Me and Borges

When I was 21, I did not go to Majorca.



photo: Ronald Shakepear



Memory

Eduardo invited me to go with him to Majorca
the night we ate paella with Borges.

 

"You have to 'front load that'," opined my husband Mark when reading my recent aside that Borges had once confided a love of the English language to me.  "You can't just casually say that Borges--Borges-- told you this and have it be the last sentence in the paragraph!"  "Listen," I soothed, "that's an important insight the man had, it fit there. It's his insight, it means something extra coming from him and I'll explain it in the next chapter." So I'm explaining.  Or, at least, I'm telling you the story.

I was a drop out undergraduate at Indiana University.  But I'd stayed long enough to be a work-study aide at a preschool where I befriended a teacher who was (then) married to an Argentinian scholar.  Later, when they divorced, he and I met at a poetry reading and he invited me and a girlfriend to dinner with, yes, Jorge Luis Borges. Eduardo (a psuedonym) was enough older than me that I was both flattered and wary of his attentions.  But he really understood my writing--something rare and precious for a poet--and he invited me to dinner with Borges.

We had drunk brandy late into the night, him telling
me stories of the Tango while the music itself played, the music

that allowed men to dance with each other in a lonely
land, lonelier now that torture played the music.


He quoted my own poetry to me—“o window light of next to next”
Even then
I couldn’t land in love with him.

Borges was amazing.  Like Funes the Memorious, he seemed to remember every word, every lilt and story.  He recited his own poetry for what seemd forever. I could have listened that long.  It took searching through files, not my own mind, to find my own poem about this extraordinary evening.  Borges stored his library in his mind, shared it gently and generously. He was a librarian, he said--a blind librarian.   I was nonplussed when he asked for me to recite my own poetry.  I simply could not.  Not only was the sangria blurring my memory, but to recite to Borges?  My own writing?  Even now it would astound me.  Even now, I would be hard pressed to call up a complete work from memory.  

Self-Portrait by Borges

He had no eyesight left, leaned upon the beautiful
woman’s arm. She wore fur even in the spring warmth.
Shadowed across this--my own mother’s slow movement into
blindness, her mind racing the darkness 
--memorizing our faces, her favorite scripture, the strategic
outlines of furniture, mapping memory
before apeture betrayed her.

It was a sweet and confusing night and I was in way over my head. Like an echo of a meloncholic song, the incredible potency of the two men's shared homeland--Argentina-- shadowed the evening. Eduardo had fled because of the repressive political climate. People were disappearing simply for being in the academy.* But Borges was unhappy with both sides of the divide. I knew enough to know that I couldn't fathom the poignancy of their histories, their losses, their loves, their interests.

Earlier in the evening Borges recited stanza upon
stanza of his own, extolled his favorites, the lineage of thought
and beauty. He inclined his head gently to me, asked me to recite
my poems; I stammered, finding no handhold
in my shadows. He chuckled
and noted that he often did not remember his own, as well,
and kindly turned away.

I had never heard of, much less eaten, paella before. I got a bit tipsy on sangria and, late that night, long after everyone had left and the tango music had quieted, Eduardo did indeed invite me to go to Majorca. It seemed an exotic temptation--Mai-YOURrr-ka;  even the name is spoken with unfamiliar accents and lilting phonemes not found English. However, I was shy about the implied relationship such a journey might encourage. I guess I liked Eduardo and myself enough to be honest about that; in what seemed a clearer morning light, I decided not to go.

Oddly enough, my mother encouraged me to go.  At the time I thought she was naive.  Now I consider her strange openess to me travelling overseas with a man she'd never even met a sign of her own sense of adventure.  A girl born to Bostonian wealth, she eschewed that and most acceptable feminine roles to become a minister and a leader nationally in a Christian denomination.  She obtained her ordination with failing vision, travelled around the world teaching--even while unable to decipher airport postings or read her own itinerary--and completed her career as a Pastor in a small church in London, nearly blind.  (I joke with her, now, "I'm going to use the 'B' word, Mom" as we negotiate her current needs and ventures.)  I watched my mother--chased by loss--memorize her moments, our faces, writing and speaking into an increasingly invisible world. In the pause that grows as vision and mind distance from one another, a kind of raw ululation sounds in the heart.  

I didn’t go to Spain and only a few bones of my own lyric
tent into the noise. Yesterday's landscape turns to grainy
fade—like the end of an old travelogue. Blind or not, in remembering,
it is the resolute throat of loss that gropes through,
leaning on slender arms.


Now, decades and husbands and lovers gone by, I wonder what might have come of such an adventure.  We never really know how to apprehend a moment.  Hindsight is not, I think, 20/20. In fact sight itself is a sense I have learned to examine a bit more critically.  The scholar Phil Carspecken writes eloquently on "occularcentrism and phonocentrism" pointing out how the metaphors of sight and speech permeate our language and thought about knowledge He says this belieis a some assumptions about the foundations of knowledge that cannot be logically supported.  One might say he is suggesting that our sight obscures our visions, our speech confuses our understandings. 

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and blindness at one touch.

Jorge Luis Borges

I had forgotten about Majorca...but not Borges.  As a poet, I began with his poetry and as a mother, a divorcee, a worker, a ctizen, a lover, a teacher and a scholar, I gained a new love of his prose.  I am now married to a surrealist/abstract painter and graphic narrative writer who deeply loves Borges fiction:  Of course he felt my evening with Borges bore more attention.  I think Borges himself, though, would have liked that he--great man, great mind--was an aside in an meditation on belonging and the many "languages"--including that of place--that are involved in such a notion. 

