One-night reads: Recommendations 3

 Today’s list is on poetry.

• Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

• Norman MacCaig, Collected Poems. Just spend an evening dipping into it. Do not miss “Praise of a Collie.”

• William Stafford, The Way It Is. This collection is, with MacCaig’s, priceless. Don’t miss “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” and “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune.”

• Christian Wiman, The Long Home, an astonishing long poem about Texas.

• Alice Oswald, Dart, an astonishing long poem about the river in England.

• Toi Derricotte, Tender, a long poem, or a series of interlinked shorter poems, about slavery and its awful aftermath.

• Archilochus, a good selection of his poems is in 7 Greeks, translations by Guy Davenport.

• Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight,” an epic voyage in a small format, easily read in an hour or two.

• Stephen Dunn, Different Hours. “The Last Hours” is one of the best poems I know about following the still small voice that says, in a respectable work place, “get out of here.”

One-night reads: Recommendations 2

Today’s list offers a few suggestions for memoir, biography and autobiography.

• Norman Malcolm: Wittgenstein: A Memoir, in my mind, the best.

• Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, a very close second.

• Orwell: “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a longish essay, rather than a short book, on the horrors, rather than the benefits, of school.

• Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill’s War Leadership. This book of about 100 pages gets to what made Churchill significant.

• Stanley Walker, “Uncle Ernest,” a chapter in Home to Texas. To me, this is the best specimen of a short biographical essay. Though you might check on the competition by looking at the biographical essays of Thomas Babington Macaulay and Lytton Strachey.

• Gilbert Highet, “Henry Fowler.” One of the pleasures of a short biographical essay is spending an evening in the company of an eccentric. Knowing an eccentric for one evening is enchanting. But one evening might be enough.

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X would be a test. It’s a riveting book. But can you get through it in one night? I can’t. The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is, in terms of length, about my limit. Evelyn Waugh’s essay “Max Beerbohm” would be a good model. I wish someone would try to catch the character and personality of Malcolm X in such a short form.

 

One-night reads: Recommendations, 1

A line from yesterday’s post: “I keep thinking there is a literature of short items that would make a good college course.”

I promised a syllabus. Instead, I’ve got a list of recommendations, starting with essays. My idea of a nice evening would be spending time with any one of these writers.

• James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son.” This might be better classified as memoir, but its reflections on American culture are striking.

• Montaigne, anything is good. If I had to pick one, it would be “A Custom of the Isle of Cea,” a description of the ancient practice of euthanasia.

• Charles Lamb, “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig.” Lamb is known for his humor — his ability to create a mood.

• Henry David Thoreau, “Economy” and “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.” These are chapters in Walden. You might compare this to Scott and Helen Nearing’s “Our Design for Living,” in Living the Good Life, or to Wendell Berry’s essays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”

• Virginia Woolf, “A Friend of Johnson.” Woolf wrote a million words of what she considered journalism. This essay on a minor character in literary history is among her many wonders.

• Ta-Nehesi Coates, Between the World & Me. It’s book-length, but short. This should be a part of a writer’s education.

• William Osler, “Aequanimitas.” This advice on the cultivation of equanimity came from a doctor who was great teacher of doctors. It’s one of the essays I return to. Another, by another physician, is Oliver Sacks’s “Gratitude.” 

• Sir Thomas Browne, “Musaeum Clausum.” And, yes, yet another medical man. His book-length Religio Medici is more famous, but I have a hard time getting through it in one night.

• Umberto Eco, “My Lists,” an essay that gets at the heart of writing, the learning that goes on before a person who is thinking starts putting writing sentences.

• A.J. Liebling, Between Meals, a wonderful piece about food.

• J.B. Priestly, Delight. All lists have to end somewhere, and this ends with a short book, almost a pamphlet, of short essays about all the things that have given one writer delight. It’s the book all of us should write for ourselves.

The notion of one-night reads at 20

It’s been 20 years since David C. Major and John S. Major published 100 One-Night Reads: A Book Lover’s Guide.

The brothers list their favorite books that can be read in a night. (They admit some of their choices stretch what’s possible — and might be better if enjoyed over two or three nights.)

This enterprise appeals to my aesthetic sense. Brevity is important in writing. It’s behind only clarity on my list of virtues.

A lot of their selections didn’t appeal to me. But that’s one reason to read: to discover what you like. And it was a pleasure to discover shared interests. I thought nobody had heard of A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals. It’s still the best piece I’ve ever read about food.

One of the things I like about the book is that it organizes its recommendations into categories:

• Fantasy and saga

• Fiction

• History, public affairs and environment

• Humor

• Memoirs

• Mystery and suspense

• Science

• Travel

I keep different lists, putting things into the categories of essays, short stories, memoirs, biography, letters, collections of aphorisms, etc. I keep thinking there is a literature of short items that would make a good college course. At some point, I’ll post a syllabus.

