The plan to abandon Attica

There’s a passage in Herodotus that includes an astonishing line.

The Persians were coming for the Athenians. The Great King wanted all of Greece, but particularly Athens. The Persian army was too big to count. A lot of Greek poleis capitulated, sending earth and water to the Great King. The people, the land, the rivers were his, without a fight.

The oracle at Delphi — which was to the Greeks what the King James Version was to my folks — prophesied doom.

The official interpreters preferred that the Athenians not prepare for battle. Herodotus says their

advice was, in fact, that Athens should not resist at all, but should abandon Attica and find somewhere else to live. 

Can you imagine that? A whole community willing to abandon land, houses, temples and ancestral graves and start elsewhere because they preferred to live free rather than under a despot?

I grew up hearing preachers recount how the ancient Hebrews were uprooted and taken to Babylon. That loss of homeland was because of conquest and captivity. Can you imagine a mass migration by choice?

A second oracle left a glimmer of hope in a defense based on walls of wood.

Some traditionalists recalled that the old defensive walls around the acropolis, a stockade really, had been made of wood. They planned to man the traditional defenses and pray for divine help.

But a newcomer named Themistocles, an advocate of sea power, convinced a majority that “wooden walls” meant ships.

The Athenians, desperate, did abandon Attica. The citizens put the women, children and livestock on ships and sent them to safety.

The Persians massacred the few who believed that the stockade around the acropolis had some kind of divine protection. While the city burned, the Athenians took to their warships, resolved to fight at sea.

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. The quotation is from Book VII, paragraph 143.

Alice Oswald's poem on battle

 An appropriate read for Memorial Day?

How about Alice Oswald’s long poem Memorial, which recounts how soldiers in the Iliad met their end?

Her poem is Homer’s poem without the plot, without the sense of purpose. The deaths don’t have meaning. They are simply deaths.

She simply recalls — in one case after another — how the soldiers died in battle. In the Trojan War, men were speared, stabbed, struck by arrows and javelins, strangled and trampled.

We’ve come a long way technologically. Now soldiers — men and women — are shot, blown to bits by artillery and mines, and vaporized by bombs, missiles and drones. Sometimes they are shot after surrendering. 

An earlier note suggested that we Americans remember those who died in our many wars in a context that involves a sense of collective good. Without that sense of collective good, there is no dying for a noble cause. There is just dying.

It’s an important point, not much mentioned on Memorial Day. Memorial gets to that point. It’s powerful, intense reading.

• Source: Alice Oswald, Memorial; London: Faber & Faber, 2012.

Remembering old soldiers on Memorial Day

 Years ago, I attended a reunion of veterans of the 10^th Armored Division, my father’s old unit.

The division, 10,000 strong, lost many men in the Battle of the Bulge. The veterans were old men when I met them. They were proud of what they had done collectively.

They remembered their comrades who died in battle — and they were adamant that they had died for something that was so valuable it was worth the awful sacrifice.

But they also reminded me that it’s the responsibility of us ordinary citizens to make this country into something that is worthy of the sacrifice.

My father died this year. He was a teenager when he was drafted. He was one of the last of his comrades.

I think that people of his generation had a belief in collective good that is hard to imagine now. It was a belief forged in world war. They had the sense that Americans could achieve great things, almost impossible things, by working together.

The idea seems almost naïve today. We live in a time when “collective good” is denounced as socialism and patriots are people who are wholly concerned with individual rights, not collective goals.

But without a sense of collective good, there is nothing an individual soldier has to fight for. Without that sense of collective good, there’s nothing in war that makes a soldier’s death a sacrifice. It’s just a senseless death.

Any democracy has the potential for standing for the collective or common good, a union for the benefit of all.

It’s an important idea. We shouldn’t let it fall out of fashion.

Darwin's way with a notebook

 Charles Darwin wrote a description of his method of working.

It’s a short passage in his autobiography. I wish every young person with a sense of curiosity got a chance to read it. It’s a good account of the kind of method that independent thinkers could use to study any problem that interests them.

Here’s the basic method:

1. In July 1837, when he was 28, Darwin was working on a problem about how animals change. His thinking was not clear, so he “opened a notebook” on the problem. I like that phrase.

2. The notebook was a place where he collected facts. He tried not to have a theory in mind that would influence his thinking about what was relevant. He just collected facts — all of them.

3. Collecting facts is similar to reporting. It includes observation, conversations with experts, interviews and reading. He filled his notebook with abstracts of books and articles.

4. A book he was reading outside his own disciplines of geology and biology— Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population — was the catalyst for Darwin’s own thinking about his own problem. 

