Between the Eternities

After a day in the high desert, surrounded by mountain ranges wherever we go, as darkness falls once again I turn to books about desert and mountains. Far from seeking escape in my winter reading, what I desire above all is immersion.

The reds are always salmon-colored, terra-cotta, or Indian red; the greens are olive-hued, plum-colored, sage-green; the yellows are as pallid as the leaves of yellow roses. Fresh breaks in the wall of rock may show bright colors that have not yet been weather-worn…. A mountain wall may be dark red within, but it is weather-stained and lichen-covered without. Long-reaching shafts of granite that loom upward from a peak may be yellow at heart but they are silver-gray on the surface. The colors have undergone years of ‘toning down’ until they blend and run together like the faded tints of an Eastern rug.  

- John C. Van Dyke, THE DESERT: FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL APPEARANCES (1901)

John C. Van Dyke (1856-1932) was an American art historian and critic, and his books all have to do with art. THE DESERT is no exception. Geologic formation, factors of climate then and now, flora and fauna, and human plans for alteration of the land all find their way into THE DESERT, but it is first and foremost with an eye tuned to art that he examines effects of light and atmosphere, clouds, mirages, and every other aspect of what is to be seen in the desert and its mountains. A few of his details — over a hundred years after this book was written — are by now outdated, but in essence it remains truthful to the land, to his experience, and it wonderfully captures the ways in which such a severe landscape can penetrate and capture a human heart. I read my own experience in his, mine not of artist or art critic but only a seasonally retired bookseller and philosophe fauve, when I read sentences such as the following:

How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilderness! How ‘the morning and the evening make up the day’ and the purple shadow slips in between with a midnight all stars! And how day by day the interest grows in the long overlooked commonplace things of nature! In a few weeks we are studying bushes, bowlders, stones, sand-drifts — things we never thought of looking at in any other country.

In my case those last eleven words do not apply, I think immediately, because wherever I am “bushes, bowlders, stones, sand-drifts,” along with insects, lizards, birds, mammals, tracks on the ground, clouds in the sky, running water or indications of water has run, still water, trees, habitations of human beings and other life — all this I look at and drink in hungrily. I suspect the difference for Van Dyke was one of familiarity vs. unfamiliarity, because in the West he did not find what he “knew so well when [he was] a child by a New England mill-stream.” And yet, something tells me that back in his New England boyhood he must already have been doing much more looking than overlooking, that he must have been noticing and forming impressions and making mental notes about everything he saw around him. Because being open to nature is generally a lifelong habit, and in the contrast of long-ago and recent experiences, after all, both are sharpened. 

For example --

The state bird of Illinois is the cardinal, a bird also common in Michigan, both in summer and winter. Against dense green summer foliage, the brilliant scarlet of the male cardinal commands attention, while seen on a background of winter snow, the white a blank page behind its startling color, it is no less impressive. Amid the dusty hues of a desert wash, to someone from the East or Midwest, the cardinal is more than impressive and attention-grabbing: it is downright improbable, verging on miraculous. 

Arizona’s "silver cardinal," the pyruhlloxia, unfamiliar and new to someone new to the West, is no more wonderful than the familiar cardinal, unfamiliar again in its “new” setting. Both give a lift to the heart and put a smile on the face.

Trail through new snow after April storm in Michigan

In Leelanau County, Michigan, Up North winter brings opportunities for noticing comings and goings of life that otherwise proceeds invisibly all around, as tracks in the snow tell stories. (Follow link to see more Michigan tracks. There was another, more extensive post of tracks in the woods, but I can't find it.) In spring, when the snow is gone, my dog still gets the news with her nose; I, on the other hand, dependent on vision, have the olfactory equivalent of near-blindness in grass and woods and must await dirt roads or wet shoreline sand to see what she detects on and near the ground. Here in the desert there is more bare earth, thus more signs accessible to sight. On dirt roads, in dusty washes, across the desert itself, there are more tracks and trails for me to see than back in Michigan after snowmelt, but whether here or there, looking for signs and paying attention to them is just as natural to me.

