No Good Deed

We got a subscription to a daily newspaper called Financial Times back in November. Six to eight weeks later, as promised, it started arriving.

Somehow, the FT subscription department messed up and started sending me two papers each day. The FT that was showing up in my driveway first thing in the morning was the same as the FT that was delivered to my mailbox in the afternoon. The only difference is that the one in the driveway was in a plastic bag, and the one in my mailbox had my name and address printed in the top margin. I considered calling the FT subscription department and letting them know about their mistake. But the thought of doing so filled me with anxiety. I mean, they’re in screw-up mode to begin with, so what’s to prevent them from screwing up again and canceling both deliveries if I ask them to cancel just one? And anyway, they’re the ones screwing up, not me. Why am I obligated to call the problem to their attention? If they discover it for themselves, fine; if they don’t, it’s not my problem.

Okay, so, what to do with the extra paper? The first few went into the recycling bin, and I think I might’ve used one to start a fire in the fireplace. Then I thought of Dan and Megan Fresnel, whose driveway is right across the cul-de-sac from ours. She’s a lawyer, he’s a stockbroker. Both kids in college, lots of spare time. They might enjoy a free Financial Times, right? I figured I’d let them have the one delivered in the morning to my driveway, since I never get a chance to read anything until the afternoon anyway. But as I reached for the phone to call them with my amazing story of good luck and congratulations -– how often do we get to do something like that? — new worries stopped me cold. What if it turned out they didn’t like FT but were too polite to tell me so? I pictured poor Megan, who left for work first, dutifully trudging across the street to retrieve the unwanted newspaper. Worse, what if they really liked FT, and what if FT’s subscription department discovered on their own that I was getting two papers, and they stop delivering one of them? Then I’d have to call the Fresnels again, only this time the news wouldn’t be so good. I supposed I could always let them know up front that if FT stopped delivering one of the papers to me, I’d have to retract my offer. That way, they wouldn’t be disappointed when it happened. Well, maybe they’d be disappointed, but they wouldn’t be surprised. Okay, fine, even if they were both surprised and disappointed, they couldn’t say I didn’t warn them, right? No, I couldn’t possibly call them about it.

I paced back and forth. I went to a deposition. I bought a new umbrella. No matter what I did, the problem was still there. Suddenly, while we were driving home from dinner at Paparazzi, the solution came to me. Without saying a word to the Fresnels, I would steal out first thing in the morning and throw the FT in its plastic bag into their driveway. They would never know whence it came, and if FT caught on some day and I had to stop my pre-dawn deliveries, they would never know whither it went. And I would never know if they had become as addicted to it as I had become (did I tell you what a terrific newspaper FT is?), or if they just tossed it unread into the rubbish.

Perfection!

The first few days went smoothly. I would throw the newspaper into their driveway each morning, and each afternoon it would be gone. I was starting to feel like a shoemaker’s elf. The fifth or sixth morning, my wife took care of the paper delivery without telling me, and for one awful moment I was terrified that the Fresnels, now believing that they had been given a free subscription to FT, had seen it in our driveway and retrieved it themselves, thinking it had been delivered to us by mistake. My wife reassured me what had happened, but a strange foreboding began to haunt me. Then, a week to the day after I started my clandestine paper deliveries, FT didn’t arrive with the afternoon mail. The subscription department had finally caught on. Goodbye extra copy; so sorry Dan and Megan.

The next morning, I crept out at the crack of dawn to grab the FT in my driveway before Megan left for work. But as I was walking out to the end of the driveway where my FT was waiting for me, the Fresnels’ garage door started creaking open like the curtain on a murder mystery, to reveal Meg’s Thunderbird, backing slowly out, spouting steam from its tailpipes in the cold air. As casually as possible, I turned and walked back to the house at what I like to think was a very quick amble, a kind of accelerated saunter, whereupon I sat down to meditate. I am a prisoner in my own house. I can’t even perform the simple task of going out to get the morning newspaper without first making sure the coast is clear. I can no longer so much as wave to my neighbors, our oldest friends in the neighborhood. Oh, and did I tell you what color the Financial Times newspaper is? It’s pink. It’s fucking shocking-salmon pink! You can spot it a mile away.

