i-Spy books and Nan Shepherd’s lists

How does listing, recording, and collecting serve us: is there any point to it beyond the thrill of completion?

Everyone has different ways of making ‘lists’ it seems. Nan Shepherd wrote and listed, May Sarton described events in her garden in her Journal of a Solitude, i-Spy books give boxes to check, and I photograph. Photographing is no less collecting than checking off species in an i-Spy book, except that I don’t always manage to find out what, exactly, I have photographed. I don’t, yet, know their names. Does photographing change my relationship to the things and creatures I observe? Yes, a little. I have to be observant or fully present to see these things in the first place: these are not objects in a museum that sit still, visually isolated, with good lighting, and with convenient labels. It takes a different kind of looking to see the real thing and in looking through the lens I’m looking even closer, framing out the surroundings, looking for the ‘interesting’.

I do not know what kinds of butterflies they were. This made them feel more strange and wonderful somehow.
Sara Maitland, From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales

What about identifying and naming? Inevitably in identifying something I learn more about it than I knew before. I learn if it is native or nonnative, what it eats or when it flowers. But information such as where it typically grows in my ‘plot of land’ is not “all in the books”. Nan Shepherd is right, it is about the living encounters, moments of our lives that have crossed paths, like recording people you meet and speak to as Virginia Woolf did in her diaries.

A hurried note about the lunch party…An art of light talk; about people. Bogey Harris; Maurice Baring. B. H. “knows” everyone: that is no one…Talk of houses and periods. All very smooth and surface talk; depends on knowing people; not on saying anything interesting.
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

I remember having, and using, i-Spy and Observer books as a child, although I forget which. They tapped into that impulse to collect that children have. Some of the language seems old-fashioned now (when doesn’t it?) but they similar to a scavenger hunt, turning the whole world into a kind of living museum and game. Snippets of information about each item and just small enough to prevent textbook overwhelm and boredom.

Is all this listing and journaling just another way of ‘containing’ nature as Mark Dion suggests when he talks about museums, or is it part of making sense of something that initially looks like chaos? Describing and photographing a caterpillar is very like getting to know someone. We are verbal and so we verbalize our thoughts as we meet and make friends, figure out relationships, in our little corner of the world. Once this might have been less necessary – the names and habits and uses would have been passed onto us as children, no need for lists. Now those are questions we have “forgotten the answers” to, as Barbara Kingsolver put it. We are discovering the world anew, almost as we did after the Dark Ages.

She was a fount of strange woodland names like boneset and virgin’s bower, for which no person of their acquaintance seemed to have any use. That must be lonely, Dellarobia thought, to have answers whose questions had all died of natural causes.
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior: A Novel