Cow tracks on road

Cow path through mesquite

Michigan

And everyone who lives near or visits Lake Michigan, the native of a lifetime or tourist of a single day, carries home stones. Desert and mountain rocks are fascinating and very different from smooth, rounded, water-polished beach stones, but to say I would “never thought of looking at” rocks or stones back home in the Midwest would be utterly false.

Michigan

Arizona

Enough, however, of this caviling. I did not set out with the intention of arguing with Mr. Van Dyke. On the contrary, I love his writing and especially love his love of nature. Was it the art criticism of his time that hailed “art for art’s sake,” rather than for conveying and imparting spiritual or political values? He does not insist on “meaning” in art, I’m guessing (not having read any of his other books), any more than he looks for it in nature, where he finds beauty “in itself."

Line and tint do not always require significance to be beautiful. There is no tale or text or testimony to be tortured out of the blue sky. It is a splendid body of color; no more.

Michigan blue

Arizona blue

Mountain blue

And there I am absolutely on the same page with this writer of over a century ago. It is not “sermons in stone” that I look for or find in mountains; nor do I find the absence of sermons something that mountains lack. In themselves, both as they are now and as they became over millenia, along with the changes they continue to undergo, mountains with no addition of sermonizing are endlessly fascinating and awe-inspiring. They are enough. No, more than enough. Monumental and overwhelming — and at the same time engaging, welcoming, beloved.

At the same time…. 

At the same time, neither Van Dyke’s prose nor his sensibility are those of our age but belong instead to the nineteenth century, a period that had closed — on the calendar, at least — only very shortly before this book appeared. While he refrains from passing judgment on nature, stylistically he is given not only to rhetorical questions and flowery exclamations, but also to the personification of nature and to teleological thinking, writing of nature’s designs and purposes, mysterious as the latter must always remain. 

Those first twenty years of our life we were allowed to sap blood and strength from our surroundings; the last twenty years of our life our surroundings are allowed to sap blood and strength from us. It is Nature’s plan and it is carried out without any feeling. With the same indifferent spirit that she planted in us an eye to see or an ear to hear, she afterward plants a microbe to breed and a cancer to eat. She in herself is both growth and decay. The virile and healthy things of the earth are hers; and so, too, are disease, dissolution, and death. The flower and the grass spring up, they fade, they wither; and Nature neither rejoices in the life nor sorrows in the death. She is neither good nor evil; she is only a great law of change that passeth understanding. The gorgeous pageantry of the earth with all its beauty, the life thereon with its hopes and fears and struggles, and we a part of the universal whole, are brought up from the dust to dance on the green in the sunlight for an hour; and then the procession that comes after us turns the sod and we creep back to Mother Earth. All, all to dust again; and no man to this day knoweth the why thereof.

Over and over he reminds us that the individual is of no concern to nature. Only in his closing pages does he finally conclude, somewhat shockingly, that nature is equally indifferent to species, and, probably, even to life on earth itself. Shocking? Surprising, certainly, and yet the conclusion is of a piece with all that came before. Nature is not benevolent, he has said all along. Nature is indifferent. So why would nature care about the survival of a planet?

Individual, type, and species, all shall pass away; and the globe itself become as desert sand blown hither and yon through space.

Van Dyke acknowledges that such a “destiny,” as he calls it, seems “harsh” to us, but he sees purpose even in the eventual destruction of our planet, as he sees it in the “waste” of the arid desert — 

…not because they develop character …, but simply because they are beautiful in themselves and good to look upon whether they be life or death.

Would I use those words? Destiny? Purpose? Destinies and purposes seem at odds with indifference, and I can’t help wondering how a mountain would remain beautiful with no one to behold it. — Of course, without senses and minds to apprehend and appreciate desert and mountains, the question of beauty would never arise. So here we are. 

Yes! Here we are, me here and you wherever you are! And aren’t we the lucky ones, though, to be alive at all, “to dance on the green in the sunlight for an hour” on our transit “from the sweetgrass to the packinghouse”? 

Who Gets to Name Places?

Sunday was another cold, windy, chilly day, too cold to sit and drink coffee on the porch at Beverly's and watch trains go by. Go to La Unica for lunch? No, esta cerrada los domingos. (Sorry about those missing accents!) Another nearby wonder our friend Joe had never visited, however, was the Amerind Foundation Museum, over the other side of Texas Canyon, and yes, the museum was open until 4 p.m., so off we set. 