Frost Heaves

In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost describes the process of repairing a wall that separated his property from his neighbor’s. Rustic stone walls used to be a feature of the New England landscape. Although some have fallen into disrepair, they still can be seen in rural areas. They are said to be made of rocks the last glacier dragged down from the north: debris that the early farmers had to clear away before they could start cultivating their land. Being New Englanders, they did this in the most practical way, by dragging the stones out to the property line using the stone boats that Frost describes in another poem, and then arranging them into walls running around their farms.

The walls required constant upkeep. In particular, each spring after the snow cleared, the property owners would have to go out and replace the stones that had fallen off during the winter. Water expands when it freezes; when water in the ground under the walls would freeze, the ground would buckle upward, toppling stones to the ground, then relax back down when the thaw came, leaving gaps in the wall. The term for these humped-up patches of frozen ground is “frost heaves.” Like the potholes here in Michigan, frost heaves are a ubiquitous driving hazard on New England roads, where signs warning motorists of them can still be seen. (Strange but true: the Vermont Premier Basketball League team is called the Frost Heaves.)

In “Mending Wall,” the poet uses the unfamiliar term “frozen-ground-swell,” perhaps because “frost heave” has his name in it and brings an unfortunate image to mind. The poem opens with the famous line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and immediately, in the very next line, goes on to name the process – the “frozen-ground-swell” – whereby the wall falls apart. There is really no mystery about it, and yet Frost tries to make one as the poem goes on. What is it, the thing that doesn’t love a wall, something big and active, and completely indifferent to us and our projects? If I had to put a name on it I would call it entropy – the process that causes unmanaged systems to go random, eventually scrambling the Parthenon and everything else we make. When it’s something small that lets us set our work back in order, like a frozen-ground-swell, we go out and do it. Frost once wrote: “The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so?” Not useful, just pleasant. To the poem’s narrator, mending wall is “just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more.”

The very unpoetic neighbor has a simpler take on it: Good fences make good neighbors. This is the voice of common sense, or of human social needs. Watching him walk toward him with a stone in each hand, Frost compares him to “an old-stone savage armed.” “Old-stone” = paleolithic, in two blunt Anglo-Saxon syllables. Taking the play and fun out of remaking the wall, that figure of order and concentration against the chaos of nature, leaves the neighbor in darkness, says Frost. May all your work be play.

Adam the Taxonomist

Stag Beetle by Albrecht Dürer

If there is truth in בְּרֵאשִׁית, the Genesis story, it is metaphoric or symbolic truth. For example, according to Genesis the first human’s first God-given task was to watch while God paraded all the animals past him, and to give each animal a name. “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought [them] unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that [was] the name thereof.”

This is an unthinkably enormous task. So far, for example, we have named about 350,000 different kinds of beetles alone. And it’s estimated that there are at least another 650,000 different kinds of beetles yet to be named. Instead of clinging to a literal interpretation of Genesis and the absurd belief that Adam had enough time even in his long life to name every single living creature, why not marvel at the fact that Adam (“the human” in Hebrew) is still performing the task that the creator set him? Isn’t it amazing that the need to give things names is so firmly implanted in out hearts that we continue doing so to this day and are helpless to stop until we have finally named every single beetle, all 1,000,000 of them?

What is so important about giving things names that God himself instructed Adam to do it and that we continue to be compelled to do it on such a grand scale? So obsessed are we with this ancient task that the first person to name an animal gets to attach his or her own name to it: the stag beetle is “Lucanus elaphus Fabricius” after the great Johann Fabricius who gave it that name. Why the bragging rights? Why is it such an honor (and it is an honor) to be the first describer and namer of a beetle? The answer is obvious to every gardener and farmer and hunter and outdoorsman: as Thoreau observed, with knowledge of the name comes a knowledge and appreciation of the thing itself. You don’t really see things until you know their names. The field of flowers is just an undifferentiated mass of colors and shapes until you’ve learned the flowers’ names. T.H. Huxley said that if you don’t have some knowledge of natural science, the world is like a museum filled with magnificent works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

That is why, my dear fundamentalist friends, your “creationism” is a form of blasphemy. If you believe that God Himself created the earth, and placed in our hearts the need to look at the earth and learn the truth about it and about ourselves, then your practice of ignoring that truth and deliberately, knowingly, turning those magnificent works of God’s art to face the wall again, can only be described as the most shocking and disgraceful kind of blasphemy. Shame on you.

