The bluebonnets are blooming

 Sorry, but you can’t really write, and write about Texas, and not mark the day. I saw my first stand of bluebonnets on March 27 on an outing to Medina River Natural Area, a wonderful place just south of town.

Others reported earlier, bigger and more splendid stands. But the stand just north of the river on Highway 16 was the one that delighted me.

Years ago, I attended a Sunday school class taught by a retired professor. He always began each session with a standing agenda item: “Things that Make the Heart Glad.” Each member of the class had to report some wonder or delight from the past week. The teacher’s name was Don Streeter, and his gift to us was stressing the importance of taking note of those small bits of joy that we might otherwise overlook.

Virgil Thomson: 'Taste in Music'

I have been thinking about taste in art.

The topic came up in a discussion of literature. But I sometimes find it easier to talk about music than writing. I know just enough about writing to be dangerous. I don’t know enough about music to try to create it. Perhaps I can be a little more objective about it.

But questions of what is good and what is better in music interest me. I’d like to think that thinking about music would help me think about all art, including literature.

Virgil Thomson, a talented composer who also wrote some interesting criticism, made a couple of distinctions that I find interesting.

First, he distinguished between a taste for music and taste in music. A taste for music is the ability to consume it with enjoyment. A taste in music is preferential consumption. A taste for music is like a taste for ice cream. Some people don’t like it. Some people can take it or leave it. Some people have to have it all the time. Thomson said that while taste for music varies, everyone has a taste in it. If you listen to it at all, you probably have preferences.

Second, there is distinction, even a contradiction, between what you like and what you admire. Admiration is a judgment; it involves reason. Liking is inspiration; it knows no reason. I think that observation is helpful. I admire Bach but, given a choice of music from the Baroque era, always play Handel on the stereo.

Thomson said that we choose what we like, independent of judgment. He held that choosiness is capricious. We might prefer chocolate one day, strawberry the next. That remark is less helpful to me. As with Handel over Bach, some of my preferences seem ingrained.

Thomson thought we all have a role in “America’s musical growing-up.” (He was writing in the 1940s and ’50s.) People with influence — critics, college profs, etc. — try to shape opinion. But the average listeners, concert goers and record buyers have a bearing on how the American musical tradition evolves, just by the choices we make.

This is all interesting to me because I’ve made it a point to listen to American music. Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is, on most days, my favorite piece of music, and I’m usually sure that William Schuman’s 3^rd is the best symphony written by an American. I’m intrigued by Morton Feldman. Thomson wrote a documentary film score, “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” that I enjoy. 

What have I learned in all this? Sadly, I’ve learned more about myself than about art.

I think I can say I have a taste for this art, but I can’t make heads or tails of my taste in it. I have no idea what I’d say if I were asked where I wanted American music to go. I can state which individual pieces I like and don’t like, but can’t make a general statement justifying those preferences.

It doesn’t seem fair. It would be like exploring physics and chemistry and discovering there were no general rules you could rely on.

• Source: Virgil Thomson’s essay “Taste in Music” is in Music Chronicles 1940-1954; New York: Library of America, 2015, pp. 5-8.

A matter of taste

 A friend and I have been talking about stories. He suspects that I don’t really like stories and would rather read an essay than a novel.

His suggestion made me realize that we like different kinds of stories and that we might not even be talking about the same thing when we talk about a “story.”

In my mind, one of the great American short story writers has to be Guy Davenport. I mentioned his story “John Charles Tapner” in these notes on Sept. 23, 2021. Tapner was the last man hanged on the isle of Guernsey. Victor Hugo, the great French novelist who was a ferocious opponent of capital punishment, came to investigate.

Hugo’s visit to Guernsey is a fact. And the meeting of a scandalous, flamboyant, wealthy world-famous French author, then in exile, with an insular, conservative, English-speaking community had to have been interesting.

But what exactly was that encounter like?

Davenport’s story provides an answer. It is hard to distinguish, in Davenport’s telling of it, what is fact and what is imagined. 

Fact and fiction are seamless. To me, that’s artistry. To be able to give an imaginative account of a particular event that is suggestive of the way things are is something that I’d call “art.”

