TranscriptJohn Bennett: Linnaeus and the poetics of evolution Macleay Museum, 21 March 2007 Time: 6.00 for 6.30pm

Good evening. I was described in the Herald’s ad for this event as an eco-philosopher but I see myself primarily as a poet. What is a poet doing in a museum (rather than on the mean streets of Glebe)?Some thoughts on this are in the free flyer.

What triggered my involvement in this project was seeing a display the photographer Robyn Stacey had prepared around last October at the back here, and thinking why not poetry. A challenge had been set me by a sign I had seen a year earlier for a famous louse (not currently on display):

I quote it in a poem from a sonnet sequence written for this exhibition (on the web site but not displayed). It refers to the albatross in the back case.

The louse and the albatross went to sea

Coleridge immortalised the albatross, the louse still awaits its bard. Macleay Museum sign Sept 2004.

Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher. Baudelaire, L'Albatros.

Forster (father and son), naturalists on Cook’s second voyage hunted penguins and shot a wandering albatross (or two), discovering two species of lice that fly a thousand miles a day on aerodynamic wings; the slender one is fixed here to a yellowing preserved slide, the other lost. The bird has been preening in the land of suspended animation standing on large tobacco-stained feet sailors once sewed intobaccy pouches. A feather lies loose in its plastic home marked in texta gigantus, but probably ‘wandering’ from white flecking on its chocolate wing. When we hear that long-line fishing risks 19 of 21species a shadow falls (Coleridge felt the shade) informing reasonable terror (not 9/11). Forster (the son) a respected scientist, politicised, left Mainz for France, joined the Jacobin Club, but disowned by family and friends died alone in Paris within a year. The Terror broke his heart. (1794)

I hope this poem gives you a sense that poetry can work with a wide variety of materials.

In this talk, I want to suggest:1. a radical ecological view of ourselves, our minds and our language; 2. a sense that the beginnings of science were connected to a new attention to nature,

which is Linnaeus’ great legacy, and which we need to help us address our contemporary environmental crises; and

3. a sense of the possibilities of poetry as providing information (among other things).

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1. Wunderkammer - Chance, Passion, Imagination

My installation is a kind of poetic Wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosities, ancestor of the museum.

It suggests that Linneaus’ order sprang from disorder in his personal space, which was itself a kind of cabinet of curiosities. From Lisbet Koerner’s description, it sounds wilder than Andy Warhol’s factory - “The walls of his rooms disappeared behind tangled braches – some thirty species of songbirds nested in them . . . Linnaeus pasted botanic prints as wall paper. . . Over the sanded, broad planked floors, he strewed his botanic manuscripts, which blinded nightingales splattered with droppings while racoons played and clawed among them.”1

Feminist theoretician Roberta McGrath suggests reasonably that there is perhaps something anal about collecting activity. She writes, “Collecting, preserving and filing samples in cabinets was a

way of controlling and regulating both bodies and knowledge.” 2 However, my installation plays, plays with contingency and association. Linnaeus was mostly dead-egocentrically-serious, but noted: “The botanist who chooses to exercise himself over varieties can hardly come to the end of playfulness of nature in its numerous shapes.” As Jan Westerhoff says of the Wunderkammer, “The arrangement of the genera did not serve to separate all the various areas, instead, it built visual bridges to emphasize the playfulness of nature through the associative powers of sight.”3 The power of poetry I believe lies in its ability to make connections.

A contemporary of Linnaeus, John Pointer defended his Wunderkammer against criticism that such displays were purely for show by, "some of the Ignorant & Illiterate Part of Mankind (that only look upon the Out-sides of Things without examining their real & intrinsic Value)." 4 Like early proponents of the scientific enterprise (e.g. Robert Boyle and Linnaeus) he thought such displays, "lead us to the Great Author of Nature, & not only serve to puzzle the Philosopher, but also to admonish (if not convince) the Atheist."

I mention in the flyer that William Dampier justified his explorations and collecting in similar terms to Pointer. His writings have been read as narrative cabinets of curiosities.5 In A Voyage to New Holland, he wrote, "the Things themselves in the Discovery of which I have been imployed, are most worthy of our diligentest Search and Inquiry; being the various and wonderful Works of God in different Parts of the World.” The odd thing is Dampier, a pirate for twelve years, leaves out the profit motive! Linnaeus was an imperial collector who Lisbet Koerner sees primarily NOT as a taxonomist, but a patriot obsessed with Sweden’s economic self-sufficiency (primarily through Rhubarb and Pearls, the title of my installation).6

In 18th C Paris, there were more than 450 private collections of this sort (collections de diverses curiosités). Nicolas Malebranche, a disciple of Descartes, complained rationally of their creators: “They transform their heads into some kind of furniture storehouses, in which they pile everything on top of everything else without distinction and without order, everything which has some air of erudition . . . They pride themselves on resembling those cabinets of curiosities . . . where the price depends solely on imagination, on passion and on chance.” 7

I would argue that imagination, passion and chance are actually crucial to human existence and experience and of our understanding of how the world works and has come to be.

1 Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pP4. Systema Natura (1735): "there are no new species (1); as like always gives birth to like (2); as one in each species was at the beginning of the progeny (3), it is necessary to attribute this progenitorial unity to some Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, namely God, whose work is called Creation. This is confirmed by the mechanism, the laws, principles, constitutions and sensations in every living individual." p18. By 1760, Linnaeus was willing to consider the possibility that "new species" might be "produced by hybrid generation.2 “Furthermore, that control over the miniature seemed to be more than a refuge against modernity; it seemed to be the only adequate response.” Roberta McGrath ‘Looking for Life: Microscopy and Modernity’ in Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body, p174.3 Jan C. Westerhoff, ‘A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early Modern Wunderkammer’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62.4, 2001, p645.4 He bequeathed it to St John's College (c1740), Geraldine Barnes, ‘Curiosity, Wonder, and William Dampier's Painted Prince’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.1 (2006) 31-50.5 Geraldine Barnes, p34.6 Lisbet Koerner, 1999.7 Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité où l'on traite de la nature de l'esprit de l'homme..., (1674) ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Paris, 1965), XV. Quoted, Jan C. Westerhoff, 2001, p643. He developed Descartes’ ideas in line with standard Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Malebranche published major works on metaphysics, theology, and ethics, as well as studies of optics, the laws of motion and the nature of colour.

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Take Chance

The word Chance has two distinct meanings:1. events occurring within a system caused by external factors, e.g. a tree branch falling and killing you does not eliminate the causal factors of wind, termites etc.. We have another word luck for that, traditional societies may talk of spells, spirits, gods and fate.2. events that are random in nature e.g., the sequence of heads and tails in two-up or the exact position of an electron at any time.

Our interest in Chance is an interest in causality and concern for order. We want an ordered world, we hope for certainty. Some of us are deeply unhappy with the second sense of chance, from the Pope to Einstein, who hated the idea of uncertainty in quantum mechanics and wasted the second half of his life looking for a simple equation to unify relativity and subatomic physics.

However, evolutionary history interweaves both these meanings via random variations through mutation and natural selection. The well worn notion of “the balance of nature” has ‘evolved’ to an emphasis on change and chance.8 Ecologist William Drury writes, ‘To sum up: chance and change are ubiquitous; habitats are heterogeneous; selection drives parents to produce a great excess of young; death (disturbance) is necessary for life; and movements of individuals are pervasive. That’s the way the world is made and works.’ 9

And Passion

Plato never articulated a ‘theory of mind’, but distrusted emotion (and poetry). In Phaedo, he talked of the soul as chained in the prison of the body, a concept he later developed in Phaedrus. In the Republic he wrote: ‘[The poet] arouses, nourishes, and strengthens this [irrational] part of the soul and so destroys the rational one, in just the same way that someone destroys the better sort of citizens when he strengthens the vicious ones and surrenders the city to them.’10 At least Aristotle disagreed with Plato. He thought Greek tragedy was about embodied passion, about becoming a slightly different person by experiencing a cathartic drama.

