March 17, 2026
Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #4: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social as much as in academic or political spaces—plays out on the level of acquaintance. This new series of essays on the Diacritics blog interrogates the impact of those fleeting, brief interactions, or, alternatively, the influence of connections with those we have known for a long time but not very well. Contributors explore how the meaning and value of “acquaintance” varies in different cultural, historical, or social contexts, and how we can think about surface connections between diverse thinkers and creators that nevertheless may have a far-reaching impact on their work.
Starling Feathers; or, the Matter Near Words
An accidental finding of biological material in a copy of John Ray and Francis Willughby’s 1678 Ornithology in the Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections provided the inspiration for this entry.[1]
How to describe a kind of thing that exists in the world, without in effect describing only an individual instance of it? A biological species, for instance. The question has persisted as long as the concept of species has existed. By the time Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), its meaning was both tacit and unsettled. Darwin wrote that “no one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.”[2] The OED gives this as an example for the biological meaning of “species,” yet the quote is taken from the context of Darwin’s chapter on natural variation. No naturalist would seriously deny variation among individuals of a species, and yet the significance ascribed to variation makes all the difference—whether one thinks there is an essential stability underlying variation; or whether, as Darwin perceived it, variation is a source of change: “Authors sometimes argue in a circle when they state that important organs never vary; for these same authors practically rank that character as important . . . which does not vary.”[3] A tautology, self-reinforcing, and “systematists are far from pleased at finding variability in important characters.”[4] Darwin observes in the “systematists” of his day a displeasure at the instability of their own knowledge. If those important character traits are potentially variable rather than fixed, then the knowledge of species cannot be absolute; it is ever provisional and relative. The kind of knowledge that can be had of such changing and changeable entities as species might better be called acquaintance. Our modern sense of acquaintance as a slight or glancing knowledge often implies that another, deeper form of knowledge is both possible and preferable. In contrast, we might understand acquaintance as a lack of fixity in the mind’s (indirect) object.
Perhaps too early to be targets of Darwin’s critique, Francis Willughby and John Ray were part of the community of naturalists who formed the original “Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge” in the 1660s. Willughby and Ray sought to identify species by relying on something very much like Darwin’s “important characters,” or “characteristic marks,” as Willughby called them. Willughby and Ray would not have questioned the basic stability of species, but they were immersed in the task of identifying and articulating just what made each species what it was. As Tim Birkhead puts it in his biography of Willughby, appreciating the development of his own discipline of ornithology, “I don’t think we have any idea just how difficult this was.”[5]
Ray and Willughby sought a knowledge of the natural world at once expansive (by traveling to observe as many forms of life as possible) and reductive (by identifying the “characteristic marks” which sets each species apart). They traveled in Britain and on the European continent together in order to observe firsthand all the plants, insects, fishes, and birds they could find. Theirs was to be a “natural system” (as opposed to an artificial one), derived from “the subtle and complex order of nature itself.”[6] What I want to bring into view in this essay is something related to but distinct from the history of biological classification: a recurring, persistent, if not perennial element of the attempt to perceive and represent living things in all of their specificity. This is a question of poetics, which happens to overlap with questions of science. As I understand it, Willughby and Ray’s search for characteristic marks was an attempt to see things distinctly and in meaningful relation. The difficulty of this task is that the “subtle and complex order of nature itself” and the living things of the world are sometimes felt to be incommensurate. If for Ray, devout pioneer of natural theology that he was, the difficulty could only be a matter of seeing the relations more clearly (and not a disjunction between species and living individual in nature itself), I find surprising, and poignant, continuity between that immense project of classification and many subsequent attempts to see and represent living creatures aright, as they are; both in themselves and as instances of a larger category. Both individuals and species become indirect objects of acquaintance, because both compel the observer or writer to maintain a certain distance from what they perceive.
