Stone Mountain, late September

 A year ago, fresh off the truck from Texas, all we noticed about the Georgia Piedmont was how green it was in October. This year, we’re already seeing the early color, small patches of yellow and red, mostly in the maples.

In late September, we’re seeing some leaves fall. Not a lot, but enough to keep you off your game. When you see movement in the woods, you expect to see a bird or squirrel. Now, it’s often a single leaf, falling early.

Frostweed, Verbesina virginica, is blooming in the woods south of Stone Mountain. A few lovely white blooms appeared in August, but there are more now. Frostweed is in the aster family.

Another member of the aster family, blue mistflower, Conoclinium coelestinum, has put out its purple blossoms.

The goldenrods, genus Solidago, are everywhere. I only thought we had a lot in Texas.

People here like dogwoods, in genus Cornus. You see them in yards as well as in the woods. The leaves are turning, and the drupes look like cranberries: they’re the reddest red.

Sleep temples and sacred snakes

 Hellas, the world of the ancient Greeks, had temples devoted to Asclepius. They are sometimes called sleep temples or dream temples.

Asclepius was the icon of medicine. Some people — Homer, for instance — thought he was a man, a doctor. Others thought he was a god or demigod. Myths tend to get more elaborate with age.

In ancient times, sick people went to the temple and slept overnight. They expected to see Asclepius or one of his daughters in a dream. The temple had physician-seers on staff who interpretated dreams. They’d recommend therapy based on your dream.

It’s a peculiar idea: the cure for what ails you comes from within in you, somewhere deep down, below the level of awareness.

It’s hard to tell what different Greek thinkers had in mind when they talked of psyche, which usually becomes soul or spirit in English. Some people believed the psyche was immortal. Some did not. But some people still have similar beliefs. If you believe that your cure must come from your subconscious, your self, your life, you might feel at home at an Asclepieion.

This is an oversimplified version. But it’s important to get the general idea because the details of ancient practices tend to strike us as creepy.

Trips to the temple usually started with catharsis, a cleansing and purging that might last days. The Greeks also had a word for this “temple sleep,” egkoimesis. It wasn’t waking, dreaming or sleeping in the usual sense; it was something else. It might have been induced by drugs. But if you were there, you were after guidance, rather than a good night’s sleep.

Asclepius was something of a trickster. He liked to appear in dreams as a dog, snake or rooster. Dogs and snakes were allowed to roam the temples. We see therapy dogs in hospitals now, but the snakes are harder for us to fathom.

Sacred snakes were a feature of life in Hellas. Even the gods quarreled when somebody killed somebody else’s sacred snake. Asclepius always carried a rod with a snake coiled around it. If that seems strange, remember that we have self-help writers who teach us how to get rid of stress, anxiety and guilty by just “letting go.” The snake was an obvious metaphor for that doctrine. A snake must shed its skin, leave part of itself behind, to grow.

And, if you’re wondering about the roosters, recall that at the end of Socrates’s life, he asked his friend Crito to offer a cock to Asclepius. The professor who endured my clumsy efforts to learn Greek was convinced it was the customary thank-you gift for a healer.

Why would anyone think of Asclepieia? My excuse was that I was reading Anne Carson, who mentioned them in an essay in praise of sleep.

• Source: Anne Carson, Decreation; New York: Vintage Books, 2005. “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” is on pp. 17-42.

Heading up the river

 At Island Ford on the Chattahoochee River, we saw a dozen Canadian geese on some flat rocks midstream. The geese would feed in the current — bobbing, rumps up, heads underwater — and then lounge on the rocks.

You can often hear geese on that stretch of the river. But when these geese decided to move, they seemed to have a debate. All the geese honked — it was a frenzy — for about 15 seconds until they suddenly flew upstream in unison.

They’re big birds. You can hear the rush of wings when one takes off. A dozen sounded like a small plane. But the honking … that was louder. The sound drowned out the Chattahoochee.

I'm stumped by the behavior. Was that a debate or an argument? Did some of the birds want to remain at the shoals, while others envisioned better fare upstream? Did they somehow reach a consensus? Or did one lead and the rest join in a group cheer to build morale for the journey?

Lamentation 2

 A sage suggested that, instead of letting irritation run to anger, one should write a poem instead. 

Cost high, portions small,

but the taste killed appetite.

So now I diet.

 

A bad meal — takeout at that — shouldn't make me lose my temper.  But I contain, if not multitudes, these two things: I am magnanimous in aspiration, grumpy in reality.

