Butterflies

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Charles Dickens


There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

R. Buckminster Fuller


Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Nathaniel Hawthorne


My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Vladimir Nabokov

More on Hannah Duston

In yesterday's post, I gave a brief overview of the the new bobbleheads from the New Hampshire Historical Society--Hannah Duston, vengeful mother, and Passaconaway, Penacook Indian chief. I was grateful for the fact that the NHHS chose to model their bobblehead of Hannah after a statue which holds only the hatchet she used to kill her Indian captors (including six or seven children), and not the scalps she took from them. The distillers of Jim Beam whiskey were not so genteel when they turned Hannah into a bottle in 1973. Note that her left hand holds a few scalps, as does the monument to Hannah in Penacook, NH.


For a detailed review of numerous accounts of Hannah Duston's capture and escape, beginning with Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), see Kathryn Whitford's "Hannah Dustin: The Judgement of History." Essex Institute Historical Collections. Vol. CVIII, No. 4 (October 1972), 304-325, excerpted at the Hawthorne in Salem web site. Hawthorne was among the authors who wrote about Hannah and her family. Whitford's article captures the moral, legal, and religious ambiguities of Hannah's actions.

Burdock

Burdock, St. Joesph County, Indiana, August 2, 2008

Until recently, my only knowledge of burdock (Arctium lappa and other species) came from a box of burdock root teabags that has sat in our pantry for years. The blurb on the side of the box extols its health benefits without specifically saying what those benefits are. On a few occasions, during my doomed attempts to get off caffeine, I drank burdock root tea when there was no other herb tea in the house. People have to believe that burdock root tea is healthful, because I can't imagine they would drink it for the taste.

The box of what by now must be unbelievably stale burdock root tea informs me that the plant is native to Europe and Asia, and if allowed, will grow in almost any uncultivated space. In addition to its health benefits, whatever they may be, the stalks can be boiled like asparagus or eaten raw with vinegar. In Japan it is known at gobo and the root is used in everyday cooking.

According to Wayne Bethard's book, Lotions, Potions, and Deadly Elixirs: Frontier Medicine in America, "many folk remedies contained burdock and were said to 'purify the blood' and cure everything from head colds and acne, to cancer and a leaning chimney." He doesn't explain how burdock was supposed to cure a leaning chimney, but he states that burdock extracts contain arctiopiricin, which has antibacterial properties, and he says burdock extracts also have some antitumor and antimutagenic activity.

What got me thinking about burdock recently is an article by Janet Malcolm, entitled "Burdock," in the August 14, 2008 edition of the New York Review of Books. She writes of photographing burdock leaves in a house in the Berkshires for three successive summers. She doesn't specify if this is her occupation or avocation. I assume it is a hobby, as it's hard to imagine there's a huge market for pictures of burdock leaves. She goes on to write about how "photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality," and decontextualization, and other things that tend to make my eyes glaze over.

But the thing I found interesting was her observation that burdock is a "rank weed that grows along roadsides and in waste places and around derelict buildings," and "writers have used it to denote ruin and desolation." Specifically, she cites Hawthorne and Chekhov.

The Hawthorne passage to which Ms. Malcolm refers in her article comes from Chapter 1 of The House of the Seven Gables:

On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or three feet long.

Hawthorne mentioned burdocks again in Chapter 19:

A person of imaginative temperament, while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it well: its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney; the deep projection over its basement-story; the arched window, imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics, and be conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan, Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day.

And still later in Chapter 19, in in a scene involving the young Italian organ grinder I have mentioned in previous posts:

He entered the neglected yard (now wilder than ever with its growth of hog-weed and burdock), stationed himself at the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his show-box, began to play.

He persisted in his melodious appeals

Illustration by Maude and Genevieve Cowles, from 1899 edition of The House of the Seven Gables

Chekhov wrote in his short story, "Ward 6":

In the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco.

and

If one imagined some spirit flying by the earthly globe in space in a million years he would see nothing but clay and bare rocks. Everything -- culture and the moral law -- would pass away and not even a burdock would grow out of them.

If that ain't ruin and desolation,I don't know what is. But not all writers focused on the negative aspects of burdock.

In his journal entry for July 19, 1896, Tolstoy recorded seeing, in the middle of a plowed field, a clump of burdock with one living shoot "black from dust, but still alive and red in the centre....It makes me want to write. It asserts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other has asserted it."

Long live the lowly burdock.

