New beech leaves in Grib Forest in Denmark
Forests. Lots of plants, big and small, living together on land. Animals dwell there. Hunters hunt there. Recluses and far-away grandmas live in cabins there. How many fairytales take place in a forest? How many books you’ve read? Is the forest good, evil, or both or neither? When was the last time you sat on a fallen tree in the middle of a forest and just listened? What did you hear?
Mirkwood
Forests really get my imagination going. Some of my favorite books use forests as major backdrops — even as characters in their own right. Tolkien, for example, takes readers into at least four different forests over the course of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (the Old Forest, Lothlórien, Mirkwood, and Fangorn). These are mythical places with elves, talking trees, gigantic spiders, and, especially, the endless woods.
When we were kids, my brother, our friend, and I spent many of our days in a “forest” (in reality it was about an acre of planted pine trees. I’m from the part of Washington where such a thing is highly unusual and utterly unnatural.) We built a “fort” — an enclosed wooden platform in the trees, complete with its very own collection of gigantic spiders. You could climb high enough on some of the trees that your head came out of the general canopy and you could look out over much of the rest of the forest. Occasionally we even climbed and jumped between trees high above ground.
On November 20th, 2008, Richard Hacken (work|poetry) gave a lecture entitled “Into the Imagined Forest: A 2000-Year Retrospective of the German Woods“. There he spoke of the cultural history of the German wald — the forest that figures so prominently in the German and the more general European imagination. A summarizing quotation:
The imagined forest is a contradictory forest. To early Germanic tribes, the forest was an object of worship — a temple of holiness — while to others it was the home of evil and danger. For later thinkers it stood as a model of immortality and regeneration; for others it perfectly illustrated the Darwinian struggle for survival…. Culturally, the forest has formed the context for heroic quests; it has been a backdrop for sorrow (especially in the vicinity of fir, willow and cypress trees).
It has been the asocial haunt of wild men, sociopaths and thieves, but it has also been the stage for social justice. It has been a moral exemplar but also a place to avoid. The woodlands have been seen as a source of industrial materials; or they have been a place of rest and recreation. The forest has been a source of food and medicine on one hand, and a venue of death on the other. The structure of a tree has been the well-rooted inspiration for branching charts such as family trees, grammar trees and hierarchies…. And most recently… the forest [has been seen] as both barometer and fount of ecological salvation.
[A] forest is… a landscape that subsumes every fern, butterfly, tree, rock, soil type, underground ore deposit, clump of lichen, fallen branch, shrub, insect and wild animal within it. Woodlands provide potent and vivid symbols of life, death, regeneration, social process and collective identity.
A book I was reading a few months ago glowingly described the forests of Poland and their role in the upheavals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century. I started to see the forest as characterized by its vastness and its seeming unconquerability. For thousands of years, civilization lived around the forest and utilized the forest. Traveling by boat on a forest river gave some few a glimpse of the forest’s mysterious endlessness. Yet none but the wildest people actually settled there.
Eventually that changed. Settlement by pioneers with axes resulted in the conquest of the woods, giving us today’s widespread deforestation combined with a safer, more civilized wood that is criss-crossed by highways and major settlements, rarely even lacking cellular phone service. But vast tracts of virgin forest still beckon to moderns, offering a chance to confront Nature more or less raw and uncut.
Below are some images, quotations, and links to articles on the topic of forests that might excite your imagination. Enjoy!
[Note: Some of the image links in the original post were broken. This has been corrected.]
Links
Forest
Old-Growth Forest
Cloud Forest
Rainforest Layers
Wald
"Despite veneration of individual trees, the forest as a whole was seen, at least through the Middle Ages, as problematic. It was difficult to travel in, and it was seen as a nuisance, occupying ground that might otherwise have been used for farming. Groves and individual stands of timber were carved out for use and cultivation, but the deep, unending primitive forest was a danger."
"The German language developed two different words... to make a distinction: the Wald (not cognate to English 'wood,' but to the antiquated 'wold') was natural forest, while the Forst (cognate to English 'forest') was the managed, cultivated forest, the wilderness domesticated. Thus was born the profession of forester to protect demarcated woodlands, usually belonging to a sovereign or noble family."
"To early Germanic tribes, the forest was an object of worship -- a temple of holiness...." A hymn by Paul Gerhardt: "Make room for your spirit in me / That for you I become a great tree, / Sinking my roots deep in the earth. / Allow me, solely for your praise / Within your garden to raise / Myself from sapling in rebirth"
"The forest was the cultural context for the medieval quest, a place where life had to be wrenched from the dark, foreboding wood with bravery and effort. Forest darkness was not just an absence of light; it was an absence of humanity, friendship and morality. The inventory of dangers imagined in the forest grew from mythical wild men in league with the devil to include dragons and monsters. In black and white terms, the court was good and the forest was evil. This was fictional, of course, since the dichotomy ignored any treason, intrigue or violence found at court."
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“It is in the forest that fairy-tale characters often lose their way and then find themselves again as their life’s purpose becomes clear. The forest in question is not a small tract of woodland. It is always immense, unbounded and unknowable. The fairy tale forest of Germany has power to change hearts and destinies. It is a meritocracy that distributes justice without regard to social class. Hansel and Gretel are not the only ones to get lost in the forest and then to return wiser and fulfilled.”
"In the first decade of the 20th century, Franz Kafka wrote that: '...we are all like tree trunks in the snow. It appears that we can be easily kicked aside. But no, we are rooted to the ground. Yet even that apparent rootedness is deceptive and misleading.'"
"Fairy tales are as popular in America as they are in Germany, perhaps because we... prefer order and predictability in our own imagined woods. But... the imagined German forest requires its heroes to tame the wilderness both within and without."
