Harmonious Disarray

What do artists’ still lifes, jazz, Japanese gardens, and literary lists have in common? The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley identified one thing, at least, in a letter in verse he wrote in 1820 while staying at the house of his friend Henry Revely (Henry once saved Shelly’s life after he fell into a canal, and the two were now planning to establish a steamship company between Marseille and Genoa. Nothing came of those plans. Two years later Shelley drowned, at age 30, while sailing near Spezia.) Central to the long poem is a list of objects in Revely’s workroom:

Upon the table…
A pretty bowl of wood…
A hollow screw with cogs…
…bills and calculations much perplext…
…a range of mathematical
Instruments…
A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass
With ink in it; — a china cup…

Near that a dusty paint box, some odd hooks,
A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms
To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims,
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray
Of figures, — disentangle them who may.

There are several levels of harmony in this disarray. First, of course, Shelley moves things around for the purposes of rhyme and meter and for the chant-like pleasure of saying them. But the objects he selects also construct a biography: the screw with cogs, the bills, and mathematical instruments for the planned steamboat company; the china cup and ivory and rosin (residue of turpentine used to manufacture varnish and ink and to treat violin bows) that might someday serve as cargo; the half-burnt match that ignites the boiler that fires the engine (and maybe the figurative match that fired the poet at his desk); the logarithms of the French mathematician Laplace, whose theory of tides was an aid to navigators; an artist’s paint box made dusty with misuse, perhaps, by this foray into the business world.

Shelly’s phrase “harmonious disarray” was seized upon by one of my favorite writers, Guy Davenport, to describe the art of still life in his brilliant study, Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. The phrase serves equally well to describe the art within certain kinds of lists, inventories, and catalogs in literature.

A list is a tricky thing. Used carelessly it freezes the reader out. But when arranged artfully, with attention to the music of the words and the accumulating feeling of abundance and especially the startling juxtaposition of incongruous things, it can be delightful, powerful, intoxicating (more about all this in future posts). To test the power of a list, all you have to do is read it aloud. The listings in a telephone book probably don’t work. The merely random usually doesn’t. But try it on the examples below to see if you, too, get carried away:

Margaret Atwood in Good Bones: “The basic Female Body comes with the following accessories: garter-belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose-ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignor, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head… The Female Body has many uses. It’s been used as a door-knocker, a bottle opener, as a clock with a ticking belly, as something to hold up lampshades, as a nutcracker, just squeeze the brass legs together and out comes your nut. It bears torches, lifts victorious wreaths, grows copper wings and raises aloft a ring of neon stars; whole buildings rest on its marble heads.”

Padget Powell in Typical: “I wish I were a redheaded Fort Worth millionaire ten times. I’d have a good truck, jewelry, ironed jeans, neat house, docile wife, decent daughters, busy eyebrows, pithy maxims, damn nigh aphorisms now, and very little trouble except possibly nagging prostate. And good boots. Preferably Luccheses, settle for Sanders.”

Philip Roth in the prologue to The Great American Novel, a litany so luscious and lengthy (it goes on for many pages) that he had to alphabetize it: “Call me Smitty. That’s what everybody else called me — the ballplayers, the bankers, the bareback riders, the baritones, the bartenders, the bastards, the best-selling writers (except Hem, who dubbed me Frederico), the bicyclists, the big-game hunters… and thirty-one others – And that’s only the letter B, fans, only one of the Big Twenty-Six” …O what a race we are, fans! What a radiant, raffish, raggedy, rakish, rambunctious, rampaging, ranting, rapacious, rare, rash, raucous, raunchy, ravaged, ravenous…rundown, runty, ruthless race!”

Oh what a race indeed!

The New Lyceum

A nice invitation has come my way from Northwestern Michigan College to speak May 17th at TEDx Traverse City, a local version of the acclaimed TED conferences that bring people together every year to share inspiring ideas. The national conference, TED2011, was launched yesterday in Long Beach, California, and runs through this week. Speakers, each limited to an 18-minute presentation, include an array of revolutionary thinkers who know how to grab and hold an audience’s attention. They include a musician, surgeon, epidemiologist,  cellist, inventor, CEO of a wearable-robot company, neuroengineer, newspaper columnist, gamestormer, chef, historian, artist, film critic, futurist, health policy expert, dinosaur digger, street artist, poet, physicist, four-star general, polar photographer, architect, “wrongologist,” filmmaker, linguist, and many others.