Hawthorne and Lugubrious Drollery

I've now finished reading The House of the Seven Gables. I don't intend to give a formal review, but I would just like to quote one passage, from Chapter 19, where Hawthorne is describing the scene when the Italian organ grinder and his monkey (mentioned in an earlier post here) are performing outside the old Pyncheon house:

Was ever before such a grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance? Yes, very often. This contrast of intermingling of tragedy with mirth, happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house, deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude, was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled to hear the thrill and echo of the world's gayety around it.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of the mournful and the amusing in this passage.

Franklin Pierce the Obscure

It probably has something to do with the fact that I am in my fourteenth hour of reading X-rays, CTs and ultrasounds on call today. I don't know how else to explain this post. I would do almost anything, read almost anything, Google almost anything to get away from the images of the huddled masses in the ERs and ICUs, yearning to have their brain hemorrhages, belly abscesses, and clotted veins diagnosed by yours truly. Actually, the afflicted have no idea who I am, nor will they ever, until they see my name on their bill, for radiologists labor for the most part in obscurity in front of computer monitors. So, for respite between cases, I have been surfing the web for material on the Marx brothers. They are cited as an area of interest in my Blogger profile, but I have not written about them yet. My search took me to David Holzel's zine The Jewish Angle, where he talks about being inspired by Groucho, and his plaster statue of Groucho, like the one I have.
In fact, I have plaster statues of Harpo and Chico as well. Harpo was a wedding present almost thirty-five years ago, and the other brothers were added soon after. From Holzel's site, I linked to The Franklin Pierce Pages, authored by Holzel, Benjamin Bratman, and Todd Leopold. Here, an unusual convergence of items from my recent posts occurred in Bratman's article "Wrested From the Jaws of Triviality." To wit:

Pierce had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president the only nationally elected American official ever to be sworn in on foreign soil. Pierce also had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president a man who never worked one day in the job. William Rufus de Vane King was terminally ill with tuberculosis when he was nominated and subsequently elected as vice president. (This begs the question, why was he selected?). He was sworn in in Cuba where he was seeking medical treatment. Less than a month later, he died, never having assumed his duties.

Ah ha! An example of the modern usage of "begs the question," which I had condemned in recent posts.

Also from Bratman's article:

Pierce’s salad days were clearly in college at Bowdoin College in Maine. There, he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later became a writer and author of The Scarlet Letter, as well as one of Pierce’s closest friends and advisors.

Wow! Another of my newfound obsessions--Nathaniel Hawthorne! Bratman doesn't mention that Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, and was rewarded with the American consulship to Liverpool after Pierce was elected. Hawthorne stayed at the post from 1853-57. Also of note, Hawthorne died on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce in 1864.


Who knows, I may now become obsessed with Franklin Pierce. After all, writing about an obscure president (James Buchanan) paid off for John Updike in his play Buchanan Dying and his novel Memories of the Ford Administration.

The Secret Staircase

In keeping with this blog's fixation on useless information, I have spent a fair amount of time researching one architectural feature which Mary and I saw on our recent tour of The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts. Adjacent to the central fireplace is a door which opens on a "secret staircase." You can't take pictures in the house, so I have included a picture of an old postcard, with the addition of two arrows to show the entry to the narrow stairway. I was pretty sure the guide said the staircase was installed during the 1909 restoration of the house initiated by Caroline Emmerton. When I came home and started looking around that great cesspool of misinformation known as the World Wide Web, I found many purported facts about the staircase, such as:

- In the novel, it led from Clifford's room to the first floor.
- Hawthorne learned about the staircase from his cousin, Susannah Ingersoll, who lived there
- It was built in the nineteenth century.
- The door to the staircase was discovered in the 1880s.
- It was used to hide slaves as part of the Underground Railroad.

To all these assertions, I respond with a resounding, "Horse hockey!" I am reading the novel now, and there I can find no mention of a secret staircase, nor can I find one online in searchable versions of the book. There is a scene where Hepzibah is looking for Clifford in his room and where he mysteriously appears in the parlor, but there is no indication of how he got there.

Regarding when the staircase was built, I cite as an authority Alexandria Mason, who wrote in the Curator's Corner column of the Summer/Fall 2004 edition of The House of the Seven Gables newsletter:

Some may wonder why we have chosen to restore the chimneys to their 1909 appearance rather than to one based on the 17th century. The answer is that preservationists today base restorations on hard evidence and we do not have information regarding the appearance of the original chimneys built by the Turners.

