Neurodiversity and Literature: Thoughts on Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood

Today I finished Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, a book I enjoyed a lot, and yet felt like it could have been more. I kept expecting the memoir to open up, from an exuberant description of her idyllic childhood, to a more general reflection on the world in which she grew up and her place in it. But that never really takes place, except in passing here and there (for example when she suggests her father’s trickle-down theory of economics might not be quite right).

Instead, Dillard’s memoir remains absorbed in the bliss of detail, in the escape from self which is total concentration. Dillard herself outlines a kind of philosophy throughout the memoir based on this total immersion into an interest or a pursuit. A part of me is attracted to this philosophy, as I’ve mentioned before in a post about Thoreau’s Walden (who, by the way, is on the extreme opposite end of the detail-big picture thinking spectrum from Dillard).

As attractive as this philosophy is, I wonder if it is wholly compatible with one of the things I admire most in writing: Don’t great books on some level subordinate description to the overall thematic development? Just comparing Dillard to other memoirists I’ve read recently, I would say her point of view evolves much less over the course of the memoir than does say Anand Prahlad’s in The Secret Life of a Black Aspie.

If I had to compare Dillard to another writers in this respect, I would say she reminds me of two Russian writers: Maxim Gorky’s Childhood, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Gorky was of course an incomparable raconteur with a legendary memory for detail and character, but his stories seem to progress mostly horizontally, rather than through a vertical accumulation to a chord. His style was melodic rather than symphonic. Nabokov, very much like Dillard, seems to have resolutely refused to approach anything so messy as culture in a collective sense, preferring to raise the observations and memory of an individual consciousness to the supreme heights of his aesthetics. (Nabokov and Dillard were also both naturalists and the products of a very select and privileged upbringing).

It seems to me a different kinds of mind are at work here, and I wonder about the application of theories of neurodiversity to literature. There seem to be more detail-oriented writers, who eschew the political and the collective, seeking to forget the self in pure concentration, and then there are the more socially conscious writers, consciously seeking the self through belonging in a community. Although in many ways I sympathize with the first group, and the basic principle of neurodiversity implies that we shouldn’t prioritize one mode of thinking and writing over another, when it comes to what I consider great writing, I tend to lean a little bit towards the second group.

Mushroom Lingo #1: Reticulate

Words are power, and one of the early obstacles to identifying mushrooms is understanding the terminology of the field guides. Today we’ll focus on the adjective “reticulate” because recently I’ve found lots of the Ornate Stalked Bolete, which illustrates that term perfectly.

Reticulate is not just a mushrooming term, but it’s also not common knowledge. It means “resembling a net or network,” and can also be used as a verb, to reticulate, which means to form a net or network, or as a noun, reticulum. In the case of mushrooms, it’s usually used to refer to a kind of net-like pattern on the stem. For example,

This kind of reticulate stem is most common with boletes, and is a kind of extension of the pore surface down the stipe— a little bit like how gilled mushrooms are sometimes “decurrent,” meaning their gills run down the stem. The stipe can be strongly reticulate, weakly reticulate, or just reticulate at the apex. And that’s about all there is to it!

It’s not a fungus, but what is it? Part 2

Plants are multicellular organisms that use chlorophyll to make their own food…right? Well, not always, as it turns out.

There are actually a number of plants that parasitize other organisms, mistletoe, for example. Or American Cancer Root, which has featured before on this blog and parasitizes oaks.

American Cancer Root, aka Bear Corn.

But have you ever heard of a plant feeding off a mushroom?? It’s usually the other way around, but Monotropa uniflora, or “ghost pipes,” formerly “Indian Pipes,” does just that. It feeds itself by taping into the mycelium of a specific group of mushrooms, the Russulas, which in turn get their energy from a symbiotic relationship with the root systems of trees.

So if ghost pipes don’t have chlorophyll or photosynthesize, what makes them plants? Well, their evolutionary history mostly. Ghost pipes are actually somewhat closely related to blueberries, if you can believe it. There seems to be some taxonomic back and forth, with some biologists (and wikipedia) considering them part of Ericaceae (the family of which blueberries are a member), and others claiming they should be part of a seperate Monotropaceae family. Regardless, based on DNA they are much more closely related to other plants than to the fungi they parasitize. Besides DNA evidence, there are structural features which group them with plants. Having a flower and seeds for example. But it just goes to show how hard it is to define something as simple as a “plant,” and how many exceptions you can find if you look hard enough.

