The Humanities and Sciences Depend on Each Other

My Index column from last week is my small addition to all that's been written about why we should not install medical and neuroscience research labs in all of our Humanities buildings just yet. To me, the debate of whether there is a major that is better, or more necessary for our society to study right now, often misses the point that we need many different ways of thinking to get any task done in any one discipline--be it a paper analyzing the motives of characters in O Pioneers! or a social psychology study on prejudicial attitudes towards a certain ethnic or cultural group. In all fields, we need data and insights from many different sources in order to say anything meaningful about the world. But for a less apologetic take on the need for English majors, and one that I like better than mine, read Adam Gopnik's "Why Teach English?" from the New Yorker this August. We need English students and teachers because people like to read, and to talk about what they read. Why would we need any more defense for the major than that?

Watching the Wheels

On this lazy Friday afternoon, Notebook is just making the wheels go round and round ... and possibly learning the chords for mandolin. Here's the Index column from yesterday about illustrator David Grove and the need for patience that can deal with decades and not just minutes. Hope you all have a good weekend.

Staring Down the Rat

In this week's Index column, I take a look at two poems from the Seamus Heaney collections I picked up earlier this semester, and use them to try to come to terms with processes of change and decay around Kirksville. The column does not mention it, but the poems are from Death of a Naturalist.

Biology Metaphors in Popular Culture

Inspired by Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," in today's column I examine some biological concepts such as "survival of the fittest" and see if the way they are used as metaphors in popular culture actually makes sense anymore.

Hard Times for the Elfin Tailor

College students have a way of getting down on themselves about struggles with their subject. If I'm not able to do this, they say, how am I supposed to do something in this field as a job? Or perhaps it's more along the lines of How does what I'm doing here matter at all? Accordingly, sometimes it's nice to remember where we are and what we are working with—or, as Kay Ryan encourages us to do, balance the daily challenges facing the elfin tailor with the rarity of being an elfin tailor, of being trusted to work with enchanted cloth at all.

Bad Day

Kay Ryan

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf.

Finding Walden, Continued

This semester of reading has partly been a search for Thoreau's clarity of vision, mainly through the works of writers who have come after and have felt the same desire. I recently finished two collections of poems by Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and Field Work. Field Work includes the Glanmore Sonnets and other poems from the four years he spent in a country home in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow with his family after leaving Belfast during The Troubles. Death of a Naturalist you will hear more about soon. Or read it before I have time to spoil it for you. Rarely are you able to find an autobiography that could fit on the sides of a paper crane, a crystallized, solid thing. 

Today began my pilgrimage through Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her record of a year in the mountains of Virginia in Walden-like solitude. As energetically as I have seen anyone try, she attempts to see the world as if "just set down here," yet at the same time seeking to synthesize the best of what she has seen, read, and struggled with so far. Strangely, these two intentions, though at first seeming to preclude the other, end up supporting each other, like two halves of an arch. She moves from intensely felt observations of reality to Rilkean wondering and wandering at just the right speed:

"We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water." It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."

Index Columns: Truman and Conservation

Last Thursday, I wrote about problems with Bear Creek, the stream that runs through Truman's campus, which the EPA considers an impaired stream. Today, my column considers the benefits of creating a wildlife watching license, as other states have done, that would allow birdwatchers to pay into conservation, which is traditionally supported by hunters and fishers alone. Again, apologies for the lack of paragraph indentation or spacing on the Index website ... Also, the website's teaser for my column describes me as an "enthusiastic" birdwatcher. I don't remember providing such an adjective.

Tales from Ancient Trumania

Here's the link to this week's Index column, which relates some of the more entertaining stories I found in an extensive, idiosyncratic history of Truman written by former Pres. Walter H. Ryle (who had plenty to say about himself.) By the way, I never used the word "venerable" to describe Truman's history in my draft. The word I remember using was "unique."