Naturally this brings to mind the Lyceum of ancient Athens, where philosophers walked back and forth lecturing while acolytes trotted along and scribbled down their words. Those lectures inspired the American Lyceum movement that began in Massachusetts in the 1820s and reached its heyday in the Boston area in the 1840s and 1850s, when hundreds of lectures on a dazzling variety of subjects were presented to an eager public.

The movement reached its peak just as American literature exploded onto the world, with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, and Hawthorne producing their greatest works in a few years of remarkable fecundity. Most of those major authors, as well as hundreds of minor ones, supplemented their incomes by speaking to live audiences in New England and, later, across the rest of America. Their lectures became immensely popular — by 1835 there were 3,000 town lyceums in New England — and helped fire a national passion for self-improvement and education. Emerson relied on his lecture audiences as a flame-test for ideas that often began with scribbled entries in his daily journal  (his “bank account,” he called it). If the lectures went well, he further revised them into essays that were finally collected into his books.

It’s fun to imagine the ideas that burst from the stages in Boston and Concord. Those communities were already crowded with eccentric characters that Hawthorne called a “veritable host of hobgoblins and nightbirds” – and few of them were shy about sharing their opinions. Audiences of up to 3,500  crammed into auditoriums to hear not just  rock stars like Emerson, but such varied speakers as the chemist John Grissom, who punctuated his lectures on the wonders of chemistry by setting off spectacular test-tube explosions; John Gough, who railed against the evils of alcohol, illustrating his remarks with lurid examples of lives destroyed by a single sip of brandy; and the feminist and abolitionist Fanny Wright, whose proclamations against slavery and for easy divorce were so inflammatory that the audience once dismantled the platform upon she lectured

After about 1845, New England lecturers began finding their way to the Midwest, where they were eagerly welcomed. Soon just about every sizable Midwestern community was hosting a winter lecture series. (Farm work made it tough in spring, summer, and fall to attract audiences.) Emerson, after an 1854 tour through Ohio, southern Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, wrote to his wife to say that he was pleased to have “found a population of Yankees out here, and an easy welcome for my Massachusetts narrowness everywhere.”

But Midwesterners could be a little grudging in their enthusiasm. Though hungry for ideas they were defensive about being thought to lack a culture of their own (we haven’t changed much in that regard), and they could be especially prickly about money. New England speakers were accustomed to receiving speaking fees of $40 to $75 per lecture back home, but homegrown lecturers from the Midwest typically charged only $15 to $25. This disparity inspired the Sandusky Commercial Register to complain about Emerson’s price of $50 during his 1854 tour and to warn its readers that “…this winter the threat is that more will be charged! If such really be the case, we emphatically say don’t hire Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

Still, there was no shortage of speakers, and from 1847 to 1857 the Lyceums enjoyed greater growth in the Midwest than anywhere in the nation. Among the noteworthy lectures:

– Herman Melville at the Detroit Young Men’s Society (where the average attendance that winter of 1857-8 exceeded 500 per lecture)  speaking on the subject of “Statuary of Rome.”

– E.L. Youmans on “The Chemistry of the Sunbeam.”

– George Vandenhoff on “Smiles and Tears from Poetic Fountains.”

– John Clevees Symmes on his “Symmes Hole Theory,” which held that the earth had a hollow interior that could be entered at the North and South Poles. Symmes sometimes ended his lectures with a call for “one hundred brave companions” to travel with him to the North Pole, where he was certain they would find “a warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men.”

Have our tastes changed much in a century and a half? Judge for yourself.
Here is a partial list of lecture titles from this week’s TED2011:

“Glowing Life in an Underwater World”
“My Seven Species of Robot”
“Women Reshaping the World”
“Hacking Your Brain With Music”
“Using Nature’s Genius in Architecture”
“Medicine Without Borders”
“Reviving New York’s Rivers — With Oysters!”
“What Makes Us Happy?”
“Might You Live a Great Deal Longer?”

And here are some titles from the American Lyceum of the 1850s:

“The Sun”
“Causes of the American Revolution”
“The Sources of National Wealth”
“The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement”
“The Honey Bee”
“The Legal Rights of Women”
“Instinct”
“The Discovery of America by the Northmen”
And my all-time favorite lecture title:  “…[A] Moral and Satirical Lecture on Human Hearts and a Dissertation on Noses, the Whole to be Concluded with a Hornpipe.”