There are poetic corollaries to the search for characteristic marks, which pick up on another meaning of “character”: “A member of a set of symbols used in writing or printing to represent linguistic elements, as individual speech sounds, syllables, or words; any of the simple elements of a written language, as a letter of an alphabet, or an ideogram.”[7] Writing itself involves characters which may or may not prove characteristic; getting marks on a page to characterize, differentiate, describe a coherent form of life. At least since Plato’s Cratylus, thinkers have worried about the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Jonathan Swift made the literalism of the Royal Society famous in the Laputans of Gulliver’s Travels, who carried around sacks of objects to convey exactly what they meant rather than having to rely on the vicissitudes and irreducible ambiguities of symbolic language. The absurdity, and unwieldiness, of such a system soon becomes apparent. But Ray was also sensitive to an attraction and seductiveness that language itself could hold. Words are not merely inefficient but might exercise their own enchantment. Poetically, and casting a glance ahead to Darwin, we might put the problem more affirmatively: that multivalence in language can have a power and insight of its own, and in turn reflect back on the physical world; thus suggesting that incommensurate ambiguities exist in nature and are not only generated by the inherent imprecision of words.
In addition to the natural world, Willughby and Ray were curious about linguistic phenomena, collecting information about languages and dialects on their travels, and contributing (later to Ray’s regret) to the sections on animals and plants in the 1668 Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language by John Wilkins, also of the Royal Society. At least in theory, Wilkins’s sense of “a Real Character” was meant to resolve or dissolve all ambiguity. The trouble for Ray was how arbitrary Wilkins’s system turned out to be. Frank Kermode supposed that “the need of the Society was not so much for a universal all-purpose new language as for a new way of writing, plain and unrhetorical, appropriate to scientific reports.” And, provocatively, “the plain prose advocated by the Society contributed to the development of an easy and accessible English style which, in the very long run, became, as they had wished, the lingua franca of international science.”[8]
The problem of language for Ray’s scientific mind, which was also his theological mind, is primarily a temptation of distraction, of words absorbing the attention due to matter. Words for him were useful; yet he witnessed in his contemporaries a tendency to mistake them for what they symbolize, and to consider them independently of their symbolic function. Ray expressed his linguistic ambivalence in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691):
That Learning (saith a wise and observant Prelate) which consists only in the form and pedagogy of the Arts, or the critical notions upon Words and Phrases, hath in it this intrinsical Imperfection, that it is not only so far to be esteemed as it conduceth to the knowledg of Things, being in it self but a kind of Pedantry, apt to infect a man with such odd Humors of Pride, and Affectation, and Curiosity, as will render him unfit for any great Employment, Words being but the Images of Matter, to be wholly given up to the Study of these. What is it but Pygmalions Phrenzy, to fall in Love with a Picture or Image.[9]
The danger is vividly phrased, and yet Ray echoes (plagiarizes?) a sentiment about the relationship between words and matter found also in Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605):
Here therefore [is] the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter. . . . . It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.[10]
The suggestive phrase Ray adopts from Bacon, “Pygmalions Phrenzy,” refers to the legendary sculptor who falls in love with his sculpture of an ideal woman, coming into English literary reference most directly through Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The implication of vanity shines through in this myth: an “image of matter” is taken for an ideal, which in turn improves matter itself; whereas I take Ray and Bacon’s implication to be that matter is already ideal, not to be improved. We must bend language, our minds, our perception and all of our faculties toward matter, in order to grasp its principles. For Ray’s natural theology, these are the creative principles of The Wisdom of God.
The motto of the Royal Society, adopted in 1662, is Nullius in verba, explained on the Society’s current website as “‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts as determined by experiment.”[11] But the attempt to reject verba does not only apply to questioning the authority of others’ words; there is also a problem with the authority of words themselves. Words are supposed to be nothing substantial, null in themselves. Yet as Virginia Woolf put it much later, words are “the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.” Then again, she agreed more with Ray and Bacon than might at first appear, for “all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different.”[12] Words permit no approach closer than acquaintance; and to be well acquainted with words is to respect a certain distance from them.
