'This Interplay of Past and Present'

Luigi Galvani (1737-98) was an Italian physician from the age of non-specialization, when a curious, enterprising man or woman could do basic science and make lasting contributions to human knowledge. Galvani was interested in a new and still controversial phenomenon – animal electricity. Using an electrostatic machine and a Leyden jar he was able to make the legs of a dead frog “dance” when touched with an electric charge. What he had discovered, without quite realizing it, was that the nervous system was a means of delivering electric impulses through the body of the frog and, by extension, other animals. From his name we get galvanism – electricity generated by chemical action. His work was further developed by another Italian, Alessandro Volta, leading to development of batteries. 

As a kid I was a dedicated reader of books of potted biographies, brief summaries of celebrated lives. Scientists and inventors especially interested me – Marie Curie, for instance, and Thomas Edison. In one such volume I read about Galvani but what I remember is the illustration that accompanied the biography – an old engraving of frog legs hanging from a sort of miniature gallows with a disembodied hand holding a wire. Something about the confluence of animate and inanimate, with perhaps an echo of the electric chair, left me mildly disturbed. Even after sixty-five years I remember that picture and the book – red cover, oversized, but with no memory of title or author.

 

In the Autumn 2002 issue of The Hudson Review, the brilliant translator, critic and essayist Tess Lewis reviewed Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (incidentally, the first book I ever ordered through Amazon). Lewis writes:

 

“[N]o one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one's life, and the particular book’s smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one’s physical and emotional circumstances. The spell cast by a book can be broken as easily by different illustrations as by the changes brought by adulthood.”

 

Scratch smell but the rest stands. The other day when I encountered a passing reference to Galvani in something I was reading, the whole thing came back in a satisfying Proustian rush – a vivid image, the sense of curiosity piqued, of understanding commenced, of a hole in knowledge filled. This might be mistaken for a trivial pursuit, yet another mundane example of pedanticism. In my experience, knowledge metastasizes like out-of-control cells. Learning feeds off itself. I would love to find a copy of the book I was reading in 1962 or so but the qualified memory too is consolation. Later in her review Lewis writes:

 

“[Lesser’s] ideal books were those to which, as she read, she could feel her older and younger selves reacting simultaneously but differently. This interplay of past and present is Lesser's primary source of literary vertigo, and she abandons herself to it with relish.”   

'And All Are Lucky Just to Be Alive'

The writer who has died since I launched Anecdotal Evidence, whose subsequent nonexistent work I’ve missed the most, is probably Tom Disch (1940-2008). There’s an irony here because Disch is best known as a writer of science fiction, a genre I largely gave up around age thirteen, though his novel Camp Concentration (1968) remains rereadable. 

Close readers of his poetry had little reason to be surprised by his suicide. Death remained his abiding theme. He titled a 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. With Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and About the Size of It (2007) on my desk, I began tallying poems devoted to death but quickly lost count. Instead, consider some representative titles: “Symbols of Love and Death,” “At the Grave of Amy Clampitt” (written almost a decade before her death), “In Defense of Forest Lawn,” “The Art of Dying,” “At the Tomb of the Unknown President,” “How to Behave when Dead” – and that’s just Yes, Let’s. About the Size of It includes “Death Wish IV” but also “The Vindication of Obesity,” with this memorable simile -- “cheeses rank/as death” and this final line: “With news of the deliciousness of death.” Disch could make death, at least in his poems, amusing.

 

In the Autumn 1994 issue of The Kenyon Review I happened on “Trees in the Park,” a poem aware of mortality but in Dischian terms a celebration of life and its variousness:

 

“Each is so visibly its own history,

The thrust or tilt of the trunk

A geologic record of some slow event

We have been too impatient

To observe, whether an alteration

Of the supporting mineral mass beneath

Or the cumulative effect of leaves

Thirsting for the fractal vagaries

Of light and rain. The results

Are there in their varying

Perpendicularities, the choice

Of where each branch has felt impelled

To go. So with us: we show

Where we have been in the conformation

Of cheek and jowl, lip and jaw,

The stride or the slouch that declares

This one needed more love at age eleven,

That one read the wrong book at twenty-five,

This other lacked a certain vitamin,

And all are lucky just to be alive.”

'Release from the Relentless Consciousness of Self'

Seamus Heaney somewhere said true poets always know the names of wildflowers. Certainly, he knew “Lupines,” and his poem “A Herbal” is a veritable bouquet:  

“Between heather and marigold,

Between spaghnum and buttercup,

Between dandelion and broom,

Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle . . .”