To my friend, that seamless blend of fact and fiction is an incidental feature of the story. He values other things.

Is that just a matter of taste?

Notes on Gray vervain, botanical and bliblical

 The Gray vervain is blooming along Zarzamora Creek. I noticed the square stems of Verbena canescens before I noticed the purple flowers, which are small and easy to overlook. The usual color is pink, I’m told, but the flowers along this stretch of the creek are purple. The "gray" in the common name refers to the foliage.

If you're looking at the scientific name, “canescent” describes a kind of pubescence. It means the plant is covered with short, stiff hairs. V. halei, Texas vervain, is glabrous, meaning smooth.

If you didn’t memorize part of a botany textbook in college but have the Bible stuck in your mind, Gray vervain is like Esau and Texas vervain is like Jacob.

Both species are in the Verbena family, which has 75 genera and 3,000 species and includes the majestic teak trees of Asia and the lantana bushes that are all over the West Side of San Antonio.

A report from the creek: Indian blankets

 So much is going on along Zarzamora Creek, it’s hard to keep up. So just a few notes:

• First stand of Indian blankets, Gaillardia pulchella: March 24.

• Mulberry trees on the north bank began leafing: March 25.

• Swallows swirling around under the 24^th Street Bridge, where they nest each year: March 26.

Also on March 26, there were about 20 Snowy egrets in the trees on Bird Island, a tiny island in Elmendorf Lake. Until a couple of years ago, Bird Island was the home of a big flock of Cattle egrets. They roosted there in such numbers — maybe 300 — that they destroyed the vegetation on the island. Each day they’d fly west of town to feed in the grasslands with cattle. To get west, the birds had to cross an area where the Air Force trains pilots. The authorities broke up the colony at the request of the Air Force.

Menander and literary borrowing

 I sometimes wonder what Menander would say if he were writing today, in a society in which thoughtful people with academic credentials are ridiculed and organizations like QAnon have influence.

Keep in mind that I live in Texas. Dan Patrick, whose greatest contributions to society were as a television clown, is lieutenant governor. Ken Paxton, whose greatest legal feat has been in keeping prosecutors and the bar association at bay, is attorney general.

Menander loved making fun of bad judgment. He was a dramatist — a comedy man. 

He was arguably the most quoted writer the ancient Greeks produced, but almost all of his plays have been lost.

The Greeks thought of him as we think of Shakespeare.

Aristophanes the grammarian said something like: “O, Menander! O, Life! Hard to tell who was cribbing from whom.”

Menander included proverbs, street sayings and urban legends in his plays. It’s difficult to tell what was a folk saying and what was an original line.

That’s Menander’s genius. The Athenians loved his work because they saw themselves in it. They heard their own voices in his and couldn’t really tell which was which.

Menander had this saying, which I think is about literary borrowing: “An oak having fallen, every man makes wood.” The oak was sacred to Zeus, so it was more than bad form to cut one down. But if an oak fell on its own, everybody started making doorposts and framing lumber.

The process of writing doesn't begin when you sit down in front of a blank page. Writers begin by collecting materials. Writers scavenge, rustle, borrow and steal.

Whatever happened to oracles?

 The world used to be full of oracles.

The traditions of each place were different. But there were places you could go if you wanted to know whether you should marry the neighbor’s daughter or declare war on Persia.

The oracles were fading away by the end of the first century. Plutarch, curious as to why, wrote a little book on “The Decline of the Oracles.”

Why did they die? Did the world change in a way that made it difficult for men to believe the word of the gods?

Plutarch slyly answers those questions in the opening scene of his dialog. Cleombrotos, a Spartan who liked to travel, had been to the shrine in Ammon in western Egypt and was reporting to his friends.

The priests at the shrine told Cleombrotos that the lamp at the shrine, which was constantly lit, was using less oil each year. The priests kept exact records. They concluded that the years were getting shorter.

Demetrius, the grammarian, scoffed. It’s ridiculous to draw vast conclusions from little evidence, he said.

