May in Stone Mountain

 When the month began, I was putting a fire in the fireplace to knock the chill out of the house in the morning. We’re past that now. I’ve cleaned the fireplace and spread the ashes over some garden beds. But most mornings are still chilly to me, about 60 degrees.

I walk the dog wearing a sweatshirt. By afternoon, I’m sweating over a shovel, with temperatures in the 80s. The Wise Woman is planting bulbs.

The big change in May has been in the foliage: trees, shrubs, vines. Everything is putting out leaves. Six weeks ago, we walked through a spring thunderstorm in the woods south of Stone Mountain. When we flushed two deer, we watched them run for a hundred yards. Now the vegetation is so dense you can’t see 10 feet through the brush.

The biologists talk about biomass. Collectively, the leaves in those trees weigh tons. They catch the wind, and you can hear it. The dense foliage catches the wind like sails. I don’t get tired of seeing 70-foot trees waving like grass.

All this month, I’ve been watching southern dewberries ripen. Rubus trivialis is everywhere in the Georgia Piedmont. An earlier version of me would have been picking berries and making jelly.

A long history of bad ideas

 Lawmakers are doing so many outrageous things to undermine schools that it’s easy to forget that this kind of thing has been going on for generations. The country’s history of bad ideas about education is unfortunately long.

In 1922, Oregon voters enacted a law requiring students to attend public schools — and only public schools — through eighth grade. Private schools were essentially outlawed.

One of the enduring features of populist movements in the United States is hostility to immigrants and minorities. The law was aimed at parochial schools, especially Catholic schools. Private military and prep schools were collateral damage.

The law was struck down in 1925 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. It was a 14^th Amendment case, a question of due process.

• For another 14^th Amendment case, Meyer v. Nebraska, see “The Right to Study,” May 22, 2023.

A master of the second opinion

 Melvyn celebrated his 92^nd birthday Sunday.

Dr. Schreiber is still practicing and teaching medicine at the University of Texas’s first medical school. He’s a radiologist, and experience counts when you are looking for clues in images.

In an earlier life, we met with a couple of other fellows for a weekly lunch. No talk of weather, baseball, politics or personal aches and pains. We tried to stick to books and ideas. Sometimes one of us would talk about an interesting book. Sometimes someone would mention an idea that seemed half-baked, and collectively we’d try to improve it.

When the Wise Woman and I left Galveston, Melvyn and I continued the conversation in letters.

Just the other day, I ran across an idea in my reading. It struck me as ingenious and brilliant — but not quite right. And so I’ll write Melvyn. I want to see what he’ll make of it.

If you have a friend who is learned and wise, don’t miss an opportunity to have a conversation.

• Sources and notes: Melvyn appears in these notes many times. One example: “The pleasures of old-fashioned letters,” Nov. 18, 2021.

A small fact in the story

 Sarah Bakewell tells a story about Beacon Hill, the experimental school that the philosopher Bertrand Russell and his second wife, Dora, set up.

Russell had a lot of scandalous opinions. He was imprisoned for opposing World War I. He was a famous atheist. When the weather was hot, the Russells let the children run around naked.

The story goes that a journalist visited the school. He reported that he rang the bell and was greeted by a naked child.

Journalist: Oh my God!

Naked child: He doesn’t exist.

The child closed the door, and the journalist wrote a story.

It’s an engaging story. But the school didn’t have a doorbell at the front door.

Old newspaper editors spend a lot of time talking to young reporters about facts and about how most readers handle them. If you are a reader, and you know that a little fact at the beginning of a story is wrong, you doubt what follows. If a reporter who is just out of college and is new to town reports that the auto accident occurred on First Street near the intersection of Smith Street and all the readers know those two streets don’t intersect, they doubt the accuracy of the report. In some cases, readers might wonder whether the teller of the tale is just careless or is trying to deceive them. But all such doubts are fatal.

I edited newspapers for decades. Every edition had errors. But in news organizations, workers try to eliminate errors. It’s one of the things that sets them apart from political fronts and entertainment businesses.

• Source: Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible; New York: Penguin Press, 2023, p. 300.

A footnote on the role of religion

 I’m not, as a matter of principle, much for mourning trends in American culture. I’ve been watching the trend in which more Americans identify themselves as secular, as opposed to religious, with interest, rather than concern.

But in thinking about Meyer v. Nebraska, a case that strikes me as being more about intellectual than religious freedom, it hit me that the social role of religion in American life has often been to limit the power of government. It seems to me that we Americans fight for our religious beliefs when we won’t fight for anything else.

• For more on the court case, see “The right to study,” May 22, 2023.

Stephen: ‘A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps’

 I love Leslie Stephen’s essay “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps.”