 

I’ve just learned that Ruth Schottman, an Austrian-born biologist and author of Trailside Notes: A Naturalist's Companion to Adirondack Plants (1998), died last month at age ninety-eight. She lived in Burnt Hills, N.Y., north of Albany. I interviewed her several times, wrote about her book, accompanied her on tramps through the woods, especially in the spring, and relied on her when I had a botanical question. Though not a poet, she lived up to Heaney’s claim and confidently identified every flower, tree, sedge, grass and fungus we encountered. Remarkable, considering that her first language was German and so many plants are known by common, folk and scientific names. Her obituary quotes a passage from Trailside Notes:

 

“I have learned one general principle from observing nature and reading about it: there are many ways of coping with life. For some of us, nature watching is a release from the relentless consciousness of self. We find joy in empathy with other organisms. . . .  No matter how old you are, new discoveries—new to you—await you on every outing.”

 

The Louisiana poet Gail White speaks for the rest of us, the bumblers in the woods who wish we knew more, in “I Come to the Garden” (Asperity Street, 2015):

 

 “I can name so few flowers. This is why

I’m not a better poet. Shakespeare knew

oxlip and gillyvor and eglantine,

while I, beyond camellia, violet, rose,

and lily, am reduced to saying, ‘There,

those crinkly yellow things!’ Out on a walk

with mad John Clare, I’d learn a dozen names

for plants, and bless the wonders underfoot.

‘More servants wait on man,’ George Herbert said,

‘than he’ll take notice of.’ I know it’s true,

 although I’ve never had observant eyes.

 Would I care more if my heart’s soil were deep

 enough for herbs and loves to take firm root?

 Mine is a gravel garden, where the rake

 does all the cultivation I can take.”

'They Are Read When They're No Longer There'

One of my annual jobs as a boy, self-assigned, was tending the portulaca that grew along both sides of the driveway -- hundreds of plants in narrow plots flanking the gravel. In the fall I harvested the black seeds, each a little larger than a salt crystal. It took several days, plucking the pods and rolling them between my fingers so the seeds fell into one of my father’s empty pipe tobacco cans. There was always a bumper crop. The following spring, once the snow had passed, I reversed the process and sowed the seeds.

 

To this day I enjoy some of the jobs – those with satisfyingly identifiable beginnings and ends -- that others deem tedious. I’m reassured by the completion of projects. The only person who paid attention to my portulacas was the old, red-haired German widow, Elsie Becker, who lived next door. She occupied two lots, one of which was an ambitious vegetable garden surrounded, European-style, by flowers. At the center was a peach tree that reliably produced fruit, which she shared with the neighborhood kids. She was a library of folklore and plant lore. I thought of my portulacas and Frau Becker when rereading “The Sweet Peas” (Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006) by Timothy Steele:

 

“The season for sweet peas had long since passed,

And the white wall was bare where they’d been massed;

Yet when that night our neighbor phoned to say

That she had watched them from her bed that day,

I didn’t contradict her: it was plain

She struggled with the tumor in her brain

And, though confused and dying, wished to own

How much she’d liked the flowers I had grown,--

And when she said, in bidding me good night,

She thought their colors now were at their height --

Indeed, they never had looked lovelier --

The only kind response was to concur.

 

“Thereafter, as a kind of rite or rule,

Each autumn when the days turned damp and cool,

I’d sow peas gathered from the last year’s pods.

I’d watch as young plants, bucking storms and odds,

Mounted the net and buds appeared on stems

While, using self-supporting stratagems,

Fine tendrils twined in mid-air, each to each,

Or to the mesh of screens within their reach

Until the vines and blossoms waved aloof

Of net and eaves in full view of the roof,

As if reporting, situated so,

News of the heavens to the yard below.

 

“And I’d recall her, who had loved their scent,

But who, in spite of my encouragement,

Was shy of picking them until I said

They flowered the more that they were harvested.

(Red blooms came earliest, and, when they’d peaked,

The purples followed, and the salmon-streaked;

All equally attracted moth and bee.)

Meanwhile, her phone call gathered irony:

If, at the end, she’d summoned back somehow

Those vanished sweet peas, their descendants now

Returned the favor, having been imbued

With her departed grace and gratitude.

 

“When blossoms -- each with banner, wings, and keel --

Stir in the warmth above me while I kneel

And weed around the bottom of the plants,

I sometimes think that, if they had the chance,

They’d sail off after passing bird or cloud.

I sometimes hope that, if it was allowed,

She felt within her what she loved when she

Passed from this to that other mystery

And kept, by way of comfort, as she went,

The urge to complication and ascent

Which prints such vivid signatures on air

That they are read when they’re no longer there.”

 

It was Frau Becker who taught me that portulaca is also known as purslane, which is grown as a salad vegetable. The English gardener and diarist John Evelyn translated The Compleat Gard’ner (1693) from the French of Jean de La Quintinie. In it he writes: “Purslain is one of the prettiest Plants in a Kitchen-garden, which is principally used in Sallets, and sometimes in Pottages.”