5. You could describe what occurred as a moment of enlightenment. Darwin said he could point to the spot in the road that his carriage was passing when the idea of natural selection occurred to him. But that account overlooks 15 months of working through material in his notebooks and his fortunate decision to cross the lines of academic disciplines in search of insights from another field. There was a flash of insight, yes, but only after months of plodding.

I have a good friend who has two precocious granddaughters. The next time he mentions their interests and inquiries, I’m going to ask Grandpa if he’s showed them how to keep a notebook.

I have many bad habits, but keeping notebooks a good one. It’s been fun. There’s nothing quite like thinking about a problem for a while and deciding it’s time to open a notebook on it.

The other museums of San Antonio

Our word “museum” comes from the ancient Greek ton Mouseion. It’s a proper noun because the Muses were goddesses who, when inclined, helped mortals make art. Ton Mouseion, grammatically neuter, was used to describe place, a place where Muse-like things happen.

My old Liddell & Scott lexicon gives the example of mouseia chelidonon, literally places of the swallows, but more accurately the places where swallows do their Muse-like things. The translator must supply the verb.

Liddle & Scott say swallows twitter, and so does most everyone else. But I hear songs when swallows gather by the hundreds. To my ear, the swallows sing.

The swallows build their nests on the limestone cliffs and ledges of Central Texas. But like the bats on Congress Avenue in Austin, the swallows have discovered concrete bridges.

The 24^th Street Bridge on Zarzamora Creek is such a place. So is the Mitchell Street Bridge over San Pedro Creek.

The bridge on Mitchell Street is near the bridge that carries I-10 over the river just south of downtown, and the swallows have moved in. It’s eerie, being in a metropolis, underneath one of its busiest highways, and being in a swarm of several hundred swallows.

These under-the-bridge places are among my favorite museums in San Antonio. Few visitors seem to have found them. 

A good conversation — in letters

 My friend Melvyn and I have been exchanging letters for a while (“The Pleasures of old-fashioned letters,” Nov. 18, 2021). It looks like the habit has stuck.

I’d recommend it, and here’s why:

I find myself, during the week, coming across an idea that, ordinarily, I’d let escape. But rather than letting the idea float off, I wonder what my good friend would say. And the act of putting the idea down on paper helps me get clearer about the idea itself and about the questions I want to ask.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way:

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.

Montaigne, bless him, thought that conversation was an essential part of our learning. He was all for “knocking off the corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.”

Conversations are hard to beat. Some occur in writing, rather than over lunch. 

I'm grateful for Dr. Melvyn Schreiber's wisdom and his ability to share it. I'm thinking of him on his birthday. 

• Sources: Emerson’s note is from his essay on “Friendship.” Montaigne’s comment is from “Educating Children,” Book I, Essay 26.

A myth as a philosophical problem

 A second thought on yesterday’s dog story: In the Greek myths, Laelaps, the dog, was destined to catch everything it chased. The Cadmean fox was destined never to be caught.

One reason the story interests me is that I think we have a bias in our culture for scientific solutions. We would like to think that if we had accurate measurements of, say, Laelaps’s ability to accelerate and the fox’s ability to change directions we might be able to predict who would really win.

We want to say that there could be a calculus for this.

But it’s not that kind of problem. There are other kinds of problems that we experience in life —or, more accurately, that we experience in our language, as we try to talk about our lives. And, as with this problem, the ability to collect and analyze data is not relevant.

It’s a logical problem: a contradiction. The alleged destinies of both dog and fox can’t possibly be true.

As a student, I was interested in the logic of propositions. I later got interested in philosophers who noticed other kinds of contradictions in language — not just those between propositions. For example, if I say that the neighborhood kid who hopes to play point guard in college is 5-foot-9, that sentence rules out — or contradicts — other possibilities. If he’s 5-foot-9, that rules out the possibility of his being 7-foot-1. He’s not going to have a second shot at playing center if he doesn’t make the team at point guard. All of that, intended or not, is implicit in that first sentence, a description of his height.

The logic of our language is more complex than it appears. If I had more than one life, one would go to the study of logic.

• Notes: (1) I should have pointed out that you can find more than one version of the myth. In some, the wonderful dog was a gift of Zeus, not of Artemis. (2) If you’re wondering about pronunciation, I like LIE-lops.

Old Laelaps was some dog

 I was listening to some dog stories, which reminded me of old Laelaps. He was some dog — destined to catch anything he chased.

Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, gave the dog and a dart that was destined to always hit its target to Minos, that guy who had something to do with Minoan Civilization.

But incredibly, this priceless dog changed hands — he was a great gift to a beloved.