The Naming of the Shrew

Illustration: Glenn Wolff © 2011

In the beginning was the word, and it’s a good thing, because above all else we are creatures of language. Adam’s first act was to name the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, and in so defining the things of the world he made it come alive. Little wonder, then, that we are obsessed with giving names to everything we can see and touch and imagine. It’s probably our best trick.

Which might explain why, since childhood, one of my favorite rainy-day pastimes has been to browse on animal names. My life-list of nomenclature includes some exotics we’ll get to, but I keep coming back to the shrew. The word, first of all, is fun to say. Pronounce it slowly, with feeling, and you can’t help forming the face you would make if you happened to bite into one. Predators avoid shrews because the glands on their flanks secrete a nasty-smelling musk that makes them bitter to the tongue. Scrunch up your face and say it: “Shrew!” The word isn’t so much spoken as expelled.

Few people observe shrews up close, not because shrews are rare (they’re quite common), but because they’re usually nocturnal, are very small – two to four inches on average — and are almost too shy to live. As you’re driving at night you might occasionally see one darting in manic dashes across the road in front of you: a hyperactive bundle of indecision, scampering first one way, then another, then streaking across the pavement so fast you’re breathless with sympathy for such a tightly wound package of nerves. If ever a mammal needed to take a deep breath and relax, this is it.

By any standard, shrews are damned strange animals. Their metabolism operates at full-tilt boogie every moment of their lives, but when frightened their hearts can accelerate to a rate of 1,200 beats a minute, about twice that of a hummingbird’s heart.

To maintain their frenetic metabolism, shrews must eat nearly all the time, so they can’t afford to be choosy and will consume just about anything they find, including earthworms, spiders, centipedes, snails, slugs, insect larvae, lizards, frogs, fish, nuts, seeds, plants, and any mammals and birds small enough or slow enough to be overpowered. Shrews have poor eyesight and hunt seemingly at random, zigzagging across the ground until they blunder into something edible. Some species have a taste for carrion and like to burrow into the brain first. Others, if they can’t find anything else to eat, will curl up, lock their hind legs with their forelegs, and snack on their own feces as they defecate.

Some mother shrews and their young travel in caravan, each animal biting the fur on the rump of the one ahead of it to stay in touch, making them look like a string of furry frankfurters undulating along the ground. If threatened, shrews are likely to rise on their hind legs, bare their teeth, and emit a squeaky warning cry. Like bats, they probably use echolocation to get around in the dark. Some swim and dive as adroitly as tiny otters; others are equipped with fringes of hair around their feet that allow them to scamper across the surface of ponds and streams. Still others spend most of their lives in trees. One species, the Sichuan burrowing shrew, appears to live almost entirely underground.

Naturally, such odd creatures are magnets for superstition. Shrews for a long time were thought to be so poisonous that they could sicken farm animals just by crossing paths with them. In Europe it was believed for centuries that the bite of a shrew was venomous, a notion carried to the New World despite experts’ assurances to the contrary. Folklore, they said. Old wives’ tales. Until some skeptical American biologist picked up a short-tailed shrew and it sank its teeth into his finger, pumped venom into the wound, and left the biologist a howling believer. It turns out that the short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda,  is the only venomous mammal in North America. Found from southern Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia in the north, and central Nebraska to central Georgia in the south, it packs poison powerful enough to kill a full-grown rabbit, though the ordinary dose is just enough to paralyze a field mouse or cause pain in a human for several days.

The European water shrew also produces venom, with which it subdues fish, frogs, and aquatic larvae while hunting underwater.In his book Et Cetera, Et Cetera, the biologist Lewis Thomas traced the origin of the word “shrew” to an ancient Indo-European root, skreu, which served as a verb, meaning to cut something up, and as a noun, for the tool used for such cutting. Later, in Old English, it became the noun screawa, and was awarded to the mammal we now call the shrew, perhaps because it is such a vicious little butcher of prey. In time the word morphed into the Middle English verb “to shrew,” which meant simply to curse, inevitably evolving into the adjective “shrewd,” meaning “bad, keen, or piercing.” A shrewd or shrewish person was deceitful and nagging, and prone to violent temper tantrums and foul speech, although by the time of the Elizabethans the epithet had softened somewhat. Quick-witted Kate in The Taming of the Shrew was an easily recognized character type in Shakespeare’s England, feisty and free-spirited, at a time when to be called a shrew could be either a compliment or an insult (thus the audience of Much Ado About Nothing knew, as we do today, that to be “shrewd of tongue” was to be spiteful, severe, malicious, and clever). These days nobody likes to be called a shrew, but shrewdness in courtrooms and negotiating sessions earns our grudging admiration.