Recommended reading: The Sacred Depths of Nature, by Ursula Goodenough

Also recommended: Taxonomy

Pieces of Branwen

Branwen, by Christopher Williams

My first thought was that Branwen was some sort of archaic or perhaps scholarly spelling of the Welsh name Bronwyn.  According to  Think Baby Names, the name Bronwyn was in the top 100 baby names in Canada between 1998 and 2003, although it has never even made the top 1000 in the U.S.  On the other hand, the same web site says Bronwyn means “fair, blessed breast” in Welsh, and we know from the Medieval Scotland website that Branwen in fact means “white raven.”  The author (Heather Rose Jones, who goes by the name Tangwystyl ferch Morgant Glasvryn in the Society for Creative Anachronisms) adds that the name Bronwyn is just a stupid American invention.  Ms. Glasvryn doesn’t actually use the word stupid, but you can tell she wants to.  It’s not hard to imagine that the name Bronwyn is the product of the Boomers’ New Agey fascination with things Celtic.

Ms. Glasvryn bases her idea that the name Branwen is meant to signify “white raven” on the fact that Branwen and her brother Bran are a matched pair in the Mabinogion, and “Bran” means “raven.”  The fascinating but fatally low-budget short film version of “Branwen uerch Lyr” ends with scenes of ravens emerging from the Tower of London, where they are apparently maintained to this day by the Ravenmaster, in Britishy wish-fulfilment of the Mabinogion’s prediction that as long as Bran’s severed head remains at the Gwynfryn, the white hill where the Tower now stands, no invader could conquer the “Island of the Mighty” (as the Mabinogion calls the island of Gordon Brown).  I would like to add that I consider “Ravenmaster” to be the geekiest job title ever.

I have tried diligently to discover any evidence that the severed head of somebody named Bran was buried in London, which is to say that I Googled the phrase “Bran’s Head.”  I found depictions of the gruesome object itself.  I learned of the existence of a publisher named Bran’s Head Books Ltd.  But nothing at all about a convincing archeological head-find in London.

One problem would have been the sheer size of Bran’s head.  Bran was known to be a giant who was unable to fit inside a normal house.  He was so tall, he was able to wade across the Irish sea when he and his men went to Ireland to rescue Branwen from her captivity in the kitchen of the Irish king Mallolwch (pronounced “Murdoch,” I believe).  According to the latest data published by the Island of the Mighty, the Irish Sea, in the area where Bran likely waded across, attains a maximum depth of approximately 120 meters, or a little under 400 feet.  Assuming everything in proportion, for Bran to wade with his head above water the whole way he would have had to be about 460 feet tall, which makes Murdoch’s achievement in building a house big enough to hold Bran all the more impressive.  The structure would have had to be at least 46 storeys high, making it Ireland’s first skyscraper.  The Mabinogion doesn’t say what use this skyscraper was put to after the war, but we can assume that with the entire population consisting of five pregnant Irishwomen the real estate market was nonexistent, which is a shame.  Anyway, the point is that Bran’s severed head would have been a whopping 60 feet tall!  It seems extremely unlikely to me that something that size can have gone undetected in the city of London this long.  The British admittedly have a reputation for being absentminded, but surely even the most preoccupied Englishman would have noticed if he tripped over a three-foot-long molar.  I won’t deny that Bran might have been NBA tall, but it is not possible that he was 460 feet tall.  I am convinced of that.

One story that tries to explain away the absence of Bran’s head from the Gwynfryn claims that the head was dug up and taken away by none other than King Arthur, who believed that he didn’t need any magic giant head to defend Britain from its enemies (see the Sacred-texts website).  This is a half-step away from saying the tooth fairy stole the head because she really, really wanted those three-foot molars.  I believe there might be a certain element of exaggeration in the Mabinogion.

