Category Archives: Genesis

Naming Things

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Birdwatching, Calendar, Genesis, Meteorology, Seasons, Weather

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One Sunday morning a while back I walked out early and experienced a pretty sunrise. As I stood watching I was aware of birdsong swelling around me. Our property is a large area of cleared land surrounded on most sides by woods, and it felt like being in the midst of a symphony of song. But my mind, like so many people, quickly descends to the trivial, and within moments I was pestered by an old problem of mine.

I can’t name birds by their song. I mean, crows and owls, sure, and cardinals, I think, and who doesn’t recognize the screech of a hawk? But of all the dozens of sparrows, nuthatches, chickadees, woodpeckers, robins and starlings that inhabit these woods and fields, I can identify none of them by their song. I need to look online and find a guide to birdsong, or get a recording for in my car and listen to it while I commute, committing each song to memory. That would impress family and friends, wouldn’t it? ‘Ah, there’s the black-capped chickadee,’ I would say, casting a knowing glance to the west . . .

I read a birdwatching guide years ago, and one piece of advice stood out more than any other. When you spot a bird you do not know, it said, linger on the bird. Look at it as long as the bird stays still for you, and memorize things about it. What color are its feathers? Are they uniform, or are there different colors on the breast, the head, the tail or the tips of the wings? Is its beak straight or curved? Only after observing the bird for a good while, open the book and see if you can find it. Not only is this the best way to identify the bird, but it makes the experience of viewing the bird that much richer. What you are doing is watching birds, not naming birds. Yes, you will eventually want to discover the names of the birds you view, but not to the detriment of enjoying their beauty.

Naming things is a human prejudice. We do not know something until we have named it. In Genesis, God has no sooner created all the animals than he makes Adam sit down and name them. Why this naming of the animals is so crucial at this early point in creation is mystifying, let alone why God has Adam do it: unless we acknowledge that scripture is written by humans, and this passage in the Bible is us rationalizing not only our practice, but our God-given right to name all the things in nature.

As I have researched the seasons in human life, I have found people from many disciplines–geography, meteorology, philosophy, history–who insist that the seasons as we understand them don’t really exist. Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese-American geographer, said it well in his excellent (though difficult) book Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values: ‘In the middle latitudes temperature changes continuously in the course of a year but it is customary for people to divide it into four or five seasons, often with festivities marking the passage from one to the other.’

In other words, there are seasons largely because we see them that way, we name them, and thereby define them. In centuries past, we prayed and sacrificed to deities whose deaths and resurrections or sojourns in the Underworld governed the seasons. In modern times, when a season does not arrive on the date expected, we pretty much just complain about it. Which is odd, given the fact that there are different theories about what constitutes a season. To meteorologists, seasons begin on the first day of the first month in which that season’s temperature pattern predominates: thus March 1 to May 31 is spring. But to most of us, the seasons begin on the solstices and equinoxes. Neither of these schemes take into account the fluctuating weather we get around the beginning of each season. March can come in like a lion or a lamb. It’s often not until the middle of any season when we get that season and no other. But it does not stop us from slapping definitive names on them.

Yi-Fu Tuan calls it segmenting reality, dividing it into nameable portions that we can digest and understand bit by bit. A mountain sloping into a valley and thence out into a plain is also a continuum, unbroken in its run, but we have these different names for each part of it. Japanese people have a system of twenty-four sekki, or climatic segments of the calendar year: February 19 begins Rain Water, June 6 Grain in Ear, and September 7 White Dew. This is an ancient system, adopted from China, and one wonders how rarely climatic reality harmonizes with these lovely names.

Everything is an admixture of experience and intellectual exercise which creates an irony and a tension. I want to experience nature and the seasons; at the same time, running through my mind are these naming conventions that only detract from my pure experience. I am aware of this, but will likely not change. I still wish I could name each player in the symphony of birdsong.

‘Season’

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Etymology, Genesis, History, Meteorology, Seasons, Spring, Weather, Winter

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Yesterday was sunny and relatively mild–okay, 35° Fahrenheit, which is tolerable, given the cold we’ve seen all winter. Today we have snow, sleet and ice. It’s the kind of precipitation that could be a spring rain, except the temperature is too cold. It has been like this for weeks now, this painful birthing of spring, going on in a kind of cycle within a cycle. A few days of warmth and sunshine, birds singing, light breeze in the trees, and then BAM!–back to winter. Like an engine that hasn’t been used for too long and needs to clear the gunk out before it can get going, coughing, sputtering, revving up and dying again. One tires of writing about it, and surely people tire of reading about it. So one thinks of something different to write about, doesn’t one?

