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The hero of the modern myth is the victim, the emblem of the modern self the pronoun. We seem to have forgotten that we are survivors of innumerable spasms of space and time, creatures who never would have given up the gills for lungs if we attached identity to gillness. Not so with lichens. When I was a child, lichen meant to me the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlando. I had no idea that Usnea longissima is just one of… read article
You wouldn’t know it, looking at the tiny elderly woman in the white lab coat bent over a table in a halogen-lit government office, you wouldn’t know she had spent her youth doing science with her whole body: extracting herself from a deadly mudflat with stubbornness and applied physics; narrowly escaping permanent tendon damage after severe sunburn on the tops of her feet during a daylong barefoot tide pool expedition; managing to return ashore by manually rigging a rudder after her boat’s steering apparatus had broken and left her stranded in the open ocean; surviving blood poisoning in the pre-penicillin… read article
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see, lensed through its anticipations… read article
Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private superstition: If I touched each of the vertical bars on every fence along my walk, no dog would die. Sometimes I ran to touch as many bars as possible in as little time as possible, the impact bruising and callusing my fingers. Dogs continued dying. I continued doing it.… read article
“One must be a seer, make oneself a seer,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.” As more and more of our senses are being amputated by the blade of our image-centric culture, reducing the vast and delicate sensorium of human experience — moss on a rock, a salty summer evening at the ocean’s edge, a lover’s kiss — to a purely visual representation on a two-dimensional screen, it matters all the more that we train our vision to see beyond the veneer of the visible. It is hardly surprising, given the co-evolution… read article
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Holger Berty has been a professional bowyer for nearly two decades. Based in Germany, he was introduced to bow carving by a friend. Holger's approach to bow making is eclectic, exploring various styles—from primitive bows to modern laminated designs.
The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” (Exactions, 1980): “The wings tremble, it is the red admiral Ecstatically against the garden wall; September is his enjoyment, but he does not know it, Name it, or refer to it at all.” When I was collecting butterflies as a boy, the Red Admiral was my favorite after the mourning cloak. The beauty of each is less gaudy, more complex than many other species. I always thought the orangish-red pattern on the wings resembled the outline of a gaping human mouth or a partially erased circle. The species was described by Linnaeus in 1758 and is known to lepidopterists as Vanessa atalanta. It is widely distributed among the world’s temperate zones. Sisson, no scientist, is right. Butterflies are often most active in late summer – a sort of lepidopteran last hurrah -- but I have seen no red admirals in our garden this year, only monarchs and various fritillaries and swallowtails. In his marvelous The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025), Nigel Andrew describes the surprising origin of the butterfly’s Latin name: “Vanessa is a name that sounds as if it has been around for ever – the kind of name that might be found in Latin love poetry – but it was in fact invented by the poet and satirist Jonathan Swift as a pet name for Esther Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate young woman, twenty-two years his junior, who was the object of his obsessive love for seventeen years, until he moved on to another Esther (Esther Johnson, nicknamed Stella).” Swift arrived at “Vanessa” by conflating the “Van” of “Vanhomrigh” with “Esse,” a pet form of Esther. Soon after Swift published his poem “Cadenus and Vanessa” (written 1713; published 1726), the Danish naturalist Fabricius named the butterfly’s genus Vanessa. Nige tells us “Atalanta” was a figure in Greek mythology, “a formidable virgin huntress and athlete who was notably reluctant to marry." Handel titled his 1736 pastoral opera Atalanta. Nabokov took to calling the butterfly Red Admirable “(Admiral, in vulgar parlance).” No other species shows up so often in the lepidopterist/novelist’s work. In his novel Pale Fire, in the poem that gives the novel its name, the poet John Shade, likens his wife, Sybil, to the butterfly: “Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed, My dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest My Admirable butterfly!” In the poem’s final lines, Shade is looking for his wife moments before his death: “A dark Vanessa with crimson band Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white. And through the flowing shade and ebbing light A man, unheedful of the butterfly - Some neighbor's gardener, I guess - goes by Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.” Nige notes that Nabokov believed “Admiral” was a corruption of “Admirable,” but the opposite is likely true: “‘Admiral’ was the earliest recorded name,” he writes, “‘Admirable’ a later version that gained little currency except with those who, reasonably enough, liked the sound of it.” I never encountered “Admirable” until reading Nabokov. Here is the final stanza of Sisson’s poem: “Its fingers lighter than spiders, the red admiral Considers, as I do, with little movement; With little of anything that is meant: But let the meaning go, movement is all.”
If something feels wrong, it is useful to articulate very precisely why that is
Ridgeline subscribers — For the last ten days I’ve been walking around London. Mostly in a little corner of it in the northeast part of the city. But can you even call a part a “corner” when the city extends in every direction without stopping? Whatever you call it, I’ve been in my little northeast section (if not corner) spending mornings reading and writing until I’m cross-eyed and then afternoons walking the streets over and over again.