While we are on the subject of non-photosynthesizing plants, I’ll briefly mention a third I’ve seen recently, called Pinesap, or Monotropa hypopitys. It’s fairly similar to ghost pipes, except that it has several flowers instead of just one, and tends to be reddish tinted. And lastly, many Orchids are also myco-heterotrophs (meaning they feed on mushrooms) which is part of the reason they are so hard to cultivate!

Pinesap. A plant that feeds on fungi
Coralroot Orchid, another myco-heterotrophic plant

It’s not a fungus, but what is it?

One of the fun things about looking for mushrooms is that often in the process you will find and learn about something else. Maybe it’s trees, or insects, or mosses…or slime molds. Many is the time I’ve bent down to look at a spot of color on a log to discover strange globs, blobs, fuzzes, and splats of color. They’re not quite fungi, but what else could they be?

To go back to a bit of simplified High School biology, there are five kingdoms of life: plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and…Protista. The most well known Protists are probably algae, kelp, and amoebas. It’s hard to say what really defines this kingdom except that they don’t fit anywhere else. Slime molds are single-celled organisms somewhat like amoebas which aggregate for purposes of reproduction, but spend most of their time “crawling” around on logs or the forest floor enveloping and eating microorganisms like bacteria or fungi.

Earlier this year I saw what I will tentatively identify as Dog Vomit Slime Mold, an almost neon-yellow splat of color on wet wood.

More recently, however, I’ve been seeing one of a genus of species known as “Chocolate Tube Slime Molds.” My first thought, before I learned the accepted name, was that they looked like little tufts of brown carpet. They are fun to find because when you touch them, a brown powdery dust is released, kind of like puffballs. Based on my experience, they seem to be unlike most fungi in that they like dry weather for spore dispersal. The past couple weeks have seen almost no rain, and for about the past week I’ve seen Chocolate Tube Slime molds on almost every hike.

I don’t know if there are slime mold hunters, as there are mushroom hunters, but if so they must be a pretty dedicated lot! For more info on slime molds check out: http://website.nbm-mnb.ca/mycologywebpages/NaturalHistoryOfFungi/SlimeMoulds.html and http://www.bucksfungusgroup.org.uk/articles.html#slimemould

Walden and Types of Thinking

I think it’s fitting to write a blog about Thoreau, since you could think of him as nothing less than the founder of American blogging (unless that title should go to Benjamin Franklin). Once you stop to think about it, so many American writers have been bloggers. Moby Dick, for example, with its two-page chapters and onion-skin accretion of meaning. And Mark Twain certainly would have been a good blogger. The blog as genre is very much linked to an Enlightenment ideal of self-improvement, “cultivate your garden” and so forth, which is often associated with early Americanism. The idea of a nation as an experiment, life as an experiment and the writer a note taker.

The idea of deliberate self-formation is central to Walden. I think a lot readers get caught up in the specifics of Thoreau’s attempt at self-determination and miss the more general question the book asks, which is: to what extent is self-determination possible? How far is it possible to live by choice? What are the limits of our ability to determine our own lives?

This gets back to another question I have raised before on this blog, why do we obey? How much of our obedience is truly forced? And how much of our willingness to obey is just that, an ingrained cognitive bias which works against our rational good as individuals. Put another way, the question Thoreau tried to answer was, do we submit to the laws of society because ultimately it pays off, or out of habit? And how can we know if we benefit from inclusion in society if we have never tried to live without it?

Obviously, the idea of using your own life as an experiment quickly comes up against limits. One cannot be both the subject of an experiment and its observer. Furthermore, what is true for you may not be for me, so how do I know the results of your experiment are valid for me?

I think for this reason people who tend to be detail-oriented or result-based thinkers really hate Thoreau. I myself very much fall into this category. For me a large part of the satisfaction of identifying plants and fungi, or reading history, lies in the concentration on details. Accumulating and understanding detail gives me a sense of control. This has been part of the challenge of my current job (helping students with disabilities transition into adult lives) in which success is more often a matter of the big picture, and may not produce any results at all in the short term.

