(What follows is originally from an email exchange with my friend & novelist John Crowley)

Gnosis Through Taxonomy … or Science Fictions

February 2020

John,

I’ve been meaning to thank you for the inscribed copies of your latest book collections (And Go Like This; short stories, and Reading Backwards; essays.) My own work and interests means I have varied stretches of time where all my reading is non-fiction — botany (both “general” and detailed taxonomical work), ecology, anthropology, archaeology, and history. There have been some periods where this has been my exclusive reading focus for years on end. Usually, however, I am seized by an almost visceral need to “balance” this out by immersing myself in fiction. Occasionally I juggle both. Currently I have been in a rarer state of floating between the two– being drawn to both and pondering their intersection or interpenetration. The arrival of Reading Backwards could not have been more timely. I’ve been enjoying it immensely. I’ve been reading it in a rather random/intuitive manner; starting with the last two entries first, next the prologue, then a random scattershot. Most recently I settled onto the beginning of section three (Norman Bel Geddes) and have been carried along towards where I began reading–at which point I’ll need to make use of the table of contents to ascertain the unread portions…
As always I find something familiar and comforting about your prose. There’s also a clarity of thought which is both refreshing and inspiring, especially after reading so many dry academic texts. I hope to one day have the space to write more. My biggest obstacle is a paucity of time for such endeavors (compounded by the seemingly endless cacophony of young girls and their imperial requests! The sudden lack of which can be just as confounding!)
Whenever I read something that touches me, a feel compelled to reciprocate in some manner. I’m not sure why this is, most folks seem to be content with being “consumers” of books. I always feel like it is some co-creative process that I should (though rarely do) take a more active role in. So let me attempt to share at least one small sapling of thought that germinated years ago and got well fertilized while reading some of your essays. I realize it is inevitably incomplete and I would need much more time to fully flesh it out. Yet I think (hope!) you can still make sense of it and will find some amusement in it.

In the piece on Madame Blavatsky you have a wonderful line where you write that Yeats’s:
“The trance principal of nature” might be a good name for the apparently hardwired human impulse to make and become enthralled in fictions.”
This got me musing about the degree to which this “hardwired human impulse”, arguably a religious impulse, is found in the sciences such as taxonomy.
I have an ongoing fascination with taxonomy. Not just plant taxonomy– but the whole human propensity to describe and classify the world– I find utterly bizarre yet alluring. Entrancing even.
I have “discovered” and helped describe through publication several new species of Andean succulent Echeveria in the past decade, I’ve had to key and identify hundreds of plants during my travels or years on as the seed I collected has grown into mature flowering specimens. I make use of these taxonomical systems all the time. Yet I have come to view taxonomy (at least plant taxonomy) as a “philosophical science.”
There are varied philosophical foundations to how one gathers and interprets data, to ones education and beliefs about the endless unfurling routes of evolutionary biology. What constitutes a Genus, a Species? At what moment in evolutionary time, in which exact generation, does a change from one species to new distinct species occur? Is this truly recognizable? Measurable? These are deep philosophical ponderings without absolute physical answers. The recent trend in taxonomy to use genetic mapping has not clarified this as greatly as some would like us to believe. Highly useful in some cases yet there are a surprising number of arbitrary ways knowledge of DNA is interpreted and then applied in classifying genera.
At times the whole affair can seem an absurd compulsion, like trying to describe and order water droplets in a river.
Ultimately our descriptions and ordering always fall short. The map is not the territory. They are a form of fiction (science fiction?) A highly useful fiction that is born from our enchantment with, and need to make sense of, Life (what to best call it? The Real? Nature- I find deeply problematic) At their best these fictions can be a tools that enable us to have more meaningful relations with Life in all its diverse exuberance. Yet many taxonomists are still caught up in the religious impulse of science. Believing in– and searching for– the monism of “Truth.” I found your brief explanation of medieval nominalists versus realists (in the Rosamond Purcell piece) as a useful example of a now subconscious philosophy that still strongly influences the workings of taxonomy. (J. Crowley writes – “Medieval nominalists were opposed to realists, who thought that organizing categories, types, concepts, had a real, not merely a notional, existence; the treeness that all trees share was as real a thing as any individual tree. The nominalists said that such categories were mere names, not realities, a human mental construct, a handy tool; every existent thing was unique in itself, and not just the emanation of some overarching logos.”)

