Stone Mountain: Late November

 The leaves have been falling for more than a month, so slowly, so steadily that I hardly noticed. Then on Nov. 18, the leaf fall was a blizzard. School children walking home from the bus stop scuffled through deep drifts. I could hear laughter 100 yards away.

Even in deep woods, you can see now. In the neighborhood, I can see houses last noticed in early spring.

Small things:

• Common ivy loves autumn in the Georgia Piedmont. The vines are deep green. The ivy runs up the trunks of tall tulip trees, and so you see green and then a burst of gold at the top. It’s football season, so I think of the Baylor Bears.

• The first hard freeze — the forecasters said 27 degrees — was Nov. 28. We had light freezes — 32 degrees or just below for an hour or two — earlier in the month. I’ve been tending the fireplace on and off since Oct. 8.

• A few asters, mistflowers and sunflowers bloomed all month.

• On Nov. 20, I made a note on the return of the Ruby-crowned kinglets with a remark that the red crown feathers weren’t usually a reliable field mark. I said: “Only males have them, and the crown feathers display only when the bird is excited. You see a flash of red only when the bird sees a prospective mate, rival or predator. You can see a lot of kinglets without seeing the crown feathers.” I’m quoting myself because I’m now eating those words, chewing slowly. A kinglet has been flashing me all morning.

Jung speaks of mythology

 I’ve been tromping around in the Labors of Heracles and thinking about mythology. I’m not sure that myths mean anything. But since I’ve got a friend who’s interested in the psychology of Carl G. Jung, I read Jung’s essay “Approaching the unconscious.”

It’s the lead essay in Man and his Symbols, a book that includes essays by scholars who developed and expanded Jung’s ideas.

The part of Jung’s essay that interests me is a metaphor. Biology students learn about the evolution of bodies by studying embryos. They compare embryos of a fish to those of a mouse. They see in the porpoise’s fin something that resembles the human hand.

Jung says we need a comparative anatomy class for the psyche. He says we can learn by studying archetypes, the primordial images that the psyche produces naturally. This imagery comes up routinely in dreams.

 

One cannot afford to be naïve in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a threat of nature — a spirit of the beautiful and generous a well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies or the fables of the primeval forest than in the consciousness of modern man. 

 

I like the ancient mythologies and the fables of the primeval forest. I’d like to think they will lead me to a better understanding of an earlier version of human beings, beings whose minds we can barely fathom because we, their descendants, have gained so much and lost so much since then.

• Source: Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols; New York: Anchor Press, 1988, p. 52.

A hero cleans up a mess

 Of the Labors of Heracles, I ought to love the thinly disguised tale about the pursuit of wisdom. But I like the story about the Stockyards of Augeias.

The labor is usually known as the Stables of Augeias, but it’s clear we’re talking about stockyards. Augeias, king of Elis, was said to be the wealthiest cowman in the world.

If all this is new, Heracles, the better man, had to work for Eurystheus, a much lesser man, as penance for a crime. Eurystheus was the boss from Hades. He ordered Heracles to clean out the stockyards in one day. He relished the idea of the hero sweating under tons of manure.

Heracles was strong but also crafty. He breached the walls of the stockyards, dammed a couple of rivers and flushed out the mess with a minimum of fuss.

What’s the attraction of this tale?

One of my daily chores is to tend to the cat’s litterbox. Funny, but I sometimes think of Heracles. 

• Note: For the labor that involved the pursuit of wisdom, see “A story about a deer hunt,” Nov. 22, 2024.

Between gods and humans

 I love to read about the ancient Greeks. But I am constantly reminded that it’s difficult to get inside the minds of people whose culture was so different from our own.

One example: Ancient people, including Greek speakers, commonly believed in apotheosis, the notion that humans can become divine. Herakles and Asklepius were the usual examples. And everyone knew that Prometheus sacrificed himself for the good of humans, a choice that made him less than he was among the gods but more than he was among humankind.

The central idea is that the border between humanity and divinity is fluid.

I suspect the idea wouldn’t be received well today by many fundamentalists among the world’s major religions.