Antonio Damasio provides evidence of the inadequacy of Descartes’ (the Cartesian) conception (of mind as separable from the body) He underlines the embodied nature of mind and the interaction between mind, body and the environment - it is an ecological account of cognition. He writes: ‘It is not only the separation between the mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.’11 Passion in the sense of emotions and feelings is not a luxury, but a necessary and vital part of our survival, more so than mathematics or logic. Damasio emphasises that emotion is fundamental to reason.12

Imagination8 The new paradigm, called the non-equilibrium or hierarchical patch dynamics paradigm, recognises different kinds of change are contingent and active in ecological systems. See J. Wu & O.L. Loucks, ‘From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics: A paradigm shift in ecology’, The Quarterly Review of Biology 70, p439-466, 1995.9 William Holland Drury, Chance and Change: Ecology for Conservationists, John G.T. Anderson (Ed.), U of California P, 1998, p199.10 Plato, Republic Bk 10, (605b2-5)11 Antonio Damasio, Descartes' error: emotions, reason, and the human brain, New York: Avon Books, 1994, p 118. Gregory Ulmer wrote, ‘One of the most amazing events of this decade, from the poverty of poststructuralism, is the awarding of a Nobel Prize in Economics to the U of Chicago professor who demonstrated empirically that emotional factors prevent individuals from making economic decisions that reason would seem to dictate.’ Joseph Tabbi, ‘A Project for a New Consultancy’ interview with Gregory Ulmer’, Jan 1996, http://www.altx.com. [DL 34.8.1999]12 Damasio argues that feeling is, “the realisation of a nexus between an object and an emotional body state.” 1994, p132. See also, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. How metaphors for embodied interactions with the world are the sources of higher-level representations of language and thought (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson); The fact that robotocists (e.g. Rodney Brooks learning from Damasio, Lakoff, and Johnson) have made situatedness and embodiment, the two fundamental principles of constructing humanoid robots. Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, New York: Pantheon, 2002.

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Coleridge wrote extensively but confusedly about imagination, but Imagination is nothing mysterious, just a term for important ways human cognition works. There is no need to contrast reason (unfavourably) with imagination, as Shelley did to begin his Defence of Poetry.

Mind is not a structure, but an active integrative process of seeking for, interpreting, and responding to meaning. Signals from the world do not generally represent a coded input, but are potentially ambiguous, and highly context-dependent. To quote Abner Shimony, Any ‘situation is incredibly rich in modalities of scale, senses, cognition and environmental possibilities.’13

The cognitive scientist Mark Johnson argues that both reason & imagination “must be understood ... as an interaction of a human organism with its environment (which includes its language, cultural traditions, values, institutions, and the history of its social community).”14 You and I are ecological creatures making sense of all that happens, sensitively at every moment through imagination.

2. The Mystery of Language

Language helped us evolve. At some stage, hominids stripped speech sounds of their associated meaning and reserved meaning for combinations of sounds strung together, expanding exponentially the range of meaning - this was the revolution of syntax and the use of convention was key. 15

The breakthrough in understanding language came with Johann Gottfried Herder’s Essay on the Origin of Language (1772) and the realisation that language expanded thinking, offering a new reflective stance towards the world – Herder also thought poetry was the origin of language.

Wilhelm von Humboldt utilised Herder’s ideas in his image of language as a productive-expressive act, part of an infinite web.16 And followed Rousseau in viewing humans as fundamentally creative – he wrote: “to enquire and to create – these are the centres around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.”17

Archaeologist Steven Mithen notes: ‘Both private and public language act as tools for thought and play a fundamental role in the evolution of consciousness: in the opening up of our minds to ourselves. But during the course of the latter stages of human evolution, another tool was found that may have had even greater consequences for the evolution of consciousness: material culture itself.’18 I would just note that I believe cumulative bricolage to be the key active process, use of tools, objects, and concepts.

A word is a complex thing, as is a concept. Take the word horse – it has various cognitive modalities, emotion (affect), memory, language, imagery etc. We may recognise a horse, store various facts and narratives and images of horses, have feelings and attitudes towards them, and a sense of its category - animal, location (fields), and what they do, run about and eat sugarlumps.19 The word horse allows us to touch the object, smell it, the feel of its nose and hide, its sounds, a sense of its movement; its sound (the word), its spelling, memories of stories of horses and encounters with individuals with personalities. Auditory association areas have stored the sound of the word, and other areas the motor sequences required to pronounce the word.

Then there is the imaginary. Mark Turner points out, ‘the unitary horse we assemble from all of this disparate information is as much a ‘fabulous blend’ as any Pegasus . . . suggesting the ‘literary’ nature of the human mind.’20 He argues that, ‘Meanings are . . . rather complex operations of projection, binding, linking, blending, and integration over multiple spaces . . . meaning is parabolic and literary.’ And there’s an ethical element - Aristotle was on the right track: ‘. . . the excellence of 16 , an 'infinite use of finite means.' Herder thought language and thought are inseparable. John Zammito thinks Herder was as important a philosopher as his teacher, Kant, though ‘the pre-critical Kant’ prior to the first Critique of 1781 was similar. Herder later criticised Kant for ignoring language and artificially creating dichotomies in the mind. John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.17 Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language. Cambridge University Press, 2002, p24.18 ‘Modern humans, especially those after 50,000 years ago, learned how to overcome those evolutionary constraints by exploiting material culture, by telling stories, and performing rituals as a means to offload and provide cognitive anchors for ideas that have no natural home within the evolved mind. In this regard, the modern brain is unlikely to be significantly different from that of a Neanderthal. But it is linked into the world of human culture that augments and extends its powers in remarkable ways.’ Steven Mithen, "The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective," SubStance 30 (2001): 28-54 . 2001, p51.

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the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy.’

Turner explains, ‘We expect phenomenology to indicate the nature of neurobiology. But it does not. It appears that there may be no anatomical site in the brain where a perception or a concept horse resides, and, even more interestingly, no points where the parts of the perception or concept are anatomically brought together. The horse looks obviously one thing; yet our visual perception of it is entirely fragmented across the brain.’21

Concepts are experiential and embodied. Idealist notions of a Form, or symbol of ‘horseness’, are misguided. Each brain processes language differently (even identical twins), which is evidence against the theory that specific linguistic rules or categories are hardwired and innate.22 Language is ecological, developing as the human organism negotiates the world.

We also have to be able to use the concept of horse in metaphors that are intrinsic to language. Nietzche noted that we are hardly aware that we use metaphors constantly in speech. George Lakoff & Mark Turner demonstrate that our pervasive use of metaphor “is indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason.”23 They go further, stating, “Poetry, through metaphor, exercises our minds so that we can extend our normal powers of comprehension beyond the range of the metaphors we are brought up to see the world through.”24

This poem refers to the small jar situated towards the primates.

Equus Caballus

The jar of liquid fills with light, a hologram takes shapeescaped from a bestiary, skin pale as a unicorn’s stretched in folds, the dainty muscle definition on the hindquarters tapers to beautiful forms, sculpted hooves, translucent limits. The body is squashed to fit, chin resting on front legs crossed. When I turn the jar, he shakes his head, the nostrils flare, the eyes almost open. Above the muzzle, two flaps lift as if a horn might emerge (narwhals’ weighed in gold by medieval quacks). The umbilical cord floats like the lifeline of an astronaut spinning into deep space, swimming through ontogeny, life passing before the eyes. The foetus, gentle and still, is obtained only through extreme means,but unicorns, fierce and fast, are only caught by cunning. The best method is for a hunter to lead a young girl to their habitat, a shady glade, the beasts are spell bound in the presence of a virgin.

3. What’s in a name?

Syntax, rather than naming, is the key mystery of language, but even naming is not as simple as Genesis suggests: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to all fowl of the air, and to all the wild beasts.” Epicurus in a letter to Herodotus suggested that names were not given by convention but arose from our nature, that different tribes 'under the impulse of special feelings and special presentations of sense' uttered 'special cries'.25 William Dawes tried to understand the original Sydney language through his friend Patyegarang, but Paul Carter points out that, ‘Words are not Platonic forms. Patye’s speech cannot be idealised, easily generalised or satisfactorily represented by the kind of laconic one-to-one word-list found in Collins or Tench.’

25 He then thought that to prevent confusion people had come to agree what to name things, but it is not clear whether this is a natural process or by rational thought. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Blackwell, 1995, p88.

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The need for a universal language became apparent with the decline of Latin and vernacular languages were being used for trade, missionary works and colonisation. In 1516, Sir Thomas Moore in “Utopia” described a language used by the Utopians. Just like everything in Utopia, it was based on logic, truth and universality.

The Elizabethan ‘scientist’ John Dee court astrologer to Elizabeth I, and necromancer, performing magical rites to summon the spirits of the dead (considered by the church to be rather dangerous) was as much alchemist (like Newton) and clairvoyant, but also connected with the ‘forward-looking’ movements of the age - Puritanism, trade and the city of London, in this sense he was a precursor of Linneaus.26 In 1564 he wrote his most famous text in contemporary times Monas hieroglyphica, he posits a geometric alphabet with no connection to Hebrew. He though his Monad based on geometry 'would explain the form of the letters, their position and place in the alphabetical order. . .' 27

Francis Bacon intended to invent one language where each word would carry a clear meaning. In De Augmentics Scientarium (1623), he suggests a universal language would compare grammars of different languages in search for the most perfect elements.28

Seth Ward (1617–1689), a professor of astronomy at Oxford elaborated on Descartes’ idea of simple notions. John Wilkins, code breaker in the English civil war, developed this idea. His, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, (1668), the first linguistic engineering text written, is in my installation. It contains a large ontology, a written and spoken language derived from the ontology, and a dictionary that maps terms in the ontology to English. His world language was based on the division of the universe into forty categories, subdivided into differences, and in turn subdivided into species. His extraordinary classification was meant to advance science and be complete.