My mother lost her own vision so slowly that her brain compensated in heroic ways to fill in the missing pieces. For years, she "saw" mostly with her mind, her mind's memory and inventive logic. Now that all "sight" has left, she sometimes sees text swooping across her "vision;" sometimes even in French--a language she once spoke and read with some skill.  "I see the strangest things, now," she marvels, "It's a bit tiring."I am more than sympathetic to Phil Carspeken's questioning of our senorsy "centrisms"; in fact, my own orientation to knowlege argues for a better sense of embodiment--of the whole body being acknowledged when we consider knowledge, wisdom and life. But it is a tall order, I think.  In some ways, Borges forged a unique way through this dilemma with his fantastical, labyrinthian, origami puzzles of storying.  He told stories that turned the idea of story, or narrtive and memory, on it's head.  Perhaps it was no coincidence that he began this approach after a traumatic head injury and infection.  I wonder what new facet of mind he experienced?  And then, with the ocular faded to black, what is left? 

Perhaps what is left are the traces of what we call memory--the sight of a smile, the sound of laughter, the taste of paella,  the smell of the ocean, the feel of sun-warmed wind upon our skin. Or in lieu of that...the idea of it, the dream of the memory.

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Marxist-Leninist militias such as People's Revolutionary Army utilized aggressive tactics that sometimes resulted in violence.[36] Later the military government used these acts as justification for their even more brutal measures. The "ideological war" doctrine of the Argentine military focused on eliminating the social base of insurgency. In practice that meant assassinating many middle class students, intellectuals and labor organizers, most of whom had few ties to the guerrillas.




The costs of what the armed forces called the "Dirty War" were high in terms of lives lost and basic human rights violated. Thousands of deaths may be attributed to various guerrilla attacks and assassinations. The 1984 Commission on the Disappeared documented the disappearance and probable death at the hands of the military regime of about 11,000 people, relatively few of whom were likely Montonero or ERP cadres. Human rights groups estimate that over 30,000 persons were "disappeared" (e.g. arrested, tortured, and secretly executed without trial) during the 1976–1983 period; many more went into exile.[citation needed] The People's Revolutionary Army alone admitted it lost 5,000 militants.[41]


Serious economic problems, mounting charges of corruption, public discontent and, finally, the country's 1982 defeat by the United Kingdom in the Falklands War following Argentina's unsuccessful attempt to seize the Falkland Islands all combined to discredit the Argentine military regime. Under strong public pressure, the junta lifted bans on political parties and gradually restored basic political liberties.


His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature."[2] His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of magical realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century.[3][4][5] In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia (1935).[6] Scholars also have suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination.[7] His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.

His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the "Latin American Boom" and the success of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).[3] Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."[8]


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

Jorge Luis BORGES (Argentinian, 1899 - 1986) Self-portrait. ink on paper; 8 3/4 x 6 inches (225 x 150 mm) From the collection of Burt Britton. Borges was nearly blind when he drew this for Britton.


Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, A New Directions Book, 1984. Page 110.

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)

I am a Bad God

It's a scandal--our yard.  It's clear we're not good at this--this edge-of-country life.  The fence line has grown up in willy-nilly volunteer trees--weedy Hackberry, undisciplined Locust and the sneakiest weed of the tree family--Maple with it's baby-haired pistils raining "helicopter" seeds that sprout in the gutters, weighing them near a breaking point.  I don't mind....much.  I am an Émigré to the green.

This is a semi-country life is somewhere between "All Creatures Great and Small" and "Winter's Bone"--neither simply idyllic nor only brutal but, somehow, both.


Through my view to the west I see an expanse of green that backs up to the 600 sq. foot domicile of my next door neighbor to the East, Mrs. Beal.  On the East side of the house, 1/2 acre of woods buffer between our driveway and our "next door" neighbors.  Strewn about beneath that tangled canopy of sycamore and hickory draped heavy with wild grape vines--thick as a carpenter's arm-- are old car parts, empty cans, even a bathroom mirror and a rusted remnant of long forlorn vehicle.

Warren is my neighbor to the back--across a steep ravine valley--and owner of the creek and cows that meander at the bottom of my "back yard."  He says the kids with little to eat once gobbled the onion-like Ramp plant; its aroma permeated the children's bodies so pungently that the schools tried to prohibit Ramp eating.  Now Ramps are a delicacy in East Coast Nouveau Cuisine. In our valley today, it's Ramp Creek that's flooded and whooshing with the sound of distant applause, swollen with rains that topped off and left sloshing my garden pond. The frogs and goldfish nudge curiously at new contours.

I am a Bad God.

I create the world and it languishes—so loved ,

yet so rampant,  overblown.  The bees in the Comfrey

startle me—swarming and furious in their work.

Even waters befuddle:  How much muck is good—

sheltering the tadpoles, lending humus

to the water lily?   How much is dreck—

forcing fish from depths to sun scald, tannins toughing

silken pools to murked burlap?

As a gardener I may be a bad god, but, as a resident,  I am a refugee. Landscapes are languages we live in--their features become articulations of our psyches...or do our psyches become articulations of our landscapes?  I fled the insistent debate and clipped diction of city life and now I am mouthing my way into my version of heaven.  A patois of greens--emerald to chartreuse, khaki to olive to lime--splay across my living room view. Still parched for this even after 18 years,  I gulp in the vision:  Tight furls of fern nestle among last autumn's fallen gold and the Redbuds blink fuchsia through verdant tangles of verging wild raspberry.  Ivory Dogwood's petal heart shaped hands open to misted air. Goldfish flicker and glint in the cool pond depths while the scarlet of the Cardinal startles out from the fence brush.  Jorge Luis Borges once told me that he preferred English to his native tongue: "There are so many more words," he marveled wistfully, "so many more choices because of all the conquerors, conquests and immigrants it has adopted."

The language of this land is my retreat, my hospital, my home. After failing abysmally to grow anything in the ruin of city soil, over-shaded by ancient mulberries and mined with the detritus of a century's worth of peeled paint, cinders, broken glass and household pourings, here I am an overwhelmed amateur in a buoyant garden nearly overrun by gangling woods.