To some of my colleagues what I’ve written would be a form of heresy. I’m sure I could find a train of thought to refute my own thinking here, but for now I’ll just sit with that awareness.
It is so easy for us to get entangled in our own complex constructs, in language itself. Part of why I find some occult and Gnostic systems so compelling is their predilection to recognize us as lost or entrapped within some fiction and the longing to transcend this, to return to our origins.
For myself, this has always been about the fictions we can’t help but impose upon our world through language, through dizzyingly complex architectures of thought and our capacity to also allow such compelling ephemera to disperse and be re-immersed into the flow and tumult of Life…
So what I am realizing while writing this is that, in a sense, I experience some gnosis through taxonomy; it is both an enthralling fiction and a doorway to escape that fiction and return to the arms of the utterly strange yet familiar living world of which I am…
I think this is part of why I’ve found your Aegypt tetrology so deeply affecting; the long journey it charts from the lofty heights of occult enthrallment through to the even more wondrous stars, stones and roses of the quotidian.

saludos,
Ben

Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 19:39:02 -0500
From: john crowley To: Ben Kamm

Ben —

Thank you for this perspicuous and actually quite moving piece. I certainly hope you find time for writing — you certainly have the power. Your thoughts in the piece align with mine in some ways: at 77 I can sometimes feel that the world around is somehow insubstantial, even unreal (that it is losing substance in fact is a different feeling). I have been meditating in the last couple of years and (as promised) have had some insights delivered I would not have acquired in other ways — a few days ago as I was remembering some incident in my past, it was made clear to me that the past doesn’t exist. Sort of absurd to say, since it lies all around us, but I think you might know what I mean. The insights granted you in the work you do are like those given me in my work: dealing with matters that have a real and solid yet at the same time so tenuous that they border on the imaginary. It can be lovely sometimes to experience this.

Love to you and the women folk —

John Crowley

Copyright Ben Kamm, et al 2020

Family Tales
I was told quite young that we had Cherokee ancestors on my mother’s side, but nothing more. As I grew up, hearing one has Cherokee blood began to sound like a classic American cliche. I always assumed that digging up any information about said ancestry would be difficult at best. Several years ago, overcome by some esoteric mood, I began looking into the endless bifurcations of my genealogy. Knowledge of my dad’s Russian/Jewish heritage begins with his maternal and paternal grandparents arrival on eastern US shores and whatever family remained in the “old world” was later lost to us in the smoke and tears of WW2. My mom’s paternal line meanders back to late 1700s Ireland–with side trails disappearing into the mists of Scotland, England, France, Germany–a spicing of Blackfoot and negro rumors thrown in for good measure. But then looking at my mom’s maternal side I discovered, literally, whole volumes.
My mother’s mother’s mother, Ruth Ghan, was a mixblood Cherokee and the last in my line who knew the language; she intentionally did not teach it to my grandmother. Fleeing her Indian identity, she left Oklahoma for San Francisco, California around 1916 in her late teens. Her father, Darius Ward, was a cabinet maker who held various minor offices in the Cherokee government in Oklahoma. His parents, James Ward and Esther Hoyt Ward, died tragically before he was ten. Both James and Esther were born in the original Cherokee Territory (which includes the Carolinas, Tennessee, parts of Georgia and Alabama) and survived the trials of the Trail of Tears as children. James became a teacher at a Moravian Mission in Oklahoma. During the Civil War the Cherokee Nation was deeply divided and James was brutally murdered by his own people (including a family “friend”) because he came from a Southern family. Esther fled with her five children to church friends in Arkansas then Salem, Illinois, where she promptly died upon arrival. Esther’s father was Milo Hoyt, the son of a prominent early missionary, and her mother was Lydia Lowrey Hoyt, author of the first Christian hymn written in Cherokee–which came to her in a visionary dream. Lydia’s father was Major George Lowrey (or Lowery) (named Agi’li: in Cherokee “He Is Rising” “Aspiring” or “Standing Tall” due to his tall stature and reported regular presence standing next to government officials and missionaries as a translator, perhaps also his religious aspirations). He was the assistant principle chief (VP) of the Cherokee Nation during the time of the Removal / Trail of Tears–he’s in every book I’ve come across on Cherokee history. He was said to be a great orator and have a “deep humor”. He was something of a proselytizer of Christianity and the myth of progress and was instrumental in the Cherokee adoption of “white” civilization as a means of cultural survival. He was bestowed the honorary title of “Major” for his valor fighting alongside Andrew Jackson during the war of 1812. Of course, it was Jackson who was responsible for the forced removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands in 1838. Ethnologist James Mooney wrote that the Removal “may well exceed in weight of grief and pathos any other passage in American history.” A Georgia Confederate colonel wrote: “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.” Lucy Benge, my 7x great grandmother and Lowrey’s wife, was half sister of Sequoya (also a cousin of G. Lowrey), who in addition to lending his name to our largest trees, is remembered for being so enamored by the idea of the written word that he created an alphabet (syllabary) for the Cherokee language that was adopted and put into use by the entire tribe in a relatively few short years. Gifting his people their own writing and reading–unique in the annals of history and a rather astounding feat for someone who had only ever seen a few “white man’s” books and never learned to speak, read or write English. One of Lowrey’s ancestors was the blood-soaked war chief Oconostata who survived numerous massacres and helped ratify peace with the Iroquois and British. His name translates as “Groundhog Sausage” (literally “pounded groundhog”!). Things then begin to get a little murky at this period where matrilineal descent through the seven clans was still common. It seems that I’m related to several other prominent 18th century chiefs, British soldiers (such as John Stuart (know to the Cherokee as “Bushyhead”) and Scottish, British and Irish fur traders ( Benge (Byng), Daugherty, Lowrey, Watts, Ward, etc.) that eschewed colonial culture and chose to live in the “wilderness” in the mid 1600s.

