Piecing Together the Past

After a week of balmy summer, Nature today has carried us back to spring with a second wet morning in a row, this one cool enough for a jacket, though sweater and raincoat may be more appropriate. Yes, rain. Rain means a break from mowing grass — and also encourages the grass to grow all the more lushly. Everything is a double-edged sword.

Yesterday morning I came to the last page of Rachel May’s An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery, and today I feel challenged to get across to male readers, many of whom will have little or no interest in domestic arts (am I stereotyping?), that this is not just a “book about quilts.” It is much more. Though there is plenty of information about quilts and several other examples of quilts made in the early years of the Republic, for author May the 200-year-old quilt tops encountered in the book’s pages are pieces of material culture that first open the door to decades of American history in which she will subsequently immerse herself and her readers. What May pieces together in her book are lives. 

But here I want to go in another direction for a while, because May will be the best narrator of her own story and I don’t want to pre-empt anyone’s reading and listening of that. Also, my digression has a definite purpose, connected to May's book, so once again I ask you go come with me on a little detour.

Old books. Some people have no use for them, especially old history books, but for me the age of a book, the era in which it was written, is never a reason to pass by without opening the pages. “Outdated” is not a term I usually  recognize. Many of today’s perspectives will surely be discarded in the future, so why should we necessarily valorize them over other views, merely because they are current? For me, the calendar cannot be a yardstick for value. And just as some past views require correction in the present and will require additional correction in the future, surely other perspectives of the past may be resuscitated and one day seen as superior to what is commonly believed today. It has happened before, and it will happen again. 

The “old” book I picked up yesterday afternoon — actually, I initially picked it up months ago and have had it tucked away in the car for an occasion that finally arrived yesterday, an hour when I would be waiting in the car for the Artist and would need something to read — is a book of essays on the philosophy of history, essays gathered together and published in 1959. It is The Philosophy of History in Our Time: An Anthology, selected and edited by Hans Meyerhoff, and in the parking lot of the Suttons Bay library as afternoon segued into evening I had the opportunity to dip into the first essay in the collection to catch my eye, “The Historical Imagination,” by R. G. Collingwood. 

Revisionist history. There is another phrase used as one of depreciation and often uttered with a sneer. The common connotation, nurtured by many who consider themselves lovers — even practitioners — of history, is that to revise history is to falsify it. And of course intentional falsifications have occurred from time to time. But not every revision is a distortion. I would venture to say that most revisions are corrections and clarifications rather than distortions, and here Collingwood comes to my aid, as well as serving to bolster the work of Rachel May, which is the reason for my digression today. 

Collingwood begins by setting forth what he believes is most people’s first “commonsense” theory of history, in which the essential features are memory and authority. According to this view, an authority is someone with memory of an event, and subsequent historians remain true insofar as they rely on facts set forth by authorities. Collingwood challenges this view and insists on the historian’s autonomy, that he or she (for Collingwood, always “he,” but no matter) must always be his or her own authority. 

As natural science finds its proper method when the scientist, in Bacon’s metaphor, puts Nature to the question, tortures her by experiment in order to wring from her answers to his own questions, so history finds its proper method when the historical puts his authorities in the witness-box, and by cross-questioning extorts from them information which in their original statements they have withheld, either because they did not wish to give it or because they did not possess it. 

So much for authority, although I am not giving you every step or every example in Collingwood’s refutation. What about memory? Will that not be essential?

And as history does not depend on authority, so it does not depend upon memory. The historian can rediscover what has been completely forgotten. … He can even discover what, until he discovered it, no one ever knew to have happened at all. 

What, though, about facts? The question of facts, which seemed more or less settled to the commonsense imagination, has once again become contentious, and Collingwood insists that for the historian facts about the past are always contentious, that there are no “bare facts” that can serve as fixed points on which to pin a complete history. No authorities, no fixed points, no data. 

Another philosopher of history in the same old book, Carl Becker, addresses himself to the question of historical facts and takes as his example that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. What of it? he asks. Many people have crossed rivers, many even have undoubtedly crossed the Rubicon, and certainly in saying “Caesar” crossed it we mean that he did so with an army, and when we look at this “simple fact” closely, we see that thousands of other facts must have gone into it and have been left out of the story. Historians are always selecting and omitting.

