4. There’s No Success Like Failure: Writing and Ornithology

Revising Finch by Finch

[Previously]

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.' —Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man

Like every sparrow fallen, like every grain of sand.

—Bob Dylan, “Every Grain of Sand”

(“Ornithology,” Charlie “Bird” Parker *)

We recoil as if something has gone wrong in the cosmos, as if a shutter has creaked open that should have been kept closed, exposing a shadow world beyond our world, a place we were not meant to see.

That’s Jonathan Weiner recounting what it feels like to come upon the numerous dead birds he saw in the Galapagos. He describes Daphne Island as a harsh environment where seeing such a sight is common. In The Beak of the Finch, he documents the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant who studied finches, looking for evidence of natural selection in the wild. I assigned a section from Finch in my English composition class as we investigated issues related to conceptualization. I admit it was an unusual choice for a reading in an English class. After all, we were studying writing, not evolution—except we were, kind of.

One student paper, the fifth assignment in a sequence that started with metaphorical concepts and their influence on thought and action, began with the above quotation. The student wrote about our concepts of death because she related to what Weiner had written.

Since the island the Grants frequented every summer was contained and isolated, it was a perfect laboratory for their study. To keep track of changes among the various finch populations generation after generation, the Grants tagged birds, measured beaks, took blood samples, counted seeds, and calculated the force required to crack them. After months of this daily grind in a hot, inhospitable place, the Grants gathered their data and headed back to Princeton. Weiner writes about the dead finches because, at that time, this was such an ordinary sight on the island and also because it helps him to make a point about a key implication in the Grants’ study.

In her essay, my student tells the story of losing her pet and how Weiner’s words reminded her of how that felt. For a teacher, the connection might be discouraging. It’s a The-Same-Thing-Happened-To-Me! paper. A student who doesn’t engage in the reading sometimes clings desperately to anything common to experience, no matter how slight. Often not much is made of the connection either because there’s not much to it or because the student thinks that merely making the connection will suffice. Her writing focuses on the fact that death gives her the creeps. She doesn’t know how the Grants deal with it.

The next quote, though, she reads as a kind of consolation. "Each generation lies where it falls, and the next generation builds on the ruins of the one before.” There––that’s how you deal with it, she says. Later she quotes Weiner again: "The birds were not simply magnified by the drought, they were reformed and revised. They were changed by their dead.” Though she doesn’t know what to do with this one yet, she has the good sense to see that it’s key. The selected passages are good ones, filled with rich implications and connections to previous course readings and also connections to the book of classmates’ essays I collected and distributed after a previous assignment. All of this could lead the student somewhere, but here, detached from their context and their possible connections, the quotations lie flat on the page left to bleach in the sun like a dead bird.

For most readers, the essay’s problems would be immediately apparent: it quotes Finch but doesn’t otherwise engage with it, relying only on a coincidental connection to the author but not to the Grants’ work, and it uses quotations cut-and-paste style, leaving large gaps for her poor, lost readers who have no idea what is happening on Daphne Island. As a result, the most the writer can say about her concept of death is that she’d rather not think about it.

The Grants’ story is left out of the student’s paper. Including more of it would provide context for the quotations she uses. For instance, during a severe and prolonged drought, the finch population fell sharply. (Hence the ubiquitous dead finches.) After a while, the remaining seeds were 40 times more difficult to crack which required expending much more energy to get fewer calories. Larger birds with stronger beaks had an advantage in the extra-long dry season since they could crack the toughest seeds using the least energy. Because the drought lasted for several seasons, the next generations of finches were increasingly larger with bigger beaks. The birds seemed destined to keep moving in that direction.

Then the rainy season came. Like the drought, it was prolonged. Smaller, easier-to-crack seeds became abundant. The larger birds with their stronger, yet less dexterous beaks suddenly found themselves at a disadvantage. Finch and beak sizes drifted back in the other direction. This is what Weiner means when he says the finches were being “reformed and revised.” All of this was happening while the Grants were jotting down figures in their notebooks, but they only realized the implications after they left the island and entered their data on their computers. That’s when they saw how they’d been witnessing selection at work in the wild in real time, not over countless centuries with no one to observe until well after the fact, as was usually the case.

The chapter from Finch that the student uses opens with a metaphor from Shakespeare, “there’s special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” Shakespeare borrowed the image from the New Testament where Jesus says, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will” (Matthew 10:29). The Special Providence metaphor is one where Life Is Planned. In such a world, everything happens for a reason. Traditionally, people have found comfort and meaning in this metaphor. It helps make sense of seemingly random events. Somehow, if there is a plan, even if it is unseen, then whatever happens is easier to take, both because it implies a larger purpose and because it absolves you of responsibility. (It couldn’t be helped.) Even death can appear to have meaning and make sense. With Weiner’s reference, however, the fallen sparrow metaphor takes on a different meaning.

What if everything happens for a reason—just not the reasons we thought? The Grants’ study turned up evidence that undermines the Special Providence concept and replaces it with something more complex and random. The Grants are an example for students of what inquiry means and the actions required to pursue a question. Easy answers won’t cut it anymore.