This is where I set down my research. Honestly, discovering this rich and tragic hidden family history was a bit unsettling. I’ve always been intuitively aware of a subterranean chasm of grief in my maternal lineage and now that I have stories to illuminate that terrain it appears stranger and more expansive than I could have imagined. I’m still not quite sure how to relate to or fully integrate it. It evokes a new empathy in me for the characters in John Crowley’s stories who find themselves entangled in gossamer webs of some aged tale…

Little People:
So… the ethnologist J. F. Kilpatrick edited the written recollections and stories of my great-grandpa George Lowrey’s granddaughter (my great-grandma Esther’s sister, I guess that makes her my great-great aunt?) Lucy Keys (her Cherokee name was Wahnenauhi: “Over-There-They-Just-Arrived-With-It”!?) This was published by the Smithsonian. It is within this collection that short stories of the “little people” occurs.
I find it fascinating that part of the story is the “little people” leaving –departing for lands beyond…and their name Nunne’he (or Nuh-na-yie) translates as “they who continue to live”. In ethnologist James Mooney’s documentation of Eastern Cherokee in the late 1800s Nunne’hi is a more general term for what he translates as “dwellers anywhere” or “immortals”. The “little people” are a diminutive subspecies referred to as Yunwi Tsundsi. One tale explains how prior to the Removal (Trail of Tears) the Nunne’hi warned certain villages of grave misfortunes on the horizon and invited the people to come and live with them in their eternal lands within the mountains and rivers. I’d like to think that some of my ancestors chose that route…

It seems that nearly every culture I’ve come across has some story of “little people”. Whether this is some mythic impulse, a universal archetype necessary to the stories we tell or something that exists (or existed) outside of ourselves is a conundrum–at least for those of us swayed by the revelations of science. For my ancestors, these stories suggest the “little people” were an integral part of their ecology, real enough to have an active living relationship with…which may be what truly matters.

copyright Ben Kamm, December 2014

5/12/15

(A slightly altered version of this article was published in The Explorer’s Journal in tandem with a longer piece by archaeologist Gary Ziegler, you can email us for a pdf of the article)

Possible Relictual Anthropogenic Vegetation at Choquequirao

At the time of Spanish contact the Inca had highly diverse agriculture (National Research Council 1989) and a complex relationship with trees which were intimately associated with the ancestors (Ansion 1986, Sherbondy 1986). Harnessing the fecundity of the land was an integral expression of Incan power (Dean 2011). We know the Inca had a priest class, the Mallki-camayoc, dedicated to agroforestry (Sherbondy 1986, Johannessen and Hastorf 1990) and were actively planting forests before the Spanish arrival (Chepstow-Lusty and Winfield 2000). Despite such documentation, the first thing done at most archaeological sites is vegetation removal without considering its historical, cultural and conservation value. Assessing the vegetation at Andean archaeological sites has been largely overlooked, yet may provide another important view towards better understanding past cultures and their ecological relations. With this in mind, we conducted a cursory floristic inventory of the cloudforest at Choquequirao during our short time there in May 2014. Given our temporal constrictions, this should only be considered a brief initial survey and is by no means exhaustive. We counted over 70 species of plants from 42 families. About two-thirds of these species have some known cultural significance or ethnobotanical usage. This diversity would appear to be considerably higher than the cloudforest just outside the archaeological site, but further observations would need to be made to conclusively confirm this. To what degree this high diversity is due to the favorable microclimates, water and nutrient catchment of the topography of the ruins or is the result of Incan horticultural practices warrants further study. The absence of any Spanish introduced plants helps to confirm Choquequirao’s isolation during and after the conquest. Further pollen studies, analysis of carbon remains and wood utilized in construction at the site would also give us deeper insight into the vegetation of Choquequirao and how it has changed over the centuries.