• Source: David C. Major and John S. Major, 100 One-Night Reads: A Book Lover’s Guide; New York: Balantine Books, 2001

Another writer who liked pamphlets

Ezra Pound, in his article “Terra Italica,” made a case for pamphlets.

The article is on religion, but the insights on pamphlets are better.

Pound said that people who think sometimes have new information and insights that crystallize in “chunks too long for magazine articles and too short for books.”

In the United States, these short books don’t make economic sense. In Italy, Eduardo Tinto published pamphlets for a lira, then worth about a nickel.

We Americans tend to pad the pamphlet into a book. The lucidity of 30 pages is lost in 450.

An evening with an old pamphlet

 I was sorting boxes of old books and photographs from the family home place when I came across my name on a pamphlet. It was “The Gettysburg Speech and other Papers by Abraham Lincoln,” No. 32 in the Riverside Literature Series.

It wasn’t mine. The Heber Taylor on the flyleaf was my grandfather, Heber Taylor I, who died of tuberculosis on Nov. 1, 1931. He was 36. My father, Heber Taylor II, was 7. That death 90 years ago, just as the Depression was setting in, is a landmark in my family’s history.

The pamphlet was first published in 1886, back before the speech at Gettysburg became the “address.” My copy is not a first edition and has a copyright date of 1899 in it. The price was 15 cents.

I have more than one interest in this little treasure.

First, my grandfather, a Tennessee farmer who lived through the heart of Jim Crow, was reading Lincoln. Like all old white men who grew up in the South, I have had to think about the culture I absorbed. It’s been a painful reckoning. It’s a small, quiet comfort that my grandfather was reading the work of a man who had done his utmost to save the Union, rather than destroy it.

Second, I love pamphlets. I love them because I love short things, things I can read in an evening. And so, on a recent evening, when I could have been watching some sitcoms or police dramas, I thought about Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” I thought about James Russell Lowell’s essay on Lincoln. And I thought about Lincoln’s letter to Horace Greeley and his short speech at a cemetery.

It was an evening well spent.

Literature on the short side

 The Brazilians have stories called cordel literature. The term is Portuguese: string literature. The books, usually 8 pages, are produced as quartos and are illustrated with woodcuts. They are hung on clotheslines to dry.

Galeano’s The Book of Embraces is a model: 180 short notes, essays, anecdotes, accounts, narratives and stories.

The length is distinctive. They are short, like blog posts.

Galeano’s Walking Words is closer to the pure form. Each story would fit that format, about 8 pages with room for woodcuts. The book is illustrated by cordel maestro Jose Francisco Borges of Bezarros.

Writing — How one fellow did it

 Most people have the notion that a writer is working only when he or she is sitting in front of a computer, typing words into a contraption.

I think of that as the last step in writing. You type only after most of the work is over.

Writing is a species of thinking. It involves research, including reading other writers and talking to other people.

It also involves the kind of thinking that comes to a point — that makes a narrative of the collected facts.

People do it in different ways. They naturally get organized to do it in different ways.

Years ago, I dug into Andre Gide’s journals, just to see how someone who has such a different sense of what writing is went about it.

Gide said he created while lying down, composed by pacing, wrote standing up and copied sitting down. Therefore, his workroom had:

• A bed for creating.

• An open space for pacing.

• An upright desk for writing.

• A small table and straight chair for copying. (Gide, a child of his day, thought of editing as getting a fair copy.)

Gide thought the postures were almost indispensible. He reminds me of Anglican Christians, who can’t really worship without standing, sitting and kneeling.

Gide banned books, except dictionaries, from the workroom. Nothing must rescue — that is, distract — the writer from work. Likewise, the room contained no serious art, although he thought that a few portraits or death masks of writers and thinkers would be fine.

And while he banned books, in general, he didn’t mind reading a few lines from the ancients. Apparently, it was a kind of prompt. A quotation or short passage might get him going.

He set down one rule of conduct for writers: Originality.

His theory of creativity was that you have to have an idea first. Then you can imagine it. You turn it over while you’re walking or pacing.

You have to wait for it to ripen. It’s a mistake to put pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — until you’ve done some thinking.

• Source: The Journals of Andre Gide, Translated by Justin O’Brien, Vol. I: 1889-1913; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949, p. 36ff.

Fooled by an anhinga

 The name, meaning “snake bird,” comes from Brazil. The last one I saw fooled me. I was sure it was a snake swimming across the creek.

The anhinga is a big bird, similar to a cormorant, though thinner. But it rides so low in the water that only its head and neck stick out. It looks a bit like a submarine running at periscope depth.