For years, as I have worked on The Varied God, I have made notes for a subject I’d like to address in the book, namely the exact origin of the word ‘season.’ Yes, I am an English major, and have a fascination with words and word origins. You may recall that my interest in the seasons began with my curiosity over the whole ‘fall’ or ‘autumn’ question, and why autumn is the only season that gets two names. As with most words in English, there are some interesting things about the word ‘season.’

It comes to English from the Old French word saison or seison, where it meant ‘a sowing,’ or ‘a planting.’ That word in turn descended from the Latin word sationem, which had a similar meaning, ‘time of sowing, seeding time.’ This time could be spring or autumn, depending on when grain crops are sown in various areas. The sense of a season being ‘seeding time’ is embedded in our language in other places.

One of the few verses of the Bible to speak of seasons comes just after Noah has found dry land. God promises that, ‘While the Earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ (Genesis, 8:22) In this formulation it would seem that ‘seedtime and harvest’ are synonyms for spring and autumn, except for recalling that ‘seedtime’ may be a more general reference to seasons, and that seedtime and harvest can both come more than once a year. The areas of Mesopotamia and the Levant where flood myths such as the story of Noah first arose have never been characterized by a distinctly four-season climatic regime.

Further, this quote comes from my King James Bible, which first edified English Protestants in the early years of the 17th century. There is evidence that at that time, the word ‘season’ was not commonly used to mean specific times of the year, and that a word such as ‘seedtime’ may have had the more exact meaning. The Bible’s most famous seasonally-based verses, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (To everything there is a season . . .), which I have discussed at length here, use the word ‘season’ to mean units of time, not climatic designations.

One of the more important documents in American history is William Bradford’s The History of Plimoth Colony. Bradford, leader of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, wrote this meticulous journal of their expedition as it was happening, from 1620 onwards. In Chapter IX of his book, during the sea voyage here, he writes, ‘After they had injoyed faire weather and winds for a season . . .’ There are two things to note about this. One is that he uses the word ‘season’ to mean a period of time, not ‘spring,’ or ‘winter.’ The other is that his language is generally archaic. With this in mind, scholars have long issued new editions of Bradford’s History, with the language updated. Here is the same quote from a 1948 ‘translation’: ‘After they had enjoyed fair winds and weather for some time . . .’

But as the Enlightenment progressed, certain things became more scientific. In 1780 Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria convened a group of meteorologists he charged with formalizing how weather and climate were studied. They decided that the meteorological seasons would be defined by temperature and designated as three-month periods beginning on the first day of the first month in which that season’s temperature pattern prevailed. Spring would run from March 1 to May 31, summer from June 1 to August 31. This group only met until 1795, but meteorologists still recognize these seasons, even though the run of mankind still designates the seasons by their more ancient, celestial markers of solstices and equinoxes. It seems that seasons defined by this more rigorous standard needed a term reserved just for them. While the word ‘season’ is still used occasionally to mean some unit of time other than a meteorological season, we now understand these to be exceptions.

The homonym ‘season,’ meaning to add savory ingredients to food, actually originates in the same Latin root, sationem, or a time of seeding. As it sat in Old French for several centuries, developing its various shades of meaning having to do with the passage of the natural year, the word took on an additional meaning of ‘to ripen,’ which of course includes adding flavor, and saison grew into the general term for adding flavor.

One more interesting note: the most famous musical work about the seasons, Antonio Vivaldi’s quartet of violin concerti known as The Four Seasons, is called, in Italian, Le Quattro Stagione. The term stagione, though it too means seasons, does not come from the same Latin root, but from the word meaning ‘stations,’ or divisions. It is a curiosity of language development that Italian, the language closest to Latin, would have found a different word to cover this phenomenon, while many European languages use descendants of sationem.

The freezing rain is falling as I wind up this essay. I am anxious for the engine to rev up at last and take us away from this season, to pull out of this station where we’ve been stuck for way too long now. Maybe by the next time I write I’ll have blissful things to say about spring. One hopes, doesn’t one?

