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I recently read some snippets or tidbits from various Up North, Lake Superior, North Shore artists and poets and craftspeople. They seemed so joyful, so full of life and happiness. Their work was a celebration. Their lives were filled with gratitude and amazement at the small things of nature – like Indian pipes (Monotropa uniflora) – to the great – the gales of November and the moose (Alces alces). Think of Uncle Walt, singing his Song of Himself, playing on his little Leaves of Grass.
Bully for us. For the luck in being born who we were, and the work (time multiplied by force) in becoming who we became.
A couple years ago in Grand Marais we were blessed with a visit by a philosophy professor from out East. From New York or something. And being who I am – a very minor and amateur philosopher – and being what I studied and gave my life’s work too, I was invited to come up with some questions for him of a philosophical nature.
The philosophical questions – or, rather, question – was not hard for me to come up with.
After some pleasantries, and his asking me my interests (existentialism) and background (Hemingway and Joyce – neither of which he considered either existentialist or philosopher) I came out and asked him:
Considering the vector in the field of mathematics from Euclid to David Hilbert and Alan Turing, and considering the progress in medicine from Hippocrates to, say, Drs. Salk and Fauci, and considering the development of physics from Archimedes to Newton and Einstein, what, in the past 3000 years of thinking and rhetoric and Socratic dialogue and the dialectic, what have we learned from the human endeavor of philosophy?
And after some seconds of careful thought (very philosophical of him), the professor answered with the only answer there could be:
“The primacy of language.”
Philosophy, that is to say, has helped reveal the preeminence of language in our every day lives, and of our most advanced discourse.
Not to say that we – the poet-warriors and philosopher kings – have made anything clearer. Not so in the post-Joyce world, or in the realm of modern philosophers (Heidegger the Nazi existentilist, Lacan the French Freudian, Zizek the communist Marxist). Just look at the clarity in the early rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly visà vis the supposedly refined “Revolver,” electric Robert Zimmerman, and drunken babblings of Mr. Mojo Risin. We seem to just get more confused.
I had a buddy in Grand Marais. An outdoorsman like me. It was September or October, I remember, and I asked him what his plans were for the weekend. He wasn’t sure yet; maybe take the dog out after grouse or woodcock (Scolopax minor) (his favorite), or maybe get in some end-of-the-season brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) fishing (his other favorite).
“I need to kill something,” he said. “It’s been a while since I killed anything.”
Some people catch me – or correct me – in my use of the term “partridge.” Wayback when I was researching them in W.W.W. Richardson Elementary School, I even had to correct – or clarify with – my father. We always used “partridge” for the ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus). Maybe that goes back to our Czech heritage.
Heritage – which I no longer believe in (after all, I’m Irish [Homo sapiens neanderthalensis]) – taught me to use the shortened form “’coon” for the furbearing bandit (Procyon lotor) so common in the St. Croix basin when I was young. I tried trapping ‘coon when I was young with not much success. I did catch a big grizzly ‘coon on the Flute Reed in ‘05. And I tanned that hide and sold it for $25.
One term we didn’t use in the oak savannah of Wisconsin and Minnesota was “cross fox”. I’d never heard that term in seriousness until I came to Cook County, Minnesota. I think Hemingway used it in one of his early stories (“Three Shots”) where his child alter-ego, Nick Adams, alone in the night in a pup tent, hears a barking, or some scary noise, and not being able to identify it calls it a “cross fox,” or a cross between something and something. The multi-colored, smallish-sized fox of much of the US I call the gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus). The cross fox – a phase of the red fox (the unrelated Vulpes vulpes) – is quite rare.
I heard the term “brush wolf ” yesterday when compared to a coyote (Canis latrans). I have no experience comparing the two, other than very close encounters with wolves (Canis lupus) and distant sightings of coyotes.
This is not to say that any of these examples are as important as, for example, a plus or minus sign or negative numbers, or the difference between a virus and bacteria, or whether Schrodinger’s cat (Felis catus schrodinger) is in the box or not.
Only to say that there is a partridge, and there is a ruffed grouse, there is a gray fox and brush wolf and a coyote and (maybe) a cross fox, and there is a ‘coon that is the same as a raccoon. And many of these I have killed. But none of them I have needed to kill. And that is all the vector in my development needs to show.
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