Plat Map of Our Mind(s)

I have an unpacking problem.  Every time I return from travel, the suitcase sits for weeks, half unpacked.  Thus it has always been for me; like an army kid I cannot say clearly where I am “from.” 

Upwardly mobile ministerial parents, having to go where the church made a good match for them, packed and unpacked me through a peripatetic childhood.  I suppose this and the resultant bridging to new communities and their cultures have given direction to my musings on the shades, shadows and illuminations of belonging.

"Here in the tentacles of April night
as I round the last bend towards home,
reflected headlamp beams scurry up a pole
glistening in the drench  and for a moment
I see something alive
making away...."

I don't know where I belong. I don't know if I belong here, here in a semi-rural area that I moved to with great effort, finally seeming to choose my home.  I don't manage the land well, it manages me.  And the natives, generationally embedded here, eye me as the one likely to report them to animal control, however untrue that is. In a natural disaster, we'd shelter together; in a civil war, we might not. But I know I love this place still, unreasonably, like an asylum-seeker loves her new land. I study the soil and the greenery, bemusedly learning from their intractability, loving them anyway for being real after so long a dwelling in the mirage of urban wasteland dreaming. But I know I'm an immigrant, translating always.  Will I always be partially unpacked/packed?   

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. (attributed to Robert McCloskey, State Department spokesman)

Perhaps I am about done here--in the only community I chose for myself and my family. Certainly the “terminal” degree I am pursuing suggests that.  As well, the community and I have our mutual disenchantments; like a frayed marriage, the accumulated stutterings of dark projections, fatigued efforts may be too trapped a dance. Is the best next step for me a bowing back from the music, a walk away from the dance hall?  I don’t know. My ancestors moved on from here to there, making bold moves from homeland to "frontier" to escape old patterns, new oppressions. How do we know it's time to move on?

"...Pulling in, the illumined shapes of Redbud,
hillside, chipped doorway are all the same, but I
--having turned,  having seen—
am not..."

I've written in past postings of several borderlines and their crossings--city and country, "racial" demarcations, the borderlands of life and death, daily life and grievous sorrow.  Borderlands are special places:  The academics I enjoy talk about the "liminal"--people, places, perspectives that are unsettled, outside, hybrid.  Like my son's multi-racial girlfriend identified as such simply because her skin is a darker hue and her hair kinked and yet who grew up rural, home-schooled--a confluence of "types" that just can't hold their boundaries in the face of her lived reality. 

My sons are probably multi-racial, too.  I've dug enough through the geneological dirt to find not only the relationships to Mayflower ancestors, but also the Eastern European ancestors with suspiciously Judaic names and dusky skin, the fuzzy spots in the matrilineal heritage where "founder" settlers and the aboriginal already-settled may have quietly settled together.  The human genome project's exploration of our inner sequencing points to how we all carry the synchopations of a myriad of "races," histories, cultures.  The lines of race, of belonging, are not very straight.  Indeed, the DNA molecule itself is a twisty spiral of interlocking and over-lapping.  There's a reason it's a family "tree" not a family grid--as we trace back further and further, there are entwinements that confound, crossings that complicate, often obscured by name-change erasures, the blurring of migrations. 

When colonization marched across the U.S., land, even rugged land, was claimed by the newcomers and etched onto plat maps in irregular rectangles and trapezoids. Even so, many places--like here where our little squares of 1-acre plots trace the sinuous curve of Ramp Creek and its steep ravine--mountains, flood plains, rivers and lakes sometimes shoulder aside such artifice. 

Were we to follow the land (and how we actually use it, walk it, draw from it and dwell on it) rather than claim it, our plat maps would swirl and whirl like cloud formations.  Instead, we've place a grid upon the planet pretending that we can override the tidal flows of land and water.  The ongoing peril New Orleans faces from the river, the oceans and the flow of weather is just one example that gives lie to this posturing.  

I am unsure of what is a healthy approach to making a home: When is it time to migrate, when to settle?  Bruce Chatwin, explorer and writer, was convinced that humans were really meant to be nomadic and Pilosophers Gilles Deleuze and Guattari used the term nomadic along with de- and re-territorialization as keys to a philosophy that eschewed straightlines--through space, time, even thought. *  They say "A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own."

Perhaps I am not so much interested in the borderlands as I am in gaining this nomadic "be here now" sensibility?  I've become such a student of transition spaces and margins that I advise my transitioning friends to.."consider change a 'worm hole'--a warp speed place where the usual "natural laws" don't apply." As well, though, I consider the borderlands and transition spaces incredibly poignant. The edge of them points to endings and endings call for elegies. This is the sad music that is so beautiful one cannot stop listening, quiet tears welling.  Sometimes such a moment is very still--an elongation of time even to the point of time stopping. 

To not belong is a belonging, too--to not belonging.  Fanon, writing insightfully of the psychology and sociology of the colonized,  describes of this odd layering of identity into a non-identity that is an identity. This complication of identity is important to understand in an atmostphere of increasingly subtle and pervasive corporate colonizations. Economic and social globalization bring along their nasty henchman of physical and psychic colonization with every encroaching step.  In Haiti, babies die of malnutrition because formula is marketed to mothers unable to afford it. In Chicago, having the name-brand jacket may trump having the rent.  The talismans of colonial "belonging" are insidious, clutched in the hope we will not be seen as "other."

To think like an "other," to find that other in us and know that the right-angled plat lines are just a kind of pretending, to know that, even as we yearn for a homeland, nature will altering the contours of our dwelling...these are all nomadic acts of reclaiming our minds. 

I wrote earlier about the death of some neighbors, untimely and tragic, who's familial roots sink deeply here, locally.  If we move on, the folks across the street will note it mostly with worry about what kind of difference will move into our place.   

 

"...Closing one door, I move to the next--

open and return."

My suitcase remains half-unpacked (or half-packed?), like my mind.  Am I coming or going?  A settler?  An emmigrant? An immigrant? A native?  Am I all of these, instantiated only in moments, moving across the landscape of belonging? This is the way a creek moves; changing course across time, following the sinuous contours of where it may flow the swiftest--always the creek, but never the same waters.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization

Poem: Returning to a Place Called Home by Julia Heimer Dadds

Photos:  Katie Thompson original chair found at:

http://interiordesignsense.com/tag/chairs/page/6/
Mark Beebe  "Wall Flower in London"

Mississsippi River meanderings U.S. Geological Survey

 

*"The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo." ( Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizonphrenia. Massumi, B. trans. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota, p.380)