Solving the Oxford Comma Problem: A Platonic Dialogue

After reading an excerpt from Gerard Manley Hopkins' "On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue," I was inspired to write a similar dialogue for the TSU Writing Center's blog on the use of the Oxford Comma. And as Hopkins' dialogue takes place at Oxford, what setting could be more fitting for a discussion of that ever so troublesome comma?

Find Your Own Walden

Here's the link to my latest Index column, which discusses the nature of Truman's location and compares Thousand Hills to Walden Pond.

It's Not a Shame to Love a Morning Brew

Here's the link to the first of my weekly-ish columns for the Truman Index.  The web page doesn't seem to have paragraphing at the moment, so if you are on campus, just pick up a hard copy somewhere if you want to read it. This will also allow you to see the somewhat awkward juxtaposition of my silly observations about coffee culture next to a very serious, and I think well done, column on alcohol dependency ... I wasn't aware of that when I was writing my column. Oh well. I suppose you get both light and serious this way.

Noli Timere

Seamus Heaney’s last words to his wife, sent in a text message, were the Latin phrase Noli timere: do not be afraid. I hesitate to stamp a meaning on these words, other than their undulating cadence, their peaceful music, their importance in many Bible passages. In some ways it seems almost immoral not to be afraid today, considering the precarious state of the world. But one of our best lights got as close as the living can come to death and had these words for us. Something to carry around and consider every now and then, like his small, solid poems.

It makes me sad that it is Heaney’s death that will be the thing that finally leads me to read more of his work. I had read his chart-toppers like “Digging,” and could probably recognize one of his poems if they were put in front of me (look for bogs, damp, and short, musical lines), but had never read a mass of his poems. However, based on the several obituaries and remembrances of Heaney that I have read (probably the most I’ve read about a recently-deceased person ever), it seems that this irony might just make him chuckle. My personal favorite essay on his death is from his friend Tom Sleigh, which gives a rare glimpse into a relationship between two practicing writers.

Something that makes Heaney’s last words ring even stronger is their harmony with the English poet John Keat’s last words, which were reimagined in this poem I’ve recently discovered:

Keats

Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street vendors, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

may enter you.

The Virtue of Not Being a Genius

Even though my reading backlog is as clogged as Highway 64 at 5:30 on a Friday, it often happens that I suddenly have a strong desire to read a particular book, totally out of my carefully planned sequence. Today it was George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Barcelona in the besieged region of Catalonia as a journalist, but soon found himself joining the local socialist militia to fight against Franco’s fascist army, because “at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” The memoir recounts Orwell's evolving understanding of the cold realities of the war alongside the relationships he made with the people he served beside. Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the book intersects pleasantly with a discussion we've been having in my creative nonfiction workshop at Truman about essays. This excerpt sketches pretty succinctly what it means to be an essayist, and why we are drawn to read their work:

“If we ask what it is that [Orwell] stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do. We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us. They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel that they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing. Beside them we are so plain, so hopelessly threadbare. How they glitter, and with what an imperious way they seem to deal with circumstance, even when they are wrong. Lacking their patents of nobility, we might as well quit. This is what democracy has done to us, alas—told us that genius is available to anyone, that the grace of ultimate prestige may be had by anyone, that we may all be princes and potentates, or saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of the heart and mind. And then when it turns out that we are no such thing, it permits us to think that we aren’t much of anything at all. In contrast with this cozening trick of democracy, how pleasant seems the old reactionary Anglican phrase that used to drive people of democratic leanings quite wild with rage—'My station and its duties.'

            

Orwell would very likely have loathed that phrase, but in a way he exemplifies its meaning. … [His works] seem to become what they are chiefly by reason of the very plainness of Orwell’s mind, his simple ability to look at things in a downright, undeceived way. … He is not a genius—what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do.