"Tree cult practitioners among the Germanic tribes equated man with plant. Early medicinal superstitions held that a tree could remove or call back diseases; a specific living tree, spiritually conjoined with a person, could serve as a Doppelganger to share, forecast, or even determine that person's fate. Today there is still a German figurative usage of Lebensbaum (tree of life): 'the tree of my life is growing, blossoming, withering, dying...'"
Real, or Ideal? OR What To Name A Post When No Cohesive Theme Binds It Together
1. Academia
Last night I went to the “Evening for New Graduate Students” at BYU (which was actually secretly or not-so-secretly open to all graduate students — note for next year
). President Samuelson spoke first. During that short talk and during his devotional address on Tuesday, I had the feeling that I have really undervalued President Samuelson’s ideas in the past. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have the sort of voice you might hear on TV or the radio. The last part of the program was a speech by Dr. Wynn Sterling, Dean of Graduate Studies. He presented a very exciting view of grad school and the potential to become involved to a greater degree in mankind’s quest for knowledge. He encouraged us to engage in that pursuit, even to the point of disagreeing with our advisors and their colleagues. (This seemed promising for me, since I can never seem to keep my mouth shut at lab meetings, colloquiums, and thesis defenses….)
Dr. Sterling’s view of graduate school was idealistic. It contrasts with another common vision of the graduate experience: the realistic. This is the viewpoint of the likes of PHD comics and the satirical essay How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps (which I discovered via Greg Mankiw’s blog). It also seems to be confirmed by the extreme frustration felt by some of my friends in their master’s programs.
I do not accuse Dr. Sterling of any sort of blindness or naiveté when I say that his vision is idealistic. In fact, I like to think that he presented an idealist vision as a sort of counterpoint to the difficulties and even cynicism that often afflict grad students.
2. Opinion Leaders?
When the media announce a new trend in public opinion, I often respond skeptically, asking whether their report is cause or effect. Can data-based analysis determine whether this is just paranoia or if there are some instances of the media leading rather than merely reporting public opinion (not including editorial and opinion page articles)? Most recently articles like this on rising skepticism about the mission in Afghanistan have reminded me of this question.
3. Bathwater
Two retrospectives on the economists’ role in the financial crisis:
The two articles paint eerily similar and yet vitally different pictures. Largely, Eichengreen blames the crisis on selective reading and self-serving interpretation of free market economics. Krugman blames an idealistic romance with the neo-neoclassical economics that arose after Keynesianism faded. Eichengreen suggests that the future holds a prominent place for empirical economics research. Krugman highlights behavioral economics and hopes for a Keynesian renaissance.
Krugman’s paper is well-crafted, but I think Eichengreen’s is a better portrayal of reality. Maybe that’s my free-marketeer self speaking. But I just can’t help thinking there’s a baby sitting in the economic bathwater that people are dumping out their windows these days. The ideas I learned in my economics classes were not empty — they were just idealized. To abandon them wholesale now reminds me of the ideologically-motivated cataclysms that Chomsky led linguistics through every decade or so. To put it another way, while relativistic physics explained major gaps in the Newtonian model, it didn’t keep Newtonian physics from being a good-enough description of the world for most purposes. Newton wasn’t wrong so much as he was incomplete.
But it’s Eichengreen’s focus on empiricism that really wins me over. We live in an age of data: vast — almost incomprehensibly huge — stores of data waiting to be utilized. Actually making use of it is at once one of the greatest challenges and one of the greatest opportunities of our time. (I believed that even before my two weeks in a class about data mining.) These huge amounts of data give us an opportunity to reason inductively more than ever before, whereas past models of reality relied on a small number of unproven fundamental tenets (“axioms”, “theorems”, “laws”) from which a theoretical structure was assembled by means of deductive reasoning. While these deductive systems are very powerful in addition to having much the same elegance as mathematics (an aesthetic appeal not to be underestimated), they build a very large superstructure atop a relatively small foundation. Any cracks in the foundation can threaten the whole system.
In a way the tension between fact and theory mirrors the idealism/realism contrast mentioned earlier. Humans seem to have a cognitive bias in favor of uniform explanations of phenomena, giving fuel to idealistic theories. Linguists face a similar crisis of empiricism versus theory; sadly(?) there won’t likely be a linguistic analog to global economic catastrophe to shake their academic confidence and encourage a reassessment (Tower of Babel 2: Confoundations ?)
4. Why Are Academic Disciplines Polypolistic?
Or rather, when will disciplines rely less upon a small number of arbiters of what is or isn’t “credible scholarship”? Instead of a few important journals, couldn’t much of the discussion occur right here in the blogosphere? Are scholars really so ill-mannered that they can’t carry out their debates in real time before a world audience just like the open source hackers and the Wikipedians? Even the U.S. Congress seems transparent when compared to some of the academic oligarchies.
Had economics been democratized, in a sense, would it have been less susceptible to the sort of groupthink that seemingly got it into trouble? Or would it just have been a different type of groupthink? How do you kill the echo chamber without simply gagging everybody?
Speaking of open scholarly discourse, I now wish to present a(n) hypothesis [indefinite article parenthesized for correctness in certain British Commonwealth nations {hint: it's not Fiji.}]:
5. A(n) Hypothesis
I hypothesize that music modeling will encounter much less of a data sparseness problem than word-level language modeling. This issue came up in a PhD thesis proposal I attended today, and it made me think: though I agree that music and human language are similar in many ways, music seems more closely analogous to the character-level or phonological properties of language, rather than to its word-level, syntactic properties. In other words, a phoneme trigram model’s entropy will be much closer to a note trigram model’s entropy than to a word trigram model’s entropy. Does that even make sense? And, is it correct?
6. Terminus
And so it ends. 10 bonus points if you read this.