In 1648 Wilkins was appointed Warden of Wadham College, Oxford and gathered around him a group of intellectuals, which led to the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, which marks not only as the end of the Interregnum, but as the end of the Renaissance in England.29 1660 marks the adventures of looking out and looking in, it marks a remarkably candid individual Pepys (who owned seven books by John Wilkins) and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 was the end of iconoclasm that had begun with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. The Royal Society met at Gresham College and dominated the new experimental philosophy. Wilkins put his project o a universal language into practice – using his language to communicate with his friend Robert Boyle. In 1668, Royal Soc set up a committee (incl Wren, Boyle and Hook) to study possible applications of Wilkins’ universal language.

Borges used Wilkins’ odd logic to write an invented Chinese classification which Foucault placed at the head of his Order of Things. Borges concluded any classification is arbitrary and conjectural. Classification functions to simplify the world (and binary dichotomies are the simplest), whereas poetry celebrates its complexity. Umberto Eco points out: “The language of Wilkins failed as a universal language but produced all the new classifications of the natural sciences. The language of Leibniz failed but produced modern formal logic. So, in each failed effort to formulate the perfect language a small inheritance remains.”30

Wilkins “assigned to each category a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel: De, means an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a part of that element, a flame …” But as Borges notes, “The word salmon does not tell us anything; zana, the corresponding word [in Wilkins’ lexicon], defines (for the man knowing the forty categories and the species of these categories) a scaled river fish, with ruddy meat."

26 See Peter J. Finch, John Dee: the world of an Elizabethan Magus, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. And Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, (1965) OUP, 1996.27 Quoted by Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Blackwell, 1995p 18728 Sir Thomas Urguhart(1611–1660) was the only seventeenth century thinker who based the project of a universal language on phonograms. According to Urquhart, every letter of every word in his project of a universal language was to express a defined idea. Thus the meaning of the concrete word would already be present in its written form. See his boom, Logopandecteision or an Introduction to the Universal Language.29 See Marion Wynne-Davies, Ed. The Renaissance from 1500 to 1660, Bloomsbury, 1992.30 Umberto Eco, ‘For a Polyglot Federation’, New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1993

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Salmon eggs hatch on a riverbed into alevin and quickly develop into parr camouflaged with vertical stripes, after a year or two they become glittering silvery smolts which swim to brackish water and then to sea. They return to freshwater as juveniles grilse. Eventually most species return to their native streams to spawn, changing from the silvery blue of a fresh run sea fish to a darker colour, deteriorating after spawning into kelts which die. Atlantic salmon look very similar to Pacific salmon, but are actually a trout. Salmonella is a genus of aerobic bacteria pathogenic to humans, named after an American scientist, not a fetid fish. The world is in dynamic process. Hegel used the example of an acorn to show how minute quantitative changes accumulate until an actual qualitative change occurs. An ideal language will always fail.

Yet one reason for it is a desire to efficiently manage information (that used to require thinking, but which Albert Borgmann thinks information has become just another commodity.)31 Jean-Francois Lyotard views a postmodernism as a dissociation of knowledge from the ‘training of minds’. Knowledge becomes information, and, ‘Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its use value.’32 Such anxieties are not new. Jonathan Sheehan suggests that they emerged between 1625 and 1735; Richard Yeo from 1735; and Ann Blair traces the problem back to the 13th C!33

4. Attention to nature One of the earliest nature writers was Pliny the Elder whose curiosity killed him in 79 AD during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and whose work Historia Naturalis formed the basis of scientific authority though a varied mix of facts and fantasies for many centuries34 Early natural histories were herbals or bestiaries. The former helped readers identify medicinal plants, the latter illuminated human nature through real and invented animals. Pictures, of course, were more useful than local names or written descriptions for identifying a flower or herb; but in the middle ages the details in Roman frescos or Persian miniatures gave way to vague Christian conventions, useless for identification. Misinformation was passed on from generation to generation, with a few added mistakes along the way. Early Renaissance artists began to look closely at individual plants. I am thinking of one of my favourite pictures, Durer’s Great Piece of Turf, 1503, Watercolour and gouache on paper, 41 x 32 cm, Vienna. A wonderful composition, looking natural but the dandelions arranged, the grass leaves so fresh, then the bottom tails off into browns, showing the roots. Budding yellow dandelion flowers suggest it was painted in May 1503.

New herbaries began to be produced and as an increasing number of new plants arrived in Europe from explorations, the inadequacy of the old books and names became obvious.35 The very diversity and beauty of nature was cited by the first English naturalist John Ray, a natural theologist, who developed a rival system of taxonomy to Linnaeus, beginning in 1660.36

31 ‘Once we had to impart our worlds through the work of writing or telling, and we had to gather our worlds laboriously from the promptings of writing and our fund of experiences and recollections. Now information is handed to us as readily available sounds and sights. Engagement with the world has been yielding to the consumption of news and entertainment commodities.’ Albert Borgmann, ‘The Moral Significance of the Material Culture’ in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Ed., Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, Indiana UP, 1995, p90.32 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minnesota UP, 1991, p52.33 See David Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload’, Journal of the History of Ideas, V64:1, 2003, p7. For the latter two the ‘information overload’ refers principally to books; Sheehan refers to an increase in descriptive facts.34 “Historia Naturalis” (Natural History), an encyclopaedia of natural science that spanned thirty-seven books. Pliny describes in detail the physical nature of the world. It includes books on geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, and the medicinal uses of plants. Much of its importance lies in the way Pliny organized previously random facts and spotted important details which had been ignored by others.35 Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, Bloomsbury, 2005.36 John Ray wrote, ‘How variously is the Surface of it [the earth] distinguished into Hills, and Valleys, and Plains, and high Mountains affording pleasant Prospects? John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, London: S. Smith, 1691, p63. Starting in 1660 with his Catalogue of Cambridge Plants, and ending with the posthumous publication of Synopsis Methodica Avium et Piscium in 1713, Ray published systematic works on plants, birds, mammals, fish, and insects, in which he brought order to the chaotic mass of names in use by the naturalists of his time. Like Linnaeus, Ray searched for the "natural system," a classification of organisms that would reflect the Divine Order of creation. Unlike Linnaeus, whose plant classification was based entirely on floral reproductive organs, Ray classified plants by overall morphology: the classification in his 1682 book Methodus Plantarum Nova draws on flowers, seeds, fruits, and roots. Ray's plant classification system was the first to divide flowering plants into monocots and dicots. This method produced more "natural" results than "artificial" systems based on one feature alone; it expressed the similarities between species more fully. Ray's system greatly influenced later botanists such as Jussieu and de Candolle, and systems based on total morphology came to replace systems based on only one feature or

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But in 1500, few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. The Dutch humanist Erasmus in his Praise of Folly wrote of natural philosophers. "Theirs is certainly a pleasant form of madness."37 Yet fifty years later Ulisse Aldrovandi a pioneer naturalist founded the first museum of natural history and botanical garden at Bologna, establishing natural history as a legitimate field of study.38

Robert Boyle, as a leading member of the Royal Society (1660), was pivotal in the mid 17th C construction of what Steven Shapin calls, ‘material, social and literary technologies for the conduct of experiments and the production of knowledge.’ He sought to create an impression of ‘virtual witnessing’ by describing experiments in detail and with apparent honesty, though this was on the basis of being a gentleman, rather than within a democracy. In France, the newly emerged salons began a passion for conversation that Harold Nicolson claimed developed new conceptions of ‘reason and ‘nature’, breaking down divisions between aristocracy and intellectuals and gender.39 However, he also advocated observing the ordinary elements of the natural world, in devout contemplation of their wonders. He wrote: ‘I would not confine Occasional Meditation to Divinity itself... but am ready to allow mens thoughts to expatiate much further, and to make of the Objects they contemplate not only a Theological and a Moral, but also a Political, an Oeconomical, or even a Physical use’.40

George Swinnock (‘ejected Minister”) encouraged everyone to undertake personal meditations on the world and if possible write them down: ‘To the Reader. God has given us a large field to walk in, and choice of flowers, pluck what we will, to put into our nosegay.’41

Edward Bury wrote 100 meditations centred on his garden, listing diverse natural phenomena, and encouraged us all: My desire is that thou maist take out this leson, prove an artist, and set up for thy self.42

