From Word To Word

As you will probably have gathered on your own by now, very few of my interests lie in the realms of science or mathematics, but this was not always the case.

I was very interested in botany and entomology in my early teens.  During the summers that I spent with my father and brothers at the hunting camp on Manitoulin Island, I used to go for long walks, taking specimens of anything that seemed interesting.  I would dissect, pin, arrange, bottle, and collect things.  I would grind them and make infusions out of them and even paint with them as  pigments.  It was amateur science mixed with some strange instinct to herbalism and alchemy, all born out of months spent in the midst of nature without much else by way of distraction.

I was also fascinated by some of the more or less philosophical questions that mathematics raises.  I can remember pondering for hours about what zero was, for example.  If it was not a number, then I wanted to know what it was precisely, and this was my first flirtation with the idea that nothingness is actually necessary to thingness, not just as a placeholder, but in essence.

Unfortunately, as I have recounted to many people over the years, these kinds of interests were soundly beaten out of me by the very people who were supposed to be teaching me about them.  One mathematics teacher, for example, came by my desk one day to ask what exactly I was doing.  I showed her my notebook and explained that I was trying to work out the nature of zero.  She told me to stop fooling around and start doing my homework.  I never did any kind of mathematics again except under compulsion, and I dropped the subject entirely as soon as I was able.

A whole semester of memorizing the parts of a cell, for reasons that were never explained to me in any way, had a similar effect on my interest in biology, and my chemistry teacher the following semester actually told me, only two weeks into the course, that I should drop it because I was most likely to fail it anyway.  I ended up taking Science in Society instead, where we baked bread and wrote poems about scientific principles and mostly did very little of anything.

Since that time, however, I have found any number of books that have appealed to the initial interest that I had in science and mathematics, as rudimentary and uninformed as that interest was.  Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings was the first such book I can remember.  Its story engaged me so thoroughly that it inspired me to read further about dopamine and to learn more about chemistry than I ever did in any class. Its attraction for me was that it situates a particular scientific problem in its narrative context.  The reader is invited to identify with the scientist and with the patients and with the story.  The science becomes meaningful because it is a part of a story, and it was this story and that caused me to go beyond Sack’s book to some of the more technical details of his work.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage my students to read Robert Adams’ The Land and Literature of England if they are interested in the history of English literature.  As opposed to most history textbooks, it employs an interested narrative rather than trying to achieve some kind of disinterested objectivity.  It revels in the anecdotal and the tangential, even when it admits that some of these things are a little suspect historically.  It makes the historical study of literature into a series of tales that could be shared over a few pints, assuming that you are the sort of person who would share literary stories of any kind over a few pints, which I must assuredly am.  I find, invariably, that this narrative of English literature not only entertains and informs the students who bother to read it, but that it also encourages them to go to the historical documents themselves.  The story not only helps them to learn the basics.  It also creates the desire to learn more deeply.

I am writing about all this now because I have just finished another of these books:  Colin Tudge’s The Secret of Trees.  The front cover of my edition proclaims that it is “a love-letter to trees,” but it is more accurately a love story about trees, a story that goes back millions of years and is by no means finished yet.  Tudge does not at all shy away from the technical details of his subject, giving introductions to plant biology, natural history, and botanical classification, among other things, but neither does he dwell on them.  They are simply included as elements of his larger narrative, and this narrative, written as only a lover can write, inspires its readers to love trees too.  More than that, it gave meaning and interest to some of the mere facts of biology that were inflicted on me in highschool.

If some teacher, any teacher, had thought to tell me the story of how mitochondria, and other organelles as well, probably originated as independent simple cells and then invaded other single cells in order to form complex cells, this would have lent a whole lot more meaning to the apparently random shapes that I was labeling in my notes.  If anybody had taken the time to explain how plants use hormones to respond to their environment, I would have had a meaningful point of entry into chemistry.  Yet everyone was so busy trying to transmit information that they failed to make the information meaningful.  Everyone was too busy, too scientific, too objective, and too educated to tell a story.

Yet stories are how we learn, certainly as children, and also, if we are willing to admit it, as adults.  I understand that scientific papers and mathematical proofs serve their purpose, and I am not suggesting that we do without them.  I am only arguing that these things remain mostly meaningless without the context of their stories, and I am also perhaps suggesting that the increasing irrelevance of academia for many people has to do with its inability to remember and recount the stories that give its work meaning. It is these stories that inspire people to learn more, inspire them to love what they learn, and so these stories need to be shared more often.

My friend Lauren Anderson has just posted about finding an old binder full of her juvenile writing, some of which she was brave enough to share, and it made me reflect on how much of this kind of writing there must be, lying in the neglected folders and binders and boxes of even the most accomplished writers.  I found myself wondering what might happen if everyone were brave enough to share this kind of thing with each other, whether this might not encourage people to see writing and writers a little differently, a little more accurately, a little more humanly,  and so I thought that I might also share some of my own highschool writing as a beginning to that end.