Cormorants ride low in the water too, but not that low. You can see a bit of back above the surface. One noticeable difference between the two is the bill. The cormorant has a hook on the end of its bill — it’s like a pruning knife. The anhinga has a harpoon, a long, slender needle, not curve. He spears fish, brings it to the surface, flips it like a pancake and opens wide. When the fish goes down the hatch, it’s a long, heron-like hatch.

Anhingas have supple feet, webbed and clawed. You see them in trees.

Anhingas have slow metabolisms. Like the cormorants, they spread their wings, but the behavior is not thought to be wing drying. It’s thought to be a matter of regulating body temperature.

Low riders take a lot of energy

 Ducks ride high in the water and can take off flying like jets catapulted from an aircraft carrier.

Cormorants struggle to get airborne: 25 to 30 feet of thrashing and splashing before they are aloft. In the air they are fast and sleek. But the divers generally ride low in the water. Getting out of the water is a production.

Keeping an eye on the 'sea crows'

 I watched three cormorants, one after another, flying down the creek toward the lake. One was flying as cormorants often do, inches above the water, which was still and clear. Poetically minded naturalists say their wings brush the water, a slight exaggeration. The second cormorant, flying at 20 feet, was visible through the trees, and the last was flying above the trees. But all were following the creek, making a 90-degree bend to the lake. The bird flying above the tree line could see the shorter route was a B-line, but he didn’t take it.

Later, I watched a cormorant diving. The pattern: he would be down for about 30 seconds, then would emerge about 100 feet down the lake. He’d pop up amid dabblers, who were unperturbed, and then he’d dive again. He was fishing the north bank of the Island.

Phalacrocoracidae means bald raven, the raven without its crest or cap. We have two: the Double-crested and the Neotropical.

The Neotropical is smaller and has an olive tint. It was known as P. olivaceous for a while. It breeds on the Texas Coast, south to Brazil. It’s now P. brasilianus.

The Double-crested winters in Texas but breeds from Alaska to Newfoundland.

Cormorants — the common name means “sea crows” — breed in big colonies. Guano is fertilizer in Chile. 

After a swim, they dry their wings. They stretch like yoga masters.

Some people think of them as quiet birds, but not at evening, when they’re roosting. They sound like the mountain orcs of Tolkein.

After the rain: Part 2

 After rain, water beads on rough leaves — mesquite and clover — but not on smoother leaves, like live oak and holly. The beads look like spheres, not drops.

Early in the morning, the light shines in them.

After the rain: Part 1

 After the rain, the lake was so still that ducks left 100-foot wakes. Two mallards, a male and a female, parted ways, swimming off at angles. Their long wakes overlapped.

Why the long wakes? The water is still, but it’s also thick.

Decades ago, when I was a biology student, we measured turbidity with a weighted disk that we lowered into the water. We measured the depth at which we could still see the disk.

Today, there was so much silt in the water that a disk would disappear immediately.

The lake looked like mud. But it’s not just soil.

Drains are everywhere. The Commerce Street Bridge has an 18-inch drain taking runoff from the street and gutters into the creek. After a rain you can see the sheen of oil. Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, to-go boxes, bags, a softball.

In her book Bonelight, Mary Sojourner talked about seeing a meadow lost to development and feeling a connection to what she called the “One-in-Whom-I-Did-Not-Believe.”

 “But the moment I knew I was part of earth and thus part of something greater than my small human self” was just that moment, she said. She looked down on what had been a desert meadow, saw a gated golf course and felt pain.

It’s a test, like the mallet-on-the-kneecap test in a doctor’s office. If you feel a connection to the world, you feel pain. Not pride in development. Not anything else. Just pain.

I feel that way about drains. Drains are everywhere. Every parking lot at every store and apartment complex has a few. The runoff from the rains carries everything into the creek.

• Source: Mary Sojourner, Bonelight; Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002.

A red-tail hawk looks for lunch

 A few days after I saw the caracara, the red-tail hawk I’d seen on the creek flew by, overtaking us from behind. I heard him before I saw him.

Several interesting yards line the public fence — yards that are filled with anything you might need to finish a project: water heaters, a gas furnace, car parts, including at least two hulks, outdoor furniture, indoor furniture, badly soaked. The hawk was hunting. What? Rodents? Cats? Chihuahuas?

Some of the people on the West Side keep chickens. You can hear the roosters in the morning, but they are all sheltered, protected from hawks and other predators.

I’d seen this big hawk several times at the apartment complex on Commerce Street and the west bank of the creek. I’d seen him dive into the Dumpster. One day he came out carrying a rat, the tail dangling like a loose line.

The dense population of people produces garbage, which attracts rodents, which attract hawks.

They seem to like the campus of our Lady of the Lake University. I’d like to think it’s the quiet, scholarly environment. But I know better.

