Stone Mountain, late August

 It’s been a while since I’ve caught up on walks through the woods. Here are the highlights:

• The muscadines are ripe. We saw the remains of black and dark purple grapes everywhere on the trail. The scientific name is Vitus rotundifolia. My father, as a boy in West Tennessee, would eat them until he got sick. I love muscadine jam and biscuits.

• All month, I’ve been watching common elephant’s-foot, Elephantopus tomentosus. It started blooming in late July and is still going, with lovely little purple flowers above dark green leaves that look like the colonial tri-cornered hats. It’s everywhere: deep woods, vacant lots, lawns.

• Bindweed, in genus Convolvulvus, is putting out striking blue flowers in the shape of a pentagon. The blue is the color you see in the French flag. There are perhaps 250 species in the bindweed family, which is cosmopolitan. Many people call the plants with pink flowers morning glories.

• American burnweed, Erechtites hieraciifolius, is heading. It’s a bit like a 7-foot dandelion. The flowerheads are in casings that remind me of pistol cartridges. The cylinders look perfectly round, as if they were machined. Burnweed is sometimes called fireweed. It’s among the first species to return after land has been burned.

• Carolina buckthorn, Frangula caroliniana, is putting out fruit, although  “drupes” is proper word; think of plums or olives, a fruit with a central seed. The drupes, which are the size of small marbles, were green in mid-August and are pink-red now. They’ll ripen to purple-black this fall. People eat them, and birds love them.

• Creeping cucumber, Melothria pendula, is a climbing vine with five-part yellow flowers, about an inch across. The fruits do look like a small cucumber, but they’re poisonous.

Finding one's way

 Robert Penn Warren didn’t like the idea of “finding oneself.” It implies that there’s a pre-existing self to be found out there somewhere, kind of like a Platonic form. 

He didn't like the image of an Easter-egg hunt in which we all dash about, each trying to find our right or true self.

Warren’s complaint was that it’s all too passive. The self is not found but created.

Any time you run into a conceptual problem it’s a good idea to check your metaphors. 

One of the classic ones involves an archer who takes aim at a target and shoots. The purpose of the archer is decided before any activity begins. And so ancient students of philosophy took aim and, in old age, judged their lives by how close to they come to the target imagined long ago.

But consider another metaphor: an oak tree that is trying to grow so that its leaves reach the light way up in the canopy of the forest. Speaking metaphorically, we could say that the tree’s growth includes many discoveries, great and small, along the way. When an ancient hickory falls nearby, the oak’s leaves turn toward the light. New limbs grow that way. When small roots and root hairs run into to rock, they grow around the obstacle and find nutrients in other places.

The flight of an arrow does not allow for corrections and changes in the way that the growth of a tree does. It seems to me that we learn a lot along the way.

The glamor of cowboying

 Yesterday’s note about a dream prompted memories.

The cow that hooked me when I was young left me bruised. But the real wound was to my pride: the dressing down I got from my grandfather for walking between a cow and her calf. That might not sound like a first-degree offense, but the underlying complaint was that I was working in a place that wasn’t without its dangers and I wasn’t paying attention.

It wasn’t my only blunder.

A 1,200-pound cow is dainty compared to a 2,000-pound bull. When the bull was in a good mood, he would stick his muzzle into my coveralls and filch range cubes from my pockets. When I once got between him and a heifer at an inappropriate time, he tossed me over a barbed-wire fence. I flew like Superman for a while and cleared the barbs but landed in a briar patch on railroad right of way.

The worst was when I was still a teenager. I was helping my grandfather — then considered ancient, but in fact younger than I am now — to give a pill to a sick calf. As you’d expect from animals that ruminate, calves have a remarkable ability to spit up pills that have been forced down their throats. So I wrestled the calf down, while my grandfather stuck a huge pill into the end of some clear plastic tubing, rammed the tube past the calf’s throat and used a supple willow switch to dislodge the pill into the calf’s stomach.

To my amazement, the calf’s mother didn’t gore and trample us, although she danced around us hysterically, bucking like a horse. When the deed was done, I released the calf and stood up, turned around and was raising my arms in victory when she kicked — both back hooves.

I still do not know how she got behind me.

I stayed in bed for several days.

My grandfather thought I ought to try hard to get into college because I wasn’t exactly stellar as a cowhand.

The surprise attack

 In the dream, a 1,200-pound Brahma cow fixes me with a stare. I know what’s coming and start running, although I know it’s useless.

She hops a fence like a deer and comes after me with long black horns. I don’t die. I’m not trampled. I am hooked, though, and if a couple of ribs aren’t broken they are pretending to be.

