Nomenclators of a place

 Here’s an idea from William Least Heat-Moon for your next walk through the woods: Leave the guidebook behind. Instead of trying to identify an animal or plant by its common or scientific name, see if your specimen’s appearance or behavior suggests something.

Least Heat-Moon wrote a chapter on the many names of Circus cyaneus, the Northern harrier. Many people have called hawks wind riders, which I like. But ink dippers might be even better. The tips of the harriers’ wings are black, and their looping flight suggested a dip pen writing words on the sky. Wind writer was a variant.

Least Heat-Moon thought that giving a plant or animal a name of your own making was important: 

 

then it will become yours to carry into dreamtime because memory depends finally upon what we create for ourselves, and, until we become nomenclators of a place, we can never really enter it. 

 

That line reminded me that sheep played a big role in the consciousness of the ancient Greeks, who called them πρόβατα, ones that move forward. It’s an apt name. Grazing sheep advance like lawnmowers.

Me? I’ve been watching a headstander. White-breasted nuthatches, Sitta carolinensis, often feed upside down. The one I’ve been watching ran, headfirst, down the trunk of a pine, searching for bugs.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 422.

Societal transformation

 When the Argonauts landed on the isle of Lemnos, they were confronted by a bunch of angry people in armor shouting threats.

The sailors needed to rest and refill the ship’s water casks, so they begged to land. As the sailors haggled, they noticed that the warriors shaking spears were all women.

Where were the men of Lemnos?

The Argonauts were told various stories, none of which was true. The men of Lemnos had told their wives they were tired of them and could find slave girls by raiding the coast of Thrace. The women of Lemnos had considered the matter and killed all the men.

I’ve been thinking about the word “transformation,” about the difference between trying to make incremental changes and transforming something — a person, a society, a culture. I grew up among people who believed in religious conversions, that a sinner could be transformed into a saint. Is it possible for a community to change that quickly, that completely, that dramatically?

The season in between

 Last week, every Magnolia liliiflora in the Piedmont erupted in pink blossoms. These trees from Asia seem to bloom in unison. Below them daffodils put on yellow and white blossoms. Camillias are mostly white, pink and red.

It’s the barely describable season. We went from highs in the 70s to hard freezes. I can never fathom how the blooming plants survive.

The woods are more subdued. We saw hints of red — maples and redbuds. But the beech trees are still holding onto last year’s leaves. Last year’s crownbeards and beefsteak plants are still standing, brittle but elegant. Their shapes are ornate, and I always stop to look. I think I know why early human made sculptures.

'Most possible kinds of pain'

 James Agee’s psyche was injured and never healed. The pain comes through in all his writing, but Agee sometimes thought he communicated most clearly, most understandably, in poetry.

Throughout his life, Agee wrote letters to his teacher, the Rev. James Harold Flye at St. Andrew’s, a school for boys near Sewanee in Tennessee. Agee, then known by his middle name Rufus, was 9 when he met Father Flye. He was 25 when he wrote this from New York:

 

In two or three days, when I can get hold of another copy, I want to send you a copy of my book of poems, not out of any pleasure in them myself but because I expect you would like to see them and have them: If a dying man passed out his hair and his toenails to friends, he would not be thought vain of hair, toenails, or his friendship. Not a dying man, and you are more than a friend, but the reason for all this elaborateness of diffidence is more genuine than it looks: I am in most possible kinds of pain, mental and spiritual that is. In this pain the book and its contents are a relative small item, only noticeable in the general unpleasantness because they are tangible.

 

The pain that Agee wrote about was from wounds of the soul, rather than the body. He was fascinated that something intangible could sometimes be caught in ink on a page.

• Source: Letters of James Agee to Father Flye; New York: Bantam Books, 1963, p. 61. The book was Permit Me Voyage, No. 33 in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, published in 1934.

Word of the Day: lek

 What Merriam-Webster says: an assembly area where animals (such as the prairie chicken) carry on display and courtship behavior.

What I’m thinking about: the bird feeders, where the male cardinals are making claims about territory and their suitability as mates.

• Source: “Lek.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lek. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

A stupefied country

 James Agee’s “1928 Story” is about a writer who stopped writing.

I don’t think there’s anything special about writers. I’ve heard of painters who couldn’t paint and composers who couldn’t compose.

I haven’t heard of bankers who couldn’t bank or developers who couldn’t develop. But if your practice of making things is something you have to put your psyche into, you’re in trouble if yours is injured, wounded or damaged.

Agee’s character, a fellow named Irvine, who was once a writer, mainly a poet, looks back over World War II and the Depression before it. He thinks of all that was crushed during those hard times. It seems to him that only the meanness and insanity survived.

 

Certainly, by now, he felt no hope or trust in anything that anyone might do or say. It was a stupefied country, and evidently a stupefied world and as stupefied as anything else was his sense of universal mistrust and hopeless regret, his dependence on mere taste, his pleasure in the sensuous, his miserable reluctance to live in the world as it was, and to discard the pleasures of recall.

 

I think this is a story for our times. I keep telling friends who are worried about the republic that the first duty is to keep the lights own, not to lose courage, not to be overwhelmed.

If you’re a poet, one who makes poetry, now’s not the time to stop.

• Source: James Agee’s “1928 Story” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 1-19. The quotation is on pp. 2-3. 

A picture of regret

 I admire Carson McCullers’s story “The Sojourner.” I think it paints a convincing picture of what regret is like. I also think that’s not easy to do.

“The Sojourner” is the story of John Ferris, who turns 38 during the story, and who has just buried his father in Georgia. Ferris is returning to Paris by way of New York. He sees his ex-wife, Elizabeth, on the street. It’s been eight years. Perhaps emotional from his father’s death, Ferris calls Elizabeth and has dinner with her and her husband and meets their son, Billy, and the new baby.

Ferris thinks of his own girlfriend and her 6-year-old son and feels inexplicably miserable.

I like this bit of dialog, which begins with Elizabeth saying that Ferris should visit again.

 

“You’re not going to be an expatriate, are you?”

“Expatriate,” Ferris repeated. “I don’t much like the word.”

“What’s a better word?” she asked.

He thought for a moment. “Sojourner might do.”

 

I’m biased because I believe there’s a connection between regret and how we live — and particularly how we go about getting rooted to a place and all the living things and that make up a place. We can be rooted there or just passing through. Or somewhere in between.

Regret is slippery, but I have felt it most when I’ve been a tourist when I should have been an inhabitant.

• Source: Carson McCullers’s “The Sojourner” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 233-24. The quotation is on p. 237.