Lorraine Hansberry on characters

 What values do you have that did not come from your culture?

That question comes from Lorraine Hansberry. She used to ask it about characters in her plays. It’s telling in drama, telling also in ethics.

One of the recurring themes in this collection of notes is how human beings come to religious beliefs. That’s one of those things that comes from the culture.

It’s interesting that Hansberry thought that a writer, in developing a character, had to get to at least one value that came from somewhere else.

Her question is a master class for writers.

A new biography of Charles Lamb

 Here’s a cause for celebration: Clare Bucknell reports in the New York Review of Books that a new biography of Charles Lamb, the English essayist, has been published.

It’s Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G. Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest who appears to be interested in Lamb's peculiar cast of mind.

I’m excited about the new biography because I have the current standard, written by E.V. Lucas. It was published 117 years ago.

Public enthusiasm for Lamb has never threatened to unhinge the republic.

But I love him dearly. I’m resigned to being in the minority in estimating his value.

I think “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” is the great English essay. When I was younger, I read everything I could by Lamb: Essays of Elia, of course, but also the letters — those magnificent letters.

If you’re curious about why such a minor writer could inspire such devotion, there is a single sentence in Professor Bucknell’s review that gets to the matter. She quotes a passage of Lamb’s writing and says:

This is Lamb cogitating.

That’s it exactly. Lamb thinks aloud, just as Montaigne thought aloud. (But interesting thinkers are interesting because they don’t think like others. Montaigne’s thinking is nothing like Lamb’s.)

Lamb’s and Montaigne’s essays are examples of the kind of writing I like best: one person with an interesting mind trying to think something out.

A pleasure that's a kind of wealth

 I’ve been following a reader’s progress through James Joyce’s Ulysses. The reader is Michael Leddy, a retired English professor. It’s been fun to see his notes on this 100-year-old novel.

I think of that pleasure as a kind of wealth. Maybe that sense of wealth is part of what came into me through the culture. It’s a way of thinking that’s so close to me that I’m hardly aware of it.

But I feel rich when I feel the pleasure of a good book — or get to listen in on the discussion of a challenging book by a discerning reader.

The poet William Stafford did a better job of expressing this idea. So I’ll let him take over.

Stafford spoke of the wealth and poverty he experienced as a boy in Kansas. Here’s the poverty:

That Christmas Mother made paper

presents; we colored them with crayons

and hung up a tumbleweed for a tree.

Here’s the wealth:

the library had books we hadn’t read.

It’s not just me. For some of us, this kind of thing is more fun than Christmas, more joyous than payday.

Sources: You can see what I’m talking about on the pleasure of seeing a good reader read a good book at Michael Leddy’s blog, Orange Crate Art, at https://mleddy.blogspot.com. The quotations are from the poem “The Rescued Year” in William Stafford, The Way It Is; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, pp. 107-109.

A poet talks of time

 Stephen Dunn’s book Different Hours is about time. It’s also about how different human beings can experience it differently.

Take Odysseus, for example, whose trip home after the war took time. Odysseus sometimes thought his life was with his family back home. But he dallied quite a bit, living an interesting life along the way.

Dunn says Odysseus’s secret is that “this other life had become his life.” He always thought of home.

            But after a few years, like anyone on his own,

            he couldn’t separate what he’d chosen

            from what had chosen him. …

            A man finds his shipwrecks.

            Tells himself the necessary stories.

The poem has a dimension that strikes me as religious, or almost religious.

The poet asks: What are the gods? Our own fears? Intimations from the unseen order of things?

Whatever they are, they finally released Odysseus, and he zipped home.

Source: These lines are from “Odysseus’s Secret” in Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002, p. 32-33.

A place eventually tells you something

 One more note on sense of place: It develops with your capacity to notice things.

There’s a long island in Elmendorf Lake, the wide spot along Zarzamora Creek.

The authorities built a weir dam on the creek in the 1970s, one of the many measures to control flooding.

The island was created as the water backed up, flooding the existing creek channel and also a swampy area.

But which of the channels — north or south — was the main channel? Which was the swamp?