Some people have dreams of their working days or student days. I’m surprised that I still have dreams of cow-working days.

But the cow of my dreams was once a real cow. Her markings, her coloring, her horns were perfect. And those eyes. When I woke up, I felt my left side, just to make sure.

Best guess at what’s going on: I’ve been reading Susan M. Tiberghien’s book on writing. She’s studied enough psychology to teach at C.G. Jung Centers and she urges writers to tap into their dreams. It’s pretty conventional advice, but I’ve been resistant. Tiberghien says Martin Luther prayed that he would have no memory of his dreams. I come from a line of folks who would have recited Luther’s prayer had they known about it.

I’m reading Tiberghien because I finished a long essay and have started a short story, more piddling than writing at this point. But I’m guessing the cow came out of that pasture.

• Susan M. Tiberghien, One Year to a Writing Life; Cambridge, Mass.: De Capo Press, 2007.

A sociologist sets an example

 Howard S. Becker, a sociologist who studied outsiders and the notion of deviance, died recently.

I was not aware of his work. His Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance is now on the long list of books I want to read.

He’s mentioned here because he’s a brilliant example of my bias that people who live interesting lives should write some kind of autobiography.

I went from knowing nothing about Becker to knowing something about an original thinker that I’d somehow missed because of Elsa Dixler’s fine obituary. Because Becker took the time to write about himself — explain himself in a way — I’m learning more.

Becker’s autobiography is a collection of essays. I’ve just read the first, “The New Yorker and Me.” Becker was a social scientist who started his autobiography by thinking about the influence that an example of good writing — as opposed to pedestrian writing — had on his life.

It was an inspired choice, I think.

Come on now. One short essay about one aspect of your life. Is that too much to ask?

• Sources: Elsa Dixler, “Howard S. Becker, Who Looked at Society With a Fresh Eye, Dies at 95”; The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2023. You can find it here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/books/howard-s-becker-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Howard S. Becker, Here and There: A Collection of Writings; San Francisco: Wise Guy Press, N.D. You can find a nice edition here:

https://www.howardsbecker.com/images/books/here-and-there.pdf

Leaders in undemocratic places

 Yesterday’s note included a comment by the great but flawed conductor John Eliot Gardiner about orchestras. They are undemocratic, he said. Someone has to be in charge.

I grew up in the Navy and am familiar with that ethos. If you are on a submarine that is being attacked with depth charges, you can’t really form a committee, break out Robert’s Rules, and find consensus on the best course of action.

Someone must make a split-second decision, issue clear orders — and the crew must leap to carry them out.

It’s more complicated than it sounds. Crews that don’t trust don’t leap. Crews that have doubts about their leaders perform badly.

In my view, the former president who was recently indicted in Atlanta was a terrible president. But he would have been worse as a naval commander. What would you do if you had a commander who had unwavering support — but only if you counted less than half the crew? What if it were obvious that most of the crew just didn't trust him? Would you risk a billion-dollar boat carrying nuclear weapons on a hunch that everything might turn out all right?

I heard some fascinating arguments about leadership.

The officers hoping to command a submarine were weeded out ruthlessly. Some got close. Some who did well as executive officers, second in command, just could not perform as commanders.

The tradition then was to give the poor fellow — they were all men then — a bottle of whisky with orders to a shore station to await retirement.

A note on 'stroppy'

I learned the word “stroppy” in a heartbreaking way. 

The word is new to me, but Merriam-Webster says it’s been around since 1951.

“Stroppy” means touchy or belligerent, and John Eliot Gardiner, in my view the world’s greatest conductor, used it. He was accused of striking a singer after a performance. He apologized and withdrew from a tour.

The New York Times article cited a 2010 interview in which he said:

 

I can be impatient, I get stroppy, I haven’t always been compassionate. I made plenty of mistakes in my early years. But I don’t think I behaved anything like as heinously as you have heard. The way an orchestra is set up is undemocratic. Someone needs to be in charge.

 

If I had to choose one musical hero, it might be Gardiner. I’ve listened to many of his recordings, but his recording of Mozart’s Requiem left me thunderstruck. The singers were Barbara Bonney, Anna Sofie von Otter, Hans Peter Blochwitz and Willard White.

To me that recording is a good test. If you don’t know whether classical music is for you, listen to it. If you come away unmoved, you probably can move safely on to other genres of music, other kinds of art.

It might make you want to sell all that you own, spend it all on classical music and see if there is anything else — anything at all — so wondrous.