These were natural theologists who wanted to find God in the world without necessarily sharing St Augustine’s vision of the world laced with vestigia dei (traces and shadows of God) and while avoiding the heresy of pantheism.43 Joseph Priestley, writing a hundred years after Boyle, was still attempting to both standardise science and yet relate it to the visible hand of God.44

organ system.13 Abner Shimony, ‘One source of richness is the simultaneous involvement of several sense. Another is the array of ‘higher order variables of stimulus’’, such as spatial and temporal gradients, which are capable of conveying decisive information. Finally, in ordinary situations there are usually opportunities for exploration, by motion of the organism as a whole or by movements of the eyes, hands, and head, for the purpose of bringing small cues into prominence and achieving new perspectives.’ Abner Shimony, ‘Is Observation Theory-Laden? A Problem in Naturalistic Epistemology’ in R.G. Colodny, Ed. Logic, Laws, and Life, Pittsburgh UP, 1977, p196. 14 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, Uni of Chicago Press, 1987, p209. As he puts it, we are: ‘weaving together the threads of our lives. In order for us to have coherent experiences, to make any sense at all of what happens to us, to survive in our environment, and to enhance the quality of our lives, we must organize and reorganize our experiences from moment to moment.’ Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993, p152. An ecological approach appreciates the feedback and interrelationships between culture, biology, behaviour, and biological evolution - exemplified by Tim Ingold: ‘What we need, instead, is a quite different way of thinking about organisms and their environments. I call this 'relational thinking'. It means treating the organism not as a discrete, pre-specified entity but as a particular locus of growth and development within a continuous field of relationships. It is a field that unfolds in the life activities of organisms and that is enfolded (through processes of embodiment or enmindment) in their specific morphologies, powers of movement and capacities of awareness and response.’Tim Ingold, ‘From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Boundaries Between Social and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology and Psychology', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 123, 1988, p43.15 Though in themselves the sounds of language are meaningless, they can be recombined in different ways to yield thousands of words, each distinct in meaning.... In just the same way, a finite stock of words... can be combined to produce an infinite number of sentences. Nothing remotely like this is found in animal communication. Derek Bickerton, Language and Species, Chicago, IL University of Chicago, 1990 p15-16. Joseph Catalano stresses the use of convention itself, ‘The world of artefacts had already made things exist ‘by convention.’ All artefacts are conventional, or arbitrary, because they involve a use of matter arising from human intentions.’ ‘Coulmas's point is valid, but it has to be put in proper perspective. The move from mnemonic devices to numbers and from pictures to pictograms established a distinctive kind of convention, but not convention itself.’ Joseph Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness... Routledge, 2000, p53. Jonathan Culler, ‘If a cave man is successfully to inaugurate language by making a special grunt signifying 'food,' we must suppose that the grunt is already distinguished from other grunts and that the world has already been divided into the categories 'food' and 'non-food’.' Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982, p96

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Boyle wrote: The world is the great Book.45 Linnaeus seventy years later believed he was ordained to reveal divine law, and claimed to “read nature as any other book”. He was not an empiricist (then fashionable) and had no interest in science or technology. He grounded his claims in revelation. Remember that Newton was a great Bible scholar and spent more time on Natural theology and alchemy, then gravity, light, physics, or calculus put together.

In the following sonnet I note how two scientists can have quite different approaches to their discipline. While Kepler found the snowflake sublime, Robert Hooke (Robert Boyle’s assistant and famous for his work with microscopes) insisted that it was ordinary.

First day with the specimens2

19 Herbert Simon also points out the modalities: ‘But there is more to dogs than just recognizing them. One has also stored in memory a large body of information about dogs ... On the basis of this knowledge one can form expectations and predictions about a dog's behaviour. One has not only knowledge and beliefs about dogs, but feelings as well.’ Simon goes on to mention all the expressions and names that ‘dog’ dogs. Herbert Simon, ‘Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach’ from Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism: A special issue edited by Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, The Stanford Humanities Review, Vol 4, No1. http://shr.stanford.edu:80/shreview/4-1/text/toc.html [DL 28.1.2002] Antonio Damasio writes: ‘By object I mean entities as diverse as a person, a place, a melody, a toothache, a state of bliss; by image, I mean a mental pattern in any of the sensory modalities, e.g. a sound image, a tactile image, the image of a state of well-being. Such images convey aspects of the physical characteristics of the object and they may also convey the reaction of like or dislike one may have for an object, the plans one may formulate for it, or the web of relationships of that object among other objects. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Random House, 2000, p9. Simon, a Nobel Laureate in economics, began in political science and became interested in the psychology of problem solving. His interest in cognitive science stems from his criticism of economists’ assumption of ‘economic man’, an excessively rational animal. The term stored is dangerous in suggesting memory traces- as Dennett notes, ‘The consensus of cognitive science...is that over there we have the long-term memory...and over here we have the workspace or working memory, where the thinking happens.... And yet there are no two places in the brain to house these two facilities. The only place in the brain that is a plausible home for either of these separate functions is the whole cortex - not two places side by side but one large place.’ Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992, p270-271. Rosenfield looks at globally brain-damaged people, memory loss is not destruction of a ‘memory trace’ but a restructuring of the brain. Consciousness is the act of sense-making; brain-damaged patients exhibit ‘a breakdown in the mechanisms of consciousness. A patient's state of confusion is no more to be ignored than his failure to recognize, say, his home. Memory, recognition, and consciousness are all part of the same process.’p35 Conscious memory states require ‘a dynamic organization that, given the complexity of the processes (the immediate, the past, and self-reference), are not reproducible.’ Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992, p129. Clancey comments, ‘Again, neural structures coordinating what we say, imagine, feel, and how we move are activated ‘in place,’ as we are in the process of speaking, feeling, moving. Saying that some memories are forgotten and others recalled suggests a process of search and matching for relevancy; instead, the brain directly reorganizes itself on a global basis, not merely filtering or ‘reinterpreting’ sensations, but physically recoordinating how perception and conceptualization occur.’ W.J. Clancey, ‘The biology of consciousness: Comparative review of Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An anatomy of Consciousness and Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind’, Artificial Intelligence 60, 1991, p313-356.20 Mark Turner, from a linguistic, English literature and cognitive science background, echoes the point that a familiar concept like ‘horse’ requires input from multiple sensory domains to construct the movements, sounds, emotive significance with its signature feel and smell, pictures and arbitrary symbols like ‘horse’. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind, OUP, 1996. p111. He notes that ‘blending is already involved in our most unitary and literal... conception of basic physical objects, such as horse and horn, and in our most unitary and literal... conception of small spatial stories, such as horse moves and horn impales.’ p112. Turner argues that, ‘Meanings are . . . rather complex operations of projection, binding, linking, blending, and integration over multiple spaces . . . meaning is parabolic and literary.’ 21 Mark Turner, 1996, p110.22 Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An anatomy of Consciousness, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p82. 23 ‘Far from being merely a matter of words, metaphor is a matter of thought - all kinds of thought: thought about emotion, about society, about human character, about language, and about the nature of life and death. It is indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason.’ George Lakoff and Mark Turner, Preface, More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.24 George Lakoff & Mark Turner, 1989, p214.37 151138 156739 For example, from the 1660s, the salons of Paris began a passion for conversation that Harold Nicolson developed the new conceptions of ‘reason and ‘nature’, of ‘free thought’ were sifted codified, and eventually imposed.’ Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason, Panther, 1968, p291.The salons broke down divisions between

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What strikes us both is a Willow Ptarmigan, capsised on its side onto a beady black eye; its feet are furred, no sign of claws, “The white plumage, full time or seasonal?” I ask, thinking of hares, then notice the other dozen birds are all on their backs and none healed with prosthetic eyes. This pretty bird looks well, head perched on an upright neck, good enough to be a decoy, and if I look past the barred tail? I see snow sculpting trees before the sun pulls the rug out from under the icing, and the bird flying through a blizzard, and Kepler, court astrologerwalking back from the castle, noticing the snowflakes on his coat were all six-sided, and muttering “in that we say Nature plays”; whereas Hooke saw, "the most simple and plain operation of Nature". The bird flies past us all straight into the bank of snow so as to leave no footprints for hunters to follow.