           

Or could do if we but made up our minds to do it…”

             

A Poem a Day

The Poetry Foundation, publishers of Poetry magazine, have a "Poem of the Day" program that sends subscribers one poem every morning around 10 a.m. Like Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project and Billy Collin's Poetry 180 program and books, it's a small but concrete way of circulating poetry to a large audience and exposing new readers to the diversity and energy of contemporary poetry in a way that fits into a busy daily schedule. Having gotten their emails for about a year now, I can tell you that not every poem they send is great; some are delete-able; some are repeats; others you will find challenging (never a bad thing); but many, like the string of winners they have sent out this week, are absolutely worth it and will change your day for the better, if they are given the small moment of consideration they ask for. This morning's poem:

The World Is in Pencil

BY TODD BOSS

—not pen. It’s got

that same silken

dust about it, doesn’t it,

that same sense of

having been roughed

onto paper even  

as it was planned.

It had to be a labor

of love. It must’ve

taken its author some

time, some shove.

I’ll bet it felt good

in the hand—the o

of the ocean, and

the and and the and

of the land.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

Other good poems from the past week from the Poetry Foundation:

“Knowledge,” by Louise Bogan

"After Work," by John Maloney

"Impromptu," by J. Allyn Rosser

By checking a box at the bottom of the website's page, you can subscribe to the "Poem of the Day" without getting annoying newsletters, et cetera.

The Text, the Book, and the iPad

For your consideration: a thoughtful, concise editorial notebook from Verlyn Klinkenborg of the Times trying to parse through the nature of reading books on e-readers, and what may be lost. It's something we have all thought about, but I think it bears further discussion. Like him, I'm divided on the issue, more so than I have been in the past. In my polemic high school journalist days, I would have said that taking away a physical book and replacing it with electronic text is excising one brick from the temple of literacy, and other such wounded, sorrowful expressions.  However, could e-readers make books more affordable? Could they help us share beloved passages more quickly? Could they reduce our use of trees? Could they help create a more democratic, competitive market for writers? Some of the answers are clearer than others.

Yet for my own part, physical books have acted not just as monuments to the achievement of reading a book, but as a concrete way of organizing the landscapes, characters, and stories of a particular reading experience. As Klinkenborg says, the book's physicality is a "constant reminder," peculiarly alive, mysteriously like the presence of a friend. Not to mention that I have great appreciation for the art of typography and layout, the particular makeup--even, if we were to be rather Victorian for a moment, the physiognomy--of a book that make it memorable and contribute to the book's personality along with the author's words. The decision of the layout editors and jacket designers are meaningful, and comparable to the director's arrangement of artwork in a museum or the approach to a piece of music chosen by an orchestra conductor.

If you showed me a page of semi-recycled paper with Garamond typeface and chapter names with dagger-like serifs, I would know without having to read the words that I was looking at a Harry Potter paperback. If I saw a tall glossy page with Caslon body text and wacky Art-Deco headlines, I would know I was seeing a page from the New Yorker. At least in our current culture of literacy, a connection of touch as well as thought that binds the reader to the text. For a dose of literary piety, look up copies of the galleys and proofs passed between Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker to see the amount of work that goes into the typesetting even for a single poem. (I don't provide a link partly because I can't find one, and partly because I want you to engage the blessed difficulty of books and libraries.)

Seeing the Book of Kells this summer in Dublin was a powerful new point in my understanding of books. The library of Trinity College only displays one spread each from the two folios of the Book of Kells, but any page is a calligraphy performance and a display of the miniaturist art of illumination. In addition, the monks that copied the Gospels into these books would sometimes, when visited by a thought, write down a small poem about their lives in the margin, further personalizing the book and creating some of our first examples of written vernacular poetry. Within this highly energized culture of printing from our past, single letters became stained-glass windows.

I have not been awed by or befriended texts I have read online. Indeed, I have struggled to maintain even a mere civil acquaintanceship. Reading Henry James' novella Daisy Miller and Edith Wharton's not-so-short-stories online dried my eyes out and gave me headaches. I was inclined to blame the authors for this suffering, to damn them for their massive paragraphs and lack of pagination, even though the printed copies the authors intended would have solved those problems. I do not have an iPad or e-reader, but I have seen how their darkened screens and attractive typefaces make the experience easier on the eyes. Yet there is no invitation to dog-ear, to bend the spine to favorite passages, to jot colloquies with the author or characters into the margins, to make the book irretrievably yours as a printed book offers. Still and all, maybe we will see the day when the craft of electronic printing matures enough to rival the craft of printed texts.