Ammonios, an astronomer, pointed out that a trend toward shorter years would be evident in other ways. The patterns of eclipses would change. We’d also experience climate change.

It’s the opening scene, but it’s all there. When people appeal to evidence, oracles are doomed.

The world didn’t change. People did.

More on grief: a new disorder

 The American Psychiatric Association has added “prolonged grief disorder” to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly called the DSM.

It’s the newest disorder to make the DSM. It reaches print with DSM-5, released this month. 

I’m baffled how something natural, such as grief, can become an illness. I realize something similar happens with physical structures, as when a natural growth becomes a malignant tumor. But I don’t see clearly how natural emotions can become something that can be called an illness.

Does that make sense to you?

I’m dubious, but on this topic I’m especially dense. I’m just baffled by grief.

• Source: The American Psychiatric Association’s account is at https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/apa-offers-tips-for-understanding-prolonged-grief-disorder

Nature can get closer

 Here’s something I should have mentioned in talking about John Burroughs’s essay “Nature Near Home.”

A piece of suet on a tree in front of your window will bring chickadees, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, brown creepers, and often juncos. And what interest you will take in these little waifs from the winter woods that daily or hourly seek the bounty you prepare for them! It is not till they have visited you for weeks that you begin to appreciate the bit of warmth and life they have added to your winter outlook. 

Burroughs was writing before the days of fancy birdfeeders. I used to smile at “elderly” people, meaning those over 60, who kept birdfeeders and talked about them constantly.

I now have a birdfeeder, a fancy one, and spend hours watching the show. If I had to choose between unforgivably extravagant expenses — buying bird feed in farmer-sized sacks vs. cable TV — well, that decision was made long ago.

• Source: “Nature Near Home” was originally published in Field and Study in 1919. It was reprinted in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau; New York: The Library of America, 2008. 

Pinks are the dominant wildflower

 When people think of wildflowers in Texas, they think of bluebonnets, Indian blankets and maybe Indian paintbrushes.

But the dominant wildflower is Oenothera speciosa. I’ve seen them as early as January along Zarzamora Creek. But this year, they’re late. I saw the first real stand on March 18, a couple of days before official spring.

I tend to see them first in sheltered places. The south side of the Commerce Street Bridge is the lee side — the bridge blocks the north wind, which still has some bite in it.

Other species that come in with pinks: yellow dandelions, yellow coreopsis and little white asters.

The duckweed in sheltered spots on the lake is spreading.

Riddle of the cypress

 One of the puzzles of spring: Some — not all — of the cypress trees on Woodlawn Lake are putting out leaves. The trees at Elmendorf Lake are still bare.

I’ve thought about the possibilities: Woodlawn Lake might be more sheltered from the last cold fronts. (The last freeze was just eight days ago.) Perhaps it’s the genetics of related trees, the family of cypress trees at Woodlawn being earlier bloomers than the family a couple of miles south.

But at Woodlawn, there are four cypress trees in a row, two in leaf, two bare. They alternate: leafy, bare, leafy, bare.

It’s one of my favorite themes: We can make generalizations about kinds of things in nature, but the individual living things, the plants and animals, don’t necessarily follow the rules.

I think that part of the puzzle might be gardener’s bias. Our cultivated plants, through natural selection, might have more regular — or more limited — habits than those in the wild. If we don’t see those regular habits, something must be wrong. 

Looking for the swan

 On Sunday, we walked around Woodlawn Lake, hoping to see the swan that used to be on Elmendorf Lake.

The swan has disappeared. He was tame and took agricultural grade waterfowl feed out of my hand to prove it. Swans have teeth halfway down their throats. I’ve had swan-nibbled fingers.

No swan. We have coyotes, stray dogs. The world is full of cruel people. But at least one of the two swans I’ve seen could fly. I’d like to think he’s headed for Nebraska or Minnesota.

Clifton: ‘Sorrow Song’

 As I watched the news of the Russians bombing a shelter for Ukrainian children, I thought about Lucille Clifton’s poem “Sorrow Song.” It’s a poem about the eyes of children who watched from the Middle Passage, Buchenwald, Nagasaki …

staring at us, amazed to see

the extraordinary evil in

ordinary men.