Today, the fad is to talk of people being on “the spectrum,” referring to traits associated with autism. But in an earlier day people discussed traits associated with divinity. You could talk about where Herakles and Asklepius stood on the spectrum between the most powerful gods and an ordinary human being. The spectrum had places for heroes, demigods, titans, nymphs and other wonderful beings.

The idea of apotheosis is one example of difference in the way people think. I couldn’t tell you whether the difference is large or small, but today it seems enormous.

Ann Petry: ‘Harlem’

 The April 1949 edition of Holiday magazine was devoted to New York. Imagine a single issue that had work by E.B. White, S.J. Perleman, Roger Angell and Langston Hughes.

It also included Ann Petry’s essay “Harlem,” which I wish I had read between grade school and high school.

When I grew up, our culture taught young people to think of Harlem as a monolith: a place where Black people lived. Petry talked of the neighborhoods in Harlem. Her essay showed the diversity within the place.

She talked of The Hill, where rich doctors and lawyers planned European tours and elaborate vacations. She talked of The Hollow, the catcher of new immigrants from the South. It was a place where landlords subdivided buildings into ever tinier apartments.

Petry talked of the pervasive fear and hatred of the cops and of the oversized influence of the Amsterdam News. She talked of Spanish Harlem and of fights among Black, Puerto Rican and Italian gangs. Children feared to use swimming pools that “belonged” to another group.

I found Petry’s essay a couple of years ago, after decades of reading about Harlem had given me a better sense of what it has been and is now.

What struck me about Petry’s piece is how much an essay can do to convey a sense of a place. I love books. But an hour with a good essay seems like a gift, a bit like an hour's conversation with a gifted teacher.

• Source: Ann Petry, “Harlem”; Holiday, April 1949. It was collected in Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows; New York: Library of America, 2019, pp. 766-75. It was one of Library of America’s Stories of the Week and is archived here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/02/harlem.html

What’s in a journal?

 If you keep a journal, you tend to be interested in how others do it. The poet William Stafford left a partial inventory of the contents of his. It included:

• Odd things, like the things you’d find in a button drawer.

• Evidence to hang him by.

• Clues that lead nowhere.

• Deliberate obfuscation, the kind that takes genius.

• Chasms of character.

Someday, I might find a better description of what a journal’s about. For now, that’s the flag that still waves.

• Source: William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 248.

No cure, but there are diversions

 The holidays have predictable elements: feasts, parades, carols and sales. And you’ll see stories in newspapers about how to cope with grief.

Everyone says it’s natural. At a time when you think of those you love, you think of loved ones who are gone.

The best advice, I think, came from Montaigne. He said rational arguments don’t help with grief. The better the argument against grieving, the worse the grieving person feels.

Montaigne was once charged with consoling a grieving woman. She was obsessed with her loved one and with her loss. Montaigne deflected the conversation to a nearby subject — and then to gradually more remote topics. As the old soldier put it, "I made use of a diversion."

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 936. 

Calendars with more seasons

 While we think in terms of four seasons, the ancient Chinese thought of 24.

Ancient astronomers marked the position of the sun in the zodiac in 15-degree increments, each increment, term or season being 15 days. The arithmetic of the calendar was this: 24 terms x 15 days = 360 days. The custom was to add an extra short term, a holiday season, to get to 365 days.

It’s easy to see why the ancient poets liked the idea. The more detailed seasons prompt you to think about the recurring patterns of nature — the return of migrating birds or the appearance of the first flowering plants in spring.

One of the delightful little seasons, “Awakening of Insects,” begins March 5.

All systems have their problems, and one of the obvious problems here is that the growing seasons in northern China are not in sync with those of southern China. Several of the seasons are named for the various phases of ripening grain. They work better in one part of the country than the other. If we had a season called “Arrival of Tomatoes,” it would be hard for folks in Texas and in Minnesota to synchronize their celebrations of the first harvest.

The Japanese started with the 24 seasons used in China and developed a series of 72 micro-seasons, each 5-days long. The trend toward more seasons started early. The court astronomer revised the calendar in 1685.

The calendar has micro-seasons marking the return of the swallows, the beginning of frog singing and the blooming of irises.