I had already been twice to the museum and was more in need of a little quiet reading time than another exhibit walk-around, so I waited in Joe's truck, luxuriating in warm sun through the windows, while he and the Artist took in the exhibits. One of the books I bought from Winn the other day on the Benson book-buying excursion was Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, by Keith H. Basso, and Chiricahua on Saturday and Texas Canyon on Sunday were the perfect backdrop for Basso's book, as his purpose in these essays -- as in the research preceding their writing -- was to understand the significance of place-names in Apache life and thought. For too long, Basso writes, linguists have considered place-names exclusively as referrents, regarding them within the larger range of proper nouns "as referential vehicles whose only purpose is to denote...." He notes the irony of this position,

...for place-names are arguably among the most highly charged and richly evocative of all linguistic symbols. Because of their inseparable connection to specific localities, place-names may be used to summon forth an enormous range of mental and emotional associations--associations of time and space, of history and events, of persons and social activities, of oneself and stages in one's life. And in their capacity to evoke, in their compact power to muster and consolidate so much of what a landscape may be taken to represent as both personal and cultural terms, place-names acquire a functional value that easily matches their utility as terms of reference. 

- Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996)

Because of the evocative power of place-names and their freight of associations, they also make available rich metaphorical meanings that native speakers use in story-telling. It felt good to sit quietly and soak in warm sun and rich ideas.

When my expedition companions returned from their museum tour, the Artist directed our friend to drive to the picnic grounds, where amidst seemingly gravity-defying boulders (many, I have discovered from close examination, have vestigial mushroom-like stems connecting them to base rocks) the three of us deployed cameras like the tourists we were. 

The edge of Texas Canyon encompassing the Amerind and lining Dragoon Road is certainly spectacular, and Joe was especially entranced, seeing it up close for the first time, but I couldn't help relating the place to my reading and thus thinking that surely it once had an Apache name, a name that would have been very important to the people who knew and used it. The entirety of Texas Canyon would have had such a name, and the smaller area we were photographing no doubt -- the feeling was very strong; I was sure of it -- had its own specific name, a name would hold for its people a history of events to which we visiting Anglos are completely blind. 

We can read all we want about the geology of the area, how the rocks came to be, as they are, but we have no personal connection to the place, no memories of unwritten local events, no knowledge of the stories that would make the rocks live for those knowing the stories. We are only strangers passing through a place named on our paper maps. 

Back on the road, though, from our passage through Texas Canyon on the expressway, I could see Dos Cabezas in the distance, and I thought, those twin peaks are my mountains. I look out on them every morning. They are the landmark from which I orient, whatever direction we travel out from our winter cabin to go elsewhere. Those mountains have become part of my life, whether hidden in clouds or mist, standing out bright in the first light of morning, or darkening as night comes on. I smiled, seeing Dos Cabezas -- and again, a little farther down the road, when Willcox appeared, "my little cow town," as I call Willcox, feeling a fondness for an endless number of ordinary spots and corners in the town, places now woven into my life history and meaningful to me, even from my ephemeral position on the far periphery of local culture.

Most of the town names around here are not awe-inspiring or evocative of very much. Willcox, Benson, Pearce, and Safford are named for whitemen who were at one time big deals but are hardly household names any more. Texas Canyon is called that because some a family from Texas got no closer than this to their original destination, the West Coast. The name Cochise County, when you get right down to it, is only the name of a person — albeit an Apache — not the kind of specific, descriptive place-name Apaches themselves would have used. 

Dos Cabezas, the name of a small mountain range, its twin peaks, and also the ghost town nestled on the south side of those peaks, comes nearer the spirit of Apache place-naming. As one of Basso's informants said of her home mountain: "'Elsewhere, hearing that mountain's name, I see it. Its name is like a picture.'" That is certainly true of Dos Cabezas. Its name is like a picture, and whenever I see or hear the name, I see the mountains, their identifying twin peaks, and the ghost town below, and my impulse is to pronounce the name aloud. 

In Dos Cabezas, our little poblado del invierno, I feel like more than just a stranger passing through. However temporary our stay, I feel at home here. 

