The Poppies of Terra #51 - Strange Wonders

Imagine chancing upon a museum of literary sculptures. Each one is sinewy, casting deep shadows that evoke the big mysteries of existence. But the proportions are exacting, anchored in science and engineering. You meet the museum’s curator, authoritative yet jovial, Victorianly stylish, earnest yet given to whimsy–it's none other than Mary Poppins! This imaginary gallery, it turns out, is really A. Kendra Greene’s new non-fiction collection No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. Like Poppins, Greene’s writing can sing. It also knows when to elucidate the straight facts of the matter. And like Poppins, Greene has traveled to far and secret places (see The Museum of Whales You Will Never See), both on the globe and in her mind. Her latest essays beautifully, sometimes arrestingly, display the scope of her thoughts and her detail-steeped engagement with the marvels of the natural world. The book possesses an enchanting artisanal quality, no doubt abetted by Greene’s own excellent illustrations, inspired by a variety of sources like historical texts (she mentions in the Acknowledgments that she is “indebted to the old bestiaries” and goes on to name several of them), photographs, and her direct observations.

That’s all very well, you might say, but what does she actually write about? I suppose you wouldn’t be satisfied with the answer that reading one of Greene’s essays is like discovering what happens in the meadow at dusk. Depending on your sensibilities, it may be nothing, or everything. No, you implore, be specific: what are some of her subjects? In the moving “When Winston Became a Speck,” for instance, she explores a young child’s fascination with a story about a dog becoming a tiny speck due to distance, specifically the weight of the word “speck” in this context and the concept of zero. “Until It Pops” breathes fresh air into the world of balloon artistry, beginning with a random encounter with a woman named Laura at a wedding and extending to a full-on balloon convention, with ruminations on the science of latex along the way. What’s the difference between observing things and living with them? “Wild Chilean Baby Pears” investigates the question. “The Sorcerer Has Gone to Italy” recounts the author’s visits to a museum run by a man she refers to as the eponymous sorcerer, and evokes his enigmatic personality, unconventional interactions, and sudden disappearance. In the quietly mournful “My Mother Greets the Inanimate,” Greene recreates her mother's long-standing practice of greeting things like mountains, horses, fences, and what it means when she no longer does so.

I mentioned a museum. “I ache to believe there are things in the world that have the power to transform us,” Greene writes, “and I’m sure at least some of them are housed in museums.” A number are referenced throughout, such as the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Field Museum (Chicago). Zoos also abound: the Jardín Zoológico de Santiago (Chile’s national zoo), at which the author interned, New York’s Bronx Zoo, the Austin Zoo, and the Santa Barbara Zoo, for example, all instigate reflections. Naturally, in a book chock-a-block with these types of institutions–we gather along the way that the author herself has worked in a photo museum, at a bindery, and so on–wondrous creatures, living and extinct, could not be absent. Greene mentions dozens and dozens, like the basset hound, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the pileated woodpecker, the bullfrog, the peacock, the great auk, the lion cub, the duckmole, the alpaca, the sea urchin, the giant sloth, barnacle geese, and, pun intended, at great length, the giraffe. Animals are often part of quotations, analogies, or historical references; nature comes in handy when Greene is circling around more esoteric ponderings on things like the creation of meaning or the unpredictability of the universe. “We say extinct when the last living member of a species dies, but their properly preserved skins will last for centuries, never mind their bones,” she muses. “What we don’t have is a word for after extinction, for when we lose whatever’s left.” In “Flip” she writes: “Of course even now whales have hip bones and femurs, set snug, wholly encased, in the meat of muscle. Vestigial, we say, but nothing we keep is without meaning.” Other times she’s not afraid to go into full-throttle explicatory mode. 

An unusual contrast of tones and styles, it took me a few pages and a few pauses to get used to. Greene comes to her subjects armed with the erudition and joyful intellectual curiosity of Stephen Jay Gould, but funneled through Annie Dillard’s quirky voice and gift for locating the sublime in the everyday. Or, imagine Oliver Sacks’s humane writing brio blended with Eula Bliss’s ability to discover unexpected connections between seemingly disparate subjects. Or, to try in filmmaking terms: think of the punctilious, precisely orchestrated productions of Wes Anderson somehow combined with the evanescent and elliptical sensibility of Werner Herzog. Greene can at times trace the shape of her thoughts so finely that she herself seems to vanish in the process. 

One of my favorite pieces, “The Ghost of Christmas Always,” displays a number of Greene’s virtues. In describing Scrooge's appearance she writes: “He has a waistcoat and a cravat and a silk hat. He has breeches and those shoes with conspicuous buckles.” The repeated “and” creates a sense of accumulation, of richness, emphasizing Scrooge’s tangible details with a slightly archaic, Dickensian feel (polysyndeton for the win!). “Parsimony derives from the Latin parsimonia,” she then explains, “meaning frugality and thrift, only later acquires the connotation of stinginess, becomes a synonym for Scrooge. Dickens, on the other hand, might as well be a synonym for abundance.” Indeed, as she has just stylistically demonstrated a few lines earlier. A page later she makes the fascinating observation that when we use Scrooge as a “shorthand for grinch, for cold unfeeling spite,” we’re completely ignoring the Scrooge at the end of the narrative who has been transformed–namely, the whole point of the story. We stick with the initial version, “as if we did not believe in change.” Astutely she notes: “I wager no one has ever said Scrooge and meant a person who’s undergone radical rehabilitation.” This attention to language, both in its evocation of subject matter and as a construct worth investigating in its own right, because it may encode hidden truths, are typical of Green’s polished yet particular form. 

Eagerly touring the cabinet of wordsmithed curiosities, some readers may feel certain passages labored. The anaphorical incantation, for example, of the following lines, may read as plodding or affected: “I assume Visitor X was already familiar with the Iowa museum. I assume Visitor X had seen this very display more than once, had come back again and again. I assume he did not mean to take the ivory-billed, not at first.” A simple solution: pace yourself. Spacing out the collection’s twenty-six entries to the tune of one every two weeks will perfectly round out a full year, a leisurely rhythm sure to smooth out any stylistic speedbumps. 

Even at their most staged, these essays never lack vitality. To use one of Greene’s own descriptive gems, the echidna’s “determined tank waddle gait” may be mannered, but it’s not unnatural. So it is with Greene’s own prose. And like the echidna, it comes “armored in spiny quills,” in this case memorable protrusions of insight and wonder, stemming from the greater quill of Greene’s capacity to observe and relate.