Memoir – Page 14 – Via Negativa

February 11, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

The Man with the Bag

I’m slowly learning how to play this strange instrument, the kubing.

Found all over the Philippines, the mouth harp is called Kubing among the Mindanao trives [sic] (Maguindanao and Maranao), Kulaing in Cotabato, Subing in Visayas, Barmbaw among the Tagalogs, Kollibaw among the Negritos, Kinaban among the Hanunoo Mangyans, Afiw (made of metal) among the Bontocs, and Coding among the Ibaloys and Kalingas.

With this instrument, it is said that courtships are made and the common words and language of love and lovemaking can easily be expressed.

It turns out that you really shouldn’t hold it against the teeth, as I had been doing, but simply press it against the lips. I guess that’s how it became associated with courtship: it’s not very loud when played this way, and absent a microphone, you’d have to get it pretty close to a listener’s ear. If my own experience is any guide, there must be quite a high risk of spraying one’s date with saliva. Fortunately, folks at home won’t have to worry about that. With the microphone turned all the way up, you can hear my breathing pretty clearly, though, which may or may not improve the effect. “Man with the Bag” is my own off-the-cuff composition.

“The man with the bag” was something my maternal grandfather used to joke about. Evidently this was his own mother’s name for the bogeyman: Be good, or the man with the bag will get you! I don’t know if that came out of Southeast Pennsylvania folklore, or was just something she made up. Georgina Dresch Myers was quite a storyteller, I gather, and my Pop-pop, as the first-born of her three sons, must’ve been especially favored with her off-the-cuff bedtime stories. She was by all accounts a very bright woman, who pretty much ran the local Methodist church for many years. She lived as much as possible according to the Golden Rule and the beatitudes, and was forever scolding my Pop-pop for his focus on making and saving money — not atypical for a boy who came of age during the Great Depression. Pop-pop told us that his mother fed every beggar and hobo who came to the door, usually in return for some token chore so they would feel like they were earning their bread. There were many men with bags wandering through Pottstown, Pennsylvania back then.

February 5, 2007November 25, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Supreme Ultimate Fist

Taipei, 1986

4:30 a.m. & the foreign devils
are staggering home, loud
on the otherwise deserted avenues
where only sixteen
hours earlier, tanks
& missiles had crawled,
draped in flowers,
& floats bristled
with stooped dignitaries
holding each other up
like cigarette butts in
a crowded ashtray.
One flatbed bore a small
plane from the mainland,
complete with defector
waving stiffly from the cockpit,
smiling that smile
that drives
the expats crazy.

Now the Chiang
Kai-Shek Memorial
glows all alone in
the darkness. A taxi
approaches, head & arm
protruding from
the rear window,
obscene fist extended
with a howl:
Fuck you & your 4000
years of civilization!
While two blocks away
in the unlit park,
dozens of shadowy figures
are just beginning
to move the tips
of their fingers.
__________

The title is a common, albeit poor, English translation of Tai Chi Chuan (太極拳)

December 31, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Out (sort of) with the old, in with the newer

All my computers have been hand-me-downs. This was my third — a 1997 or 98 Proteva. It used Windows 98. It was slow but serviceable — literally. At one point a couple years ago, the fan broke and my cousin-in-law Jeff (see Credits) kindly installed a new one.

Two days after Christmas, Jeff arrived with a newer computer, a two-year-old Dell with 1.5 GB of RAM and 214 GB of free space on its hard drive. Now I’m learning how to use Windows XP — after changing everything to look and act as much like Windows 98 as possible.

To the left of the sleek new black box you can see the gray case that contains my manual backup system in case of apocalypse or an extended power outage. It’s an old Olympia typewriter — the one I wrote my college papers on, and all my poems up through the late 80s. My dad got it when he was a kid.

We kept the hard drive from the old computer, too, mounting it inside the new box alongside its faster, emptier counterpart. It has a mere 917 MB of free space, but so far — knock on veneered particle board — its little motor still works. Now that I have a CD burner and working USB ports, I can think about backing up my files.