aristocracy and intellectuals and gender. Madame de Rambouillet, began the trend and insisted on god elegant conversation. From 1750 the work of the encyclopaedists were central to the themes and issues. Good conversation gave rise to the art of letter writing, Byron and Horace Walpole. Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757) promulgated rationalism against superstition primarily through his conversation. Romantic writers would later praise conversation for quite different reasons. De Quincey wrote, ‘I felt... that in the electric kindling of life between two minds... there sometimes arise glimpses and shy revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy, that could not have been approached through any avenues of methodological study.’ De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Ed. David Masson, 1896, vol x, A. and C. Black, 1889-90, p268.40 J. Paul Hunter Before Novels: the cultural contexts of eighteenth-century English fiction, WW Norton, 1990, p201-3. Hunter posits such thinking with the beginnings of the novel, ‘It is no accident that journalism and the novel - as well as the adventurous spirit and preoccupation with the epithanic moment of discovery that sponsored both - got their impetus primarily from Protestantism in general and Dissent in particular.’ P199. Hunter’s thesis is that the novel emerged from a varied discursive environment rather than being a bastard offspring of romances.41 Swinnock concludes, ‘Reader, I have now ended the Treatise, but whether thou (if a stranger to this calling) wilt put an end to thy carnal fleshly ways, and begin this high and heavenly work or no, I know not. (p868/9). 42 Edward Bury, The Husbandsman’s Companion of 1677 (British Library Accession No. 1019) ‘Upon worms in the garden, When I was digging in the garden, I observed many worms and other insects which divine providence had there disposed to be fed and cherished, but by what I know not... then he thinks ‘ what a poor miserable piece man is.’ (p70); Upon a garden spoiled through bad fence; Upon a mole spoiling the garden [he’d fixed his fence], ‘when we have the greatest expectation we meet the greatest disappointment.’; Upon sympathy and antipathy of vegetables; Upon the painted butterfly ‘Lord keep me humble, make me sincere, and help me to be diligent, so shall I be happy for ever.’; Upon the pleasures of a garden. It seemed to be an earthly paradise... my affections were much tickled with it (p207); Upon a heap of ants or pismires; Upon a snail; Upon leaves falling in autumn; Upon the many enemies fruit trees have.’ 43 It is often forgotten that Kepler had trained as a priest and was a devout Lutheran. His mother was imprisoned for witchcraft and he was the court astrologer yet thought empirical data important. Newtown entered Cambidge 1660 to study theology and was an alchemist.44 See Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Joseph Priestley and the Millennium’ in RGW Anderson & Christopher Lawrence Eds, Science, Medicine and Dissent, Wellcome Trust/Science Museum, London, 1982. He recommends electrical experiments as being ‘of all others, the cleanest, the most elegant, that the compass of philosophy exhibits’ and noted the power of electrical performers, ‘So far are philosophers from laughing to see the astonishment of the vulgar at these experiments.’ Quoted in Simon Schaffer, ‘Priestley and the Millennium’ p40-41, in Anderson & Lawrence ibid. Whereas, Pepys a keen member of the Royal Society, recorded Charles II ‘mightily laughed’ when hearing that scientists were ‘spending time only in weighing air’. (Probably Boyle’s experiments on pressures of gas). John Carey, The Faber Book of Science, Faber, 1995, P27.45 Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon several Subjects. Whereto is premis’d A Discourse About such kind of Thoughts, 1665. Quoted by J Paul Hunter, Before Novels: Cultural concepts of 18th C English Fiction WW Norton, 1990. The notion of the world as a book, a text has prospered. Now various media from paintings to film as ‘read as texts’ which I find problematic. Each medium has its own processes and structures.

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This poem refers to the male in my wunderkammer, the female is undistinguished and is in the back cabinet. Like Aristotle, Linnaeus grouped mammals by toes and teeth and birds by beak and feet, but in winter the willow ptarmigan’s feet, as I write, ‘are furred, no sign of claws’.

Milton’s description of Eden in Paradise Lost influenced English nature poetry and the Picturesque, in terms of a local pastoral, which observed the local. Milton wrote in ‘L’Allegro’ (1632)

‘Som time walking not unseenBy Hedge-row Elms on Hillocks green . . .And every shepherd tells his tale Under the Hawthorn in the dale.Streit miner eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the Lantskip round it measures,Russet Lawns . . .’46

Both scientists and poets were beginning to pay attention once more to nature. A new naturalistic aesthetics was then introduced by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1711) 47 (influenced by John Locke), together with Francis Hutcheson (1725),48 and Joseph Addison,49 was becoming popular. Addison returned from a visit to Italy (1701-3), declaring that Italian gardens were passé, and that the natural landscape of the Campagna, as ‘worked upon’ by painters like Claude, should be echoed in English gardens.50 The English word ‘nature’ became wrapped up with paintings, gardens, poems and landscapes.

In my installation, I mention 1771 as a key date when Goethe and Rousseau wrote literary ‘letters’ about nature within a few days of each other. Botanizing increasingly became Rousseau's passion as he grew older, and his encounters with plants brought him peace and contentment. He fled to the island of Saint-Pierre. “I set about doing the Flora petrinsularis and describing all the plants of the Island ... in sufficient detail to occupy myself for the rest of my days.... As a result of this fine project, every morning after breakfast ... I would go off, a magnifying glass in hand and my Systema naturae under my arm, to visit a district of the Island, which I had divided into small squares for this purpose, with the intention of covering them one after the other in each season.”51

Umberto Eco visited San Diego Zoo where the resident grizzly was known as ‘Chester’ not Ursus horribilis. The zoo, known for enclosures designed to ecological verisimilitude, is both a living museum and theme park, an example of scientific ecology and the entertainment industry. Then he asks, “Where does the truth of ecology lie?” Linneaus undertook a hyperrealist project of cataloguing all of God’s creation, and then interfering with it, though postmodernity recently boasted imitation as the sincerest form of reality. Which reminds me of George Shaw's first published scientific description of the platypus, he admitted it was, "impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal."52

The roots of environmentalism lie with the English Romantic poets and painters, as well as, the work of Linnaeus, Gilbert White, Erasmus and Charles Darwin. Attention to nature is a great problem now that we are so urban, and one reason for our list of eco-crises. I see renewed 46 Milton II, l57. Complete Poems and Major Prose, Ed., Merritt Y. Hughes, New York: Macmillan, 1957. "L'Allegro", begins with the birth of melancholy, which happens during the dark hours of the nights among horrid shapes and sights in the unholy dwelling of a wild beast, but is about a carefree lifestyle, "II Penseroso" its companion poem describes a more thoughtful person whose nights are filled with hours of study in the confides of a quiet place. 47 The Earl of Shaftesbury was a naturalist in supposing fundamental principles of ethics and aesthetics (taste) were established by attention to human nature; certain things naturally please us and are naturally conducive to our good. (Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711). He was an associationist, a merging of ideas was fundamental to aesthetic experience and the crucial bridge from the sphere of contemplation to the sphere of action. [Link to David Hartley as Essay on Cog Science]48 An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). Hutcheson was also a naturalist and empiricist who thought aesthetic judgments were perceptual and take their authority from a sense common to those who make them.49 In a series of influential essays, "The Pleasures of the Imagination" in The Spectator (1712), Addison defended the theory that imaginative association is the fundamental component in our experience of art, architecture, and nature, and thus the true explanation of their value to us.50 Joseph Addison noted in The Spectator (1712), 'We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art.'51 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, R Masters & C Kelly, Eds, UP New England, 1990-2004. Vol8, p43.52 George Shaw and Frederick Nodder, The Naturalist's Miscellany: Or Coloured Figures of Natural Objects Drawn and Described Immediately from Nature, 24 vols. [London: Nodder & Co., 1789-1813], 10:384.

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attention to nature in direct descent from these enthusiasms; we are too far removed from our agrarian, let alone nomadic ancestors. Aesthetics, both natural (bushwalks and gardening etc.) and art exploring nature are important for humans to cherish natural environments and processes and life once more.

5. The rise of prose, decline of poetry

Linnaeus read Latin poetry daily, Ovid and Virgil were favourites, but he condemned rhetorical ornate writing. However, his plain style was just as much a form of rhetoric, but one that matched his simple, practical system of taxonomy.53 Plain diction has been praised from Horace to the English empiricists.54 Locke argued for propriety in language, and for a common usage.55 Geoffrey Hartman cites neo-classicism, Puritanism as well as the scientific Enlightenment as influencing this trend.56 Galileo published a report of his trials of the telescope in a pamphlet ‘The Starry Messenger’ (1610), of which John Carey comments: ‘It was written in a tersely factual style no scholar had used before, and it fell like a bombshell on the learned world.’57 (He was provoked by a personal attack by the Jesuit astronomer, Orazio Grassi (writing under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsi) who upheld the traditional authority of the poets against ‘scientific’ truth claims).

Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and others, were all worried about the role of language.58 Thomas Sprat, student of John Wilkins and author of a history of the Royal Society (1667) was a poet, yet his theme is the purification of language from poetic artifice, as language was a tool for learning.59 Both the introductory Ode and frontispiece of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) honoured Francis Bacon as prophet (his belief that science was best undertaken in institutions as a social activity with laboratories and technical specialists was very influential in changing attitudes to knowledge - and thus poetry). Scientists attacked poetry and praised writing that was ‘brief’ and ‘concise’ to quote Francis Bacon, hoping for increased rationality.60

Sprat argued for, ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive statements expressions; clear sense; a native easiness; bringing all things as near to mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artisans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.’61 He wanted, ‘to curb the quasi-magical effect of strong figure, and perhaps a religious ‘enthusiasm’ associated with that effect.’62 But as I have mentioned, language is naturally metaphoric, creative and poetic.