• Note: “Lamentation 1” appeared June 6, 2023.

A dialog at the hardware store

 The Old Guy at the Hardware Store really is an old guy, as old as me.

I explained that I had to put a hasp that could hold a lock on a hollow-core door.

“Do you realize how senseless that is?” he said. It wasn’t a question.

So I said: “I’ve been under adult supervision for decades now. It’s not what makes sense. It’s what she wants.”

“Oh, so your wife wants a lock on a place where you can’t put really one. And it’s got to be done — or else.”

“Or else.”

There was a long pause and I asked: “Any advice?”
“Don’t do it, man. It’s a job for a skilled carpenter.”

I nodded.

He said: “You know how those doors are made, don’t you.” That wasn’t a question either.

I said: “The door’s got a little wood around the perimeter, and the skin of the door is glorified cardboard.”

“Yep, and it’s just an eighth of an inch thick. That’s a pretty thin skin. Unless you’re good you’re going to punch holes in that door.”

“I thought I’d try a drywall anchor. Any advice?”

“Everybody swears by the metal ones. But they don’t set at an eighth of an inch. Your only hope is to try these little plastic ones. They might set at an eighth of an inch.”

I thanked him and got two packages.

“Wish me luck,” I said.

He snorted and said: “Don’t do it, man. It’s a job for a skilled carpenter.”

I went home and did what I do best: procrastinated. Then, while the Wise Woman was watching a movie, I taped the door with blue painter’s tape. I drilled carefully. I set the anchors slowly, turning the screws by hand.

Years ago, I was a barely passable handyman. Today there’s a lock on the door of the Wise Woman’s home office, a small but concrete bit of evidence that love can be transformative.

The transformation, sadly, is not about skill. It’s about what you’re willing to try.

Williams: 'Paterson'

 William Carlos Williams’s Paterson baffles me. It’s a long poem, but I couldn’t tell you whether it’s an epic. It’s about place — but I’d have a hard time telling you how Williams would have defined his sense of place.

I had wondered what excerpts Charles Tomlinson would include in his Selected Poems.

Paterson includes passages of prose, some of which comes from the police archives. Among those that made Tomlinson’s cut was the tale of how William Dalzell’s garden was trampled during a May Day outing of the German Singing Societies of Paterson. Dalzell was waiting the following year, still outraged and armed, determined to prevent even the slightest intrusion. He shot John Joseph Van Houten. We think tales of road rage and homeowner aggression are stories for our times. But this one was news in 1880.

Williams’s book is like an album of snapshots that somehow give you the history, natural history and social atmosphere of the place. The prose sections remind me of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, which is about the place we call the Americas. It’s a mosaic of anecdotes that somehow make up a much bigger picture.

That’ the prose of Paterson. The real test, of course, is what to say of the poetry, and I’m just not up to it. Williams was trying to find a new way of expressing new things — attitudes, customs and arrangements — that are distinctly modern. He was trying to find a new line, a new form.

 

Without invention nothing is well spaced, 

unless the mind change, unless

the stars are new measured, according

to their relative positions, the

line will not change, the necessity

will not matriculate: unless there is

a new mind there cannot be a new

line, and the old will go on

repeating itself with recurring

deadlines …

 

I’m not sure that he found it, that new mind that invents the new line.

I don’t see the world that way. But I like to read poetry because poets stretch the language, finding new ways to talk about the new ways we find to live.

• Source: William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson; New York: New Directions Books, 1985, p. 280.

A stand of partridge peas

 On June 21, I mourned the mowing of a vacant lot where I’d found dewberries. The damage was catastrophic, but the tract is all green now. The first responder to the crisis was partridge pea, Chamaecrista fasciculata.

The vacant lot — scraped and bare 90 days ago — is now green with partridge peas, wondrously thick, about 8 inches tall.

It’s a low-rent example of what the biologists call succession. In Texas, the pine forests and prairies were always in flux. A lightning strike would ignite the pine straw on the forest floor, and the woods would burn for days. When the damage was done, the first species to come back were grasses. Before the Europeans came, the buffalo would sometimes follow the new grass. They’d trample any tree seedlings that came up, keeping the woods at bay for a while. Then, little by little, the woods would encroach, the pine straw would build up, lightning would strike.

If I were going to teach a child biology, that’s the way I would do it. When we found a disaster — a county mowing crew in a vacant lot — we’d try to guess what species would come in to repair the damage.

Equinox, Stone Mountain

 It’s time to catch up with the woods.

