Leafing and Loafing

 

 

 

            October exited these parts in a somewhat unpleasant manner.  The days already became short and dark even before we turned the clocks back.  Chill winds seemed to threaten a cold and early winter.  It was all the more delightful, therefore, as well as thematically appropriate, when the weather turned full Indian Summer just after election day—bright, crisp, sunny days with clear cool nights, extending over several days and still going strong as I write this.  The foliage has been particularly notable.  So much early cool and wet weather seems to have retarded for an extra week the tincturing of the leaves, but all of a sudden they have turned bright and are falling in profusion.  Along the gutters of most of the roads in our neighborhood are long leaf mountains waiting for the big, noisy trucks  to take them away.  A few days ago in the late afternoon we sat in the yard listening to the nearly silent scraping of dry locust leaves against the lower branches of the tree from which they floated down.  Half the leaves on a large tree must have fallen in half an hour.

 

            I lack a therapy dog, but a lot of the rest of my life is therapeutical, such as my recently acquired “happy light” and my daily walk in the mini-park across the street.  This spot, which I have written about before, is the former site of a graduate housing project dating back to the end of World War II.  The University removed all the buildings, but left the mature trees, which are numerous and varied.  Circling and criss-crossing along the old street grids, now looking nearly as ancient as the Appian Way, I do almost three miles in my daily perambulation.  For the past two weeks of cool weather, the local leaf-peeping has been superb, but in dry weather a fallen leaf soon shrivels.  The photo at the top of the post is of a batch gathered on Monday.  That is probably my last of the year.  Winter really is around the corner.

 

            Thinking about leaves in one way soon leads to thinking about them in another.  For an English professor one other way is particularly obvious.  Leaf is a very old word in our language, unchanged in its spelling (though not its pronunciation) for more than a thousand years.  And already in Old English it had the double sense of Latin folium—the leaf of a tree, the leaf of a book.  A third meaning was a shoot of any kind of vegetation.  Several factors account for the richness of the English vocabulary.  One of the most important is that we tend to have both a Germanic and a Romance word for so many nouns and verbs.  So far as leaves are concerned, the Latin folium (French feuille) has left many active progeny, such as foliation, folic acid (from green vegetable leaf), and portfolio.  Walking in the place just described with my young grandson before the pandemic, I came upon a happy linguistic epiphany.  He lives in Montreal and goes to a French school, and he sometimes throws in a French word if he doesn’t happen to know the right English one.  Walking past a lush patch of clover, his eyes lit up.  “Trèfle” he cried out in recognition.  I actually know that word in French, though only when he said it did I grasp its etymology—trefoil, (trois feuilles) three leaves.

 

            As noted above, the parallel botanical and bibliographical meanings of a leaf are already fully developed in classical Latin.  Of many materials used as surfaces for recording the written word, by far the most common has been vegetable stuff, leaves, bark, processed wood fiber.  Our very word for paper is the name of the papyrus plant of the Nile delta.  Specially treated animal skin is more durable, but also very expensive.  So we still leaf through a book, just as we may hope in our metaphoric life to turn over a new leaf to find a better way.

 

                                                                                     Walt Whitman

 

            Inevitably I had to go to a bookshelf and take down my copy of Walt Whitman.  I have never really thought too deeply about the title of his amazing masterpiece, Leaves of Grass.  There are leaves on trees and many other plants, but are there leaves of grass?  Surely the proper English term is blade of grass?  The word Whitman himself uses in the first lines of “Song of Myself,” the extraordinary first movement of Leaves of Grass, is spear: “I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass”.  Both of those terms (blade, spear) are military, referring to thinly-beaten and sharpened metal.  From the French side the relevant word is foil, as in a fencer’s sword.  Beaten tin or aluminum is tinfoil or aluminum foil; but finely beaten gold is gold-leaf.  Here the defining feature is thinness, just as it is with paper—or with a blade, a spear, or a leaf of grass.  In his substantial prose preface to his vast poem Whitman makes the explicit claim that his language is particularly suited for his national theme.  “The English language befriends  the grand American expression. . . . it is brawny enough and limber and full enough.”  

 

            Whitman followed many lines of work in his vagabond career, among them that of a trained printer.  Nineteenth-century printing was a large, expanding, labor-intensive industry in America.  He was not the only major American literary figure who made books in more senses than one.  Naturally he also had experience as a journalist and editor, and there are throughout his writings numerous passages in which his vocabulary reflects a printer’s expertise.  In “Song of Myself” he says somewhat cryptically that paper and types are unsuitable for the task he has undertaken.  What, then is suitable?  I believe that the answer to that must be leaves—leaves of grass.  There is a strange moment early in his book concerning a small child, presumably, like the poet himself, another “loafer” on the grass.  “A child said, What is the grass?  fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.”  But the leaves of grass, surely, are the copious and varied, indeed nearly encyclopedic materials of his vast panorama of the American land and the American soul.  The poems themselves are leaves, or woven from them.

