This happens every once in a while: I become re-enthralled with Guy Davenport’s essays.
This week I picked up The Hunter Gracchus, which I started reading years ago at the Newberry Library, in the silent and cold reserve room of the second floor. I had previously read all of Geography of the Imagination that way. But then we moved.
And W. was kind enough to buy me my own copy, for a birthday.
Last night I read the second essay, “On Reading.” It nearly knocked me out the first time I read it, years ago. It did it again last night. Really, if your library has a copy of this book, seek it out and read “On Reading.” Hell, go through interlibrary loan if you have to.
When I returned the biography of Leonardo, the generous Mrs. McNinch lent me Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, also published in 1938 and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. This was harder going, with phrases like “minister plenipotentiary,” which I would mutter secretly to myself. It is a truism that reading educates. What it does most powerfully is introduce the world outside us, negating the obstructions of time and place. When, much later, I ran across the word opsimathy in Walter Pater, I could appreciate the tragic implications of late learning. All experience is synergetic: Bucky Fuller should have written, and probably did, about the phenomenon of Synergetic Surprise. We cannot guess what potential lies in wait for the imagination through momentum alone. The earlier Leonardo and Franklin enter one’s mind, the greater the possibility of their bonding and interacting with ongoing experience and information.
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book learning
Kevin Drum:
As longtime readers know, I’m generally a scourge of cranky elders who spend a lot of time kvetching about how ill educated kids are today compared to the golden age they used to live in. Spare me. But that doesn’t mean the opposite is true either. Kids who grow up on the internet may be great at looking up odd bits of information quickly, but my experience is that they often suck at figuring out what that information means and what conclusions it’s reasonable to draw from it. That’s because they don’t know the context. They don’t know the rest of the story. And that’s because they don’t read enough books. I’d love to be wrong about this. But I’m not. If you want to understand the world, not just collect endless factlets, you still need to read books. If you do, the internet makes you smarter. If you don’t, it makes you dumber.
Reading about Leonardo da Vinci lately has made me feel more and more the urgency of learning. I think the above is very true—the Internet is limited. I’m also interested in how we learn from others in person—how to get past the funny-story part of any given conversation into learning about the interesting things other people are learning/researching/thinking. This also has to do with the bit I quoted from Davenport’s “On Reading” the other day, about how the things we know interact in our brains, producing some lovely new combinations.
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Galvani enchanted the hearts and legs of dead frogs by running an electrical current through their muscles. That’s the word Galvani used: enchantment, incantesimo. Or, as we might say in English, he besonged it, he magicked it with a spell, a charm. Shaped words perhaps began as magic spells, charms. Lovely sounds is what cearm means in Old English, and by Chaucer’s time we were saying bird charm for birdsong, and were saying as well that church bells were charming the hour. That literacy was kin to casting spells with words can be seen in the fact that glamor, the power of beauty to enchant, is grammar misheard and mispronounced. Rhymes that bite and accuse—satire—were thought in ancient Rome to be so disruptive of social order that laws proscribed them.
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Randolph Bourne’s idea, that critical discernment is in knowing why we like what we like, is intelligent and wise. He was disturbed that education in art is geared to an imposed canon. Our problem now is that nobody knows anything to begin with. A love of knowledge is gone, and with it curiosity and a critical eye. We have theory instead of perception, contentiousness instead of discussion, dogma instead of inquiry.
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“LILY, Rossini contralto, dove or egret, monarch butterfly, spinning, virginity, Raphael, white, longing, anarchy, girlhood of the Virgin, Joan of Arc.”
(from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears by Guy Davenport)
Illustration from A monograph of the genus Lilium by Henry John Elwes, illustrated by W.H. Fitch. Via the Missouri Botanical Garden Library website.
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“SUNFLOWER, trumpet, lion, wasp, the smithy, moral grandeur, Vincent, yellow, male orgasm after fugal intensity, monarchy, Sparta, Alexander.” (from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears by Guy Davenport)
Illustration from Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen mit kurz erläuterndem Texte : Atlas zur Pharmacopoea germanica by Franz Eugen Köhler. Via the Missouri Botanical Garden Library website.
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“PRIVET, harpsichord, hen, midge, needlework, patient diligence, Corot, pale green, sentimental solicitude, a good aunt, the early XVIIIth Century, Marianne North.”
(from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears by Guy Davenport)
Illustration from Traité des arbrisseaux et des arbustes cultivés en France et en pleine by Jean Henri Jaume Saint-Hilaire. Via the Missouri Botanical Garden Library website.
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“DAISY, a country jig, bee, carpentry, girlish titillation, Denis, golden brown, l’embrassement de deux jeunes filles, the management of a dairy, Huizinga’s XIVth Century, Chaucer.”
(from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears by Guy Davenport)
Illustration from Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen mit kurz erläuterndem Texte : Atlas zur Pharmacopoea germanica by Franz Eugen Köhler. Via the Missouri Botanical Garden Library website.
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“TULIP, drum, camel, ladybug, glass-blowing, genial arrogance, Rubens, purple, eroticism as gourmandise, zamindary, the Caliphate of the Umayyads, Haroun al-Raschid.”
(from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears by Guy Davenport)
Illustration from Les liliacées by P.J. Redouté. Via the Missouri Botanical Garden Library website.
“ZINNIA, Scott Joplin, Szechuan blue-combed copper-tailed bantam cock, Viceroy butterfly, arc welding, passionate exuberance, Matisse, pepper red, wild Gypsy humping behind the hawthorn in an odor of mint and sweat, feudalism, the Sicilian Vespers, Maria Callas.”
(from “Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek” in Apple and Pears by Guy Davenport)
Illustration from Icones plantarum rariorum by Nicolao Josepho Jacquin, illustrated by Joseph Hofbaue. Via the Missouri Botanical Garden Library website.
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