Stephen had a reputation as a writer and thinker in his day but is probably best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf. He asks you to picture — perhaps best as a fiction — this:

He left the inn for a stroll before dinner, lost the trail and then slipped while trying to return on a ledge. He found himself clinging to the side of the mountain as if it were a pane of glass. He had one foothold. He thought he could last 20 minutes before his strength ran out. A couple of hundred feet below him was a torrent. He tried not to think about what his remains would look like.

So what do you do when you see the end? How do you make the most of the life that’s left?

Stephen did a quick theological review and found that he still thought Jonathan Edwards and his allies were talking nonsense. He tried to think of great things, but he kept returning to the life he had at the moment — to his position on the cliff, to his companions at the inn.

The one metaphor that made sense to him was a memory of a boat race many years ago. He was losing badly and had no hope of winning. Yet he rowed for all he was worth.

Life is a gift, and the proper response is to accept a duty to live it completely. You just always do your best.

His mind kept coming back to the here and now, and he noticed a possible handhold he had overlooked. It was just out of reach, and he’d have to lunge. His strength was already ebbing, but what did he have to lose?

Stephen lunged and missed. He slid down the rock. But almost immediately he landed on another ledge that had been hidden from view. It was a clear shot back to the trail.

Astonished, he consulted his watch and saw the drama had taken just five minutes. He still could make it to the inn in time for dinner.

It’s a fine essay. I like it because it tackles that question about how you go about making the most of the life that’s left to you.

Maybe it’s a question for people of a certain age or of a certain cast of mind.

• Sources: I came across a reference to it in Sarah Bakewell’s new book and found the essay online here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/essays-on-freethinking-and-plain-speaking/bad-five-minutes-in-the-alps/87B7C168C47BC4FA517DD5B7FFA3F1B5

It’s Chapter 5 in Leslie Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plain Speaking; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873.

Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible; New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

A tale of ingenuity and courage

 I have a new hero: Richard Carlile, who was tried and imprisoned for publishing Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.

Even in 1819, court records were privileged, meaning they were public records that could be legally published.

Carlile recited the full text of The Age of Reason, claiming it was essential to his legal defense. He hoped that the work would then become part of the transcript of the trial, which could then be legally published.

Sadly, the ingenious idea didn’t work, says Sarah Bakewell, who tells the story in her new history of humanism and humanists.

Bakewell says that when Richard went to prison, his wife, Jane, took up the publishing business. When she went to prison, Richard’s sister Mary Ann took up the business. They ended up in the same cell, and I actually have three new heroes, not one.

Perhaps families that stand for human rights together stick together.

• Source: Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible; New York: Penguin Press, 2023, pp. 184-5. For another note on this delightful book, see “The Donation of Constantine,” May 16, 2023.

A note on the news

 The other day, a friend made a case for reading the national newspapers. He’s pretty sure he gets everything he needs to know.

I subscribe to two national dailies, The New York Times and Washington Post. I also get the weekly edition of the Christian Science Monitor.

But there are some things that interest local and regional newspapers because they interest readers who live in a specific place.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal did a series of stories about dangerous drivers in southern Nevada. We all like to complain about dangerous drivers. But in 2021, Nevada police wrote more than 5,100 tickets for speeds of at least 100 mph.

In that one fact, it seems to me, you get a sense of the place: of a geography where speeds like that are possible and of a culture where speeds like that are common, almost routine.

The case of the frightened millipede

 The Wise Woman found a flat-backed millipede, order Polydesmida, on the trail at Panola Mountain. It was handsome: 3 and a-half inches, black bands over pinkish brown. We frightened it, and it flipped over on its back as it scrambled up a steep slope. I scrambled to get a picture, but I got a photograph of only part of it.

Adult flat-backed millipedes usually have 20 sections. You can see only 16 in my photograph. The others are buried in grass and leaf litter.

After the head, the first section has no legs. Each of the next four sections has one pair of legs. Each of the remaining sections, except for the last, has two pairs of legs. (Well, males have gonopods, legs adopted for reproduction, on Segment 7.) 

If you’re curious about the “flat back,” some millipedes have a flat shell — it looks like the shell that covers a lobster tail to me — across the back of each section. In some, they hang over the body, kind of like stubby wings on a plane. Other millipedes have a kind of keel running along the back.

• Sources: The Field Museum has a clear explanation here:

https://www.fieldmuseum.org/science/special-projects/milli-peet-class-diplopoda/milli-peet-millipedes-made-easy/milli-peet-1

You can see some interesting photos here:

https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47734-Polydesmida/browse_photos

The right to study

 Arthur Mullen, in responding to questions from U.S. Supreme Court justices about what the 14^th Amendment covers, replied that he thought it includes “the right to study, and the right to use the human intellect as a man sees fit.”

The court agreed. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the court said the amendment specifically guarantees the right “to acquire useful knowledge.”