“Stroppy” isn’t used in my circles, but most of my years have passed in the South. The dictionary says the word might be a based on “obstreperous.” The only person I know who used that word was my father, who might have had an obstreperous son.

• Source:  Javier C. Hernández, “Maestro Accused of Striking Singer at Performance Apologizes”; The New York Times, Aug. 24, 2023.

A little experiment

 One more note on Mary Oliver, and I’ll try to move on. Here she is, in a conversation with broadcaster Krista Tippett, sneaking in some advice to writers: 

Oh, I very much advise writers not to use a computer.

 

I learned to type when I was 13 and got my first newspaper job when I was 14, writing high school sports. I’m in a deep rut when it comes to keyboards.

But Oliver’s line was so sure, so definitive, that I determined to conduct a little experiment on myself. The past few mornings, I’ve been working with a pencil and stack of index cards. We’ll see what happens.

• Source: Mary Oliver, “Mary Oliver: I got saved by the beauty of the world,” an interview with Krista Tippett; On Being, Feb. 5, 2015.

A writing lesson from Mary Oliver

 In reading Mary Oliver’s essays, maybe the lesson for writers is this: If you are going to write about the meaning of your life or your most deeply held beliefs, write about something else.

The essay “Staying Alive,” which I described as a good autobiography, is about foxes. At least it has some of the best anecdotes about foxes I’ve seen.

Her essay “Sister Turtle” is of course about turtles, but if it’s not also about deeply held beliefs I don’t know what those things might be.

She talks of how those of us with inherited wealth — and by that she means the thoughts and ideas or writers and thinkers who came before us — have a responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. She says that the life devoted to that ideal is marked by curiosity and respect.

The essay is about turtles. But if human beings had to have a creed that we all could recite with together, I could live with that one.

• Source: Mary Oliver, Upstream; New York: Penguin Press, 2016. “Staying Alive” is on pp. 13-22, and “Sister Turtle” is on pp. 49-61.

He was surprised, not pleased

 Because the bank of the pond was steep, I didn’t see the heron and he didn’t see me until the last moment.

It was a great blue, Ardea herodias. He was so big, and we were so close I must have jumped when he took off. The Wise Woman supposed I’d come across a snake. She didn’t see the bird. The heron flew low, shielded from her sight by the pond’s banks.

I saw great blues often in Galveston and along Zarzamora Creek in San Antonio. I’ve seen a couple here in the Georgia Piedmont. Wading, they are skinny and gawky, all angles. In flight, they are improbably graceful.

This one had a wingspan of more than 6 feet and might have weighed 5 pounds.

I’ve been thinking of the poet Mary Oliver recently. Her description of the great blues: “angels carved by Giacometti.”

Mary Oliver’s ‘Staying Alive’

 Mary Oliver was reserved about the abuse she’d suffered as a child. She acknowledged it without allowing herself, her conversation or her interviewers to stay there.

In her essay “Staying Alive,” she said this:

 

And you must not, ever give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

 

I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, and bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet.

 

But she talked of two things that called to her: “the summoning world,” the wonderful things in nature that are more interesting than one’s own anger and bitterness, and “the thing that one does,” in her case the making of poems. She said that

 

having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

 

I’d say that essay was her autobiography.

• Sources and notes: Mary Oliver, Upstream; New York: Penguin Press, 2016. The essay “Staying Alive” is on pp. 13-22. The quotations are on pp. 19-20.

In May 2017, Penguin Press announced that it had acquired an untitled biography of Mary Oliver by Lindsay Whalen. When Oliver died, Whalen wrote a moving article: “How Mary Oliver’s Biographer Finally Met the Legendary Poet”; Vulture, Jan. 18, 2019. A note said the biography was forthcoming. But that’s the last I’ve heard of it.

These letters require stamps

 I recently discovered The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society, based in Swanage, Dorset, UK. It gives me hope and strikes me with guilt.

I receive a handwritten letter regularly from my friend Melvyn, a professor of medicine who is still practicing and teaching at 92.

I reply with a typed letter. I got my first newspaper job when I was 14. I typed my stories, three-paragraph accounts of high school games.

Once you start typing, it’s downhill, I’m afraid. I typed at work, so why not type school papers? Handwriting skills, never good, atrophied. I can make notes that I can read, occasionally, but such an upbringing doesn’t do much for the ability to write a legible hand.

Note that I’m making excuses. I feel guilty because I think that the exchange is not equal, that my friend’s handwriting being more valuable than my typing.

But there’s this: This exchange of letters has been going on for years. Both of us communicate with other people using email and text messages. But these letters we send to each other are on paper and go by post.

As members of the Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society say, each one feels like a gift.

