I had the strangest experience the other day. It starts with one of the books I am reading called Things That Are by Amy Leach. So extremely hard to describe. It’s a collection of essays, which are my latest passion because that is something I can write. I’ve been reading it off and on for some years now. I got halfway through, put it down, and when I came back had to start over again.
My first thought about how to describe is to say that she is a nature writer, somewhat like Henry David Thoreau in that the essays are a cross between the natural world, the philosophical world, and the writer’s world. Can there be a three-way cross? Anyway, that still doesn’t really explain. Then I realized that it reminds me of Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky except it isn’t nonsense and the words are not invented but spring from taxonomy and, dare I say, esoteric vocabulary. BTW, perusing the back cover, I find I am not alone in that appraisal as someone named Yiyun Li is quoted as saying she is “Like a descendant of Lewis Carrol…” It’s the words, the enchanting, bewitching words.
Amy Leach’s work is, for me, what I imagine poetry is for others. I am taking a long time to read, not because it is hard to read or not interesting enough. It is that the essays are extremely attractive to me, and I want to wallow in them. These are not words to read quickly to get to a point. They often are the point. This is prose to read slowly, to savor and, sorry, to “lick the plate” to get every last drop.
And none of that is the actual strange experience. But first, let me set the scene by listing a few of the chapter titles.
In Which the River Makes Off with Three Stationary Characters
Goats and Bygone Goats
Silly Lilies
The Wine of Astonishment
Love
God
Please Do Not Yell at the Sea Cucumber
Makes you want to explore, eh? I know! Especially when you learn that the chapter titled Love is about Love-in-Idleness (Viola tricolor), Love-in-a-mist (Nigella Damascena), Love-Lies-Bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus), and Love-Bind (Clematis vitalba, although I know it as old man’s beard). All flowering plants that are natural, native, or whatever you call not created by horticultural means. Sometimes, in the wrong place, weeds. Having a degree in horticulture, and a personal struggle between nature and technology for the last 25 years, I was intrigued to read about the first, the Love-in-Idleness.
This is how the essay begins. I’m not making money here, so I hope that quoting it is okay. If ever I become published, I’ll deal with my trespasses.
“In the year 3,000,002,012 the Andromeda Galaxy my collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In a galactic collision the stars do not actually collide—as with crisscrossing marching bands, only the interstices collide.”
“What?” you may say. At any rate, I sure did. I start with the title Love, move to the subtitle Love-in-Idleness, and suddenly I’m in a colliding galaxy with a reference to marching bands which was one of my lifelong best times in high school. Where are we going?
“But, unlike the gaps between clarinetists (ME!) …”
All of this, and the couple of paragraphs that follow, are to talk about the collision and what will be left of the earth, so she can talk about what will repopulate. The wild viola is something she thinks will be there because it can grow amongst the rubble. Yes, I have had many a viola pop up randomly in the gravel of the driveway. It is a survivor. Leach describes them as having “lax standards” in comparison to the cultivated cousin pansies. And the words, the words, the words that follow. They beg to be read aloud. I read on and on, absorbing and enjoying that I actually know of what she speaks.
Then comes the word. The one that caused the strange experience. Was it my new reflex reaction? Was it that I was tired and reading in bed? Was it madness (prefer that to saying it was old ladyness)? I tried to long press the word to get the dictionary to pop up. Friends, this is a paperback book. A wonderful one printed on linen-like recycled paper with deckled edges, but a physical book none-the-less. And, being frustrated that nothing happened, I tried again. And then…I laughed. I laughed so hard that the spooky (spooks like a horse – run first, ask questions later) cat beside me leapt to the floor lest this strange think foreshadow the coming of a monster.
That’s the strange experience. I’ve been reading for almost 65 years and only thirteen of those on a Kindle e-reader. And less than that 13 years has the pop-up dictionary been available. But here I am with my brain wanting the same experience in the paper. Of course, with no one there I was not embarrassed, and had I not written this no one would know. But my fascination with everything brains these past years makes me wonder if it was not a thought, but a learned experience for my finger. Brain needs info, finger can get info, push. I suppose these technologies, the ancient paper/book and the relative nascent e-reader, will merge someday in a hologram where I feel a book, but it acts like a Kindle. Meanwhile, I decided that the corresponding technology of a paper dictionary was the answer. And I will not punish finger or brain for doing what now comes naturally.
What caused this collision of technologies? Myrmidon. I have never encountered the word myrmidon before, and I’ve got to say that the definition did not help without the wrap-around sentences. Please note that love-bind is a vining weed that encapsulates and entraps, creating new shapes with its captive as the form beneath. Myrmidon means a loyal follower.
After describing how it acts, Leach writes:
“Could we marshal all our myrmidons and send them in, with spikes and poison, to argle-bargle with the love bin even they might become shapes: myrmidon shapes, blanketed in greenleaf. Burly armored warriors from being waylaid by love-bind.”
“Clematis vitalba never goes feeble-brown: it ever reaches, ever enwraps, like the effusion from some fanatical knitter’s speed-needles.”
I have a plant that is not as invasive or enrobing as that clematis, but I can really use my imagination with the image of those last words. It was a strange experience to try to get my paper to give me the technology my finger sought. However, the experience of this book I can sum up using a quote on the cover from David Abram, “Infernally addictive.”
Sidebar, although I’m not going to the trouble of making an actual sidebar. Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born author and David Abram is as indescribable as the writing in the book. His philosophy is informed by phenomenology (in particular, by the work of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), according to the bio at wildethics.org. He was born three years after me, so not really in the midst of the hippie movement, but the concept of phenomenology still seems to underpin one of those careers where a person gets paid just to think. I read the explanation at plato.stanford.edu and now know less about it than if I’d just stuck to Wikipedia. 😊
Amy Leach has a new book due to be released 11/16/21. I think I may have to get that one on Kindle, so the finger gets what the finger wants. The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays, and Other Pandemoniums. When it comes out in paperback, though, I may get a copy to sit with the other, so I may linger longer with my dictionary at hand.