Watercolor: NUI Galway Quadrangle

I added watercolor to a sketch from today. Not necessarily finished, but probably all that I'll have time for while I'm here. I didn't actually do this at twilight, but I have seen the place at twilight, and I like it better that way.

A didgeridoo! As the Galway Arts Festival kicks into gear, the buskers get more and more inventive and frenzied.

Lastly: I did not know this mammal, called a pangolin, existed. It is apparently the only mammal that has keratin scales, and it is also known as the scaly anteater.

Some Sights and Sounds from Ireland

Oh, hi. It's been a while since I've posted anything here, and I did actually have plans of regular updates. Fortunately/unfortunately, it seems I don't have time for that. But here's a few pieces of some of the more vivid experiences of my time in the city of Galway and excursions to other parts of Ireland.

A whirlwind of sound: a traditional ("trad") session in progress tonight at the Tig Coili pub, one of my favorite places in Galway. They're midway into a set of reels. Why can't St. Louis have music this good on a Monday night?

The Cliffs of Moher, on the coast of County Clare. The pathway along the cliffs is lined with large sheet rocks you might make out in the top right. My first sketch in Ireland was begun while I rested after feeling light-headed and queasy from the long and stomach-churning bus ride down from Galway. It was a gloomy day with low clouds moving in, but somehow that felt right.

A view from inside Dun Aonghasa, an Iron Age fort on the edge of a different set of spectacular cliffs (you see a number of those around here.) Dun Aonghasa is on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands, southwest of Galway. On that day we had brilliant sunshine.

The view of Dingle Harbor from our hostel. We spent a weekend on the Dingle Peninsula, which is part of County Kerry, a 5-hour bus ride south of Galway. It was an excellent weekend besides sharing a room and single bathroom with 11 other guys (way too much drunken giggling between 2 and 3 a.m. among some of the other occupants of the room.) We also had the best weather of the trip so far--resplendent sunshine but mild temperatures and a light, persistent sea-breeze.

Sketching

For a while I've been reading Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier's 471-page Siberia-sized, immensely enjoyable record of his trips to that region. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Russia or travel writing--I now prefer him to Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux. Every now and then Frazier drops in one of his pen sketches into the text, like this one on the cover of the book: 

That one was colorized for the cover. Most are unadorned line sketches. Parts of the book were serialized in the New Yorker, whose website has an excellent slideshow of some of Frazier's best sketches. (I hope you can see that without being a subscriber.)

Upon landing on a Russian island not far from Alaska, a woman in the customs office begins to tell Frazier about the island's complicated rules for taking photographs and pulls out paperwork for him.

"I took my sketchbook from my pack and showed it to her and said I preferred to draw. At that she mentally slipped me into the harmless-nut category and sent me on my way." (165)

Another time, upon losing his notebook and sketchbook, he remarks that losing these essential journalists's tools is to him "a shooting offense, like an infantryman losing his rifle." I was inspired by Frazier's sketching habit, among many other things. It is, I think, more than an interest in anachronisms and lost causes, of a wistfulness for the past days when nearly everyone had a sketchbook and had a basic proficiency in sketching, though I certainly have no problem with that kind of nostalgia. As much as I like having pictures as a record of a trip, there is something shallow and unsatisfying about picture-taking for me, similar to clicking the "like" button for a friend's post on Facebook. When I see a landscape that impresses me, that has a strong "inscape," to use Gerard Manley Hopkin's term, pulling out my camera and clicking the button feels almost farcical to the way that the scene has made me feel, like checking a box: Been here. Was good. Perhaps photos are easier for communicating to others what I liked about the view, but for me, I didn't do the work of understanding the features of the landscape, as a sketch allows me to do.