The deflection of words away from words and toward “something different” is wonderfully evasive. For my seventeenth-century naturalists, Willughby and Ray, the difficulty of characterizing a species had to do with both locating the “marks” by which we can recognize the distinctness of species; and, implicitly but no less problematically, with creating the marks of words that would express the species’ marks adequately. On the one hand, there is the word as written or printed, a concrete instance differing from others in orthography, typeface, context, and in the very matter of the ink, on the matter of the page; and there is the abstract word, the idea, brought down to the page, represented. In Ray’s estimation, Willughby had a tendency to conflate the marks of individuals with those of species; and to render even individuals in terms that could be barely “intelligible.” The work of characterizing an individual—of getting at what makes a person, a tree, a bird, a dog that one and no other—mirrors that of characterizing a species. For in each case, it is a matter of salience, of bringing something into view that is just what it is. To find and arrange the words for what makes an American goldfinch an American goldfinch is neither a greater nor a smaller task than evoking the individual life of a single goldfinch. When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in 1978, “the Goldfinches are back, or others like them,” she expressed a seasonal phenomenon of return, and the limitations of a human observer unable to distinguish one goldfinch from another.[13] It was also a shift from the definite article, used as though the species were an eternally replenished self-same entity, to the indefinite pronoun “others,” which simultaneously blurs and establishes the birds’ nonidentical life. What comes after the caesura, marked with a comma, is a movement away from abstraction but not toward concreteness, not toward closer scrutiny of these particular goldfinches; rather it is a relinquishment of the claim to recognition. The speaker can identify goldfinches as goldfinches, but in pulling back from the identification, acknowledges a level of life that confounds and is incommensurate; the sense in which the category of the individual, the living instance, is strangely larger as well as smaller than that of the species. Bishop knows that these are goldfinches, being acquainted with their form of life; but she doesn’t know these goldfinches. The poem makes plain that such acquaintance is not a thing one moves beyond or overcomes.
This seems initially like the opposite sort of movement from the one that Willughby and Ray hoped to make, for their project was to proceed from individuals to species. Yet the incommensurability of words and matter resembles, and even expresses, how a species is incommensurate with its living instances. David Cram articulates the “epistemological paradox for experimental methods of the sort vaunted and promoted by the Royal Society: the objective is to account for species by rigorous empirical description of them; but species are not the sort of entity which can themselves be directly experienced.”[14] Bishop the poet indicates obliquely an entity inaccessible to direct experience, but which constrains and shapes experience; an entity subject to acquaintance. The evasion or swerving away from direct statement is one way for a writer to accommodate such entities, recognized implicitly, but not held in place to be more closely examined. Percy Shelley in 1820, however, addressed his skylark head-on, “What thou art we know not”—expanding upon the earlier denial, “Bird thou never wert”—only to slide into a feverish chain of similes after the question, “What is most like thee?” His poem is yet another approach to the enigma of identification, of coming up against the nonidentity between a living being and the kind of thing it also is, the what of it.
In April 2025, during the second of several visits to the Cornell Library Rare and Manuscripts Hill Collection, in order to examine the copy of Ray’s 1678 The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, completed by Ray after Willughby’s death, I encountered “images of matter” suddenly proximate to the matter itself: fifteen small, dark, slightly curved starling feathers tucked into the gutter between pages 196 and 197, near the entry on starlings (“stares”). These feathers all but tickled the printed words describing what starling feathers are supposed to be like:
The tips of the feathers on the Neck and Back are yellow: The feathers under the tail cinereous, else they are black all the body over, with a certain blue or purple gloss, varying as it is variously exposed to the light. In the Hen the tips of the feathers on the Breast and Belly, to the very Throat, are white. In the Cock the Back participates more of purple, the Rump of green; only the lower Belly is more spotted.
All the quil-feathers are dusky; but the edges of the third, and subsequent to the tenth, and from the fifteenth again to the last are more dark. The covert-feathers of the Wings glister, and the tips of the lesser coverts are yellow. The feathers covering the undersides of the Wings are dusky, having pale-yellow edges.