• Low smartweed, Persicaria longiseta, is blooming. It’s everywhere in the Georgia Piedmont: deep woods, roadsides, vacant lots. It’s one of those inconspicuous plants that make up the weedy groundcover. They are overlooked — except for this time of year when the tiny flowers — I’d say magenta, but I’m not good with colors — are everywhere.

• Long leaf woodoats, in genus Chasmanthium, is common on the forest floor south of Stone Mountain. It’s a grass that tolerates shade. The distinctive seed heads mark the season with changes in color. They’re green in spring and khaki in summer. We’re getting the purple streaks now.

• On a trip to Panola Mountain, we saw purple and yellow blooms everywhere. Although this is Georgia Bulldogs country, black and red, I thought of my friend Pat Golden, an LSU grad who wore purple and gold in autumn. Bear’s foot, Smallanthus uvedalia, is in bloom — big yellow blossoms that look like sunflowers. It’s in Asteraceae, the daisy family. The leaves are shaped a bit like a bear’s track, I suppose. A lot of the purple flowers were coming from Georgia calamint, Clinopodium carolinianum, a shrub that’s usually no more than a foot tall. The blooms began in summer but they are plentiful now.

Out on the rock outcrops, Puck’s orpine, Sedum pusillum, was blooming. Its tiny white flowers look almost like a white moss.

William Carlos Williams: ‘Tract’

 I mentioned William Carlos Williams’s poem “Tract” the other day. I’ve mentioned it before.

Williams was capable of many things, and that early poem was different from the kind that I think of as the Williams poem — the kind with a single sharp image, tightly focused.

“Tract” is not that kind of poem. It begins:

            I will teach you my townspeople

            how to perform a funeral. …

The poem is a harangue on how to do it. He wants a rough wagon, rather than a hearse. And really, why would anyone think that the dead need glass windows in a hearse?

It’s almost a wise guy routine. When I read it, the voice in my head is the voice of a Jerseyman I met as a kid in the Navy.

Williams came back to this kind of poem decades later in a section from “Two Pendants: for the Ears.” The narrator’s mother, Elena, is dying in a hospital, and the poem is a record of the all the inane, zany and tasteless things that are said at the end. 

Both poems are near bonkers — and serious. “Tract” advises that mourners should walk behind the dead, exposed “to the weather as to grief.”

            Or do you think you can shut grief in?

I don’t think we humans can do much with grief. I’m not sure, but I think it’s the strongest force we contend with. I like both poems. 

• Sources: You can find “Tract” at Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45503/tract

I’ve been marveling at Charles Tomlinson’s edition of William Carlos Williams’s Selected Poems; New York: New Directions Books, 1985. “Tract” is on pp. 18-20 and a section of “Two Pendants: for the Ears” is on pp. 187-96.

For more on “Tract,’ see “Marking the Day: W.C. Williams,” Sept. 17, 2022.

Williams: ‘The Great Figure’

 William Carlos Williams’s “The Great Figure” seems like a pivotal poem.

Williams perfected a kind of poem that involves a single image, so vivid you can see it, touch it and sometimes smell it.

People who read poetry know some of his images: a red wheelbarrow, a tidy room in Nantucket with lavender and yellow flowers through the window, some chilled plums in the icebox.

But those images came a bit later.

“The Great Figure” is a numeral, No. 5, painted on a firetruck

 

moving

tense

unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls. …

 

Williams’s friend Charles Demuth was so taken by the image of a firetruck running through an urban canyon at night that he painted it. “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold” is in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Scholars say Williams’s poetry took a turn toward the vivid image, the concret object earlier. But “The Great Figure” appeared in Sour Grapes, published in 1921. It’s the first poem I have found where an image jumps out at me. I could see it. It raised an image in my mind, just as it raised a far more famous image in Demuth’s.

Some of Williams’s earlier poems are interesting. I think “Tract,” published in 1917 in Al Que Quiere!, is his first great poem. But for me, Williams found something wonderful when watched a big machine racing through the dark and thought to make note of a single — perhaps a minor — detail.

• Sources: You can find “The Great Figure” at Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51549/the-great-figure

But I’d recommend reading it here: William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson; New York: New Directions Books, 1985. That edition has been mind-expanding. Poems mentioned in this note include “The Great Figure,” p. 36, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” p. 56, “Nantucket,” p. 72, “This Is Just to Say,” p. 74, and “Tract,” pp. 18-20.

The things you hear

 Some days you go into the woods and see all kinds of things. Some days you don’t. And then there are days when you don’t see but hear. 