Obviously, what might work in one part of Japan won’t work in another.

But I like it. It’s not really a calendar for strict scientists, but it’s a wonderful calendar for poets who are interested in nature. It’s a poetic look at the year.

• Note: Phenology, the study of recurring biological phenomena tied to the calendar, pops up occasionally in these notes. See “Maybe I should have studied phenology,” Oct. 20, 2023.

A story about a deer hunt

 Some folks who live in the area were dismayed to find a dead deer in the yard. It had been shot by a bow hunter. The animal must have run miles before dying.

Georgia has a lot of deer, and so it has an archery season. Whether the hunters are performing a public service is being debated on social media. The folks who had the unpleasant surprise of finding a dead animal in the yard and then having to pay to have the carcass hauled away did not describe hunters as heroic. 

In the Labors of Heracles, the simplest story is about a deer hunt. Heracles had to capture the Cyreneian Hind alive. And so he pursued her for a year before she dropped of exhaustion. There was no other way.

Robert Graves thinks that was the original myth, and I suspect he’s right. Some versions of the tale feature a miraculous shot. Heracles was such a good archer that he pinned two of the hind’s legs together with an arrow. He was so accurate that the arrow passed between the sinew and bone of both legs, drawing no blood.

That detail strikes me as it struck Graves, a kind of cadenza, a flourish after the story was told. The hind was a magical creature, and Heracles wanted to capture her without hurting her.

The hind is a symbol of wisdom. In that kind of labor, the only story is about pursuit.

• Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 110-2.

An unlikely productivity coach gets results

 Paul Bloom, a psychologist whose writing I admire, is interested in how people work. He’s always interested in tips on productivity. 

Bloom says he tries to write for at least an hour each morning. Later, he’ll take on other projects that he’s less enthusiastic about — in six-minute increments. He sets an alarm.

If you have only six minutes, you tend not to be overwhelmed and you tend not to procrastinate. Bloom works on several projects, shifting from one to the other as the alarm sounds.

Would the constant interruptions drive you crazy?

Stopping work when things are going well is the best time to stop, Bloom says. You put the project down with the expectation that something good is going to happen when you pick it up again.

It’s a version of the Pomodoro Technique. I’m curious enough to give it a try. 

But I’ve come across a technique that might be even better — at least for me.

An old cat named Lucas, rescued from the pound ages ago, wakes up every morning at 6 o’clock ready for breakfast. 

Cats know nothing of Daylight Saving Time, and so I have not been able to convince Lucas that it’s 5 a.m., rather than 6.

I’ve been sleepy for a week. But imagine having another hour before the house wakes up and the chores call — time to enjoy the quiet and think.

Welcome back, migrants

 I saw some tiny birds with gray-green coats in the woods behind the house. They are Ruby-crowned kinglets, Corthylio calendula.

I noticed them when we moved to Georgia last fall. They seemed to be part of the landscape during the winter. In the spring, they left us, heading for the conifer forests of Canada to breed.

Last winter, they would occasionally come to our feeders. They eat berries and seeds in winter. But they feed mostly on small insects and spiders. The leaf litter in the woods is full of bugs. So the Ruby-crowned kinglets seem shy, staying mostly in the woods.

Most of the birds I see are less than 4 inches long, I’d guess. The ruby crown feathers are rarely useful as a field mark. Only males have them, and the crown feathers display only when the bird is excited. You see a flash of red only when the bird sees a prospective mate, rival or predator. You can see a lot of kinglets without seeing the crown feathers.

I look for a white ring around the eyes and a white bar on the wing.

I was glad to see them back — and a little surprised at myself. The sense of joy was surprisingly strong.

How does nature make a hedge?

 How well do you know the place where you live?

I think this might be a good test: Do you know what plants would be in a natural hedge?

One of my friends says the notion of a natural hedge is an oxymoron, and I’ll admit that my usage might be clumsy. What I mean is this: Humans are part of the environment. If some of them clear land to grow food or build a house, what would naturally grow around the border of that field or lot? If lighting struck and fire cleared the field, what would grow at the borders of the meadow that the bison and deer grazed? What would expect to find where the prairie stopped and the forest began?