A word like “shrew” fits its namesake well, but we’re not always so practical with our naming. Because we get pleasure from the trill of syllables and the cadence of consonants, we often choose names because they are the audible equivalent of flowers in blossom. Is there a correlation between our words and our notions of beauty? Of course. How else explain the gorgeous names we’ve bestowed upon butterflies and birds, and the dull ones with which we’ve burdened bats and reptiles? We’ll now and then deign to offer an interesting name to a bat – the Little Flying Cow, for instance, for a small African nectar feeder; and the ghostly white Ghost Bats of Central and South America; and the African Butterfly Bats, which resemble moths and butterflies with their spots, stripes, and fluttering flight – but those are the exceptional names in an order that includes a thousand blandly labeled species. Surely it is indicative of our ambivalent attitudes toward bats that the two most common species in North America are called the Little Brown Bat and the Big Brown Bat.

Among reptiles and amphibians, beautiful names are as rare as beautiful faces, but a little digging in the literature uncovers such alliterative gems as the Longnose Leopard Lizard and the Savannah Slimy Salamander. And who can resist the Bluetail Mole Skink? Or the Rusty-Rumped Whiptail? Or the Redstripe Ribbon Snake?

The names we’ve given some marine animals sound like characters in children’s books. The Notable Rattail and Southern Gobbleguts would make deliciously nasty villains. Ovate Silverbiddy and Precious Wentletrap are surely someone’s eccentric maiden aunts. What kid wouldn’t like to be friends with a Harlequin Sweetlips or a Bicolor Dottyback? Who wouldn’t be charmed by a Lollipop Shark or a Rose Petal Bubble Shell or a Honeyhead Damsel? Who doesn’t feel some sympathy for the Depressed Gorgonian Crab?

Most freshwater fish are named less imaginatively than their saltwater cousins, but a few stand out, including the Stargazing Minnow, Virgin Spinedace, Bluefin Stoneroller, Warpaint Shiner, Flannelmouth Carpsucker, Sharpfin Chubsucker, Suckermouth Redhorse, Bigeye Jumprock, Stippled Studfish, Rainwater Killifish, and Frecklebelly Madtom.

Of course we’ve revealed our passion for language most extravagantly with birds. We might not have the opportunity to see them in the wild, but we can enjoy nominally the Fan-Tailed Berrypicker, Tink-tink Cisticola, Ruddy Turnstone, Willie Wagtail, and White-crested Laughing-thrush. Dr. Seuss might have named the Greater Racket-Tailed Drongo, the Pale-breasted Thrush-babbler, and the Yellow-Rumped Tinkerbird. The Bearded Helmetcrest sounds like an obscure accessory to medieval armor. The Variable Seedeater might be a garden tool manufactured by Black and Decker.

Entertaining as those names can be, they don’t carry a lot of weight among scientists, for whom precision usually has to take precedence over poetry. The vernacular creates local color, but it also creates confusion. A biologist needs to know that the American Woodcock he studies in Maine is the same bird that elsewhere in North America is known as Timberdoodle, Bogsucker, Woodhen, Big Eye, Midnight Rider, Whistledoodle, Labrador Twister, Night Partridge, and Mudsnipe.

Our tendency to invent local names underscores the need for  reliable and universal systems of organization. Naturalists since Aristotle have tried to shoehorn plants and animals into a variety of often whimsical systems.  One system ranked animals by their level of nobility, with lions and eagles at the top of the heap. Others began with domestic animals and proceeded to wild ones, or from smallest creatures to largest. Early Anglo-Saxon naturalists relied on a system based on modes of locomotion, in which, for example, all snakes, nightcrawlers, intestinal parasites, and dragons were classified as worms, because they were “creeping things.” A habitat-based system in the 17th century made the beaver kin to the fishes, simply because both lived in water. A remnant of that concept lingered as late as the 1930s, when muskrats in northern Ohio and elsewhere were granted papal classification as fishes, so that they could be eaten on Catholic fast days. It lingers in our vernacular to this day, which is why we are so cavalier about designating certain aquatic organisms as “fish” when they are clearly not fish: starfish, crayfish, shellfish.