The goddess was grieved that her gift got passed around. She took revenge on those who didn’t appreciate the gravity of having a good dog.

The last owner, Kephalos, used Laelaps to help Amphytrion, ruler of Thebes, to deal with the Teumessian Vixen, also known as the Cadmean Fox. The fox had been sent by some god or another to punish the countryside. The fox was taking a child a month.

What happens when a dog who is destined to catch everything it chases meets a fox who is destined never to get caught?

It’s a contradiction, and if you’re interested in logic the story is interesting. But Zeus was no logician and was not known for his patience or thoughtfulness. Enraged at a problem he couldn’t solve, he turned both dog and fox into stone and tossed their images to the stars.

If you know your constellations, Canis Major is the dog, and Canis Minor is the fox.

Marking the Day: Trevor

 William Trevor was a fine writer of short stories. I like short stories that unfold slowly, and the good ones can do that because they are simple. The heart of the story is usually a short paragraph, maybe a couple of sentences.

Trevor’s “The Hill Bachelors” is a portrait of Irish bachelors.

After the funeral, it’s understood that Paul, the only bachelor in the family, must take over the farm. Mom, 68, can’t manage. But there’s a problem: Young women don’t want to live in the hills. Here’s how Trevor puts it:

Paulie harbored no resentment, not being a person who easily did: going back to the farmhouse was not the end of the world. The end of the world had been to hear, in Meagher’s back bar, that life on a farm did not attract Patsy Finucane.

Our hero is stuck, but he won’t sell out to a neighbor. And so the hills, unchanging like Irish bachelors, claim another one of their own.

I’m marking a birthday. Trevor was born on May 24, 1928 in Mitchelstown, Ireland. He died in 2016.

• Source: William Trevor, Selected Stories; New York: Viking, 2010. And, if you’re curious about “Marking the day,” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

Vacation v. retreat

 Yesterday’s note brought up the idea of retreat, as a kind of counterpart to vacation.

A retreat can be a religious idea, but it doesn’t have to be.

The idea of a vacation is to relax. The idea of a retreat is to relax with a purpose. It’s a chance to sort yourself, your thinking and your work. 

The ancient Hebrews kept the Sabbath as a day of rest. They weren’t the only ones. As Robert Graves points out, the seventh day was sacred to Jehovah and therefore to some ancient Hebrews. But it also was sacred to the Titan Cronus, and therefore to some ancient Greeks. (Graves sees some family resemblance in the two immortals.)

But from the sacred comes the secular. From the Sabbath came sabbaticals. Scholars use the days of rest to sort their work and their thinking out. It usually means a book.

Creative work, some of which is dazzling, comes out of those periods of dedicated, focused rest.

I have an abiding interest in religion that I find hard to explain. But I might be able to suggest it with an analogy.

Astronomers are interested in galactic clouds, vast soupy mixtures of primal stuff out of which starts are born. Brilliant stars explode out of a mixture that is so formless we have a hard time defining it. (Where does a galactic cloud end?)

I think that the religious impulses that became part of human beings as we evolved, long before they were refined in the days of Jehovah and Cronus, are the galactic clouds out of which stars are being born today. If I were a graduate student looking at sources of creativity, I know where I’d start to look.

Then again, my friend the carpenter and I just finished replacing old siding on a house in South Texas in 100-degree heat. Maybe I just need a vacation.

The Rule of 21

 Robert Benson, who has written some interesting things about the practice of religion, has proposed that the cosmos operates according to the Rule of 21.

The gist of it is that you can’t go for more than 21 minutes without an interruption, 21 days without a mishap or tragedy, and 21 weeks without a retreat.

A couple of days ago, a talented carpenter and I, his barely skilled assistant, finished a job replacing some old shiplap siding on the house. It was 100 degrees. The carpenter looked puzzled for a second, so I asked him what he needed. I thought he’d ask me to bring him a saw.

Instead, he said: “I need a vacation.”

I remembered the Rule of 21, even though a retreat isn’t exactly the same as a vacation and even though I hadn’t read Benson’s book in years.

But it seemed like a good idea: to get out of the heat, go somewhere quiet and get in touch with the central facts of your life.

I’m not sure that’s a religious idea. But it might be.

If you’re not sure, and are curious, Benson makes a good case that it is.

• Source: Robert Benson, Living Prayer; New York: TarcherPerigee, 1999. 

After the wind, ball moss on the trail

 I’m not a great observer. I missed the pillbugs on the sidewalk, until I had to step over them. And now I see the ball moss, Tillandsia recurva, because it came down in the wind and is on the sidewalk instead of the trees. 

If you don’t know these plants, they are balls of gray-green — moss-like tangles in the trees. Some are as big as cantaloupes.