The University of Georgia has a list of native plants, and you’ll find many in hedges. But it’s a long list, and I haven’t developed a sense of the progression — the process of how some plants grow in ground that has been disturbed by humans and then are succeeded by other, bigger plants.

I’ve looked, made predictions, and have been astonished by my own capacity to be wrong. The last time county work crews ravaged a vacant lot in the neighborhood, I thought that the first plants to come back would be grasses and briars and little plants like horseherb. I was surprised when partridge peas covered the lot.

If I knew a precocious youngster who wasn’t fully occupied by the questions being asked at school, I’d ask her: How does nature make a hedge?

In my mind, the attempt to answer that question would be a valuable bit of an education.

• Sources and notes: The University of Georgia’s list of native plants starts here:

https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B987&title=native-plants-for-georgia-part-i-trees-shrubs-and-woody-vines

If this sounds familiar, I do repeat myself. See “A stand of partridge peas,” Sept. 24, 2023.

Dawn in the woods, with crows

 The crows in the woods behind the house talk for about five minutes every morning just before dawn.

Dawn looks like this: The jet black of night dissolves into the sharp silhouettes of trees. The light between the trees is a muddy brown and then becomes yellow, I think, but I’m not good with colors. The light between the trees gradually becomes blue sky, and if there are any clouds in the sky, they flash pink as the sun pops over the mountain — something I can’t see from the forest floor.

The blue and pink look like neon signs for a minute. Then the colors fade.

The crows talk until you can see the pinks and blues. Then they stop. 

The Wise Woman says the crows stop talking when there is enough light in the woods for the hawks to see them.

In my imagination, the crows are helping the sun come up, just as humans who called themselves druids once did.

Excellence among birds

Of all the birds, which are the best?

Vultures, Heracles said, because they don’t harm even the smallest living thing.

The hero’s remark came to mind when we got off the trail to let two serious hikers go by. They were young and fit. They had hiking poles and good boots. They remarked that the woods were quiet: little wildlife other than squirrels, and few birds.

They hadn’t seen the best of all birds circling overhead, just above the canopy.

If you are older, you are slower. But you sometimes see things that those who go faster miss.

Bill Porter, Red Pine

 Bill Porter is the most interesting independent scholar working today whose father was a bank robber.

Porter’s father, originally from Arkansas, was the only member of his gang to survive a shootout in Michigan. He spent time in prison, became a wealthy businessman and was an influence in the Democratic Party in California. Bill Porter was raised in affluence. Famous people called the house. And then the family lost its wealth.

It’s an interesting story, but Porter’s work as a translator is more interesting.

Years ago, I began reading Chinese poems translated by Red Pine. That’s Porter’s “art name,” used when he’s working as a translator.

An art name is not exactly a pen name. Porter says that in ancient Chinese culture, when a person found a calling, often in middle age, that new aspect of identity was acknowledged by taking on an art name.

I know two wonderful Chinese by their art names: Cold Mountain and Stone House. I have to look it up to tell you that scholars teach them as Hanshan (said to have lived in the 9^th century) and Shiwu (1272-1352).

At one point in Porter’s complicated biography, he was working at a radio station in Hong Kong to support his family and his habit of reading poetry. He would travel to places in China and describe them. He collected about a thousand short stories about places. He called them “fluff” pieces, but he also said they shaped his craft as a translator.

 

Everything I’ve learned about writing I learned from doing radio. The hook. You’ve got to grab people’s attention right away, and you have to keep it. You can’t digress. You learn naturally to be terse and succinct, and focus on things that people can grasp right away. Not the arcana. What I write, it’s for the readers, not myself.

You don’t want people to hear the words. You want them to hear the story. Like translation.

 

• Sources: Robin Dudley, “’Red Pine’ talks translation, fluff and writing”; The (Port Townsend, Wash.) Leader, Oct. 18, 2016. The quotation is from this article.

“The Chinese Hermit Tradition: An Interview with Red Pine”; Tricycle, Winter, 2000. The interviewer was Andy Ferguson.