My problem with the Texas law about what can and can’t be taught in schools is that it would prohibit a student from learning about historical records.

Texas has myriad records that offend the current law. Let’s take one, a resolution introduced into the Texas House of Representatives in 1857, urging the state to urge the U.S. Congress to repeal the laws abolishing the international slave trade.

The resolution is detailed. It gives explicit arguments for white supremacy. It states why the majority of people in Texas believe that people of other races need to be enslaved. It quotes scripture.

It’s disgusting.

But it’s also a public document, a record of state government, and I think that the state has made it illegal to teach it in schools. I think if a history teacher presented the resolution in a class as somehow relevant to any current event, he or she could be accused of teaching critical race theory.

I don’t think a teacher could attempt to answer a student’s question about why this country has a problem with racism without getting into historical records like this one. Those documents are relevant — I’d say essential — in understanding how we got to this point. Those records are also matters of fact, not of opinion.

The new law presumes that our past has nothing to do with the problems we face today, which is obviously false. It’s the kind of logical failure that allows us to believe we can elect people of limited reasoning ability to public office without having to worry about the laws they’ll make.

History is about consequences. We’re not making good history today.

• Sources and notes: David Kopel, “Meyer v. Nebraska: As told by the lawyer who won it”; The Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2016. He quotes from Arthur Mullen’s autobiography, Western Democrat, published in 1940. For more, see yesterday’s note on the court case.

Meyer v. Nebraska

 In 1919, the Nebraska Legislature made it a crime to use any language other than English to teach students younger than 9th grade. The law applied to all schools, private and public.

It was an intolerant era. The Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington. People terrorized immigrants.

In Nebraska, the legislature picked on Catholic and Lutheran schools that taught religious subjects to immigrant children in their primary language, rather than in English.

Robert T. Meyer was a teacher at a Lutheran school. He knew the parents of his students wanted their children to learn religious lessons, in Luther’s German, during recess. 

He knew about the law and knew what was going on when he saw the county attorney standing in the doorway. Meyer later told the story to his lawyer, Arthur Mullen, who gave this account:

 

“I had my choice,” (Meyer) told me afterward in that quiet voice which was more impressive than any shouting. “I knew that, if I changed into the English language, he would say nothing. If I went on in German, he would come in, and arrest me. I told myself that I must not flinch. And I did not flinch. I went on in German.”

“Why?” I asked him.

He widened his gaze a little. “It was my duty,” he said simply. “I am not a pastor in my church. I am a teacher, but I have the same duty to uphold my religion. Teaching the children the religion of their fathers in the language of their fathers is part of that religion.”

 

Meyer was arrested, tried and convicted. He was fined $25. His case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course it was overturned. The case seems barbaric today because we have enjoyed a century of broader protections under the 14^th Amendment since Meyer v. Nebraska was decided in 1923.

The story cheers me up whenever I read the news about the idiotic laws being passed in states like Texas and Florida that restrict what teachers can teach.

Somewhere out there, there are teachers who will teach history with that same sense of integrity.

As a corollary for the rest of us, it would be wise to choose presidents who will pick justices with the aim of preserving freedom, rather than limiting it.

• Sources: David Kopel, “Meyer v. Nebraska: As told by the lawyer who won it”; The Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2016. He quotes from Arthur Mullen’s autobiography, Western Democrat, published in 1940.

First look at Panola Mountain

 We went to Panola Mountain to get a pass for the state parks.

In our household, having a pass to the state parks is a kind of civic responsibility, kind of like having a voter registration card and a library card.

Panola Mountain is another monadnock, a granite outcrop in the Piedmont. It’s the southern anchor in a string that begins with Stone Mountain to the north. Arabia Mountain is in between. Like Arabia Mountain, most of the dome of Panola Mountain is underneath the surface. By contrast, the peak of Stone Mountain is 825 above the surrounding woods.

The efforts to preserve the Arabia-Panola mountain area are complicated. Arabian Mountain is a national site, while Panola is a state site. Various organizations have property that are being conserved as natural areas, including the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, which has more than three square miles in a preserve.

The ranger who helped us said there are 38 miles of trail in this network, and more are under construction. The PATH Foundation, which has more than 300 miles of trails in Georgia, is doing wonderful things.

The main idea of this outing was to get our pass and get acclimated. But we took the short trail to see the outcrop. Among the wonders:

• Fire pink, Silene verginica, which is in the pink family, Caryophyllaceae. The flowers are said to be brilliant red. I’ve never seen anything more brilliant, more red. I crawled up a rock ledge to get a look at it. Its color attracts hummingbirds, a principle pollinator.