The Tail is three inches long, made up of twelve dusky feathers with pale yellow edges.[15]
The “distinctive thin, pointed feathers” in the Hill Collection copy of the Ornithology are likely contour feathers, from around a starling’s “head, throat, chest, and mantle,” according to Mary Margaret Ferraro, bird collections manager at the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates.[16] Yet I do not find it easy to see in these feathers the description Willughby gives of them: a challenge inherent in visualizing a meticulous visual description, in the move from matter to words and back again.
If Ray was concerned with words as “being but the Images of Matter,” the description of a species carries the additional challenge of somehow parsing the images of matter, and matter itself, for the essential details belonging to every instance of a thing. What Willughby called “characteristic marks” resembles the twentieth-century American ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson’s groundbreaking method of visual representation in the modern field guide. Making a similar connection to Peterson’s “field marks” in his biography of Willughby, Tim Birkhead notes the way Peterson’s images “perfectly reduced each species to its most salient features.”[17] It might in fact be more accurate to say that identification in the field is, rather than a claim of knowledge, a process of getting acquainted. The means by which we learn to identify a species express this distinction by their exacting reductions. It would be presumptuous of me to say that I know a bird I have just glimpsed through binoculars and matched to an image in my mind, informed partly by field marks learned from the likes of Peterson, partly by seeing many other birds like this one . . . but I would also be no closer to knowing this bird in any active sense if I were to examine its corpse inside and out, as Willughby and Ray did with many of the birds they described. Locating the characteristic, definitive, or salient is necessarily a process of reduction; and reduction, whatever its virtues and necessities, whatever is gained by it, also entails a loss. Note that the full title of the Ornithology ends with an explicit reference to the aim of reduction: Wherein all the Birds Hitherto Known, Being Reduced Into a Method Sutable to their Natures, are Accurately Described.[18]
What I might say about poetic descriptions in a very broad sense—including writers as distant in sensibility and context as Elizabeth Bishop and Percy Shelley—is that they are freer to address themselves to the loss involved in this reduction. Poetic words are no less subject to the loss of matter, but poets are at liberty to make do with acquaintance; and to create out of the taxonomist’s leavings. Bishop is not expected to contribute to the classification of goldfinches. But the work of classification, that reductive science, is among her materials. She creates by retracting an identification; as Shelley does by denying the identity between the word (“bird”) and the being of the skylark. Darwin, all scientist and half poet, who was wary of those “systematists” and their principled reluctance to embrace variability as a force rather than a flourish, expressed in multiple instances that he wished his work could be “all observing & no writing.”[19] For Darwin, writing exercises a constraint on the observation of living, changing matter. All writing is writing down, as the gaze of the writer turns from the world toward words.
Returning to the description of starling feathers in the Ornithology, I notice the tension between detail as meticulous and as representative; between exhaustiveness and reduction. I can almost see Willughby with a freshly killed starling in front of him (as he may well have had), covering it systematically from head to toe with his words, giving each individual feather its due. In differentiating the male and female (“Cock” and “Hen”), we have at least an indication that Willughby’s description draws upon multiple specimens. Yet the description is hard to visualize except in fragments. I can see in my mind’s eye parts of individual feathers, and a “certain blue or purple gloss, varying as it is variously exposed to the light,” while the description is meant to distill the plumage of an entire species. Imagine describing every hair on the head of a person—its varying tints, its texture, its measurements—in order to describe human hair in general.
This difficulty of visualizing the textual description of a species, in a way that could actually inform perception and observation, is what made Peterson’s method of field-guide illustration revolutionary. The significance of that contribution to the visual representation of birds would be difficult to overstate. Yet seeing a throughline from Willughby and Ray’s Ornithology (which also includes images, gathered in the back of the book) to the latest field guides, what intrigues me is the persistence of written description in the service of identification, however increasingly compressed. I notice that words have not been found quite redundant, even in the plainest work of representation. There are aspects of a bird’s image words can point to, emphasize, elucidate. In fact, it is precisely those “characteristic marks,” which bear the burden of distinguishing one kind of bird from another, that most seem to require the support of words to be made clear, to train the eye to know what it is seeing.