It’s hard to believe that years of work can fit so snugly in the palm of a hand.

The old doesn’t go out, exactly, but more deeply inside. And what comes in — well, it’s new to us, perhaps. But on the other side of the world, they’ve seen it already. We’re all living on borrowed time.

December 28, 2006 by Dave Bonta

On the 13th day of Christmas …

My writing table is clean for the first time in three years. Digging down through the piles, I discovered some unopened correspondence — can there be anything more melancholy? — and four envelopes that I’d put stamps on, presumably for letters I never finished writing, or wrote and then decided not to send.

With two or three years’ perspective, one has a better idea of what’s really necessary to keep, and what can be pitched. I found multiple copies of minutes from old meetings I couldn’t remember having attended. I found articles that I had set down where I would see and read them, but then quickly buried with other, more urgent things. I had to create four new file folders, and in the process reacquainted myself with my filing system, which is not organized alphabetically but by logical relatedness.

For example, in one of my file cabinets, a folder marked “Me” — for expired passports and the like — is followed by “Stuff” — owner’s manuals and warrantees — and then “Financial Crap.” Beyond that, the back half of the drawer holds files of correspondence from family and friends — letters and postcards, poems and photos. Going in the other direction, “Me” is preceded by “How-To” (which is practically empty; I’m not very handy), “Herbs,” and at the front of the drawer, a number of bulging folders devoted to beer and brewing.

So here I sit at my clean, almost empty table, struggling against the blankness of this virtual page. I feel suddenly very exposed. But that NY Times article I blogged about the other day, “Saying Yes To Mess,” frightened me. I never like thinking I might be part of some trend or movement.

Last night we asked my cousin Morgan, who is still young enough to believe in Santa, how her Christmas had gone. “O.K., I guess,” she said. “But I have so many toys now! Next year I’ll have to have a little talk with Santa, and tell him not to bring me too many more toys.” I’m not sure she realizes that many of her cousin Elanor’s toys, including some that were in my parents’ living room last night, had once belonged to her.

Of course, Elanor is young enough to be happy with practically anything: an empty plastic pint container can provide hours of amusement. And Morgan’s attention is drawn often enough to natural objects — a mantid egg case, a goldenrod gall. She brought the magnifying glass that my mother had given her on an earlier visit and wanted to take a close look at everything.

Most interesting of all — to me, at least — is Morgan’s penchant for spinning stories. A toy or other object no sooner attracts her attention than it is endowed with a personality and a basic trajectory of needs. We humans are all still animists at heart, I think.

December 24, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Getting the tree

We went to the Christmas tree farm yesterday, the whole lot of us. If, as they say, Christmas is for children, the main focus of our seasonal sentiment this year is my two-year-old niece Elanor — too young herself to possess an ounce of sentimentality, much less to understand all the folderol about Santa and sleigh bells. We thought she’d enjoy meeting the reindeer they have at the tree farm, though.

Last year, it had been my other niece, Eva. She was ten at the time. Both girls love animals, and are equally extroverted, but the differences in their reactions to the place were striking. Whereas Eva had been a little afraid of the reindeer initially, and then became entranced, Elanor showed no sign of fear, grabbing at a reindeer’s snout at the first opportunity. But then, much to our surprise, she grew bored and wandered off. She was much more attracted to the homely little brown-and-white dog that lives at the farm. It kind of makes sense. The reindeer were enormous, were on the other side of a fence, and were really only interested in one thing — treats. The dog, on the other hand, was Elanor’s size, with just about the same level of hyperactivity. She raced all around getting into things, as dogs will do, digging and sniffing, and led the way when we all trooped down the hill to find a tree. She had an odd way of running, with her hind legs appearing slightly out of alignment with her front — an old injury, perhaps. When she squatted to pee, I couldn’t help thinking that a male dog would’ve made much better use of all those thousands of tree trunks.