These guys are creatures of the city

 Last winter, the big dog and I were beside Zarzamora Creek, just above the fork with Apache Creek. A turkey vulture riding the northeast wind swooped by, flying low and fast, covering 120 yards in three seconds. He turned and then worked his way back slowly, almost hovering.

His slow circles meant he’d found carrion along the upper creek. Within three minutes, 12 vultures were circling.

The flight feathers, viewed from below, appear white, especially at the wingtips.

The birds, flying at 25 to 30 feet, came on us suddenly. One, flying down wind, made tiny, nervous adjustments to his outstretched wings, looking like a middle-aged man crossing a creek on a fallen log. Another made the same adjustments casually, like a man adjusting his position in a recliner. The birds were adjusting their flight paths to avoid us.

We expect to be surprised by wonderful creatures in nature. It comes as an additional surprise that the wonderful creatures are surprised by us. For the vultures, the encounter was an unpleasant surprise, interrupting dinner.

Biologists have written about coyotes that live in urban environments. I remember, years ago, reading a piece that suggested the densest population of coyotes might be inside the city limits of Los Angeles.

Some species — such as coyotes, rodents and grackles — thrive around humans.

Turkey vultures seem to do well in this neighborhood. But I’ve not been able to find much about how they adopt to urban environments.

The next morning, the vultures were gone. In their place was a caracara. Although known as Mexican eagles, caracaras behave as vultures, scavenging carrion. This one had taken over the prize.

The history of an intriguing idea

 One more note on Wittgenstein before I go back to the creek.

One of the central problems in the philosophy of language is how it is that language relates to the world it describes. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein provided one solution: the Picture Theory of language.

Wittgenstein held that the world is not made of things. It’s made of facts, that is, things that stand in relation to other things. The description of the world is possible because grammar — which shows the logical relationships among parts of a sentence — reflects the relationships among the facts.

The idea occurred to Wittgenstein when he was a young Austrian soldier on the Eastern Front in World War I. He read a magazine article about a lawsuit in Paris about a car wreck. A model was used in court to show how the accident happened — where buildings, cars and people were at the moment. The model gave a picture of the accident. 

Extending the analogy, Wittgenstein stated that a proposition is a model of a state of affairs: that is, it’s a model of the complex relationships among facts. Our language, if we pay careful attention to its logical grammar, will allow someone else to picture the state of affairs we’re describing.

Wittgenstein later saw problems with the theory. He amended the views of the Tractatus in his Philosophical Investigations. But the Picture Theory is a landmark in the philosophy of language, a milepost in the history of ideas.

One of the interesting things about the idea is that we can pinpoint it historically. The idea occurred to Wittgenstein in the fall of 1914, when he was a young soldier in the Austro-Hungarian First Army. The army and other forces of the empire were driven out of Galicia by the Russians. The fighting and long retreat covered parts of what are now Poland and Ukraine. It was, from the point of view of military history, one of the great disasters of the war.

In the middle a world-shaping disaster, there was a soldier who kept a notebook and had an inspiration. The empire is gone. The map has changed. The idea is still with us.

A change in how we talk

 This train of thought about spirituality — which began with a note on Oct. 6 and resumed Oct. 13 — is an example of what Wittgenstein called a “language game.”

Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, said our use of language reminded him of games. If you ask someone what a game is, it’s not one thing. Some games, like soccer, are physically strenuous, profoundly different from games like poker. We might think that competition against other players is a key feature of games. But the game of solitaire, a card game, is played alone. Occasionally, so is golf.

It’s difficult to find one defining feature of a game. Wittgenstein said that in looking at different games we see family resemblances here and there. But each game has its own rules, its own logic, its own strategy.

The way we talk about “spirituality” is a language game with its own distinctive features and rules. It’s changing rapidly in America and other Western countries because the way we live our lives is changing.

Because the change is dramatic, we tend to think that our talk about “spirituality” is all over the place. Some of talk includes notions of a higher power. Some doesn’t. Some of the talk includes notions spiritual practices that are ancient — Zen meditation and Benedictine prayers, for example. Other practices are so recent they are dismissed as fads.

The rules of the language games about spirituality are evolving.

I’ve suggested three features that seem central to me.

But the important point is that our language is changing in because the way we are living our lives is changing. We Americans are becoming more secular, but we are also identifying ourselves as spiritual, but in different ways.

I think this is significant — for me, beyond interesting: fascinating.

Spirituality: a notion in three parts

This train of thought on spirituality was prompted by an interesting study about spirituality and religion in America. The social scientists’ tools gave me a better idea of what Americans believe — and about the wide variety of beliefs that Americans count as “spiritual” or “religious.”

But no research can clarify what we’re talking about when we speak of “spirituality” and “religion.” That’s a logical or conceptual problem, not an empirical one.