I don’t weed well;  I prune even worse. 

Raspberry threatens renegade action, Maple

seedlings are insurgent, even the butterfly bush 

becomes woody and indelicate.

My neighbors were flabbergasted when I took down a perfectly good chain link fence that stretched across the front yard.  Their notion of tidy is a bit slash and burn, which--I admit--might improve my odds against immanent honeysuckle takeover.  They've been amused by my Tibetan prayer flags, too--one young teen even asking if they were some sort of new Nascar thing or what?

Across the street Manny's girlfriend before last, the second (or was it third?) one after his wife left, asked shyly about my sunflowers. She looked a bit startled when I said they were volunteers sprouting from the fallen seed from the bird feeder.  The next spring they had a few out front as well and I felt an oddly worried pleasure--did I start something?  And, if so, what? 

Is it cruel to feed the chickadee and goldfinch?

 For the hawk shadow thrills me--above

like a benediction

before the kill.   

I have two garden ponds.  The first I put in simultaneously along with digging up two-thirds of the 25 foot wide x 200 foot long front swath of yard.  My second husband--a new resident of the house--called it Mom's Folly.  It was a seething mud-pit for over a month until I could haul in pea gravel for paths, gather the humus to sculpt mounds for planting (unamended soil is so clay-laden we can make pots of it). It looked pretty tidy, nearly British, for that first year.

Now the paths have been overtaken by an array of greenery and the gardened part is a riot of surprise perennials, the encroaching sprawl of Rose-of-Sharon, other invasive. That's probably when I crossed the good ol' girl line in the neighbors' view, when I dug holes in the ground, lined them with rubber, water and goldfish and let the rest of it go pretty much the way it wants. It appears that holding back the wilderness takes a level of force I'm not skilled at or keen on--chainsaws, burnings, chemicals.  We don't even rake.  

The glaciers forgot or could not defeat the trunk

of bedrock beneath this local land.  Elsewhere--

rolling fields east and west, loose black soil north;

fertility beckoned and, like the aboriginal

of every invaded land, the trees fell quickly

and forever,  Corn and soybean geometried

sheared lands.  Not here.

The benefit of my land management pacifism is that we are surrounded by creatures--Red-wing and Cooper's hawks drift in the updraft, goldfinch, chickadee, nuthatch and titmouse flash from feeder to bush to branch.  Deer meander through now and again along with raccoon, wild turkey, fox, rabbit, coyote. There are pairs of cardinals, robins, and mourning doves I swear I recognize along with the summer hummingbirds with their scarlet neckerchiefs, musketeer dueling amongst throaty blooms.

Don’t get me wrong; I know all this nature will kill me.  The hawks picked off my chickens one by one and the coyotes snatched my neighbor Huck’s prize rabbits, angering him enough that he learned a coyote call.  One night he drove up and down the road, unworldly warbles emanating from his truck, a rifle in his lap. My home will disintegrate soon if we don’t root out the damp, cut disruptive roof-line lilac, bolster the tilted retaining wall.  As natural as is spring profusion so is the inevitability of decay.  Rust never sleeps.

Here the horizon heaves with Paw-Paw, Black Walnut,

Hickory, Persimmon, Wild grape snaking through it all--

the Celtic knot upon the letter of the limb.  Across each

acre, ravines and rock surprise us, resist us.  Here

we scrabble for a living.  The land does not easily yield.

Nevertheless as an immigrant, an asylum-seeker--I am a nature patriot.  When I first moved here, I would wander into the woods and perch on a rock for hours.  Even with the junkyard remnant in sight, I would marvel.  I was a woman rescued from a desert trek that had collapsed, parched and dying.  In the middle of Indy, both of my young children gasped, dependent on the the asthma nebulizers to keep their airways open. We had a bullet hole in our ceiling and even my Impatiens died from lack of light in the shadows of close-set houses.

We were "urban camping" as my husband put it--and that meant waking up to drunks on the porch on Sunday mornings and possums sneaking through the unsound roofing, along with soot-stained rain. I'm not sure when or how I came to a decision point to move away, but when I did it felt like an act of will and it took everyone in our lives helping us to move from city chaos to country chaos.  But now here, I'm not sure if I'll ever belong...or should.

The Reverend Billy Talen street activist and teacher from The Church of After Shopping says this about the "wilderness" and the Western European conquest of it: Our "gods" were...

"...supposed to defeat Appalachia, and the Ohio Valley after that, and the Mississippi and the Great Plains and Rockies and the Golden State and the Moon, but the Promised Land receded into the distance like a white whale the size of pixel. The pillar of fire that was supposed to get us home – the GPS was on the fritz. And then our Eden caught us from behind. It turned out to our surprise that the Promised Land was never in front of us. The Promised Land caught us from behind because it was an inside job, the seeds and eggs and screaming birds. There is an Eden inside us, and we know there is."

When I first moved to Sanders, my neighbor through the west wood was a mother of triplets, daughter of the farmer behind us.  This edge of country living had long lost any appeal for her; she dreamed of quick trips to the grocery and houses with no hidden wildlife scurrying in the eaves.  We would take walks up and down the road and over to her father's farm, attempting to trim our shape, share book reading lists and commiserate on child-rearing.  We could sympathize in so many ways except how we felt about living here on our road.  As a native--born in a house that didn't have running water 'til later, trudging to the local school full of ramp-scented country-kids--she seemed tired, longing. And me?  I was smitten.   


Even so, I love

it all with the eye of a mother who

only sees the original child, 

with the heart of a lover who only  knows

that she loves, not how to, or why.