I’ve been trying to figure out why. And I’ve decided it’s not the handwriting, although it’s wonderful. It’s the time.

E-mail is quick and efficient. There are rules — written and unwritten — for replying promptly.

All those rules don’t apply to the traditional letters. Above all, there’s no expectation of an immediate reply.

And so I’ll pose a question — about my friend’s life, his habits or his pleasure or displeasure in the book he’s reading — and I don’t expect a quick reply. The reply that comes back is not from impulse. It’s considered and reasonable — and that’s possible only when someone is not in a rush and is taking his time.

That’s the gift, I think. That time.

A warning too late

 Maybe yesterday’s note on B.F. Skinner should have come with a warning label. I tried to imagine what one might look like.  

Warning: Please understand that as a reader with no background in psychology, I’m not unsympathetic to Skinner, just mystified. I read Skinner with the same wonder with which I read Bishop Berkeley. I marvel at the ingenuity of the thought and, at the same time, can’t imagine using the conceptual framework of either fellow to address problems.

 

I did not intend to imply that just because I could not think of a way to use the concepts that I think they are useless.

I think of concepts as machinery for doing practical work. I think of philosophy as tinkering with machinery when it’s cranky.

Professor Skinner’s advice on writing

 It might surprise you that the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner offered some advice on writing.

When I was a student, Skinner was the behaviorist. He thought that thinking is simply a behavior and that it’s better to exhibit looking-at-it behavior in these terms: our verbal responses are the ideas, rather than expressions of ideas, which suggests something “deep inside us” — a self, a soul, a spirit, a mind — that simply isn’t there.

You can see that he’s not going to offer any advice about finding our center or going deep inside ourself for story ideas.

I’m not competent to say anything about psychology and so will not.

What I found interesting about the advice is that it’s conventional. Skinner’s views on fixing a time and place to write daily are shared by artsy people who try to find their center and try to find something deep within themselves.

But of course Skinner would see the value in habits. If you write at the same time, you’ll take advantage of an organic tendency to establish and maintain a circadian rhythm.

I don’t know how to resolve the paradox that some of Skinner’s conventional advice strikes me as original. We’ve all been told that we should encourage ourselves by writing in a place we like. But if anyone else has mentioned the importance of writing in a place that smells good, I haven’t seen it.

One point that was fascinating to me was his casual comment about private verbal behaviors aimed at reinforcing the production of verbal behaviors to be shared with other organisms. I love this calculation: If you write 50 good words an hour for two hours a day, you’ll put out 35,000 words a year — a book every two or three years.

• Source: B.F. Skinner, “How to Discover What You Have to Say — A Talk to Students,” The Behavior Analyst, 1981, 4, No. 1, (Spring), 1-7. It can be found here:

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~catania/ABACNJ/bfs%20how%20to.pdf

Brecht: ‘The Unseemly Old Woman’

 One of the biases of this collection of notes is that some writing of recent years is as illuminating as the ancient scriptures.

Bertolt Brecht’s story is as good as a parable — perhaps better, because I’m at an age where the topic of aging is, well, relevant.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read it and think you might, stop here.

The narrator says Grandfather died when Grandmother was 72. She lived in a big house. One of her sons — the narrator’s uncle — had a big family living in crowded quarters and wanted to move in. Grandmother didn’t invite him.

Instead, Grandmother began to hang out with a cobbler and other disreputable people. Uncle’s letters focused exclusively on Grandmother’s behavior and became increasingly hysterical.

When the narrator’s father visited Grandmother, she showed no interest in accompanying him to see Grandfather’s grave.

When you come to think of it, she lived two lives in succession. The first as daughter, wife and mother; the second simply as Mrs. B, an unattached person without responsibilities and with modest but sufficient means. The first life lasted some sixty years; the second no more than two.

 

When Grandmother died, the narrator was struck by how small she was, but there was no smallness.

 

She had savoured to the full the long years of servitude and the short years of freedom and consumed the bread of life to the last crumb.

 

I like the story for a couple of reasons.

For people who write: We’ve been told “Show, don’t tell.” Brecht does just fine telling.

For people who are old: In younger days, we chose the circumstances of our lives, the roles of “daughter, wife and mother” in this case. When those circumstances change, we must choose again. Otherwise, choices are made for us.

• Source: Bertolt Brecht, “The Unseemly Old Woman” was republished in Real Life: Ten Stories on Aging, edited by Patrick McKee and Jon Thiem; Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 1994, pp. 32-7. The quotations are on pp. 36-7.

Orbweavers in the woods and at home

While the eyes of the country were on the courthouse in Atlanta, where a former president and his allies were charged with trying to steal an election, I was in the woods south of Stone Mountain. 