Attention to detail is often an advantage, and is highly prized by our educational system. As a society though, I think we might overrate measurable results, and tend to confuse the signs of something for the goal itself. In some situations, my current job for example, it seems to be the big picture thinkers who are more clear-sighted and, paradoxically, down to earth. Whereas I might obsess over a detail and blow it out of proportion to its true worth, someone else might, by ignoring that detail accomplish the same task far more simply and directly.

I think the strength of Walden lies in its basics. Perhaps this explains its influence. The impact lies not in how it was done, but in the fact it was done at all.

Tree of Heaven: Tree Identification with your Nose

It’s interesting how much of an impact street names have on our knowledge of trees. Pretty much everyone knows that Oaks, Hickories, Walnuts, and Elms are trees, even if most people can’t identify them. I am reminded of the chapter called “Place-Names” in Proust, how some words exist that no longer refer to anything particular, but are left after generations of use like phantom words, strangely resonant because hollow. But no streets have been named after Ailanthus altissima, the “Tree of Heaven,” so up until recently I had no idea what it was.

Turns out, it’s pretty much everywhere, and is one of the most universally hated tree species out there, despite its heavenly name. As far as I can make out, the name comes from the fact that it grows especially fast (10 feet in one year), as if it were striving to reach heaven, or merely the sky. It’s hated because it’s hard to eradicate, spreads rapidly through suckers, and like another much hated invasive plant I’ve written about, Garlic Mustard, is a master of allelopathy (one of the most musical ecological terms I know of). Allelopathy is the chemical inhibition of other plants. For example, pine trees are allelopathic because their needles keep other plants from growing around them— which is why there is so little underbrush in pine stands.

https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/forestry/thinning-loblolly-pine-stands-to-benefit-wildlife-timber-production/

Tree of Heaven looks a lot like Black Walnut from a distance. Giant pinnately compound leaves which leaf out at about the same time of year. Bark is a major give-away though: Walnuts have furrowed dark chocolatey bark, that of Tree of Heaven is flat and grey and features large leaf scars (on branches and smaller trees).

Another interesting difference on closer inspection is the leaflets. Tree of Heaven has a very distinctive glandular tooth towards the base of the leaf. These glands (I think) are responsible for the foul smell of the crushed leaves—to me something like almond, but mealy and rotten. These glands and the odor help to distinguish Tree of Heaven from Sumacs, which also have big compound leaves. (There is at least one American street named after the Sumac —in Philadelphia–by the way…)

Terminal leaflet showing glands at the base

Despite all its negative qualities I think Tree of Heaven is worth knowing, even seeking out at least once, because I’m always drawn to trees that are distinctive in non-visual ways. Unpleasant as the smell is, I think it’s important to experience your environment more than just visually. Slippery Elm, possibly my all time favorite tree, is the king of texture. The roughness of the leaves and the gooeyness of the inner bark–not to mention the styrofoam corkiness of the young trunk. Tree of Heaven is, if not the king, at least the knave, of olfaction.

June Hiking and the Brown Water Scorpion

Today I’m going to try something new and discuss not a plant or a mushroom, but an insect. It hasn’t rained in weeks and there’s not a whole lot going on in the fungal kingdom (visibly, anyways). Besides, The Brown Water Scorpion, Ranatra fusca, is a pretty cool thing to find. I found one for the first time yesterday on the edge of a creek, probably preying on the many tadpoles moving around in the shallow water.

One of the coolest things I learned about this species is that it breathes underwater through a kind of snorkel (its tail). They hold themselves perfectly still parallel to the vertical stalks of plants, blending in like a stick bug, breathing through two tubes connected to their abdomen. Also interesting is that they can trap and store air in a bubble using water repellent hairs. I don’t understand exactly how this works, but apparently it functions something like a scuba tank, allowing them to breath even when fully immersed, and to survive the winter when the surface freezes over.

Although they are harmless to humans, Brown Water Scorpions are pretty impressive predators. Once they’ve caught something to eat, they puncture it with their mouthpart and suck the internal fluids out.

For a video of this in action, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewYPUkGjPds

Chicory

On my morning bike ride to work one day I spotted some electric blue flowers in my neighbor’s yard—which he has yet to mow this year. Then I saw them a couple other places on my morning route. I took a mental note and resolved to come back during my lunch break and photograph them and figure out what they were. They were a very pretty shade of blue, “electric” in the morning sunlight in contrast to the still-in-shadow ground. But when I went back around 12:30 to look for them they were nowhere to be found.

