Continuation from Part I, found here.
Uncle Jack &
Aunt Marita
Clay Etruscan Head |
Out of all those journals in those mice-filled boxes, I ended
up keeping only two. One of them included a description of a late-night
conversation with my Aunt Marita and Uncle Jack - about the ancient Greeks, about
a sailor, about Jack's childhood, about the Etruscan language…
In the months after my divorce in the mid-nineties, I spent
a lot of time at my Aunt Marita and Uncle Jack's place, showing up unannounced in
the evening. They were night-owls and fellow artists and were very
accommodating and we'd talk late into the night about everything. Uncle Jack
was known for pursuing threads of thought that could extend sometimes for
hours. I was usually fascinated. One night, when I got home from one of those
late-night conversations, I sat down and tried to piece together what he had
said - and there it was in a long, lost journal:
"We started to talk about the Greeks after I mentioned
that I'd always focused on The Odyssey and
had never read The Iliad…which I
suspected said something about me…and Jack talked about Xenophon and the march
of the ten thousand soldiers, which led to talk of Schliemann and his discovery
of Troy, which led to him remembering a Greek sailor that some Greek Des Moines
family had sponsored, who had worked with Jack at Sherwin Williams, was blonde, blue-eyed - unlike most Greeks Jack had met - which led to
speculation about how we all come from a long strange history, more interesting
than the stereotypes, which led to talk about how the Italians were descendants
of "barbarian" tribes that had invaded Rome, which led to Jack
telling me how the Romans of Roman Empire fame weren't really the original
people there either, which led to him talking about the Etruscans and an
Italian man he and his father knew back in the 30's.
"Jack's father would talk with the old Italian sometimes,
parking down by the railyard where the old Italian spent the day sweeping the
switch tracks of gravel (his job?), and they'd talk politics - both were
Democrats, of course - and when Jack's father would talk about some Republican
president or governor, the old Italian would nod and say lamia. Jack asked his father what it meant, and his father just
shook his head, saying 'I don't know…it's just what he says.'
"But it always puzzled Jack, so when a Sicilian moved
in next door Jack asked what lamia
meant and the Sicilian said, 'How should I know? There is not a universal
Italian. What I speak in this village is different from the village on the
other side of the mountain. We've been invaded by so many people - French,
Germans, Russians, you name it - that everyone speaks something different in
different parts of the country.' But what does it mean to you, Jack asked. 'A
woman's breast, to some…or maybe a witch…someone fed on witch's milk, I think.' A magical person? 'No.' A bad person? 'Could be.'
"And then Jack brought out this 19th Century book about
the Armenian origins of the Etruscan language. The author found evidence that
the Etruscan's originated from Armenia. Jack opened the book, pointed down at a word: lamia. He said lamia was an
ancient Etruscan word. It meant 'evil spirit.'"
After reading that journal entry, I was suddenly back in their
small living room, Uncle Jack's paintings on the wall (a circus tent…a strange
Dali-like limb on an empty plain…), a dim lamp casting shadows across the
record shelf that contained a copy of Le
Mystere des Voix Bulgares Jack once played for me - a lamenting women's
choir, diachronic, dissonant - half-western, half-eastern - waiting for my
reaction…
"It sounds like sorrow," I said, perplexed.
"Or joy. I can't tell which."
And just around the corner was Aunt Marita's office, a
converted porch, where I would go to talk when I was young and passing through town,
lost, not knowing how lost I was, babbling on about choices (young enough to
believe I had more control over my life than I actually did). Once, she'd
looked out the window - at the bare box-elder trees, the snow beyond - and said:
"We didn't have as many choices as
you have now…I think that might have been a good thing."
Ceremonies: Grief
& Praise
So there I was, standing in a garage in New York state, more
than a thousand miles from home, brought back to my aunt and uncle's house in
the Midwest, thousands of miles away. Both of them were gone, the house sold off. Grief
moved through me.
The thing about grief is that it is a form of praise (I got
that from reading Martín
Prechtel). It is a form of praise because there is something missed. It's about love. To grieve
deeply, you have to have loved the thing that you lost. So, to grieve the loss
of someone is to acknowledge that they were praiseworthy. Just like life and
death, grief and praise cannot be separated from each other.
I realized then that I needed a ceremony. To acknowledge
what had been lost. And so to praise it. To acknowledge all the death was a way
to move more deeply into the rest of my life. To feel it. And, for that time and place, for that particular moment, it was my antidote against
the Trump hate-speech that encouraged numbness, that encouraged not feeling
anything at all - except maybe rage. The world of Trump and his followers is the world of death without life (which isn't really about death at all - it's about nothingness, being un-dead). It is the world of numb-silence in the face of loss. But whatever ceremony I came up with, I
needed to perform it back at home - in Santa Fe.
The Journey back from
the Underworld
Woman in a blue car
holds a white flower
to her pink face.
She breathes the flower,
eyes closed,
waiting to make her turn.
Leaves open their arms
and fly wild onto the wind.
Nothing can stop the world.
It was time to head home. After the Mississippi River, there
was the relief of an open sky. Arkansas shacks and signs telling us what will
happen when we die: "You WILL meet God." A threat? From God? Each
night on the journey back I'd look into the hotel room mirror and see all the
others - all my past selves, the ones who had written in all those journals - standing
with me. Those who had found their voice, those who had not (and now never would),
those who had loved, those who had not, all studying me with curiosity, waiting,
patient, for this "I" to join them. Leaves flew across Oklahoma. Dust
sailed the flats outside Amarillo. On the border of Texas and New Mexico, there
were fields of wind turbines seen through a dawn haze…and the giant white crosses,
always the giant white crosses…
We arrived home on All
Soul's, when the barrier between worlds is thin. That night, out under the
stars (the entire sky above again!), I listened to the black sunflower skeletons rattle
together in the wind. I could hear the dead parting the stalks, saying: Who are you? Who was I? I built a small frame from fallen apple twigs to use as
a scrying window and looked through it - to see the shades move, dark against
dark, their eyes black as sunflower seeds, blinking, newborn.
Then I whispered the names of the dead over a crack in a
stone - dead poets, old loves, lost pets, Aunt Marita, Uncle Jack, even all my
previous incarnations and their words (so many words - now long gone). I prayed
for silence, and, at the same time, hoped that something or someone would
whisper back…
Have a beautiful Day of the Dead.