My neighbor did move into town and I'm still here, years later. Ambivalently fluent in country, she quickly acquired the syllables of a small city life. Ambivalently fluent in city, I still clumsily cobble together my pidgen translation of these woods, despite their cavalier treatment of my yard. Right now, night has misted in, mercifully blurring my homesteading neglect, allowing cool breath through the windows. Peepers have begun to trill, their waltzing vibrato punctuated with the banjo bwonk of bullfrog and the occasional shusssh of late home-comer's tires on rain soaked road.  Perhaps I'll never be good at this--always speaking country with an accent--but for now, I'll revel in this Promised Land's creole sounds within me,  "belonging" in my own temporary way.

There is still some mystery here:

the peculiar moaning of the wind, even

on a still night, the yipping of coyotes

said to appear in ghostly gatherings

silhouetted against the neighbor’s open

field.

This rock is rooted to a time when only

the wind evolved and coyotes were just a dream within

the wind’s dark eyes and we were but a phantasm,

a haunting beyond even the wind’s imagination.

 Photos by Mark Beebe



"I am a Bad God" and "Bloomington, Indiana--Thanksgiving Night" by Julia Heimer Dadds
Reverend Billy's Easter Sermon: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/note.php?note_id=10150171825821912  uploaded April 24, 2011
                                                                                                                

Pass/words

SHIBBOLETH

One didn't know the name of Tarzan's monkey.
Another couldn't strip the cellophane
From a G.I.'s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We'd become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.


The morning of the first snowfall,
I was shaving, Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
"Maxine, Laverne, Patty."
                                      Michael Donaghy, Poetry*

"Pass" is an interesting word--it's extraordinarily versatile.  One might say that the word "pass" is passing strange (a fun yet archaic phraseology).  I can pass as in a lane, I can pass on having some of that haggis (thanks but no thanks), pass a class, a kidney stone, muster.  I can complete or dodge a pass, as well pass by, through, over, around. I can pass away.

In a racialized world there are people who pass for being of a "race" that might otherwise not be assigned to them. The use of that meaning of "passing" is commonly associated with African Americans describing folks passing as white and is documented in 1935. It originates in use as in "pass oneself off as" in 1809. In other words, when we pass as we internalize a movement through and around our identity in order to project something altered and outwards as our identity. Concerns around these notions of "passing" was especially acute in 19th century New Orleans, where the extraordinary confluence of cultures and colors produced such human variety in appearance that it altered the racial vocabulary throughout the nation and the era.

Sometimes at the gate we must offer a "password."  But once we pass and enter daily life,  there is the shibboleth--the test of pronunciation that gives lie to one's belonging or estrangement.  In the biblical passage the pronunciation of the the word "shibboleth"*** by refugees from a war was the marker of belonging; know it and live, mispronounce and die.  In old New Orleans the shibboleths had names like "octaroon" to denote degrees of racial complexity (and expected accompanying social behavior)and gens de couleur libres, free from the start and rendering moot the simplistic shibboleth of skin tones adding layered challenges of historical and linguistic interplay.  In old New Orleans one wanted to speak with an accent, be fluent in French. 

These ideas--passing for, passing through-- checked me when I recently visited the city of New Orleans.  In order to make the most of that visit I felt I needed to remember how I carried myself in a former life living in downtown Indianapolis.  I needed to pass for/as (at least) a street-wise visitor, someone not worth messing with as I wended my way through a French Quarter festival.

As my city ways came back to me, I reflected on my fear of the city as a kind of "stuck-up-ness"--an estrangement tinged with judgment. The term "siddity" surfaced--a term taught to me by the elder African American women I worked with when I lived in downtown Indy.  These women were old enough that many remembered crossing the Mason-Dixon line with family to find work during the Depression and World War II.  

These women knew the siddity--folks who denied their past and put on airs, viewing as lesser the very people who helped them get their new positions in life. Someone who's siddity is nervous about remembering where she comes from, tries to claim belonging in world she's moving to not from.  Siddity-ness claims this displaced belonging in a way that renders that already impossible belonging even more impossible. The siddity are "faking it." This leaves the siddity people without belonging. Labeling someone siddity carries its own smugness, as well, being breezy in its tone of knowing that the siddity ones lose what is most precious--belonging anywhere--in the end.

As a white gal, I might have no business looking for the siddity in me; there's no belonging for me in the lexicon of African-American social life.  But this white gal found it useful to learn what I could from a new world of racial awareness.  I was dropped into the midst of a racialized high-school when I was 16. (That I could make it to 16 without a lived racial awareness points to my white privilege.)  This once near-suburban school in Indy had recently been white-flighted into a majority black population.** And I had just moved there from another city. The layers of reaction/interaction, denial and disavowal around this population shift were confusing and fascinating. Besides learning not to "cut my eyes" at anyone (looking too long or closely), I also learned to listen to the unique languages around me; my inner poet was inspired by the sly lexicons and spoken rhythms of my African American schoolmates.

I don't remember hearing the old fashioned word "siddity" until working with the elders. I was a stranger in their strange land, too--a young white mother working with grand-parent-aged African American women and men. So they patiently explained things to me, like siddity, jazz and gospel music, and how to get by in hard times (the little, really important things).

They taught me that it was considered rude to pass by a black person on the street without making eye contact and saying "Hi.  How are you?"  That was a revelation.  The white practice of a curt nod, or even aversion of the eyes--essentially what's considered polite distance in the white city world--is, or at least was (I've been small town/rural for a while here), considered cold and stand-offish in the black city world.  The office manager once explained it to me:  If you're black--even if you're different from one another in many ways--you share the way the white world treats you because of your skin tone; you recognize a related, even familial-flavored humanity in one another...in a world that otherwise won't. 