They’re the most misunderstood plant around here, I think. Every year or so, the garden columnists and horticultural experts put out a plea in the newspaper, urging the public leave the ball moss alone. 

But you can tell by the tone of the columns that the authors think it’s hopeless.

People are convinced ball moss is a parasite. It’s not. It’s an epiphyte. It uses the tree for structure. It doesn’t tap into the tree’s vascular system to get to water and nutrients. 

T. recurvate is also not a moss. It’s a Bromeliad, a member of the family that includes pineapple. Ball moss has flowers and seeds.

These plants fix nitrogen, or, more precisely, are associated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the genus Pseudomonas. They get nitrogen, water and other nutrients from the atmosphere. When they fall to the ground and decompose, they enrich the soil.

If we human beings would just look, we could tell that these plants don’t have real roots that tap into the tree’s limbs. They have pseudo roots that wrap around tree limbs. The tipoff is that they don’t just fasten onto trees. They fasten onto fences and power lines.

I’ve seen power lines covered in ball moss.

But most people don’t notice.

Sadly, there’s a cottage industry of fellows with pickup trucks, long ladders and chainsaws offering to save your trees from these invasive parasites for only $2,500 or so.

You have to watch your feet

 It’s possible to get so caught up in watching the wildlife along Zarzamora Creek that you forget to look down at your feet.

The sidewalks are full of pillbugs, which we used to call “roly-polies” because they roll up into a ball when you bother them. The scientific name is Armadillium vulgare. They are crustaceans, not insects, and they are composters, turning decaying vegetation into soil.

Last month, you had to watch your step for scarab beetles, also known as Junebugs, in the genus Cyclocephala. There are so many species, I wouldn’t attempt an identification. But the Masked chafter is notorious among gardeners.

The adults are about a-half inch long and brown. They are clumsy fliers. They’ll bump into you if you stand near a porch light at night. The larvae are white grubs that eat up lawns and plants.

Last year, I found about 100 dead beetles on a short stretch of the trail. I’m guessing an outraged gardener resorted to poison.

A little more on reading the Greeks

Like countless others who grew up in the South, I was raised on the Bible. And, of course, the claims of exceptionalism are made unapologetically for that book: It’s the word of God.

I still read passages with pleasure. But somewhere around the age of Huck Finn, I ran across a page or two that made me doubt the claims of exceptional wisdom. I wondered whether this was the best mankind could do, much less God.

A few years later, I discovered that the ancient Greeks, especially Plato and Herodotus, were more interesting to me. All personal discoveries are small, but that one was important to me. Given the freedom to read whatever interested me, I chose to read the Greeks.

It's a small detail that somehow shaped a personality.

Loving the ancient Greeks

 The best kind of friend makes you think, and one of mine made me think about my love of ancient Greek writers. My friend asked whether I was making a case for exceptionalism.

The claims of American exceptionalism are riddled with bad thinking. And, as my friend pointed out, the claim of Greek exceptionalism is a claim of European exceptionalism. We’d be mired in the rut of venerating old dead white males, as if no one else could do admirable work. That claim is obviously false.

The problem is the presumption that one group of people has a monopoly on things that deserve attention and admiration. That’s preposterous. And it’s also a tragedy.

It’s a great joy to know there are so many good things that I’ll never get to them all.

But I still think the Greek Classical period was extraordinary. One really good playwright can set Broadway on fire. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides offering competing plays.

The Ancient Athenians had heartbreaking faults. They made a mess of democracy, killed Socrates and lost the Peloponnesian War because the majority supported talentless demagogues who made bad decisions sound appealing. When the Athenians lost their democracy, the tyrants had their day and the blood ran.

Losing a democracy is real, human tragedy. It’s not just an argument about politics.

Still, I’m an admirer — mostly. If I’m going to read something from the ancient world, I’ll usually read Herodotus, Archilochos, Sophocles and the gang.

An ancient version of boy meets girl

 The ancient Greeks liked to tell the story of Peleus, a mortal who married Thetis, an immortal nymph.

He first saw her when she was riding on a harnessed dolphin, coming to a cave on the beach to take an afternoon nap.

Peleus was outclassed. But he’d taken counsel from the unlikeliest of sources, Cheiron, king of the centaurs. Cheiron told Peleus that whatever he did, he must not let go.

It’s a boy meets girl story. Peleus grabbed the girl and was scorched, drowned, mauled and snake-bit as Thetis turned into fire, water, a lion and then a serpent.

Peleus had no idea what he was dealing with. The only thing he did right was that he didn’t let go.

Thetis eventually decided he’d do. The reasons for that decision might not be clear to the male psyche.