Take Branwen’s attractiveness.  If she really was “the most beautiful girl in the world,” if Bran-the-boss’s sister just happened to look like Angelina Jolie the way everybody told him she did, do you seriously believe the Irish people would have spoken out against her, thus forcing Murdoch to humiliate her?  Look at all the foolishness the real Angelina Jolie gets away with.  The truth is, Branwen’s pathetic habit of handing out little presents to all the visitors to Murdoch’s house makes her seem like nothing so much as some poor drab girl trying to buy people’s affection.

Something else that strikes me as a total whitewash is the magic cauldron that turns dead soldiers into zombie warriors.  I’m thinking the conversation went like this:

Gullible sergeant: “Hey, you guys, what are doing cooking people in that cauldron?”

Starving foot soldier: “Oh . . . um . . . er . . . it’s a magic cauldron!  Yeah, that’s it, it’s a magic cauldron that brings dead soldiers back to life so they can fight some more.”

Gullible sergeant:  “Oh, well then, in that case . . . Keep up the good work, lads!”

But even though Bran’s head is the star of the show and appears to be missing, I am happy to report that, according to Sacred-texts, Branwen, or at least some pieces of her, might have been found in the year 1813 by a farmer tilling the land “on the banks of the Alaw, a river in the Isle of Anglesea.”  There, in a jar hidden in a four-sided tomb, he found “ashes and half-calcined fragments of bone.”  The Mabinogion tells us that after Branwen died of a broken heart, she was buried in a four-sided grave on the banks of the Alaw.  Maybe this isn’t as strange and amazing as a giant magical talking head.  But it is at least real.  There is no reason to doubt that Branwen, for all her New Agey status as Celtic goddess of love, was in fact a real woman who lived and died and was buried as told in the Mabinogion.

Cadmus and Harmonia

Robert Frost

I was reading a volume of Robert Frost’s letters in the pre-Google days and noted that Frost said “Cadmus and Harmonia” was his favorite long poem by Matthew Arnold. The title “Cadmus and Harmonia” meant nothing to me, which was puzzling because I thought I knew all of Arnold’s poetry.

The selection of Arnold’s poetry and prose in the Oxford Authors series (published twenty-five years or so ago and now apparently out of print) didn’t have “Cadmus and Harmonia” in either the table of contents or index, but it doesn’t purport to be complete. I have two collections of Arnold’s poetry that call themselves “complete,” both from the late 19th century shortly after Arnold’s death, one by Oxford and one by Macmillan. The Macmillan volume didn’t have anything called “Cadmus and Harmonia,” but the old Oxford edition did: both the table of contents and the title index showed “Cadmus and Harmonia” as starting on page 112. But on turning to that page, I found myself in the middle of “Empedocles on Etna,” near the end of the first act.

I must’ve rechecked the table of contents and index of the Oxford volume three or four times, in growing disbelief. I was starting to feel like a character in a Borges story. Finally, as a last resort, I pulled down Stedman‘s Victorian Anthology and the 1879 Golden Treasury selection of Arnold’s poems. The Stedman had nothing; but there, in the little Golden Treasury selection, was my poem. It was the passage from the first act of “Empedocles on Etna.”

All I could think was that Palgrave excerpted the passage from the verse drama (I learned later than the selection had been made by Arnold himself), which was much too long to include in full in the Golden Treasury edition, and published it as a standalone poem in the collection, with or without Arnold’s permission, and that that is where Robert Frost saw it. It probably became a Victorian sentimental favorite, and so earned the oblique reference in the Oxford edition. A hundred years ago, that reference wouldn’t've puzzled anyone.

The poem is about a man and a women who saw their children all killed, and who were turned into snakes by the gods, in an act of mercy, and sent to a beautiful hillside overlooking the ocean, where they lived ever after in blissful reptilian ignorance. Frost’s reference to it was in a letter written around the time his daughter Marjorie died of puerperal fever after giving birth to her only child. The tragedy as much as killed Frost’s wife, and sent Frost into a deep depression. Just a few years later, Marjorie might’ve been saved with antibiotics.