I think people who live in democratic societies must keep up with the news. I also think that people who keep up with the news nonstop drive themselves crazy.

If you sense the contradiction, the way out, I’d suggest, is in the word “enough.” We Americans are taught to want more. Always more.

The better way is to find some balance: to find a way to take in the news without letting it overwhelm your life. I like reading the morning newspapers, rather than staying on top of the news nonstop.

But I also think it helps, especially at times like these, to read the poets. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the tragedy of this war, put the news aside for a while and read a good poet.

March madness, the kind on the creek

 I love March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournaments, but I love the madness on the creek even more. I started the month in a rag sweater under a field coat. Now, I’m sweating in a T-shirt.

The creek bank is a combination of brown and green. The green shoots of cattails are growing in thickets of brown stubble from last year.

Within the past weeks, most of the cedar elms have gone from bare to green. The ash trees are in leaf, though the leaves seem to me to show as much yellow as green. Pecans, cypresses and deciduous oaks are still bare. 

Most — but not all — of the grasses are still brown. One day soon the clover will come in, and San Antonio will suddenly be green.

Spring is arriving a bit behind schedule, at least from what I’ve seen. In 2020, some cypress trees were putting out balls, or cones, by St. Patrick’s Day. At that time, one of the biggest cypress trees was green enough to hide a hawk’s nest, and a mulberry tree favored by a vermilion flycatcher was in full leaf. This year, both trees are bare.

I saw swallows over Elmendorf Lake on March 2. But they’ve been scarce since, and they haven’t started building their mud nests under the 24^th Street Bridge.

I’ve seen fewer insects — dragonflies and mosquitos — than in past years.

I’ve been watching for the early bloomers: docks, bastard cabbage, prickly sowthistle, hedge parsley. So are, only the docks are putting out seed.

Still, spring is here. Every songbird has a twig in its beak.

The wisdom of 'Nature Near Home'

 Here is John Burroughs, the naturalist, in his essay “Nature Near Home”:

After long experience I am convinced that the best place to study nature is at one’s door ...

At home one should see and hear with more fondness and sympathy. Nature should touch him a little more closely there than anywhere else. He is better attuned to it than to strange scenes. The birds about his own door are his birds, the flowers in his own field and wood are his, the rainbow springs its magic arch across his valley, even the ever lasting stars to which one lifts his eye, night after night, and year after year, from his own doorstep, have something private and personal about them.

I think everyone who loves nature eventually comes to that same thought.

Burroughs suggested taking the same walk every day. I agree. I never get tired of Zarzamora Creek.

In his essay, Burroughs talks about how you come to know a place. If you walk the same country each day, you notice changes. Most of the year, the changes are subtle.

Right now, in spring, with so many different species of plants in bloom, the changes are explosive. It’s a good time to get out of the house, just to see what’s there.

• Source: “Nature Near Home” was originally published in Field and Study in 1919. It was reprinted in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau; New York: The Library of America, 2008. 

Mountain laurels are not tame trees

 The Texas Mountain Laurel, Sophora secundiflora, is in full bloom along the creek.

The purple blossoms are almost like hanging bluebonnets.

The scent reminds me of the tangy sugar candy that came in a straw when I was a boy. You unraveled one end of the straw and shook the tiny granules into your mouth. They were a penny apiece.

Sophora secundiflora is beautiful, but it’s not a tame tree. It fueled the flight of the White Shaman. 

The Cualhuiltecan peoples brewed a hallucinogenic drink from the beans of the tree. The drink was featured in mitotes, those wild parties that so frightened the fathers at the missions. Those who drank the brew saw visions from the spirit world.

Those visions inspired the rock art that has been preserved at places like Seminole Canyon.

A real son of St. Patrick

Today, I’m going in search of a corned beef sandwich. And maybe I'll have a wee sip of Jameson’s tonight.

