After Adam's Task 3 comments

By Brian Volck

“The world does not need words.” — Dana Gioia

My wife and I hadn’t taken the canoe out all summer, so Labor Day morning found us paddling the Whitewater (a far more tranquil river than it sounds). The sky was thickly overcast, the banks muddy from weekend rains. There would be no turtles sunning themselves on logs that day.

We did, however, see plovers sprinting along gravel bars, pulling up suddenly to cast one eye on us, the other on potential meals. Twin black breast bands told us they were killdeer, and I may have been the first of us to say so. Killdeer are common in that habitat, but Jill’s by far the better birder, having spent hours pouring over guidebooks. (Some people keep magazines at hand in the house’s smallest room; my wife has Roger Tory Peterson.)

We called out names together or in short sequence as we saw more birds along our way: A belted kingfisher in choppy flight, its rattling cough for once silent. A red-tailed hawk drawing mid-air circles, warily on the hunt. Common mallards taking flight as we paddled near. A great blue heron echoing Mesozoic reptiles as it slowly churned the wind.

Late in the trip, we named what both of us thought to be an osprey. We’ve often seen them and their huge, woody nests along the Chesapeake and spied one in flight, a fresh-caught trout writhing in its talons, in the northern Rockies. But maps and guidebooks tell us an osprey shouldn’t be in this part of the Midwest. Perhaps this was a pioneer, or migrating south from higher latitude. Or perhaps we were simply wrong, a case of mistaken identity.

If the latter, we might be forgiven. We were already dizzied by a bald eagle winging upriver a few miles back. There are nesting eagle pairs in the area, but we were reluctant to name what we saw until its size, white head and beak gave it away. To understand what we were seeing rendered its already considerable beauty magnificent. Seeing a great blue heron – and I’ve seen quite a number – turns my thoughts to grace, but an eagle is like the Shekinah itself.

Is it odd how desperate I am to name these mysteries, interposing signs between signifier and signified? Adam’s task was to name the creatures, and what he named them they were called. God, of course, remains unnamed, unmastered by signs. When Moses asks the voice from the burning bush its name, the answer is a puzzle: “I will be who I will be.” (A more grammatically precise translation than “I Am Who Am.”)

For humans, though, names are a necessary form of control. Without them, language is chaos. Naming is an expression of power, and all human power is prone to abuse. Names can be used to reinforce prejudice or instill suspicion, though we also use names to “domesticate a fear,” as Richard Wilbur observes.

But humans are naming creatures; names serve as tools of understanding, will and memory. We honor – rightly or not – those who came before by learning and using names they assigned. Names help us see the world by granting its specifics unexpected depth, rendering them, in some small way, intelligible, as Dana Gioia illustrates:

…the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

Eighteenth century Swedish naturalist, Carl von Linne (Latinized as Carolus Linnaeus) imposed a certain order on the biological world, developing what has come to be called “binomial nomenclature,” the pairing of genus and species to name scientifically rather than relying on local, variable, so-called “common names.”

The bald eagle becomes Haliaeetus leucocephalus, while the poor American robin is saddled with Turdus migratorius. Some life forms are named for their features, real or imagined; Tyrannosaurus rex means “king of tyrant lizards.” Some are named for the biologist involved in its description. The genus Camellia, species of which acquired romantic associations through Dumas (fils) and Verdi, was named by Linnaeus for Jesuit botanist Georg Josef Kamel, who studied plants in the Philippines. Whether the binomial nomenclature for humans, Homo sapiens, is a description or an unintended irony remains unclear.

Linnaeus was a complex, fascinating man. His scientific work spanned botany, zoology, mineralogy, medicine and even physics, but his great contribution was biological systematics. As one hagiographer said, “He found biology a chaos; he left it a cosmos.”

Over the bedroom door in his summer house, he carved a personal motto, Innocue vivito, numen adest: “Live righteously—
the deity is present.” He annoyed Swedish Lutheran clerics by including humans in his biological categories, and he articulated a theory of human race difference, buttressing one of the Enlightenment’s uglier developments: scientific racism.

Late in life, strokes and progressive dementia stole Linnaeus’ memory. The man who systematized the naming of earth’s living creatures died unable to say his own name.

It seems too poetic an end, a cautionary tale recalling the limits of human intelligence, but I find something reassuring there. As I writer, I’m heartened that Linnaeus’s work has long outlived him. More importantly, the world went on just as before, undisturbed by naming or the passing of the namer. Like the possible osprey along the Whitewater, Creation neither wants nor needs our names, however much we wish to honor it with words.

Even realizing I’ve misnamed something is an achievement, recognition that I’m neither Adam nor God. Nor am I Richard Wilbur, who puts it far better in his brief lyric, “On Having Misidentified a Wild Flower”:

A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

(Note: By clicking the “listen” button at this link, you can hear Richard Wilbur read his poem after recounting the story behind it.)