At one point, the dog stopped to take a crap with Elanor close behind. Steve had to run and pick her up before she could start playing with the intriguing little presents that had just popped out of the dog’s chimney. The dog trotted away with one turd still clinging to the fur on her hindquarters.

When deliberation over the tree started in earnest between Steve, Dad and me, Elanor charged off in the other direction, toward the backyard of an adjoining house that probably belonged to the tree farm people, given the dog’s familiarity with it. Mom and Karylee told us later that it was all they could do to keep Elanor from climbing through the fence to play with a small flock of very large Guinea fowl. The ersatz Africa was just a few hundred yards away from the faux Arctic.

We tend to prefer trees with a more open, natural look and several spires at the top, but since most of the trees on the farm have been pruned within an inch of their lives, it took some looking. We finally settled on a tree that had a large bird’s nest in it — possibly a catbird’s nest, I’m guessing. Steve and I took turns struggling to cut it down with a bow saw, which is also part of the tradition. It just wouldn’t seem right to carry a chainsaw.

After we got the tree all taken care of, I went back to look for the others. They’d made it as far as the road. Elanor had discovered a small puddle, and was stomping in it enthusiastically, splashing mud all the way up to her knees. “I just want you to know that Steve taught her to do that, not me!” Karylee said, watching her daughter with a mixture of amusement and dismay. “But who does the laundry?” I asked rhetorically. “Oh, well, mud washes out a lot more easily than most other things,” Karylee said. Mom managed to shoo Elanor out of the puddle, which prompted her to begin throwing stones in it instead. Gravel is one of Elanor’s favorite things.

The tree rode home in the back of the truck with all the dried grass and dead needles still attached — shaking it in the mechanical tree shaker might’ve dislodged the nest. Miraculously, when we got it home, the nest was still more or less intact. The tree sat outside until this morning — Christmas Eve — when Dad and I carried it in, according to inflexible family custom. Later this afternoon, Steve and Karylee are planning to show up with Elanor to help decorate it. My only hope is that Elanor will be as bored with the tree as she was with the reindeer, and decide to play in the kitchen, instead. Christmas may be for children, but let’s face it: when you’re two years old and surrounded by doting parents and grandparents, you can find Christmas pretty much anywhere you look.
__________

Don’t forget to send in tree-related links for the upcoming Festival of the Trees.

November 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Felling the balm of Gilead

After strong winds brought a dead limb down onto the electric lines leading into my parents’ house, my dad decided that the last of the big balm of Gilead poplars would have to go.

The balm of Gilead, Populus balsamifera, is a strange tree, growing quickly to large proportions, as befits a colonist of floodplains. Limbs shoot out haphazardly at all angles, giving this far-northern cousin of the cottonwood a rather ungainly appearance. But what was a boreal, wet-soil species doing on our dry, Pennsylvania mountaintop? At the end of the 19th century, balm of Gileads were prized for their reputed medicinal properties, and must’ve been sold through nurseries. Though completely unrelated to the Old World trees of the same name, their buds exude a sticky substance with many of the same properties as the resin of their namesake.

Populus Candicans is called Balm of Gilead in America. The buds are used, and called Balm of Gilead Buds, as are those of P. Nigra and P. balsamifera, the product of the last being imported into Europe under the name of Tacomahaca. They are covered with a fragrant, resinous matter, which may be separated in boiling water, the odour being like incense, and the taste bitter and rather unpleasant. They are stimulant, tonic, diuretic, and antiscorbutic. A tincture of them is useful for complaints of the chest, stomach, and kidneys, and for rheumatism and scurvy. With lard or oil they are useful as an external application in bruises, swellings, and some cutaneous diseases. In ointments they are a little inferior to paraffin as a preventive of rancidity.

The bark of P. balsamifera is tonic and cathartic.

Some contemporary herbalists apparently still use balm of Gilead buds. I think my mom experimented with them back in the 70s or early 80s, when she went through a period of enthusiasm for herbs and wild foods, but found them too much trouble.