The Royal Society made reality its aim: "For the main intendment of this Society is to erect a well-grounded Natural History which takes of the heats of wanton Phantasie, hinders its extravagant excursions, and ties it down to sober Realities," wrote Joseph Glanvill in his 1668 defence of the Royal Society.63 But his best seller was a book Sadducismus triumphatus, defending belief in witchcraft, though he was active in the Royal Society, from a Cartesian perspective citing limits to knowledge, sceptical about causation (anticipating David Hume).64 Glanvill was interested in plain prose, defending Anglicanism from a Platonist position and undertaking scientific studies of witchcraft and psychic phenomena. Glanvill's eliminating wordiness and substituting simple words for complex ones indicate that his stylistic aim was parallel to that of the Royal Society. The transition in his style may be seen as representative of the general movement toward the plain style in scientific and technical writing advocated by the Royal Society and still felt today. Michel de Certeau suggested that scientists condemned literary language for lacking ‘univocity’.65

Glanvill moves towards a clear and distinct style, but at what loss? 66 Stephen Metcalf compares two passages in The Vanity of Dogmatising. Glanvill first wrote: “If after a decoction of hearbs in a Winter night, we expose the liquor to the frigid air; we may observe on the morning under a crust of ice, the perfect appearance both in figure and colour, of the Plants that were taken from it.” This then becomes a general law. “… after a decoction of Herbs in a frosty night the shape of the Plants will appear under the ice in the morning.”67 Charles Dufay the French physicist, departed from Robert Boyle’s ‘virtual witnessing’ to write scientific papers in detail, but offering only essential facts of the experiment and its outcome.68 This is the modern style.

Then there is the rise of print, an issue I can only touch upon. Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued that the printing revolution, which resulted in the publishing of fixed, accurate texts and images, was the key to the scientific revolution.69 Lennard Davis notes, ‘Yet by 1664, when Joseph Glanville translated his book Scepsis Scientifica into the English version The Vanity of Dogmatising, print seems to have attained another status in the culture – it had become a guarantor or preserver of cultural immortality.’70 In contrast, Adrian Johns claims, ‘Far from fixing certainty and truth, print dissolved them. It exacerbated the ephemerality of knowledge.’71

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Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth were initially strong supporters of the new sciences. In a preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth assumes science and poetry can connect and he was intimate with leading figures in the expanding field of geology.72 He viewed language as declining from passion towards mechanical language.73 Richard Dawkins’ attempt to bridge science and poetry (a riposte to Blake, Keats and Newton) is narrowly focussed on the ‘awe of wonder’ that both fields require (a sublime scientific awe (divina voluptas atque horror) that Lucretius experienced with Epicurean cosmology). Dawkins follows Thomas Sprat’s lead not wanting poems from scientists, but simple clarity – ‘The poetry is in the science.’74 He fails to come to terms with poetry.

6. Linnaeus in England

Linnaeus left two great bequests: 1. The binomial system of naming species that he himself admitted was arithmetic and arbitrary, but as he put it, “made the ordering of floral collections less daunting both to the learned and amateurs.” By luck it is open-ended (in his lifetime systema naturae grew from 14 to 1300 pages) and still in use today; but like ideal languages of the 16th & 17th centuries has not the depth nor richness of ordinary language (I described earlier); and2. His simple system interested people in nature and gave them the tools to pay attention to nature.This is despite his deep religious feelings prompting him to write in Systema Naturae (1735) - Nullae species novae (no new species in a perfect world).

I situate Linnaeus’ project among other Enlightenment thinkers from Giambattista Vico (died 1744) to Condorcet (died 1794), who used what was variously called "philosophical" or "natural" history to order, usually hierarchically, their understanding of natural and cultural world. Religion was beginning to lose its ontological and epistemological authority. This order comes at a price (being alert to the ecology).

Mermaids, gryphons & unicorns

"In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." Lord Rutherford

Trophies of imagination: a British Guiana Cottonreel or an Hawaiian Missionary, or Roubles with and without lightningwhen the wind eases and night feeds the mind with dreams of flight, control, prediction and repetition and ideals of reversibility in experimental science. The rest of our studies have not that freedom, hence our vast ambition for economy, engineering triumphs/ disasters, exotic food (roast flamingo sating Roman orgies) and exotic décor (pink flamingos haunting Americana), and novelty (the platypus the British Museum thought faked). We are sealing so much of the shrinking worldpunctured by bolts, steel, chemicals, clear felling and oil. The sacred is not sacred. Value clings to celebrity, eviscerated language tunes to sales and slogans, swallows don’t arrive right and the birds are singing much shorter faster songs.

Taxonomist Richard Fortey argues for the centrality of his trade. Far from mere "stamp collecting," taxonomy provides the very foundation for almost all other studies involving organisms: biogeography, biostratigraphy, evolutionary studies, paleoecology, and so on. The process of ordering Bill Bryson terms ‘a battleground’, and he relates the serious lack of taxonomists.75

Linnaeus thought there were no more than 12,000 species of plants and animals, but we estimate between 15 to 80 million, about 2 million of which have been classified. It has been estimated that only between 1% and 5% of all micro-organisms on Earth have been named and classified. A large proportion of these unknown species is thought to reside in the soil.76 Microbes, though ignored except for the tiny percentage of pathogens, keep the earth’s biosphere functioning.

Linnaeus became famous sooner in England than anywhere else, partly due to his showmanship. He first became prominent as an explorer (who faked his journey and his Lapp costume seen in the portrait on the introductory panel) who toured Paris, London and Amsterdam. Following the publication of the first edition of Systema Naturæ in 1735, he worked for three years in Holland,

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France and England. Fame followed his collection being brought to London which now took became the centre of a developing Linnaeus cult. His influence was also due to Gilbert White, vicar, gentleman, keen gardener, and politically very conservative, but who sensed that culture and nature were inter-connected.

White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789) began as a 'Garden Kalendar' (1751), in the form of letters published so that, ‘stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they reside.’77 The Linnaean nomenclature system arrived in England in 1760 and White was an enthusiastic practitioner. He was also a keen reader of the accounts of travelling naturalists, particularly by the apostles of Linneaus. John Mulso wrote to White, "We have great Faith in your Topography, as if in Fact You had been everywhere."

To give you a taste of White: April (1784)15 Dogs-toothed violets blow.16. Nightingale heard in Maiden-dance. Ring-dove builds in my fields. Black-cap sings.17. The buds of the vines are not swelled yet atall.19. Timothy the tortoise begins to stir. May3. Earthed the annual beds. Set up a copper-vane on the brew house.5. Cut the first cucumber, a large one. Golden weather. . . shot three green-finches, which pull-off the blossoms of the polyanths.78

White's local history and practice of Linnaean taxonomy influenced Coleridge, Thomas Gray, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin and others. Horace Walpole complained after Thomas Gray's death (Elegy in a Country Churchyard) in 1771, that his friend would spend hours annotating his copy of Linnaeus' Systema Natura rather than writing poetry. 1771 the date Herder wrote Essay on the Origin of Language and a date I chose for proto-romantic notions of nature by Goethe and Rousseau (see my installation). White importantly started a botanising fad that swept through the leisure classes and encouraged attention to nature, even by women.

7. Erasmus Darwin, a didactic poet

Erasmus Darwin poet and doctor and inventor became interested in the work of Linnaeus and undertook a translation of his major taxonomic works (1783 & 1787). He promoted Linnaean taxonomy, praising its simple hierarchical organisation and tried to apply it to his own speciality - medicine.

Darwin used the didactic poem as an informational poetic providing scientific information, a tradition going back to Lucretius who wrote a new type of epic didactic poem, ‘De Rerum Natura’ (‘On the Nature of Things’) which informs and argues on various topics, from farming to cosmology and an early evolutionary notion, and development of the arts and technologies, refusing to cite the Gods as causes. The poem championed the philosophy of Epicurus, through investigating the nature of the world and our presence in it, and uses the plough as metaphor for fecund creativity.79

The didactic remerged in the 18th C with poets like Welshman John Dyer who published The Fleece (1757) a long informational poem (in Miltonic blank verse) on the wool trade and industrialisation. He celebrated a rapidly changing England with increasing division of labour, which required a new industrialised georgic.80 In the Eclogues Virgil describes, ‘and now far-off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops’ – whereas, Dyer describes smoke issuing from fast expanding Yorkshire mill towns as, ‘incense of thanksgiving.’ The poem’s didactic and informational style is clear from the précis provided. The poem opens, ‘The care of Sheep, the labours of the loom, / And arts of trade, I sing.’

The didactic poem i.e. one intended to educate or provide information (as opposed to the sense of the morally didactic) was revived and transformed by lesser-known Romantics (despite Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756) which instigated one important strand of Romantic sensibility – an antipathy to didactic poetry.81) This revival was not for neo-classical and moralistic reasons, but scientific ones (and emerged later with poets like W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Jorie Graham and J.H. Prynne).