'Like a Soaking Rain'

In the epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-74), Shelby Foote describes the origins of Memorial Day and recounts a speech delivered on that observance in 1884, at Keene, N.H., by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). As an army captain during the Civil War, Holmes was seriously wounded three times. Twenty years before his speech, when Lincoln had stood on a parapet at Fort Stevens, Holmes is supposed to have hollered, “Get down, you damn fool!” In 1884, less than two decades after Appomattox, speaking to fellow Civil War veterans, Holmes said Memorial Day was “the most sacred of the year,” and would always be observed by Americans: 

“But even if I am wrong, even if those who are to come after us are to forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for us that to us this day is dear and sacred. . . . For one hour, twice a year at least – at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves – the dead come back and live with us. I see them now, more than I can number, as I saw them on this earth.”

 

When I was a kid we observed Memorial Day every year – parade, speeches at the cemetery, picnic. The day is no longer held sacred, of course. Whether it is observed by Americans as other than a day off from school or work seems unlikely for most. Patriotism is no longer kneejerk gratitude for our blessings as American citizens. Many see no alternative to what Lionel Trilling called “adversary culture.” Love of country is deeply unhip.

 

At the time of his speech, Holmes was serving as an associate justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. In 1902 he was nominated by President Theodore Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He retired from the court at age ninety in 1932. That’s Holmes the public man. Privately, he was a reader and one of the finest writers of letters in American literature – perhaps the finest. Among his few rivals are William James and George Santayana.  His letters to Morris R. Cohen and Felix Frankfurter have been published but best of all are the Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe and published by Harvard University Press in two fat volumes in 1953. Harold Laski was an English economist and a political twit. But like Holmes he was an ambitious reader and their exchanges make entertaining reading. Here is Holmes writing to Laski on September 29, 1929. Holmes is eighty-eight; Laski, thirty-six:

 

 “Happy the man who can take books leisurely, like a soaking rain, and not inquire too curiously for the amount of fertilizer they contain. It takes robust and staying power to get adequate pleasure out of even the greatness of the past. It takes other and richer gifts to find all the good there is in the second rate. But I fear that I drool – farewell.”

 

“Fertilizer” shouldn’t be understood as manure. Holmes means a book’s pedagogical content, its vitamin quotient: Is it good for you? That’s not the only way to gauge a book’s worth. Does it give you pleasure? Earlier in the letters Holmes describes his mixed reaction to Proust, saying he is “out jamesing H. James in his rotation of nuances.” For some of us, that’s a positive quality. Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes and H.L. Mencken.

 

Holmes was born March 8, 1841, and died on this date, March 6, in 1935, three days before his ninety-fourth birthday.

'Farewell, Dear Friend!'

“The whole insincere suggestion of most churchyards now is that life has been spent in a vale of tears: a long tribulation, merely a preparation for another and better world. But we know that that is not usually the case, and we know that many lives, although unrelated to graveyard ideas of decorum and insurance, are happier than not.” 

More than thirty years ago I tramped around a small cemetery in the Schoharie Valley in upstate New York, its dozen or so gravestones, most inscribed with the same surname, surrounded by two walls – one of field stones, the other of densely packed wild asters. The place had been neglected and some of the stones had been partially erased by time and acid rain. A cemetery is another opportunity to read and Dr. Johnson considered epitaphs compressed biographies. In his “Essay on Epitaphs” (1740) he writes:

 

“Though a sepulchral inscription is professedly a panegyrick, and, therefore, not confined to historical impartiality, yet it ought always to be written with regard to truth. No man ought to be commended for virtues which he never possessed, but whoever is curious to know his faults must inquire after them in other places; the monuments of the dead are not intended to perpetuate the memory of crimes, but to exhibit patterns of virtue.”

 

The author of the passage at the top is E.V. Lucas (1868-1938), the enormously prolific English critic who edited Charles Lamb’s essays and wrote his biography. It’s taken from a brief essay titled “On Epitaphs” collected in Adventures and Enthusiasms (1920). He’s right. The inscriptions on many stones I encountered in upstate New York betrayed a Puritan inheritance, including winged skulls and death’s heads, and warnings from the departed that visitors will soon join them – a rather aggressive variation on the memento mori. One inscription I appreciated enough to record in a notebook. I remember it was for a man but I don’t remember his name. It dates from the nineteenth century: “God ensures that life is good. Death holds no terrors.” I remember wondering if the departed wrote the epitaph or was it composed by an inspired friend or relative.

 

Lamb’s epitaph in the Edmonton churchyard is verbose doggerel composed by the essayist’s friend, the Rev. H.F. Cary, translator of Dante and Pindar:

 

“Farewell, dear friend!—that smile, that harmless mirth,

No more shall gladden our domestic hearth;

That rising tear, with pain forbid to flow—

Better than words—no more assuage our woe.

