Consulting the creek again

 I take Harvey’s famous saying “All we know is still infinitely less than what remains unknown” as the first law of the cosmos.

Instead of learning about the entire cosmos, I set myself to learn about a piece of public land along Zarzamora Creek about a mile from our house.

Earlier in life, I began to keep a journal. It was based on the notion — a whim, a sliver of imagination — that if I paid attention, the cosmos would give me (or share with me) a little gift. Note the big if. If I paid attention, if I noticed, I would see that something remarkable, perhaps something wonderful, had indeed crossed my path that day. So, like William Carlos Williams, I had a standing heading in my notebook: “Things I noticed today that I had not previously noticed.” It was about paying attention.

Learning takes time. But, after looking at the creek for five years, Harvey’s rule still applies. What I know about it is infinitely less than what I would like to know.

Consulting the creek

 When the Taoist sages would go on a retreat, they would say they were going to consult the mountain. Just so. I go consult the creek.

I was walking down the south bank where there are several kinds of reeds, which are distinct from the sedges by feel. “Sedges have edges, while reeds are round.” You can, by running your hand over the culm, or long main stalk of the plant, tell whether it’s triangular, and thus a sedge, or round, and thus a reed.

I was trying to see the difference, rather than feel it, to find the small details that would allow me to tell, from across the creek, what I was looking at.

It’s possible, while going on a walk, to think about profound questions. When I do that, the reeds and sedges disappear. I don’t see the swallows feeding over the lake or hear the cardinals singing.

Conversely, if I am walking around the creek looking at rushes and sedges, I’m incapable of thinking about profound questions. My mind doesn’t go blank. It becomes still in this way: for that moment, it doesn’t concern itself with questions about philosophy, the pandemic, the American political tragedy. Only sedges and reeds.

Where did ceremonies come from?

 Yesterday’s note was on Edward B. Tylor’s suggestion about the origins of religion.

Having just read Paul Woodruff’s Reverence, I think this might be a helpful way to look at the topic.

1. Ceremonies or practices are older than the religions we have today.

2. Some ceremonies or practices are attempts to train the emotions, to help a person feel the feelings he or she ought to feel, as Woodruff would say. Another way to put it is that ceremonies are designed to make us more virtuous. It’s possible, for example, to imagine ceremonies to make us feel more courageous, more compassionate, more just.

3. Ceremonies are performed. Performances can be perfunctory — just going through the motions. But they also can involve real feelings, real emotion. Like any other capacity — the capacity to lift weights in a gym or the capacity to run long distances — we can train ourselves to feel the right feelings in the right situations. We can improve a natural capacity.

4. It’s possible, in other words, to imagine a better person, a human being living a better life.

The origin of relgion

 When I was a student, introductory courses on the philosophy of religion began with arguments about the existence of God. I always wanted to begin elsewhere, with the question of what religion is — where the religious impulse comes from, and why it’s a feature of most but not all cultures.

Do you know where religion comes from?

Edward B. Tylor, a pioneering cultural anthropologist, thought that religion probably began when primitive humans saw the dead in their dreams. They cooked up explanations of spirits and souls to explain how the dead could be alive in some sense.

Early humans offered a supernatural explanation of a natural phenomenon — dreaming — that they didn’t understand.

I’m not ready to endorse Tylor’s suggestion. But I’m impressed by the attempt to answer a question that a lot of thinkers have dodged — or so it seems to me. The idea was in Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published in 1871. It’s been around for more than 150 years.

The sovereign doctor of our grief

 I never know what to say about grief. I can tell you what Montaigne said about grief. He said two things that might be helpful.

First, Montaigne said grief is like a runaway horse. The best thing you can do is let it run. It’ll will tire and run out of steam. The worst thing you can do is to try to rein it in. It just makes the runaway beast more explosive.

Second, Montaigne says you can’t fight grief by consoling people. But you can sometimes distract them.

When he was touched by grief, Montaigne made himself fall in love, which took him away from his loss.

The same applies everywhere: some painful idea gets hold of me: I find it quicker to change it than subdue it. …

That is Nature’s way when it grants us inconstancy; for Time, which she gives us as the sovereign doctor of our griefs, above all achieves its ends by furnishing our powers of thought with ever more different concerns.

• Source: The quotation comes from “On Diversion” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 941.

How you show her something wonderful

 I’ve mentioned the poet Alice Oswald a couple of times as one of the remarkable talents of our time. Another is Kathleen Jamie of Scotland.

I love her poem “The Stags.” It begins:

This is the multitude, the beasts 

you wanted to show me, drawing me 

upstream, all morning up through wind-

scoured heather to the hillcrest.

The poet looks at the herd, somber 

like the signatories of a covenant; 

 and heavily antlered,

like masts in a harbor, or city spires. 

It’s a breathtaking sight, and she wonders why her companion dragged her that long way to see it.

I suspect you’d 

hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight 

our shared country, lead me deeper 

into what you know, but loath

to cause fear you’re already moving 

quietly away, sure I’ll go with you, 

as I would now, almost anywhere.

In an earlier life, I held on to a job longer than I should have to be near a wilderness in East Texas. I spent every free day in the woods.

One day, when I found a remarkable woman, I asked her if I could show her those deep, beautiful woods. It still astonishes me, decades later, that she said yes.

• Source: The full poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55800/the-stags

A short sentence from Linnaeus

 Linnaeus said: “There is no such thing as a new species.” 

Our conception of biology is barely imaginable without Linnaeus. Nevertheless that sentence is in my notebook. I turn to it as a reminder that even a genius can be confident about beliefs that are simply wrong. Or confident about concepts that turn out to be muddles.