The myths of the ancient Greeks might be a kind of litmus test. I’m not sure what it says about you if you read and wonder about them. But I know that I do. I also know that many others are not amused.

• Robert Graves’s account is in The Greek Myths: 1; Penguin Books, 1975.

Needed: another kind of exercise

 When he was 64, writer W. Somerset Maugham said: “Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”

The metaphor involves exercise, which is related to practice. We all know what he means. The weightlifter gets stronger with repeated exercise. The long-distance runner gets stronger with exercise. The athlete gets stronger and better with training, conditioning, practice.

I like to think of myself as a writer. But it’s been a while since I hit the gym of the imagination.

• The quotation is from Maugham’s memoir, The Summing Up, first published in 1938. My friend Joe Murray recommended it to me years ago.

The public reacts to crime

 One of the odder items in Library of America’s “Story of the Week” collection is a lawyer’s account of a crime in Illinois. It was written by Abraham Lincoln.

Three brothers —Henry, Archibald and William Trailor — were under suspicion in the death of a fellow named Archibald Fisher, who had been seen in their company.

Henry Trailor finally broke down and testified he saw his brothers haul off the body. William and Archibald Trailor were charged.

Lincoln described the reaction of the public as it followed the sensational story. Springfield, the capital of Illinois, was then a town of 3,500. But people followed the news and jumped to conclusions just as ably as the millions, assisted by social media, do today.

Lincoln was sure that the brothers would have been convicted if the alleged murder victim hadn’t shown up.

A doctor in a neighboring town kept telling authorities that Fisher was alive and in his care. It didn’t do any good. The case wasn’t dropped until the victim, allegedly dead, showed up, “in full life and proper person.”

• Source: Abraham Lincoln, “Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder”; originally published in the Quincy Whig, April 15, 1846 and republished in True Crime: An American Anthology; New York: The Library of America, 2008.

Whitehead's broad interests

 One more note on A.N. Whitehead, and I’ll leave him alone for a while.

I was fascinated by his thinking on logic. But his intellect was broad, not just deep. He thought about the basic problems of physics and he also wondered how a sense of beauty develops within an individual and within a culture.

Among the famous philosophers, he was like Leibnitz: interested in everything, with a sense of confidence that human beings can inquire — productively — into anything.

Here’s one odd example: He didn’t see religion as necessarily a good thing. He defined religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness.” 

It’s hard to image anyone else starting with that sort of working definition.

In my notebook there’s a page headed: “People I wish I could have had a conversation with.”

My idea of paradise is a coffee shop. Each day, I get to spend an hour over a cup of coffee with an interesting thinker, turning over an interesting question.

Whitehead would be there often.

The notion of logical adequacy

 When I was in college, I was interested in logic. If you’re looking for an explanation of yesterday’s note on A.N. Whitehead, that’s the best I can do.

Of all the great thinkers of 20^th century, he came the closest to an explanation of what a better system of thought would entail, given the revolution in physics that had occurred with Einstein, Bohr and that crowd.

Whitehead was clear on some conceptual problems that haunt us today. An account of the world must go beyond a definition of matter and a discussion of the forces that put billiard balls in motion. It will have to explain how some organisms are aware of events around them.

New work in physics had undermined Newton’s account of basic science, and Whitehead saw that the Enlightenment era’s philosophy was also untenable. One of the ideas that is no longer helpful, he said, was the notion that all of our ideas come from our sense perceptions.

Here’s Whitehead, outlining what a system of thought should do:

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of “interpretation” I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus, the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here, “applicable” means that some ideas of experience are thus interpretable, and “adequate” means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.

More than 40 years ago, that was a revelation: my first real grasp of what the notion of “logical adequacy” was about.

If it’s a part of human experience, a general system of ideas should be able to explain it.

One way to look at science

 If you even suspect that you might be interested in the philosophy of science, you might give Alfred North Whitehead a try.

Here, in a nutshell, is one way of looking at science:

The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today are the great tragedians of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Their vision of Fate, remorseless and indifferent, is the vision possessed by science. …

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. … The laws of physics are the decrees of Fate.

Whitehead saw almost everything as a process. In his view, a human being is not a thing. Or more accurately, it’s not helpful to think of a human being as a thing. A human being is more accurately described as an event, or a process involving many events.

Science is a sustained process of trying to get at how things work. Whitehead thought it should look at events and processes involving events, rather than at things.

 • Source: Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World; New York: Free Press, 1997.

Should you really give advice?

 My friend Melvyn and I used to argue about advice.

Giving it, he argued, is perhaps the most useless, futile thing you can do. When you are struck by the urge to advise, stifle it.