78 Journals of Gilbert White, Ed., Walter Johnson, Routlede & Kegan Paul, 1970. [Slightly edited].15

Erasmus Darwin hoped, ‘to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy.’82 His long didactic poems are in traditional forms, and hard to read today, though The Loves of the Plants, part 2 of The Botanic Garden was published in the same year as Lyrical Ballads 1798 and was vastly more popular, despite the new popularity of the lyric form. Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth is viewed as triggering the Romantic Revolution in English poetry. Coleridge and Shelley, among others admired his pedagogical poems (culminating with The Temple of Nature, 1803).

Yet Erasmus Darwin, a poet, first suggested that evolution is a historical and contingent process, independently of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (died1829) (of whose work he was apparently ignorant). Erasmus had a clear idea of evolution - change over time - species "strive" to change in response to environmental pressures, but he had no clear idea of how adaptive change came about. In Zoonomia, He suggested: “All animals . . . originate from a single living filament.” But the cell 85 The Romantic poets which was engraved by Blake, Fuseli and others. Darwin was particularly interested in mechanics (a key member of the Lunar Society) as well as botany and prefiguring his grandson’s theory of evolution. Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton were key players. It ended around 1809. 86Wilfred Blunt suggests, "perhaps, however, it was just as well that he had these blind spots: a tenth part of the task he was to set himself would have been a lifetime's work for any ordinary man (as he frequently said). Wilfred Blunt, Linneaus, Collins 1971, p31.87 Desmond King-Hele In the appendix of his biography of Erasmus.53 Poetic diction has been an issue since Aristophanes’ suggestion that Euripedes claimed to use ‘language man to man’. Aristophane’s The Frogs contains a debate on poetics between Aeschylus and Euripides. Euripedes boasted he did not rely on the fabulous, ‘I wrote about familiar things, things the audience know about.’ (from L959, l959). classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/frogs.html. He didn’t use extravagant vocabulary or add obscure references. He spoke in human terms (phrazein anthropeis, language man to man) avoiding ornament. (1178) He writing was clear and accurate (saphes, leptos). The diction employed for this thesis is neither poetic, nor overly theoretical. I write merely to be understood. Paul Fry's A Defense of Poetry (1995) won the Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature 1996 , for, ’It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasise, in reading, the helplessness-rather than the will to power-of its fall into conceptuality.’54 Horace argued in Ars Poetica, ‘in weaving together your words you will have / great success if your exciting juxtapositions / make the common word suddenly new.’ (L46-48) Horace, The Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles, London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1892. Eliot claimed ‘What Dryden did in fact, was to reform the language, and devise a natural, conversational style of speech in verse in place of an artificial and decadent one. . . he restored English verse to the condition of speech.’ Dryden emphasises naturalness in his 1664 dedication to ‘The Rival Ladies’ where he asks for ‘the elegance of prose’ and in his ‘Essay on Dramatic Poetry’ (1665/6, pub 1668).55 Parkes suggests that, ‘Locke’s views contributed to the formation of what became a prevalent attitude regarding the English language: that it ought to be subjected to a process of careful regulation with a view to achieving correctness and precision for the expression and communication of ideas . . .’ M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, Scholar Press, 1992, p91.56 ‘Historically, there was a standard of prose, and especially of expository prose, that the vernacular had to achieve. French Neo-classicism led the way here too; the strictures against figurative language in Sprat and the Royal Society imitated the French Academy and neo-classical ideals of diction.’ Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, Yale 1980, p135. It is this elegance and discipline that led the poet Malherbe to proclaim, ‘I will always defend the purity of the French tongue,’ and the poet, Mallarmé to attempt to ‘purify the language of the tribe.’ Purity ends up with music or even just sound. Hugo Ball, ‘In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep poetry for its last and holiest refuge.’ Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, Tran Ann Raimes, Viking, 1974, p71.57 John Carey, Faber book of Science, Faber and Faber 1995, p8-9, As Hartman puts it, ‘Historically, there was a standard of prose, and especially of expository prose, that the vernacular had to achieve. French Neo-classicism led the way here too; the strictures against figurative language in Sprat and the Royal Society imitated the French Academy and neo-classical ideals of diction.’ Hartman, ibid ,p135.58 Jill Bradbury claims, ‘Their concern with semantics, referentiality, and rhetoric was perhaps the most important philosophical influence on the eighteenth-century understanding of literary kinds.’ Jill Marie Bradbury, ‘New Science and the "New Species of Writing": Eighteenth-Century Prose Genres’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 27:1, 2003, p30.59 He was student of the secretary to the Royal Society, John Wilkins, The History was published in 1667 (the same year as Paradise Lost) and attacks poetry (despite being prefaced by an ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ by Abraham Cowley, Poet Laureate. The danger in Spratt’s opinion was ‘Obfuscation caused by the national fondness for metaphor, imagery, ambiguity and verbal embellishments of all kinds should be avoided as more proper to the childhood of the language and unsuited to the age of reason that it has now attained.’ Quoted Parry, ibid, p151. However Richard Dawkins thinks there is poetry in science but not in the writing, clarity will suffice because ‘The poetry is in the science.’ He is mistaken poetry is in the language. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: science, delusion and the appetite for wonder, Houghon Mifflin, 1998.60 Bacon’s New Organon anticipated a language in strict relation with nature, ‘And for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of eloquence, and such like emptiness, let it be utterly dismissed.

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1. abolition of slavery 2. adiabatic expansion (gases heat and

cool as they expand /condense)3. aesthetics 4. afforestation 5. air travel 6. animal camouflage 7. artesian wells 8. artificial insemination 9. aurorae 10. biological adaptation 11. biological pest control 12. canal lifts (locks)

13. carriage design 14. cemeteries 15. centrifugation 16. cloud formation 17. compressed air 18. copying machines 19. educational reform 20. electrical machines 21. electrotherapy 22. evolutionary theory 23. exercise for children 24. fertilizers 25. formation of coal

Also let all those things which are admitted be themselves set down briefly and concisely, so that they may be nothing les than words.’ The Works, Eds., J Spedding et al; Riverside Press. 1863, V4, p254.61 Thomas Sprat, a student of the secretary to the Royal Society, John Wilkins, began his History of the Royal Society in 1663. He attacks poetry despite a preface ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ by Abraham Cowley. The book’s major theme is the purification of language from poetic artifice given that language was a tool for learning. He complained, ‘The poets of old to make all things look more venerable than they were, devised a thousand false Chimeras; on every Field, River, Grove and Cave they bestowed a Fantasm of their own making: With these they amazed the world... we are beholden to experiments; which though they have not yet completed the discovery of the true world, yet they have already vanquished those wild inhabitants of the false world, that us’d to astonish the minds of men.’ quoted p 166-7. He warned of ‘the national fondness for metaphor, imagery, ambiguity and verbal embellishments.’ Walter Ong notes the roots of Spratt’s ideas, ‘The plain style, about which so much has been written lately, emerges as an ideal and actuality among their followers, particularly the Puritan or other ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘Methodist’ preachers whose formal education was controlled by a Ramist [16th century logician Petrus Ramus] dialectic evolved to the limit of its original implications.’ Ramus... (1958) Octagon Books, 1974, p283.62 Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, Yale 1980, p149.63 Joseph Glanvill, Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advance of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle, ed. Jackson I. Cope (1668; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Fascimiles and Reprints, 1958), Paula Findlen Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Configurations 6.2 (1998, qu p26464 Moody E. Prior, ‘Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft, and Seventeenth-Century Science’, Modern Philology, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Nov., 1932), pp. 167-193. Stephen Metcalf believes Glanvill turned from Puritanism towards a Platonist rationalism influenced by Descartes.65 Literary language, ‘lays on the stratification of meaning; it narrates one thing in order to tell something else; it delineates itself in a language from which it continually draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked.’ de Certeau, ibid, 1983, p128 66 Third version of Vanity published under the title, Against Confidence in Philosophy (1676), see H.F. Kearney, ‘Merton Revisited’, Science Studies, Vol 3:1, Review Issue Jan. 1973, 72-78.67 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatising: The Three Versions, with a critical introduction by Stephen Metcalf, Hove, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1970.68 Galileo quoted in Edward Jones, Reading the Book of Nature, Ohio UP, 1989, p22. Quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, OUP, 1980, p 97.69 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge UP, 1979, p71-88, 180-2, 186, 193-4.70 Lennard J Davis, Factual Fictions: the origins of the English novel, Penn, 83, p14071 He emphasises that texts at this time were not standardised, piracy and editorial meddling were widespread For example, Shakespeare's first folio, ‘boasted some six hundred different typefaces, along with non-uniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and arrangement, mispaging and irregular proofing.’ Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, U of Chicago P, 1998, p31. No two copies were identical and no one version is correct.72 ‘Poetry... is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.’ Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, in The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1992, P752-3.73 In the "Appendix to the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" (1802) and the "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" (1815) See F. Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, New Haven & London, 1977, p6.74 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder, Houghon Mifflin, 1998.75 Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Black Swan, 2004, p43776 Estimates of the possible number of existing species of different groups are staggering: 1.5 million species of fungi, 300,000 species of bacteria, 400,000 species of nematodes and 40,000 species of protozoa.77 The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White - ‘In a series of letters addressed to THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. and The Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON Advertisement. The Author of the following Letters takes the liberty, with all proper deference, of laying before the public his idea of parochial history, which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities. He is also of opinion that if stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they reside, and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects that surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county-histories.’ http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu/webRoot/Books/_Gutenberg_Etext_Books/etext98/tnhos10.txt