I want to connect the minimal function of language found in field guides—language as “reduction,” to the point where illustration and text are inverted, text dwindling to caption—to the methods of distillation in poetic description.
Willughby’s lavish detail about plumage was a sticking point for Ray, who wrote in his preface to the Ornithology that Willughby was peerless in his “exactness” and his penchant for “inventing Characteristic Marks”:
But because a prolix and operose description is tedious to most Readers, and to the unattentive seems rather to obscure than illustrate the thing described, . . . besides the description he often adds some short notes, by which the Animal described may be distinguished from others of the same kind like to it, and wherewith it is in danger to be confounded. Now though I cannot but commend his diligence, yet I must confess that in describing the colours of each single feather he sometimes seems to me to be too scrupulous and particular, partly because Nature doth not in all Individuals, (perhaps not in any two) observe exactly the same spots or strokes, partly because it is very difficult so to word descriptions of this sort as to render them intelligible: Yet dared I not to omit or alter any thing.[20]
Ray specifies that it is “to the unattentive” that such descriptions become tedious, indicating a limitation on the side of the reader. Yet he formulates a fundamental descriptive problem, where words “seem rather to obscure than illustrate the thing described.” A thick description impedes perception, blocks our view; akin to the “Pedantry” Ray lamented in those afflicted with “Pygmalions Phrenzy,” who make the study of language an end in itself. Ray also, however, placed a higher value on description than on visual illustration.[21] He was a remarkable writer and thought of words as indispensable tools, which yet must never become ends in themselves.
The so-called “type specimen” of modern taxonomy is the individual “used for naming and describing a species or sub-species.” As the Oxford Dictionary of Biology is quick to point out though, it “is not necessarily the most characteristic representative of the species.”[22] It is also a term used in typography, where it refers to “a printed sheet or booklet showing the variety of typefaces a printer or founder has available.”[23] Those “Images of Matter” keep resurfacing in the attempt to circumscribe matter itself. Richard Fortey explains that type specimens in natural history are “the ground truth for species in the natural world.”[24] One reason why it might be so difficult to keep words apart from matter is that they are also tied to it, beneath notice: whether they are warmed by human breath, as they are issued as speech; or formed in ink, either drawn by a hand (for Willughby and Ray, that hand holds a quill), or pressed into paper by a printer. That the “ground truth for species” is ever tied to an individual body, no more “characteristic” than any other, similarly discloses how matter clings to all the methods of its abstraction.[25]
The contours of these starling feathers correspond to the contours of a body. The contours of contour-feathers express a relationship between present and absent matter, more directly than words can ever express matter; for they are of the same medium.
Reading Willughby and Ray’s text, with the feathers in my peripheral vision, it is difficult to shake the impression that matter sometimes gently mocks its images or representations; the mockery becoming more pronounced the more painstaking and meticulous, the more “scrupulous and particular” a description attempts to be. Some time after I informed the reading room personnel of the feathers in their copy of the Ornithology, they added a note to the online catalog entry, and also a subject term: “Biological insertions.” As “biological insertions,” the feathers have now become classified as bibliographical as well as ornithological phenomena. One function of classification is to widen the sphere of belonging. In one sense, the feathers don’t belong in the book. They are body parts, extratextual. They answer to Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as “matter out of place,” and are “the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.”[26]
In response to my query whether there was any way of guessing the age of the feathers, Ferraro replied that it might be possible, “doing stable isotope analysis, but I think the only way to do that would involve destroying the feathers.”[27] The presentation of such a stark compromise reveals a tension I find latent in the poetics of description; a resistance felt in the attempt to bring matter into language without destroying it, or its coherence. For Ray, it was important to keep ever in view that words are not matter. Today, the forces that obscure matter are more likely to take the form of abstract data, the virtual, the automated. In drawing attention to the way an overly detailed description could “obscure rather than illustrate the thing described,” Ray made a case for language as better suited to characterizing species than representing individuals. Yet strange to say, the elusive pursuit of “characteristic marks” betrays a poetic impetus as much as a scientific one. Because just as the description of a species involves a simultaneous focusing on and blurring of detail; the poetic evocation of an individual being illuminates “characteristic marks” of another kind, generating a feeling of inimitability. And just as a species description is tied to a type specimen—which bears the representative burden, even though, as an individual, it cannot be the type; a poetic description can conjure sensuous particularity, making no claim beyond the particular and yet intimating an entire species.