 

            As a printer, too, he knew the specialized meaning of the borrowed Latin term folio (“in the [single] leaf”), meaning the largest size of printed book, made by printing very large sheets of paper folded only once, resulting in four pages , two recto and two verso, front and back, of formatted book.  This is not the format in which Leaves of Grass was actually printed, but it invokes the kind of maximalism the poet must have had in his mind in writing such a bold and abundant poem.  If you think as I do that too many of our poets today tend to shy away from great projects and grand designs, you might hope with me that more would take a leaf out of Whitman’s book.

 

                                                      a set of folios from my library--each volume about 18 inches tall

Reading the Leaves

It seems to be generally true that people in the autumn of life respond with sharpening attention to the annual coming of the autumn of the year.   Such at least is my own experience and that of others with whom I have spoken.  What might be called the incremental poignancy of the autumnal is neither surprising nor necessarily lugubrious, but it is somber and arresting.  It demands its high seriousness.  Keats wrote his famous “Ode to Autumn” when he was, I think, twenty-four years old.  Can one imagine how much richer yet it might have been could he have written it at seventy-four?  But of course for Keats twenty-four was autumn, and late autumn at that.  He knew it.  That is why he could say in another great poem that he had “been half in love with easeful death,” even as in this one he can eroticize Autumn herself as a woman in the willing oblivion of a narcotic sleep, death’s simulacrum:

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies….

            Read the whole of the Ode to Autumn.  You will find in it a remarkable density of perfectly chosen images, with one strange lacuna.  Keats says nothing about leaves.  In the parts of the world I know best, Autumn is all about leaves.  The Fall of the Year is a leaf-fall.  But the fall is preceded by the turn—the transformation of the green of life into the yellow and red hues of a slow-motion immolation.  Dante envisioned the Beatific Vision as an ocean of photons.  But by then he had been strenuously prepared by Beatrice.  Most of us would find that sea of light impossible to bear, but I can imagine walking on a leaf-strew path in the waning autumnal sunlight filtered through the glowing canopy of a deciduous copse.

 The path from the back of our house: without Beatrice, the best you can hope for

            A scholar is likely to have another wistful association with leaves.  The Latin word for leaf was folium, from which we get our English foliage.  But long ago that word folium took on an extended meaning.  It meant a piece of writing material, a sheet of paper or of parchment, a page of a book.  When one leafs through a book, one is idly turning its pages.  To turn over a new leaf is to make a new beginning.  Chaucer in a mock warning to prudes that they might be shocked by the Miller’s Tale, advises them thus: “Turne over the leef and chese another tale…”  (This is advice, however, to be followed only by those who are willing to miss the second funniest line in world literature.)

            In the early periods of printing, important books were made from large sheets of paper folded a single time in the center to make a signature of four pages, two on the front and two on the back of the sheet.  That was called printing in folio.  Think Gutenberg Bible or the First Folio of Shakespeare.  (If you are slow off the mark, think Second Folio of Shakespeare).  Fold the sheet again; the pages will be smaller but you will have twice as many of them.  That was printing in quarto, and it was still plenty big.  Most books you have read will have been printed in octavo—three folds of the big sheet, sixteen pages of text.  No matter what the format the printing was always done on single large sheets, meaning that the printer had to take care to get the pages in the right place.  The reader had some work to do, too, cutting the pages open so they could be turned one at a time.

            The folium as writing surface was not entirely metaphorical.  At the dawn of written history all sorts of materials were used—bones, bark, wood, animal membrane, and of course leaves.  One leaf-writer of note was the all-knowing Cumaean Sybil, among the most famous prophetesses of ancient legend.  Her leaf of choice, Varro tells us, was the fibrous palm.  Her sooth-saying gift was honored by the later Christians, for whom she was the precursor of the prophet-king of Israel.    The great Latin poem about the Last Day, probably written by Thomas of Celano, biographer of Saint Francis, begins thus:

Dies iræ! Dies illa                                    [Day of wrath!  That day
Solvet sæclum in favilla:                        will dissolve the world in ashes,
Teste David cum Sibylla!                        as David testifies along with the Sibyl!]

Michaelangelo's Sibyl: Oh, sweet mama, treetop tall, won't you kindly turn your damper down.

The Sibyl knew everything there was to know, and she wrote it all down on her leaves.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that as a librarian—excuse me, I meant of course Information Technology person—she was a nightmare.  Neither storage nor retrieval was her thing.  She simply tossed her prophecies down anywhere in her vast and drafty cave, where Nature soon enough did to them what she does to all fallen, brittle leaves—blew and beat them into powdered compost.  The search for a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared with the search for truth in a pile of leaf mold.

This is why Helenus, the friend of Æneas, has advised the hero to seek the Sybil’s revelation in spoken rather than in written form.  And so he wisely does.

                                          Foliis tantum e carmina manda,

                                    Ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis;

                                    Ipsa canas oro. [Æneid, vi. 74-76]

“Only do not commit your verses to the leaves, lest they fly about, the sport of strong winds.  I beg you to speak them yourself.”

Jan Breughel's Sibyl: The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

A scholar spends a lifetime raking up neat piles of leaves, but don’t count on the Sibyl to guard them for posterity.  She is too heedless, too oblivious.  She, too, is drowsed with the fume of poppies.