Language - Part 2 - Art

In a recent essay about John Sell Cottman, Sanford Schwartz commented on the ubiquity of drawing masters in upper echelon homes in the early nineteenth century. Rather a commonplace, except he went on to suggest it was a tool for amateur historians and naturalists to record their explorations of the English countryside which were then an activity of the most advanced intellectuals.

When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.

The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.

Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.

Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.

Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.

Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.

I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.

I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.

Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.

This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.

I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.

The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.

I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.

The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.

I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.

The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.

My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.

I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.

With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.

The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.

Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.

Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.

Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.

Conspiracy - Part 4 - Cory Lidle

The recent crash of Cory Lidle’s airplane into a New York apartment building illustrates the dynamics and limitations of modern news.

By chance, I heard the first rumor like I did the one on September 11, from a woman who was sent a flutter by all the possibilities that drifted into her head. Last time, the Cassandra greeted anyone who came into the work area, with the latest news. This time, the magpie found a media outlet on her computer to listen to, at full volume, so we couldn’t miss a word of it or her commentary.

The thing that’s striking is how few people remain calm in the face of the unknown. From the beginning it was a small plane or helicopter and a small, unimportant apartment building. Common sense should have said it was not a terrorist attack.

But, of course, reporters had to ask the question. Denials by government officials sounded irrelevant since the known facts were still one plane, one small fire. No second plane, no architectural catastrophe, no gluts of dead or injured bodies, no missing persons with hysterical relatives calling the media for names. It didn’t really matter if they were informed or knee-jerk denials, there was nothing to deny and they sounded silly.

By the end of the day, editors looked lazy for retaining those paragraphs in every lengthening stories that
compounded knowledge rather than reporting it.

Police barriers kept journalists from the scene, so there were few to interview. Most were as unreliable as witnesses usually are. Some were minor celebrities who volunteered their names with information, a photographer, a novelist. Since they lived in the building, they inadvertently added contextual background, by placing the building in New York’s social structure as not one significant enough to attract the attention of a strategic bomber. The Trump Tower would have aroused my office mate.

When the fire was extinguished with no more crashes, the web-available stations reverted to their regular programming and the self-important woman returned to her work.

The other person in the office, the man who flies a small plane, and I continued to talk desultorily. I suspect that every crash awakens anxiety for him, the way serious accidents resonate with amateur race car drivers. The woman was only interested in anything about John Kennedy Junior’s death.

His interest increased when the name of the plane owner, Cory Lidle, emerged. None of us were big enough sports fans to know who he was or who are still playing in the off-season games.

At that time there was little information except Lidle either didn’t have a license yet or had just earned it. The danger of inexperience was important to my co-worker. We didn’t yet know the flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was only 26 years old, not the grizzled, war tested ace of movies who would have taken the controls and saved the day.

After work I went to the local wellness center, with its single, low volume television screen that the caretaker jocks had set to ESPN. The story had morphed into a human interest sports report with wannabe celebrities competing to inflate their importance by their near association with the slightly more famous. I heard about the normal guy who happens to play ball, the teammate who supported charities. The career cut short, the child who would never know a father. But no games were cancelled; there was only the obligatory moment of opening silence.

I heard nothing about why an athlete could cause an accident. Any possibility that drugs reduce responses will disappear into a hobbyhorse for someone, whose very predictable comments will render then worthless. Likewise, any penchant for gambling.

Certainly, nothing was said about how the arrogance of success might make a 34-year-old panic or refuse to turn over control to a flight instructor, or about the possible infatuation of a trainer awed by a client who babbled athletic skills could be transferred. No one mentioned the failures of Michael Jordan and Walter Payton when they tried baseball and auto racing.

Any deeper stories about the nature of sports were already gone. By the next morning, the official spokesman who confirmed Lidle’s death owned his ball club, not the fire department or federal government.

Only a few continued to discuss Lidle’s actual career, from the time he got his chance as a scab in the 1994-1995 player’s strike to the seven games he played for the Yankees who did not win the pennant. Some grumblings came out that he condemned his fellow players for not having his winning spirit and some complaints from the criticized that he never finished a game, left it to others to salvage his messes. All the usual drama of any small group of disparate people thrown together by chance job skills.