Back to Collingwood:

All that the historian means, when he describes certain historical facts as his data, is that for the purposes of a particular piece of work there are certain historical problems relevant to that work which for the present he proposes to treat as settled; though, if they are settled, it is only because historical thinking has settled them in the past, and they remain settled only until he or some one else decides to reopen them. 

In the end, Collingwood comes to a coherence theory of historical truth. Any historian will be selecting among bits of evidence to construct a story, but that story cannot be “arbitrary or merely fanciful,” although it will be “essentially something imagined” in the gaps between what is known, and here the work of the imagination is structural, not merely ornamental. Like a novel, history but “make sense.” It must present a “continuous and coherent picture.” But unlike the novel, “the historian’s picture is meant to be true,” and this truth demands that the picture be localized in space and time; consistent with itself; and stand “in a peculiar relation to something called evidence.” Collingwood having rejected authorities and fixed points, i.e., bare facts, you will not be surprised to learn that his attitude toward evidence is not a simple one 

Everything is evidence which the historian can use as evidence. [Emphasis added]

I have italicized that sentence and left it standing alone because for me it shines light on Rachel May’s imaginative reconstruction of nineteenth-century lives, both black and white, beginning with an unfinished quilt. Collingwood goes on.

Everything is evidence which the historian can use as evidence. But what can he so use? I must be something here and now perceptible to him: this written page, this spoken utterance, this building, this finger-print. And of all the things perceptible to him there is not one which he might not conceivably use as evidence on some question, if he came to it with the right question in mind. 

I read: This quilt. This box of letters. These printed images. These houses and the much more simple buildings behind them. Historical markers in certain places, their absence in others. 

History is never finished, once and for all, writes Collingwood, but this is not an argument for skepticism.  History is a process, and the historian is part of that process. 

[E]very new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves….

And here is the heart of important revision, it seems to me. “Settled” history, that which we learn in grade school, answers a limited set of questions, but as we grow older we realize how many questions were never asked in those books. Could New Englanders have become so wealthy with their cotton mills if not for cheap raw material from the South, its very cheapness made possible only by the institution of slavery? What picture does the word “slave” bring to mind? How might it be possible to give a fuller picture not only of national economics in the nineteenth century but also of individual human lives? How can we possibly imagine what might have been going on in the minds of those who could see other human beings as property, in the minds of those who were considered little more than livestock or chattel? 

Much necessary historical revision is enlargement. It looks to answer questions that previous historians did not ask (or dismissed from consideration), and it looks to give voice to what has hitherto been kept silent. It is not suppression of truth but the bringing to light of more truth than had been made easily available before. 

What historical facts will you accept? What answers?  What stories? Each of us who reads history is a student of it, and the more we read and learn, the more critically we can assess what we read, by putting it in the witness-box of our own imaginations and cross-questioning it. 

Here’s why it matters. Another phrase from Collingwood stood out for me: 

Every present has a past of its own….

It is this truth, in part, that drives Rachel May’s investigations. Just as she asked about Southern slave-owners, how they could come to a comfortable acceptance of owning other human beings, so she also asks of our time, how did we come to be where we are today? What questions have we failed to ask ourselves? What are we not seeing, and whose voices are we not hearing, whether willfully or ignorantly?

Rachel May will be my first Thursday Evening Author, presenting her story of historical reconstruction at Dog Ears Books on June 21, beginning at 7 p.m. She is, I should add for the reassurance of crafters, a serious quilter herself and a student of historical patterns and methods of quilting, as well as a researcher of documents and places, so she will have something to offer every member of the audience, and I hope the audience for her presentation will be numerous.

“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.

Seeing the World or Only the Insides of Our Own Heads?

Vase of purple asters

My six-week beginning drawing class is over, but I’m going to keep drawing. Drawing for me is diary and meditation and vacation and conversation, all rolled into one slow, low-key, low-tech activity. Paper and pencil. Or paper and pen. Enough light to see. That’s all it takes.