• Common yucca, Yucca filamentosa, was blooming with bushels of creamy flowers all over the granite. I have to remind myself that it’s a native of the Southeast, not the Southwest. It’s in the Asparagaceae family.  It grows in the poor sandy soils around San Antonio and on the monadnocks of Georgia.

• Eastern smooth beardtongue, Penstemon laevigatus, in the plantain family, Plantaginaceae. This lovely flower grows east of the Mississippi and so is a stranger to me.

• Spiderworts, Genus Tradescantia, in family Commenlinaceae. There are so many species, I’m lost. But the ones I saw were the palest lavender.

Another puzzle in the Piedmont

 Solanum elaeagnifolium, or something that looks like it, is blooming here in the Georgia Piedmont.

It’s called Silverleaf nightshade in Texas. And though the old cowmen hated it because it was hard to kill and could poison livestock, I love it because it’s beautiful.

In the Southwest, the colors of the foliage are washed out. The green of the leaves is almost silver — halfway between grey and white. Against those faded colors the purple flowers with golden anthers are brilliant.

The scheme is reversed in the plants I’m seeing here. The foliage is lush and deep green, while the flowers are washed out — almost entirely white with just a hint of purple.

I’m not a good enough botanist to be sure what I’m looking at. The range of Solanum elaeagnifolium includes Georgia. But there are a lot of species of Solanum on the East Coast that I’ve never seen. Another puzzle.

• Source: If this sounds familiar, see “On the creek: Silverleaf nightshade,” June 14, 2022.

Admittedly, it's an odd interest

 How did a naturalist get interested in the text of the Greek New Testament?

Two forces are at work:

First, if you are interested in textual criticism involving ancient Greek, there are simply more manuscripts of the New Testament than are of, say, of Sophocles. If you are a doctor who is interested in trauma medicine, you study at a hospital in a big city where the cases come at you nonstop. You don’t go to a quiet town where car wrecks are rare and shootings are unknown.

The Greek New Testament is full of high-speed car wrecks and other disasters.

The ending of one verse, Colossians 2:2, has 15 variants. The manuscripts complete the phrase “to the knowledge of the mystery of …“ 15 ways. Greek is a declined language, and a person who reads only English can get only a vague idea of what a thorny problem this is.

Second, I have lived my life in a region where many people believe that the Bible is literally true, literally infallible.

When I’m asked whether I believe that, I crack open a book, point out that verse with the 15 variants and invite the questioner to help decide which is the right one, the infallible one. And of course if we get that one right, there are hundreds more. Our odds of getting them all right — getting a clean text — are about like our odds of winning the lottery 20 days in a row.

On the basis of beliefs about ancient texts, people have supported slavery, subjugated women and persecuted gay people.

To me, that certainty is bewildering.

• Source: Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament; Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 236-8. Professor Metzger did a masterful job of sorting out that troublesome verse.

A little tale of scholarly intrigue

 My favorite story about Erasmus’s editions of the New Testament involves a passage called the Comma Johanneum. It’s a couple of verses in the first letter of St. John that are important in the Trinitarian doctrines of the Roman church.

Here’s the King James Version of I John 5:7-8:

… the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in the earth.

It’s in the Vulgate, the Latin Bible. But Erasmus left it out of his first (1516) and second (1519) editions of the New Testament because he couldn’t find a single Greek manuscript that supported it.

That’s strong evidence. We have relatively few copies of famous works of Ancient Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle. Sometimes, what we have of a Greek author is based on a single manuscript. But scribes in monasteries made copies of the New Testament relentlessly. We have thousands. The fact that Erasmus couldn’t find a Greek manuscript that contained the famous formula is beyond suggestive.

Erasmus endured withering criticism from the traditionalists.

Stung, he famously promised that he would include the disputed passage in his next edition off the New Testament if anyone could produce a single Greek manuscript that included the passage.

It’s not certain, but the evidence suggests that a Franciscan friar named Froy or Roy translated the Latin from the Vulgate, making a Greek manuscript to order in 1520 — four years after Erasmus’s first edition.

Erasmus kept his word. He included the disputed passage in his third edition, published in 1522. But he added a footnote saying he thought something was fishy.

• Source: Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament; Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 101-2.

The Donation of Constantine

 I first heard of The Donation of Constantine in a course on Byzantine history decades ago. The text tells this story:

In 315 of the Common Era, the Emperor Constantine, sick with leprosy, was cured by the pope. Constantine was so grateful that he left the Italian Peninsula to the pope to govern — he gave half his kingdom for the cure.

It’s a good story, but this was a history course, and so the best part was how The Donation of Constantine was exposed as a medieval forgery.

First, historians were puzzled that no one else in Constantine’s era seemed to know anything about the story. The donation of half an empire would seem to have been an earth shaker. But chroniclers and other authors seemed to have been in the dark.

