When The Naming Starts The Learning Stops
We need a better schema for comprehending the world.
Toward the end of 2007’s Into the Wild, Chris McCandless, as played by Emile Hirsch, reads to himself aloud from Dr. Zhivago:
For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.
McCandless repeats those last four words to himself, and this sparks his (and the viewers’) discovery that the wild plant seeds the struggling explorer thought he was eating, Hedysarum alpinum, likely belonged to another, Hedysarum mackenzii, which looks nearly identical but can have catastrophic effects on the human body—especially one already starving, as McCandless was.
While author Jon Krakauer, who wrote the book on the young adventurer after his body was discovered by hunters in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness, has since modified his hypothesis about what killed McCandless (testing found that H. alpinum seeds also contain toxic compounds that could be poisonous in large doses), I think this speaks to a larger truth worth considering as we move through the world: that there is a whole constellation of characteristics underpinning the name we give to anything, characteristics just as important to know as the name itself.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m taking a certification course right now to become a Michigan Master Naturalist.
On the first day of field work, our birding instructor, Rick, paused our walk through the woods and asked us what we heard as a loud call came through the trees. In unison, most of us eagerly yelled “blue jay,” trying to prove in that beautifully human way that despite being enrolled in the course we surely didn’t need it. Gently, Rick encouraged us to forget for a moment that we knew what a blue jay was, what a blue jay sounded like. “Now tell me what you hear,” he challenged us.
What followed was a much longer, much more interesting discussion. We began to consider the tone of the calls, the frequency. Rick encouraged us further: did it sound more like a cry or a song? How many voices seemed to be present? Where in the trees was the sound coming from, and at what height? All of these factors, Rick said, are critical in building toward confident identification: to practice putting away assumptions and instead create a map of positive determinations. The blue jay is pretty singular in its vocalizations, he admitted, but you’d be harder pressed to tell apart a robin and a vireo, a starling and a catbird, without these additional factors.
“In my experience,” Rick said, “when the naming starts, the learning stops.”
This is great advice, frankly. It’s good to know the names of things, eventually, but you have to have other schemas for understanding the world or you’ll be totally at the mercy of the shortcomings of language. The cedar trees native to the Americas—red and white, yellow and Port Orford—are not “true” cedars, a distinction reserved for an unrelated set of trees native to the Himalayas. The nighthawk, one of my favorite birds, is also called a bullbat, and is none of the three animals that these appellations suggest. (It does come out at night, though.) Rhode Island is neither a road nor an island—discuss.
These naming choices are mostly harmless, if potentially confusing. But there are other, more nefarious ways we get hung up on language at the expense of what the rest of our senses, including our simple good sense, should tell us.
Here again I only have words to try to explain something that can’t be explained in words. We’re trapped, I think, in this way. Not that it’s the end of the world. But it should tell us that we’d do well to give just as much credence to feelings as to words, to listen to sensation as intently as we do conversation. And to admit to ourselves that there are feelings beyond words, feelings we still might express through other means.
I remember translating the Aeneid in AP Latin during high school and learning the verb ululate, a trilling, howling wail. As the mother of Euryalus did upon the news of the death of her son, killed alongside his lover Nisus in a daring raid against long odds. As the Trojan women did while their city burned:
Inside the palace there is the noise of chaos,
Screaming, shrieking, ululating sounds
Of the grief and terror of the Trojan women.
The woeful clamor rises to the stars;
From vaulted room to room of the vast palace
The women wander not knowing where they are going,
Some in their distraction clinging to walls,
Kissing the very doors. And on comes Pyrrhus,
In all his father’s power, coming in;
No thing nor person can hold out against
His coming. The great front gate of the palace falls in
Under the battering of the battering ram;
Force makes its way, unstoppable; the Greeks
Pour slaughtering in, so many of them, filling
The palace halls with the conquering entering foe.
The force of it and the fury is greater even
Than a foaming flooding river bursting through
All that would hold against its whirling waters
Insanely overflowing and carrying off
Whole herds and their stables with them across the plains.
Rereading these lines now for the first time in eighteen(!) years I am reminded of nothing so much as what has been unfolding in Palestine for the last nineteen months. The apocalyptic horror of an entire nation being devoured by invading soldiers and unquenchable flames. The people wailing as their children’s bodies, limbs, heads are pulled from the rubble where proud cities once stood.
And yet it is taboo—bordering on illegal—to call this campaign of extermination a genocide. As though it is a magic word that can only be invoked when the American conscience is plausibly clear. You use that word, genocide, vociferously enough and you could find yourself rounded up and imprisoned a thousand miles away from where you were arrested, missing the birth of your child, as Mahmoud Khalil was. You could find yourself snatched off the streets of your college campus by masked agents who refuse to identify themselves, as Rumeysa Ozturk was. You could find your degree withheld for saying so in a commencement speech in which you don’t even name the perpetrators of the genocide (for this, too, is an act of naming that has snuck its way beyond the pale in American discourse), as Logan Rozos at NYU has.
The people who support this want you playing the name game because it’s a convenient distraction from the inescapable truth playing out before your eyes and ears: that this is, by whatever name you choose, a world historic crime, an unspeakable evil being carried out in all of our names so as to eradicate a people from the earth. They want you to get hung up on defending yourself against every conceivable nuance, every bad faith attack, because to move past these games would be to give up the pretense that there is anything here but the greatest crime a human population can carry out against another.
Ultimately I think it’s good and proper to make sure I learn enough about the world to know how to call things by their right names.1 But I am also working hard not to get so hung up on blue jay that I fail to take note of where in the tree it comes from, the tone of its cries, the length of its song, the number of its voices. It occurs to me that I can tell my students this, too, when the incentive structures of their world tell them that the point of turning in an essay is turning in a document that can plausibly be called Essay rather than to learn what it means to express themselves clearly. It helps none of us to lose the process for the product. It helps all of us to start learning to pay a different kind of attention to things.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.
-Chuck
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People, too. We should give people the dignity of calling them by whatever name they prefer, and we should give them the dignity of paying attention to all the underlying things that make them who they are without getting too hung up on what we think they’re “supposed to” look like or be called. Frankly this one doesn’t take much work at all.