One of my friends, who is as Irish as Irish gets, has a remarkable frame of mind. It’s inevitably optimistic, relentlessly looking for opportunities to help others. He’s the kind of fellow who plans to do good things during his down time — the time he has to sit still undergoing chemotherapy.

I asked him how he keeps that frame of mind.

He replied: “The dividends of the smallest acts of kindness are immense. No better investment in this world.”

My friend’s health problems are serious. But instead of thinking of himself, he’s grateful he feels well enough to do things for others.

If that’s Irish, I want to be Irish.

An interesting idea about the Southwest

 Paula Gunn Allen, a poet of the Southwest, points out that nature is almost always seen as feminine. Almost all cultures speak of Mother Nature or Gaia.

In Western thought, the feminine was to be subdued and subjugated. In Europe, for example, men looked on the natural world and imposed agriculture on it. In the Southwest, that kind of domineering approach is just not possible. The landscape is not hospitable. It won’t be subdued. If you are not careful it will kill you.

Those of us who live in the Southwest are forced to take a different view or nature, and those who are in touch with the landscape come away with a different — more realistic, more respectful — view of what’s feminine.

Of course there are countless men who are not really connected to anything besides their own egos. Still, this is an interesting idea. I believe we can learn things by looking at the landscape.

Davenport’s search for arrowheads

 When the writer Guy Davenport was a boy, he used to go with his family on a hunt for arrowheads on Sundays after the appalling boredom of church. It was a family outing.

I was with grown-ups, so it wasn’t play. There was no lecture, so it wasn’t school. All effort was willing, so it wasn’t work. No ideal compelled us, so it wasn’t idealism or worship or philosophy.

The hunts had no purpose, no deeper meaning.

But on those hunts, Davenport learned skills that are handy for anyone who wants to write.

• He learned how to see things, to find things.

• He also learned, when guests came along, that some people cannot see things. They can look right at something without seeing. It was, at that age, a revelation about human nature.

• He learned that some things don’t have a purpose or deeper meaning — and that those things can be valuable. When he went to college, he no purpose, no plan, no ambition. He got an education, rather than searched for a career.

Davenport’s fiction has that quality. The purpose of his stories, if there is one, is half hidden, not in plain view.

• Source: Davenport’s account is in his essay “Finding.” It's in Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

A poet speaks of vision

 Jimmy Santiago Baca said being a poet is largely about vision. He doesn’t use the word to describe something prophetic. He said a person could have a vision simply by having a relationship with a hummingbird. Vision has to do with seeing, noticing, appreciating.

Here’s Baca on how vision plays out for the writer:

The English have a way of saying, “Find your voice,” and that represents the egotistical sense of the English people. The Native American way is “to see.” It does not entail a voice; someone like Black Elk, his seeing was very strong, nothing could boggle it. But the Anglo people always have the aggressive voice thing — “Your voice is very strong in this piece,” right? — while the Indians said, “Your seeing is very strong in this piece.”

I think that vision — a process that incudes seeing, observing, noticing, appreciating, reporting — is what makes a storyteller. Writing doesn’t begin when you take up a pen. Much of the fun has already happened by then.

• Source: This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by John F. Crawford, William Balassi and Annie O. Eysturoy; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990, p. 191.

Was the movie better than the book?

 I suppose you heard that “The Godfather,” the movie, just turned 50 years old. The newspapers seemed to be enthusiastic about that story.

I came away with the impression that far, far more people have seen the movie than have read the novel.

Did I hear you wonder why?

The website “How Long to Read” says that an average reader, who reads 300 words a minute, will get through the novel in 9:30. 

The running time of the movie is 2:55.

I do not read as fast as the average reader, and I contend that most novels are too long. But, if you read here regularly, you’d guess that I’d say that. So, rather than bore you with preaching, I’ll just mention that on Oct. 28, 2021, I began a series of notes about one-night reads — books that can be read in a single evening. The series went on for about a week.

Marking the day: Nye

 Today is the 70^th birthday of Naomi Shihab Nye, one of the poets I read.

She and her husband, the photographer Michael Nye, live in the Prince William District. I read about them but have never met them.