In addition, I have a wish to someday make illustrations for a written work of mine. This desire approaches Wagner's mania for the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, in its magnitude. 

With this in mind,  I went to Shaw Nature Reserve, south and west of St. Louis in Grays Summit, with both a sketchbook and a camera. Typically at a place like that I might take 100 or more pictures. This time I decided to try Frazier-style pen sketches, only taking a few pictures. However, using pen on the first try felt too risky for me, an out-of-practice former art student, so I roughed out things with a pencil first and then cleaned and emphasized with the pen after that. 

The nature reserve, which is run by the Botanical Garden, reminded me a lot of the large estates in Russia that formerly belonged to nobles but were turned into museums and parks. Which is essentially what Shaw Nature Reserve and the Botanical Garden are: Henry Shaw, a wealthy, slave-owning St. Louis man, created the Garden from his lands in the Tower Grove neighborhood, and the nature reserve on St. Louis's outskirts includes the estate of Joseph Bascom and his large country house.

Shaw is notable for its large replicated prairie habitat, maintained by BG staff with controlled burns and reseeding with prairie plants. It is particularly impressive in late summer and fall, when the grasses are as tall as the true prairie and the wildflowers are blooming. In 2005 the park built a pioneer-style sod house on top of a hill near the prairie area.

I'm fascinated by slapdash dwellings in unlikely, unsheltered places, such as sod houses, bird nests, bird houses, badger holes, prairie dog burrows, and other such nooks. This sod house is now fully integrated into the environment, its roof sprouting tall grasses, and I saw bees, ants, and other insects coming and going from holes between the sod bricks. When I was about done working on this sketch, a mouse burst out of the bottom of the wall in front of me and scrambled around the corner. 

I was happy with what I ended up with, but I could also tell that it would take a while to be able to start right off with permanent pen like Frazier does, and an even longer time to achieve his minimalist, calligraphic strokes, charged with information, with no unnecessary details. My sketches are, well, sketchy--messy, full of squiggles trying to work out the true lines. It also took what felt like a long time, earning me a sunburn on my neck. But I felt like I had really encountered that place in a solid way. However messy, the picture belonged to me, not Fujifilm. 

I went down the hill and wanted to sketch the sod house from a distance--it looked so wayward and daring on top of the hill with massive thunderstorm clouds overhead. I tried to start with pen this time, only using pencil for the clouds, which were a jumbled, quick-moving mess.

 But after a couple sketches I was starting to recall some of my lessons from drawing and watercolor classes in high school, and this sketch of a columbine flower came off pretty quickly. 

The downside to sketching is that it is colorless. Sometimes I make notes to myself on the colors and shading in case I want to add watercolor someday, as above.

I don't know when I'll get to next, but it was a lot of fun rediscovering an interest that I haven't had time for during the school year. One of college's pressures is to specialize, to step away from hobbies and become serious at what  you're good at. I would never be a successful artist, however much I tried, but I don't think that should stop me from using sketching as a way to understand the world around me. Or making plans for an eventual Gesamtkunstwerk.

In Just-spring

A brief history of northern Missouri weather this year, for those interested.

Not so long ago, this was where we lived. Note the heavily laden trees, the nearly unrecognizable campus (this is in front of the health center, believe it or not), and the snow leopard in the bottom right.

And then we went through that long period of a few days of warm weather and then back to winter; meanwhile, the trees cautiously kept their leaves back.

 But then, very suddenly, "the world is mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful" (ee cummings).

Welcome to the Shire. I'm a big fan of these blue flowers at left. Also the pink ones above. A kind of cherry tree, perhaps?

(In my best David Attenborough voice) With the long-awaited departure of the migratory polar bears, the rabbit population of the southern prairie and its bordering forests at last rebounds--and bounds, and bounds.

I tend to take pictures of the same thing over and over again--you might remember seeing a similar view of the shelter in the Sunken Garden before. However, I'm not particularly apologetic about this habit--no, what I really want is a picture from the same view at the same time of day from every day of at least one year, but preferably seven.