The binomial classification in use throughout the world today, whereby Latin or Latinized words designate the genus and species of every living thing, was invented by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) and soon made all previous systems obsolete. Plants had traditionally been grouped into general categories based on characteristics such as size – “shrubs” and “trees,” for instance – but Linnaeus created greater precision by identifying plants according to their sexual characteristics. Class and order were determined by the number of stamens and pistils. Genus described a general structure, such as the anatomy of a fruit or flower. Species referred to easily identified features such as its taste or the shape of its leaves.

Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae was a vast improvement over previous systems that had sometimes been ridiculously complicated. Before Linnaeus, one butterfly had been given the unwieldy Latin name Papilio media alis pronis praefertim interioribus maculis oblongis argenteis perbelle depictus. A contemporary of Linnaeus’s, the French scientist Georges Buffon, persisted in grouping animals according to their familiarity, placing horses, donkeys, and cows together, for instance, and chickens with pigeons. But Linnaeus’s simple and logical system caught on and soon inspired a mania for naming, making it a mark of high honor – and a source of intense competition – to name a species after oneself or an acquaintance. Linnaeus himself honored a former teacher, Professor Olof Rudbeck, by granting the name Rudbeckia to the genus of flowers we know as coneflowers and black-eyed susan.

Linnaeus lived to see his system revolutionize taxonomy and allow scientists throughout the world to communicate about the vast numbers of new plants and animals that were being discovered. Eventually the American Woodcock was christened Scolopax minor and the Greater North American Short-tailed Shrew became Blarina brevicauda. The ancient Greek botanist Isodorus would have been pleased. It was he who said, “If you do not know the names, the knowledge of things is wasted.”

Walt Whitman, who had little interest in taxonomy, wrote in his sprawling memoir of nature-watching, Specimen Days and Collect, “You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness… helps your enjoyment of these things.” Whitman worried that words might get in the way of a pure appreciation of nature.

But words can be appreciated for their own sake as well. Without our passion for them, the sky would be crossed only by little gray birds and big black birds. We would admit little difference between an elk and a moose, between a skink and a snake, between trout and bullhead and bass. A beaver would be a rat would be a mouse would be a shrew. Which would be a shame, because a shrew is certainly not a mouse, and the world is much enriched by the difference.

THE HUMAN PAGEANT

Who is not fascinated with the variety of people in the world? For years I’ve collected literary celebrations of the human pageant — a bookish variation on watching people on the street. Here are a few of my favorites:

Virginia Woolf, from Orlando: “At the carnival in the Royal enclosure in London: “…the couple lingered there, shouldered by apprentices; tailors; fishwives; horse dealers; cony catchers; starving scholars; maid-servants in their whimples; orange girls; ostlers; sober citizens; bawdy tapsters; and a crowd of little ragamuffins…– all the riff-raff of the London streets indeed was there, jesting and jostling, here casting dice, telling fortunes, shoving, tickling, pinching…”

James Joyce, one of many examples from Ulysses: “To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoaters, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game…”

Joyce again, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen “enumerates glibly his father’s attributes”:

“A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.”

Van Wyck Brooks, describing the societies that descended upon Concord during the glory days of the transcendentalists, from The Life of Emerson:

“The reformers thronged the roads. The Chardon Street Convention in Boston had assembled a thousand messiahs from the woods and mountains. Dunkers, Muggletonians, Agrarians, Abolitionists, Groaners, Come-outers. Every village crossroads in New England had contributed a voice and a scroll.

“They roamed about the countryside in long gowns and with hair over their shoulders, and many a strange apparition haunted Emerson’s house. The vegetarians came…and those who would not eat rice because it was raised by slaves; and those who would not wear leather… and those who rejected vegetables the roots of which grew downward.

“The Phrenologists came too, and the Mesmerists, and the Homeopaths, and the Swedenborgians. And the Rat-Hole Spiritualists whose gospel came by taps in the wall and thumps in the table-drawer – wizards that peeped and muttered… New types, desires that had never been voiced before in prosaic America. What were they seeking, these young men, what were they feeling, thinking, for what were they groping?”

Cormac McCarthy, from Suttree, in which protagonist Cornelius Suttree casts his lot with “thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.”