These starling feathers are so light that my breath, or the air movement of a slowly turning page, are enough to disarrange them. They are nonetheless, without external force, inanimate. What then is the relationship between words and animacy? The species descriptions in the Ornithology are based primarily on the examination of dead specimens. It is the form of the avian body, inside and out, which can be accounted for by those means. Yet two aspects relevant to the species description of any bird will be absent from its corpse: forms of movement, and sounds.
In The Natural History of Selborne (1789), the parson Gilbert White wrote, in the tradition of Ray’s natural theology but also as a field biologist avant la lettre, that “a good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape; on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand.” In the rambling, vivid, virtuosic list that follows, he states that “the king-fisher darts along like an arrow; fern-owls, or goat-suckers, glance in the dusk over the tops of trees like a meteor; starlings as it were swim along, while missel-thrushes use a wild and desultory flight.”[28] Encompassed in White’s notion of “air” was, as editor Anne Secord remarks, “the characteristic behaviour and motion of a bird that makes it instantly recognizable to the practised observer.”[29] This is what birders sometimes call “jizz,” a term of unknown origin but sufficiently embedded in the language of naturalists for the OED to define it as a “characteristic impression given by an animal or plant.”[30] Such an impression is a form of acquaintance, instantly renewed with each encounter.
I am thinking of this “characteristic impression” as the photographic negative of the “characteristic mark.” For the latter can in principle be made explicit, while the former cannot. An impression is an all-at-once quality; and yet as with Willughby’s painstaking descriptions of plumage, to break “jizz” up into components is to sacrifice, for the moment, a sense of the whole. I like White’s “air” for birds perhaps even better than “jizz,” because it is at once the very medium of avian movement and a word for song. Yet it does not follow that I would be able to form a “characteristic impression” without also learning to recognize certain “characteristic marks.” What has been made explicit, and brought down to the page of the field guide, is set in motion when I lift my eyes to a real bird in the field. And then again, from attending to the bird on the wing and in the bush, I lower my eyes to the page and match the afterimage of wing-bars or an eye-stripe to the simplified, labeled characteristic marks of the illustration. There is ever, in the movement between the two in both directions, a loss. At best, I come to prefer the loss of the explicit mark over the loss of the transient impression; prefer the uncharacteristic matter of the real bird over its characteristic visual and verbal representation. Whatever knowledge is possible of feathered life, it is predicated on this form of recognition through movement and change, through ephemeral encounter, always preserving a certain distance and reserve, which has the structure of long acquaintance, continuously renewed.
In the nineteenth century, John Clare begins an untitled poem (called “[Autumn Evening]” by later editors) without preamble: “I love to hear the evening crows go bye / And see the starnels darken down the sky.” In the “October” section of his The Shepherd’s Calendar, he described “the starnel crowds that dim the muddy light.”[31] These expressions are pure “characteristic impression.” Too far away to count feathers, or even to observe their dazzling iridescence, these lines attend to the starlings (“starnels” in Clare’s Northamptonshire dialect) in their collective being. White characterized the “air” of the starlings by their movement as individuals—they “as it were swim along,” referring to the mode of locomotion as observed in any individual starling. Clare conveys the starlings’ characteristic air of collective movement, described in terms of what they obscure. It isn’t an individual starling but a mass of them, which have the capacity to “darken down the sky” and to “dim the muddy light.”