I grow old, I grow old. On rereading the Oxford Authors edition I found a note to the “Empedocles on Etna” passage remarking that it was published separately by Arnold himself as “Cadmus and Harmonia” as early as 1852. Furthermore, Frost didn’t say it was his “favorite long poem by Matthew Arnold,” but his favorite poem, period, “long before I knew what it would mean to us.” I’ve got to stop quoting stuff from memory. Worked ten years ago, doesn’t work now.

Matthew Arnold

Mismatched socks and original research

Bad Usage Dog

It really isn’t that complicated. Back in the 1940′s, people said “I couldn’t care less”:

“Your socks don’t match.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

It was pronounced with a slight emphasis on “couldn’t” and everybody knew what it meant: you cared so little about your socks not matching that it was literally impossible to care any less.  I couldn’t care less. The cup of caring was empty.

The trouble started around 1950, when the ironic variant “as if I could care less” came into vogue.  When using this irritating little locution, you might say, “Margaret told me my socks didn’t match, as if I could care less.”  This time, the words “care” and “less” got the emphasis: As if I could care less. Harmless enough, you say: the cup was still empty, we still get it.

But then, some time in the 1950′s, as the phrase made its inexorable way (either downhill or uphill depending on your politics) from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, people started substituting “like” for “as if.” “As if I could care less” became “like I could care less.”  It was a very short step, less than a decade in my estimation, to that inevitable day when some poor flower-child forgot the meaning of the word “like,” if she ever knew it, and started using “like” as a kind of modish oral punctuation mark: “Like, I could care less.”  And finally, the word “like” was dropped, and “I could care less” was born.  The transition from “I couldn’t care less” to “I could care less” was complete, and people who love to complain about other people’s use of the language had something new and infuriating to complain about.

And complain they did.  Google “I could care less” if you want to read some of it.  World Wide Words gives a sampling, along with a fanciful theory about the origin of  ”I could care less.” The cup apparently isn’t empty after all. We no longer get it.

Now, you can talk any way you like.  Honestly. As long as we understand each other, I promise I won’t judge you, and I hope you won’t judge me.  I should be the last person to complain about anyone else’s use of the language. My Michigan wife and kids have endless fun with my many peculiar New Englandisms – saying “liberry” for library, “going down cellar” for going down to our beautifully finished basement (and similarly “up attic”), and other comical usages and pronunciations, some of which I am sorry to say I have passed down to my kids.  No, the fact is I was getting fed up, not with “I could care less,” which after all is completely harmless in a charmingly illogical way, but with the pretentious griping and silly folk-etymologizing by the correcter-than-thou crowd.

So, a few years ago I added a definitive article on the subject to Wikipedia, including this helpful little timeline of the evolution of the phrase as I earwitnessed it actually happening:

1950 – She told me my socks didn’t match.  I couldn’t care less.
1955 – She told me my socks didn’t match, as if I could care less.
1960 – She told me my socks didn’t match, like I could care less.
1965 – She told me my socks didn’t match.  Like, I could care less.
1970 – She told me my socks didn’t match.  I could care less.

I think I also pointed out that the “as if” that became detached from “I could care less” half a century ago has returned recently as a standalone expression:

“Your socks don’t match.”

“As if!”

You’d think that would’ve cleared everything up, right? But no – after a few days of arguing back and forth, the Wikipedians in their wisdom deleted my article! See, you’re supposed to cite other people’s opinions when you enter articles in Wikipedia. Entering an account of something you heard with your own ears, as it was happening, is forbidden.  You may add knowledge to Wikipedia, as long as it isn’t yours.

I accept Wikipedia’s rules.  I’m sure they’re there for a reason.  I respect them, even. I am perfectly willing, and not even a tiny bit bitter, to be the humble source material for others.  So here it is: something for somebody else to cite in a Wikipedia article. Go nuts, guys. Me, I couldn’t care less. Or I could care less. As if. Whatever.