Going out, early in the morning, I was walking into the sun and could see the webs of orbweavers throughout the forest. They were everywhere. The webs caught the light, which came through the forest at a low angle.

On the way in, with the sun at my back, the webs were invisible. I tried to imagine a rational bug, a flying insect. Would it fly into the sun so it could see the danger? I wondered whether that kind of strategy is possible in nature.

With the light in my face, I could see the webs and their builders. But it’s also true that I have only recently wanted to see them. I only recently became interested in them.

This is the way I learn: I was able to identify a kind of common orbweaver, Leucauge venusta. Once I came to know it, I began to notice it. And since it’s a common spider, I began to see it everywhere.

The Wise Woman planted some flowers in the front yard and was dismayed when she saw signs of aphids. She talked of countermeasures. She was explaining this as we sat on the porch, and, as she talked, I noticed an orbweaver, working on a web near the beleaguered plants.

The spiders, like the Wise Woman, had made the same discovery. She saw pests. The spiders saw food.

The Wise Woman is not fond of spiders. But she agreed to let the web be. And so I have been watching with interest bordering on fascination.

Our house has three bird feeders, which are being visited now mostly by blue-gray gnatcatchers, and a hummingbird feeder, which does constant business. But it also now has a protected area for orbweavers.

At one point in my life, I promised myself that I would not be the type of old retired man who talked constantly about what he’d seen at the birdfeeder.

It’s worse than I imagined.

The ways of shedding trees

 I’ve begun to think that the tulip trees in Georgia are kin to the pecans in Texas. In Texas, a blackjack oak will stand up to a hurricane, while a pecan will shed limbs in a heavy mist or light drizzle. Tulip trees also shed mightily. And, yes, after the big storm, I'm still walking with my eyes mainly on the ground.

A poet's fine prose

 String Too Short to Be Saved is a collection of prose pieces written by a poet.

Donald Hall described a day in the life of his grandfather’s farm in “The Long Day.”

The piece is full of sharp images. We see Grandfather milking while reciting the poem “Lawyer Green” and we take a buggy ride to the store to pick up a bag of salt for the cattle. Since a bag of salt is a small purchase, the owner says he’ll just add the charge to the Grandfather’s bill for grain. It’s the way country people did business once.

Hall found some lovely phrases. When he was chopping firewood, he was careful because “the chopped sticks flew off sometimes like surprised birds.” When he recalled that Grandmother, in leaner times, had run a millinery shop out of the parlor, he said she sold “the hats worn to 40 churches.”

Book jackets are seldom instructive, but this one said the short pieces were stories. I’d have called them essays.

• Sources and notes:  Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1979. “The Long Day” is on pp. 71-95. For other notes on this book, see “Eureka!” July 17, 2023; “A trail of the mind,” July 28, 2023; and “Eccentrics and half-lived lives,” Aug. 13, 2023.

Eccentrics and half-lived lives

 One of the stories in Donald Hall’s String Too Short to Be Saved is about a character named Washington Woodward. (His real name was Freeman Morrison.) 

Woodward decided the world was not a good place to live in, and so he bought a few acres on Ragged Mountain in New Hampshire, built a cabin and lived there for 50 years.

He did odd jobs, but was largely self-sufficient. He paid his taxes by working on a road crew for a week or two each summer.

He could fix anything, and he appeared around the farm owned by Hall’s grandparents occasionally to repair machinery and to help with heavy chores. He was an excellent hand, but he didn’t come around often.

Hall despaired of him, rather than celebrated him. When his grandfather told stories about characters such as Woodward, Hall, even as a boy saw them in a different light.

 

So many of them lived a half-life, a life of casual waste.

 

The story on Woodward is called “A hundred thousand straightened nails.” Woodward made a practice of collecting materials he might need. He thought it was a sin to waste good materials. Here’s Hall’s summary:

 

The waste that he hated, I thought, was through him like blood in his veins. He had saved nails and waisted life … He worked hard all his life at being himself, but there were no principles to examine when his life was over … The life which he could recall totally was not worth recalling.

 

It’s a harsh judgment, and I’m not sure it’s fair. Perhaps it is. But Hall recalled this life thoroughly.

It’s one complaint about a book I like. The subtitle of Hall’s book is “Recollections of summers on a New England Farm.” I’ve written elsewhere about summers spent on a Texas farm, and perhaps I tend to see the past with feelings that color my vision. But I also think you can see these characters as Hall’s grandfather saw them. Some rural people lived with integrity in response to a world that they didn’t understand — and has never been completely understood. We tend to think that our own age is more open, more tolerant to eccentrics. Perhaps that’s just not so.