When my parents bought the place in 1971, there were five of the big poplars growing around the houses. The biggest one stood at the corner of the stone wall in front of the guest house, where I live now, and where my grandparents spent the summers back in the 70s. In a series of photos of the farm from 1919, the Guest House Tree, as we called it, was already fairly good-sized. By the early 70s, its top-most limbs were beginning to die. About fifteen feet off the ground, its massive trunk divided into three, and one of the sections hung dangerously over the house. Poplar wood rots quickly, and Dad and Grandpa knew that they couldn’t waste much time deliberating about it. We were poor; hiring a professional tree removal service wasn’t an option, so they had to do it themselves, with only a small farm tractor to pull the cable.

It was a learning experience. Dad says he didn’t notch one of the cuts quite right, felling one of the trunks too close to the spring house and shaving off the eaves. The cut into the rearmost of the three trunks was notched correctly, but the ground was too soft and wet and the tractor began to dig in. When Dad backed it up a little to try and get a running start, the tree started going back toward the house. So we raced to the barn and carried down several armloads of split wood, which Dad packed into the mud under and in front of the tractor tires for a distance of about ten feet. That gave him just enough traction to pull the tree over in the right direction. “That was a little tense,” he remembers.

In the decades since, we’ve taken out three more balm of Gileads that used to stand in a line on the southwest side of the main house, and a tall black locust on the northeast side. The last and youngest of the balm of Gileads stood upslope from the former line of three by about twenty feet, and was probably the offspring of one of them. Though ninety feet tall and close to three feet in diameter at breast height, it may not have been more than fifty years old. It probably had another couple decades of life in it, at least, but its proximity to the house and to electric lines made us unwilling to take the risk.

There was really only one direction the tree could fall without crushing a lot of other yard trees, not to mention the lines and house: down toward the edge of the woods. And it was not at all clear that tree was inclined to go in that direction. Fortunately, though, we’re no longer dependent on an old farm tractor for these kinds of jobs.

So there we were on Black Friday, Dad, my brother Steve and me. It was a beautiful, clear morning with no wind. I had just spent the last three hours working on a thoughtful and sensitive poem, but now it was time to go kill a large tree. Dad had bought a new, 125-foot-long steel cable, and while he and Steve bent and bolted the two ends into sturdy loops, I took the chainsaw to some fallen trees that blocked the bulldozer’s passage along the edge of woods.

A nuthatch worked its way down the furrowed trunk of the doomed tree, and chickadees flitted through its branches. Steve climbed the ladder to wrap a logging chain around the trunk while Dad maneuvered the dozer into position. The cable was just barely long enough. I had been appointed to do the cutting, not necessarily because I am the most adept with a chainsaw, but because Dad is the only one of us who knows how to operate the bulldozer, and Steve has a wife and kid to worry about.

I’ve cut down very few living trees in my life — certainly nothing approaching the balm of Gilead in size. When I made the first, diagonal cut for the notch, the tree began to bleed profusely. I’m not kidding: much to Steve’s and my surprise, several quarts of sap came streaming out of the wound. Then, as I worked on the bottom cut of the notch, I noticed that the top cut was already gapping open by maybe an inch and a half. Holy shit, I said to myself, this tree does not want to fall downhill. As soon as I finished the notch, I signaled to Dad, and he pulled the cable taut.

The wood was very soft, but — fortunately, perhaps — the chain on the larger of our two chainsaws hadn’t been sharpened in a while, so it cut nice and slowly. I didn’t want to overshoot by mistake. Given the width of the tree where I was cutting at a little below waist height, I had to work on the back cut from both sides. When only a two- to three-inch hinge remained at the center of the tree, I put down the chainsaw and picked up my camera. Only then did I give the signal for Dad to drive forward.

The tree came down more quickly than I expected. It flattened a couple of saplings on the way down, but otherwise fell pretty much where we had wanted. Steve and I cut the bottom fifteen feet of the trunk into three, enormously heavy logs, partly to free the cable, and partly to clear the end of the “lawn.” We pushed the logs down the slope, which was fun — one of them took out most of a multiflora rose bush — but the rest of the tree’s carcass will remain where it fell, a bonanza for invertebrates and everything that feeds on them. It may also act as a shelter of sorts for shrubs and tree seedlings — deer often seem less likely to browse amid the tangled limbs of fallen trees.

