“What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear”

What is "It"? Weather? Learning? History? Class?

Weather and Stuff Like That

It was winter in Leelanau County, and then it was spring, unexpectedly and alarmingly early. The air was balmy, daffodils pushed up eagerly on Waukazoo Street, and ticks—ugh!—awoke from their hibernal slumbers. One of them found Sarah, and an assistant at the veterinary clinic said four other pet owners had called about ticks on their dogs already. Freedom from ticks is one of winter’s blessings, and the return of spring, while thrilling, also brings back dread and worry in the form of ticks.

But outraged winter roared back, with fierce winds and nearly a foot of snow (to bury the ticks—yea!) and temperatures plunging down to the single digits overnight (so cold--boo!). The old folk saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” encapsulates the same truth as my philosophy of life in a nutshell: Everything is a double-edged sword, all blessing mixed, fortune a matter of perspective.

Well, then the sun came out again as the mercury rose once more, and those heavy snowdrifts melted so fast they seemed to be saying with a laugh, “We’re sorry! Bad joke!”

But official spring is still two weeks off, and this is Michigan. Anything could happen.

Intellectual Cross-Pollination

My first semester of college (never mind how long ago) was an exciting time, and as I thought this morning about books I’ve been reading the past couple of weeks, I was reminded of that thrilling earlier period of my life. Can I possibly reconstruct my class schedule? Rhetoric (a required freshman class); Voice and Articulation (for my speech and theatre major); an introductory class in Psychology; Botany (big mistake: I’d been aiming for horticulture but didn’t realize the difference; wanted to work with plants, not microscopes); University Choir—but choir was only one credit, so I’m still missing something big, because I carried 19.5 credits that semester.

But of the classes I’ve remembered, what unites them? Not obvious, is it? Voice and Choir seem to go together, and Psychology might well work along with Rhetoric.... All these years later, the web of connections that I felt then, every day, has fallen into dust. All I can say is that all the learning, so much, was coming at me so fast, that it seemed to feed together like one big class.

Oh, here’s one connection I just remembered. A certain school of thought believed emotions were causative and produced actions, while another argued that actions, based on judgments, themselves produced emotions! For example, I run away, and the running produces fear; the faster I run, the more afraid I become. That theory from psychology had clear and obvious potential for the stage and was itself, to one hearing it for the first time, excitingly new and strange and wonderful.

How I managed to bring botanical insights into anything else back then, I cannot say now. Perhaps the connections I made were metaphorical. I’ve been known to do that sort of thing, once typing a book-length manuscript on welding, written by an engineer, and finding in it nothing but poetry about the successes and failures of love!

And So, About My Recent Reading

This winter/spring, it has been Nancy Isenberg’s startling new perspective on American history that set the stage for cross-pollinating streams of book-induced thought, streams first beginning to interweave when, not yet at the end of her book, I began reading the new John James Audubon, by Gregory Nobles. Here are a few ways Isenberg’s focus on class in America transferred, for me, to the story of Audubon in America.

First, there was the whole big question of what constituted science and who would be counted as a scientist. British and European intellectuals in general looked down on early pioneering knowledge efforts in the New World. The European establishment, proud of its focus on ideas and theory, denigrated American practicality. Americans, they thought, could never set aside questions of economic gain, and so the more abstract questions of science, abstractions that Europeans built into entire systems of thought, fell by the wayside. For their part, the Americans, insistent as they were on their intellectual independence, never felt their scientific reputations secure until they had been recognized in Europe.

Europeans, then, backed by tradition and the leisure of old money, held themselves the “pure” scientists. Americans (Audubon was but one example), scrabbling for financial gain and intellectual recognition, were suspect by comparison.

(I find it sadly ironic today that the nineteenth-century American insistence on facts, experiment, and observation over abstract theory seems to have been given up in today’s United States. At least, that is so in our politics, and one wonders about science. Look around. Controversies and divisions in twenty-first century America are all too often fueled entirely by ideology--backed by money, seen as the ideological measuring stick--, and in that, it seems, we have become European—gone back to the Old World way of thinking—I believe, to our peril.)

One nineteenth-century transatlantic argument in natural history was between Buffon in France and Wilson in America and concerned the mutability of species over time. Evolution and its direction.

Buffon did not visit the New World but advanced a theory, nevertheless, that species degenerated in the American climate. Alexander Wilson (against whom Audubon continued to compete long after Wilson’s death) argued that Buffon’s theory flew in the face of facts, and even Thomas Jefferson got into that fray! Here I couldn’t help making the connection between what Buffon saw as “degeneracy” in America and the class distinctions and characterizations of “degeneracy” Americans themselves made against different groups in their own country, so carefully laid out in Isenberg’s history.

Well, that was the theory/fact divide. On a much lower plane was the distinction made in nineteenth-century America between “gentlemen sportsmen” and “pot hunters,” a class distinction if ever there was one.

As Audubon himself might kill thousands of birds in scientific pursuit, so the killing of birds for “sport” was judged pure and unobjectionable, regardless of the enormity of any particular slaughter—and slaughter it frequently was, with no limits to the killing established by law or admitted according to need. Birds were simply moving targets, and the greater the number killed, the more glory to the “sportsman” who brought them down.