Lately I've wondered what we are to make of transformations of this kind. As astonished as we are every time, spring happens every year. The popular short-sighted mistake is to see the turning of seasons as linear progress, conquering the preceding season--which would be about as silly as spinning around in a four-walled room and thinking that each time your sight passes a corner, the wall you're looking at is new and unique in the world. Then again, maybe not such a mistake. Doesn't each spring have a character of its own among all springs that have ever been? Do we remember enough of what is the same to really know what is different? And perhaps climate change is making our weather even more frantic and capricious, and perhaps there are more sinister implications for these seemingly more abrupt changes between the seasons. But even if it turned out to be scientifically irrelevant, I suppose I'd rather stay one of the foolish humans spinning in our enormous room of light, forgetful and amazed at the intricate green details each time around.

Eating an Apple with No Noise at All

Good news! The nice folks over at the Foliate Oak Literary Magazine published my poem in their May issue. Read it here. Check out Foliate Oak's Facebook page here.

And cue celebratory fiddle tune:

The Death of Justina (Cover)

Sometimes in a day that's going in too many directions at once, filled with a strong feeling that surges out of the shallow waters of intellect and can only find its depth in music, I want to hear a certain song. Lately it's been Jimi Hendrix's live cover of "Like a Rolling Stone." And sometimes it's enough to just imagine the music coming from me, me becoming Hendrix, calling the drummer Bob Dylan's grandmother, banging out the first chords. "Yeah hear what I say now—"

But other times that's not enough—sometimes you have to hold whatever instrument it is that you play and try to play what you want to hear. I've got a violin. Violins and guitars are different creatures, but it doesn't stop me from trying. It doesn’t matter what it might sound like to others—if I can get the barest scrape to how it’s supposed to sound, it’s usually enough.

And still other times, the music I want to hear is words. Sometimes just reading the words is enough, imagining myself reading them, the author reading them—myself as the author. 

But other times I've got to actually write the words, with my own hands hitting the chords and plucking out the riffs. Because so help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions; and I can barely recall the old house where I was raised, where in midwinter Parma violets bloomed in a cold frame near the kitchen door, and down the long corridor, past the seven views of Rome—up two steps and down three—one entered the library, where all the books were in order and the lamps were bright. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

I think that's why for so long schoolchildren were taught to get Bible verses and poems to heart, and why to John Cheever, in one story no words of his own would do, why the old durable words came through him with the irresistible force of a song we all know:

"Do, he wrote, or you'll be dead. I felt very tired. I put another piece of paper into the machine and wrote: The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert my soul and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for his Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me in the presence of them that trouble me; thou hast anointed my head with oil and my cup shall be full. Surely thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. I gave this to Ralphie and went home."

A Word: Why Do We Call Dollars 'Dollars'?

Happy Spring! It still doesn't feel too much like spring in Kirksville, though we are seeing some early monocot flower buds push blade-like leaves through the topsoil. I've got a few essay-like ideas putting down roots right now. While these are developing secondary xylem and solidifying their grasp on the soil, here's a short linguistic-historical tale I wrote, once again for the Writing Center blog, on the creation of the word 'dollar.' It was the result of a journey through several entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, a voyage only possible with a sturdy magnifying glass.

A Word: Why Do We Call Dollars 'Dollars'?

Ah, the ubiquitous crumpled dollar—that small greenish rectangle of linen that purchases our chewing gum, under-tips the wait staff at restaurants, and refuses to be inserted into vending machines. But where does that word dollar actually come from?