I always took this advice with a grain of salt. Melvyn is a professor of medicine, still teaching into his 90s. Students come to him and listen. He’s learned things that it would take years for bright young doctors to discover for themselves. He’s spent decades giving valuable advice.

Melvyn used to be a world traveler. Usually, we’re most aware of the value of advice when we travel. When you get to Paris, you might know exactly what you want to see and do with your limited time in the city. What you don’t know is where you can get a good cup of coffee and rest your feet for 10 minutes before you march on.

We buy guidebooks. We speak bad French to strangers. We seek that kind of advice because we need it.

I think Melvyn is right about this: We are more apt to seek directions on how to get to a coffee shop than to seek directions on how to live a good life.

We are more apt to see our needs for the small things, rather than the big.

• For a related idea about advice on writing, see “Rules of Thumb 1,” Nov. 28, 2021.

A teacher's note on education

 Yesterday’s note about C.K. Ogden was based solely on an interview with one of his collaborators, I.A. Richards. Richards, an Englishman, ended up teaching at Harvard. Richards had this to say about education:

I think we have a better way of teaching English, but while you're teaching English, you might as well teach everything else. That is to say, a world position, what's needed for living, a philosophy of religion, how to find things out and the whole works — mental and moral seed for the planet. In this way the two-thirds of the planet that doesn't yet know how to read and write would learn in learning how to read and write English, the things that would help them find their answers to ”Where should man go?”

I’m of the same mind. It’s enormously hard to tell others what they should do. But, if asked, we all ought to take a stab at. That is, if someone really wants to know what we think, we ought to have something to say.

• Source: B. Ambler Boucher and John Paul Russo, “An Interview With I.A. Richards”; The Harvard Crimson, March 11, 1969.

A story about C.K. Ogden

 I have known the name C.K. Ogden for decades without knowing about him.

Ogden’s name was associated with the first English translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. That the book was published at all seems to me to be close to a miracle. Ogden seems to have been that kind of person: interested in everything and interested in getting interesting ideas into broader circulation.

He’s probably best known for Basic English. The idea is to use English as the basis of a kind of universal language by stripping it down to a vocabulary of 850 words and limiting verb forms to 16. Ogden showed that you could express complicated ideas with a relatively small number of words.

I.A. Richards, an English writer and critic who taught at Harvard, wrote a book with Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning. He was asked how the book and Basic English came about.

Richards was delighted with the question because it had a clear answer. 

It happened exactly at eleven o'clock at night on November the eleventh, 1918, Armistice Day.

Richards was then at Cambridge University and was renting rooms from Ogden. Medical students had gone on a rampage and Ogden’s property had been damaged. As the two men were talking on the stairwell, they discovered both were interested in questions of meaning.

The conversation went on from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. 

We went on and on, and the whole of our book, The Meaning of Meaning, was talked out clearly in two hours.

Richards said Ogden was just like that. He had a wide circle of friends, and he would raid their minds.

He was very, very witty, a most unexpected, surprising man. He'd take off with anyone he thought knew all about X and keep him up to three o'clock in the morning. By that time he'd found out what he wanted to know about X and he could use it.

I love that story. Ideas change as they are seized and digested by different people. I think it shows the importance of having friends and having conversations among friends.

If I were asked what philosophy is, I might tell a version of this story.

• Source: B. Ambler Boucher and John Paul Russo, “An Interview With I.A. Richards”; The Harvard Crimson, March 11, 1969.

Marking the day: Gary Snyder

 Gary Snyder said this about writing poetry: “I try to hold both history and wildness in my mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our time.”

I’m marking the day. Snyder was born May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He’s 92.

Snyder was the basis of Jack Kerouac’s character Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. I liked the fictional character, and I suspect I’d like the man.

One of the biases — or topics — of this collection of notes is that some really good writers rework texts that are the common property of cultures. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and the boys reworked Greek myths. Snyder is good at reworking traditional texts that are handed down by people who live close to nature.

His “Prayer for the Great Family” is a reworking of a Mohawk prayer. It begins:

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through the night and day —

and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet

in our minds so be it.

I read the poem as a litany, with the reader, or reciter, listing the wonders for which we can all be grateful, and then the people responding with the refrain:

In our minds so be it.

I love that refrain. In my mind, this poem would be a good Thanksgiving service. 

Watching the dock plants seed

 I’ve been watching the dock plants on the banks of Zarzamora Creek. You can’t miss them. The plants have heavy heads of seeds, almost like maize.

If the docks have a growing schedule, it’s casual. On some plants, the seeds are green and just ripening. On others they’re a maroon-brown. In some cases the seeds already are gone.