Henry Miller, from Tropic of Capricorn: “I heard men beg for work who had been Egyptologists, botanists, surgeons, gold miners, professors of Oriental languages, musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists, mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison wardens, cowpunchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters, dentists, painters, sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope peddlers, abortionists, white slavers, sea divers, steeplejacks, farmers, cloak and suit salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps, aldermen, senators, every bloody thing under the sun…”

Saul Bellow, from Mr. Sammler’s Planet: “What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas a Becket. Not imitated are the businessman, the soldier, the priest, and the square.”

Saul Bellow again, from Henderson the Rain King:  “…I have made a thorough study of the types, resulting in an entire classification system, as: The agony. The appetite. The obstinate. The immune elephant. The shrewd pig. The fateful hysterical. The death-accepting. The phallic-proud or hollow genital. The fast asleep. The narcissus intoxicated. The mad laughers. The pedantics. The fighting Lazaruses. Oh, Henderson-Sungo, how many shapes and forms! Numberless!”

Director Elia Kazan, in a letter urging Tennessee Williams to add a speech “in praise of bohemianism” to his play Camino Reel:
“A dying race call them what you will: romantics, eccentrics, rebels, Bohemians, freaks, harum-scarum, bob-tail, Punchinellos, odd-ducks, the out-of-steps, the queers, double-gated lechers, secret livers, dreamers, left-handed pitchers, defrocked bishops… the artists, the wanderers, the would-be wanderers, the secret wanderers, the foggy-minded, the asleep on the job, the loafers, the out-and-out hobos, the down and out, the grifters and drifters, the winos and boozers, the old maids who don’t venture to the other side of their windows, the good for nothings, the unfenceables, the rebels inside, the rebels manifest.”

And the soliloquy it inspired Tennessee Williams to write: “God bless all con men and hustlers and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on the street, all two-time losers who’re likely to lose once more, the courtesan who made the mistake of love, the greatest of lovers crowned with the longest horns, the poet who wandered far from his heart’s green country and possibly will and possibly won’t be able to find his way back, look down with a smile tonight on the last cavaliers, the ones with the rusty armor and soiled white plumes, and visit with understanding and something that’s almost tender those fading legends that come and go in this plaza like songs not clearly remembered.”

SHAKESPEARE’S BIRDS

The European Starling

We meddle. Apparently we can’t resist. Consider Eugene Schieffelin, the amiable lunatic I mentioned yesterday who is so often accused of trying to bring all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare to America. Although there’s some question about his Shakespearean connection, there’s no doubt that he kidnapped his share of birds and dragged them across the Atlantic. As a member of the American Acclimatization Society, it was his duty, after all. The Society’s goal was to introduce to America “such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as may be useful or interesting.” We know now what a bad idea that was. You won’t be surprised to learn that the American Acclimatization Society went quietly extinct long ago.

Schieffelin is usually blamed for bringing us the English sparrow (we now call it the house sparrow). He had less luck with skylarks, nightingales, chaffinches, and bullfinches, none of which survived acclimatization. Donald Peattie, in his 1941 memoir The Road of a Naturalist, suggested that Schieffelin might have tried to transplant European robins, thrushes, and blackbirds as well, but they didn’t survive either. Then in 1890 and 1891 Eugene carried starlings to America –  40, 60, 80, or 100 of them, depending on whom you ask — and released them into Central Park. The American sky would never be the same.

It took a few years for starlings to thrive here, but then they really thrived. A search through the archives of The New York Times (with free viewing of articles published 1851-1922) reveals the dramatic change in public opinion as starlings spread across America.
On March 2, 1900, in a letter to the editors, a city resident named E. Brown asked:
“Can you inform me what sort of bird it is which frequents this neighborhood, answering closely the                                 description of a starling, viz., brown plumage, penciled, and darker on head than body; beak about one inch                 long, and rich yellow color; tail rather short, and legs rather long? … It may be found almost any clear morning             on a large tree in a yard at the southwest corner of Seventy-fifth Street and the Boulevard. Do you know of any             foreign birds having been liberated in this city besides sparrows, and by whom? Research has so far failed to                identify these birds.”

The editors responded:
“In reply to the above questions, William T. Davis, a Staten Island naturalist, who is familiar with the birds in             this vicinity, says: ‘There seems to me to be no doubt that Mr. Brown has been observing the starling…  A flock             of about forty starlings was liberated by Mr. Eugene Schieffelin [sic] in Central Park in March, 1890. A pair of             these birds built their nest in the roof of the Natural History Museum, at Seventy-seventh Street, in May, 1892,             and another pair were seen with their young on the lawn of a residence on Riverside Drive during the same                 year. At that time their fate as resident birds was far from certain, but now there are colonies in many places                 near the city. Many starlings may be seen at times in the tall trees at Livingston, S.I.  They have also been                     observed in Prospect Park, Flatbush, Spuyten Duyvil, New Rochelle, Oyster Bay, and Pelham Bay Park.’”