On the island, there are 14 old cypress trees, all facing the north channel. Cypress trees stand on the banks of every stream in Central Texas. These 14 testify that the north channel was the original, and they grew up on its banks. 

These witnesses give testimony to all who have eyes to see. But you have to get out and see the place first, and then you have to think about what your see.

Developing a sense of place

 Yesterday’s long note was yet another attempt at trying to describe a sense of place.

I found the Swanflower vines on the south bank of Zarzamora Creek, about 50 yards below the forks, its confluence with Apache Creek.

I found the vines because I was looking for them. I’d seen an enormous butterfly with the bluest wings I’d ever seen.

I searched my field guides. Perhaps the ancient Greeks would have told a myth.

One of the recurring themes of these notes is how we develop a sense of place, a sense of connection with our environment. My last stab at it was “A sense of place,” July 19, 2022.

Toxic to most, but not to one butterfly

 Swanflower is a small herb that plays an interesting role in the environment along Zarzamora Creek: it’s interesting because it’s toxic. Ironically, it was given to women in childbirth.

The plants in the genus Aristolochia are known as pipevines, so named because the flowers looked like deeply curved tobacco pipes to European settlers.

The species that’s common along San Antonio’s creeks is A. erecta, or Swanflower. A. reticulate, common on the Red River, is known as Texas Ducthman’s pipe. (The deeply curved pipes, such as Meerschaums, may have been associated with German immigrants, or “Dutchmen.” While Aristolochia flowers looked like tobacco pipes to European settlers, they look like orchids to botanists.)

Atistolochia is the prototypical genus of Aristolochiacea, the birthwort family. “Wort” is the old word for herb, so the common name reflects the Greek words aristos and locheia for “excellent” and “childbirth.” Pipevines are still used by midwives in various cultures, although the toxins in these plants have generally put them out of favor in the West.

Many plants in this family have aristolochic acid, which can induce genetic mutations. The evidence mounted that the acid can lead to kidney damage and cancer, prompting warnings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The toxins are a key to the pipevines’ ecology, and the plants are associated with a butterfly.

Pipevine swallowtails, Battus philenor, are big black swallowtails with hindwings of iridescent blue. While other animals, including humans, get sick from the pipevines’ toxins, Pipevine swallowtails and their relatives thrive on Aristolochia.

The adult female lays her eggs on the pipevine, and then the hatching caterpillars go to work. They are voracious. They tend to eat the entire plant, then go in search of the next.

Birds are the main predators of butterfly caterpillars. But the Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars have absorbed so much toxin that birds that eat them get sick. The result: birds eat other caterpillars, but avoid Pipevine swallowtails.

Biologists say that’s an example of adaptation. The Pipevine swallowtails evolved by developing an immunity to the toxins that make them unpalatable to predators.

Some biologists have suggested that Aristolochia erecta is itself evolving to mimic trailing grass. The advantage is that plants that don’t look like a typical pipevine to a Pipevine swallowtail caterpillar wouldn’t get devoured.

The plant is associated with the whole lifecycle of Battus philenor. The adult males stake out the pipevines and wait for the females. A male then hovers above the female, fanning her with pheromones.

The female lays her red-orange on the pipevine’s stems, usually in a place that is open to sunlight. If the eggs were tiny pool balls, they’d be stripes. Aristolochia butterflies excrete a stripe of material on each egg. It’s nourishing — and the first thing the caterpillar eats when it emerges from the egg. The caterpillar then eats the remainder of the egg and then goes to work on the plant.

Most Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars are brown-black. But in areas with higher temperatures, including Texas, most caterpillars are red. (Generally, Pipevine swallowtails produce two generations a year, one of which overwinters as pupae.)

The caterpillars are about 2 inches long and have orange spots in rows along their bodies.

Caterpillars go through phases and then pupate. The pupae are green or brown, with a distinctive wing-shaped widening along the sides. These “wings” usually are streaked with purple.

The butterfly that emerges is striking. Swallowtails are large butterflies — their wingspan can reach 5 inches. The iridescent blue on the hindwings is hard to miss.