Texas A&M says there are 15 species of Rumex in Texas. Typically, it’s a perennial herb with upright stalk. It has a basal rosette — that is, a circle of leaves at ground level — and then alternate leaves on the stalk.

There’s at least one species for each of the vegetation regions in Texas. Docks are among the most common weeds.

I like to look at these plants, but I’m outnumbered by the people doing research on how to poison them. I’m also apparently outnumbered by the people who like to eat them.

The native foragers — people who like to eat as they hike — go after young leaves and roots as well as the seeds.

Rumex acetosa, sheep’s sorrel or spinach dock, was used in European soups. The soup eaters brought it to North America, and it’s naturalized. R. hastutulus, heartwing sorrel, is a native.

If, unlike me, you dine as well as observe, take note: The sour taste is oxalic acid, which builds up as the plant ages. Apparently, you can get too much.

The purple blooms of pickerelweed

Some stands of pickerelweed are blooming on Zarzamora Creek. It’s a lovely sight.

Pontederia cordata is in the water-hyacinth family. The books say it usually blooms from June through September, but I saw the first blooms on April 27. Zarzamora Creek will keep you on your toes.

Pickerelweed is what biologists call an emergent aquatic. It’s a forb, and much of the plant, including rhizomes, is underwater. The stems and leaves rise out of the water. The stand I’ve been watching is less than 3 feet tall. The leaves are deep green. The flower spikes are about 6 inches long, and bloom from bottom up.

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center says the flowers are generally dark blue, but all the flowers I’ve seen along Zarzarmora Creek look purple to me.

What makes for a good book city?

San Antonio ranked No. 43 on the list of Best Book Places in the U.S.

The list, published by Clever Real Estate, is here:

https://listwithclever.com/research/best-book-places-2022/

The site used data based on the per capita number of libraries, independent bookstores and coffee shops. It also considered literacy rates. Based on what I gather from the daily newspaper, this might be where San Antonio’s score suffered.

These folks obviously are interested in selling real estate, but they raised an interesting question:

What makes for a good book city?

I think this is one of the many things that Galveston got right.

The Rosenberg Library got a dedicated cut of the city’s tax rate, under the city charter. It wasn’t subject to the direct whims of the political folk.

The library has a wonderful collection. It also has rooms where people can meet and discuss books — individually and in organized book clubs.

The library is seen as neutral ground in the community. It’s a safe place for people to go to discuss controversial topics.

The city also has a lively newspaper, and the discussions in the coffee shops ought to be mentioned in guidebooks for tourists.

If you’ve never been to Galveston, go and sit in a coffee shop and just eavesdrop. Prepare to be astonished.

That mysterious sense of self

David Hume thought our ideas come from impressions — from what we gather through our senses. So where could the idea of a “self” come from? I can see and touch my thumb, but I can’t get my eyes or hands on the “self.”

Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of the self is derived: and consequently there is no such idea.

In Hume’s view, we are “bundles or collections of perceptions.”

I have a wonderful sense of myself when I’m celebrating what a jolly good fellow I am, i.e. when I’m not thinking about it. When I examine the idea, it evaporates.

This collection of notes is a good example of the problem. When we talk about a self or soul or mind, we’re talking about a collection of interests.

In my case, a lot of the impressions that have stuck in my memory involve the ancient Greeks, the natural history of Zarzamora Creek, Wittgenstein, Montaigne, writing, short stories, essays, Texas and the peoples of the ancient Southwest. It would be a long list — “tedious” might be the better modifier. But there’s no essence in there, nothing that’s essentially me.

Hume’s Theory of Personal Identity comes from A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV.

Here’s Wittgenstein on the same topic:

The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.

If I wrote a book, “The world as i found it,” I should also therein have to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do no, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.

That’s 5.631 in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It's surely one of the strangest passages to come from a book on logic.

The peoples of La Junta

 The peoples of La Junta were called Patarabueyes‚ ox kickers, by the Spanish.

Texas Beyond History, a virtual museum of Texas’ cultural history, offers this image: Enslaved people are loaded into an oxcart. Friends and relatives are trying to stop the outrage by upsetting the oxen, even kicking them. And so an off-the-cuff expression, a pejorative phrase started by soldiers, became a name.

In the case of the Patarabueyes, we know the explanation of the nickname. The explanation is provided in the journal of Diego Perez de Lujan (also spelled Luxan), the official scribe of the Espejo expedition to New Mexico in 1582-1583. In early December, 1582, Lujan wrote in his journal that the expedition traveled four leagues north along the Conchos River “and came to a rancheria of the Patarabueyes. The name Patarabueyes was made up by the soldiers when people from this same Rancheria were taken by Mateo Gonzales, head of Juan de Cubia, captain from the mines of Santa Barbara, because this very nacion that they named Patarabueyes are also called Otomoacos.”