Hermits in unlikely places

 I’ve changed the way I think about hermits. Bill Porter, who was mentioned in yesterday’s note, showed me another point of view.

“Urban hermit” sounded like an oxymoron to me. A hermit with a wife, an electrical bill or a car seemed to be a contradiction.

Thoreau’s biographers often wade into this thicket. For all his eloquence about solitude, Thoreau had an active social life while living at Walden Pond.

But he also had solitude, for at least part of the day. And he valued it, just as today’s Buddhist and Taoist hermits value it, even those who live in cities.

Porter says that the idea of solitude is connected with the idea of teaching. The presumption is that if a person is going to teach, he or she will not simply study what everyone has said about the subject. The teacher will first spend time alone, practicing. The master’s teaching does not come from a book. It comes from that regular practice — from something done alone, by oneself.

The idea is similar to that of intermittent fasting. Some people might squeeze all their meals into eight hours, giving their digestive systems 16 hours of rest. Similarly, the idea of eliminating noise — telephones, meetings and the Internet — for several hours a day, just to give one’s psyche a rest, makes sense to me. 

• Note: I’ve mentioned Bill Porter in a couple of notes. Tomorrow, a note specifically about him.

Practicing v. learning

 Musicians have a better grasp of this than I do: the difference between learning and practicing.

The distinction is fluid. Of course, you learn when you practice. Your teacher says you must practice to learn. But some people who have learned a lot about music are not great practitioners. Some professors at the conservatory are great concert pianists and some are not. Just as some professors at the seminary are great Christians, Jews or Muslims and some are not. And some professors in the philosophy department … but here I’ve stopped preaching and gone to meddling, as my grandmother would say.

I was thinking about why I’ve had such a difficult time finding a satisfying memoir written by a hermit. The problem usually lies in the flaws of the investigator — me. So the search continues.

But I found some light in Hermits, a documentary released in 2015. In the film, Bill Porter, a translator of Chinese poetry, knocked on the doors of huts in the mountains. He asked the hermits about their practices.

It’s an astonishing film. But I suspect there’s nothing profound to be learned from any of the individual practices. The astonishing thing is that they practice.

• Source: I found Hermits, featuring Bill Porter and directed by Shiping He, Peng Fu and Chengyu Zhou, here:

https://buddhistuniversity.net/content/av/hermits

The book version is Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits; Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2009. It's on my list.

Influence and identity

 I am interested in how humans form a sense of identity.

In some of us, it comes through family, tribe, nation. It comes through the religions we absorb as part of our culture. Identity is formed by the political parties, civic organizations and sports franchises we support. It’s formed by the literature we read with reverence.

All these things influence us. One of the themes of this collection of notes is how these forces shape us, turn us into something we identify as us.

And so I’m interested in people who make a thoughtful effort to escape the usual influences. I’m interested in hermits. That includes the early Christian fathers and mothers who fled to the desert. It also includes the Buddhist hermits who live in the mountains of China today.

I’ve been compiling a list of memoirs of hermits — books that might give a sense of what people who made a thoughtful effort to escape the influence of the surrounding culture learned.

It’s a narrowly focused kind of memoir. And the genre suffers a common complaint: The books end up being about something other than what it’s like to try to escape the gravity of the culture. Catholic hermits, for example, often write at length about Canon 603, the religious law that puts hermits within the context of the church. It’s possible for a well-meaning hermit to set out to write a book about the experience of escaping the influences of the culture and end up writing a book about the politics of Canon 603. You can also find books by naturalists who set out to replicate Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond who end writing tirades about the failure of environmental movements.

I’m interested in stories about experiences that lead to wiser ways of living.

Those books are hard to find.

Memorable books, memorable people

 Jean de la Bruyère suggested there is one test of a good book: Does it lift your spirit?

We remember how a book made us feel. We especially remember the books that opened us to new horizons, new possibilities.

A similar remark is attributed to Maya Angelou, among others: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Angelou was speaking of people. La Bruyère was speaking of books. But it’s the same idea.