I found plenty of bindweed, the no. 1 enemy of my garden, in bloom. I found what I believe is a kind of Salsify, which looks like the seed-head of a dandelion, but much larger. I found what looked like the stem and leaves of the blue-flower but it was bare, weedy, and somewhat ugly.

The hated bindweed
Salsify

There was nothing for it but to wait for the next morning. And sure enough they were back.

Chicory is also known as Blue Dandelion because the basal leaves are similar — although so are those of many other plants, including a potential lookalike, Wild Blue Lettuce. Also like many other plants, Chicory has two distinct leaf forms, a basal rosette form, and a stem leaf form. The basal form is dandelionish, but the stem leaves are lance shaped, clasping, and few and far between.

Basal leaves
Clasping stem leaves. Stem is nearly leafless.

The flowers are nearly stemless, open in the morning, track the sun, and close by noon. These characteristics, taken together, make it fairly easy to identify Chicory, at least during the summer. Chicory, of course, is also known for having a very sturdy taproot—which I have yet to dig up—which can be made into Chicory coffee; but what I didn’t know was that the leaves are a common salad green in Europe. In fact, Belgian Endives are a cultivated form of Chicory, as is the Italian Radicchio. The reason Belgian Endives look so different from the weedy Chicory I found is that they grow it indoors, or without light, which prevents the leaves from greening up and becoming bitter.

Belgian Endive (Common Chicory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicory#/media/File:Witlof_en_wortel.jpg

The plant is native to the Mediterranean. Its latin name, Cichorium intybus, refers to the Egyptian word for January, which is when Egyptians harvested Chicory thousands of years ago. It was later brought to North America as a fodder crop, salad green, and coffee substitute. And although it is an invasive species, I find it hard to wish for its eradication.

(If you are curious about growing Chicory for endives, or just want some language practice, there are lots of Dutch, French and German youtube videos out there that will tell how to do it–and give you some language practice too).

Elms and their look-alikes

The conventional wisdom on Elms (American and Slippery) is that they can be recognized by their asymmetrical leaf bases. However, in my experience there is considerable variation from plant to plant and also even from leaf to leaf on single tree. Many of the elms I find have nearly symmetrical leaf bases—possibly because they have hybridized with the invasive Siberian Elm which is more resistant to DED (Dutch Elm Disease)!? It’s also possible that asymmetry varies with the age and size of the tree, the point during the growing season, or what kind of stress the tree is under. In the drawing of a Slippery Elm below (from the Pennsylvania Department of Forestry) for example, the asymmetry is hardly noticeable. So here are a few other ways of identifying Elms, separating them from each other, and from their look-alikes: The American Hop Hornbeam and the American Hornbeam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulmus_rubra

Slippery Elm, American Elm, American Hop Hornbeam and American Hornbeam all have doubly serrate leaf margins. This separates them from the Siberian Elm, although as with the leaf bases the distinction is not always clear cut. Another clue you have a Siberian Elm, also known as a “Piss Elm” because they are considered unattractive, is the small size of the leaves (up to 2.5 inches.)

Siberian Elm. Notice the singly serrate leaf margins. https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/tree/siberian-elm

After checking to make sure the margins are doubly serrate, the best test, in my experience, is texture. Slippery Elm leaves feel like sandpaper, or like a “cat’s tongue,” as I’ve heard some people say. Unlike what their name might lead you to imagine, the leaves are quite rough, as the picture below shows.

Slippery Elm

American Elms, by contrast, are smooth, and have slightly smaller leaves.

American Elm

The next species to consider is the American Hop-Hornbeam. The Hop-Hornbeam is a common understory tree, almost never getting more than a foot in diameter—but then neither do Elms these days. It has incredibly tough wood, also giving it the name “Ironwood.” The best way in my opinion to tell this one apart from Elms is again the texture of the leaves. They are soft and thin, neither totally hairless like American Elms, nor rough like Slippery Elms. Their leaves look very very similar to Elms, except that they are a lighter, more yellowish shade of green. Another hint, if it’s larger than a sapling, is the bark, which is “shreddy,” coming off in thin vertical strips.