As the poem above notes, in times and places of heightened hostility, knowing the right words, the nuanced signal, might keep you alive. "The devil is in the details:"  Our signaling of threat, of dominance or privilege, rests in the gesture, the eyes, the cant of the body; these are the signals that get us through the checkpoint.   Indeed, with a new awareness of how the others might prefer to be addressed on city streets, I travelled through Indy, D.C., New York and Boston, with a different eye to and a different greeting for the people around me.  But our belonging is carried in the details--the pronunciation, knowledge of baseball, musicians and singers--these are the things that allow us to settle in, cleared of deadly label "infiltrator." 

There are plenty of "wanna-bes" (wanna belong) for black culture and other cultures, as well; but, unlike wannabes,  infiltrators refuse to recognize that their belonging is born of hospitality. No, the infiltrator is pretending, is trying to pass, without having lived the belonging. The infiltrator tries to appropriate the language and the music of the language, both, without so much as a "thank you." How much of our life is now infiltrated?  These day the market seems to appropriate any and all cultural gifts to sell us back our belonging.  Rappers--just recently the outsiders raging against the machine, cleverly sampling the past and spinning it on its head--now provide the soundtrack for car commercials.   

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

(Alfred North Whitehead)

Our belonging lives in how we roll our "r," the elongation of "ah," the how-to's of the minutiae--how to pour the tea, offer bread, unwrap the smokes.  That our belonging rests in such knowledges is dangerous if they become life/death shibboleths--for how can we ever master all the details, know the names of all the icons?  And which gesture, pronunciation, knowledge is the one to know? There are shadings and details as multiple as individuals.  We traverse through belongings, fluid and nomadic "selves" absorbed to greater and lesser degrees, into the various fabrics of daily life. Today we may pass as American, or Latina, big-city or rural resident; tomorrow's checkpoint may find us suspicious. 

The poet above knows finally, as he looks into a cold mirror, that even he is an infiltrator at some level, needing to practice, in the ultimate alienation of war, the most mundane of details so that he might pass, pass through this impossible test of belonging. As I walked  through a strange city--my head full of memories, my feet moving toward new belongings--I knew in my heart how temporary "I" am--defined and outlined by my accent and skin tone, my carriage, my clothing, my breasts, my stride.  Some day I may not speak in the right way at the right moment and then where will I belong?  Will my very life be forfeit?

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.              (Bertrand Russell)

So we do this, we aspire to pass if it gains us a life (as it does for the defeated or the oppressed, besieged or bereft, the seeker and the beginner) and we seek to root out the infiltrator (and yet, we are infiltrated most insidiously by structures and economies), even while knowing we might ourselves fail in the belonging someday.  Do we gain a better belonging in not allowing the refugee in?  Is passing such a sin?  When does passing betray our past life and peoples and when is it simply the seeking of a new life in the name of having life at all?  A password is a secret word to get us in somewhere we might otherwise be locked out from.  It overrides our surface appearance, the perceptions of the gatekeeper, confirms our belonging through an agreement of shared knowledge.  But the shibboleth, the shibboleth will catch us out once we are nearly inside. The shibboleth is the stare at our accent or dress, how we address our child, wear our hair. "So cool" coos the rural white girl serving the ice cream to my son's African American/multi-racial girlfriend. She grimaces when we get to the car, "It's just so...I don't know...Why always about my hair?" "It's really about your skin?" I venture.  "Yeah," is the quiet reply.

Like the warrior poet in the mirror, we know that the shibboleth does not serve us, does not serve our life in the long run. It points to the sweetness of belonging--the cadences of particularity but uses them to exclude, even to kill.  If we realize belonging, at best, is shifting and temporary, could we begin to recognize the refugee, the newcomer-- even those "passing"-- in ourselves?   In the long run,  I think we are all refugees, immigrants and strangers, learning to pass... and our checkpoint is on the nearing horizon. 

Pictures:

"checkpoint charlie by night" from the old Berlin Wall site, by open mindedly

"Wheat near Nemrut" Ferrel Jenkins 

The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo

Shibboleth

Tate Modern, Terbine Hall

9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008

photo Suzy Bower (http://suzybower.wordpress.com/tag/shibboleth/

 

*Vol. 152, No. 6 (Sep., 1988), p. 342 Published by: Poetry Foundation

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20601768

**I mix my term usage because "black" was the preferred term at the time I gained racial awareness. Because I was initiated into my lived racial understandings when the term "black" was the empowering label, it feels more "true" or respectful to me to use that term. However,  I agree that African-American is more accurate and appropriate (unless Haitian or Caribbean-American, of course) even while ultimately finding racial labeling problematic, however necessary at times.

***the actual meaning of the word "shibboleth" is the head of a grass that contains the multiple seeds, a head of grain.   There is some irony in this, I think, given the deep meanings of grain, of bread, and the life-sustaining pluralism of the seed head.

  

Shibboleths of City Siddity

The last waftings of New Orleans are drifting off my psyche leaving stranges traces: I visited somewhere entirely unfamiliar and, through that, my own past.

I was anxious about visiting-- felt I was a stranger entering a strange land, attending a huge conference in a big and culturally unfamiliar city.  The first night there I went for a walk to remember my big city ways.  I moved to my current semi-rural home from the middle, and I do mean the middle, of Indianapolis, so I once had city-wise ways.  

Each city has it's own flavor and NOLA has perhaps been both romanticized and demystified in uniquely striking ways.  That is a different topic. I had fears. Uniquely bad things can happen swiftly and sometimes invisibly in cities. When I lived in Indy, there were gangs on the hoof not far from my house and skirting clumps of young men could be a skill and a gamble. Crowded, tourist-laden streets are important to local economies that operate both on the surface and, more ominously, beneath it. And a woman alone is always aware of a special vulnerability.  Suffice it to say that there must be something intriguing there because I left with a sense of its livability, even though everything in me wanted to say "no! never!"