• Sources: La Bruyère is in The Practical Cogitator, selected and edited by Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and Ferris Greenslet; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976, p. 3. The quote attributed to Maya Angelou also is attributed to others. The idea is a truism now, part of the culture. But the Quote Investigator has more here: 

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/06/they-feel/

What the poet said about veterans

 Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel-winning poet, said this about military service:

“Service in the Soviet Army takes from three to four years, and I never met a person whose psyche wasn’t mutilated by its mental straightjacket of obedience. It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.”

 

I think the idea of citizen soldiers and sailors is essential to democracy. Paradoxically, I see his point.

• Source: Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays; New York: Farrar Straus Girous, 1986. The title essay is on pp. 3-33. The quote is on p. 24. It’s online here:

https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/0305/Brodsky%252520Less%252520Than%252520One.pdf

An essayist takes the measure of a poet

 Michael Dirda’s books reviews for The Washington Post are an education. But he put a little extra mustard, as my father would say, on his essay on the poet Anthony Hecht. The essay was prompted by the publication of Hecht’s Collected Poems and of a biography, A Poet’s Life by David Yezzi.

Hecht, an infantryman during World War II, is known for his poems about war. His division liberated Flossenbürg. Hecht was ordered to collect evidence. It probably doesn’t make sense to talk about recovering from some experiences.

The readers who commented on Dirda’s essay tried to mention Hecht’s famous poem “The Dover Bitch,” a play on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” But the program that monitors comments on The Post’s website wouldn’t let the readers type the correct name of the poem. It made for an interesting conversation about why Hecht might be a neglected poet. He’s ill-served by our technologies.

“The Dover Bitch” is an interesting poem, but the one I remember is “More Light! More Light!” It’s a comparison of two executions. The first, centuries ago, was horrible, but the burned man called on his God to witness his innocence, and the executioners believed in what they were doing and prayed for his soul.

The second occurred at Buchenwald. People died horribly but without ceremony. As the poet said:

 

Much casual death had drained away their souls.

 

• Sources: Michael Dirda, “Anthony Hecht strived to be on poetry’s A-list. He should be there.” The Washington Post, Nov. 7, 2023. It’s online here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/07/anthony-hecht-appreciation-biography/

Hecht’s poem “More Light, More Light” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49086/more-light-more-light

Heracles and a tale of cattle rustling

 Robert Graves starts the story of Heracles in an interesting place: a scene with cowmen fighting about rustled cattle.

Electryon, king of Mycenae, lost eight sons and his cattle in a big raid. He asked his nephew Amphitryon to mind the store while he got revenge. Electryon told Amphitryon he could marry his daughter Alcmene if he did a good job.

While Electryon was chasing rustlers, the king of Elis sent word that he’d recovered the cattle. Amphitryon had to pay a ransom to get them back.

When Electryon came back, he blew up and dressed Amphitryon down, asking sarcastic questions about the wisdom of paying thieves to return stolen cattle. Amphitryon, frustrated, threw his club at the nearest cow. It ricocheted off her horns and killed Electryon.

What has that to do with Heracles?

Amphitryon was banished. Alcmene went with him but wouldn’t let him touch her until he avenged her eight brothers. While Amphitryon was away, Zeus … well, the ancient Greeks conceived the god as a rascal and the father of Heracles.

Graves says Heracles was a peg on which people from all over the Greek world hung contradictory stories.

He pictures the original Heracles as a Dorian cattle king, the kind of fellow who grew up eating cornbread, as they say in Texas. When more sophisticated folks adopted him as a hero, he became versed in the humanities. As you might guess, I like the rustic guy.

• Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 84-90.

Early November, Stone Mountain

 The first freezes of the season were on Nov. 1 and 2. Trees are shedding their leaves, and snakes are shedding skin.

On four outings, I stumbled across five skins from small snakes, Dekay’s brownsnake, Storeria dekayi.

They’re shedding before brumation. Snakes are cold-blooded so they don’t really hibernate. Their metabolism slows down when temperatures fall below about 60 degrees. When it’s really cold they enter a torpor. A hibernating bear sleeps through the winter, but a snake will come out on a warm day in winter.

Neither freeze was hard, just a couple of hours around dawn.