• Sources and notes:  Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1979, pp. 21 and 31-2. For a note on finding Hall’s book, see “Eureka!” July 17, 2023. And for another view of the same book, see “A trail of the mind,” July 28, 2023.

After the storm

 The storm on the East Coast that made headlines earlier this week hit the Georgia Piedmont. In our neighborhood, large trees were uprooted. Some fell across power lines. Two fell across roads, blocking them. For a day or two, we all drove carefully.

But human beings are impatient. Power lines were restored and roads were cleared.

I looked at the ground on our morning walks. It wasn’t just big trees. The way was littered with leaves, twigs, small branches, big limbs.

In the forest south of Stone Mountain, you see downed leaves, twigs, branches and trees everywhere you look. If you pause on the trail and scan 360 degrees, you will not see a clear way out. You will have to step around downed trees and brush anywhere you go.

The sun’s energy that was stored in all that plant tissue isn’t lost, isn’t hauled away in garbage trucks. Since the storm, small fungal threads have penetrated between the cells of the dead plants and are breaking them down. Bacteria are digesting the tissue. Invertebrates are chewing, clawing and gnawing.

It takes time, but all that fell — the countless leaves and the ancient trees — will be absorbed back into the life of the forest.

A particular kind of book

 David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen is a pleasing kind of book in two ways.

First, it’s a book about place. Haskell studies a square meter of earth on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee and sees the whole of nature.

Other writers have done similar things. The model is Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, published in 1789. A country clergyman wrote letters about the land, plants and animals in the place he called home. When we lived in San Antonio, I used to walk along Zarzamora Creek to see what a daily walk could teach me about the place. Those walks were as illuminating as any course I took in college. 

Second, I love The Forest Unseen because I think it’s vital for learned people to introduce difficult ideas into the common market. I think that’s vital in a democracy. My bias is that people in universities are under such pressure with workloads and publishing requirements that they have little time to think about the problems of the larger society. The larger society badly needs their expertise.

And, yes, I’m aware of how badly experts with real experience in, say, viruses are treated by demagogues. That’s precisely why these kinds of books are vital in a society where the majority — well informed or ill — rules.

I have never wanted vast sums of money. But if I had that kind of wealth, I think I’d endow a prize for books by real scholars written for the education of lay people. Rather than try to define the kind of book I’m thinking of, let me give examples: Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life in philosophy and Scott Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare in English. David George Haskell’ The Forest Unseen is a winner in the sciences.

Haskell: The Forest Unseen

 David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen is one of the best books I’ve read. It was published in 2012, but I’m just now getting to it.

The Wise Woman mentioned it as something I should have read long ago. She was, of course, right.

Haskell is an Englishman who studied biology at Oxford and Cornell and who now teaches at Sewanee. The premise of the book is that he declared a square meter of an old-growth forest in Tennessee to be a “mandala.” He paid attention to that little spot on the Cumberland Plateau with the devotion of a Buddhist monk. He visited it regularly for 12 months and described the changes of the seasons.

I’ll admit that part of the interest is personal. He’s describing a place that is similar to the Georgia Piedmont. I’ve learned something about my new home. But the book pleases me so much because it shows what a good observer can do by paying attention of a place, even a limited one. Haskell brings the universal knowledge that is supposed to be the ideal of the university to a local area, giving us an idea of the microbes, fungi, arthropods and other critters in the leaf litter. We get some lessons on physics, chemistry and geology as well as on botany, zoology and ecology. 

It's a wonderful picture of how complex the local places we call home are — and how much and how little we know about them.

Haskell says two things about observing that I thought were interesting: (1) It’s best to leave expectations behind. They color your observations, and just make the mind restless. It’s best to just allow the senses to be open as you look. (2) Paying attention is a process, rather than a feat. The mind tends to wander, and you have to gently shepherd it back to its task.

We live in an age in which people will tell you can’t take a real nature walk without spending a fortune on binoculars and other gear. I think you could get the gist of Haskell’s two suggestions and do fine.

He’s an unusual scientist. I now am in search of his recent books.

• Source: David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen; New York: Viking, 2012. His two suggestions for observers is on page 245.

Darwin's problem with wasps

 Yesterday’s note about a caterpillar and a parasitic wasp reminded me of David George Haskell’s account of watching wasps on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee.