Now, my juvenile writing is certainly as horrible as Lauren’s, but it is horrible for all different reasons.  Mine is horrible because I was reading far too much Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Shakespearean romance, and because I desperately wanted to be a Romantic poet, more than anything, which produced poetry of only the most painfully maudlin sort.  Let me give an example from a poem called “The Prayer of Sir Gawain”.  I am particularly fond of the affected archaisms and the constantly inverted, yoda-like, sentence structure:

A solemn vow to Knight of Green
I made before my King and Queen
That, if my stroke did fail to part
His mighty head and stop his heart,
Then when a year and day had gone
Should I my fullest armor don
And ride from Camelot away
To where that Knight doth hold his sway.
So reaching that unwelcome place
There give myself unto his grace.

So now I kneel ‘neath awesome fear
As quick the payment stroke draws near.
My mind does see the chapel there
That fearsome Knight’s most dreadful lair.
And in his hands an axe of steel
which on my neck I soon shall feel.
I see that helmless head before
My eyes, and here his roar
Forever ringing in my ears,
Forever playing on my fears.

Unfortunately, the melodrama of Sir Gawain seems almost restrained in comparison to these lines from the fabulously titled “I Hamlet Unto Thee Ophelia”:

These tears, great sobbing tears, adorn my cheeks.
Why did I stay away so long a time?
For Fate did take within those absent weeks
Your mind, soul, heart and very life betime,
Forever stole from me, your grace sublime.

Now my lament must seek to cleanse my soul
Of grief, deep seeded guilt which rends it now.
My inaction, only mine, made this bell toll
Which now decries dread Death upon your brow,
The icy grip of hell I did allow.

Now Death alone can give me my desire.
This life can never show to me your grace.
Right gladly will I face Death’s fearful fire,
For only in that dark and unknown place
May I look once again upon your face.

I could go on, but you get the point, or I hope you do, because I would be very pleased to have people share their own such youthful secrets with me in turn.

My friends Mike Butler and Lauren Anderson were over yesterday afternoon, and in the course of the conversation Lauren mentioned that she had always wanted do run a used bookstore.  She knows, of course, that there is little money in this, especially since she would refuse to stock the kind of trash fiction that is the primary sustenance of these stores.  I mentioned to her that I have long had a similarly inefficient business model in mind, one where I would only sell things that interest me particularly.

As I was saying this, it occurred to me that what Lauren and I really want to do is to reverse the standard business model by taking literally the idea of going into business for ourselves.  Most businesses, of course, are not in business for themselves.  They are in business for their customers, at least to the extent that they need to provide what their customers want in order to make any money.  They are not in business for themselves.  They are in business for other people in order to make money for themselves.  If they could afford really to be in business for themselves, they would likely have very different businesses than they do.

By way of example, here is what my business model would be:

I would sell books and films and music, whether new or used, and I would loan these things also, maybe for a minimal fee.  I would sell coffee and tea and preserves and cheese.  I would sell beer and wine and scotch and pipe tobacco.  I would sell seeds.  I would also have film screenings and canning bees and scotch tastings and book readings.  Some nights I would also be a restaurant, but only now and again, when I felt like it, and the menu would only be what I wanted to cook that evening.  My hours would be irregular in the extreme, but customers could always come by the house and ask for the store to be opened if they needed something in an emergency.  There would be comfortable chairs and a bar, but  there would be no televisions or wireless internet.

I would not be in the business of supplying either necessities or desires.  I would not be in the business of enabling either amusement or labour.  I would not be in a business where the customer was always or even often right.  I would not be in the business of efficieny or profit.  I would be in the business of sharing the things that I love.  I would be in business for myself.

Dave Humphrey has recently tagged me with what is essentially a chain letter for blogs, the sort of thing that I usually ignore outright.  Since it comes from Dave, however, I will only ignore it partially.  I decline to list the rules of the game, and I decline to tag others in turn, but I will condescend to list seven things that people may find interesting about me.  Of course, you need not be interested unless you want to be.

1.  I am one of nine children: I have four birth brothers, three step-brothers through my father’s second marriage, and a step-sister through my mother’s second marriage.  Though I enjoy them all, I count myself fortunate that we did not all live in the same house at the same time.

2.  I have never in my life paid for television service, whether cable, satellite, or anything else.  This is a point of chagrin for telemarketers, who routinely disbelieve that this can be true, demanding to know why I would hide the identity of my provider.

3.  At one point, sometime about Grade 10, I was seriously considering being an accountant, until my accounting teacher drew me aside and told me that I might be better suited for something else, anything else, anything at all.

4.  As a result of practising for my highschool’s production of The Hobbit, I was, for a short period of my life, able to drop from standing to the jazz splits.  I discovered, rather painfully, that I was no longer able to perform this feat midway through the dance at my brother’s wedding.

5.  My wedding dress cost more than my wife’s.  The cloth for my hand-stitched kilt and plaid was imported from Scotland, which made it quite expensive, though I justify the cost on the grounds I that have since been able to wear my dress on more occasions than she has been able to wear hers.

6.  While working as a Youth Leader at a local church, the kids that I was supposed to be supervising lit a bonfire in the parking lot.  The blaze was so large that it attracted attention from drivers on the highway who called the local authorities.  A fire engine and two police cars were mobilized to the scene, and some of my charges were taken into custody as they were riding home on their bikes.

7.  During university, I worked as a security guard for the La Senza Lingerie retail chain.  I was told that I was the first male ever to work on the retail floor for the company.  Many of my friends claim that I will never be able to surpass this achievement.