They have these tall trees here in Bali that explode at their tops in great bunches of red, white, or yellow flowers. I am told that the flowers are called frangipani. I've always just called them 'flower trees', but they are certainly beautiful, exotic things by any name.
I remember a time from my youth when a good friend of mine was employed by the Forest Service for a couple years. He had previously spent very little time in the forest, whereas I had spent every summer of my life there. Suddenly, he became a walking dictionary of the correct terms for every flower and fern and creeping critter--and I found this annoying, for I myself did not know the technical terms for many of these things. I had lived intimately among them, but was more likely to interact with nature on a relationship basis rather than on a scientific or biological or horticultural one. I may not have known, for instance, which tree was a cedar and which a birch, but I knew about the wood itself in a practical, relational nature--which burned well and which did not, which was hard and which was soft. I knew the feel of the one and the feel of the other, the smell of the one and the smell of the other. So, I thought of my friend's terminology, his categories and species and Latin term specifics as a sort of abduction. It seemed a reduction of the purpose of the thing, the essential nature of the thing, to a matter of sterile language alone.
Often, also, I would know the actual name of a thing, yet would prefer a more personalized term. For example, my brother and I both called Ponderosa Pine trees Vanilla trees because of the smooth, sweet smell of the sap. It was like smelling from a bottle of vanilla extract on our mother's spice shelf. We called the bumblebee a Queen Bee--and the latter term, even now, seems the more terrible. The Gray Jay--a gray bird about the size of a Blue Jay--was a Camp Robber, given its proclivity for hanging about the campsite and waiting for bits of food to drop or plates to be left unattended.
The personalization of language is a curious sort of thing. Author Walker Percy tells a story of being on a hunting trip as a child with his father. Percy's father said something about a particular bird and the young Percy misheard the name used for the bird. I cannot now remember the details of what sort of bird it was or of what word Percy thought his father had used, but what he points out is that from that time forward, and for years afterward, the bird became exactly what he had understood the word to be, regardless of the actual term which he had later learned--the bird was exactly that word, the sound, the shape, the color of that word and no other.
In any case, I post below a photo of the frangipani--the "flower tree".
I remember a time from my youth when a good friend of mine was employed by the Forest Service for a couple years. He had previously spent very little time in the forest, whereas I had spent every summer of my life there. Suddenly, he became a walking dictionary of the correct terms for every flower and fern and creeping critter--and I found this annoying, for I myself did not know the technical terms for many of these things. I had lived intimately among them, but was more likely to interact with nature on a relationship basis rather than on a scientific or biological or horticultural one. I may not have known, for instance, which tree was a cedar and which a birch, but I knew about the wood itself in a practical, relational nature--which burned well and which did not, which was hard and which was soft. I knew the feel of the one and the feel of the other, the smell of the one and the smell of the other. So, I thought of my friend's terminology, his categories and species and Latin term specifics as a sort of abduction. It seemed a reduction of the purpose of the thing, the essential nature of the thing, to a matter of sterile language alone.
Often, also, I would know the actual name of a thing, yet would prefer a more personalized term. For example, my brother and I both called Ponderosa Pine trees Vanilla trees because of the smooth, sweet smell of the sap. It was like smelling from a bottle of vanilla extract on our mother's spice shelf. We called the bumblebee a Queen Bee--and the latter term, even now, seems the more terrible. The Gray Jay--a gray bird about the size of a Blue Jay--was a Camp Robber, given its proclivity for hanging about the campsite and waiting for bits of food to drop or plates to be left unattended.
The personalization of language is a curious sort of thing. Author Walker Percy tells a story of being on a hunting trip as a child with his father. Percy's father said something about a particular bird and the young Percy misheard the name used for the bird. I cannot now remember the details of what sort of bird it was or of what word Percy thought his father had used, but what he points out is that from that time forward, and for years afterward, the bird became exactly what he had understood the word to be, regardless of the actual term which he had later learned--the bird was exactly that word, the sound, the shape, the color of that word and no other.
In any case, I post below a photo of the frangipani--the "flower tree".
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