The canopy of the forest has thinned. You can see a bit further through the woods.

The flowers that were blooming on Halloween are still holding on: asters and mistflowers, mostly. And, oddly, that Mirabilis jalapa, marvel-of-Peru, that I ran across in a vacant lot is still gorgeous. I’ve also been admiring a hardy stand of sunflowers along Rockbridge Road.

Intelligence officers, philosophers and eccentrics

 A footnote about yesterday’s note on J.L. Austin’s service in military intelligence during World War II. Austin, a philosopher in disguise as a young lieutenant, served under Kenneth Strong, then a lieutenant-colonel and later a major general at Gen. Eisenhower’s headquarters.

The warnings from intelligence that Germany — and specifically an armored corps under Erwin Rommel — was going to cause mischief in North Africa was ignored by the British high command. Those at the top were certain that Germany wasn’t interested in Africa and discounted, ridiculed and pooh-poohed intelligence that contradicted that belief.

That sad story also seems to me to be a useful metaphor for how much of the world works. When facts run against the beliefs of powerful leaders, the facts usually are discounted. People in power got into their positions by investing in the way things were, as opposed to the way things are.

Austin’s biographer, M.W. Rowe, said that Strong became such an expert on the German army before the war that he made predictions that were considered “absurdly alarmist” by top British generals.

 

Consequently, after Strong’s lectures on German military strengths, senior officers would frequently warn audiences not to be influenced by what they’d heard; and at the Imperial Defence College he was forbidden to suggest that the German warplanes might give close support to their ground forces.

 

One wonders what the high command thought the Stuka dive bomber was for.

 

Once the war started, however, Strong’s prestige was considerably enhanced when many of his predictions proved true, especially his conjecture that German armour would launch an attack on France through the Ardennes Forest.

 

Strong was largely viewed as an eccentric until German armored units invaded France through the Ardennes.

But maybe that’s the way people should look at philosophers and intelligence officers. There is something strange about both activities.

Intelligence officers exist to tell commanders what is going to happen — they are supposed to foresee the future, to predict what a secretive enemy will do before he does it.

No intelligence officer is perfect. But I think this is true:

The inquirer who investigates broadly, rather focuses narrowly, is more likely to get it right. 

The inquirer who is studying the question now, rather than the one who studied years ago, also is the better bet.

And so it is with philosophers too.

• M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 173.

Reading your way into it

 J.L. Austin, still in his 20s, was teaching philosophy at Oxford when World War II interrupted. What armies should do with philosophers is an interesting question. The British Army, then fearing invasion, sent Austin through training as an intelligence officer and then posted him to the section that monitored Germany, the German army and specific army units.

M.W. Rowe, who has a new biography of Austin, said:

 

A young intelligence officer’s first task on jointing a headquarters section was to ‘read his way into the war.’ This meant assimilating reports and minutes of meetings, and also reading the foreign press — German magazines and newspapers came largely via the diplomatic bag from Switzerland — in case it carried any unintentionally informative photographs or articles.

 

Austin seems to have read 14 hours a day for weeks before he was allowed to touch anything of significance.

The passage strikes me as a good metaphor for how each person orients himself or herself to the world.

Intelligence people look for changes. If an enemy unit — say a unit made up of a couple of armored divisions under Erwin Rommel — is about to ship from Europe to North Africa, the routines of those divisions and the people who lead them will change in some way.

But you have to know the routine to see the change. Unless you know the what’s routine, you have no way of knowing what kinds of things count as a significant departure from the routine.

Rowe argues that it’s likely that Austin was the junior officer at headquarters who saw the Afrika Korps coming. (He makes a case for the possibility, rather than the fact.)

But it seems to me that every young student is in a similar position. Until you learn something of the world, its history, its patterns of thinking, you are not in position to distinguish what’s significant.

I think a good education allows you to “read your way” into the world. 

• M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 176.

Collections, lists and list poems

 A list is a kind of collection. I like collections and lists. I also like poems that are lists.

Well, not all of them. I don’t return to Homer’s “Catalogue of Ships” often. But I do reread the Cat Jeoffry section of Christopher Smart’s poem “Jubilate Agno.” The section begins:

 

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

 

The poet lists reasons why Jeoffry should be considered a wonderful specimen of creation.

The Australian poet Les Murray was a collector and so a maker of lists. His poem “Infinite Anthology” is a list of phrases and their definitions, interspersed with observations about the “single-word poets” who create new words or fresh meanings for old words. He says:

 

Creators of single words or phrases are by far the largest class of poets. Many ignore all other poetry.

 

The poem has many good lines. Three lines are on the same word: “bushed.”

Murray says you can read it as “lost,” “tired” or “suffering camp fever,” depending on whether you’re Australian, American or Canadian.

We humans collect things — words, lines of poetry, many things — as a way of making sense of the world and of ourselves. I’m struck by how those efforts take the form of a list.

Sources: Les Murray, “Infinite Anthology”; Quadrant, March 1, 2010. It can be found here:

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/03/infinite-anthology/

The Cat Jeoffry section of Christopher Smart’s longer poem "Jubilate Agno" is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45173/jubilate-agno

What kids put in their pockets

 I’m interested in collections. The idea of collecting things seems to me to be a basic metaphor for how we humans relate to the world.

Consider what children put in their pockets. A child’s treasures are usually things picked up in the natural world. The child is making some kind of connection to the natural order. The child notices something and then collects a sample of it for further study.

My long-suffering mother often told of washing a pair of my jeans about the time I started school. Jammed in among the pebbles, acorns and mesquite beans was a horned toad.

She gave a little cry and freed the poor fellow. But she had the presence of mind to check the other pockets and so found the other horned toad. It too escaped unwashed.

A man who wrote memos to himself

 Dag Hammarsköld, who led the United Nations when Africans were seeking an end to colonial regimes, was a skilled and humane diplomat. He was also an interesting human being.

Hammarsköld died with others in a plane that crashed or was shot down in Zambia in 1961. His grieving friends published his journal as a book called Markings.

That’s how people learned that perhaps the world’s most effective diplomat was also a seeker.

One of Hammarskjöld’s biographers, Roger Lipsey, used that word: “seeker.”

But Lipsey said Hammarsköld was also a practitioner, rather than a believer. What a person did was more important than whatever a person might believe.

Hammarsköld spoke of “spiritual disciplines” and reported on his experiences, mainly in notes and poems. He also wrote short memos to himself. For example:

 

You listen badly, and you read even worse. Except when the talk or the book is about yourself. Then you pay careful attention. Are you so observant of yourself?”

 

Even on a spiritual quest, Hammarsköld was an efficient, effective administrator. Souls or psyches or selves — like recalcitrant heads of state — sometimes must be called on the carpet.

• Source: Roger Lipsey, “Stillness in Action: Reflections on Dag Hammarskjöld”; Lion’s Roar, Sept. 24, 2013. It’s here:

https://www.lionsroar.com/stillness-in-action-reflections-on-dag-hammarskjold-november-2013/

Lipsey’s Hammarskjöld: A Life, published in 2015, is on the list of books I want to read.

Supply and perceived demand

 Many years ago, I visited some old churches in England, often stopping for Evensong.

Usually, the congregation could be counted on two hands. I heard, time and again, the story of how difficult it was for a tiny religious community to keep a building that was several hundred years old in repair.

It’s an interesting problem: what to do with those buildings.

The flip side of the problem was the movement to build churches that swept England in the mid 19^th century. Better concepts in statistics, demographics and planning were taking hold, and someone figured out that all the churches in England had seating for 15 percent of the population.

We think that pop psychology was invented in our era. But the psychology of the day held that the members of the class of virtuous poor would slide into the class of the criminally poor unless something were done.

A lot of churches, now historic, were built in that era. A lot are empty today.

A day of remembrance

 When we lived on the West Side of San Antonio, we would go see the altars honoring loved ones on El Día de los Muertos. The one I remember best was simple: a hawkbill pruning knife, a Zippo lighter, a pack of Camel cigarettes and a coffee mug, the kind with thick ceramic walls that hold the heat.

The hawkbill? The man, a beloved father and grandfather, had been a gardener.