Davis proceeded to bestow praise that was probably shared by most people, at least for a while:
“’They are common in England and over most of Europe, and, as they devour insects, they are of use to the                     farmer. It is said that they will eat potato bugs. Their nests are usually built in the eaves of buildings and in old             hollow trees, and their whistling is pleasant and cheerful. As the starling has not been found to interfere with                 other birds, we may be glad that he has come to stay. The European goldfinch was introduced into this country             at Hoboken, N.J., in 1878, and has since spread over the upper parts of Manhattan Island and the vicinity.  It                 resembles the American goldfinch or thistlefinch.’”

A decade and a half later starlings were no longer considered “of use to the farmer.” They had become an infestation:
October 15, 1914:  “Glen Ridge, N.J., Oct. 14. — The State Game and Fish Commission has given permission to             the authorities of this borough to destroy the European starlings which have great amazed residents of several             streets where the birds congregated in enormous numbers.  Attempts of the residents to drive away the birds                 have been fruitless and they petitioned the local authorities to destroy them.”

December 20, 1931:  “Baltimore has recently waged a defensive war against an army of starlings. Thousands of             birds swooped down upon the city without warning…”

Jan 6, 1933:  “An army of starlings estimated at 50,000 is making a night sanctuary of the Exterior of the                     Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was disclosed yesterday. The police regard this as a conservative estimate, and             believe that [the number should be] 100,000 birds at least…”

July 9, 1933:  “Like the English sparrow, the European starling is rolling up enemies by the score. Michigan                 farmers recently reported that thousands of starlings had settled in every county of the State. The huge flocks             not only ravage the orchards, eating tons of fruit, but they commit a more serious offense, driving other birds             out of their homes and sanctuaries.”

By 1950 starlings had colonized North America from coast to coast and from Mexico to Hudson Bay. Today their numbers are estimated at more than 200 million.

August 19, 1951:  “The starlings and purple martins that have made nights hideous in a fashionable section                     here are getting a bitter taste of their own medicine — noise. Eddie Boyes, a Detroit radio engineer, is matching             the starlings whistle for whistle and shriek for shriek and they don’t like it.”

January 20, 1957:  “Tenacious as office holders, persistent as lobbyists, insensitive as social climbers — all                     familiar types here — the starlings of Washington will not quit it.”

March 16, 1959:  “Each day at sundown, motorists commuting over the Henry Hudson Parkway witness a                     ‘black blizzard’ of birds at 125th Street.”

But our feelings are complex. When the city of New York tried to reduce the pigeon population with poison, they inadvertently killed many starlings, awakening a surge of compassion:

Dec 5, 1975:  “A cluster of bird-lovers, some of them sobbing, gathered outside the Ethical Culture School at 33             Central Park West last night to mourn dozens of starlings, their feet mired in a chemical, that fell to their                     deaths from the school’s roof…”

The Other Birds

It’s not clear how many birds Schieffelin and the American Acclimatization Society tried to bring to America, but if they had Shakespeare’s complete aviary in mind they probably fell short. Scholars have assembled an inventory of about 600 birds mentioned by Shakespeare, including:
blackbird
bunting
chough
cock
cormorant
crow
cuckoo
daw
dive-dapper
dove
duck
eagle
falcon
finch
fowl
goose
guinea hen
hedge sparrow
heron
jay
kestrel
kingfisher
kite
lapwing
lark
loon
magpie
mallard
martin (martlet)
nightingale
osprey
ostrich
owl
paraquito
parrot
partridge
peacock
pelican
pheasant
phoenix
pigeon
popinjay
quail
raven
rook
sea gull
snipe
sparrow
starling
swallow
swan
thrush
turkey
vulture
woodcock
wren

A starling appears in Shakespeare just once, in Henry IV, Part I (Act I, Scene III). In that scene the angry Hotspur, wanting to torment Henry, conceives the idea of having a starling repeat the name of the king’s brother-in-law over and over. He says:
“But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll hollow ‘Mortimer!’
Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.”

Shakespeare knew, of course, that starlings are excellent mimics and that they can sometimes be taught to speak a few words. Whether one can be taught to say “Mortimer” remains to be seen.