But a “pot hunter”? One who killed to feed himself and his family? To market the meat for gain, as a livelihood? Anathema! Motive, you see, was the dividing line, not numbers of birds killed; male bonding a gentlemanly motive for killing, making a living by killing beneath contempt.

Audubon the American woodsman occupied a strange, anomalous position in the class history of the United States. When he traveled downriver by flatboat, paying his fare by shooting birds and game to provision passengers and crew, the term “pot hunter” clearly applied to him, and all his life, from one line of business to another, providing for his family was of paramount concern. On the other hand, both as an artist and as a scientist, he found doors open to him that would have been closed to others of his social rank—even if, in the best American upstart tradition, he did have to push some of those doors open himself.

Making Me Think

“Not our kind” (or "not our class, dear") is the vaguely worded, classically voiced objection signaling the speaker’s belief in his or her superiority. I started to type the phrase in quotes and missed a key the first time around: “not our kin” is the way it came out on the screen. There you are, I thought. Who will we count as part of the “family of man”?

From Isenberg and Nobles, I turned to the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, re-reading Jane Eyre to prepare myself for Sarah Shoemaker’s new novel, Mr. Rochester, which I am now about halfway through, and again and again, in both, class distinctions come to the fore. But those observations can wait for another day.

For now I only observe that the collecting of books is traditionally a leisure class pursuit, while the selling of them locates one clearly “in trade.” It is in this that I am perhaps most stubbornly American: I have always been proud of making my way in the world. Whether cleaning cabins, picking apples, or typing manuscripts, I've never been ashamed of working for a living. And bookselling has given me much more: through my bookstore, I've grown a life.

How's Your Hungarian?

All I can tell of this book’s contents by looking into it comes from the photographs and other illustrations. On the title page, for instance, there is the word “Natura,” which is clearly the publisher’s name but also gives a clue to what’s inside the book. And sure enough, in the many pages following there are photographs of forests and trees, mountains and fields, wildflowers and fish, even microscopic aquatic fauna.

Below is a graphic representation I take to show different microclimates at varying altitudes, but there are also photographs of human dwellings and other buildings.

(I'll spare you the maps and other graphs.) Searching online, I find that this Hungarian edition (1981) is available in six libraries around the world, and I can find information on Lake Balaton, claimed to be “Europe’s largest freshwater lake.” That linked site provided hints to more of what I found in the book, e.g., the medieval ruins. Or do these ruins look even older than the Middle Ages? Prehistoric, perhaps? The answer lies open in the text, but I cannot tell what I’m looking at. I see cultivation of grapes, fishing, logging, charming thatched cottages and old-fashioned farm wagons. But how much of this is historical, and how much is current?

It was not myself-as-reader but myself-as-avid bookseller who snatched up this book! Now, to find a bookstore customer who reads Hungarian!

Selling a book in German on -- I’m guessing -- housekeeping will probably be easier. Here it is:

Wouldn’t Neuzeit be “new times," implying modern? I’m sure the maid’s uniform was modern when the book was first published, but the maid and the little table set up for coffee (not tea: this is Germany, not England) look quite early 20^th century to me. I would do better picking out a word here and there except that they are all in the old script. Ah, but here’s part of the title illuminated by an online search: Domestic Science!

Now if anyone is still with me – or has impatiently scrolled down to see if there was going to be a point to all this – that person might be asking, Is she out of her mind? So here is the place where I remind that reader that I have been a bookseller for over 21 years. Surely now you see that your question is rhetorical, don’t you?

There Are No Small Meanings, Only Small Minds

Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. – Elizabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Confined to bed by a mysterious illness and unable even to sit up, Bailey became fascinated by a small wild snail brought to her by a friend in a clay pot of woods violets. Observing the snail gave interest and focus to her interminable hours of solitary confinement and forced inactivity.

In solitude very far removed from that of Bailey’s sickroom isolation, I was studying alone one evening during my first year of graduate school in a small, almost empty apartment in a strange city. The minimal furnishings of my monkish space consisted of a wobbly-legged dinette table, two wooden chairs, a low coffee table holding my typewriter (I sat cross-legged on the floor to type) and, in the bedroom, a futon on the floor and cardboard boxes, on their sides, open end out, holding books. I was lying on the carpeted living room floor when a tiny, bright red mite, smaller than the head of a pin, appeared on the page I was reading, moving purposefully across the lines of type. Had I pricked my finger with a needle to draw blood, the insect would have matched that blood in color. Another living being! I was so pleased! The next day, as usual, I walked to campus. When I told my fellow students about the mite, they all understood.

Bailey’s situation was prolonged and extreme in comparison to mine, and her snail was more than a moment of cheer. It was quite literally her lifeline. Later in her recovery, she wrote of the snail to her doctor:

Watching another creature go about its life . . . somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in life mattered, so I kept on.

Along with a highly personal odyssey of immobility (if I may call it that), the author explores natural history and poetry, tracing what others have discovered and noted in the miraculous complexity of this one small, inconspicuous wild creature. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a jewel of a book, destined to become a classic.

Wild snails in my neighborhood would do well to continue their hibernation a bit longer, but I have chosen today’s images (photos taken Saturday afternoon) with snail scale in mind. Perhaps a note on today's heading is appropriate here, as well, although anyone who has spent time in theatre will recognize the allusion. In the world of stage and greasepaint, one is often reminded, "There are no small parts, only small actors." Never a star, I drew strength from those words.