specialized and so toxic the fire department was not equipped to deal with them. In a couple of cases, emergency officials hadn’t heard of the chemicals. These extremely hazardous chemicals were passing neighborhoods and schools.

I suppose you could call it a stakeout, although the word conjures up a sense of excitement that was absent. Staying alert for 24 hours involves a lot of coffee, sandwiches and cookies. It warps your sense of time. Toward the end, you’re looking at your watch every 3 minutes, wondering whether a half hour had passed.

It seems to me that our sense of space also can become warped. We imagine that dangers and threats — or just the things that should concern us — are somewhere else, somewhere distant.