Book Recommendation: THE FARAWAY NEARBY

The first essay in Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby describes an embarrassment of apricots, three large boxes of apricots from a tree in her mother's yard, so many apricots that she spread them out on a sheet on her bedroom floor to prevent their crushing each other. But there was no stopping time, and something had to be done with the fruit. Inspecting it frequently for rot, she saw their nagging presence not as abundance but as anxiety, a complicated set of feelings related to her relationship with and responsibility for an aging mother slipping ever further into dementia.

This abundance of apricots seemed to be not only a task set for me, but my birthright, my fairy-tale inheritance from my mother who had given me almost nothing since my childhood. It was a last harvest, a heap of fruit from a family tree, like the enigmatic gifts of fairy tales.... The apricots were a riddle I had to decipher, a tale whose meaning I had to make over the course of the next twelve months as almost everything went wrong. 

 - Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

The mother-child relationship, family stories, fairy tales, inheritances, riddles, meanings, and memories, the mystery of stories told and retold and changing in the remembering and telling – such seeds are nurtured and coaxed along with a delicate, masterful touch in the pages of this book, which constitutes a garden stretching from familiar home scenes in North America to steaming Latin American jungles and bare Icelandic plains, soils from which emerge leprosy and revolution, literary monsters and strange cults. We are on a journey with author Rebecca Solnit. And she? She says,

I am, we each are, the inmost of an endless series of Russian dolls; you who read are now encased within a layer I built for you, or perhaps my stories are now inside you. We live as literally as that inside each other’s thought and work, in this world that is being made all the time, by all of us, out of beliefs and acts, information and materials. Even in the wilderness your ideas of what is beautiful, what matters, and what constitutes pleasure shape your journey there as much as do your shoes and map also made by others.

The book itself is a series of Russian dolls. Not only does each essay consist of layered meanings and images, growing from, for example, a floor spread with apricots to a meditation on time, picking up fairy tale strands along the way, but the collection itself is a larger essay encompassing the smaller ones. Perfectly coherent, it contains the others in meaning, not only as all are held together by the book’s binding. The apricots recur. Frankenstein’s monster reappears. And each reprise of each theme adds another layer to this intricate, complex work of art.

As a reader, one is aware on every page of being led somewhere new by a master essayist as Solnit takes us into and through her labyrinth, a journey that winds along as unspooled thread to bring us back home again in the end.

In the folding up of great distance into small space, the labyrinth resembles two other manmade things: a spool of thread and the words and lines and pages of a book. ... Reading is also traveling, the eyes running along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and understanding.

The quotations I've used so far are beautiful, I hope you will agree, and yet they hardly do justice to the sensual detail of Solnit’s essays. Besides her lovely metaphors, extended analogies, and other abstractions beloved of a philosopher reader, there are also descriptions of her immediate surroundings. For instance –

Arriving in Iceland in spring, I watched the annual tuning up of the instruments everywhere as the earth woke up from winter. Mats of flattened gray plant stalks metamorphosed into grasses and great mounds of invasive Alaskan lupine smeared whole hillsides violet. Tiny flowers appeared in clumps of greening moss on the stones that paved vast expanses of land. Bumblebees that seemed to have the lower levels of the air all to themselves were joined by tiny butterflies and other insects.

The lush, swarming, high-speed Arctic spring! And the author brings to her experiences of art this same willingness to be submerged, though it is emergence -- becoming -- that is her overarching theme.

Does anyone out there remember a feature of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, a story that run from page to page in the margins? Solnit does something that reminded me a little of that story. Beginning on the first page of the first essay, there is a line of italic type (a single line, though my typeface and page formatting have it look otherwise below) at the bottom of the page:

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. This is the title of a short scientific report

The line is not a footnote, and the second sentence begun does not end on that page, and sentences bridge the spaces from one essay to the next. The relationship of this secondary (?) meditation to that of the essays, however, is a riddle for each reader to solve. (Perhaps a fiber artist would see it as elaborate decorative hemstitching.) An while a reader with a different kind of mind than my own might be able to follow both meditations in tandem, I admit I gave up trying after a few pages, reading the essays first, to the end of the book, and then starting over to follow the path laid by the meditation on tear-drinking moths.