Of course, there were no comedic speculations about what kind of terror attack a ball player would engineer. Now, if they were still competing against another New York team, one could wonder whose apartment was hit, but that’s as far as that story could go. They weren’t in the series, and the attack wasn’t in Detroit.

No one tried to visualize a terrorist attack with small planes, each filled with explosives, flying a convoy up the Hudson, peeling off to take out individual buildings. We know the military responded, that jets from Selfridge were heard over Mount Clemens, no doubt headed for Dearborn. Again, visualize the damage if they attacked that hypothetical convoy of explosives, assuming they could get down to their level.

My office mate speculated on an angry man who’d lost his apartment in a divorce settlement who was going to get even, and didn’t care who got hurt. One could go farther, and postulate the man was so angry, he got the wrong building or so incompetent he couldn’t aim the aircraft and got the wrong apartment.

Comedy is possible, but the underlying anxieties run so deep, public humor is not permitted. The lone pilot is as dangerous as the bicyclists from Palestine, and not to be imagined. Neither is an exploration possible of the sociopath’s opposite, the normal individual grown desperate by circumstances. Only one person slipped the slightest hint about despair after defeat when he denied any suggestion Lidle committed suicide.

We’re left where we were in 2001. We have poor, vain local reporters, inexperienced editorial staffs, conventional bureaucrats, decently trained professionals and no political leaders until a story has developed. George Bush made no comment that afternoon that betrayed any interest in the possibility that gripped television watchers in the first minutes or any sympathy later. His stories stood: we wouldn’t invade North Korea and the acts of Mark Foley were reprehensible.

One knows Clinton’s political instincts would have driven him to make some comment that he had followed the story and shared the concerns of his fellow Americans. He would have learned who lived in the burned apartments and made some phone calls. Even Nixon had better instincts: he would have called the ball club, found Lidle’s most famous, closest teammate to commiserate with.

The story that didn’t develop is the canonical one about how we confront the world, our fears of the uncontrollable when comedy and despair are not permitted. Surprisingly, there were no calls by the on-line media to popular psychologists or therapists who would address these for us.

This time the underlying story that attracts the day late politicians who tap the latent fear of conspiracies and blame other jurisdictions is how is it possible small planes can get so near buildings in New York City. The answer’s simple: men with money buy planes, and, like Lidle, want to go sightseeing and there’s no reason, except paranoia, why they shouldn’t. Stopping all freedom of movement is probably as futile as preventing players like Lidle from playing badminton or getting pilot’s licenses.

The story that continues is the central mystery, what happened. There is still no reason people won’t trust findings of the NTSB. So far, the interests of those who would gut investigations or pervert them with coverups have been stymied by fear of lawsuits by corporations that own, maintain, manufacture or insure planes that crash. It’s just that the answers aren’t immediately obvious, and it takes time to reconstruct what happened. Political influence will play in how quickly the problem is solved. How many resources are available before the next crash could reveal the hidden costs of slashed budgets, lower taxes and deficits, but won’t.

No one yet knows who was at the controls, and some suggest we may never know. That question is the one most susceptible to corruption, since the name of the pilot will be important to the estates of two widows and myriad insurance companies. Friends of both were soon saying neither man would have been showing off, neither was a hot shot, quickly implying it was the plane or conditions that were at fault. Cirrus soon countered Lidle had never taken any of their training and more ominous adjectives appeared for the weather.

In the meantime, people like the man I work with are the ones to listen to. They are the ones who will continue to ponder the pragmatic and philosophical issues of flight.

North South - Part 1 - Traffic

Sitting at a traffic light is one of those times I can’t do much except stare ahead, so I let my mind wander. Instead of following the byways of Walter Mitty, I find myself pondering the ways traffic reflects the values of cities who install traffic lights.

The one thing all planners do is try to slow drivers to prevent accidents. Beyond that, they have little in common.
In Detroit in the early 1980s, legend held that lights were set so a driver, who went the correct speed, would never stop for a second light. Automobiles are the local economy, and no one wants driving to be a painful experience. The ideal speed for each town was passed on as covertly as the name of the local bootlegger in prohibition..