To the north, crows were cawing furiously. Then to the south a blue jay started complaining. Others joined in.

Were those the sounds of the armies converging? A war between species? 

Finally, a hawk screamed.

Crows are just incapable of leaving a resting hawk alone. If a crow sees a hawk, it calls its fellows and they mob it. I’ve seen red-tailed hawks, tired from long hunts, sitting forlornly on a limb while a half dozen crows got as close as they dared and screamed. The hawks are huge — linebackers among schoolboys. But they are not as nimble. 

I’ve never seen jays join crows in mobbing a raptor. I don’t know whether the jays were just alarmed by the passing hawk or whether they had joined the mob.

I’d love to be able to say what happened. But I didn’t see a thing.

Hauerwas on democracy and a good life

 If I had to name one Christian thinker I find interesting, I’d say Stanley Hauerwas. He’s a theologian and a retired professor.

I’m not a fan of sermons. But I was impressed by “Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life?”

Hauerwas is interesting because he took Trump’s followers seriously while dismissing Trump. Hauerwas asked: What happens when people who want to live a traditional life — people on a sheep farm, for example — find it almost impossible to do so because the rules the world plays by have changed?

Hauerwas says that ordinary people are built out of stories. A lot of people who live on farms and in small towns have stories about the creation of the natural world and about what made this country admirable, if not great. They have stories about what makes for good lives. And, if you are a certain kind of person, you must be able to live in a way that makes sense within the context of those stories. Otherwise, any talk of a good life is just not possible.

If you’re looking for the answer to the question of whether democracy can cultivate a good life, Hauerwas’s answer is no.

The shift from local to global markets had a lot to do with why so many of the rules changed. We are obsessed with the culture wars. But the heartland of the country isn’t hollowing out and small towns aren’t dying because of “wokeness.”

It’s not an easy sermon. Hauerwas holds that Christians — in their faith in different stories — are fundamentally different. Their job, he says, isn’t to make the democracy fairer or more just. In his view, that difference — in living by Christian stories rather than secular stories — is what makes the secular world stand out in relief.

I don’t understand that point. It seems to me that we are all in the boat, no matter how different our stories are.

But the sermon did help me understand the desperation of many of my neighbors. The fear is of losing a way of life. It's not just about the loss of political influence.

• Source: Stanley Hauerwas, “Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life? What Liberals Should Learn From Shepherds”; stanleyhauerwas.org, Nov. 2, 2016. You can find videos online. The text is at Hauerwas’s website.

The other place you know

 When we lived in San Antonio, we often drove into the Hill Country, just exploring. The recent trip to the Blue Ridge convinced me that northern Georgia will be the same kind of place for us: not the place where we live, but the other place that we know — a getaway, but a familiar one.

I’ve got so much to learn about the Piedmont that it seems nutty to start reading about the geology, botany and history of the Blue Ridge. But I have, and I’ve come across surprises.

As a young man, I ran across the Foxfire books and was impressed by the stories of people who lived so close to the land in Appalachia. But I had it in my mind that this was mostly about North Carlina and Tennessee. Actually, the Foxfire organization is in Rabun County, Ga. Its museum is by Black Mountain State Park.

Another surprise was the fascination with Bigfoot, or Sasquatch. I’d somehow gotten the impression that Bigfoot was part of the culture of the Pacific Northwest. But if you drive the narrow highways of northern Georgia, you’ll see silhouettes, cut from sheet metal, of the big fellow.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which describes itself as “the only scientific research organization exploring the bigfoot/sasquatch mystery,” says there have been 140 reports of sightings in Georgia.

I’m not able to think of Bigfoot as a biological creature. But I can appreciate his importance to small, rural communities that find tourists’ dollars helpful. 

• Notes: If you must, The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization’s table of reported sightings in Georgia is here:

https://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp?state=ga

William Carlos Williams's place

 William Carlos Williams is a poet of place. I wouldn’t say he was interested in environment — that’s too broad a word — or in a place as big as a nation, if that meant trying to form an identity as an American, as opposed to a European. Williams practiced medicine in what was then a small town 20 miles outside of New York City. Rutherford, N.J. is a place, and Williams described it in the language that grew out of that place.

I’ve come to think that one of the great questions to ask about poets is what they make of peasants, using that word in its ancient sense: the people who live in a place and who seem to be a permanent part of it.

If you are an Eliot or a Pound, you might be horrified by the ordinary folk and flee to Europe, where more cultivated souls exist. Williams stayed put and listened to the rubato in the speech of his neighbors.