Weiner’s description and the student’s paper both have strong connections to our real subject—writing. I hear composition researcher Ann Berthoff’s voice in Weiner’s words, "The birds were not simply magnified by the drought, they were reformed and revised." This is related to what Berthoff calls “the uses of chaos” and how learning this is an essential step toward making meaning. Berthoff says,

Meanings don’t just happen: we make them; we find and form them. In that sense, all writing courses are creative writing courses . . . Meanings don’t come out of thin air; we make them out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, syntactic fragments, from the mysterious and unformed.

We make them, too, out of a book about evolution, another about metaphors, a childhood memory, a book of classmates’ writings, and other mysterious and unformed things. The class had been enacting this when they selected material from all of these things and added it to their current work as they revised. They’d been making, finding, and forming at every stage, and with the resulting drafts, false starts, and revisions along the way, they brought new things to life, things that could not exist any other way. Their new writing has been shaped by what they’ve written before, by their old, “dead” assignments. Whatever new reading and writing they do now will be reformed and revised versions of earlier efforts. Even failed and discarded drafts influence what will later emerge: new creations, changed by their dead.

According to Berthoff, “Skills are learned—really learned—only when there is a reason to use them.” This raises the question, What reasons can we offer? Berthoff offers different concepts for writing and different ways of thinking about what we are doing when we write. This student’s semester began with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas about metaphorical concepts and their influence on our thinking and the choices we make. They say if one of your concepts is More Is Better, you will usually make different choices than someone with a Less Is More mindset. If you think Life Is Planned, you will see the evidence in a fallen sparrow. Like Berthoff and Lakoff and Johnson are saying, different concepts lead to different outcomes. This means what you think writing is and how it’s done will determine what kind of results you’ll get.

If for you writing is only homework and your essay a one-shot deal, what you can do is limited, and even if you manage to get some reasonably good results, still, you will have no idea how much better your work could have been.

Imagine if the Grants had approached things this way—drop in on Daphne Island while on sabbatical, take a look around, and conclude that beak sizes for that population of finches will continue to grow. Their study results wouldn’t take in the whole picture. (But they might get tenure.)

What if we ask student writers to be Makers of Meaning like Berthoff suggests, encouraging them to make, find, form, and reform? What if we teach them to examine their concepts in Lakoff and Johnson’s style and help them to focus on how they think about writing and on how this limits or expands the choices they make as they write? What if we say, “Be like Rosemary and Peter. Stay a while. Measure more beaks, and count more seeds. Don’t worry yet about what it all means”? What if we teach them the Grant-like skill of holding off on drawing conclusions until they leave the island and get back to Princeton to sort through what they’ve gathered? Doing these things will teach them not to worry so much about The Well-Made Plan but instead to “tolerate ambiguity,” as Berthoff says, and to trust “the uses of chaos.” They will see how both in nature and writing, death is a seed helping selection work to make things new.

Yes, the student’s essay is flawed—yet, everything happens for a reason! Her paper, though unsuccessful, is important for her and her classmates. The writer needs to understand, as Mike Rose would say, that whatever shortcomings the paper has are “rooted in other causes.” The other causes, in this case, could be that her disposition toward writing and her concepts for what writing is and how it’s done are like her concepts about death—just more things she’d rather not think about. (Jeeze, this class is for the birds.) I don’t blame her. She probably learned these concepts in school.

Rose says, “The one thing that strikes me the most is the ease with which we misperceive failed performance and the degree to which this misperception both reflects and reinforces the social order.” (Think of Mr. Palomar’s fortress.) Students who write dead bird papers tend to be overlooked, are given so-so grades, and their suspicions about their lack of writing potential are reinforced. Nancy Sommers says English teachers “have been trained to read and interpret texts for meaning,” yet many “read student texts with biases about what the writer . . . should have written, and our biases determine how we will comprehend the text.” In response to this, Kevin J. Porter employs Donald Davidson's "Principle of Charity" when reading student writing. Preconceptions are set aside in service of understanding.

Fortunately, given all I’ve learned from the above researchers, I know now that if I focus only on the usual things about this student’s paper—that she needs to provide better transitions and organization, etc.—my comments may help her improve the essay, but it won’t be enough. Will the resulting work be an example of writing or taxidermy? Will it be her work or just her version of mine? Earlier in my career, though I always meant to do good, sometimes, I unintentionally did harm by reading student essays while prone to some of the biases Sommers points out. After I became aware that these dangers exist, my concepts changed and so did my actions. I became a different reader of student work, and my commenting style also changed. The same can happen for students.

Here is the gist of my message to this student: The work the Grants were doing is writers’ work. If you follow their steps, your writing will improve. Go back to the island and work bird-by-bird, measure more beaks, count more seeds, then later, when you enter the new data into your computer, you will be surprised.

Going back to the sequence of assignments and the readings with each new assignment is like the Grants’ annual visits to the Galapagos. They were revising their findings year by year, finch by finch.

If my student does this, as a writer, she will have a chance to become a new bird, “reformed and revised,” built “upon the ruins of what came before.”

The writer who wrote that assignment was a product of natural selection as well. The conditions that produced her will be discussed in the next chapter where we will explore physical education and its pitfalls, as well as why all education is physical education.

Notes:

Ann E. Berthoff, The Making of Meaning

Kevin J. Porter

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary

Nancy Sommers

Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch

*Charlie Parker was called Bird, though the reason is murky. One story is that he ate a lot of chicken (yard birds). Another is because of his birdsong-like musical style.