This leads to an important question. How did Chandler know what they looked like? Pictures of the house as early as 1857, of which Chandler would have known, reveal that the medieval chimneys were long gone, having been replaced with narrow chimneys used for gas stove pipes. In fact, Chandler’s restoration was very much influenced by Hawthorne’s novel, The House of the Seven Gables, and by his memory of the medieval chimneys of Europe. With both as his inspiration, he rebuilt all three chimneys to appear as if they were ancient, creating an elaborately pilastered central chimney with a “secret” stair descending from “Clifford’s room” in the attic to the dining room. One can assume Caroline Emmerton instructed him to make the house as exciting for visitors as possible in order to ensure revenue for her Settlement House activities!

She is referring to Joseph Everett Chandler, who was hired by Caroline Emmerton to renovate the house. I like Ms.Mason's writing for a few reasons. First, she implies with quotation marks that the idea of anyplace in this house being "Clifford's Room" is quite a stretch, as there doesn't seem to be all that much evidence that Hawthorne based much but the title on the Turner-Ingersoll house. Second, she is honest enough to admit that Caroline Emmerton's goal was to generate revenue rather than seeking historical accuracy. Third, instead of following the annoying modern trend of misusing the phrase, "begs the question," she correctly writes, "leads to the question." In logic, begging the question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true.

Kudos to Ms. Mason for her article, and to Caroline Emmerton for making life imitate art, more or less.

Prolixity

In the previous post, I talked about our visit to Salem, Mass., and landmarks associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne. I am doing my best to read The House of the Seven Gables. In Chapter XI, "The Arched Window," Hawthorne goes into a prolonged description (all his descriptions seem prolonged) of an Italian organ grinder and his monkey who plied their trade on the streets of the New England town (based on Salem) where the novel is set. He writes, "The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italian's feet." In the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, I found the following:

Main Entry: pro·lix
Pronunciation: \prō-ˈliks, ˈprō-(ˌ)\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French prolix, from Latin prolixus extended, from pro- forward + liquēre to be fluid — more at liquid
Date: 15th century
1 : unduly prolonged or drawn out : too long
2 : marked by or using an excess of words
synonyms see wordy
— pro·lix·i·ty \prō-ˈlik-sə-tē\ noun
— pro·lix·ly adverb

So it seems Hawthorne, who was given to prolixity in the sense of using an excess of words, considered the monkey's tail to be not only too long, but preposterously too long. Who is he to judge? Aren't monkeys supposed to have long tails?

In any case, the word reminded me of Prolixin, a brand name for the anti-psychotic drug fluphenazine. Although I have no reason to prescribe anti-psychotic drugs in my line of work, I will never forget Prolixin because of an encounter I had with a patient during a night on call on a psych rotation as a medical student. I believe it was at the county hospital, or maybe it was at the VA, and I had to interview a schizophrenic patient. He said to me, "I used to be big until they turned me into a baby with Proplipsin." I don't recall specifically why he showed up in the emergency room that night, or any of the rest of the conversation, but that statement, for some strange reason, has stuck with me. Partly, I suppose, it was the interesting pronunciation of the drug's name, and partly perhaps because on the face of it, it sounds absurd, but you can sort of understand what he meant--that he felt somehow diminished by his treatment.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here is the latest in my continuing series of dead author landmarks. During our recent visit to Salem, Massachusetts, Mary took this picture of me at the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom I first became acquainted playing the card game "Authors" as a child. Other authors I recall from the game are Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Louisa May Alcott. I don't recall that playing the game inspired me to read any of their works. But I digress. In keeping with the spirit of promoting tourism, which seems to be the main concern in Salem, Hawthorne's birthplace has been moved from its original location, and now sits on the same property as the House of the Seven Gables. One ticket buys you admission to both.


The only Nawthorne novel I had read up till now was The Scarlet Letter, and that was approximately a hundred years ago, in high school. I did my part to boost the local economy, and bought a copy of The House of The Seven Gables in the The House of Seven The Gables Bookstore, before taking the official guided tour of The House of the Seven Gables. The tour started a few minutes before the scheduled time because the guide was quite concerned that our group get through the house before a busload of 60 clamoring adolescents on a school field trip.


Turns out it's debatable that this is the house upon which Hawthorne based his book, although he had a cousin who lived there, and was known to have visited her at the house. As I understand it, the house has had a variable number of gables over the years due to repeated remodeling, and at some point had seven gables, but was down to three in Hawthorne's time. It was purchased in the early twentieth century by a woman who believed in life imitating art, and she had the mansion restored, complete with seven gables (though some people argue there are really eight), and put a cent shop in one of the rooms, like in the novel, even though there had never been a shop in the house. Whatever.


This is another house which Hawthorne lived in with his family after his father died--the Manning house.