One of the reasons I like her poetry is that it has a way of dipping a toe into more than one culture. It’s one of the reasons I live in the Southwest. It’s a place that requires you to look at a topic from more than one perspective.

There’s that. And then there’s her poem “Lives of the Women Poets,” which includes a series of lines that belittle, dismiss and misunderstand. Some are just inane.

            Essentially she is not very well-remembered. …

It deserves at least a second look. …

Her most famous love conquest was George Bernard Shaw …

By the time you finish the poem you want to know all the women poets by heart.

My favorite poems are about the little rituals of everyday life.

“Burning the Old Year” feels like a ritual to me — the practice of burning the old letters, notes and lists from the past year. The burning papers 

sizzle like moth wings, 

marry the air.

The poet reflects on how little of one year endures to the next.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone. 

When the fire dies out, only the things that didn’t get done still burn.

A new feature

 Here’s an experiment: A short essay, about 500 words, the length of a newspaper column, posted each Friday (for a while) at hebertaylor.com. The essay is a bit longer than the notes you’ll find on this site. I hope to post one a week.

The first essay is about libraries and the notion of self-education. If you're interested, go to hebertaylor.com, find the toolbar at the top of the page, and look for "Libraries." You'll find some other essays there too.

What writers do

 On March 7, I was thinking about writers who can say what they’re doing.

A writer could say: “I’m trying to write a novel.”

Instead, N. Scott Momaday said: “I regard what I’m doing as an inquiry into the nature of mythmaking.”

Other writers try to do other things.

Momaday’s quote came from a collection of interviews of Southwestern writers. From the same source come these comments from other writers about they were trying to do:

• Edward Abbey, who wrote Desert Solitaire: “Writing is a form of piety or worship. I try to write prose psalms that praise the divine beauty of the natural world.”

• Rudolfo Anana, who wrote Bless Me, Ultima, said his novels “basically have to do with a search for meaning or an archetypal journey ...”

• John Nichols, who wrote The Milagro Beanfield War, quoted Nelson Algren: “I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the ruling apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.”  

• Denise Chávez, who wrote The Last of the Menu Girls: “I think I try to demystify happiness …“

That’s a sample. All of those authors wrote other things and might have been trying to do something different with different works. 

Incidentally, interviews with writers are interesting in that way. An interview is a snapshot. It captures one instant in a changing situation.

• Source: This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by John F. Crawford, William Balassi and Annie O. Eysturoy; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. And, again, thanks, Alvin.

Consider the sources

 The Wise Woman is talking about bringing in tender plants. The clay pots are heavy, and the “lad with the strong back and weak mind” who joined the navy almost 50 years ago no longer fits half that description.

Will it freeze or not? Whom to believe?

• The weather forecasters say the low Friday will be 32 degrees.

• The climatologists say the average date for the last frost is March 5.

• The old mesquite in the park behind our house put out leaves on March 6. The old Texians planted by the old mesquite. Not the young, foolish mesquite. The old ones.

I believe the old mesquite that lives behind our house. There's no reason to move the potted plants. But a gardener who loves her tender plants is not apt to listen to reason. I think I’ll be dragging heavy pots around tomorrow evening. Don’t you?

Marking the day: McPhee

 John McPhee, who turns 91 today, is an extraordinary writer.

If you are a writer, you ought to look at Draft No. 4. McPhee taught a writing course at Princeton. This book is the gist of it.

McPhee made a career writing nonfiction. I think fact is stranger than fiction. Take, for example, the jug taverns in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Most people do not know that there is 650,000-acre area, about the size of Grand Canyon National Park, in New Jersey that acts as an aquifer for New York. It’s pine and sand, and the water is trapped in sand lenses above layers of clay. The characters who live there remind me of the characters I knew in East Texas. Those who live in the barrens do so because they want to be left alone.

Among the cultural features of the place were jug taverns. Here’s McPhee, taking a tour of a site with a local character named Fred Brown. Brown is doing the talking.