 

 

Moving

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Adam and EVe, Agriculture, Autumn, Change, Fall, Farming, Genesis, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

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My family and I are purchasing a property in the country: a ranch house with a barn surrounded by eighteen acres. Much of the acreage is cleared and flat, and will in time be put to use for horse pasture and equestrian arena, but much of it is still wooded. The previous owner was a massage therapist, a woman whose husband, whom we met one afternoon, described her practices as ‘holyistic.’ ‘She has drum circles out there,’ he said, indicating the grassy fields before us; then his face took on a slightly shy aspect and he added, ‘I join in sometimes.’ Their house is full of drums of various sizes and other paraphernalia of Native American spirituality; the bookshelves are heaped with volumes on Buddhist, Taoist and New Age thinking. There are colorful ribbons hung from branches in trees surrounding the yard. These, we learned, are all prayers of some sort. The county where this home is located is a very ‘red’ area. Driving the winding road to the house, we pass yards with signs that say things like Prayer–America’s Only Hope and God Is Pro-Life. There are signs in support of political candidates known to be not only conservative, but decidedly Evangelical. So I wonder how this woman’s New Age/Native American/Buddhist practices sit with her neighbors. But of course any neighbors reside at some distance.

We come from the suburbs. We have lived in our typical brick-fronted, vinyl-sided, two-story house since 2001; prior to that we lived in a smaller home in St. Louis City. I always liked living in the city, which I found to be diverse and vibrant and alive. I dislike the suburbs for the usual, clichéd reasons: but the thing that bothers me the most is that in the suburbs, you cannot walk to anything. In the city we could walk to the grocery store, the drug store, several restaurants, the video store (yes, this was a while ago), and even to our polling place on election day. Out here in the suburbs, one has to get in the car and drive several miles to acquire any supply or commodity. Taking a walk is a matter of pacing the pavement from one cul-de-sac to another, past a succession of homes which are remarkably like your own, the only significant difference–and thus usually the only subject of conversation–being who takes better care of their patch of grass. Walking in a suburban subdivision feels distinctly like being an inmate let out of his cell for an hour’s exercise.

You can’t walk to much of anything out here in the country either; but at least here among fields and woods, you are experiencing something already. I anticipate looking out the back windows in the morning to find deer grazing: and I understand that largely they will be grazing on my garden and landscaping. I wonder with mixed fear and excitement how we will endure the first deep snow: home-bound, baking bread, reading long Russian novels, getting on each others’ nerves. I wonder what it will look like in autumn, when all the trees start to turn. And of course, being a person who likes to write, and given this major change in lifestyle, I ask myself if I should write a journal about the experience–even start a new blog about it.

But this gets me thinking of my own theories about the seasons. I have long insisted that one need not live in the forest to experience the seasons, that people living in the middle of the biggest cities, even people living in the most sterile and sense-destroying suburbs, could find ways to be aware of natural changes and engage with the cycles of the earth.

Frank Lloyd Wright spent a career working on plans to ‘decentralize’ cities and bring more natural elements into human habitats, but all for naught. As critics of twentieth-century architecture have noted, his plans never moved forward largely because, in essence, people like living in cities–the convenience, the excitement, the vigor of them. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson observed this, noting curiously that while cities made men ‘interesting,’ they also made them ‘artificial.’

My biggest problem with the idea of leaving the city to experience nature is that so often, people move to farms, as if agriculture is some kind of re-engagement with nature. But of course it’s not. Agriculture is a way of controlling nature. Nature is wild; gardens are orderly. For hundreds of millennia, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers: agriculture was our first technological revolution, our first move toward controlling the environment and taking ourselves out of nature.

The confusion likely originates in Genesis, where Adam and Eve are born into a paradise of ease and plenty we know as The Garden of Eden. They lost that paradise because they sinned, but even today we see returning to ‘the garden’ as synonymous with getting back to nature, to something simpler and more primal. Scores of consumer products that hope to evoke nature and simplicity slap some version of the name ‘Eden’ on their label. In reality, a garden without effort is an oxymoron. Many people who think they will find a simple life in moving to the country and keeping a garden quickly learn different.

So it’s complicated. On TV the other night David Letterman was rhapsodizing about the splendors of autumn in New York. There’s even a song on that very season in that very place. Do I need to be out in the country to really feel autumn? Or spring? Granted, I will be closer to the natural changes, but the seasons are not just about nature–they are also human cultural constructs. At this point, I can say only that in my rural adventure I will learn new things. At this point, I can say that I don’t know what those things will be.