Doctor Dormer’s Tale

On leaving school, and adrift in the grown-up world, I had to find myself a job to earn money.
I had applied to be a printer, taken the exams, and passed them. It was only because friends were doing the same; I had no idea what it entailed, what I wanted to do, or what was out there.
Work was becoming tighter, even in those days. I was told it would take probably about 18 months to find me a printing post, so… ‘get something in the meantime.’

I had always a passing interest in the sciences (not that school encouraged it much) and got myself a job as trainee laboratory technician at Manchester University.
I had… a job! I was earning money! And let the printing go.

This job coincided with a period of student unrest: strikes and sit-ins. I was on the fringes, neither a student, nor not a part of their ‘scene’, and so gathered quite a sobering view of the dynamics of the heady student sit-ins.

I was working in the Department of Botany, at the university. I was on the periphery, for which I am thankful.

I came across the following blog, which covers most of the tutors and academics in the department at the time. Only a few of the people there I do not recognise:

https://ianpopay.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/victoria-university-of-manchester/

John Hartshorne, a rather quakerish-looking character, and an excellent and much respected teacher, took us for genetics,

Eric Simon, a shortish, bespectacled, rather intense and very good teacher took us for plant physiology, often in the Robinson lab, with its original drawing of the structure of IAA (indole acetic acid) on the wall.

Bob Pecket, Brian Truelove and Ron Butler also taught us plant physiology. Bob was a slighly rotund, always cheerful character who, Nigel tells me,  was knocked down by a car and never fully recovered. Brian was from Leeds – he went on to do very well at Alabama Uni. Ron Butler was a cheerful red-faced individual who, as he told me years later had done some of his national service in Kenya.

Prof John Colhoun, was head of cryptogamic botany and plant pathology, and a redoutable Orangeman.

The smooth and handsome, prematurely grey David Park also lectured in plant pathology. When he left his replacement was George Taylor.

John Tallis lectured in ecology, and his speciality was peat bogs, which included palynology, cooking up peat samples in hydrofluoric acid so that only pollen grains were left. Tallis was generaly regarded by students as rather odd and I remember we were shocked and surprised when we learned that he was to be married!

Peter Newton was a young, blond, very casual lecturer in horticulture. He was a terrible lecturer so far as we were concerned, once wrapping up a lecture, obviously ill-prepared, after only 20 minutes.

Elizabeth Cutter, a research student of Wardlaw at one stage, dealt with morphogenesis, how plants develop their structure and form. In appearance she was a characteristic female botanist, and later went on the do well at Davis, before returning to Manchester as professor.

David Smith was a briliantly clear teacher of palaeobotany. He always joked that while Clive Stace said Manchester was the furthest north he’d ever been, it was the furthest south that David had been!

Clive Stace, a very intense young man, taught taxonomy and was a very good field botanist. Dr Dormer always said the there were two kinds of taxonomists – the extensive, who covered a lot of ground, and the intensive who covered little ground but did it very thoroughly. Dormer classed himself as the former and Stace as the latter. Clive went on to become the great authority on the British flora.

Dr K J Dormer (Keith, I think, but I do not remember anyone actually being so bold!) was a good lecturer but,as I have said, a rather scary person at times. He had published papers on the control mechanisms governing the formation of spines on holly leaves by mathematical determiantions based on the numbers of spines on the two sides of the leaf,  Or something like that.

The one missing from that list was the department head, Professor David Valentine. He was a large bear of a man, but a gentle bear. He knew his importance, his status. He was guarded, yes that is precisely the term, by his secretary… whose name escapes me. She made it her mission to be fearsome and obstructive on every possible front and occasion, guarding her professor. Her reputation went before her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Valentine

But it is this last name on the blog list that I am remembering here:

Dr K J Dormer.
Kenneth, not Keith, apparently.

His position in the department was that of Reader, he had a Chair, but not the professorship. For years he languished in the shadow of that position, filled by Professor Valentine.

The unsurpassed handbook of botany, Lowson’s Botany, was a joint editing enterprise by Drs Simon, Hartshorne, and Dormer.
This was somewhat before my time, as were the publications that made Dr Dormer’s reputation:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/K-J-Dormer/e/B001KHXBH6/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Dr Dormer’s arrogance was unparalleled; a very unlikeable man. I remember his office distinctly – strange how you remember more clearly the details you were most wary of.
And yet… there is always the And yet… I met him again about 20 years later, in an area I would never have expected.

There is, near me, a very wealthy area, mostly a domicile town, but a haven for top football stars and TV personalities.

I was between jobs, so was picking up cash delivering leaflets door to door. I was covering parts of this town. It was earlyish still in the morning, when down the road as I went up came a slightly dishevelled figure: hanging raincoat, trousers a little too short. Coming up close… Dr Dormer!

Of course, I blurted it out, ‘Dr Dormer!’
He was a little taken aback, as I was. We chatted, then he told me his tale.
It was like an Ancient Mariner moment; maybe this was his counselling: tell the tale until it no longer has any meaning.