This is from The Forest Unseen, one of the great books on nature:

 

The wasps’ frenzy has a sharp purpose. They hunt for caterpillars on which to lay their eggs. Wasp larvae will creep out of the eggs and bore into the caterpillars’ flesh, then larvae will eat caterpillar, slowly, from the inside out, leaving the vital organs until last. …

The wasps’ parasitic life cycle inspired one of Charles Darwin’s more famous theological comments. He thought the ichneumon’s trade was particularly cruel. These wasps seemed incompatible with the God he knew from his Victorian Anglican training at Cambridge. He wrote Asa Gray, the Presbyterian botanist at Harvard, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” For Darwin, these wasps were the “problem of evil” write in the script of the natural world.

 

For what it’s worth, I think most thinking about what philosophers call The Problem of Evil is hopelessly muddled. But I love how this passage illustrates the difficulty of being an observer. It’s hard to see what’s there, rather than what we would like to see or expect to see or hope to see.

• Source: David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen; New York: Viking, 2012, pp. 143-4.

A caterpillar and a wasp

 On a recent trip to Panola Mountain, we saw a black caterpillar with 16 orange dots in two rows. If it lives, it will become a Pipevine swallowtail, Battus philenor. It’s one of the loveliest butterflies I know.

I used to see them along Zarzamora Creek in Texas. I’ve told you about the caterpillars, their odd niche in the network of living things and the butterflies they become. It was pleasant to think that I would see them again in Georgia.

But a little further up the trail I saw — I think — a bluewinged wasp, Scolia dubia, which lays eggs in caterpillars. The wasp larvae eat the living caterpillar, bit by bit.

And so there on the mountain, just minutes apart, were two perceptions: one of wonderful beauty and one of horrible cruelty. Or so it seemed to me.

But the butterfly and the wasp are part of the same web. And the problem here is with the observer, not with nature.

It was a clear day. When we got to the outcrop of Panola Mountain, a mostly submerged mountain, we could see Stone Mountain, 13 miles to the north.

I thought, at first, that our line of sight went right over our home. The second thought: If I were a better observer, I’d say all of it was our home.

• For a note on Battus philenor in Texas, see “Toxic to most, but not to one butterfly,” Aug. 15, 2022.

The art of the item 4

 The daily notes that appear here have a family resemblance to the items in an old weekly newspaper.

On days when I wonder what I’m doing, I think the answer might start there, in the files of old newspapers.

The art of the item 3

 Rebecca M. Dale, quoting Katherine Hall’s bibliography, says E.B. White wrote 450 signed and 1,350 unsighned pieces for the New Yorker. Some were essays. Some were items in an editorial column, “Notes & Comment.” (White hated the editorial we.)

He often hit on the three themes he said were Thoreau’s:

• A person’s relation to nature.

• A person’s dilemma with society.

• A person’s capacity for elevating his spirit.

Break those three eggs, and you can make an omelet that looks and tastes like an item, the kind that White preferred.

• Source: E.B. White, Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976, Rebecca M. Dale, editor; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990, pp. ix-xi. Her introduction quotes White’s essay “A Slight Sound at Evening” on Thoreau’s three themes.

The art of the item 2

 The journalists of the Jazz Age riffed on items like musicians riffed on themes. Writers and sometimes magazines had their own versions.

The New Yorker called its distinctive items “newsbreaks.”

E.B. White, when he retired in 1976, reckoned he’d written 10,000. They were longer than the standard items — some I admire are about 200 words. But they are still short and wry. They were based on clippings from newspapers around the country and so reflected the experience of the great republic. They were sprinkled with urbane humor and wit.

They appeared under several standing headings, such as “Neatest Trick of the Week” and “Letters We Never Finished Reading.”

White’s unsigned item “Mysteries of Life” was an account of a meeting of British scientists in 1928. The scientists appeared close to an understanding of life’s secret through the investigation of the chemistry of the cell.

The anonymous observer read the story in the newspaper with awe — and then happened to glance at the fish tank. Frisky, the family’s pet snail, had given birth.

 

Nothing about Frisky’s appearance or conduct had given us the slightest intimation of the blessed event; and gazing at the little newcomer, we grew very humble, and threw the morning paper away. Life was as mysterious as ever.

 

I don’t believe that items, as a form, should be taught, analyzed or organized into taxonomies, so I use the word “classic” with fear, hoping this small group of readers will keep an indiscretion in confidence. But “Mysteries of Life” is a classic.

• Source: E.B. White, Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976; Rebecca M. Dale, editor, New York: Harper Perennial, 1990, p. 123.

The art of the item 1

In the old days, newspapers were made of items, short pieces — 30 to 100 words.

Later, editors decided that newspapers should be made of stories, which were longer. Now some newspapers seem to be made of pieces labeled analysis that are, despite appearances, shorter than the Iliad.