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Yesterday I recommended Richard Barnes’s photos of the starlings that flock above Rome in the evenings. Those images are best displayed in his book, Murmur. See www.richardbarnes.net

Flocking Starlings

I was driving along  I-75 north of Bay City, Michigan, in an area of open fields in the flatlands of the Saginaw Valley, when I saw what I thought was a distant swirl of black smoke. I looked more closely and realized that it was a single flock of thousands or maybe tens of thousands of starlings in flight. They were a mile or more away, too far for individual birds to be visible, which gave the flock the appearance of a large dark cloud sailing over the field.

But what caught my attention was the swirling and graceful movements of this mass of birds. It was so striking and unusual that I pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, breaking the law for a better look. The flock was passing in sweeping whorls and slow curves that made me think of smoke swirling in the vortex of a passing car. It was  mesmerizing. Here in mostly wooded Michigan we don’t get many open views, and can usually watch flocking behavior for only a few moments at a time.

As I watched I noticed a larger speck isolated at the center of a whorl within the flock. It took a moment to realize it was a hawk diving through the birds like a barracuda through a school of minnows. The flock morphed into a funnel, with the hawk plummeting through the open neck. The shape was like an Einsteinian diagram of curved space, or an artist’s  rendition of galaxies being sucked into a black hole. There was something about it that reminded me also of iron filings in a magnetic blossom. The hawk turned for another assault, and the flock switched and turned, then spiraled into shapes no geometry has  yet named.

What makes congregations of this sort stay together? How can birds in a flock or minnows in a school make such apparently instantaneous switches, dives, swoops, and banking turns without crashing into one another?  Writer Henry Beston watched birds on Cape Cod and asked, “Does some current flow through them and between them as they fly?” We’ve all wondered that. Is there an intelligence at work? A theory popular a century ago, that a leader signals orders to the flock like a drum major at the head of a marching band, was disproved when high-speed photography made it possible to see that a flock constantly changes leaders. More recent studies have focused on mathematical chaos theory, an approach that was pioneered by zoologist Frank Heppner, who studied flocking synchronism for many years, and proposed four rules for the behavior:

1) Birds are attracted to a focal point, such as a roost, and the closer they approach it the stronger its attraction.
2) Birds are attracted to each other, because there is safety in numbers, but if they get too close, they are repelled to avoid collisions.
3) Birds want to maintain a steady velocity.
4) The path of a bird’s flight can be altered by random factors such as gusts of wind or the sudden shadow of a hawk.

When Heppner fed all four rules into a computer program and animated a collection of figures on the screen to represent birds, their motion closely duplicated actual flight behavior of flocking birds. More recently, software engineer Craig Reynolds has designed computer “Boids” that fly in simulated flocks, adding much to the knowledge of swarming birds and fish. (Watch Boids in action here.)

Of course there’s another side to all of this. We can consider all the explanations – the binary codes of behavior, the tensions of desire opposed, the need to stay close for safety but far enough apart not to injure, the various stimuli and responses, the oppositions of gravity and flight – and perhaps it helps us in a small way to understand the world, in the sense that it’s probably not bewitchment we’re witnessing or God idly stirring a swizzle stick. We’re reminded that the world is an unfolding story. This particular one includes the story of Eugene Schiefellin, the amiable lunatic who in the mid-19th century set out to transplant all of Shakespeare’s birds to America and unleashed a plague of starlings and house sparrows. It’s the story of predators and prey, of sky and field and thermal updrafts and a  horizon blowing up red at sunset, of superhighways cutting across the land, of our seldom taking the time to pull out of traffic and try to notice a thing or two.

Are patterns in nature evidence of organizing principle — or are we the principle organizer? Is order proof of Design — or an artificial system created by complex neurological systems when confronted by masses of data? Standing beside my car on the shoulder of the highway I became  aware that an entire river of phenomena was flowing around me. The face of a young woman driving past, the blare of a horn, the flash of sunlight off a windshield, the cars and semis making little windstorms that rocked my truck on its wheels – these, too, were starlings in a flock. Step back far enough and you can sometimes see a pattern, and sometimes you’ll find it beautiful.
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Richard Barnes’s book of photography, Animal Logic, comes highly recommended. It includes a stunning series of photos of starlings flocking over Rome. The patterns are similar to those I saw over the field in Michigan.

Google Images offers dozens of interesting flock photos here.