What do I know of rubato?

I didn’t hear it until Charles Tomlinson, an English poet who was also a penetrating critic of poetry, pointed it out. Tomlinson edited and wrote the introduction to Williams’s Selected Poems. He talks about how Williams was marked by his place, his locality, his “earth-bound track.” Early in the essay, Tomlinson quotes Williams:

 

The only universal is the local as savages, artists and — to a lesser extent — peasants know.

 

Tomlinson appreciated his own place. He had a cottage in Gloucestershire. When Michael Schmidt, another poet and critic, wrote Tomlinson’s obituary, he mentioned Tomlinson’s admiration for Williams. Schmidt quoted Tomlinson:

 

I liked his ability to deal with phenomena unegotistically — a piece of paper blowing across the street, a yellow chimney emitting smoke, all the miscellany and detritus of what just lies around.”

 

I think that’s what being local, being part of a place, means.

Two notes: I am thinking about Williams because he was born on this date in 1883. I am thinking about Tomlinson because Michael Leddy, who posts at Orange Crate Art, was kind enough to point the way.

• Sources: William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson; New York: New Directions Books, 1985.

Michael Schmidt, “Charles Tomlinson obituary”; The Guardian, Aug. 27, 2015.

Orange Crate Art is at https://mleddy.blogspot.com

What you see and what you don't

 Overcast skies, a little drizzle — a perfect day for deer to be moving in the woods near Stone Mountain, I thought, and so they were.

I saw four.

I remembered that overcast days are good times for deer watchers. I forgot that days when the woods are dark are also good times for orbweavers.

It was almost impossible to see their webs. I blundered into more than four.

A jotter speaks of daydreaming

 Jottings are the tracks that a thinker makes. Maybe that’s a good way to look at it.

Roger Deakin was a thinker, and the prolific jottings seem to have followed naturally.

One of Deakin’s friends, the writer Robert Macfarlane, said that when Deakin bought his 16^th-century house, it was mostly in ruins. Deakin gradually rebuilt it. At the start, the only habitable place was the inglenook, so Deakin threw a sleeping bag by the fireplace and started there. He gradually hauled a collection of sheds, huts and a railroad wagon to the farm. He liked to work in small, quiet, isolated places. Here’s an excerpt from a notebook:

 

In my cabin I learnt the sheer luxury of daydreaming. It has been my making and my undoing too. How many days, weeks, months have I lost to it? But perhaps it isn’t lost time at all, but the most valuable thing I could have done.

 

Some people will recognize a kindred spirit in that jotting.

Daydreaming is a kind of thinking, and I like to think. And I’m interested in how ideas in mind often occur when there’s a pencil in hand.

• Source: Roger Deakin, “Notebooks: ‘Daydreaming has been my making and my undoing’”; Granta, No. 102, 2008, pp. 233-44. The quote is on p. 244.

The overlooked genre of jottings

 This collection of notes has been interested in notes, remarks and aphorisms and in some of their containers, notebooks and pamphlets. It’s failed to consider jottings.

The word comes from Roger Deakin, a writer who was a keeper of notebooks. His friend Robert Macfarlane sorted through hundreds after Deakin died at 63 of a brain tumor. 

When he was still in his 20s, Deakin bought a ruined 16^th century farmhouse with a moat. He became an observer of nature and country life. Here’s a line from one of his notebooks:

 

Much as I enjoy the process of writing and the exercise of my own skill and craft in getting it right, nonetheless I would often prefer to be a jotter. Jottings, in their spontaneity and complete absence of any craft, are often so much truer to what I actually feel or think at a given moment.

 

Like me, Deakin was fan of Gilbert White, a great observer who wrote Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. I’ve thought of White as a note-taker. Perhaps he was a jotter.

• Sources: Roger Deakin, “Notebooks: ‘Daydreaming has been my making and my undoing’”; Granta, No. 102, 2008, pp. 233-44. The quote is on p. 234.

Robert Macfarlane, “Roger Deakin remembered”; The Guardian, 7 May 2010.

For more on short written forms, see “The remark as literary form,” July 4, 2022, and “Mencken on notebooks and remarks” July 5, 2022.

The book you plan to read

 The writer Yiyun Li made a remark in an interview that delighted and intrigued me.

She was asked what she planned to read next, she said the question for her was what she planned to reread next. Her view: There is always something serendipitous about new meetings. You plan for old friends.

My mind doesn’t work that way, and so I was pleased to be shown another way.