I’d feel bad about cutting down any tree, let alone one as large and unique as a mature balm of Gilead. It’s very strange to look up at my parents’ house and not see that tree looming behind it — kind of like the New York skyline after 9/11. On the other hand, I was happy that everything had gone well, and I was alive to write about it.

“So now that you’ve conquered a tree, doesn’t that make you feel like a man?” Steve asked jokingly. “Yes, it does,” I said. And it did — at least until the adrenalin buzz wore off.

In the silence after
the poplar crashed to earth,
a nuthatch calling.
__________

The entire series of photos from yesterday’s tree-felling is here. Don’t forget to send tree-related links to jadeblackwater [at] brainripples [dot] com by November 29 for the next Festival of the Trees.

November 13, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Briefs

When we moved here in 1971, the outhouse had a metal sign on the wall with faded black letters, evidently taken from an old passenger train: Kindly flush toilet after each use, except when train is in station.

No hobo with any sense ever walked between the rails.

***

My brother went to the high school football game last Friday night. The stands were packed, but the air above the field was crowded, too: hundreds of migrating red bats swirled above the field, diving at anything that moved, including the players and the football, he said. Screw the game — I would’ve gone just for the bats.

***

This past weekend, my Aunt Jean told an amusing story about her daughter Hillary’s encounter — if that’s the word — with President Clinton. She was standing on a street corner in Washington, D.C. sometime back in the mid-90s when the presidential motorcade went by. The President was lounging in the back of his limousine eating a banana. When they passed Hillary, he caught her eye, smirked, and waggled the banana at her. She called up her mother. “I think the President of the United States just made an obscene gesture at me!”

***

I’m tired of the same old stale oaths. I think I’m going to start saying “Crikey!” and “Balls!”

According to the Wikipedia, “In Italian there are at least 140 vulgar words for penis and around 100 that mean vagina.” Crikey! So much for the Eskimos and their legendary 100 words for snow.

***

I’ve heard my mother re-tell the story of my birth so many times, I almost feel as if I remember being there.

“A month before he was due, he flipped in the womb. Fortunately, he wasn’t as big as the other two, or they would’ve had to do a Caesarian. As it turned out, he was my easiest birth by far! A half-hour before he came, the doctor let all the other doctors and residents in the hospital know — everyone wanted to see what a difficult breech birth looked like. So there were all these people crowding into the room! It felt a little strange at first, but then I thought, ‘Oh, well.'”

I wonder how many people were actually there? It would be nice to know. Considering how few people come out to poetry readings, I’m thinking that might have been one of the largest audiences I’ve ever had.

Nor did I disappoint, apparently. I not only mooned everybody, but my penis was tucked between my legs in such a fashion that that was one of the first things they saw. It was visible for quite some time before I actually popped out. I may be reading too much into this, but I suspect it was a gesture of contempt for a world that I was clearly not at all anxious to enter.

September 12, 2006October 12, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Off color

Company policy dictated the wearing of bright colors for all male employees. One senior manager wore a sky-blue suit with a scarlet tie; another wore orange slacks and a green sport coat. Maracas were issued to everyone in management, with instructions on how to use them and when. I’m not sure what I was doing there. Probably I had been hired through a temp agency and kept on indefinitely, despite my failure to observe the rules about fun. But now they were trying to make me part of the team.

Along with one other guy, I was taken downstairs to the plush offices of the Chief Financial Officer, who always wore mirrored sunglasses, he said, to protect his eyes from the glare of the suits — including his own, which was a vibrant purple. He spoke in a low, conspiratorial whisper. “What they want us to do now,” he said, “is watch some silly training video. But I don’t think you two really need any more training. I got some other ideas — come on, have a seat.”