That hole in the ground was the cellar of an old jug tavern. That cellar was where they kept the jugs. There was a town here called Mount. That tavern is where my grandpop got drunk the last time he got drunk in his life. Grandmother went up to get him. When she came in, he said, ‘Mary, what are you doing here?” He was so ashamed to see her there — and his daughter with her. He left a jug of whiskey right on the table, and his wife took one of his hands and his daughter the other and they led him out of there and past Washington Field and home to Jenkins Neck. He lived 50 years. He lived 50 years, and growed cranberries. He lived 59 years more, and he was never drunk again. 

I’ve heard similar stories about abandoned watering holes in the woods of East Texas. Maybe that’s why I love McPhee. When I read his account of New Jersey, I feel as if I’d been there.

Source: John McPhee, The Pine Barrens; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981, p. 20.

How a writer sees his work

 I admire writers who know what they are doing. 

Here’s N. Scott Momaday: “I regard what I’m doing as an inquiry into the nature of mythmaking.”

He was writing The Ancient Child at the time.

At times, I have kept a journal while trying to do a bit of difficult writing. The next time I’m at it, I’m going to put a headline on a page that says, “I regard what I’m doing as …”

I’d like to know whether — and how — the view of your own work changes as you're doing it. In my experience, it does change.

• Source: The quote comes from an interview by Louis Owens. It was published in This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by John F. Crawford, William Balassi and Annie O. Eysturoy; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. And thanks to Alvin Sallee for sending me a copy.

Marking the day: García Márquez

 Carlos Fuentes wondered whether Gabriel García Márquez was the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes.

It’s a fair question, and a remarkable one. I don’t recall anyone wondering whether a contemporary writer in English was the best since Shakespeare. Do you?

García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Columbia. I’m guessing that people who remember him on his birthday will mention the great novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. That seems off to me. I’ll let García Márquez explain why:

I thought that the story and novel not only were different literary genres but two organisms with natures so diverse it would be fatal to confuse them. Today I still believe that, and I am convinced more than ever of the supremacy of the short story over the novel.

If you are looking for a sample of his short stories, consider “María dos Prezares,” a story about a 76-year-old prostitute who dreams she is going to die. She makes elaborate preparations, only to find she was mistaken in interpreting the dream.

She is not about to die. She is about to fall in love. Even in a life filled with sadness, there are moments worth living for.

Among the story’s many wonders — and there are many — is María’s habit of reciting her will from memory. As she became well to do, she’d collected nice things. She planned to give each item to a certain person, and so the recitations. “When it was over, she did not feel very convinced that she had been fair, but she was certain that she had not forgotten anyone who did not deserve it.”

• Sources: The quote about short stories is from Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; p. 271. “María dos Prezares” is in Gabriel García Márquez, Strange Pilgrims; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

A report from the creek: redbuds and beebalm

 A week ago, the lows were in the 30s, and we were bringing tender plants in at night. We turned on the air conditioner for the first time this year on the day after Texas Independence Day. The thermometer in the shade said 82.

So many things are going on along the creek it’s hard to keep up.

On March 2, I found a redbud tree in bloom. It happened almost overnight. The blossoms on this one are somewhere between magenta and purple. It was a flash of neon.

Then subtlety: Between the stands of dead cattail foliage are a few beebalm plants, Monarda citriodora. It’s the colors that are fascinating — all greens. The range is from a delicate, light green — kind of like an apple — to white with just a tint of green.

How do you describe different minds?

 What would a map of a person’s mind look like?

I’m not talking about the brain and its structures. And I’m not talking about the poetic images that describe an individual mind.

I’m trying to find a metaphor that will help me compare different minds — the different ways people think.

I’ve been unable to describe to others how two people who are close can think differently. Part of that difference is the result of pursuing different interests. The things one person collects in memory are different from the things that his friend has collected.

The best metaphor I have for a mind is a floor plan of a library. The best way I can describe the quirks of my own mind is to compare my own learning to a general standard of learning, maybe the kind you’d see in a public library.

My floor plan has more room devoted to philosophy and the ancient Greeks than you’d expect. It’s fairly good on the natural sciences. But it’s got some shameful and shocking holes: the psychology and sociology collection is nonexistent.