It seems to me the idea of “spirituality” has three key features. A person who accepts the term accepts three notions:

(1) that a person can be influenced by forces,

(2) that it makes sense to speak of external and internal forces,

(3) that the internal forces are decisive.

If you accept all three, you're a spiritual person. I think that’s right. Perhaps friends will disagree.

What would Wittgenstein have said?

 A friend, commenting on the note “Are you spiritual?” (Oct. 6), said he thought that Wittgenstein, a philosopher I admire, would have poked me with a stick and accused of me being purposefully obtuse. As my friend said, “people communicate using the words ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ all the time without any confusion.”

It’s fair criticism. It made me think further, particularly about what Wittgenstein would have said.

I think he would have said that the spiritual life is the only life worth living. Any other way of conceiving life just wasn’t worth it. He was a harsh and literal judge on that question. He considered suicide for years.

I’m interested in Wittgenstein because I’m interested in the philosophy of language, a field that is still under his influence, though he died before I was born.

Wittgenstein was training as an engineer when he got interested in philosophy. His biographer Ray Monk said Wittgenstein’s interest in science was more an interest in the philosophy of science. He was more interested in the fundamental questions than practical problems, about, e.g., what exactly that “force” is that Newton mentioned. Questions about the foundations of science involved questions about the foundations of mathematics, which led to logic.

One approach to ironing out the contradictions of scientific concepts such as force is to see if you can talk about the idea intelligibly without using the word. Can you discuss the concept of force without saying “force.” Is there a more productive way to talk about it?

I’ve long wondered about the words “spiritual” and “religion” — whether they have been used by so many people in so many ways that it would be better to start over.

Waiting for the shovelers to arrive

 We have a couple of cold fronts headed this way, and I’m looking forward to seeing some of the birds that winter on the creek.

Last winter, we had a bunch of shovelers. The male shoveler is a beautiful little duck with a green head and a two-tone body that reminds me of the brown and white wingtip shoes that were in fashion when I was a boy. Female shovelers look like the generic female duck — much like the mottled duck of both sexes. The shovelers are distinguished by their oversized bills, almost always black, but I’ve seen a yellowish-brown bill.

There were also some mallards and coots mixed in with the shovelers. The coots are strange birds. They appear too short by a quarter; that is, they look like a battleship built on a destroyer’s hull. And they swim like a windup toy — head bobbing back and forth as their legs pump.

The domestic ducks and geese that live on the creek year-round sometimes join this flotilla.

The shovelers sometimes will start to circle — you’ll see a pair, herding minnows into a tight circle. Others will join. One morning last January, a circle of 23 shovelers surrounded a school of baitfish. It looked like an old Western movie — warriors on horseback attacking circled wagons.

Some people say that shovelers swim and skim, rather than dive, and hardly ever go bottoms up. But I sometimes see 20 upended shoveler rumps on a day’s walk. One of the wonders of the creek.

Going to consult the creek

 When the Taoist sages would go on a retreat, they would say they were going to consult the mountain. Whatever else you could say of the experience, it was engrossing.

Just so, I go to consult the creek.

I was walking down the south bank where there are several kinds of reeds, which you can distinguish from sedges by feel. You can, by running your hand over the culm, or long main stalk of the plant, tell whether it’s triangular, and thus a sedge, or round, and thus a reed.

The saying is: “Sedges have edges, while reeds are round.”

I was trying to see the difference, rather than feel it, to find the small details that would allow me to tell, from across the creek, what I was looking at.

Before I knew it, the walk was over.

It’s possible, while going on a walk, to think about profound questions. But when I do that, the reeds and sedges disappear. I’m distracted, thinking of something else, something Plato said or Hume contended. I don’t see the swallows feeding over the lake or hear the mockingbirds fussing.

Conversely, if I am walking around the creek looking at rushes and sedges, I’m incapable of thinking about philosophers and their questions.

In trying to describe it, the best I can do is say: My mind doesn’t go blank. It becomes still in an odd way.

For the moment, it doesn’t concern itself with anything else. It’s not concerned about the pandemic or the tragedy of the political situation. It’s concerned about a pocket of sedges next to a stand of cattails.

Do animals make mistakes?

 We civilized humans know it’s a mistake to anthropomorphize other animals. I smile when other people talk for their dogs, although I talk for mine all the time.

But I think that other species of animals have intentions because I think they make mistakes.

It’s a problem of concept and of logic, rather than one of fact. You can’t make a mistake — that is, do something you didn’t intend to do — if you aren’t cognitively capable of having intentions to begin with.

It seems obvious to me that animals make mistakes. Therefore, they must be capable of having intentions.

Lucas the cat misjudged a leap to the table where I feed him and landed badly.