In my years as an editor, it was obvious to me that most readers liked items while most editors liked analysis pieces. Some of the editors who were most enthusiastic about long pieces were baffled by the decline of newspaper readership. (I thought that a newspaper should contain short and long pieces.)

Items are now mainly of historical interest, like linotypes and California job trays.

Items came in different kinds.

A straight item was a brief report, with the five Ws covered: who, what, when, where, why. 

An item with a twist offered two things: the objective report, one we could all see and agree upon, and a review of the same incident featuring another aspect, examining the story from another point of view. It was the contrast — the personal view set against what we could all see — that was interesting. They appeared on the editorial page. 

Early August

 The forest canopy is dense, and it’s noticeably cooler when you get into the woods. Several plants are flowering in the forests around the stone outcrops. The color scheme includes yellow, white and purple flowers.

Among the yellows:

• St. Andrew’s cross, Hypericum hypericoide. It’s a shrub, usually belt high or shorter. The flowers have four yellow petals.

• Evening primroses and sundrops, genus Oenothera.

• Sensitive peas, genus Chameacrista. Some of the species have leaves are “sensitive” to touch — when you touch them, they move.

•  Coreopsis, with serrated, rather than rounded, petals.

• Sneezeweeds, in genus Helenium. The flowers used to be dried and used as snuff.

I’ve already mentioned the goldenrods.

The white flowers I saw were flowering spurge, Euphorbia corollate and frostweed, Verbesina virginica. 

Flowering spurge is small and low to the ground, but it was putting out tiny white flowers in bunches. 

The frostweed, shoulder high, was in a stand at Arabia Mountain. The plants, loaded with white blooms, did look as if they were touched by frost, but that’s not the source of the common name. The plants have a tendency to split and ooze sap at first frost. The milky sap freezes and forms ribbons of ice.

Most of the purple blossoms are coming from pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana, and Maryland meadowbeauty, Rhexia mariana, which I’ve mentioned before. The earlier meadowbeauty flowers seemed whiter, with just a hint of purple. The blooms are purple now.

The pigeonwings are aptly named. The color reminds me of doves. We don’t have words that describe all the colors in the soft feathers of a dove’s breast.

Some naturalists see the shape of a mouse’s ear in the flowers of Clitoria mariana. It’s in the pea family, Fabaceae.

Baldwin on responsibility

 Before dropping out of high school, I read James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son.”

Baldwin was in his 40s then. About the time I discovered him, Baldwin had some conversations with the poet Nikki Giovanni that were recorded for broadcast. They were published as A Dialogue in 1973. Baldwin said:

 

“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”

 

Baldwin had a role in producing me. I read “Notes of a Native Son” and wanted to learn everything there was to know about him and the essay. The essay helped me to see how lives can be limited by religious beliefs and by racism. He helped me see that if I allowed myself to become a creature of the culture I grew up in, I’d deserve to live a life that was senselessly limited and limiting.

Last year, I marked the days of some of the people who shaped me. This year, those dates have passed, mostly, without comment. Here’s an exception. Today would have been Baldwin’s 99^th birthday.

The theory of practices

 What would it take for an action to be intelligible?

That’s a question from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

How would you know whether someone is praying, filling out a tax return or proposing marriage?

Human beings live in communities that have practices, ways of life, and our actions are or aren’t intelligible based on whether they fit into those practices. This is not a simple theory and there are obvious difficulties: Practices change, and things that make sense in one culture don’t in another. Consider the range of thinking about arranged marriages.

When we are in a philosophical mood, we sometimes muse that we can never really understand what is going on in someone else’s mind.

Wittgenstein says we understand what’s going on in other people’s minds all the time. Understanding another person’s intentions makes an action intelligible. If you were an anthropologist from Mars and knew nothing of humans and their ways, a game of chess would baffle you.

But the more you understand about the game — the practice of playing chess — the more the intentions of the players become clear to you. The more you understand the practice of the game, the more the players’ actions become intelligible. The actions make sense to you in the context of the practice of a game.

A couple of notes:

• One thing that might make this simple concept seem difficult: We might be fooled by the grammar into thinking that an intelligible action is a species of action. The adjective modifies the more general noun. But it’s the other way around. The intelligible action comes first logically. You have to come to grips with the actions that make sense before you can get to the actions that are simply bewildering.

• I’m less interested in the theory of practices than in the idea that some practices can lead to a good life while others can be disastrous. Even in a culture that can agree on little, you could get a consensus that the practice of learning from good books is better for you than the practice of taking opiates.