botanizing

Fours

Four Japanese women stroll.  At a flower-bed they stop to admire a tall, century plant that is in flower.  The flowering stalk is twelve feet high and topped with a cluster of tubular yellow flowers.  One young woman, who wears of green dress with a skirt like an umbrella, stands next to the plant.  She looks down, smooths the flare of her skirt, and checks the inches between her legs and the pointed tips of the leaves. Her long black hair sweeps over one of her eyes.  She extends her arm to the flowering stalk, pointing delicately her index finger so that only its tip touches the thick stalk.  A companion makes a photograph.

Four teenage boys with skateboards rustle in the shrubs at steps on the sidewalk. Branches hang along the steps where they will practice jumps.  Three of the boys tear at the branches; they twist and rip them from a small tree. They laugh and throw the branches in a pile to the side of the sidewalk.  A smallish boy with a mop of sandy hair that covers his eyes stands on the walk.  His up-ended skateboard rests on the toe of his shoe.  He looks up, shaking the hair from his eyes, to watch my approach.

Bennington, Vermont

From orange to yellow

Fog sat on the wetlands this morning.  My flight was early, and we left in the dark for the airport in Hartford, Connecticut.   The sun rose in haze as we approached the airport.  The scrim in the sky made the early sun a hard orange ring.

For ten hours I was encapsulated either in airports or airplanes.  Air travel is an ‘air-conditioned nightmare,’ if I may borrow from Henry Miller, that places one in exile from the experience of travel.   The expectations of modern time force on us the oddity and uniformity of air travel.

The difference between New England and the intermountain West was in the air when I arrived.  The air in the East hugged the skin but in the intermountain West the dry air fell away when I stepped from the airport in Spokane, where the sky was cloudless blue.

On the Palouse in eastern Washington, I found the peas in flower.  Fields that followed the rolls of the hills were made lighter than pea green by the dotting of white flowers.  Mustard fields made yellow patches.  From orange in the sky to yellow on the land, I found my delights in travel for the day.

Travelling

Posts are unlikely for the next week - I'm off to the East Coast to look for Thoreau and friends.

Elevators

In Harris, Saskatchewan

Near Steptoe, Washington

Where life makes sense

Where life makes sense, I turn.  I stop in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, for a cup of tea, exiting Highway 1 just beyond the sign that proclaims the town’s motto ‘where life makes sense’ to pull into a Husky minimart. 

I peel open the white envelope that holds a bag of Red Rose tea and drop the bag in my thermos cup.  Very hot water makes sense, I think, but this reflects my narrow view.  It takes hot water to steep tea, bringing-out the flavors, fragrances, and colors.  I press downward the red lever for the water. 

‘Where life makes sense’ is epigraphic.  The phrase gives pause, leading me to consider life on the Canadian prairie.  My initial ‘feel good’ thoughts, as my tea steeps, give way to Camus’s sense of life as absurd.  It’s difficult to see life making sense when absurdities arise to bash us each day.  In Camus, I appreciate his sense that it’s possible to wend one’s way through those absurdities through creativity.  “Creating is living doubly,” Camus says.  He writes of Proust’s collecting flowers, wallpapers, and anxieties not as sensible in some given scheme of a proper life, but as acts that create life.  I wonder what Swift Current means to claim in its motto that here life makes sense.

There’s a line at the cashier. We wait for a man who wants more than he has brought to the till—he walks away from the cashier while we wait. The cashier mutters to another man behind the counter.

What would Camus do in Swift Current?  I think about him working here at the minimart as a cashier.  In his time-off, he reads Proust and Nietzsche and writes essays.  The locals, having a good sense of humour, make soft jokes about his pessimism. He talks too much about suicide and crime.  A few of the women like to chat with him about Proust, but Nietzsche . . . no, all they say in that regard is “Nietzsche, eh?”  Would Camus find some greater sense of life in Swift Current than in some other place?

At the edge of Swift Current, I pass a Walmart and begin to fear that life here has succumbed to bits of nonsense.

*  *  *
Quote from p. 70 of The Myth of Sisyphus (1955; Vintage paperback edition) by Albert Camus.

Near Rosetown, Saskatchewan

Crossing to Canada

I crossed the Canadian Rockies in rains.  There was a moose at the roadside in Elk Valley, a pair of elk at creekside near Crowsnest, and there were crows in the skies all along the drive.  Past Crowsnest and Hillcrest, out of the mountains and into Alberta, I drove onto a roughened plain with hills and buttes. There were aspen patches on the slopes and clusters of conifers on the rocky-topped hillocks.  Here a sway back ridge had a line of wind turbines.  The white wind turbines recalled a flock of geese – the steady turning of the blades like wings in the wind and the shifting white to gray light on the blades like the play of light on feathers.  Several more flocks gathered wind on the land. 

Composing

For the past several days I’ve been composing a research talk.  I’ll leave this weekend for a trip to Saskatoon for Plant Canada 2007, a meeting of various Canadian plant science organizations at which I’ve been invited to speak. 