I have almost no general anthropology, but a collection on the native peoples of Texas and some odd groups in Africa. I have little in general zoology, but a lot on coyotes and crows. Almost nothing on medicine.

A lot of history. The collection of poetry, memoirs, essays and short stories is better than the collection of novels.

This could go on for a while, but you get the idea.

You might have a better way of looking at it. If so, I’d love to hear it.

The metaphor of a mind as a collection is the best I can do now. It’s got some obvious drawbacks. But that’s a note for another day.

A conversation from long ago

 When I was 14, my father, who was also named Heber Taylor, was in the local newspaper. He’d spent his life writing for and editing newspapers. He wasn’t used to being the subject of stories.

He was a tenured professor, and a university regent wanted to fire him. My father was the faculty adviser for the student newspaper. Students were protesting the Vietnam War. The regent didn’t want to see any anti-war commentary in the university newspaper. My father replied that the students had a right to publish their views. He also said the regents did not have legal standing to act as censors.

One regent did what he could to make life miserable for anyone who was not susceptible to bullying.

I asked my father what qualities you needed to bear up when people are after you.

He replied: “Equanimity and magnanimity.”

That was the conversation.

My father died Monday. He was 97.

It's independence day down here

 When the Texians declared independence on March 2, 1836, it was an act of defiance. The military situation was bleak. It’s hard not to see similarities in today’s fight by the Ukrainians against the Russians.

You can make an excellent case that the only reason Mexico lost that war was because of the arrogance and incompetence of its leader, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Lt. Col. José Enrique de la Peña, an officer on the general’s staff, made that case. If you’re interested in the details, I have an essay about the colonel’s diary at hebertaylor.com.

I love that spirit of defiance. 

But anyone who celebrates this day must also come to terms with this: The men who signed that declaration were clear that they intended to build a republic based on slavery. The writings of Texas’s founding fathers are clear expressions of white supremacy. They envisioned a country where people were treated like property and children were torn from their parents and sold at markets.

Among the founders were souls of remarkable courage and souls that had been poisoned by their own hatred and cruelty. Extreme good and extreme evil, often in the same soul, in the same place.

The end of winter

 We had cold weather the last week of February — overnight lows in the 30s. But just before the end of the month, I saw swallows over the lake near the 24^th Street Bridge. The bridge is their favorite nesting place around here. And, in the few years I’ve been here, February is the month they arrive.

Every spring and summer, these acrobats swarm over the still water, snapping up flies as they hatch. Then, one day in late fall, they’re gone.

The swallows, I guess, are a sign to me that spring is just about here.

Other signs: Most of the grass is brown, but some green is beginning to appear. Most trees are bare, but a few are putting out leaves.

But the huisache, that lovely little tree, is already full of yellow flowers.

What if we all thought history was a science?

 I love all literature, especially American literature. There’s a crackpot quality about some American thinkers that I just haven’t found anywhere else.

Take, for example, Henry Adams’s address to the American Historical Association in 1894.

Adams, famous for The Education of Henry Adams, was a public intellectual. People who taught at universities wanted to know what he was thinking. In the 1890s, there was some handwringing about whether history could become a science.

Everyone was talking about Darwin and what the different academic disciplines could learn from his thought.

The possibilities for history seemed open and immediate. If science could discover the laws that rule nature, it must discover the laws that rule human beings.

The great thing about science is that it is predictive. What, Adams asked, would we do if we thought history was a science and could predict the behavior of humanity?

What would do if we thought, based on the laws of human behavior, that the scientific age would prevail and exterminate religion? What if we thought that the scientific impulse would decline and be submerged in another age of faith?

What if we thought that the power of labor, which was on the rise at the time, would ebb and workers would be treated like worker bees? What if we thought that the labor would prevail and that the notions of capital and property should be suppressed?

A science cannot be played with. If an hypothesis is advanced that obviously brings into a direct sequence of cause and effect all the phenomena of human history, we must accept it, and if we accept it, we must teach it. The mere fact that it overthrows social organizations cannot affect our attitude.

 Genius, I think, with a streak of that crackpot quality.