Some bees in the garden mistook a flowered shirt for a source of food. It was a mistake, but they were persistent in their mistake.

A couple of winters ago, a pair of hawks followed the German shepherd and me for a mile as we went up the creek.

The female landed in a treetop, on a springy twig that had him bouncing like a man on a trampoline. The male then flew in, and then it was as if you had two people on the trampoline, trying to keep their balance.

Do hawks get disgusted? Is that anthropomorphism? The female hawk looked at her mate and flew to another tree.

I thought of the Yale experiment in which a pre-language toddler opened a closet door for a loved one who was pretending to be trying to get inside. Babies — before they acquire language — can read intentions. What about hawks?

Of course there is danger in thinking you know what’s in a hawk’s mind. I had been puzzled by the pair all morning. I have no idea what they were doing. I have no idea why the same birds followed us up the creek — or whether the  repeated sightings of the same birds was just a coincidence.

I noticed them because I was interested in what they were eating. I don’t even know that.

But it seems to me that the male thought that the little perch his mate had landed on was strong enough to support them both comfortably — and that thought was mistaken.

It’s probably just silly anthropomorphism, but I thought for an instant that hawks are also capable of disgust. For just that instant, I thought I could see it in her eyes.

Another riff on those myths

 The Greek myths are a bit like jazz.

It’s not the story — it’s what an artist does with it. A terrible person in Aeschylus might be a sympathetic character in Euripides. The basic story admits different points of view.

In jazz, an old tune might be resurrected in one way by Louis Armstrong and in quite another way by John Coltrane. It’s not the old tune — it’s the riff on it that’s distinctive, that jolts us into thinking for ourselves.

I live in Texas, a place that has always taken property rights to the extreme. (It’s now illegal, as I read a Texas Supreme Court ruling, for Mother Nature to infringe on the rights of property owners by eroding beachfront lots. I’m waiting for the court to send law enforcement out with Tasers and restraints to accost the Gulf of Mexico.)

I wonder what the Ancient Greeks’ fluid approach to “owning” stories would mean today in terms of copyright laws. To the Ancient Greeks, the stories of gods and heroes were common heritage, common property. All artists — poets, playwrights, sculptors and pottery makers — worked and reworked the ore from those mines.

The Ancient Greeks assumed there would be different points of view. Different people will see things differently. That seemed completely natural to them.

They didn't invent rustling in Texas?

I don’t think it’s possible to eat just one French fry or to tell just one Sisyphus story. So we have a digression, which I take to be mandatory.

Sisyphus kept a herd of cattle at the isthmus and eventually founded the polis of Corinth. He noticed that his herd kept getting smaller while that of his neighbor Autolycus kept getting larger.

The god Hermes had given Autolycus the gift of metamorphosis — at least as it applied to cattle. Autolycus could change the color of a cow’s coat. He could make hornless cattle grow horns.

Sisyphus considered the matter and carved brands into the hooves of his cattle. Robert Graves has a discussion of the “double-S” brand The Greek Myths: 1. But basically the brand meant, “This cow was stolen by Autolycus.”

Sisyphus called out his neighbors as witnesses, and they trailed the distinctive tracks back to Autolycus’s place.

Rustling always inspires a ruckus. While the neighbors and Autolycus were shouting about frontier justice and ways of dying that might be too good for rustlers, Sisyphus took advantage of the distraction to case Autolycus’s house.

He seduced Autolycus’s daughter Anticleia. She had a son named Odysseus, who turned out to be another trickster and who cut quite a figure in literature.

The day no one could die

 To celebrate my birthday, I spent an hour among the Ancient Greek vases at the San Antonio Museum of Art. I sometimes feel as if the collection were meant for me. When you write a story — or create a work or art — it’s hard to say who will enjoy it and who won’t. Personality has a decisive role in aesthetics, I’m afraid.

The museum has a wonderful collection of Ancient Greek art. I imagine that most people who see it trudge through the gallery, looking dutifully, hoping to absorb some culture. I look with joy.

All human beings come to some kind of understanding about the standing of mankind in relation to the cosmos. Einstein talked about it. All great thinkers do. We look at the enormous size of the cosmos and consider the near infinite number of things that make it up. We wonder where we stand in relation to it — where we fit in.

I admire the way the Greeks looked at this mystery. In some cultures, the stories handed down can’t be changed. Failing to dot an i or cross a t of the received text is a deadly offense.

But to the Greeks, the stories were a challenge for each new generation of artists. A god or hero who was a cad to Aeschylus might be a sympathetic figure to Euripides. Each artist interpreted the common stories differently. And so you have to pay attention.

All this made me think of Sisyphus, the Greek character who was, as my grandmother would say, a bit too smart for his britches. He got into all kinds of trouble, and the Judges of the Dead eventually sentenced him to rolling an enormous rock up a hill. The rock is so big it always rolls back down, and to this day poor Sisyphus is hard at it. Most of us know Sisyphus as the symbol of an endless task.

