The ‘heaven-appointed task’

I think we all ought to have one. I think those of us who are older ought to help younger folks find their own.

Nan Shepherd, a remarkable Scottish writer, taught at the Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers from 1919 to 1956. Instead of talking about her job or her career, she talked of her “heaven-appointed task.” She said hers was “trying to prevent a few students who pass through our Institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern.”

Shepherd never married, lived her own life, thought her own thoughts, wrote her own books. She had a cottage in the Cairngorm Mountains and spent her free time there. Shepherd is one of those writers who can somehow convey what it is to be part of a place, rather than to be an observer passing by.

Robert Macfarlane has a wonderful chapter on her in his book Landmarks.

 • Source: Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 56. 

Arabia Mountain, mid September

 We went to Arabia Mountain and took a 4-mile walk, moving slowly. On the way out, we went mostly through the woods, past a spot the Wise Woman calls the Cathedral, a lovely stand of tall trees in a creek bottom. We then went on to the little falls at Arabia Lake to see if water was coming over the dam. It wasn’t. Mitchell Creek was almost dry, with water only in the holes.

You can see leaf fall now. The leaves would come down with each gust of wind. But the canopy is still thick and mostly green.

A week ago, I mentioned the changing colors. The early changers include sourwood, sycamore, sweetgum and tulip trees, along with muscadine vines. I don’t know how I could have left off black tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica. I see it less often, but its colors are the neon of these woods.

We came back across one of the outcroppings of the mountain, where we saw pineweed, Hypericum gentianoides, in impossible places. I think it looks like a Mediterranean herb — all wiry stems. But most people think it looks like a batch of pine needles on the ground, hence the common name. We saw it all over the rock, wherever a tiny bit of soil had collected in a crevice. It has tiny yellow flowers with five petals: five-pointed stars. 

Keeping inventory

 I like Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath poems.” In one, the poet hears a bell in town, calling him to church. He hears, but walks into the woods to

            Take up a different story.

            I keep an inventory

            of wonders and uncommercial goods.

I wonder what makes Berry and poets of like mind write such poems. I wonder whether that impulse is hidden somewhere deep down in all of us. The lines came up on a long walk over one of the outcrops at Arabia Mountain.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997; Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint Press, 1999. The lines are from “1979 IV.”

Summer tanagers, fall migration

 In the fall, summer tanagers leave the Georgia Piedmont for their winter spots. Some fly across the sea to South America.

To store up energy for the long flight, they feast in late summer. The males are red, and the females are mostly yellow. I saw them catching the bees and wasps that hover in clouds over the ironweeds and bear’s foot along the Yellow River.

The last summer tanager I saw snagged a wasp midair. That was two weeks ago. I wonder whether he is already gone.

 

Speaking the language

 Other writers told me I should read Robert Macfarlane, who is interested in places and how we humans find ourselves in them. He quotes the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:

Messages everywhere. Scholars, I plead with you,

Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

 

MacCaig has been quoted often in my own concatenation of notes — but I had missed that later poem. It’s “By the graveyard, Luskentyre.” We leave messages behind in our graveyards, mostly trite and easy to understand, hoping to be remembered. But across the way are shorebirds doing mysterious things we can barely imagine. How do we talk about those messages?

MacCaig watches a lobsterman headed out in a sailboat and asks us to imagine his connection with the natural world, the dictionary it would take to hold his language.

• Sources: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005, pp. 434-5.

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 17.

A sense of place

 Robert Macfarlane tells the story of Richard Cox, an English linguist who went to Carloway on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides and taught himself Gaelic.

Carloway is a district of about 60 square miles. It had 13 townships and perhaps 500 people when Cox arrived in the 1990s. In that small place, Cox recorded more than 3,000 place names.

I like places like that: places where everything has been named, often more than once.

I grew up in such a place. On my grandparents’ farm there were many precise places. The Bottom was a place, and within The Bottom were many places that could become soft and treacherous when the creek flooded. But there was only one Place Where Grandfather (Always) Gets the Tractor Stuck. There were many pecan trees, but only one Pecan Where Joe Killed the Rattlesnake. (Joe was a birddog, famous in the 1950s.)

If my grandfather told me to cut nettles in a place, I knew where to go. We organized our minds that way.

I’ve discovered that’s one of the features of my mind that won’t change. I’m new to Georgia, but I’m acquiring a sense of place.

• Source: Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016.

Big rock, little rock

 It seemed like a good idea: Big rocks fall faster than little rocks.

The idea was widely accepted. Galileo pointed out a problem.

If you tie a little rock to a big rock, the little rock, falling more slowly, should act as a drag on the big rock, almost like a parachute. The combo deal should fall more slowly than the big rock alone.

On the other hand, if you tie a little rock to a big rock, the combined weight is greater, so the package deal should fall faster than the big rock alone.

Therefore, tying the rocks together should make them fall faster and more slowly than the big rock alone.

It was Galileo’s way of saying: There’s something wrong with this idea.

When I was in college decades ago, this argument was called a “thought experiment,” which seemed unfortunate to me. The term suggested that philosophers were doing something that was similar to what the chemists were doing in the lab.

Galileo was working on a concept. He was not conducting an experiment.

The scientists who taught me how to do research would have denied it, but they did a lot of philosophy in going about their work. They tinkered with concepts all the time. Often, what counts as data is a philosophical question. Sometimes it takes a leap of imagination to see what data might look like.

You can see obvious examples of conceptual problems in neuroscience, where notions such as “consciousness” are famously thorny.

I gather that the term “thought experiment” is outdated, replaced by “intuition pump,” a coinage of Daniel Dennett, who recounts Galileo’s thinking as an example.

I don’t like that term either. Maybe, instead of being philosophical or scientific, I’m just grumpy.

• Source: Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. His account of Galileo’s argument is on p. 5.