I usually come to books through reviews or interviews or casual mentions in other reading. It’s been a couple of years since I mentioned it, but use Good Reading, which started as a pamphlet in 1932. It was compiled by a committee of professors and was to be a “modest guide to supplementary reading” for students. 

• Sources: By the Book: “One Day, Yiyun Li Might Get Around to Reading Roald Dahl,” New York Times, Sept. 10, 2023. It’s online here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/books/review/yiyun-li-interview.html#:~:text=“They%20are%20meaningful%20books%20for,the%20collection%20“Wednesday%27s%20Child.”

For more on Good Reading, see “The award for most borrowed book goes to ... ,“ Nov. 23, 2021.

Lang: 'Letters to Dead Authors'

 Andrew Lang, a Scottish polymath who lived from 1844 to 1912, wrote Letters to Dead Authors. I like the idea of the book, rather than the book itself.

Lang wrote 22 letters to authors he admired. He wrote to English contemporaries such as Charles Dickens, and to ancient Greeks such as Theocritus. 

Lang had a remarkable mind. Talking back to the authors that most influenced him was a way of leaving a record of that mind, of giving a future generation an idea of what it must have been like to have been living and thinking in an earlier day.

The project started as a series of essays for St. James Gazette. Lang’s essays tended to run 2,500 to 3,000 words, I’d say, guessing rather than counting. I’d have preferred shorter.

What I don’t like about the book: Lang wrote his letters mimicking the style of the writer. He’s got Herodotus’s quirks down cold. It’s amusing, but not for long. I’d prefer to hear a reader talking back in his own voice.

Many times, I have wished my best friends would a write book such as this, a book that shows what a mind is like.

If you’re a writer — and aren’t we all? — maybe you should take a stab at it.

• Source: Andrew Lang, Letters to Dead Authors; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886. The Public Doman Review has a copy here:

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/letters-to-dead-authors-1886/

Sunday, with mountain and river

 A little 4-point buck was grazing in the woods by Stone Mountain. The dog and I stopped to watch.

Later, the Wise Woman wanted to get passes at the U.S. Forest Service’s Chattahoochee National Forest’s headquarters. Once there, we couldn’t resist hiking up the river a bit, listening to the sounds of water hopping over the shoals.

At one point, the song of the river was drowned out by a dozen Canadian geese. They were feeding — but also playing, I think. We watched them swimming in the fast water and floating on the eddies, sunbathing on the flat rocks midstream, drying their feathers — wings spread like cormorants — and diving for food. We also saw a troublemaker or two meddling his feathered neighbor. I’m pretty sure they were playing.

Leaving, we saw a small bunch of deer — six, I think. Three were fawns. One little one stayed behind the others and stared at the truck as we crept by. I saw more curiosity than fear in that face, but how could I know what he was thinking or feeling? He was a wonder to us. We must have been Martians to him.

A story about Democritus

 As a student, I heard a story about the philosopher Democritus, who some sources say was more than 100 when he died. According to the account that’s inexplicably stuck in memory, Democritus saw death coming and, instead of running, helped it — in the gentlest way. I found a quotation attributed to  the psychologist James Hillman that gets at the story I remember:

 A story is told of the legendary philosopher Democritus. At 109 he began relinquishing the pleasures of life one by one by omitting an item of food from his diet each day. At the last, he had only a pot of honey left. He absorbed its sweet aromatic fragrance and passed away.

 

I have not tracked down Hillman’s book to find his source. And my usual source on the old philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, has a story about Democritus's death, but not this one.

I’ve got some work to do on my next trip to the library. But I like the story I remember and the similar version attributed to Hillman. I like the image of a person who has used up every bit of life and then has the grace to hand it back gently.

• Sources: James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life; New York: Random House, 1999.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. II, with a translation by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Up in the mountains

 I love the Piedmont, but we’ve just started exploring the mountains of northern Georgia. The Appalachian Trail wasn’t far from the cabin where we stayed in Sautee Nacoochee. The nearest town is Helen.

We went into town to eat, and we watched people ride innertubes down the Chattahoochee River for a bit. But the real scenery was in the woods.

And the stars at night are big and bright, just as they are in Texas.

If you’re looking for a reason to come to Georgia, Anna Ruby Falls would be sufficient for me. It’s the confluence of two creeks — Smith and York — and some of the mingling occurs on rock and some in air.

If you love nature, you’d enjoy the place.

Naval planning and disaster

 After World War II, American naval officers searched German records hoping to find out what their adversaries had been thinking.