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26. geological stratification 27. hereditary disease 28. individuality of buds 29. insecticides 30. language 31. light verse 32. limestone deposits 33. manures 34. materialism 35. mental illness 36. microscopy 37. mimicry 38. moon's origin 39. nerve impulses 40. night airglow 41. nitrogen cycle 42. ocular spectra 43. organic happiness 44. origin of life 45. outer atmosphere 46. phosphorous 47. photosynthesis 48. Portland vase 49. rocket motors 50. rotary pumps

51. secular morality 52. seed-drills 53. sewage farms 54. sexual reproduction 55. speaking machines 56. squinting 57. steam carriages 58. steam turbines 59. struggle for survival 60. submarines 61. survival of the fittest 62. telescopes 63. temperance 64. timber production 65. travel of seeds 66. treatment of dropsy 67. ventilation 68. versifying science 69. warm and cold fronts 70. water closets 71. water machines 72. wind-gauges 73. windmills

79 ‘The changeless stuff, and what from that may spring / Is fixed forevermore? Lastly we see How far the tilled surpass the fields untilled / And to the labour of our hands return / Their more abounding crops; there are indeed / Within the earth primordial germs of things, / Which, as the ploughshare turns the fruitful clods / And kneads the mould, we quicken into birth.’ from Proem BOOK I. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Ed. & Trans. Cyril Bailey, OUP, 1947. The form may have derived from Empedocles’ poem, ‘On Nature’ (which Aristotle argued was not a poem) Dalzell notes that Aristotle initiated the debate on the status of didactic poetry when he denied the status of poet to Empedocles, but ancient writers did not recognise the didactic as a separate genre. The debate has been sterile. Alexander Dalzell, The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, U of Toronto P, 1996. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Trans. William Ellery Leonard, http://classics.mit.edu//Carus/nature_things.html80 Native 18th C Georgics include: John Phillip’s ‘Cyder’ (1708), Christopher Smart’s ‘Hop Garden’ (c1750) and Stephen Duck on the sweat of labour (c1725).81 Warton wrote that Pope excelled in poetry ‘of the didactic, moral, and satyric kind; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry Quoted by Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England, Princeton UP, 1970, p366.82 "Advertisement," The Botanic Garden, Part II. Containing The Loves of the Plants: A Poem. With Philosophical Notes (1789). See Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. See the section The Poetics of Labour; Chap. 4. The Georgic at Work; and Chap5. The Lyricisation of Labour.83 The struggle for existence is present in Erasmus Darwin's description of plants striving for light and air: “All animals therefore, I contend, have a similar cause of their organization, originating from a single living filament.” Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the laws of organic life, Volume 1 Boston, Thomas and Andrews 1803, p392 [Second American Edition, from the Third London Edition,. The term “filament” may seem vague; keep in mind that the cell theory of Schleiden and Schwann, that all living organisms are composed of cells and cells are the basic building blocks of tissues, dates from 1838-39. “The final course of this contest among males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species which should thus be improved."84 Between the time of his return from the Beagle voyage and the publication, more than 20 years later, of the Origin of Species.

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74. wind 75. women's emancipation

By 1791, Darwin was not so popular. Alarmed by the French Revolution, England embraced a conservatism at odds with the radical, individualistic, atheistic materialism of Erasmus. He died in 1802 and was buried in a purple velvet dressing gown.

8. Attention to objects

These species you see around you were once individuals with individual behaviour patterns and DNA, and many are endangered - or have adapted to a planet of weeds and ferals we are creating. “In the US, there are five times as many raccoons per square mile in suburban settings than in ‘the wild’.”88 And there are 10,000 pet tigers but only 7,000 in the wild!

If you recall, Robert Boyle encouraged our “thoughts to expatiate much further, and to make of the Objects they contemplate . . .”89 Rosamond Purcell notes, “A label without the specimen has intrinsic historical value but, as a curator of mammals once said to me, "a monkey without its tag is worthless”."90 I mention objects in the flyer, and would just add that I think we must respect the autonomy of objects, to quote Richard Sennett (from a very different context) – “Autonomy . . . requires a relationship in which one party accepts that he or she cannot understand something about the other. The acceptance that one cannot understand things about another gives both standing and equality in the relationship. Autonomy supposes, at once, connection and strangeness, closeness and impersonality.’91

I have been asked - so I must just state my innocence – I did not pull the legs off the creature in my video. I am guilty of being a witness, as we all are. Living objects are the more powerful, and in the accompanying poem (on the wall), I investigate this issue.

James Putnam of the British Museum writes, “It is a vital role of a museum to paint the larger picture, to reveal the life behind the artefact, to present the interpretation imaginatively and to provoke the visitor's thought rather than simply instruct. One of the most enjoyable features of a museum is the opportunity to browse and explore its unknown territory which offers ample opportunity for accidental, spontaneous discovery and enlightenment. . .”92 A museum's programs and objects ideally act as catalysts for conversations, memory, imagination, research, aesthetic appreciation, curiosity, and empathy (like James Clifford’s notion of museums as "contact zones".93)

Poems are artefacts with the same potential. Poems provide opportunities to use our amazing cognitive technique of language which connect us with our environments, facilitating webs of meaning and skilled practice we continually weave in our dreams and every moment of our waking lives. I use poetry to work with the world. In his Defence of Poetry §279: ‘It [poetry] is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred.’ (A theory first seen in the poems 'Epipsychidion' and 'Hymn of Apollo'). Wordsworth also proclaimed poetry as the meta-discipline: ‘the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.’ I make no such claims, preferring poetry that works with other disciplines, including science.

As citizens and neighbours and friends, our responsibility is to use our creative energies and imagination for ongoing dialectical engagement with the world. I’ll end with a poem. My Latin is badly faded but my invention for humans Baro mollis-macresco means something like soft-skinned barbarian. And I should explain the last line. There are three racoon poems in the sequence, and one refers to camping by a lake in Vermont when hearing a rustling at midnight I flashed my torch and saw a racoon escaping with an unopened packet of chocolate biscuits. I gave chase but he got away.

Counterfactual

For the infinitely little is equivalent to the infinitely great. Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Life of an Ant”

If Linnaeus had been an ant, classification would be different. Humans would share a single genus with chimps (we can’t decide whether to love apes for their language or utter wildness) and homo sapiens might be named Baro mollis-macresco. But Linnaeus was Swedish, so the glass case of butterflies

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with wings spread like butter I’ll call light in the shadows, or dancers in the dark, lovely as serried rows of moons.And I should suggest a collective name hovering somewhere between an exultation of larks, span of mules, deceit of lapwings, unkindness of ravens, murmuration of starlings, watch of nightingales, swarm of flies, shoal of fish, cast of ferrets, charm of finches, skein of geese, bevy of swans, down of sheep, wisp of snipes, sneak of weasels, siege of herons and gaze of racoons, though I prefer sneak for racoons.

I’d like to thank the staff especially Jude and Rebecca and Erna for working with me patiently.

88 “Many of these organisms are adaptive generalists—species that flourish in a variety of ecological settings, easily switch among food types, and breed prolifically. And some have their needs met more completely and efficiently by humans than by Mother Nature.” Stephen M. Meyer, The extinction crisis is over. We lost, April 12, 2005, The Boston Review89 J Paul Hunter, ibid, p201-3. Hunter posits such thinking with the beginnings of the novel, ‘It is no accident that journalism and the novel - as well as the adventurous spirit and preoccupation with the epithanic moment of discovery that sponsored both - got their impetus primarily from Protestantism in general and Dissent in particular.’ P199. Hunter’s thesis is that the novel emerged from such an environment rather than being a bastard offspring of romances.90 Rosamond W. Purcell, ‘The game of the name. (natural history collections)(The Problematics of Collecting and Display, part 2)’, The Art Bulletin, v77.n2, June 1995, p180.91 Richard Sennett, Respect, Penguin 2004, p177.92 James Putnam, Department of Egyptology, The British Museum (http://www.tumblong.uts.edu.au/about/putnam.cfm)93 James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’ in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Though in this essay it was the stories and songs of indigenous people not objects that were the focus of attention.

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ENDNOTES

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