I sank into the plush leather armchair and directed my gaze toward the screen while the CFO fiddled with the projector. “I know, I know. We can build the most sophisticated weapons delivery systems known to man, but can any of us operate a simple projector? No, we cannot,” he said with a self-deprecating chuckle. C’mon — how dumb do you think we are? I remember thinking just before the first of the lurid images appeared on the screen.

The CFO maintained the avuncular tone throughout, supplying the only soundtrack to the silent movies of rape and incest and torture. “Good stuff, eh guys?” I found myself nodding in agreement — I wanted the job. When the lights came back on, I forced myself to smile. Our new friend handed us each a pair of sunglasses identical to his own. “Welcome to the firm,” he said.

That was my last dream this morning before I woke. Don’t ever let anyone tell you we dream in black and white — a silly notion — though sometimes maybe I wish I could. Outside it was overcast and threatening rain.

The other day around 3:00 in the afternoon, the sun broke through in the middle of a downpour. In the little marsh across the road, the roof of the springhouse shone brightly through the curtain of rain. It was beautiful. Fog began to form almost immediately, the rain turning back into clouds as soon as it hit the ground. When it slackened off, I rushed up into the field to watch the last of the mist rising off the goldenrod.

By the following morning, off-and-on showers had given way to a steady rain. My brother brought his year-and-a-half-old daughter up for a visit and they horsed around for a while in my parents’ library. She has been drawn to books ever since she could sit upright — even large books without words. She loves sitting and turning the pages of her daddy’s scholarly tomes, or visiting the public library with her mother. If her grandpa doesn’t sit down and read one of her favorite children’s books to her as soon as they arrive, she gets very out-of-sorts. And I have to say, whenever she comes to visit, the books up on the shelves suddenly seem considerably less solemn and reserved, as if they know it won’t be too many more years before a new reader takes them down, one by one, and translates their black-and-white pages into joyful sound.

(As usual, click on the photos to see the full-size versions, which may take a little while to load at slower modem speeds.)

September 4, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Farewell to dial-up

This weekend, we bid a fond farewell to dial-up Internet. With the invaluable assistance of my cousin-in-law Jeff, we’ve swapped 28 kilobytes for 3 megabytes per second.

For years now, Jeff and my father have been scheming about ways to get high-speed access to Plummer’s Hollow. They didn’t think that the phone company, Verizon, would be laying fiber optic cables anytime soon. But last month, a telephone line repairman out on a service call informed us that they had indeed installed a local fiber optic network this past winter. It seemed a little odd that Verizon would go to all that trouble and expense and then neglect to inform eligible customers, but once contacted, they shipped the new DSL modem willingly enough. It only remained to wait for Heidi and Jeff’s next visit — fortunately already scheduled for Labor Day weekend — since we figured we wouldn’t be able to reconfigure on our own the wireless system that Jeff had set up for us between the two houses.

We were right. On Saturday morning, Jeff muttered and puttered around for a couple hours while the sorry remnants of Hurricane Ernesto kept us all indoors. Dad and I were on hand with what you might charitably call color commentary: advice, perhaps, but only of the fatuous kind offered up by the guys in the press box who couldn’t throw a pass to save their lives. It took Jeff a little while to figure out what he had done before and undo it, but suddenly there it was: the new version of Firefox downloading from the web in seconds rather than taking half an hour. “Gee, look at that, Paw!” To say we were stunned would be an understatement. After lunch, a couple more hours sufficed for Jeff to install a new wireless network.

On Sunday, while Jeff and Heidi’s six-year-old daughter Morgan went off to explore in the woods with my mother, the laptops came out in the living room. That’s the funny thing about computers: since they tend to be less absorbing than books, somehow their use doesn’t preclude social interaction quite the way reading a book does. On the other hand, when my parents sit together in the evening reading newspapers and magazines, they also frequently share aloud from what they’re reading, so maybe there isn’t a huge difference.

Suddenly, Morgan was back, in a state of high excitement: “There’s a snail! We found a snail! You HAVE to get pictures!”