But however one reads this book, whether in one long, thirsty series of gulps or slowly, measuring the reading out over a longer period of time, I cannot a more rewarding feast for lovers of the essay form. And at the end of the meal, hungry for more, you will be delighted to discover Rebecca Solnit's other books. The Faraway Nearby will be my first featured book for January 2017, and I'll be ordering multiple copies soon, so please contact me by phone or e-mail to reserve or to request one of Solnit's other titles. 

When Metaphor Fails: What Counts as ‘Porn’?

In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson laid out a major philosophical position on language and meaning, namely, that spoken language (and so, by extension, written language) is fundamentally and inevitably metaphorical in nature, i.e., that all linguistic meaning is based on a metaphorical understanding of the world.

Let me start again. This time I’m going to use another color for a while to help get Lakoff and Johnson’s point across.

In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson laid out a major philosophical position on language and meaning, namely, that spoken language (and so, by extension, written language) is fundamentally and inevitably metaphorical in nature, that all linguistic meaning is based on a metaphorical understanding of the world.

Some would go even further with this than I have gone; others would object to going even this far. But you see the general direction of the argument? So let’s continue.

Our commonest of utterances, according to Lakoff and Johnson (who convinced me years ago), are shot through and through with metaphor. Johnson continued to develop the thesis in The Body in the Mind. Families of meanings cluster around our most basic embodied experiences, such as inside and outside, up and down, etc. Language without such a foundation is unimaginable – and there again is another metaphor, for we imagine in images, not necessarily visual but necessarily drawn from our physical senses of embodiment.

‘Metaphor’ itself is a metaphor, a meaning “carried over,” as oil is carried in a jar. And think of the contrast usually made between ‘figurative’ and ‘literal’ language. What does ‘literal’ mean? There are no letters in speech, are there? So is not ‘literal’ itself a metaphor, dependent on ‘figurative’ meaning?

The French philosopher Henri Bergson, my “main man” in philosophy, famously realized that we human beings can only make sense (how’s that for a metaphor: make sense) of time by casting it in spatial terms. American Sign Language, spoken languages, and arguments on free will (the last Bergson’s original focus) all bear this out. We spatialize time in order to see it conceptually, and in so doing, Bergson says, we cannot help misrepresenting it. Here is a quick and dirty recap of his dissolution of the free will argument: The determinist sees a fork in the road ahead and tells us that which road we will take when we get to the fork is fixed in advance. The free will advocate says no, when we get to the fork, we can choose. Bergson’s point is that there is no fork ahead, no road, no path at all. Where we postulate the forked road ahead, there is, as yet, nothing. Only as we live in and through time do we create the course our life takes. The future is what is not-yet, nonexistent.

The French language is rich in agricultural and pastoral metaphors, and so after a digression or background explanation, Bergson writes, “Let’s come back to our sheep” to signal that he is once again taking up the main thread of his argument. “Revenons à nos moutons.” English is also rich in agricultural expressions (“one rotten apple”; “a hard row to hoe”), as well as many from the English maritime past (“a loose cannon”; “down the hatch”). Like the more basic metaphors, the ones we don’t even notice, these figures of speech have over time become clichés, their origins seldom brought to mind, if not forgotten. What is a cliché to a native speaker, however, can be a charming and lively metaphor to one who comes to it in a language acquired later in life.

But I have not yet even introduced my sheep! Here goes--.

Recently I was taken to task on Facebook over a term that offends me in its newly widespread, indiscriminate application. Clearly, ‘indiscriminate’ is my interpretation of the new usages. (That is clear, isn’t it?) I am not pretending to take a god’s-eye view here. This is my perspective, my point of view, and no one is under any obligation to share it, but I would like to lay it out more thoroughly than I did on Facebook. 

The term is ‘porn,’ and I was accused of failing to appreciate the metaphor active in the uses that offend me. My friends were pushing me (whether this was their intention or not) to think carefully, and I did. 'Pornography,' the full, longer form, previously signaled a serious, controversial subject long debated in the realms of art, aesthetics, law, and civil society. The abbreviated term, by contrast, has come to signal an amusing, sophisticated dismissal of seriousness. Thus we are invited to exclaim and laugh over ‘food porn,’ ‘book porn,’ ‘bookshop porn,’ and ‘bookshelf porn.’ 

