Back to Blood

Blood is thicker than water.

And I want to ask "Why the contest?"  Because the truth is--blood cannot exist without water and the breathing of the blooded ones offers breath to the water cycle.  There is no contest.  Nolo contendere.

That's a legal term for not contesting a charge but allowing it to go forward.  Nolo contendere.  I am not going to fight you, argue or protest.  But I am not going to confess, either.  Water and blood.  What's so great about thick, anyway?  It stays put better?  Flows slower?  Is this a good thing? 

The point, as most of us know, is that blood relations--familial DNA and its entangled helixes of heart, hubris and humanity--holds sway, trumps other forms of relationship.  But I wonder.  Nolo contendere.  Blood--you've got the power in the courtroom, but I'm not so sure how your argument holds up in the messy, fecund world outside the stony walls of argument. A test is only one demonstration.  Mundane life is a test of its own and may reveal truths at odds with those provided in a the pitched state of "proving." Like the slow migrations of characteristics across generations, blood's sanguinity is intrinsically affected  by water's mobility. Water's lowered viscosity carries mutations and adaptations across a planet that seems nearly as vast as the interior worlds of its beings migrating along and across its waters.

Migration has a price.  The disconnect from embedded life in a place and a people can cause a palpable rift in a life course, like a river diverted.  This can be freeing--as it was perhaps for my forbearers leaving oppressions and moving toward promises (however vague and differently realized). My father didn't seem to yearn for the farm left behind here in Nebraska.  I think the life was spare, mean and grueling enough that even the romance of the land and sky could not balance those muscle and mind-wearing realities.  My grandma did not painstakingly save the chicken money to have the boys return to muck the silage. The family vision was one of mental, not menial labor.  This may be a vision of progress that bears some course correction, but it does appear to be a common catalyst for migrations.

Yet, there is a loss, a grief;  my father always planted a garden...always.  There has never been quite the miracle equal to that of the spring green pea upon my two year old tongue, the bright laugh of the snapdragon's mouth opening and closing between my father's fingers behind the parsonage in Scranton.

My mother never ceased to sigh longingly about the ocean--the wet salt smell and blue-sifted light of Maine. 

And they kept changing locations--packing us up and moving from city to city in the territory between their hometowns--Boston and Hebron--the thumbtacks of origin holding the map of upward mobility.

I never quite recovered from moving from Minnesota during one of those shifts.  Even now, in times of stress or joy, the exaggerated clip of the northern vowels, the Nordic sing-song of sentence structure, slips through causing the labor nurse in Indy to ask me where I'm "from." 

That has always been a question that flummoxes me. People generally want a one-word answer to that question.   The historian/ sociologist/scholar in me wishes to retrace the geographic steps--which I believe are also psychical steps.  Geographies shape societies and psyches both.  Mountain people indeed are that.  And peoples dwelling on rivers cannot help but have a sense of flow, of there-to-here-to-there, as well as a gestalt of stream bed/containment with the rising beyond the bank as a horizon of change.  Our place shapes us as much or more as we shape our place-- the plat lines are more a dream than the insistently shifting sinuous shape of real geographies.

How to trace the "from" of self? These are lines on an invisible map. Like the magnetic fields so clear to migratory birds and bugs,  I am "from" Minnesota, but also the church my parents pledged their lives to.  I am from the odd Germanic migration of ancestors but also from the hidden spots on the genealogical branch--usually the women who's "maiden" names unravel in the patriarchal parceling land and progeny. 

I am also "from" the acts of Minnesota, hidden in plain sight--from the marginalizing of Jane Schoolcraft who helped to find the Mississippi headwaters, only to have her husband make up an "Indian" name from Latin words.  I am from the small brown women birthing children in my lineage, their skin tone not mentioned, their mothers' names conveniently forgotten.  I am from the bussing of dark-skinned children into white-skinned people's neighborhoods in Indianapolis. I am from the oppressive turning of teacher's and administrator's backs to the confusion and conflict that convulse in the wake of throwing disparate worlds together in linoleum hallways. I am from the healing tutorials of the descendants of slaves who coached me as I tried to understand.  I am from the silver reach of the Sycamore across ravines in the karst territory of Indiana--a state named for a people who don't even have a reserve in that place.  

And  I am "from" an even more messy mélange--an interior geography--an breath-holding course of study in the academy, a lifetime of poetry, mothering in difficult (and are they not always difficult?) times.  I am from that life lived, now and moving, always moving through time and territory.  And moved to Nebraska, I am from Indiana. In Indiana, I am from Bloomington and in Bloomington, from Sanders.  In Sanders, I am from somewhere else, having arrived just this generation, while my neighbors remember the children who walked the dirt roads and ate Ramps from the shadows of quarries.  But I am from my parents and from my present, as well.  I am from the bed where I dream, each night.  I am from those dreams and from the repetitions of my daily life that seems both more and less real than those dreams.  I am from this page that is a kind of dream, itself.  I am from you, to whom I am speaking.  Am I speaking to you?  There is a trace, here, from me to you and back again, it traces a line across thought and consciousness--like the dream, the joke, the intuitive leap.

There are many laments about our electronic connections--cartoons showing everyone looking at a little handheld communicator with no exchange in the geography around them.  Lamentable, perhaps.  Certainly ironic.  But the irony may rest in how that represents a reality that is present, cell phone/tablet or not.  The zap of a genuine connection does seem to ride waves more comprised of wave than particle:  We often lumber numbly around each other while our thoughts, emotions and communications weave and hum invisibly like honeybees deep in an April rose bush. Indeed, the web of connectivity that hopscotches across miles, borders, oceans and skies, seems somehow to capture an old yearning that our physical migrations enacted in clannish slo-mo.  It may not be all to the good that we can celebrate or mourn an uprising, a death, a miraculous save halfway across the globe, one mind to another, disembodied but also unencumbered by the heavy weight of the caravan of culture and the trappings of identity. But it may not be all to the bad, either.  What happens when we connect this way?
 Like the curtain of northern lights, can these connections flash across an old sky in new ways, revealing patterns in the vastness, traces that we might not have otherwise known?

‘Quién puede borrar las huellas?’ Who Can Remove the Traces by Regina José Galindo. These meditations began with this question posed by Ms. Galindo as she placed bloody footprints across a place.  She walked the question across the town square, in front of the courthouse and leading to the jail to the road to the graveyard to the people.  She dips her bare feet in a basin of blood and she reveals the traces--of the couple who killed themselves down the street in Sanders and down dirt roads of rural history, of their children and their new life-stories woven with threads of grief.  Her steps reveal the traces of my garden and its implication in the constrictions of cultivation. Galindo reveals the traces of history and of the lonely resolute traveler--someone who finds those traces just by paying attention to them, walking to them, walking from them.  She reveals the traces of our longing--to migrate, to stay, to change, to belong, to be visible to love  and yet to disappear when the searchlight beams our way. Nolo Contendere. Blood and water. She doesn't ask what can remove the traces but who.   She pauses, places the basin on the concrete, dips a naked foot into the blood and steps. And as we witness, it become our footprint, too.

photos by Mark Beebe, Painting by Mark Beebe.