American Hop-Hornbeam

The habitat tends to be more upland than Elms, but I have also found them growing along creek beds interspersed with Elms and our next tree, the American Hornbeam, also known as “Musclewood” because its most distinctive feature: the sinewy, muscly shape of its trunk

The middle tree is a Musclewood. The trunk also explains another common name, the “Blue Beech,” although it is actually not in the Beech Family.

Aside from the trunk, which is distinctive even with saplings, Musclewood can be differentiated (from Hop-Hornbeam and Slippery Elm) by the smoothness of its leaves and its prominent veins, almost giving the leaves a corrugated look at least when young.

We’ve discussed the bark of Hop Hornbeams and American Hornbeams, what about the bark of Elms? Again, visual details aren’t always the most helpful when identifying Elms. Rather, it’s the feel of the bark—soft, almost like styrofoam, so that when you press into it with a fingernail it gives— that is helpful, at least for American Elms. Also, it tends to have a sort of “terraced” look, like multiple layers built on top of each other.

Elm tree with buttresses, and soft terraced bark.

All this is not to say that leaf asymmetry isn’t a useful feature for identifying Elms, but I do think that it can be quite minute, and there are other, perhaps easier, features to check for when the leaf bases are ambiguous.

Why do we obey? Thoughts on Peter the Great.

One of the most striking things about the reign of Peter the Great is how much he was able to get away with as a ruler. I mean not in terms of his personal life, but in terms of his demands on the people as ruler of the State. Over the course of his reign, everyone, at all levels of Russian society from serfs, to priests, to boyars, gave up ground as individuals for the benefit of the State, in the person of one man: Peter. It’s hard to convey the enormity of the changes Peter enacted. For that, you’ll have to read Massie’s 900 page biography, but I’ll try to mention a few of the more memorable. To start with, he banned beards.

http://www.mysocialstudiesteacher.com/wiki/index.php?title=Russian_Revolution_-_Land_of_the_Tsars_-_Peter_the_Great

He taxed the people literally to death (a government monopoly on salt, for example, made it so it expensive peasants who couldn’t afford it often “sickened and died,” I assume from the inability to preserve food!?). He introduced the tax on “souls” you may be familiar with from Gogol’s Dead Souls. He ended the semi-autonomy of the Orthodox Church, making it effectively a Ministry of the State. To quote Massie, “For the next two centuries, until 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church was governed by the principles set down in the Ecclesiastical Regulation. The church ceased to be an institution independent of government; its administration, through the office of the Holy Synod, became a function of the State.” Nor was all that he took from the Russian people then reinvested back into Russian society, in the form of schools or some other such enlightened institution. Rather, as in 1710, he spent 80% of State revenue on the army and navy.

The list could go on and on. Peter’s whole reign is stamped with two words: State Power. How was he able to accomplish this? Conventional wisdom tells us that people deeply resist change. Most of us assume that any alternation to our present collective reality would be met with the enormous resistance of the status quo. We have a cognitive bias in favor of stability, and yet there are historical examples, as recent as Covid-19, of huge societies shifting in a matter of weeks or months.

But Peter’s “reforms” are still more interesting because—at least according Massie—they did not stem from the great mass of people, but from one man. Peter the Great seems like the incarnate refutation of Tolstoy’s theory, advanced in War and Peace, that it is not the leaders who control society, but the great mass of people who control the leaders. After all, as Tolstoy points out, isn’t it absurd that the will of one whimsical man could be sufficient to uproot or end tens of thousands of lives? Why would people go along with such an absurd system? Why would thousands of powerful landowners consent to have their beards shorn, their serfs taxed, and the independence of their church abolished, rather than just gang up on one man and throw him in the river?

Unfortunately, I’m no Foucault. I’d have to read much more deeply into Russian history to really understand why Peter was able to do what he did. But a couple ideas come to mind. Maybe “freedom” is not so innately precious to mankind as we assume. Maybe instead of assuming that individuals behave like Newtonian particles according to rational laws of force and inertia, we need to look at political power as the product of certain cognitive biases, as Richard Thaler has done in the field of Economics. Perhaps an even more subtle historian that Massie will come along and demonstrate that Peter’s reforms didn’t “stem” from the top after all, but from an infinitude of invisible causes permeating the whole system, just as Tolstoy thought. But still, we would have to throw out the assumption that people always act for their own individual benefit unless compelled to do otherwise.

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