And so I did. This was a distinctly unsluggish woodland mollusc — a snail on speed. They had picked it up somewhere down along the road, and it emerged from its shell almost immediately and began exploring my mother’s hand. While I snapped pictures, it glided rapidly from finger to finger like a circus performer, switching to other hands as they were offered.

Ironically, living out here in the boondocks far from cable TV, we now have a faster connection than many folks in town. Jeff explained that since we’re tapping into a node less than a mile from our houses in a rural farm valley with, presumably, fewer than a dozen other Internet users, we don’t have to compete for space on the cable. In his suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, by contrast, hundreds of people might be downloading files off the Internet at any one time.

Needless to say, this has left us all feeling a little breathless and barely able to believe our good fortune. But high-speed access probably isn’t going to change our lives. Like the snail, I’ll still remain fairly slow moving and low-energy by most people’s standards. I’ll still retreat into my shell from time to time. But I’ll relish being able to explore things like Flickr slideshows and Internet radio, and I’m already appreciating the ability to dispose of mundane tasks, such as reading and answering email, more quickly.

Best of all is the fact that I no longer have to keep my computer on all the time to avoid breaking the wireless connection between the houses, as was the case when it ran through the modem in my Dad’s computer. Now, I can turn the computer off before going to bed each night and wake up in a quiet house. More than anything else, it is that new access to silence that feels luxurious.

Click here to see all six snail pictures. If you have favorite sites on the Internet that you think I’d enjoy, I’d love to hear about them. My tastes in music run to blues, jazz, roots/world music, and modern classical.

June 22, 2006 by Dave Bonta

In the hallway of the ancestors

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Self-Portraits

My seventh entry in the self-portrait marathon

My mother’s people gaze across at my father’s people in the narrow upstairs hallway of my parents’ house. It all seems amicable enough. Some were rich, some were poor, but most were somewhere in the middle. Both sides are dominated by people of German, English, and Dutch ancestry, with a little French Canadian and Irish thrown in. A discouragingly large number on both sides were teetotaling Methodists, but for all that, they don’t look any more sober than decorum required.

Aside from genealogists, most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about their ancestors. After all, we are descended from the disinherited and the violently dispossessed — or at the least, from people who believed in leaving the past behind. And we’re still that way, aren’t we? We think of our ancestors as forebears only, and believe them quite irretrievably dead and gone — perhaps to a better place from which they might occasionally cast a fond glance in our direction, but that’s all. They’re not expected to take an active interest in the affairs of their descendents, much less transmigrate back into the clan. Sometimes one of them might come back as a ghost, but that’s about it.

I think it’s important to remember how odd this belief about our ancestors makes us, how much of an exception to the general run of societies around the world. Combine that with our astonishing ignorance of history — even quite recent history — and I think it’s safe to say that we Americans are almost uniquely alienated from our roots. It goes along with our alienation from nature, I believe, and in some respects probably helps license the on-going commodification of what used to be thought of as Creation. In pre-modern Europe, the dead were buried in the churchyard at the center of the village, and had their day on the calendar (All Souls Day). Ancestor reverence formed a minor part of a complex system of traditional observances — including local saints’ days, rogations, feasts and fasts — which all together told people who they were and where they came from. Carnival rites linked bodily symbolism, both sacred and profane, with the cosmic drama of changing seasons and renewed fertility.

The Protestant Reformation did away with most of that, and the Industrial Revolution finished it off. The 19th-century bourgeois novel and 20th-century psychology invented the isolated, narrowly sexual and generally neurotic individual, and the Great Awakening and subsequent religious movements stressed a personal relationship with God or Jesus above all else. My Methodist ancestors seem, on the whole, content with this arrangement. They knew how to compose themselves for a photograph, wearing their Sunday best and meditating on eternity, or something else completely apart from daily life, for as long as it took the man with the box and the flash to capture their likenesses. They rest easy in their frames, smiling sardonically — if at all — at the thought that some lonely fool might someday long to re-enter those frozen moments.