The following three species are the ones we think are most likely Incan relicts:
Ceroxylon sp.– Only about a dozen specimens of this palm were observed in the vicinity of the section of ruins referred to as the ridge group or pikiwasi. The tallest were about 8 m (26′) tall with hemipsherical crowns of large pinnate leaves. Ceroxylon is an endangered Andean endemic taxon with 6 species reported from Peru. Utilized for construction and thatching, the waxy coating on the stems has been used for candle production and the fruit of some species is edible (Sanin & Galeano 2011). Ceroxylon quindiuense is reported from the Chachapoyas ruins in Amazonas Dept., Peru and is utilized in agroforestry of the region (Galeano et. al. 2008). There have been very limited herbarium collections of C. parvifrons and C. vogelianum from near the Apurimac (Sanin & Galeano 2011). Taxonomically the plants at Choquequirao are closest to C. vogelianum but morphological variation keep us from clearly identifying as that species. It is highly probable that occurrence of Ceroxylon at Choquequirao is anthropogenic.

Cedrela angustifolia– “Andean mahogany”, “Cedro”. A large tree to 45m (150′), this Andean species is documented within much of the former Incan empire: from southern Ecuador to northern Argentina (Pennington & Muellner 2010). Highly valued and overharvested for its durable wood, it is now rare throughout most of its range, though known historically to have been much more abundant (Gade 1999). Common at Choquequirao, specimens of all sizes occur. It may be worthwhile to conduct dendritic analysis of the larger trees to assess their age.

Solanum ochranthum– This is an unusual woody tomato vine that grows to 10m (33′) tall and bears large, thick skinned, green fruit with an edible pulp. It has a broad distribution from Columbia to southern Peru, though locally rare. Its reported occurence in Chachapoyas, Machu Picchu and now Choquequirao suggests possible anthropogenic dispersal. (Peralta et. al. 2008).

To mention just a few of the other culturally important tree species that are common at Choquequirao– Escallonia resinosa “chachacomo”, Hesperomeles ferruginea “mayu manzana, Piper elongatum “mocomoco”, Vallea stipularis“chijllur”, and a few possible agricultural relicts: Arracacia sp. “arracacha”, Bomarea sp. “sullusullu”, Cypella sp. “chulluco”, Physalis peruviana “aguaymanto”.

Ben Kamm is an independent ethnobotanical researcher and conservationist based in northern California.

REFERENCES
Ansion, J. 1986 El arbol y el bosque en la sociedad Andina. Proyecto FAO-Holanda/INFOR. Lima, Peru.

Chepstow-Lusty, A. and Winfield, M. 2000 Inca Agroforestry: Lessons from the Past. Ambio Vol 29 No. 6, 322-328

Dean, C. 2011. Inka water management and the symbolic dimensions of display fountains. Res 59/60 Anthropology and aesthetics. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Gade, D.W. 1999 Nature and Culture in the Andes. University of Wisconsin Press.

Galeano, G., Sanin, M.J., Mejia, K., Pintaud, K-C., and Milan, B. 2008. Novelties in the genus Ceroxylon (Arecaceae) from Peru, with description of a new species. Rev. peru. biol. 15 (suppl. 1): 065-072–The palms in South America

Johannessen, S. and Hastorf, C. 1990 A history of fuel management (A.D. 500 to the present) in the Mantaro Valley, Peru. J. Ethnobiology 10, 61-90

National Research Council. 1989 Lost Crops of the Incas. National Acadamy Press, Washington, D.C.

Pennington, T.D. and Muellner, A.N. 2010 Monograph of Cedrela (Meliaceae). dh Books, England.

Peralta, I.E., Spooner, D.M., Knapp, S. 2008. Taxonomy of Wild Tomatoes and their Relatives (Solanum sect. Lycoperiscoides, sect. Juglandifolia, sect. Lycoperscicon; Solanaceae). Systematic Botany Monographs Vol. 84. The American Society of Plant Taxonomists

Sanin, M.J. and Galeano, G. 2011. A revision of Andean wax palms, Ceroxylon (Arecaceae). Phytotaxa 34, 1–64

Sherbondy, J.E. 1986 Mallki: Ancestros y cultivo de arboles in los Andes. Documento de trabajo no. 5 Proyecto FAO-Holanda/INFOR/GCP/PER/027/NET. Lima, Peru

copyright Ben Kamm 2015