Why, aside from food, do so many of these have to do with books? Is it merely that my own life’s focus brings them to my notice that I have come to detest these phrases? Are there an equal number of uses in other parts of American life? Music? Sports?

“Revenons à nos moutons.”

As with widespread adoption not long ago of ‘ho,’ mostly by young people, calling so many things ‘porn’ not only not only sexualizes them but also trivializes sexuality. An enormous power is ignored and/or denied. Is the joking another version of the camel hiding its head in the sand? Do we fear the power of sexuality that much?

A friend of mine, doing research for a book she was writing, ran into a very dark reality behind a beautiful façade, a summer camp on an achingly beautiful island where, far from family and legal surveillance, young boys were sexually abused and exploited for the purposes of a child pornography ring. Nothing about the story was amusing.

At the other extreme, my friend Helen wrote for her blog a post on world-famous libraries, including photographs of surpassing, catch-your-breath loveliness. I am so grateful to Helen for not devaluating the great buildings and collections in her blog post by calling them ‘library porn’!

Human beings are capable of dreadful cruelty, shameful neglect, and unspeakable perversion, but our species has also added to the beauty and fullness of creation with works of art in every domain, along with institutions and systems of government, law, and science. At times we achieve magnificence with our works. Are we embarrassed to recognize the good? Are we as embarrassed to feel ourselves responding to beauty as we should be ashamed of being drawn to the gutter? Are we afraid of looking and sounding naive unless we shift instantly to a glib pretense of humor that levels all experience – no more horrors, no more inspiring heights?

‘Amazing’ and ‘awesome’ take human responses of awe and amazement and transfer them onto the world outside themselves. The mountain itself knows nothing of awe; it is we who feel awe in its presence. When a blueberry muffin or a pair of high heels is ‘awesome,’ what is left to say of the mountain? And when lovingly executed haute cuisine or the creation of an impressive book collection or a beautiful building is called ‘porn,’ what word can we use for the sexual exploitation of those children hidden away on the island?

Sexuality isn’t the only powerful human experience in the world. Words have power, too. On the other hand, we can bleed power out of words by abuse, misuse, or casual overuse. Do our lives matter? Does it matter how we treat one another? Do our efforts and achievements matter?

The world is not as flat as some pundits would have us believe. What have we to gain by relinquishing strong language with which to describe its beauties and its horrors. To anyone who loves words, this is an important question.

At home these winter evenings we have begun watching the television series The Newsroom” on DVD, and last night we watched an episode titled “Tragedy Porn.” In this episode the network in the story, attempting to gain back recently lost viewers, joins other networks in bypassing important, serious news during ratings week to focus on the most salacious, least important aspects of (1) the trial of a mother for killing her child; and (2) the ruin of a politician’s career for having posted sexually explicit photographs of himself on Twitter. In this instance, I thought the use of the word was perfectly appropriate: the network audiences were invited to wallow in cheap images and easy judgments without much if any concern for important issues or relevant facts. The network was pandering, the audience thrilling voyeuristically to cheap horrors. In this instance I buy ‘porn’ as a metaphor.

What do you think? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? And, on a lighter note, how do you rate my use of the cliché in the foregoing sentence?

Time Out for a Word Rant

"I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermittent dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates." – Hermann Melville, MOBY-DICK OR, THE WHALE.

There’s something that’s been eating away at me, and I can’t keep quiet any longer. My fellow Americans, if you among those guilty of this error, I’d like to shake you awake right now! You are driving me crazy! Never fear, this has nothing to do with politics. 

Let’s start with a quiz, if you don't mind. No one will know how you answer, so you risk nothing. In the following sentences, a form of which word belongs in the blank space: ‘rein’ or ‘reign’? Note that ‘reign’ and ‘rein’ both have verb and noun forms.