The drawing I did of my son during his visit I posted on Facebook as well as here on my blog. Reaction from many people (including my son) is often, “I can’t draw at all” or “I can’t even draw a straight line.” Honestly? I have trouble with straight lines myself, but that’s what rulers are for. The contours of most of the things I want to draw, it turns out, do not have straight edges.

What about you? Do you think you can’t draw?

Our instructor remarked the first evening of class that no one would expect to sit down at a piano and rip off a Beethoven sonata without advance study and practice, but people think they should be able to pick up a pencil and right away dash off a good drawing the first time around. Anyone can learn to draw, Elizabeth Abeel, our instructor, told us, but it is something to be learned, and it does take practice.

Classic book!

Abeel uses a lot of techniques from Betty Smith’s classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence, the book that convinced me long, long ago that I (or “even I,” as I thought then) could learn to draw with a teacher using these methods. Whether you take “left brain/right brain” terminology to be strict physiological description of brain anatomy or a metaphorical distinction between two different ways of interpreting the world, the big lesson in drawing is this:

"DRAW WHAT YOU SEE, NOT WHAT YOU KNOW."

Betsy said this to us over and over, and here’s an example of what it means: If someone is told, “Draw a flag,” most beginners will have recourse to their mental symbol set. That first flag drawing, therefore, will begin as a rectangle, with stripes, stars and whatever subsequently filled in. The drawings will look pretty much like this section of a page from an atlas, only without color and without the slight wave in the lines of these flags:

Flat flag symbols 

But how often do we see a flag stretched out flat? The lesson is to resist pulling out a mental symbol and, instead, to look at a real flag, hanging on a pole. Here are a couple of my efforts to draw a flag in front of me. The first is a hurried first-night sketch (I had read the book long ago and had spent time one winter and all last year drawing, so my first sketch wasn't quite as flat as is the usual with beginning students), the second our “final exam” on the last night of class.

Quick sketch, first night of class

Slow, careful study of artfully draped flag

Getting from the flat symbol to the complex rendering of reality is not instant. One of the first exercises we did was to draw “vase faces,” as our instructor and Betty Edwards call them. (This is in Chapter 4 of the Edwards book, the chapter titled “Crossing Over: Experiencing the Shift from Left to Right.”) First we drew a simple contour of a face seen from the side – forehead, indent for the eye, nose, open mouth, chin, neck. Then we drew lines extending out from the top and bottom of that curved line. Finally, we began the curved line again on the opposite side. The result is either two faces looking at each other or a single vase, depending on how you look it, but the point of the exercise is that one’s “left brain” (verbal, symbol-using, fact-obsessed) will be frustrated and give up, allowing the “right brain” (visual, intuitive, loving complexity) to take over. The “left brain” hates complexity, and the “right brain” loves complexity. You can see why it’s necessary to make that shift if you want to draw what you see and not what you know.

Another exercise was drawing upside-down, copying a drawing which we were also looking at upside-down. Again, the aim was to frustrate the left brain so that it would give up and get out of the way. Instead of the left brain being able to look at a hand and say, “I know what a hand looks like” and pull a clumsy, flat, iconic mitten out of its symbol set, the right brain was given time to concentrate on lines and relationships, without putting nametags on any of the parts. 

(Drawing, the mind bypasses names and symbols and reasons and arguments and causal chains and settles down in the moment. That’s what makes drawing such a meditative experience.) 

Another exercise was doing "pure contour" drawings. In my mind, I call them "blind" rather than "pure," because what you're doing in this kind of work is drawing an object -- say, your own hand -- while looking only at the object and never at your paper. Also, you put the pencil to the paper and don't lift it until you've finished the drawing. The idea is not to reproduce the object perfectly but to give your eye time to follow all the complicated ins and outs of the object's contour and have your hand translate its movement directly from that of your eye.

You can see all these exercises in the Betty Smith book, and in it you'll also find many examples of student work showing exciting and vast improvement in the course of a very few weeks.

A question I have – a hope I have – is whether/that what can be done for seeing can also be done for hearing. What would it take to quiet the chattering, knowing-everything voices in our heads and truly hear what other people are saying? For them to quiet their minds enough to hear us in return? For all of us to slow down and talk to, not past, each other?

Can we translate the lessons of meditation into everyday life?