Dollar, just like Dvorák, RENT, Pilsener, a lengthy pseudo-operatic rock song from the 1970s, and Ántonia Shimerda, comes to us from Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. In 1516, in the town of Jáchymov, situated near the German border and called by the nearby Germans Joachimsthal (literally “Joachim’s valley”), a new silver mine opened. Three years later, Count Hieronymus Schlick, a nobleman wishing to extend his coolness even beyond being a Bohemian count named Hieronymous Schlick, decided to start minting his own money from the silver mined in Joachimsthal, and called his large coins Joachimsthalers. (Note that in German, ‘th’ is pronounced as a hard ‘t,’ and that the ‘a’ in Joachimsthalers is pronounced like ‘a’ in English ‘what.’) As this coin gained use throughout Bohemia and Germany, burghers chose to shorten this unwieldy name to just thaler, which became the currency in many German states until German unification under Otto von Bismarck, when the Goldmark became the imperial currency. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 16th century the thaler spread from High and Low German to Dutch, the language of the great sea-traders who spread their dalars all over the world, and from thence at last to England, where it was Anglicized into daler, daller, and finally dollar. Moral: next time you go to buy a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine in the laundry room, thank Count Schlick for not naming his coins Hieronyms or Schlicks.

The Pope and the Sow

At my Catholic, all-boys high school, our theology teachers advised us students to be ready for people that would challenge our beliefs once we were turned loose upon the world. Probably the most prevalent reaction to this warning among us, for better or worse, was a sort of confused indifference; some of us armed ourselves with Catholic apologist thought, in preparation for future theological sparring matches; my personal feelings lay somewhere in the muddle between those two. I have little tolerance for some of the ossified social opinions that the Catholic church chooses to cloak in heavy dogmatic robes and impenetrable pseudo-legal prose. On the other hand, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of hearing the church criticized. I felt protective of it in a certain way, like one would feel protective of a relative with some odd habits. The purest dogmatic form of Catholicism is certainly not my spiritual center, but at the same time many of my strongest beliefs do come from the Catholic tradition. More traditionalist Catholics would likely criticize me as a “cafeteria,” or carelessly eclectic, Catholic, picking out beliefs like green beans, pizza, and chocolate milk at the dining hall.

But as Truman State’s Newman Center pastor Father Bill says, it’s hard to be in the middle. My beliefs, which I would never claim as the best or even particularly coherent, are just where conscience and experience has led me. Many of my friends in college are amused to find that I’m Catholic. The church seems to be regarded not so much with suspicion but with cautious interest, perhaps like the kind felt at a zoo when looking at a rare species of iguana. The iguana has little interest in them, but they are interested in its unusual form. “Huh,” they say. “Catholic. Interesting.” I have a tendency to offer fun facts in conversation, and when one of these is related to Catholicism, my friends acknowledge the occurrences by calling, “Catholic Fact!”

The one thing that non-Catholics have actually questioned me about in college is the tradition of saints. Why pray to saints when Jesus is supposed to be our personal savior, our direct link to the divine? I’ve never had a perfect, direct answer for that question, mainly feeling that such spiritual navigation is best left to one’s own working out. The idea of saints as good examples is too simple. Catholics and non-Catholic Christians are not likely to come to an understanding on that issue.

However, I do understand saints as stories. Many of our early saints are, plainly stated, made up. They are some of the countless mythic creations that are a large part of our story-telling species’ lives. That does not have to make the truths they represent less valuable, or that I don’t have great respect for most of the saint stories I’ve heard. Like any of our stories, saint stories begin with a seed of real-world experience. In some cases, it was the verifiable life of the person in question. In other cases, it is a re-working of messy experience into terms that can be communicated through a memorable story. Whether we realize it or not, we own the stories of our saints. They are what we will make of them.

Our new pope, Francis, formerly Arcbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, is the first pope from South America, as well as the first Jesuit pope. As my high school was Jesuit, this connects him to me. We share an important set of beliefs about living in the world. Many religious orders believe that a relationship with God is only possible through removing oneself from the world and living monastically. Jesuits believe that solitude is important, but that one must also find God in all things, particularly in the chaotic world of human society and of nature. The language of the Jesuits uses military metaphors because the founder, Ignatius, saw the new order as on the front lines of carrying out the Gospel, delving into the messiness of reality and doing their best there. Jesuits value connection with the world as it is. One of the first stories that CNN told about Francis is that, as Archbishop Bergoglio, he lived in an apartment and rode the buses of Buenos Aires to work. Anyone on the bus could chat with him if they wanted. That’s the mark of a true Jesuit.