But was my fear somehow born from a place of privilege, an lens of outsider assumption? African American's have a word for this attitude of false superiority--siddity. One of the layers of meaning in that term, is that siddity folk come from the same place but act like they don't.  I was once a city gal, walking down borderland streets and yet here,  I was literally on the border of the French Quarter and did not venture into it until my 2nd day there. When a colleague posted pictures of his forays on Facebook,  I noted that I hadn't even visited and he offered to walk me into that world.  It was lovely.  The world of the Quarter itself (in festival mode) was, yes,  full of--as a cabbie put it later--the 3 P's (pourings, piss, puke)--all of which were disgustingly aromatic and ubiquitous, but the waft of music was masterful and the art--everywhere.  My guide and I wandered through, getting acquainted, keeping time to blues, admiring architectural tableaus.  We found an Edward Hopperian diner serving plain ol' breakfast and savored cool air, hot coffee, new friendship.

That small stroll gave me the gumption to wade through the festival and then across a quieter swath of old neighborhoods to attend a crawfish boil the next evening.  Again, as a solo woman, I set a certain pace, wove through the crowd with assurance and then strolled with a purposeful step through the quiet back streets.  My walk of two miles across the French Quarter left me with a nostalgia for the architecture of past centuries, surprising me with its ghosts--like muted lullaby strains crooned by a lost grandmother.

I re-experienced how the middle of city can have surprising corners of serenity.  It's the hidden places--the back streets, the alleys and the "empty" lots that are populated with  welcome sunlight, needed shade, shelter from the traffic of vehicle and human.  Strangely sacred spaces emerge in the midst of the most industrial of spots.  Indeed, the spare haiku of empty railroad track, the twilight warehouse stoop, the drowsy rusted scaffold-- feel like chapels in the city's storm.  And Sunday mornings can have an unworldly peace in the middle of an urban center.

When I lived in Indy, I did a backward commute--I drove over 40 miles to an outlying town in a bedroom community and, somewhat ironically, did social work there.  In the course of my work, I sometimes rode with the sheriff's department to accomplish a visit.  One time a deputy exclaimed, upon hearing where I lived, "Do you sleep with a gun under your pillow?!"  I found that comment (and the mindset it revealed) both amusing and insulting. 

Thinking we're better is usually siddity.  And me thinking that the dangers of New Orleans are any worse than the dangers of rural Western Monroe county is just plain siddity once I acclimatize.  A stranger in a strange land is always in danger.  But there are usually more friends than enemies wherever we wander...if we don't get too siddity about it.  The guy selling me pralines in the little shop took the time to commiserate about obnoxious motorcycle sounds and confided his dismay at how they overrode sublime live cello music the day before.  He even shared the name of the cellist when I revealed my love for cello sounds.  We shared a connection about things that matter--traffic, rudeness, cello music.

As my last captain's log entry pointed out, trauma happens in any neighborhood.  Indeed, my job in that pricey outlying suburb was Child Welfare and--contrary to the ridiculous occasional exclamation from the ignorant--YES, the rich and privileged do abuse and neglect their children (They just have better lawyers).  So murder and suicide happen in the lovely rural hills and they happen in crowded city neighborhoods and it's usually all about love and despair in the small world of family and friends.  Despite the hauntings of the drive-by shooting--the worst fear of a lawman anywhere is the "domestic dispute."

I lived in the middle of Indianapolis in a neighborhood bordered by a schizophrenic pathwork of gentrificition and gangs. One night the kids from next door--all six of them--showed up bundled in their winter coats to troupe up our stairs and sit in a silent row on our couch to wait out a particularly violent fight between their mom and her boyfriend. She and I had chattted now and again beacuse her lone boy-child, Jonathon, tended to play with my son. She told me of her struggle to find work, the blessing of her church people, and the wonders of imbibing aloe juice (I suspect she was hoping I'd participate in her fledgling business selling said product).

That mundane pause in our usual passing by perhaps allowed enough human trust for her to send the kids to me for safety in a bad moment. As they sat there, utterly still, politely refusing to take off their coats, I checked with the kids about whether they had been in danger (no), if they ever had been (no) and if they thought I should call the police (no). I didn't.

The police derisively referred to my neighborhood as "the swamp" and tended to treat most of us, even when victimized, as if we were swamp creatures that would be better off devouring each other. Factor in that this family was African American and I just couldn't bring myself to seek such dubious "assistance." One time all the tools, my husband's lifeblood and the source of our income, were stolen from his locked truck. The neighbors behind us said they knew who stole them but were too afraid to say. The police didn't even blink.  That's just the way it was.

So I wonder about Jonathon just as I worry about the children of the suicide couple down the road.  Jonathon is an African American male in a large city in the midwest;  his prospects are not good.  He grew up poor, but churched, loved but a little isolated, handsome, but--to the police--just another black kid running loose on the downtown sidewalks.  I don't even remember his last name or what kind of music he liked.  I do know that, when we went to the movies, he was fearless in the face of Jurrasic Park's Tyrannosaurus Rex.  My son and I had to move to the back of the theater and hide our heads in each other's arms.  Johnathon just sat there, stoic, amused, in the very first row as a monster roared out, in huge 2-D splendor.  3-D adult survival is proving difficult for my 23 year old son, how much less or more so for his old friend?  

The thin line between alienation and privacy wavers indistinct and maddening no matter our environment.  The answer is not evident to me on how to find it, cross it with timely kindness, respect it with dignity. How do I keep the siddity part of me settled down and the down home part of me open to insight and real human connection?  Are there ways for me to listen to the praline guy, to connect with Jonathon, to reach Susie when we nod in passing that will grow my soul, that will allow their souls to grow, too, in that moment of connection? 

Sanders Death Trip part II

"The sky is red, and the world is on fire, and the corn is taller than me

And the dog is tied to a wagon of rain, and the road is wet as the sea
And sometimes the music from a dance will carry across the plains
And the places that I'm dreaming of, do they dream only of me?"


Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennen Waits Whistle Down the Wind


My last post was about a neighborhood tragedy--one where, within months of each other, a mother and a father both killed themselves, leaving two young teens behind.  Like the Wisconsin Death Trip book and movie, the mundane-ness of our surroundings somehow foregrounds the small signals of tragedy. Examples of this heart-rending everyday-ness include her use of the tub to try and keep the disaster tidy and his trip to the nearby lake with his kids and a bag of Long John Silvers fish just 24 hours before those same kids found his body. Something about the domesticity of the tub, the fish 'n chips fast food at the lakeside evokes a pathos that seems unbearable. 

Despite the sensationalism of these losses, I am actually more interested in the surrounding "mundane." The mundane is the opening--the one plain book amongst the others; but when we notice it, when it is touched, the door to a secret passageway swings open, the sharp air of what was hidden in plain sight waking us up. Mundus--the Latin root for mundane--means world. 

The antonyms for mundane (per Merriam-Webster) are "heavenly, non-temportal, unearthly....."  I object. It's not the definition I object to but rather the allusions in how we use it.  When we label something "mundane" it has a whiff of debasement about it, of the rote--that which is not worth deep consideration.  Boring, actually, the mundane is boring--like doing the dishes. Indeed, it is the chore of washing dishes that is presented  in the Merriam-Webster as an illustration of "mundane."  The domestic, as ever, holds sway as the exemplar of what is trite, not allied with spirit (heavenly), entwined with time...Perhaps we are so ambivalent because it is bound to time--ticking us towards our mortality.

For if no one does those dishes, well then, suddenly the world is not quite so mundane, is it?  We get insect problems, critters, perhaps even officials called in to deem a household unfit for habitation.  The daily, mundane chores are the stitches that hold the garment of daily life together.  And the seamstress is so often female.  Take away the mundane and beneath we have crisis.  Is the mundane a mask?  Or is it something more, something holy or heavenly after all? 

I am sorry to say I did not hear about Susie's suicide until just last month, 2 months after the fact.  It created a crisis for me, to know that someone I cared about had taken her life and I didn't even know it.  She and I were nodding neighbors.  We all nod to each other as we drive up and down the street, here.  A wave is best, sometime just a lift of the finger from the steering wheel.  There's a elaborate system of manners about pulling over to let each other through: the road is so narrow that most times two cars simply cannot pass. 

Susie and I talked and plotted at one point to get rumble strips on the two lane main road that drivers--despite vicious twists and turns--seem to view as a highway.  Our children crossed that road to get to their school bus.  And our neighborhood road's juncture with this county road is a blind one--we gamble out lives everytime we pull out. So, we thought maybe folks rushing through needed to be alerted: They might round the corner to a dead stop, a line of kids crossing in front of them like some many ducks in a carnvial game. 
After our successful calls to the county, Susie and I always had a little smile for each other in addition to the nod.  But the "do not disturb" field around her was strong.  I always had a sense that her home life was not sweet.  I glimpsed the kids' father all of about 4 times in 17 years.  Susie did all the yard work, all the transporation, all of the visible child  and pet care. She hung the laundry out to dry year 'round--a raw job in our damp winters.  A gal I knew who lived next to them said he had some crazy ideas--something to do with alien abduction. What I saw from my passing-by was a woman living a suppressed life--a woman not allowed  to say much or do much.  But this is a strong "live and let live" neighborhood..  Like that laundry hung close in the vast wind, our little string of homes line up against open rural space, exaggerating our sense of frontier. So here in Sanders, the careful distance between our lives never seemed that strange.  It's bad manners to pry. Now I wish I had.

Susie's family owned the turn of the century limestone gas/grocery building at the corner of our street.  Though the building is throughly shuttered, the vintage gas pumps are still embedded out front. With the architectural lines of a rum-runner's Buick, these pumps were once artfully rusted to a soft blush of sepia.  One day, a few years ago, they were suddenly painted in bright strips of red, blue and white--some sort of effort to restore them? Perhaps a 9/11 patriotic gesture? Frankly, to me, the effect was hideous.  But such is the aesthetic of Sanders folk.  I never took a poll, but I'm betting I'd lose out in my assessment of improvement/not improvement.

Though I never saw her at it, I've alwasy been certain it was Susie's doing to paint those pumps with present-day paint.  Maybe she wanted to cheer the busstop.  I kind of think that paint represented a claim on time--she was pulling on the thread of the past, a past where her family's patriach was the prinicpal just up the streeet, a past where neighbors talked a bit more, walked a bit more, (probably fought a bit more), stopped by the store for some bread and a pack of smokes.

It's the little details that we dismiss that, in the end, break our hearts--telling the small story of lives:  A sunset echoing anguish, a crumpled fast food bag, the dog held in place by the weight of rain, the music drifting from a place we can't quite reach, ancient gas pumps translated through paint.  We dream our dreams separately. And yet, we all seem to dream.
After the paint job, I kept watching for something else to happen around those pumps, maybe the station doors to get glass on them again.  Flower pots on the steps, maybe. Despite the  impossible reuse regulations, I've always dreamed of it being renewed into a little neighborhood store--coffee for tired neighbors, candy for clamoring kids, gossip gently traded.  Now the house is empty, too. Fallen off the porch are two big pots of mums turned dark brown and lying on the ground, side by side. Something in me sobs at that simple sight and mundanely wonders who bought them and why.  Did she have one last hope of making things nice before the holidays came?  Before she climbed into that plain tub on Christmas eve, pulling the trigger on the year, on time, ending it for once and all?