Then scholars of language pointed out that certain words in The Donation hadn’t been in use in Constantine’s time. These words entered the language later. If someone wanted to sell you an authentic letter, signed by George Washington, but it included some lyrics from the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” you might get suspicious.

Historians often say that questions about motive are always tricky — and interesting. But this case is straightforward. Almost anyone could see why someone in the Vatican might want to forge such a document.

My history professor made a point: This is the kind of thing that historians do.

I was reminded of all this while reading Sarah Bakewell’s account of how humanists tackled the problem in the 15^th century. 

For me, this is the first story of humanism. The early humanists scoured the earth for Ancient texts. They compared variants in the copies and developed critical skills to determine which were most likely authentic. But of course critical thinking skills are developed to divide the wheat from the chaff.

The story turns when those skills, developed because of a love and admiration for those ancient authorities, were used to question the authorities themselves.

It’s one thing to have a critical edition of Plato or Aristotle. When people began to think about a critical edition of the New Testament, that was something else. 

Phrases like “The Age of Faith” and “The Age of Reason” strike me as being more trouble than they’re worth. But if I were going to play that game, I’d say Erasmus’s critical edition of the New Testament, published in 1516, is a guidepost, a marker that indicates a fundamental change of thinking. Scholars were looking critically at the role human hands had played in the making of what many people had assumed to be the word of God.

• Souce: Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible; New York: Penguin Press, 2023. I am a Bakewell fan.

Sharing the trail with an eastern rat snake

 I have seen plenty of rat snakes, although I grew in Texas, where most of the folks called them chicken snakes.

The one we saw along the Yellow River looked a bit different. It was a specimen of Pantherophis alleghaniensis, the eastern rat snake, and the authorities say this is about as far west as it gets. They say it isn’t found west of the Chattahoochee River, which runs through Atlanta, a dozen miles west.

This snake had just eaten and was trying to get away. The Wise Woman, who does not like snakes, was also trying to get away. I was trying to get a photograph of this one, which was less than 4 feet long. I don’t ever remember seeing blue in those slate gray scales before.

My grandmother and grandfather had different views about rat snakes. Country people in Texas call them chicken snakes because rat snakes hang out at chicken houses, where grain for the chickens attracts rodents.

My grandfather, who was a great killer of venomous snakes, thought that nonvenomous snakes that preyed on stealers of chickenfeed should be left to their business.

My grandmother, who actually collected the eggs every morning, did not.

The rock bridge

 We found the rock bridge over the Yellow River on one of our tramps last week. It’s so obvious, you can’t imagine how anyone could not know it’s there.

I mentioned it Feb. 14, 2023 (“The trail that runs nearby”). The old Sandtown Trail, used by native peoples long before the arrival of Europeans, runs north of our house. Rockbridge Road follows the trail, and to get anywhere we have to get on that road. I wondered whether there had been a rock bridge at some point.

I couldn’t find any information. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, a wonderful source for invasive species like me, was silent on this point.

Mark Pifer, who writes about local history, said he thought the rock bridge was not a human construction but a series of rocks or boulders in the Yellow River that allowed a traveler to cross on foot.

Since reading that line, I have been searching.

If you go to Yellow River Park, a county park east of Stone Mountain, you’ll see it. Near the north end of the park there’s an observation deck on the west bank of the river. If you look north, it appears that a rock formation runs across the river.

The bed of flat rock looks like a causeway.

It’s an illusion. From that vantage point, you can’t see the open water near the east bank and you can’t see openings in the rock that allow the river to flow through, falling about a foot.

But you can see why everyone who knows the land would call it the rock bridge. 

It’s a small thing, but to me it points to the divide between those who know the land and those of us who don’t.

Some things are so obvious to those  who know a place that they just don’t mention them. These obvious things aren’t written down. And within a generation or two, the perfectly obvious has to be rediscovered.

I grew up near Abilene, Texas, not far from Fort Phantom Hill. As a boy I heard about the phantom, or ghost, that haunted the ruins of the old fort on the hill.

But, as the writer and historian A.C. Greene pointed out, there was no phantom, just a phantom hill. If you come toward the site using the route of the old Butterfield stage coach, you see what appears to be a hill. It’s another illusion. And it’s another case of people losing touch with a natural feature of the landscape.

I wish it were easier for newcomers to learn about the land. Learning about a place is always harder than it looks.

Source: Mark Pifer, Native Decatur; Decartur, Ga.: Downriver Books, 2018.

How do we assign value to poetry?

 I don’t think that’s a rhetorical question. I think I can show you how I value the work of some poets and not others.

Here’s a line from Abraham Maslow’s Religions, Values and Peak Experiences that rings true to me:

 

The great lesson from the true mystics … is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard.