Our new pope has chosen a name that no pope has ever chosen before. And he has taken partial ownership of a very important name and story, that of St. Francis. I’m thinking, as I would imagine the new pope was, mainly of St. Francis of Assisi than the other saints by the name of Francis (though, importantly, Francis Xavier was a co-founder of the Society of Jesus with Ignatius, and Francis Borgia was an early Jesuit.) The story of St. Francis of Assisi is to us very familiar—that animal saint. He is surrounded by happy, anthropomorphized smiling creatures when he is painted. It makes him a fun saint, and much approachable for non-Catholics than some of our bloodied martyrs or anti-Semitic crusader-saints (I’m looking at you, Louis IX, namesake of my hometown.)

You might be surprised to hear that St. Francis’s story was not always told this way—far from it. The original St. Francis had little patience for animals on their own, and much less for flawed humanity’s connections to the natural world that animals usually represent in our stories. One of the original, canonical tales of St. Francis was his interaction with a sow. The sow had killed a lamb with its muzzle, and Francis, linking the lamb to the metaphor of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God, vengefully cursed the sow and proclaimed that no man or beast would eat from its dead body. This curse led to its death just days later. This sow is our fallen nature, our inclination to destroy innocence. The historical St. Francis—and even the St. Francis of many legends—had no particular kindness for most animals. Though he believed in the communion of all creation in praise of the Creator, he did not believe that all creation was anything near equal, holding to the medieval Christian conception of nature, in which humans were the privileged stewards of creation. In the Victorian period, however, St. Francis began to be pictured as associating in a friendly way with animals, based on the “Canticle of the Creatures” attributed to him. In the 1960s and ’70s, during the environmental movement, ecologists, environmentalists, and theologians began re-popularizing these images of St. Francis emphasized caring for animals that were created long after his death. In 1967, historian Lynn White argued that St. Francis should become the patron saint of ecologists, for he saw St. Francis as a radical that brought about a new, more humble conception of the relationship between humans and nature. White viewed St. Francis as what is known as a deep ecologist, claiming that the “key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility—not merely for the individual but for man as a species.” Though White’s goal was essentially to create a “new religion” of ecology, whose patron saint was St. Francis, the part of his paper that suggested a reconsideration of St. Francis as a medieval Christian ecological activist was accepted by the religious establishment. Pope John Paul II followed White’s suggestion and canonized St. Francis as patron of ecologists in 1979.

A year later, one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell, published a piece called “Saint Francis and the Sow.” (Yes, short and worth a read. I wrote a paper on it last year, which is why I’ve got all these fun facts about St. Francis ready to go. Catholic Fact!) In his poetry, Kinnell tries not to personify animals but to animalize humanity, and to seek out the natures of animals as valuable in their own right. In this poem, the reverse of the original story, St. Francis is depicted awakening the sow to its own powers of self-blessing, playing a surprisingly humble role for a saint. He “reteaches” the sow “its loveliness,” and the sow “flowers, from within, of self-blessing.” Kinnell’s St. Francis empowers animals. He does not presume to lift them above their animal-ness but rather affirms it, and in so doing affirms the cast-off, looked-down upon parts of ourselves.

Pope Francis the First reminded me of this humbler incarnation of St. Francis today when he asked the assembled crowds at St. Peters’s, as well as the millions tuned in around the world, to pray for him. The applause and hum on our TV gave way suddenly to a few moments of meditative silence as he and everyone else bowed their heads. It is a small sign, but it is a sign of a humble vision of the pope’s role, and a sign that perhaps this pope is participating in the continued creation of St. Francis’s story like Galway Kinnell and others. It gives me hope that I’ll be better able to explain why I am still a Catholic, and that the stories that we tell about this Francis just might have value for future generations. But we’ll have to see.