On a cool day nearly two weeks ago, I started a fire in my fireplace and sat in my rocking chair with a yellow pad to sketch the arc of my talk.  Earlier in the spring I had submitted a title and abstract, which set the themes to address.  I outlined the set of data, how they would be ordered, and the basic conclusions, but other aspects of the talk’s arc occupied much of the thinking time in front of the fire.  History and ideas add significant depth to talks and can serve as the plot lines to propel the arc of the story.  It’s those elements that take quiet thought in the rocking chair as well as several cups of tea and trips into my library (even trips into my office).

From the sketch, I composed a rough script of the first third of the talk, a point where I was undecided about the best way to proceed.  That catch led me to begin making the visual presentation.  These talks are strongly visual and working on the Powerpoint slides can sometimes offer insights on how best to structure the information.

Another of the critical questions these talks raise is how to convey ideas with pictures. I’ve been asking myself idea by idea, bits of data by bits of data, slide by slide how to compose.  This is the consuming part of the process.  I worked steadily on slides for several days, thinking about their aesthetic appeal and focal points as well as the clarity of the ideas.  The slides need to hold audience attention, convey swiftly the ideas, and also give me a set of clues about what to say (because I won’t be using either script or notes).

I’ve scavenged slides from an old talk, but the ideas of the new talk are sufficiently different that most of the slides will be new for the Saskatoon talk.  Most slides will have one or more photographs; indeed, one slide has 13 photographs and a diagram.  My photographs of research materials have been captured largely on film, requiring me scan Kodachrome slides to acquire digital images to import into Powerpoint.  I’ve been scanning in the late afternoons after spending the day laying-out slides and writing text.  My mornings often have begun by cropping and adjusting the lighting of the digital images.  These images were then imported to fit around text and/or diagrams.  Many of these slides, which may be on the screen for no more than a minute, often take several hours to make.  This week there have been several ‘single slide days.’

I finished the slides of the Powerpoint presentation late on Thursday night and drafted the last few notes this morning.  I’ve printed the notes to use as I practice the talk to check how the information flows, to make sure the descriptions work, and to know precisely what points to make with each slide.  And I need to know that the talk will fit the time that I’ve been allotted. 

This evening I began to pack clothes, apples, oranges, and tea.  I’ve set my thermos on the counter to fill tomorrow morning with hot water.  My binoculars and bird book are with my camera.  First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll start driving north.

*  *  *
The photograph is Mentzelia multiflora and is one of the images I'll use in my talk on evolutionary innovation in flowers.

Acknowledgments

In a review in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Alan Hollinghurst begins by looking at acknowledgments, which he believes provide “slightly cryptic narratives of the writer’s heroic struggle.”  In the acknowledged, he finds boasts (‘see all of the important people I know’) as well as a record of debt.

Authors and the success of writing a book make me curious – as a consequence, I often turn first to the acknowledgments when I pick-up a new book.  There is often a different tone in the acknowledgments than in the book’s body – the difference is akin to that between our speaking voice and the voice we hear in our head.  The acknowledgment voice, like that voice in our head, rationalizes while also reeling-back through recall, sorting the names and events and their effects.

Some books lack acknowledgments.  Lionel Shriver’s recent The Post-Birthday World, for example, has none.  That absence fits well the deception of the novel. The parceling of names and events among paragraphs and categories in acknowledgments speaks of an author’s values and circumstances.  Does the absence of acknowledgments speak also of a certain muteness in the voice in the head?

The writer’s circle – those friends and colleagues who inspire and assist or simply join the writer for tea – are critical, I imagine, to the creative endeavor. The channels of ideas and energy that help to create books are fascinating, and I look for them in acknowledgments. 

There’s a will to connect in reading acknowledgments.  I want to know whether I know anyone acknowledged – a recognition that would give me at least a tenuous connection to the writer and his or her creative process.  Reading acknowledgments may also reflect my desire to be acknowledged – not only to have had some value in the creation of work as substantial as a book, but also to exist in that circle of writers, where creation and conversation and art and life mix (in my imagination at least).

Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James, a book about James’s intellect, which I took from the library a few days ago, has the acknowledgments titled “A Personal Note.”  Barzun begins:  “This book is the record of an intellectual debt.”  As a record of debt, I’m intrigued that the entire Stoll could be read as acknowledgments.  But the body of the book is something other than a record, more than a memoirist acknowledgment of understanding and influence, it is Barzun recreating James’s ideas, and it’s appropriate, I suppose, that he acknowledged the source at the beginning.

*  *  *
Notes
Alan Hollinghurst’s review of Satyr Square:  A Year, a Life in Rome by Leonard Barkan is in the New York Review of Books (volume 54, number 10, June 14, 2007), and I have quoted from page 40.

Jacques Barzun’s A Stroll with William James was published in 1983 by Harper and Row, New York.  The quote is from page vii.

I acknowledge that I have been listed in the acknowledgments of at least one book.  I thank the author for recognizing my role.

I acknowledge also that a book I co-edited in 1996 does not have any acknowledgments.  I regret that omission and wish now to thank everyone that I then neglected.