For a closing, you can give a listen to the song below, closing your eyes to nod  with me one last time to Susie--leaving the husband, the children, the busstop, the laundry, the lot of us....to whistle down the wind.
Tom Waits (click to link to the song)

Sanders Death Trip

Last week I left at dusk to pick my youngest boy up at the archery club out in the western hills of our county.  It's slated to be paved over with a "pork barrel" new terrain highway--the brain child of a few deep (and gold-filled) pockets and our Ayn Rand-ian Governer.  But that's a sorrow for another story.


My journey  this early spring evening was abruptly and dramatically blocked .  The street's entry--including the gravel area around the defunct grocery--was completely cut off  by about 5 different varieties of emergency vehicles.  Misgiving and dread arose in my heart.  My plans for the night--domestic and even a bit mundane--were interrupted.

There's a perversely marvelous book (and movie that I've not yet viewed) called Wisconsin Death Trip.*   The book tells a haunting story through its gothic black & white photos of everyday settler life and portraiture. The story is one that doesn't really know an era: People suffer from their minds, times get hard and people suffer even more, someone murders someone else, babies die, debts take people down, someone commits suicide. 

I live in a place called Sanders.  It's not a got a post office to preserve its status as a community, so someday it will not be known as its own place but rather, a northern end of  the nearby (and equally tiny but possessing a post office) Smithville or a southern 'burb of Bloomington.  Yet, this place was once a stop on the limestone railway--with a full working quarry and the tiny clapboard dwellings clumped around housing the quarry's bosses and maybe some of the more prosperous workers.  At the end of my street is a genuine historical building--a sweet little grocery/gas station that still has the pumps out front.  Derelict and serving as a storage shed for the house across the way, it also served as the shelter for my kids and many others on this 1/2 mile long dead end road as they waited for the bus to pick them up to drive them nearly 10 miles south to the public school.

Just 60 yards up the road is an elegant limestone building carved with the words "Sanders Elementary School"  and just 2 miles down the road the still post-officed town of Smithville strives to preserve from near ruination the larger building that once housed Smithville Elementary.  We once educated our children within walking distance here in the "sticks."  But progress, like that soon-to-be highway, rolls along.

I often joke that the entire side of the street across from me is related to each other but it's not really hyperbole; of the 11 houses on the north side--8 of them house people somehow related to the ones next door.  I once was able to trace this genealogical "tree" but, having lived here for nearly 17 years, generational migrations have obscured the lines of relationship.  I do get misty-eyed seeing the toddlers across the way who are the babies of children I remember as kindergartners. 

But there is a certain heartache beneath the smile.  The uncle to those toddlers was put in jail by his own grandmother for stealing from her--a desperate move on her part to interrupt his involvement with drugs (methamphetamine ala Winter's Bone, is my guess). He returned from his time away tattooed with Aryan Brotherhood symbols; yet I still see the boy who played Mario Brothers on the game system with my own boy. It's wrenching....and mundane.


So last Wednesday night I exited the car, slowly walking toward the mill of Carhart-clad firefighters and men in blue with apprehension.  A young teen girl ran up to me in recognition.  I've watched this girl grow from a night-gowned toddler gazing out into the dawn as I took my morning walk. The boy I was thwarted from fetching today was then just a bulge in my belly, slowing my steps.  Tonight, she was breathless, a bit manic, "My daddy has hanged himself" she said and stood in front of me, an arm's length away.  Like a trapped bird, the ache in my chest rose to my throat and all I could do was place my hands upon her shoulders and hold her eyes, just for the briefest of moments and say "Oh I'm sorry.  I'm so so so sorry."  She leaned into me then and sobbed dryly for just a moment.  I asked if she'd found him and she said yes. The bird beat it's wings helplessly behind my eyes and she then ran off, to a new neighbor, a new shoulder.

Only 3 months earlier, her mother had climbed into family's bathtub, let the safety off the shotgun and taken herself out of this world.  The children--this girl and her slightly younger brother--were in the next room.  As a result, each day as I drive past their house (literally the gateway to our street) I think how pathetic, yet oddly kind, it was that she placed her demise in that easy to wash-down room.  And in a tub--once a luxury on this street--that tidily drained her blood into the septic stretched under the earth behind the house.

Wisconsin Death Trip shows us that the lone prairie was lone-r than we'd like to fully remember...and that hard times have always produced tragedy for the regular folk.  The mists of time seem to allow us to sentimentalize the past, rendering even tragedy somehow romantic.  Is it the clothing?  The black and whiteness of our imagery?  Or some desire we have to render tragedy then as qualitatively different from tragedy now?  The notion of progress obscures and diminishes our own present day heartbreak.  Other-ing the past, to paraphrase Santayana and Burke, may, in part, doom us to repeat it.  And in that othering we disown/disavow even our own present.

The lone hills and valleys of Sanders were too lonely, too sad for this lost couple to bear.  Rumors of drug use do not explain away the tragedy just as they do not explain away the boy across the street.  The tragedy existed in Wisconsin Death Trip when laudanum was a luxury and alcohol a debatable agent of medicine.

I can't help but remember each and every day as I pass the now-empty house, Rosie's eyes, only briefly, so very briefly meeting mine when I said "sorry, so so sorry."    You see, the girl's grandfather, the patriarch who bought the grocery when it couldn't run any more, whose house she grew up in, that man--long gone--but the heritage of this small place whose name will soon be forgotten--he was the last principal of Sanders Elementary School.
Sorry.  So. So. Sorry.

* From Wikipedia
Wisconsin Death Trip is a non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, first published in 1973. It has been adapted into a film.
The book is based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin photographer Charles Van Schaick, mostly in the city of Black River Falls, and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization.
The film, which was directed by James Marsh and starred Marcus Monroe, was released in 2000. In a docudrama style, and shot entirely in black-and-white (except for contrasting sequences of modern life in the area, in color), it combined re-enactments of some of the events described in the book with a voice-over narration by Ian Holm. Its visual style was intended to carry the content of the film - as Marsh said: