A shelf of old journals

 My father read a quarterly journal called ETC: A Review of General Semantics. I remember, as a teenager, finally noticing dozens of them in his office and asking about his interest.

He’d read Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. Korzybski suggests that the conceptual framework we create with language is a map of reality, not reality. My father, who was drafted off a Tennessee farm and fought through the Battle of the Bulge, was interested in the mass movements of the 1930s. His unit liberated a concentration camp late in the war. He had a sense of how lives could be touched, changed and destroyed by propaganda — by bad conceptual maps.

My father was convinced that we have an obligation to look at the words and phrases we use to see where they come from. We should see if the language we use gives us a map that reflects the world we experience — or whether it reflects someone else’s prejudices, fears and grievances.

That inquiry is not etymology exactly, but something similar. It’s not like determining the provenance of a work of art exactly, but similar.

I wish we had a review of popular semantics.

Those who rule the symbols

 The council in Cork, Ireland, is considering building a statue honoring the mosquito that allegedly infected Oliver Cromwell with a fatal dose of malaria.

I know this because I read Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter The Fortnightly. Girdham cites the story as an example of how people can have a toxic legacy that endures for centuries.

I read the story is an example of how we use symbols to make sense of our experiences, especially the toxic ones. I thought of this line, which my father used to quote:

 

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

 

Since I live in a part of the world that is still debating Confederate monuments, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we took the statues off their bases and replaced them with figures that were, say, 5 mm high.

• Sources: Julian Girdham’s site is here:

https://www.juliangirdham.com/the-fortnightly

Liz Dunphy, “World’s Smallest public statue’ proposed for Cork mosquito linked to death of Oliver Cromwell”; Irish Examiner, May 14, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41844780.html

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelean Systems and General Semantics; Lancaster, Pa.: International Non-Aristotelean Library Publishing Co., 1933, p. 76.

Election Day

 Today is election day in Georgia. The primaries are making news, but Georgia also has judicial races — allegedly nonpartisan — that are on the same ballot.

Democrats are in court, arguing that judicial candidates should be labeled by party. It’s an argument for truth in advertising. I agree, but as a practical matter it’s not hard to figure out. Incumbents on the state supreme court tried to undermine the election in which Biden defeated Trump in Georgia. At least one candidate for appellate court was on a committee investigations legal action against people who tried to undermine elections.

If you know that, you probably know all you need to know.

I’m interested in all the elections. But I think that democracy presumes a judiciary. I don’t care much about the usual modifiers that suggest what kind of judiciary: strong, weak, activist. If we had any kind of judiciary, we wouldn’t be worried about the rule of law.

Having an instinct for it

 I used to have a dog named Satch who was famous for rolling in nasty stuff.

My friends often claimed that their dogs had the most revolting habits. But after seeing and smelling Satch, they had to admit that their dogs were amateurs. My oft-bathed dog set the standard.

The ability to find something horrific and then get it all over you is not an intellectual pastime — it’s an instinct. It’s not something that can be analyzed.

When I lived in Texas and was baffled by horrific events that I couldn’t understand, I’d look to some public figure who had an instinct for scandal and make sure I was on the other side.   

I’ve been horrified and fascinated by the Republican Party’s fight for the governor’s nomination in Georgia. A political action committee is running millions of dollars of ads accusing the heir apparent, Lt. Gov. Bert Jones, of corruption. The ads allege that Jones, who has been endorsed by Trump, used his connections to enrich his family.

Jones says one of his Republican opponents — Rick Jackson, a billionaire — is behind the ads. Jackson denies that and says that he would be Trump’s favorite governor. The political action committee that claims to be bringing transparency to Georgia voters is a dark-money outfit. People in Georgia who want to know who’s behind it found a lawyer in Ohio connected to the organization, but that was it.

Jones’s record for public service stinks. Jackson’s campaign stinks. The whole business of using dark money to make accusations stinks.

I can’t reason this out. I can’t rank the stink. I can’t say which is the lesser of evils.

I can only note that Newt Gingrich endorsed Jackson.

What I missed

 The Wise Woman saw a hawk rise out of the underbrush and sail off through the woods, a 4-foot snake trailing from its beak.

How did I, standing beside her, miss this wonder? Was I searching the forest floor for blooming vervain, in genus Verbena? Was I lost in thought?

Many notes in this collection are about paying attention and noticing things. Sometimes it seems a wonder that I notice anything at all.

Wittgenstein's cottage

 Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously. In his last years, he was trying to get the manuscript into a form that satisfied him.

From November 1947 to June 1949, he was in Ireland. From April to August 1948, he was at a cottage in Rosroe, County Galway. The place was owned by the older brother of Maurice O’Connor Drury, one of Wittgenstein’s ablest students.

I have known some of that story since I began to read Wittgenstein in college. But I recently ran across a sketch by the artist Peg Smythies of “Wittgenstein’s Cottage” in History Ireland. The image delighted me. In the accompanying article, Professor John Hayes includes a description based on a memoir by Richard Murphy, a poet who rented the cottage three years after Wittgenstein:

 

Heat came from a turf fire. The fuel was stored in a galvanised shed in the backyard, where there was also a chemical toilet. Candles gave light after dark. Drinking water had to be drawn by bucket from a nearby well. The kitchen furniture was made of deal. The beds were of cast iron with horsehair mattresses.

 

I hadn’t realized the cottage was quite so spartan. But Wittgenstein’s accommodations were always spartan. He was not looking for comfort but for solitude.

• Sources: John Hayes, “Wittgenstein’s Irish cottage”: History Ireland, n.d. It’s here:

https://historyireland.com/wittgensteins-irish-cottage/

Passing the field lab

 I’ve been watching a sandbank along the South River near Panola Mountain.

I’ve seen it scraped like a construction site — nothing but sand — after a flood. But this week it was knee deep in grasses — including some ryegrasses that were introduced by European settlers. There were knee-high thickets of sweetgum sprouts and one belt-high tulip tree.

The seeds that stock this place come in by air, water and animal. Sometimes, after the flooding currents have scraped the sandbank bare, you see grass. Sometimes you see rivercane.

We visit this place only occasionally. I wish that a younger version of myself could visit it daily, study it for years and record the succession of plants. I think I could learn a lot — almost get an education — from this quarter acre.

After the fire

 The foresters burned what local folks call a prairie between Panola Mountain and the South River. The fire killed the small pines and sweetgums that were growing in the tall grasses, as well as the tall grasses.

The dead and decaying vegetation in grasslands is so thick it makes for hard walking and spectacular fires. What’s coming back after the fire?

I expect to see the tall grasses again, but other plants have a head start. We saw some extensive stands of crownbeards, just putting out buds. Eight species in genus Verbesina are native to Georgia, and the experts were probably hoping to see them. We also saw some impressive stands of Japanese stiltgrass, Microstegium vimineum. This plant often comes up when biologists discuss the most damaging invasive species.

I, an old retiree, can call it an impressive stand of stiltgrass. If I were a government biologist, I’d have to call it an infestation. I’m wondering what the experts will do now.

Finding a place, being content

 I think a sense of place is linked to a sense of contentment.

It’s an ancient idea. Here’s Joseph Joubert taking a stab at that connection:

 

To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.

 

I’m interested in place, but I came to this passage in a meandering way. The translator is Paul Auster. I’ve been thinking of Auster because the book reviewers have been tempting me with Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories, a “meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, Paul Auster.”

• Source: The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p. 41.

A reporter in Moscow

 A footnote on yesterday’s note on Ramon Adams, a native of Moscow, Texas: When I was a young reporter, I rode the train from Moscow to Camden.

The Moscow, Camden & San Augustin Railroad Co. was chartered in 1898 by W.T. Carter, a timber baron. The line was 6.9 miles long. It connected Carter’s mill in Camden with the Houston East & West Texas line in Moscow.

In the 1890s, besides getting into a war with Spain, Americans were buildings cities, stores and houses everywhere. A lot of the lumber came from East Texas. Timber barons needed railroads to ship their wares, but the state wouldn’t grant charters unless the companies promised to provide general freight and passenger service.

About 45 years ago, I showed up in Moscow as the railroad men were putting together a train and asked if the company still honored its charter and provided passenger service.

It did. I was the only passenger among a gazillion tons of cargo — logs going into the mill and dimensional lumber and plywood coming out.

Carter was a sawmill man, not a railroad man. He bought his first rolling stock as cheaply as he could find it. He found an old locomotive that had been in the Panama Canal Zone. His passenger car — singular, not plural — must have looked like a rolling Christmas ornament: it was red with a green roof, and it had rattan seats. It came off a commuter line on Long Island, N.Y.

The Houston East & West Texas, incidentally, was notorious for its rough ride. As soon as the trainmen painted the HE&WT logo on the railcars, the locals insisted it stood for “Hell, Either Way Taken.”

The missing man

 The Southwest Writers Series was a collection of pamphlets published by the Steck-Vaughn Co. in Austin, Texas, 1967-1971.

A complete set contains 37 pamphlets. But dealers list the set as Nos. 1-33, 35-38.

No. 34 was planned and promoted but never published. The missing pamphlet was supposed to be about Ramon Adams, surely the most famous writer born in Moscow, Texas.

I’m interested in pamphlets in general and this set in particular. I’m also interested in forgotten writers, or nearly forgotten writers. Adams is an odd case — someone that scholars didn’t want to fall into obscurity, but who somehow fell anyway.

Adams, 1889-1976, began life as a musician and headed the violin department at the University of Arkansas for a while. He had an accident while cranking a Model T that ended his career. His wife had a dream of running a candy store, and the couple did well.

Adams’s avocation was writing. He had grown up near a minor cattle trail and had a lifelong habit of talking to cowboys. His first book, Cowboy Lingo, was about the language. He wrote 24 books. Two were published after he died.

His best known might be Burs Under the Saddle, a look at all the stuff that writers get wrong about the history of the West. I heard of Adams by reading A.C. Greene, who admired Adams’s Six-Guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen. Greene described him as “a strange sort of man who had facets of personality unlooked for in a historical and bibliographical assembler.”

 

People who knew Ramon well enough to be invited to one of his Sunday afternoon “teas” can tell of some afternoons when Ramon would sit without saying a word for many minutes at a time, the guests obliged to do likewise. His talk, if it began again, was pleasant; he knew and loved the southwestern book world.

 

J. Frank Dobie, the subject of pamphlet No. 1, used to wring his hands about whether there was a literature of the Southwest. (The handwringing was dramatic. He taught a course on the subject at the University of Texas.)

I like the literature of the Southwest. But it seems to me that the best books are neglected, while the popular books often depict a place I don’t recognize.

• Sources: A.C. Greene, The 50+ Best Books on Texas; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1998, pp. 82-3.

The Texas Archives has a note on the Ramon Adams Collection at the Dallas Public Library here:

https://txarchives.org/dalpub/finding_aids/08206.xml

A lost book

 I’m trying to imagine what Epicurus’s lost book on Rhetoric was like. Diogenes Laertius says that in Rhetoric, Epicurus said that clarity was the only thing the literary arts demanded.

If that’s all there is to it, Rhetoric must have been a wonderfully short book.

Diogenes offers a clue about how Epicurus achieved clarity. The word Diogenes used to describe Epicurus’s language is usually translated “ordinary” or “plain.” In ancient Athens, there were two types of assemblies. The ordinary assembly was for everyday business. The called or summoned assembly was for something special.

As with assemblies, so with language. Epicurus preferred everyday language to the language that is summoned for special occasions.

I think his point is a good guide. But Wittgenstein spent a lifetime trying to untie the knots in ordinary language. I wish it were true that all philosophical problems could be eliminated by the analysis of language, but I am a skeptic. 

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 542.

 

The Persian arrangement

 Herodotus didn’t think that individuals, by nature, are evil. It’s the social arrangements — the bargains we make to live in groups — that are wrong.

Herodotus marveled at the Persians and their magnificent empire. But he could not imagine living as a subject, rather than as a citizen. The Persian arrangement seemed to Herodotus to be unnatural. Humans naturally need freedom to do the things that make each individual human. Without that freedom to develop, an individual isn’t fully human.

It follows that each person should be free to have a say in the governing of collective life. You can’t surrender your say to a tyrant and be healthy, whole, human.

Many readers of The Histories have come to that idea. But Ryszard Kapuściński focused that thought beautifully in his Travels with Herodotus. Kapuściński has a digression on why people surrender that part of their nature and follow dictators. He calls the people most susceptible the “superfluous people,” people who have been left behind, without place, position or purpose.

 

All dictatorships take advantage of this idle magma. They don’t even need to maintain an expensive army of full-time policemen. It suffices to reach out to these people searching for some significance in life. Give them the sense that they can be of use, that someone is counting on them for something, that they have been noticed, that they have a purpose.

 

The benefits of this relationship are mutual. The man of the street, serving the dictatorship, starts to feel at one with the authorities, to feel important and meaningful … The dictatorial powers, meantime, have in him an inexpensive — free actually — yet zealous and omnipresent agent-tentacle. Sometimes it is difficult even to call this man an agent; he is merely someone who wants to be recognized, who strives to be visible, seeking to remind the authorities of his existence, who remains always eager to render a service.

 

Kapuściński was thinking of Europe — of the rise of fascism and of the brand of communism that prevailed in the Soviet bloc — rather than of the United States.

The passage might remind you of Eric Hoffer. He called these folks true believers.

• Source: Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus; New York: Vintage International, 2007, pp. 112-3.

Farmers and politics

 When a friend asked about politics and the prospects of Democrats in Georgia, I thought of Jimmy Carter.

Until about 1990, people in rural and urban areas tended to vote alike. Since then, rural areas have voted increasingly Republican. Urban areas have voted increasingly Democratic.

My county is heavily Democratic. But it’s been a while since most people in rural counties thought that the Democratic Party had ideas that were good for them.

That’s sad and ironic. Democrats do have some ideas about how to relieve the suffering of farming communities. Just ending the war would help with the prices of fuel and fertilizer.

I think rural folks would be willing to listen to some new ideas. But when the messages are delivered by … well, pick your favorite Democrats and compare them to Carter. Carter had a kind of credibly among rural voters because he was a farmer. Even people who doubted his politics would give him the benefit of the doubt and listen.

The role Carter played in his community was genuine, rather than theatrical. When he was 95, he was still teaching Sunday school in Plains. People would come from all over to go to Sunday school, even if they weren’t religious, much less Baptist. The newspapers said that about 10 people showed up for the adult Sunday school class — unless Carter was teaching. Then the crowd would jump to 500. People arrived at the church early and tailgated in the parking lot, just to get a seat.

The idea of people tailgating for Sunday school is jarring — especially when you consider that Carter’s politics were unpopular in rural Georgia.

I’m not arguing for going back in time or glorifying old ways. I just wish the Democratic Party could find some candidates who speak rural.

Beardtongues

 When the forest canopy fills in, the ephemeral wildflowers of early spring disappear. The woods around Panola Mountain seemed almost bloomless. But we found some beardtongues in the deep shade.

Genus Penstemon is the largest genus of flowering plants native to North America and found only here. I don’t know which of the 280 or so species I was looking at. The scientific name suggests that penstemons have almost five stamens — two pairs of fertile ones and a sterile or rudimentary one, which the biologists call a staminode. The common name beardtongue comes from the long, hairy staminode.

Some penstemons are pollinated by hummingbirds, while others are pollinated by bees. Folk wisdom has it that those adapted to hummingbirds usually have red flowers, while those adapted to bees have blue or purple flowers. The beardtongues we saw were blue, but the color was almost gone. They reminded me of old china: delicate, fine, fading.

Real pleasure

 Athenaeus wrote an epigram praising Epicurus. The heart of it goes like this: 

The scope of nature’s wealth is modest.

But empty judgments have no scope, no limits.

 

Hedonism — the idea that pleasure is a guide to goodness — was controversial in ancient Athens. But I think it’s almost incomprehensible today. The pleasures Epicurus claimed as ethical guides were natural pleasures, rather than human inventions.

It seems to me that if Epicurus could be with us today, he’d urge us to take a walk in the fresh air and forget about our own devices for a while.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 540. I’ve departed from Hicks’s translation.

Divisions and borders

 People forget that Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza, the hero of Cinco de Mayo, was born in Texas.

Zaragoza’s birthplace still stands in Goliad. He was born in 1829 and was 6 when the Texas Revolution erupted. His father, a sergeant in the Mexican Army, was loyal to the government. His mother was a Seguín, one of the families that led the revolution.

People who love and respect each other can end up on different sides of arguments. That seems to happen often along borders.

Texas, for all its silly politics, is a borderland. I can’t imagine having lived my life without knowing and loving people on both sides. I think governments that seek to sever those natural human ties will fail — and deserve to.

• Note: For more on the Battle of Puebla, see “Celebrating Cinco de Mayo,” May 5, 2023. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2023/05/celebrating-cinco-de-mayo.html

A sign, not a poll

 In the South, “Trump” is not so much a person as a social movement, a kind of populism that sweeps the region every 30 years or so. For the past few years, in rural areas from Georgia to Texas, we’ve seen Trump symbols displayed at homesteads permanently. As symbols go, these were more like flags than election signs.