 

It’s the kind of thing I copied down in my notebook when I was in college. I can’t prove it. I can’t argue it. But it rings true to me, and I wanted to try to live it. When I first read that line, it seemed as if the writer had seen a part of me. I’m one of those people who mistrust sweeping visions of the cosmos but who will get into an argument about how you should eat your breakfast or how you should greet your neighbor.

I think small things are important. 

And so I like poets who write about red wheelbarrows and cold plums in the fridge. I like Williams Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Norman MacCaig, Lorine Niedecker and Wendell Berry.

That’s not a theory. It’s just a single case of how one reader reacts to values in poems.

All human beings — poets and their readers — have more than one value. I also value clarity and brevity, for example.

When I sit down to read a new poem, I’m not aware of all the values that I carry around with me. But when I start reading, my values and the poet’s collide. Sometimes there’s wonderful harmony. But not often.

• Source: Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values and Peak Experiences; Ohio State University Press, 1964.

Can you appreciate both or do you take sides?

 How do we assign value to the poetry of one person and not to the poetry of another?

When I started reading poetry, I found that I liked some poets and disliked others. But these likes and dislikes seemed to go beyond a matter of taste. My reactions seemed to involve values, and values often conflict.

A poet who values ambiguity isn’t going to appeal to readers who value clarity. And so people who love one poet find that they almost automatically dislike a poet who upholds different values.

If Donald Davie didn’t actually say that one can more readily serve God and Mammon than admire both Pound and Stevens, he should have.

I’m thinking about things that I should have thought about at 22, when an English professor flipped the light on for me.

I was about to graduate from a university when the counselors discovered that I didn’t have a single credit of English. Since my degree had involved a lot of writing, it seemed pointless to make me take freshman composition. So some dean decided that justice would be served if I took a sophomore poetry course.

I went with a sour attitude. Three weeks into the course I vowed that I would be a lifelong reader of poetry.

I’m grateful, but I missed a lot by not spending more time in the English Department. I am just now getting to some of the questions I should have explored 45 years ago.

Why, exactly, do I react so strongly in favor of one poet and so strongly against another? Is this just taste or are these reactions connected to my values in some way?

When someone is to be consulted on some puzzling question, it’s often Montaigne for me. Here he is, writing about the poetry and criticism of his day:

 

Here is something of a marvel: we now have far more poets than judges and connoisseurs of poetry. It is far easier to write poetry than to appreciate it. At a rather low level you can judge it by the rules of art: but good, enrapturing, divine poetry is above reason and rules. Whoever can distinguish its beauties with a firm and settled gaze does not in fact see it all, no more than we see the brilliance of a flash of lightning.

 

I’m still thinking, but I’ve been warned.

• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 260. The note about Donald Davie comes from Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets; London: Phoenix, 1998, p. 707. I think the remark is more Schmidt than Davie.

What critics say about poets

 I have been reading about the poet Randall Jarrell’s criticism and have repeatedly came across the claim that he helped revive the reputations of several poets, mainly Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, but also William Carlos Williams.

It’s hard for me to fathom that any of those poets ever needed help. I can’t imagine anyone not admiring their work.

But I’m no scholar. I have no idea what the climate was like in English departments when Randall was writing criticism. (Jarrell’s first volume of collected prose, Poetry and the Age, was published in 1953. He died in 1965.)

One of the preoccupations of this series of notes is the role of the common reader in keeping alive the work of neglected writers. I’ve thought less about the role of critics and scholars. In many cases, those roles are combined. Jarrell taught English and wrote about poetry for periodicals.

William Carlos Williams was a physician, rather than an English scholar or critic, but he tried to promote the works of younger authors he admired.

When David Ignatow’s first book, Poems, was published in 1948, Williams wrote: “These poems, the best of them, ought to be printed on pulp and offered at Woolworth’s, a dime a copy. They’d sell, too. For these are poems for the millions.”

Williams said that good writing can touch the humblest lives and did so in Ignatow’s poems. I can’t read Ignatow without thinking of that line.

• Source: Several good articles about Randall Jarrell’s criticism are online, including Brad Leithauser, “’No other book’: Jarrell’s criticism,” The New Criterion, April 1999. It’s here:

https://newcriterion.com/issues/1999/4/ldquono-other-bookrdquo-randall-jarrells-criticism

So short, so telling

 William Carlos Williams tells a beautiful story about the love of an old couple in a short poem called “The Act.”

He and she were arguing about whether to cut the roses, so beautiful in the rain.

            Agh, we were all beautiful once.

That’s what she said before she put the roses in his hand.

• Sources and notes: You can find “The Act” here:

https://readalittlepoetry.com/2010/11/25/the-act-by-william-carlos-williams/

Every once in a while, I get the urge to try to explain why Williams was better than whatever poet is being promoted as the great American poet. It’s probably just a character flaw, but there is more at “Marking the Day: W.C. Williams,” Sept. 17, 2022.