In starlings, this overwhelming and mysterious characteristic impression of the flock is called a murmuration. Murmurations, in their concentrated swirling, can in some phases resemble fingerprints. The contemporary poet Devin Johnston ends an essay about murmurations with a meditation on the starlings in a poem by Tom Pickard, called “Dusk.” He traces the birds in the sound of Pickard’s lines, which “suggest a simultaneity of things that are not the same, a pattern—in the poem’s form as well as in the dusk—just beyond our grasp.”[32] Pattern beyond grasp is one way of understanding what is “not the sort of entity which can be directly experienced”: a species.
Robert Hayden’s 1970 poem “A Plague of Starlings” attends to starlings in Tennessee, where they embody Douglas’s “matter out of place” in another, more political sense. Sturnus vulgaris is invasive outside of Eurasia, deliberately introduced across the globe throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.[33] Harriet Ritvo observes that the “assurance” underlying the rhetoric of biological invasion “neglects to acknowledge the instability and ambiguity inherent in both elements of the label ‘invasive species.’” This isn’t to say that the label is without meaning, but that the rhetoric of invasion assumes and idealizes a harmonious “previous existence of a static biota without intruders” (and tends to pick and choose among intruders), while the term species, which “has always been a philosophical problem,” is “paradoxically . . . both always essential and often misleading.”[34]
Hayden’s poem records human acts of war against these invaders. The terse lines, between one and three stresses, are a form of “reduction to salient details,” not unlike the work of a taxonomist or a field-guide illustrator. Yet there is no question here of identification: the starlings are ubiquitous and unmistakable, “gathered noisy and / befouling there.” Which is to say, the reduction Hayden performs of words upon the matter of starlings is a creative reduction, representing a dubious and exasperated destruction of life. The starlings as “death’s / black droppings” are racially inflected, but obliquely, incommensurate with any “frost-salted” bodies other than their own. The poem’s parenthetical subtitle (Fisk Campus) locates this particular, repeated attack on the campus of Fisk University in Nashville, where the poet teaches Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue the poem imagines as dramatically and enigmatically intertwined with the dead and still-living starlings. The temporal words are plural yet indefinite—“Evenings” are the temporal setting of the poem’s first three stanzas, and “Mornings” of the last two. These ways of keeping time convey the recurring yet unstable return of the birds that were inadvertently “spared.” The aspect of the starlings’ “air” that Hayden observes most keenly is sonic: he describes their furtive “chitter[ing],” which commingles with the sound of the weapons discharged against them. The words, in turn, make sounds of their own, over or beneath the sounds they stand for.
In the quiet of the reading room, far from Hayden’s befouling, noisy birds, I thought of how the feathers and the words neither equaled nor negated each other. The words do not touch the matter, but get near it; they warm their hands on it. And then, this particular matter—these contingent starling feathers, placed in the book we don’t know when, by an unknown person for unknown reasons—will never again constitute a starling and take flight.
After dutifully recording Willughby’s “diligent” observations on the plumage of the “The common Wigeon or Whewer,” Ray finds it necessary to interject that Willughby is “more particular and minute in describing the colours of each single feather . . . than is needful; sith in these things nature doth as they say sport her self.”[35] Ray chides Willughby for lavishing attention upon that which is variable, and his reflexive sense of the verb to sport suggests to me the possibility of nature’s own scope for variation and play within each species. These feathers in the book seem to mark the pages referring to them. But even if the matter of which they are made (keratin) brushes against the matter of the ink on the matter of the paper, the longer I look back and forth between the feathers and the words, the more I see the space between them; and the less I would ever wish to close that space. Only now, in a moment of distraction, does the oddly joyous pun in Hayden’s grim poem leap out to me. Befouling! What else are fowls to be?
I wish to thank the kind staff in the Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collection Reading Room at Cornell University Library, particularly Julia Gardner and Eisha Neely.
[1] Quotes and titles taken from Ray, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, preserve the original seventeenth-century spelling.
[2] Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 44.
[3] Darwin, 46.
[4] Darwin, 45.
[5] Birkhead, The Wonderful Mr. Willughby, 188.
[6] Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, 26.
[7] OED, s.v. “character,” definition 1.3.a.
[8] Kermode, “The Search for a Perfect Language,” 217–18.