Dr Dormer’s Tale

As you may remember, we had yearly student field-trips to certain isolated, designated spots of open countryside. I had a hobby – landscape photography. Always took all my equipment on those trips.
The more remote the region the better. For specimens, you understand.

I had taken my camera, stand, lenses, out with me; end of the day; get some shots in.
In one field – it looked a likely spot. I heard a noise; turned around.
It was a bull, and running at me. I had no time to do anything, dropped everything, tried to grab its horns and… wrestle, somehow.
It just threw me down. So easily.

But instead of goring, it… knelt. On my chest. All its weight, on my ribs.
The pain was agonising; I heard ribs snapping. The pain; couldn’t breathe.
I must have passed out, fainted. When I came round, it had wandered away, no longer interested.
The pain; couldn’t breath, barely move.

Eventually after what seemed hours I heard someone in the next field. I had to try and attract their attention. That was so difficult.

I was in intensive care a long time. This is my weekly physiotherapy session; that’s where I am going now.

He seemed broken, somehow.
But still had some of the old Dormer about him, asking what I was doing, and the gleam in his eyes. Was it a sneer?

I had taken my BA (yup, Arts, not Sciences) by then, as a mature student. But he must have known many students like me: gained their degree, then….

You can read so many things into his tale: the landscape photography, for one, as an opener onto the private man.

Incidentally, the following incumbent of the professorship Chair was Dr Elizabeth Cutter, also a keen landscape photographer, and an angler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cutter
And yet I find the bare bones of her story moving, very touching: there must have been times of joy. Wiki does not give those.
She co-wrote a history of the Botany department.
She battled the education cuts in the 1980’s to save the department, by amalgamating it with the Zoology department, and others, under the umbrella of Biological Sciences. Only to retire, to look after her ailing mother, live quiet and out of the way, with, Wiki says, ‘No known living relatives.’

The Season’s March: tributes to Pina Bausch

In France, Ireland, Chile, Cyprus, Spain and Germany, dance lovers of all ages – professionals and amateurs – have responded to the call and danced their own individual NELKEN-Line. And many more will be able to join, because the project continues

http://www.pinabausch.org/en/projects/the-nelken-line

The ‘Season’s March‘ also known as the Nelken Line:

https://youtube.com/watch??v=vJpgjsOr6hk

And really quite joyous.

There is an argument that says at times like this we must face up to our fears, explore them. I suppose it’s a kind of the Ancient Greek idea of catharsis. But catharsis has never been acceptably defined.

That is all well and good, it fits in with Middle eastern religious thinking very well: a successful graft, to use a term from gardening (not a practice promulgated in Eden, I dare say. For there our reasoning raises all the dark corners and tangled thorns of ‘the natural’ as a basis for behaviour. Farming; I wonder what celebrations hunter-gatherers had? Successful hunt? Returning safe from the hunt? Finding new spreads of berries, fruits…?)
Catharsis though, also now has the relish of the flagellist about it.

And celebration seems to get forgotten along the way. For celebration is where those dark roads are to lead to.

The Season’s March celebrates what we have left of a basic pattern of life, that is outside of our fears and horrors. It is above droughts and bush-fires, of back-breaking farm work, ploughing, fruit and veg harvesting: celebration is a time out of time.
It is also an activity.

The Season’s March is a leisurely celebration of life.

The term Nelken Line alludes to the particular performance by Pina Bausch’s Tantztheater of Wuppertall, in which The March first occurred.

Enjoy:
https://vimeo.com/273317019

https://vimeo.com/243863216

https://vimeo.com/240967153

Keep yourselves safe; breathe deep and properly deep.

Birds etc

I came across it again the other day: birds have a greater range of sight than we humans; the wavelengths they can detect are so much wider than ours.

Of course, the implication is that we poor humans are so badly adapted to the world. Dogs have a keener sense of smell, animals as a rule have a better range of hearing, sensory awareness is much keener.
We are such poor forked creatures.

And so:
breakfasting a while ago, our bantam hen came asking for food. We gave cooled porridge on a plate.
Porrage on a white plate.
She could not see it. Nor could her sense of smell guide her. and this was in normal daylight.

Take twilight, putting birds to bed – they cannot see a thing by then. We can see quite well, but they, no.
Owls, of course, are the exception. But in bright daylight? No.
We can.

So then:
That we are so badly adapted to the world… so we construct artificial worlds to live in: cities, urban environments.
But we cannot live in those, either. They quickly turn into congested, stinking chaos.

And so:
Our problem is, and this is particularly noticeable in politics, and philosophies, is that what we imagine, conceive, for and of ourselves, is so many times less than what we are.
We have never made anything commensurate with our natures.
We always think, mentate, whether solely or in group-making, so much less than ourselves.