New Jersey in the mid-1970s was divided between traffic circles in the north and jug handles in the south. Both were attempts to engineer the roads themselves to control traffic flow. Circles were the more challenging. You entered on the edge, and by centripetal force ended in the center before trying to edge out to make an exit. If you failed, you simply went around again. It was all a bit of a carnival ride, an exercise in vertigo that made my favorite circle the one that emptied into a road with an overpass for horses leaving their barns for a racetrack.

In Georgetown in the mid-1970s, drivers simply ignored lights. Whenever traffic moved, people would charge into intersections, even though they knew they wouldn’t clear when the light changed. Gridlock was not just deliberate; it manifested that every single person was too important to yield or compromise for the greater good.
Abilene, Texas, came close to that attitude in the middle 1980s. Someone had installed a traffic circle, but someone else erected stop signs at two places. If you came from the south, as I did, you had to stop every few feet. If you came from the wealthy neighborhood, you never stopped, never had to yield, and certainly never experienced vertigo. The democratic forces of the one were overruled by the power elite of privilege. I admit, I used to fantasize dropping those drivers into northern Jersey.

In Dallas in the early 1990s, I used to imagine the drivers suddenly transported onto Telegraph Road or a Detroit expressway. They had no concept of fast lines to the left, slow lanes to the right. The three lane road north towards Plano were always stopped as slow cars filled each lane. Since the only shopping mall was miles up that road, I turned to mail order catalogs. E-commerce hadn’t developed yet, but it was an idea waiting to be born.

If the patterns in Detroit and New Jersey demonstrated efficiency which promotes egalitarianism and the Texas roads showed the elitism of the old south, the place I live now exemplifies traffic in a world where government either does not exist, or is directed by people who think it a costly luxury.

The place I live has never risen above family ties to organized government. I go through four lights to get to the post office. They not only are not consistent among themselves, they are not consistent to themselves. Sometimes, the left turn arrow is at the beginning of the cycle, sometimes at the end; sometimes both directions get the arrow, sometimes only one. When only one gets it, sometimes only turning traffic is allowed, other times through traffic is permitted. Then, since they are supposedly on demand, sometimes no arrow appears for several cycles.

The most accidents I see continue to be at the lights that were placed where there were the most accidents. People act on the patterns they expect, but haven’t learned to cope with no pattern. The only sure thing is someone will run the red light.

In the town where I work, it’s worse. The city planners seem to think the smooth flow of traffic is as dangerous as recreational sex. Folklore says the merchants don’t want traffic to move where the chains are building, and think making traffic bad will encourage people to continue to use them. I learned early to either do my essential shopping early Sunday morning, or get through the place as quickly as possible early Saturday to shop in the next city.

Even so, I often get stopped at every single light early Sunday morning, and marvel that people still have accidents at that hour. It got worse when they were widening the road near the area where the big boxes were building. The cops ran speed traps, ticketing anyone going more than ten miles through a construction zone when no men were working, no equipment was stored and the pylons had been moved.

I used to visit some of the stores in that area to see what they had; I haven’t been back since the road construction, except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m usually in such a foul mood by the time I get through the traffic, that I grab what I need and get out as quickly as possible, irritated even more by long check-out lines.

When one drives through cities on the interstate the landscapes look like the cities have been homogenized by government engineers. The persisting variations in surface roads may be as surprising as the discovery that red and blue states signify more than political preference. The roots of the differences are probably the same.

Back during the age of Andrew Jackson, politicians argued the function of government in encouraging economic growth. Northerners promoted internal improvements like turnpikes and canals, while southerners argued limited government. When automobiles appeared, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio built turnpikes; Detroit started it expressways. Folklore says North Carolina developed speed traps to fleece northerners headed for Florida and to harass and intimidate Negroes.

Enabling legislation for interstates depended a great deal on Eisenhower arguing the military necessity of moving materiel quickly. The first exit opened near by Michigan hometown in 1959 just three years after the act was passed. It took southern cities choked by traffic years to take advantage of available money.

Where I live, there still are no good roads. When I told a woman I work with that one deep ravine on a county road I cross to get to my house has no shoulder or guard rail, and that the dry river bed beyond my house has no bridge and at least one woman has flipped her car there during a storm, she dismissed the problems. She said, don’t you realize how much bridges cost?