I like the lesser-known tale of the havoc Sisyphus created when he went to the Underworld. He met the god of death, Hades. But Sisyphus was such an engaging fellow that Hades fell for the old “show me how the handcuffs work” trick.

And so for a day we had a cosmos in which no one could die.

Hades couldn’t take anyone in. The Underworld was effectively out of business.

You’d think that would be a delightful state of affairs for us mortals. But it was a disaster. Men who’d been beheaded couldn’t die and were having to make their way around as best they could. It was awkward.

Of course, this really crimped the style of Ares, the god of war. He eventually went to the Underworld, got Hades out of the cuffs and restored order.

As I was looking at the pottery, I kept trying to imagine what that scene might have looked like to one of those wonderful artists who lived 2,500 years ago. Imagine it: the god of death, with that air of awful somberness, trying to explain to Ares how he’d come to be trussed up.

I'm still grinning, days after I left the museum.

Are you spiritual?

 Once, when someone asked what my religion was, I replied: Equanimity.

I was popping off, and I should have had the decency to apologize to Antoninus for stealing his material.

But when the questions are serious, I don’t know what to say.

Are you a “spiritual” person? A “religious” person? Am I?

I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what the terms mean.

I’ve been searching for light on this puzzle for years. Recently, I came across the Fetzer Institute’s “Study of Spirituality in the United States” (September 2020).

Here’s what I took home:

• First, “spiritual” and “religious” don’t have any concrete meaning. We tend to use “religion” in referring to institutions now. “Spirituality” is more personal, more private. And “spirituality” is all over the map, a suitcase term big enough to include astrology, Alcoholics Anonymous and remarks by scientists — Albert Einstein and E.O. Wilson are favorites —about the connectedness of all things.

• Although the meanings of these basic terms are mushy, they are highly predictive. People who identify themselves as “spiritual” or “religious” are more likely to vote, donate to worthy causes, join social protests, etc. (There are also patterns that would interest advertisers. If you self-identify as “spiritual,” you’re more likely to buy certain kinds of cars, although this study just mentioned other research on that point.)

• One of the striking features of the talk about spirituality was the idea of connectedness. You’d expect some talk of a connection with a “higher power.” But being connected with nature or with mankind also seemed to count in many people’s minds as being “spiritual.”

The report suggests that this sense of connectedness seems to activate this social activism. Where people feel a connection, they also feel a responsibility.

However, Dr. Ruth Braunstein, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, suggested that we assume that this sense of connectedness causes the action, that my sense of connectedness with all people causes me to join a protest in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement. She points out that the cause could be the reverse: I could feel a sense of connection with people as a result of joining a protest — of rubbing shoulders with so many who had suffered injustice.

I’m not belittling “spirituality” because it’s hard to define. To me, some of the most interesting words, some of the most interesting concepts, are difficult to define. I’d have a hard time telling you what “philosophy” means. Difficult terms are sometimes profoundly interesting.

After reading the study, I was struck by similarities between the concepts of “spirituality” and of “education.” The overwhelming majority of Americans consider themselves to be spiritual. The more spiritual a person considers himself to be, the more spirituality he wants to have. Almost unanimously, those who say they are spiritual report they are more spiritual today than they were.

I’d love to see a similar study on American views on education.

As for me, I still don’t know what to say.

If you’re interested, the report is at https://spiritualitystudy.fetzer.org.

A long poem that captures Texas

 Every list of Texas books should include a work of poetry as a sample of the kind of language the land can inspire. Christian Wiman’s long poem The Long Home contains the most beautiful, haunting language written on Texas.

Long poems are relative things — this one is about 40 pages. It’s the story of Josie, the poet’s grandmother, who came to Texas from Carolina when she was 10. The family followed her father’s dream of owning his own farm.

West Texas is inhospitable to farming, and this is the story of how the women in the family endured one hardship after another. 

Here are a couple of samples of the language. The first is about the letters saved by the matriarch of the family:

She’d keep a letter from Carolina

A week or more, before she’d bring it out

One night when everyone was on the porch

And read into the evening’s scattered sounds,

Her voice at times so soft it seemed to change

Into a killdeer’s cry, carrying far

Across the fields and coming back as words

Again: details and conversations which,

Later, when I would read the letters myself,

Weren’t there. 

One of Josie’s sisters-in-law was a beautiful soul for whom Texas was just too much. Josie noticed her beautiful, but haunted, eyes.

Opal’s eyes

Were all horizon. Looking in, you knew

That what you saw was your own vision’s limit,

And not the end of what was there.