That hand outstretch’d from small but well-earned store

Yield succour to the destitute no more.

Yet art thou not all lost: through many an age,

With sterling sense and humour, shall thy page

Win many an English bosom, pleased to see

That old and happier vein revived in thee.

This for our earth; and if with friends we share

Our joys in heaven, we hope to meet thee there.”

 

You would never suspect Lamb was an appealingly comic writer, with a very modern sense of absurdity. Best to read his letters and Essays of Elia for a more fitting epitaph.

'He Loved What He Was Doing'

In junior high school, in a closet-like room just off the cafeteria, was a bookstore displaying several dozen paperbacks arranged on wire racks. A student sat behind a small table with a cash box. There I bought T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems (60 cents) not long after the poet died in January 1965. At the time I had two paper routes, so I was flush. Out of curiosity (the driver of all worthwhile education) I chose another book because of its title: George Gamow’s One, Two, Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (50 cents), published in 1947. I didn't recognize C.P. Snow’s silly notion of “Two Cultures” and still don’t. Literature and science are two expressions of the same impulse, available to all human beings. 

Later, from the public library I borrowed and read other Gamow titles, including The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) and Biography of the Earth (1941). I was simultaneously investigating literature, reading for the first time Kafka, Plato and much of Shakespeare. Those early forays into books might be compared to Lewis and Clark’s exploration and mapping of the American West. I was orienting myself and, like Gamow, seemed driven by curiosity and a capacity for delight. When reviewing a biography of Charles Darwin, Guy Davenport awarded the biologist his supreme accolade: “He loved what he was doing, and he did it out of pure curiosity.”

 

The astronomer George Greenstein published “The Magician,” a profile of Gamow, in the Winter 1990 issue of The American Scholar. Gamow was born in Odessa (then in Russia, now in Ukraine) on this date, March 4, in 1904, and died August 19, 1968, age sixty-four. He was a theoretical physicist and, eventually, a cosmologist. In 1933, Gamow and his wife, also a physicist, defected from the Soviet Union. The following year the couple moved to the United States. They became naturalized American citizens in 1940.

 

Gamow developed the English physicist Ernest Rutherford’s insights into radioactivity. He was interested in stellar evolution and the early history of the solar system. He worked in quantum theory while writing popular science books like One, Two, Three ... Infinity. Greenstein writes:

 

“Gamow’s work is marked by a remarkable inventiveness and originality. In each of the disciplines in which he worked, he imposed his own special stamp. Most scientific papers break little new ground and are chiefly concerned with cleaning up one or another messy detail. But, in Gamow's writings, one finds insight upon insight, particularly in his shorter papers.”

 

Interestingly, given the shared concerns of science and the humanities, Greenstein lauds Gamow as a writer: “These papers are a pleasure to read. While many are heavily technical, others contain not a single equation or mathematical symbol. These are unusually short -- often a mere three or four paragraphs -- and they are marked by an intense compression of thought. Every sentence says something new. It is a style much in favor among scientists, who could never be accused of garrulity in their scientific communications. But my own impression is that Gamow developed the style to an unusual degree. He published papers in German, French, and English, but never, curiously enough, in his native Russian.” One thinks of another Russian émigré to America, Vladimir Nabokov.

 

In 1953, when almost fifty years old, Gamow read Watson and Crick’s just-published paper detailing the structure of the DNA molecule, which sparked another transition in his career, from astrophysics to biochemistry. Greenstein writes:

 

“In an age of specialization, Gamow was a generalist. All of science was his province. Furthermore, the very style of his work kept changing. He made no attempt to come to what we normally think of as an intuitive understanding of radioactivity, contenting himself rather with developing a theory based on the magical formalism of quantum mechanics. His work on cosmology, on the other hand, was wholly an effort to develop a physical comprehension; avoiding philosophical speculation and mathematical formalism, he worked to comprehend the big bang in all its details. In his biological studies his role was that of the puzzle solver (one of his popular books was on puzzles), and he focused attention on the abstract, mathematical aspects of the problem of the genetic code.”

 

Can you see why an unsophisticated, twelve-year-old working-class kid might be interested in Gamow – and in T.S. Eliot? Here’s Greenstein’s conclusion to his profile:

 

“Common to all of Gamow’s work are the qualities of playfulness and inventiveness, and a resolute refusal to be trapped within a ponderous consistency. The gleam I imagine in his eye as he worked out the solution to a scientific problem is the same gleam I see as he recited the poetry of Pushkin by the hour or demonstrated to an impromptu audience some new and ingenious trick of magic. Towards the end of his life, recalling his perilous flight across the Black Sea in a frail canoe [during an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to defect], one particular image stood out in his recollections: that of a porpoise he had glimpsed, momentarily suspended in a wave illuminated by the setting sun. How Gamow-like!”