One interesting account was published in 1954 by D.L. Kauffman, then a commander, later a rear admiral in charge of the U.S. Naval Academy. Kauffman was writing when people still talked of the “recent war.”

He was interested in the plans of Grand Adm. Erich Raeder, who headed the German navy as Hitler prepared for war. The most telling was Plan Zebra, which was the result of a surreal meeting at the Reich Chancellery on Nov. 5, 1937. Hitler summoned the top brass. Here’s Kauffman’s account.

 

At this meeting, Hitler detailed to his Commanders-in-Chief his plans for conquest and his theory of Lebensraum. He proclaimed the necessity of Germany’s expansion by force and posed but one problem. “The question for Germany is where the greatest possible conquest can be made at the lowest cost.” Of particular interest here was his naming England as the “hateful enemy to whom a strong German colossus in the center of Europe would be intolerable.” However, he believed that he could swallow Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland first, without British interference, and repeatedly promised Raeder that under no circumstances would he risk a war with England until 1946 at the earliest.

 

Raeder, preparing for war with a naval power in 1946 at the earliest, outlined plans for four aircraft carriers, as well as bunches of battleships, battlecruisers and pocket battleships. 

If you don’t recall any big carrier battles involving the Germans, don’t worry;  your memory isn’t slipping. Raeder fought the production ministry to get resources to start building ships and got approval in early 1939. Hitler, of course, provoked a war that September.

The odds of Germany, with an unprepared navy, winning a war against the United Kingdom and the United States was miniscule. When Hitler invaded Poland, he might as well have scuttled his navy.

The story is interesting to me for two reasons:

• It took years to build weapon systems in those days, and it takes even longer now because the weapons are more sophisticated. Democracies have a hard time assessing threats and making realistic plans to address them. 

• It’s a textbook case of how the “genius” model of leadership is ruinous. To have a chance in modern war, you have to make a plan and stick with it, no matter how many revisions you have to make along the way. Tossing all the plans and allowing a charismatic leader to make decisions on impulse is one way to guarantee that you can’t win.

• Source: Commander D.L. Kauffman, “German Naval Strategy in World War II”; Proceedings, US Naval Institute, January 1954, Vol. 80/1/611. The quoted material within the quotation refers to a footnote that says: “Notes on the conference introduced as evidence at Nuremberg trials.” The article is here:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1954/january/german-naval-strategy-world-war-ii

A philosopher looks at democracy's dilemma

 Does the 14^th Amendment bar those who involved in the takeover of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, from holding office? Does that include the former president who incited behavior that has been punished by the courts as seditious conspiracy?

The legal questions apparently are going to be answered in Colorado. This note is a reminder that the philosophical questions were debated a couple of generations ago.

In theory, democracy is a form of government in which all voices must be heard and tolerated. But what about voices of political parties whose goals are to destroy the democracy? Must a democracy allow Nazi Party members to participate in elections? What about Communist Party members?

Nazis were out of fashion when I was in school, but Communists were not. Some interesting thinkers in America had been Communists during The Depression.

Should they be barred from holding security clearances? Should their views — current or former — bar them from teaching at universities? And aside from the rights of individuals, don’t universities have the right to find experts who can understand and teach and even sympathize with all political views?

One firebrand in the debate was Sidney Hook, who was still writing when I was in school. Here’s The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summary of his views:

 

Hook sought to resolve this dilemma in a controversial book titled Heresy, Yes – Conspiracy, No. The line that Hook sought to draw was the granting of full cultural and political freedom to any heretical anti-democratic views. At the same time, if holders of such views were organized as a disciplined cadre which could represent a threat to national security or as a doctrinally controlled movement which could exercise coercive influence in a free marketplace of ideas, then the activities of such groups could be limited.

 

One version of this argument: It’s OK to talk about storming the Capitol and undoing reversing an election. It’s OK to believe that the world would be better if the U.S. Capitol were stormed and free elections were overturned by mobs. It’s not OK to do any of that.

The courts set the logic for this debate when they found some of the rioters guilty of seditious conspiracy. A protest or political demonstration would have been OK. But what happened Jan. 6, 2021 was a seditious conspiracy, a threat to the country.

• Sources: David Sidorsky and Robert Talisse, “Sidney Hook,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). It’s online here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/sidney-hook/

The Feynman Technique

 Yesterday’s note on Richard Feynman’s notebook reminded me of the Feynman Technique for learning.

There are several versions online. Here’s the one that made my old, handwritten notebook:

• Research a topic you really want to know about.

