QTWCS Reboot, starring Robinson Jeffers and a Very Angry Jay

I'm getting back in the habit of writing here, because I want to explore questions about people and other social animals, while sparing the beleaguered readers of my twitter page. Once again, I chose a poem to set the tone.


This is a poet that was introduced to me by professor Steve Herman, who teaches Summer Ornithology, a program that I took and then TAed for. The program is a three week trip to Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge, in late July and early August, just in time for the Perseid Meteor Shower. We'd set up our mist nets at dawn, and sit back to watch the birds hit the nets (our presence met that we probably got slightly fewer birds, but that we had almost no injuries or fatalities from birds getting twisted up in the nets). In the evening we'd sit around the fire and talk about Sagebrush Steppe, and what cattle ranching had done to it, or swap stories of birding experiences. It's an amazing program.

Near the end, Steve recited "The Boody Sire" and "Shine Perishing Republic", both of which deeply affected me. My Dad had inculcated me with a love of exactly that sort of stark poetry; he used to recite Robert Service (namely "the Cremation of Sam McGee" and "the Shooting of Dan McGrew") by memory by the nightly neighborhood bonfire growing up, and in his previous life had occasionally wrote anniversary sonnets to forgetful husbands at his local bar in exchange for beer. My Evergreen science faculty have made sure that I don't lose sight of that aesthetic as I get farther into my chosen field. They've taught me that a good scientist, and for that matter a good citizen, is something or a renaissance woman or man: every field you understand a little bit of gives you an additional perspective to view your own from, and insight is as likely to come from bicycle design, the Pride Parade, or Rosencrantz sassing Guildenstern as it is from observing ravens manipulate string.

Anyway, I looked up the book of Jeffers' poems Steve had read from, and I came across this. I decided to include it here. It's as good a description as any of why I am where I am, doing what I do.

*Animals

At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or gret-eyed heads, as they roll
in the sea,
Bigger than draft horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded,
idle and singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold midwinter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious
lives in the sun:
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to
do with oxygen and salted water; the would look
monstrous
If we could see them: the beautiful passionate bodies
of living flame, batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that
ride the storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are.
There are many other chemistries of animal life
Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-
acids.