• The morning following a big storm, a majestic calm often _____ . 
• For the morning writing exercise, the professor always gave her students free _____.
•  At the public meeting, several speakers had to be asked to _____ in their impulsive speech.
•  The dictator’s _____ of terror lasted five years. He then handed over the _____ of power to his oldest son.
•  With the lightest touch on the _____, the third rider into the ring controlled her horse perfectly, and that team of horse and rider ultimately _____ supreme in the dressage competition.

If you find these two words confusing but grammar in general interesting, bear in mind that the verb ‘to rein’ is transitive, while ‘to reign’ is intransitive. For those not keen on grammar, what does this mean? Look at other verbs. ‘To throw’ is transitive; it takes an object. The dog’s owner threw the ball [object] for the dog to retrieve. To stand is intransitive and does not take an object. She remained outdoors for hours in the rain. It makes sense to ask, “She threw what object?” It doesn’t make sense to ask, “She remained what object?” She remained. The verbal buck stops there. Or He stood. Intransitive. But then there’s She stood their hectoring as long as she could, which is transitive, but that’s a different verb, though it looks the same. –Oh, all right, maybe transitive/intransitive won’t be much help here.... 

Think, then, of the famous Hallelujah Chorus: “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” “And He shall reign forever and ever.” (One online site I wish I hadn’t seen gave this as “He shall rain”—NO, NO, NO! Gods and humans do not rain. Only rain rains! Are we really confused about ‘rain,’ too? I find that hard to believe. I don’t want to believe it. Please, let it not be true!) If ‘reign’ is really the word you want, then it’s the word you want, but stop to think and be sure. “He handed over the reigns”? NO, NO, NO! Rein in—that is, hold back—that fevered rush to error!

To figure out which word you want, it helps most to know where each comes from. Think of regal, regency, regalia—all this pomp and circumstance has to do with kings and queens and courts. See the ‘g’ in all the words? On the other hand, there are horses, animals domesticated to our use, controlled with bits in their mouths and reins leading from those bits to the hands of a rider or driver. Give the reins a twitch, and the horse’s mouth feels it, and the trained horse responds. So in the sentence you are writing, which sense applies? If you are using the word as a metaphor, is your guiding image one of a ruler or an animal being controlled? Wordsmith Michael Sheehan gave readers of a brief Facebook exchange the following Latin origins: 'Reign' goes back to regnum, the office or power of a king, while the Latin verb retinere, from which comes 'rein,' means to curb or restrain.

What is our problem, Americans, with all the confusion over these two words?

The United States rejected monarchy from the start. No one reigns over the American people, and early Americans were very clear on that point! It meant a lot to them. For our first century, also, we were predominantly a horse culture, and every American knew that reining meant controlling. Today, in the 21^st century, both monarchs and horses have faded from general cultural consciousness, and a people with little feeling for matters royal or equestrian find themselves using old words out of historical context. For some reason—and I’d be interested in any speculations on why this might be so; because it is fancier???—the spelling related to royalty is the one almost always used these days, while that related to horses, which is often what the writer really wants but doesn’t know it, almost never appears. The problem is that the two meanings are very different.

When I posted my original (much shorter) rant on Facebook, asking friends for their understanding of these two words, several responded, and all my literate friends got it right, I'm happy to report, but my favorite response came from Sylvia Merz, librarian at the Leland Township Library, because her explanation was so delightfully succinct. (That is, she doesn’t go on and on and on the way I do.) Here is the way she distinguishes the two verbs:

“‘Reign’ is to rule; ‘rein’ is to control.”

Thank you, Sylvia, and my other clear-thinking friends! But are we fighting a losing battle? Is the day at hand when a single word will contain both meanings and thus makes no etymological sense at all? I give the last word today to someone I’ve never met:

The spelling “reign” in this expression is an example of the triumph of folk etymology over origin. The expression to give free rein to is figurative. It means to give a person freedom to act on his own authority. It derives from an equestrian term:
 free rein – a rein held loosely to allow a horse free motion; the freedom that this gives a horse. (OED)
 The word rein derives from a word meaning “a bond, check” from a verb meaning “to hold back. It’s related to retain. The word reign derives from a Latin word for kingship. To reign means to exercise the power of a king. The sense of this “reign” has become conflated with the expression “to give free rein to.”
The confusion has become so complete that it’s beyond correction.