• Teach it to someone else, using simple language.

• Identify gaps in your understanding.

• Fill them.

• Keep the cycle going.

Rather than teach, I write. Perhaps that explains the simple language.

But this, and a library card, is my pretty much education, such as it is.

Professor Feynman's notebook

 Richard Feynman, the physicist, kept a notebook titled “Notebook of Things I Don’t Know About.”

I have thought of that notebook as I have struggled to learn about so many natural things, such as mushrooms, wasps and spiders, that I just don’t know about. I’m still looking at the Georgia Piedmont with the eyes of a newcomer.

I also thought of that notebook when we were cleaning out the refrigerator. The idea, so it seems to me, is to keep the things you use up front where you can see them and the things that you should be eating but don’t toward the back of the bottom shelves.

Feynman kept his questions — rather than the answers — handy.

Seeing for yourself

 A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was watching orbweavers, just as some people watch birds.

The poet Mary Oliver also watched spiders. Her essay “Swoon” is about a hatch of spiders. It’s also about how watching a hatch — paying attention to something most people ignore — changes you in some way. Here she is:

 

This is the moment in the essay when the news culminates and, subtly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is a music to be played with the lightest fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!

 

If the title of the essay seems odd, have you ever seen a live spider, hanging from a thread of web, curled up as if sleeping? Is it in a swoon?

• Sources and notes: Mary Oliver, Upstream; New York: Penguin Press, 2016, p. 125. For my own embarrassingly belated interest in a fascinating subject, see “Orbweavers in the woods and at home,” Aug. 16, 2023.

The Haskins lectures

 Yesterday’s note was about the historian Peter Brown’s lecture “A Life of Learning.”

The lecture is part of a series. Since 1982, the American Council of Learned Societies has asked a scholar to give a lecture with that title. 

Each lecturer is asked: 

. . . to reflect on a lifetime of work as a scholar, on the motives, the chance determinations, the satisfactions (and the dissatisfactions) of the life of learning, to explore through one's own life the larger, institutional life of scholarship. We do not wish the speaker to present the products of one's own scholarly research, but rather to share with other scholars the personal process of a particular lifetime of learning.

 

I wish all my friends would take that as an assignment. I’d like to know what makes them inquire and how they went about it.

I’ve been reading through a few of the lectures. I was pleased to see that the sociologist Robert K. Merton said that his early education came from the public library.

That’s my story: What education I have came from the library. 

• Source: Robert K. Merton, “A Life of Learning,” Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1994; American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, No. 25. You can find it here:

https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Haskins_1994_RobertKMerton.pdf

The memoirs of a wonderful thinker

 As a young man, I once stood in a swamped lecture hall to hear Peter Brown, the British historian, talk about Augustine of Hippo.

Brown, now 88, has released a memoir, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History.

• Arguments for buying and reading book: Michael Dirda, a critic I admire, says it’s exactly the kind of book I love. I think of ethics as the search for a good life, and it’s something you do, rather than theorize about. I was impressed by Brown’s thought. I would like to know how he lived.

• Arguments against: I like small books. This one is 736 pages.

Of course I’ll break down, eventually, and get it. In the meantime, I found Brown’s lecture “A Life of Learning.” It’s 20 years old, meaning that Brown gave the lecture when he was about as old as I am now.

He said many interesting things. I’ll mention just two.

Brown pointed out the role specific places play in an individual’s learning. He mentioned reading rooms at the Bodleian Library that were conducive to thinking. 

He also mentioned the companionship of learned fellows who were not necessarily academics. He used to sit across from a clergyman who came to the library to pursue his own researchers. The fellow would listen as Brown told about his own studies and would offer constructive suggestions. Brown was young then and smiled that the old fellow wore carpet slippers to the library and sometimes dozed off.

“Environment” is a vague word. I try to avoid it. But I do believe in places, and some places — and the people who visit and occupy them — can influence your thinking.

Brown’s lecture was part of a series that I admire. But this note is already long. I’ll come back to that topic tomorrow.

• Source: Peter Brown, “A Life of Learning,” Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 2003; American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, No. 55. You can find it here:

https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Haskins_2003_PeterBrown.pdf

A found poem

 A note, printed in the blocky letters of a first-grader, found in the pages of Jim Harrison’s Off to the Side: A Memoir in a used book store:

Dear Daddy, I am sorry for what I did. I love you, Emily.

 

I left the book, hoping that a father would realize his loss and go in search. But the clock is ticking. Do you think a week is reasonable?