The clock ticks: Friday, Feb 3
Today's miscellany is about mostly evolution and canines
Happy Friday, friends! It is so exciting to know I’m speaking with a few more of you each week. I try to picture each of you as I write, to consider whether I am likely holding your attention or losing you, surprising you or satisfying, shocking or pleasing, or a bit of both.
Some writers write without thinking of the eventual reader at all, some write with a specific person in mind, some address an ideal reader. I think I usually do best when I imagine real people. It makes me more alert, more specific, more ‘on’, as if on-stage. It also makes this newsletter feel like a gift I’m putting together for you, a specific person I care about. I guess when I write, I think a lot about (or feel a lot about) the effect I’m exerting with my words. This often requires painstaking rewriting and fussy adjustments of a word here, a word there—or even the careful re-arrangement of blank space to achieve what I hope your brain will do as you look at the screen or the page.
Not that any of that—gift-giving, speaking directly to you, use of the first person, manipulating or massaging your feelings—has to be or ought to be in of all writing, nor all fiction. By no means. Still, I personally find it motivating to write with a sense of direct connection to readers, for non-fiction but also for fiction, and even if I intend to provoke or disturb. On that note, here is a medieval dog with hands, reading a book.
Some housekeeping notes since we’re still mostly all new here. Already know the drill? Skip down a bit. Late in the week, you will receive a miscellany of literary, artsy, and wonder-of-nature goodies to stimulate imaginative thinking. You may want to use some of them to make a commonplace book (as explained below). This miscellany is what has just crossed your virtual threshold as a kind of stimulating bonus to the Sunday main event focused on fiction and living more lives. On Sundays, then, I hope you can stay in bed or at worst just crawl out in your pyjamas to make some coffee, then settle in for a good read. If not, I hope you can find a mental Sunday for it somewhere in the week. And now, I need some input from you…
Please let me know which you prefer. But if you have other wishes or feedback, you can also be in touch with me directly at carly_z@hotmail.com or via Twitter DM (@CarlynZwaren). I’m eager to hear it! I like granting wishes, if I can. I know the Tooth Fairy, the Valentine’s Fairy, and even Santa Claus.
And now on to today’s miscellany. If you’ve forgotten what a commonplace book is, here’s a sweet blog that explains it. The idea is that you can open a google doc right now, cut and paste the bits from these weekday emails that appeal to you each week, add in other flotsam and jetsam you come across, and in time you’ll have your very own book of written treasures.
Since I first learned about evolution (from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and those who have elaborated on and filled in the details of how it works) and in fact even before I knew the basics of it, I’ve been fascinated by the concept, by the way of understanding the world it allows, and really by everything related to it, as well as how it might be explored in fiction and poetry.
In high school I had a superb biology teacher, Mr. Staines. He explained really clearly how natural selection works on the variation among individuals within populations to produce, over vast stretches of time, the mind-bending diversity of flora and fauna and fungi (etcetera) that exist on Earth today & that have existed in the past.
Photo of a young Kinu to demonstrate mind-bending cuteness.
Later, I learned from Jill Lazenby, the feminist science historian PhD who taught my university history of biology class about the development of, acceptance of, and opposition to Darwin’s radical ideas. Radical in implication, sure, as Darwin’s theory described a world in which diversity, complexity and abundance arise from random chance, not from intelligent design by God. Yet Darwin was cautious and scrupulous rather than radical in spirit, his ideas arising from attentive observation, painstaking data collection, creative thinking, and his refusal to ignore evidence that upended even his own received ideas.
If I remember right, Lazenby also described the misuse of Darwin’s concepts by folks like his cousin, Francis Galton, the guy who invented fingerprinting (cool, for crime novels, at least) and coined the word ‘eugenics’ (not cool). (Darwin was interested in artificial selection and though he took a staunch and progressive stand against slavery, his writing nevertheless does reflect the racism and imperialism of his day. He died before Galton really developed the idea of eugenics, a way to supposedly improve the human ‘race’ that ultimately led to the Nazis’ Rassenhygiene, the murder of disabled children, and its extension into the notorious Aktion ‘T4’ program, altogether murdering an estimated 250,000 people.)
In a comparative anatomy class (which, along with the horrors of eugenics, partly inspired the novel I’m working on now), I witnessed evidence of evolution of different vertebrates from a common ancestor, by dissecting a number of them. In physical anthropology, I got to see the same thing by observing differences and similarities among different hominid skulls. On a tropical ecology field course on Ometepe Island in Nicaragua, the evidence of evolutionary processes came via varying species of bats whose presence I recorded, though ineptly, at different elevations of a volcano. We see it in the speedy profusion of SARS-CoV2 variants, too, as unmitigated spread provides natural selection ample material on which to work.
The Origin of Species is, for the most part, a beautiful piece of writing. That last, glorious sentence1:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
One such example: the three pound, crepuscular (=active at twilight), cream-coloured little Fennec Fox, the smallest and surely the sweetest of all the foxes, smallest even of all the canids (except maybe those dogs bred to fit in a purse), with these wonderful heat-dissipating, underground-insect-hearing ears, like the ears of the B.F.G.
Oy, I have such an ingrained tendency to find patterns and make connections that I quickly subvert my intended randomness. I have far more to say on evolution, on Darwin, and on their relationship to fiction but I had better set it aside for another day. In fact, before I give up totally and acknowledge that this is more of a themed weekly collection than a miscellany, here’s a delightful essay about the writer Katherine Mansfield and food.
And this: one of my daily travels by foot this week, I came across this display in an otherwise vacant-looking storefront roughly opposite the House of Lancaster all-nude gentleman’s club. From a scrawl on the door it looks like this is the new home or maybe part-time or temporary location of Superwonder, an art gallery last seen in another part of town. As Toronto is gobbled up by the global financialization of housing and lack of rent control on either newer residential or commercial buildings, the creators of urban culture must constantly move as rent is opportunistically tripled or quintupled or octupled out of the realm of possibility. I actually address this financialization and its impact on homelessness and misery across North America in the last section of this 2020 article, if you’d like a taste of grim reality to balance out your fiction. I don’t know who made these charming cardboard horses but will add credit if I find out.
I constantly discover beautiful oddities on my walks and am pleased to be able to share them with you.
It was snowy last week though not that storm to end all storms we were promised; this week there is still snow but also we expect -20 Celsius2 though icily sunny weather this weekend. This is all the excuse I need to share another winter poem with you. This one is very special, and if anything feels like giving a gift, it’s letting you know that this exists. It’s by Ted Hughes, which, whatever you think of him as a husband, really was a fine poet. I love Sylvia Plath’s poetry very much too, and am glad there’s no need to choose between them. But listen to this!
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a moment, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow,
between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to comeAcross clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
-Ted HughesIf you are, perhaps, already working on a piece of writing—a poem or a short story or a novella or a novel, or even non-fiction, or even a piece of art, a creation that won’t emerge without loneliness, delicately and warily, even perhaps the cold, brilliant thought that precedes an actual creation—well, I wish you your very own visit from the Thought-Fox this weekend.
Till Sunday, friends,
Carlyn
This is the 6th edition, with God as a sort of prime mover prudently restored. I think all versions rise to this appropriately heightened and awe-struck poetry at the end, though, regardless of whether somebody sets the process of evolution in motion at the start or not.
That’s -4 Fahrenheit for my American friends, which sounds deceptively toasty to me. While you’re here, thank you for deciphering my zany Canadian spelling. Your labour does not go unnoticed.