A walk in the marsh (again) and 10/1001 - the Bradbury reading plan makes it to double digits!

 

Brown creeper

Coral fungi

Story: Putois by Anatole France 

Essay: The Loss of the Creature by Walker Percy

What an essay! It reminds me of the poem The Vacation by Wendell Berry  especially in Part I.  Part I traces the veil of "symbolic complex" that keeps a person from seeing - actually seeing - what is in front of him. This paragraph especially brought Berry's poem to mind:

"Seeing the [Grand Canyon] is made even more difficult by what the sightseer does when the moment arrives, when sovereign knower confronts the thing to be known. Instead of looking at it, he photographs it. There is no confrontation at all. At the end of forty years of preformulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do? He waives his right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years. For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future."

Here is Berry's poem:

The Vacation

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

In very simplified terms, it seems like he is saying that our expectations of what we see are what we see and not the actual thing itself.

In the second part, he describes how students are kept from the things they are learning about, how experiences like reading a Shakespeare sonnet or dissecting a dogfight are presented in an "educational package" that get between the student and the thing as it is:

"The educator whose business it is to teach students biology or poetry is unaware of a whole ensemble of relations which exist between the student and the dogfish and between the student and the Shakespeare sonnet. To put it bluntly: A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the Creature itself for the educational package in which it is presented. The great difficulty is that he is not aware that there is a difficulty; surely, he thinks, in such a fine classroom, with such a fine textbook, thr sonnet must come across! What's wrong with me.

"The sonnet and the dogfish are obscured by two different processes. The sonnet is obscured by the symbolic package which is formulated not by the sonnet itself but by the media through which the sonnet is transmitted, the media which the educators believe for some reason to be transparent. The new textbook, the type, the smell of the page, the classroom, the aluminum windows and the winter sky, the personality of Miss Hawkins -- these media which are supposed to transmit the sonnet may only succeed in transmitting themselves. It is only the hardiest and cleverest of students who can salvage the sonnet from this many-tissued package. It is only the rarest student who knows that the sonnet must be salvaged from the package. (The educator is well aware that something is wrong, that there is a fatal gap between the student's learning and the student's life: the student reads the poem, appears to understand it, and gives all the answers. But what does he recall if he should happen to read a Shakespeare sonnet twenty years later? Does he recall the poem or does he recall the smell of the page and the smell of Miss Hawkins?)

....

"The dogfish is concealed in the same symbolic package as the sonnet. But the dogfish suffers an additional loss. As a consequence of this double deprivation, the student...is twice removed from the dogfish, once by the symbolic complex by which the dogfish is concealed, once again by the spoliation of the dogfish by theory which renders it invisible. Through no fault of zoology instructors, it is nevertheless a fact that the zoology laboratory at Sarah Lawrence College is one of the few places in the world where it is all but impossible to see a dogfish."

He goes on to say that seeing the dogfish as a mere specimen of dogfish, a representative of a larger and theoretical dogfish - in Platonic terms, the Idea of the Dogfish - instead of the individual unique dogfish laying on the table in front of the student keeps the student from seeing the dogfish itself. 

"The dogfish, the tree, the seashell, the American Negro, the dream, are rendered invisible by a shift of reality from concrete thing to theory which Whitehead has called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It is thr mistaking of an idea, a principle, an abstraction, for the real. As a consequence of the shift, the "specimen" is seen as less real than the theory of the specimen...there are no individuals, only specimens."

What is the solution? Is there a solution?

"I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissection boards. I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester; and that the latter upon reading on her dissecting board

      That time of year Thou may'st in me behold

      When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

      Upon those boughs which shake against the cold --

      Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang

might catch fire at the beauty of it."

This essay was recommended by Ray Bradbury in his talk here and it is definitely one I want to reread. There was a lot that reminded me of Wendell Berry and Charlotte Mason. I'm still mulling over this statement from his closing paragraphs:

"The layman will be seduced as long as he regards beings as consumer items to be experienced rather than prizes to be won, and as long as he waives his sovereign right as a person and accepts his role of consumer as the highest estate to which the layman can aspire."

My takeaway: to see what is before one as it is in itself a very real struggle.

Poem:

Snow Toward Evening

by Melville Cane

.

Suddenly the sky turned gray,

The day,

Which had been bitter and chill,

Grew soft and still.

Quietly

From some invisible blossoming tree

Millions of petals cool and white

Drifted and blew

Lifted and flew,

Fell with the falling night.

This brings back memories of sitting on the roof outside my bedroom window, watching the snow fall and drift like "millions of petals cool and white" in the soft grey night. I wish it would snow, just one day. The year feels off when it doesn't snow at all.

The Magpie by Monet