Magnolias in bloom

 The southern magnolias are blooming all over the piedmont. I saw a spike of a flower on Magnolia grandiflora on April 8. A month later, the show is on.

If you haven’t seen a southern magnolia bloom, the show goes like this: The flower spike looks like a long finger. It gradually swells, first into the shape of a candle flame and then into the shape of a pear. The creamy white flowers finally emerge, and they are big, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, the size of a salad plate or a dinner plate.

The flowers give way to burrs — “spherical, cone-like fruiting clusters,” is what the botanists call them — but boys who scoop them off the ground for ammunition in battles with friends call them burrs. Battles involving little boys happen later in the year, when the burrs are hard and filled with red seeds. At this point, the burrs are fuzzy and look like a big rabbit’s foot.

You see flower spikes, flowers and burrs on the same tree now.

There are other species of magnolia, of course, but M. grandiflora is dominant. I saw the buds on M. liliiflora Feb. 7 and full flowers in March. I have not seen any buds on bigleaf magnolia, M. macrophylla.

Learning to see a little better

 One recent effort at self-improvement: a series of classes on watercolor painting.

(Those who suspect the unseen hand of the Wise Woman in these doings would be on the right track.)

I will not become a good artist, but I’m at least beginning to see what I missed. I’m learning to find the edges in things I look at. I’m also learning to see values, not just color. That is, I’m learning to pay more attention to shadows.

I think I’m learning to see better. (A bit ironic, now that I’m at the age where the doctor talks about cataracts.)

I’m glad I’m learning now, but I wish that drawing and painting had been a much larger part of my education. It seems to me that drawing might be as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.

What can we say about fairness?

 The difference in net worth of the average Black family and the average white family: $840,000.

I don’t think you can accept that number and still believe in the fairness of our economic system.

I’m always willing to hear arguments. But that number is the third torpedo, as the old salts used to say in the navy. The phrase means that, at some point, the burden of proof shifts. When you hear that third explosion you can’t presume that the ship will stay afloat.

In a lot of the discussion about race, you hear that you can’t possibly imagine what this or that is like.

Actually, just about all of us can imagine the difference that $840,000 would make in terms of being able to get mortgage on a house.

The number is big in a couple of senses. It’s a large number in terms of the average family’s wealth. And it’s large in terms of consequences: It affects what a family can think about in terms of educating the children and planning for retirement.

I came across the number while reading articles by and about Dr. William A. Darity, a professor at Duke University. Darity is on my list of interesting thinkers whose work I plan to follow.

• Sources: Basic information on Dr. William A. Darity can be found here:

https://sanford.duke.edu/profile/william-darity/

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20211690

Lamentation 1

People that I admire have stopped letting their rage take over. One suggested that, instead of erupting, it might be good to write a poem.

At every red light

he stopped, head bowed, reverently,

over his cellphone.

This one is numbered. Just guessing, but it might be one of many.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo

 I have been to the birthplace of Ignacio Zaragoza, the hero of the Battle of Puebla on Cinco de Mayo, 1862.

I've been many times. Zaragoza was born in 1829 at Bahía del Espiritu Santo. It was then in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas. If you go to Goliad, Texas, you can't miss it.

Few people who celebrate Cinco de Mayo know what it's about or that the young general who won the famous battle on that date was born in Texas. 

During the American Civil War, the United States was fighting for its life and was in no position to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. The French moved in.

The conventional wisdom was that Mexican forces couldn't meet a European army in a pitched battle on equal terms. The Battle of Puebla didn't win the war, but it proved that the conventional wisdom was spectacularly wrong.

I used to go to Goliad to get my cultural bearings. You can't really understand Texas without understanding some of the history that occurred there. 

The history is difficult and complicated. And most of the state's political leaders want to make it illegal to teach it honestly in the public schools.

Here's one small instance of how complicated it is: General Zaragoza was just 6 during the Texas Revolution. When he was born, his father was a sergeant in the Mexican army and was loyal to Mexico. The general’s mother was a Seguin, a family of famous revolutionaries who fought for the independence of Texas.

Many Spanish-speaking families have relatives on both sides of the border. It’s one of the reasons Texas, for all its faults, is such a fascinating place.

Hyde: 'Alcohol and Poetry'

 I have tried to read John Berryman’s Dream Songs and failed.

It’s almost an allergic reaction. Something about Berryman’s poetry affects me — and not in a good way or in a way that I understand.

I wanted to at least understand my reaction, but books on Berryman didn’t help.

I got to the point where I was no longer willing to invest hours on this question, but when I came across Lewis Hyde’s pamphlet, I was willing to give him 45 minutes.

It was time well spent. I’m clearer, though still perplexed.

Hyde analyzes the connection between writers and alcoholism.