[9] John Ray, The Wisdom of God, 256; quoted in Cram, “Francis Willughby and John Ray on Words and Things,” 123–24.
[10] Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” 182. As Gavin Alexander observes in the note to his selection from Bacon’s text in Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, “the separation of words (verba) and matter (res) runs right through rhetorical and literary theory” (431, note 3).
[11] https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/
[12] Woolf, “Craftsmanship,” 96.
[13] Bishop, “North Haven.”
[14] Cram, “Francis Willughby and John Ray on Words and Things,” 265.
[15] Ray, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, 196. For a thorough account of the publication, structure, and content of The Ornithology, see also Birkhead, Smith, Doherty and Charmantier, “Willughby’s Ornithology.”
[16] Personal communication between Mary Margaret Ferraro and author, May 2, 2025.
[17] Birkhead, The Wonderful Mr Willughby, 187.
[18] In the age of binoculars, the Peterson and subsequent field guides presume that their readers will be able to identify birds in the field at a much greater level of detail than Willughby and Ray would have been able to do. Conversely, characteristic marks can be internal as well as external, informed by examination and dissection of dead birds.
[19] See for instance Darwin, “Letter to J.D. Hooker on 3 February [1868].”
[20] Ray, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, third page of Preface, n.p. (emphasis is mine).
[21] Birkhead, The Wonderful Mr Willughby, 226–27.
[22] Hine, A Dictionary of Biology, s.v. “type specimen.”
[23] OED, s.v. “type-specimen” definition b.
[24] Fortey, Dry Storeroom No. 1, 60.
[25] Nowadays, identification of species is no longer dependent entirely on observable and describable characteristics. Natural history museums employ molecular biologists, and the “International Barcode of Life,” a database for DNA barcoding, explains: “Every species has its own barcode, just as every person has their own fingerprint” (https://ibol.org/about/dna-barcoding/). The slippage from species to individual in this analogy is remarkable, and of the essence. For the “barcode” is applicable to any member of a species, while fingerprints are famously unique, unrepeatable.
[26] Douglas, Purity and Danger, 44. Searching the World Catalog, the only items I find listed with “biological insertions” are late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century herbaria from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Andersen Horticultural Library—plant rather than animal matter, flowers and leaves dried and pressed, expected in the context of that rarefied genre. Cornell librarian E. Haven Hawley informed me of a recent field of study called “biocodicology,” which “expands the field of codicology (learning about book history through studying a copy’s physical attributes . . .) to interrogate physical books with proteomic, genomic and microbiomic tools” (Rosenbloom, “The Books Are Alive With Biological Data,” 336). In vivid terms: “A monk’s kiss on a gospel, a bookworm’s excrement, lapis lazuli in the dental calculus of a woman’s skeleton alluding to her work as a medieval manuscript artist: exploring these minute pieces of evidence underlines what one interdisciplinary project calls ‘the contaminated book as a cultural good’ and transforms ‘dead’ collections into ‘living’ ones” (Rosenbloom, 337). The biological data itself has also been interpreted in order to construct the implied narratives about the monk’s kiss, etc. Biological insertions such as the feathers are interlopers; untouched by such tools of analysis, they do not become data.
[27] Personal communication between Mary Margaret Ferraro and author, May 2, 2025.
[28] White, The Natural History of Selborne, 188 (emphasis is mine).
[29] Secord’s note to White, The Natural History of Selborne, 293.
[30] OED, s.v. “jizz.”
[31] This is line 103 in the manuscript version. The 1827 published version edited by John Taylor reads: “And whirr of starling crowds, that dim the light / With mimic darkness, in their numerous flight” (see Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, 166–67).
[32] Johnston, “Murmurations,” 40.
[33] For a history of European starlings in the United States, see Stark, Starlings.
[34] Ritvo, “Invasion/Invasive,” 172–73.
[35] Ray, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, 376. Ray may be alluding to the phrase “Nature sports her selfe” from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Member 1, Part 1, Section 2, Subsection 2, 48).
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