On this last trip, all those signs were gone. We didn’t see one.

Stepping out v. staying put

 The trip to Tennessee has me thinking about travel. I had gotten to the point where I wanted to stay put. But that little trip unsettled the notion of being settled. I found myself learning things I hadn’t expected to learn.

Part of this is learning from the Wise Woman and learning about her. We are opposites in some ways. I dislike complicated technology. I master a few reliable tools and pass on everything else. The Wise Woman has never seen a gadget she didn’t want to try.

Before I met her, I used to backpack in the wildernesses of Texas. I traveled light. Instead of lugging a tent, I usually carried a ground tarp. I slept under the stars but could rig a shelter if a storm blew in. Many Texas hikers always carry a lot of water. I eventually found so many springs I could get by with a water bottle.

When I met the Wise Woman, I took her to see the wonders. I carried a tent. I cooked what I thought were elegant meals. I brought bug spray. She was not impressed.

Later, we did some truck camping. A bigger tent and all kinds of gadgets went into the bed of the truck. I would complain when I couldn’t find essential tools, such as a flashlight, buried among things that you might use, such as a cat stroller.

Different people travel in different ways. In some ways, I’ve changed. As a young man, I dashed across parts of Europe and Mexico. I ran from one site to another. If I went to a museum, I would try to see it all. My old friend Melvyn, by contrast, would sometimes sit in front of one painting all morning. Perhaps I am becoming more like that.

I’m beginning to think that if the Wise Woman and I parked a camper in a state park for a few days, I’d be content to hike a little and catch up on some paperback books.

Traveling and how you do it

 The mission was to visit Uncle Alex in Tennessee. The mission behind the mission was to find out what it’s like to travel in a camper.

The Wise Woman wanted to know. She’s been window shopping since we moved from La Casita, which began as a home away from home. She’s the enthusiast. I’ve been the foot-dragger. When we went to Tennessee, we rented a camper built on the chassis of a big pickup truck.

In many ways, the maiden voyage was a disaster. It took longer for greenhorns to load than you’d imagine. We forgot things — like phone chargers — and had to find a store. We hit Chattanooga at rush hour and spent almost two hours getting through town.

A big storm that the forecasters had been talking about hit as we were going through the mountains. It was dark when he reached David Crockett State Park and raining so hard we were reading signs by lightning flashes. It took a long time to find our campsite. We hooked up water and electrical connections in a gale.

We didn’t get off to a great start. But when we got up the next morning, we spent a while listening to birdsong and talking about the coyotes we’d heard in the night. Wild canines sometimes celebrate the end of storms with song.

We spent a couple of nights on the Cumberland Plateau and felt a connection to the place we wouldn’t have felt it we’d stayed at a hotel off the highway.

The jury’s out. But given enough time, I usually begin to see what my wife is talking about.

On the road

 Stefan Zweig says that when Montaigne traveled, he didn’t follow the guidebook. In 1580, Montaigne took off on a long tour. Here’s Zweig’s account of Montaigne in Rome: 

He scarcely mentions the Raphaels, the Michelangelos, the monuments. Instead he attends the execution of a criminal, has himself invited into the home of a Jewish family to witness the circumcision of a child, visits libraries, enters the Bagni di Lucca, invites peasants to the ball; chats away with all the lazzarones. But he eschews all the celebrated sites. For him, all that is natural is to be celebrated.

 

Montaigne was on the road for almost a year and a half. Maybe I’ve been thinking about his travels because the Wise Woman and I just got back from a three-day trip to the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. We went a long way to see a natural wonder, Uncle Alex, 95. Like the Wise Woman, he is Black in a society that sees only Black and white.

He’s a Korean War veteran who came home to see the country get angrier and more disturbed. The neighbors across the county line elected George Wallace governor.

He lives in Pulaski, Tenn., which is known as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Uncle Alex’s living room had hand-drawn maps of a Black neighborhood with thriving businesses. It grew under the protection of U.S. Colored Troops, stationed in Giles County after the Civil War, and survived the of Jim Crow. He calls the place Belleview.

Uncle Alex is working on history projects these days. He argues with what his place in the world is known for. He wants a better account of what it should be known for. He wants a better guidebook. 

• Source: Stefan Zweig, Montaigne, translated by Will Stone; London: Pushkin Press, 2015, p. 134.