Only the arts, I would suggest
– well, I would wouldn’t I, since I know so little of higher mathematics, theoretical sciences –
to be released from the constraints of utility and social conforms… that only the reaching out and conceiving of something other, greater, than this image of us –
I guess I am arguing against the current fad of ’embodied’ discourse –
that to reach out
beyond what we know….

I happened to catch sight of a rescued pigeon – road casualty, now restored to health again – a male, and isolated because he is dominant and fights everyone else… he lives happily within sight of the others…
he was in his nest box and burbling away to himself, and doing his ‘dance’, and it struck me: there is imagining going on there, and play.
Remarkable.

There is so much more than we give credit for.
So, so much, more.

Highlight of my week: The Swan – Birmingham Royal Ballet: BBC Arts – Culture in Quarantine, 8 April 2020 — Dancing Review

Swanline Offering Because of the coronavirus pandemic, more and more artistic material is appearing online. The BBC’s hastily published response, Culture in Quarantine, is now beginning to bear fruit and its latest presentation comes courtesy of Birmingham Royal Ballet. The Dying Swan (as it’s usually called) was originally created by Mikhail Fokine in 1905 for […]

The Swan – Birmingham Royal Ballet: BBC Arts – Culture in Quarantine, 8 April 2020 — Dancing Review

History and Reality

There are many, many problems with our time and people that I have struggled with over the years.
How can we move ahead if still held back by these… they must be glitches, plummets into madness? ‘The blindness of God,’ perhaps.
If we think of ourselves as planing onwards towards better futures, – think of a slow low and elegant curve upwards, of improvements in general technological, scientific, especially ethical and moral codes. Then does this leave us open to misrepresentation and misinterpretations of our basic human nature? And so, prone to perpetuating these same horrible acts?

One of these ‘problems’ I have been struggling with has been how people could, that is, certain officials backed up by the rank and file officers, think it acceptable to release poison gas onto battlefields, into trenches, of the opposite forces.
The recent Times Literary Supplement has an article on Einstein’s brief stay in England. Mentioned in a sideline is Fritz Haber who helped develop this ‘tactic’. So, we have a name.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-public-and-private-lives-of-albert-einstein-p-d-smith/

How could anyone think that was acceptable behaviour under any circumstances?
Is my problem a lingering belief in an agreed gentlemanly conduct, even in wartime. The two 1929 Geneva Conventions, perhaps?

I began to wonder whether there was something about the German make-up, at that time, beset by War reparations, the Financial crisis, and the Soviet Union’s internationalist programme.
And then, of course, there was the Holocaust.
Completely unimaginable how that could be perpetrated, on such scale and over such a length of time. How was that possible?
Not that there have not been pogroms of great brutality throughout history. They are easy to forget, especially if one’s own history glosses over such self acts.

The scale, I think, is the problem.

I have come across incidents in history, going way back, of equal and sustained barbarity. All smaller scale, but as bad in their ways. Precedents, then.
And then I came across this book review:
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45, and the American Cover Up

https://contagions.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/japanese-use-of-plague-during-world-war-ii/

That the Japanese military had indeed been conducting biological tests on prisoners using ‘plague, glanders, anthrax’ etc to see which was most effective, i.e. quicker, and most contagious. They extended these tests to villages, to find which could decimate larger areas.
This was conducted in Manchuria/Manchukuo, preWar.
Now, Manchuria was bordered, in the West and North, by the Soviet Union.
They also were carrying out similar tests, and along this same border.

So, is the German make-up exonerated?

It is the military mind, then, surely…
how it isolates itself from common morality ( how could you kill wholesale otherwise?) but in time becomes self-sufficient in its own utilitarian ethics and morals.

And so, in a little way, but nonetheless revealing, is myself looking for cause (blame?) in the German make-up, that gives a quick glimpse into my failings (get the hint? Conjugate my) – a lack of sufficient background knowledge.

I reviewed a book some years back, The Causes of War, by Professor Hidemi Suganami, published by Oxford University Press:

https://pure.aber.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/the-causes-of-war%28486854c0-7420-4dc2-b947-48ff5f1b0090%29.html

His conclusion? Wars exist because they are continue to be seen as a viable option.
It sounds banal, especially after the hugely meticulous research and arguments he perused and conducted.
Wars seem as viable an option now as they ever have.
Short-term thinking and blinkered reasoning.
It is the aftermath, though, that takes generations, centuries, to struggle to accommodate, or reject, that wars leave behind is the real face of war

And so, that is where I begin here, as part of those attempts to accommodate the problems of my time , and yes, as can be seen, even attempt a brief rejection (German make-up).

We are all prone to these creeping errors of thought. We all must be constantly on guard – against ourselves, that is, our mono-cultural attitudes, backgrounds, and prejudices.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/european-colonial-powers-still-loth-to-admit-historical-evils

This is not something that needs to be started now – it is the common practice of modern historians and cultural materialists, and has been for many years. It’s already on its way.
Let’s climb on board.