One of the proverbs of the frontier was that Texas was a paradise for men and dogs and hell on women and horses. Here is a record of days in Texas — working a farm, sitting on porches as the sky darkens, seeing deer in the pasture, grieving lost children and husbands.

It’s a sad, beautiful poem that will give you much that can said about Texas in a single evening of reading.

Looking at a poem as scripture

 I recently discovered Christian Wiman’s wonderful poem “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs” on the wonderful podcast “Poetry Unbound.”

The program begins with the host, Pádraig Ó Tuama, making this remark: “… poetry, for me, has become a scripture that is in partnership with my life. I trust that somebody around the world has written a poem that is going to be sufficient for the moments of my life where I need something that hasn’t been said to me before. And if I can’t find it, I try to write it.”

I find it remarkable because I’ve come to the same place. It’s as if I’d wandered off into some really good wilderness, looking for solitude, and there I find Pádraig.

I grew up with one sense of scripture, a profound reverence for the Bible, and have come to a sense of something else — of scripture as the voice of an inspired poet.

I’m posting this because I think Christian Wiman is a wonderful poet who wrote the great poem about Texas, The Long Home. 

If you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://onbeing.org/programs/christian-wiman-all-my-friends-are-finding-new-beliefs/

 

Consider the source

Sometimes, really significant news lands softly —almost like a dud. But a significant story is like a pebble tossed into a pond. Little waves roll out, gradually covering more and more of the pond. That’s the way significant news spreads. It’s the people — especially good readers — who do the spreading.

And so it’s been with Karen Hoa’s report in MIT Technology Review, which was based on leaked Facebook documents.

Before the 2020 election, troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook.

The troll farms in Eastern Europe are professional propagandists. They were targeting the same demographic groups that the Internet Research Agency, which is supported by the Russian government, was hitting in the 2016 election: Christians, African Americans, Native Americans.

The story of how the troll farms used Facebook was published Sept. 16, and now publications aimed at the groups targeted by propagandists are trying to bring the news home to ordinary readers. The Christian magazine Relevant pointed out that 19 of the top 20 pages for American Christians were run by Eastern European troll farms.

I spent my working life as a newspaper editor. I often told our readers that I’d tried for decades to put out one really good edition — completely fair and completely accurate — and had always failed. A small town editor is always running into someone in the grocery store whose grandchild’s named was misspelled in the elementary school’s honor roll.

The failures — small and great — occurred despite efforts to be fair, accurate and objective. Some of the most common tasks in life turn out to be extraordinarily difficult. Educating and nurturing a child is harder than it looks. So is conveying information in a democracy.

Most of the newspaper folk I knew took the responsibility seriously, a trust. They knew that inaccuracy and unfairness could undermine trust. They also knew that trust is the foundation of democracies — and of all human relationships, for that matter.

We now live in an age where people who don’t even speak English can cut and paste propaganda into social media platforms. They can influence elections. They can discourage people from taking vaccinations that might save their lives.

The sources of the fundamental things in life turn out to be really important. That’s true of your sources of information. And that’s especially true in democracies.

Let’s hope the consumers choose wisely.

Hoa’s article is here: 

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/

Unknowns everywhere, living with uncertainty

The Talmud says: “Accustom your tongue to say, I do not know.” (Maimonides said something similar: “Teach your tongue to say, I do not know.”)

That's the theory. On the creek:

• A hawk, unlike the red-tails, flies over the campus, over a roofline. But I can see only the shadow of a flying raptor.

• Something — I think a large turtle — slips off a log. I see only the splash.

• A raptor — it looked twice the size of a kestrel, but with a light chest and blue back — was flying up the creek.

• A strike a calm lake — bass, carp or gar?

I looked. I saw. I do not know what I saw. If that drives you crazy, better not walk.

What were those two birds doing?

 This morning, I watched a great egret lumber over the lake and then begin his slow glide down to the shoreline. At the last second, his wings bowed and his descent became ascent. He was rising, just slightly as he let the air out of his sails and thrust his long legs forward, grabbing a hold of the muck. It was elegant and it was mesmerizing. I had to watch.

I would like to understand these birds, but I do not.

One morning I looked up to see a red-tail hawk chasing a great egret across the lake. The big bird, slow as a tractor being chased by a racecar, gave one great squawk. The hawk, flying as slowly as it could, was 5 feet behind when the chase started and 5 feet behind as the two disappeared down the lake. The hawk never closed the gap.

What then did I witness? Into what great pattern can I put this fact and have it make sense? What were those two doing? I have no idea.

I take William Harvey’s maxim as the First Law of the Cosmos: “All we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.”

The writer Thomas Pynchon had a similar idea: “Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.”

We have a deep need to understand. But in most cases, we simply don’t.

I have a deep need to understand what I see along the creek. But in most cases, I simply don't.