I think this is where I stumble: 

If you like old blues tunes, you grasp this: Suffering is an activity. It’s about something. The woman across town has done you wrong, and it’s going to hurt for a while. But the suffering will end, and you’ll move on.

In Hyde’s telling, anxiety, rather than suffering, is a symptom of alcoholism. Anxiety is not focused on anything — not about anything. And it’s a state, rather than an event, so it doesn’t end.

I know people who appreciate Berryman’s poetry. But I’m among those that should stick to old blues tunes.

• Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking; The Dallas Institute, 1986. It’s available at Hyde’s website:

https://lewishyde.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/18AlcoholandPoetry.pdf

The Thomason tracts

 We know some things about the English Civil War because George Thomason, bookseller at the Rose and Crown in London, collected 14,942 pamphlets, 7,216 newspapers and other items from 1640 to 1661.

Yesterday’s note mentioned that pamphlets could have documentary value.

The Thomason tracts are an example. All ages should have such a collection.

 You can find out what people — great and ordinary — were thinking about the events of their times. There are speeches, debates and sermons. There are poetry and plays.

During the war and restoration, people continued to go about the business of making a living, courting beloveds, burying the dead, and reading literature. An awful lot of what they did and thought is here.

Thomason knew what was being printed during that era would be important. And so he collected, despite the enormous trouble and expense.

He had the materials — 22,255 items — bound in 2008 volumes. They eventually were acquired by the British Museum, which turned them over to the British Library in 1973.

The trustees of the museum had a catalog of the collection printed in 1908. G.M. Fortescue, keeper of printed books, wrote the preface.

Fortescue said Thomason collected just about everything printed in London. Thomason was content to get the London reprints of works published in Edinburgh and Scotland. He collected some, but not all, of the works printed by regional presses, including those in Oxford and Cambridge.

If there’s a hole in collection, it’s in Quaker tracts. That was a remarkable era for Quaker writing. Thomason had 44 pamphlets by George Fox and 24 by James Naylor, but that was far from a complete collection. Fontescue suggests that Thomason, a Presbyterian, simply didn’t like them.

• Source: You can find the two-volume catalog of the collection here:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/thomason-tracts

Orwell: ‘Pamphlet Literature’

 George Orwell said pamphleteering had a revival beginning about 1935. Orwell rejoiced at the trend. But he said almost all the pamphlets he’d collected were trash. 

The reason why the badness of contemporary pamphlets is somewhat surprising is that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own.

I think that sentence is still true today.

Orwell, who was writing during World War II, described three main features of his age. It was, he said, a time:

• when political passions were high and people were polarized.

• when it was hard for ordinary people to be heard through traditional channels.

• when organized lying had become an industry.

For plugging the holes in history, the pamphlet is the ideal form.

I think that sentence is still true today.

Pamphlets are inexpensive and flexible. People can produce them without having to find a big publisher. People can try to persuade their neighbors on a topic they feel passionate about.

Orwell talked of plugging the holes in history. I’d say pamphlets have a documentary role. The pamphlet can be to literature what documentary photography is to the visual arts.

Historians often wonder what people of an earlier age were thinking about a topic that is now simply baffling. They should look for pamphlets.

• Source: George Orwell, “Pamphlet Literature”; New Statesman and Nation, Jan. 9, 1943. The essay can be found here:

https://orwell.ru/library/articles/pamphlet/english/e_pl

Collegiality is a fragile thing

 Maureen Dowd has a column in The New York Times about the atmosphere in old-time newsrooms. It’s a lament for things lost.

When I went to work at 14, I was told that the editor kept a bottle in the lower left hand drawer of his desk. That was by tradition. It’s what lower left-hand drawers were for. The drawer was opened only in emergencies.

The rogues of the press tell good stories about the old days, but the real loss is the loss of collegiality. I’ve heard the same lament, oddly, from scholars.

Where I remember a sports writer and a society columnist giving advice to a cop reporter on how to write a murder story, I’ve heard professors in the sciences recalling how they used to talk to specialists in history, philosophy and literature who knew something about their field. The conversations from different perspectives, different disciplines, were animated, often lengthy and sometimes spilled over into a bar.

People from different backgrounds learned from each other, and it was all great fun. But a lot of the fun seems to be in the past. People are too busy grading exams, publishing papers or chairing committees to talk.

I think the atmosphere in common places — especially places that deal in ideas — is vital. I also think it’s too soon to lament. These conversations have died in some places but live on in others.

It seems to be partly a question of values. Lively conversation occurs in places where it's valued.

If I were young again, I'd try to find a place where people were having interesting conversations and try to figure out how to work there.

• Source: Maureen Dowd, “Requiem for the newsroom”; The New York Times, April 29, 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html?smid=tw-share