The people of La Junta lived in small communities, and, like the ancient Greeks, they seemed to think of each community as a distinct people — related to others, but distinct. But the Spanish lumped them all under one name.

I would love to know about their beliefs about the world. I’d like to know something of their religion. It’s sad how little we know.

• Source: “Part-Time Farmers: Partarabueyes of La Junta,” Texas Beyond History. This site is wonderful. You can find the article here:

https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/trans-p/peoples/farmers.html

The mission of El Polvo

 Here is Enrique R. Madrid of Redford, writing about El Polvo:

The lost mission of El Polvo is lost not in space, for we know what it looked like and its exact location, but rather it is lost in time as we do not know when it was built or even what its name was. This problem is the reserve of what archeologists normally face. In lieu of archeological dates, one must search the Spanish archives for the date of construction of the Polvo mission and for its name.

His essay on “The Lost Mission of El Polvo” is, to me, a model of what an educated person can do by looking at his or her community. And it’s not just looking, but seeing it, knowing it, understanding it. Madrid read all the archeological reports, but he also talked to people in the community and heard stories that had been handed down for generations.

Madrid’s essay persuaded me that the mission was built in 1715, rather than 1683, and was named San Pedro de Alcántara de los Tapalcomes, rather than San Antonio de los Púliques. The sources from the 1700s are not clear, and in the case of the name, disagree.

How did two entrada leaders, coming to the area in 1747, report two different names for the mission? One didn’t know that the Tapalcomes had moved their community upriver. He assumed that a mission named San Pedro de Alcántara de los Tapalcomes would be in the place where the Tapalcomes were living when he found them. 

The oral and written traditions are confusing. Madrid seems to know all the stories and offers a reasoned explanation of how best to resolve them.

One of the heartbreaking things about El Polvo was that the ruins of the old mission were razed by the county in 1956. Everywhere I’ve seen that fact in print, it’s been noted that the ruins were destroyed at the landowner’s request.

Redford took its modern form in 1870, when Texas offered Mexican immigrants 160 acres and citizenship for settling in Presidio County.

Apparently, the people renovated the ruined mission church and worshipped there until a new church, San José del Polvo, was built in 1914. (Today, the new church is one that was built in 1970.)

I would love to have been able to see the old mission church. I'm glad that Madrid wrote a description of it, which included memories of people who saw it.

• Source: Enrique R. Madrid, “The Lost Mission of El Polvo: Searching for the History of a State Archeological Landmark”; The Journal of Big Bend Studies, Vol. 15, 2003, pp. 55-68.

El Polvo, a little town worth knowing

 The little things you learn from interviews.

I recently read an interview with Denise Chávez, the New Mexican poet, who said her mother’s side of the family was from El Polvo, Texas.

It’s in the Big Bend. Years ago, I drove through there, taking the River Road from Lajitas to Presidio. Along the way, you pass through Redford, as in the Red Ford, Vado Colorado, a ford in red rock. Redford includes the community known as El Polvo, the dust.

The area is part of an oasis the Spanish called La Junta de los Rios. Rios Conchos and Bravo del Norte, which we call Rio Grande, converge near the twin cities of Ojinaga, Chihuahua and Presidio, Texas.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and friends passed through in 1535.

Several entradas, as the official expeditions were called, explored the area in the 1580s. The Spanish found pueblos — agricultural people living in adobe houses with flat roofs — along both rivers. The Conchos is the mightier river, and most of the pueblos were south of the modern border.

The soil in the river bottoms is rich, and the rivers made irrigation possible. The people of the pueblos knew of the other peoples of the Southwest. Some archeologists and anthropologist see this as the southeastern-most extension of that larger culture.

At El Polvo, the pueblo was called Tapacolmes.

The Spanish set up a mission. It didn’t last, and the story of its failure is long and poisonous. 

The first Europeans the native people saw after Cabeza de Vaca were slavers. Countless people worked and died in the silver mines of New Spain. The slavers first arrived in the 1560s, and they kept coming, on and off, for 200 years.

And so began a tug of war. Missionaries wanted to make converts for the church and citizens for the king. Many of these priests were well educated, with the ideals of Augustine’s City of God in their minds. They’d come, learn something of the language and culture, and then be expelled, or killed, whenever the slavers returned.

On Nov. 30, 1747, Capt. Joseph de Ydoiago, leading an entrada, visited the ruins of the mission. He mentioned the adobe walls and church in his report.