Bi-Weekly Topic for Oct 1, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060115223037/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?AncestralPlace
Ancestral places (Ecotone)
By Mulubinba Moments (Geoff)
Ancestral places are not just old places, they are places where we can feel a connection with the generations that have gone before us.
If I go back a few generations, my ancestors lived in England, Scotland and Ireland. Thanks to my father’s genealogical research, I know that my great great great grandparents were married in a church in Wishaw, Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1845. I have not visited the church, but if I did I could stand at the back and look towards the altar and imagine them taking their vows. Perhaps if the register they signed still exists, I could gaze at their signatures. I could even attend a service in the church and know that many of the words spoken and sung today would be similar to those of 158 years ago.
Last year we visited Ubirr. Ubirr is an Aboriginal site in the Kakadu National Park of the Northern Territory and it is truly ancient. Humans have lived here for at least 23000 years, and there are rock paintings reliably dated at over 20000 years old. We did not personally meet Bill Neidjie - Kakadu Man - who died in May 2002, but his presence was throughout Kakadu. He was the last surviving speaker of the Gagudju language, and he recorded enormous amounts of indigenous knowledge. It is thanks to him that we know that the painting in my photo is part of a series depicting the story of a young girl who breaks tribal law by killing and eating Barramundi in the wrong season. This story is part of an oral tradition thousands of years old.
Bill Neidjie could hear the voices of his ancestors from thousands of years ago, and thanks to Bill and his people, when I stood and gazed at these paintings I could clearly hear those ancient voices too. They are not my ancestors, but I believe they belong to all of us.
Source: http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/2003/10/ancestral_place.html
Ancestors: The Grafted Roots
By Fragments from Floyd
The roots of my family tree run shallow and short. Someone gave me the "First" coat of arms as a gift when we were married; I appreciated the thought but it connected me only to the lineage of a biological stranger and a name not my own. Any meaningful connection with my father's paternal lineage was severed by divorce in the 1930's; my surname by true inheritance should have be Strickland. This is a twig of our small tree I have not been able to trace with the little information that I know. My mother is an only child. I never knew her father who died in a hunting accident when she was very young. Her father's Dillons go back in remote history to Ireland (Henri of Lion migrated to Ireland in the 1100s'-- du Leon becoming O'Doullin, then Dillon over the centuries). Mom's mother's Harrisons disappear in the genealogies earlier than the mid 1850's when my granny's grandparents moved to Mufreesboro, Tennessee.
I can walk the same dark high school hallways and over the summer camp trails that my mother walked; and I can visit neighborhoods where we lived in Birmingham as I was growing up. Beyond that, I cannot stand in hallowed places known to known ancestors. I cannot conceive what it must be like to have relatives spreading across the hollers and back through time for five or more generations as many of my neighbors here in the southern Appalachians do. For me, there will be no retracing ancestral footsteps to the places from which, in some sense, my true roots arise. Nevertheless, with the quick passing of decades, I do feel some need to find roots. If I am to know ancestral places, lacking any of the old-fashioned kind, I will be happy to adopt them: this old house, this patch of land, the Blue Ridge Mountains... and the people who have loved them long before I did. If they will have me, my belonging will be here to these places, these hills, these people.
Since we've been married, eight places have been "home" for us. It was not until a year ago that it dawned on me that, even after both Ann and I had marketable careers that would pretty much let us find work anywhere, we have consistently chosen to find our place in the southern Appalachians. This must be our home, as warm a hearth as we are likely to find in this life. We've adopted its traditional music as our own. The particulars of the language have settled in comfortably along the margins of our speech, modulating the rhythm of our neighborly conversations with snatches of the Elizabethan English that our geographical ancestors brought into these mountains two centuries ago. The gentle grandeur of the Blue Ridge seems to appeal to us as if we had known these broad ridges and gentle valleys in a lifetime long ago. Yes, I've adopted all of this, but there seem to be unknown lines of pull that make the Appalachian hills lay a deeper claim on me.
But what of my children? They suffer the same rootlessness and lack of history I have known; they cannot go back 'home' unless they are content to visit a half dozen houses in which others now live. This patch of earth I look out on, lying peacefully in a natural bowl between two little creeks; an old farmhouse that comes with a history and kindly ghosts of its own going back a hundred and thirty years, full of memories; the rugged hillsides and slender pasture bordered by the old stone wall, and the crude field-rock foundation of a little barn where ash trees are growing from it's center-- all of this recently claimed ancestral ground can become 'the old homeplace' to my children's children. Perhaps here we can lay down a soil in which future roots can grow, where unborn feet can walk and hearts can feel with deep certainty that "those from whom I come walked here, they sat on this old wall, saw these same high ridges swept by west winds that sounded just like this wind today, and I belong here".
My children and theirs may have these buildings and creeks and ridges to hold their history. But having this daily journal as a record of the everyday details of life here on Goose Creek, I'd have to hope that it too can become part of the ancestral roots of those who come after me and from me, though I will never know them. Those dear ones, as they age and wonder about the infinite regression of generations past and future, as I do, will not be ignorant of the peculiar lives of ancestors at the turn of the twenty-first century who adopted a region, then birthed a homeplace in the flesh-- one that will carry on, perhaps, into future generations of Southern Highlanders.
The topic this week at the Ecotone:Writing About Place is "Ancestral Place".
Read the posts, join the discussion.
When I saw Holli last month, I told her that we were "Stricklands, really," and that baffled the two of us, as we both tried to dig back and inward, to see how much that changes things. I guess it's still settling in, really. Rootlessness is something that most of this generation has inherited. I usually wear it as a badge, but, then, I do the same with bruises. Still, we DO have roots, Papa. Your chilluns have grown up with one more generation of ancestors than you had, and better, we've had your farms, your Wendell Berry, your hot buttered rum and parties on porches and Prairie Home Saturdays, and our own kids will have Goose Creek, Grannie Annie, and Dumpa Dumpy. Thanks for them roots, Parentals. They stretch to BC.
There you go!
Wow, there's a testimonial if I ever saw one! Your Nathan must warm your heart as your post warms mine (at a particularly salubrious moment). Plus which, this post seems to me to contain the kernel of a preface to your book. Nice going. Fan request: write about smells? What are the scents of Appalachian autumn? I long to know!
"Perhaps here we can lay down a soil in which future roots can grow. . . " Fred, your essay struck a deep chord in me re what we're trying to do with the pine trees (the 100 acre wood) in northwest Florida. I want each grandchild to have their own small grove where they can have a bench if they wish or make some art to mark their area, and mostly to know those quiet interior dirt roads will always, always be there for them. There's only a very small house there now, so Buck is working right now on the design for the "old home place" expansion.It will include a kind of funky observation tower sort of place where we can all watch the little trees grow and the abundant wildlife. Thanks for helping me pinpoint part of why it's so important to me (who has been bootless and unhorsed for much of my life) to do this. Beth
Frodo
By Laughing~Knees
Rose Window, Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain 1988.
This is the seventh installment of the bi-weekly collective essay topics in Ecotone: Writing About Place. This week's topic is Ancestral Place
I came across my first copy of "The Fellowship of the Rings" from J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" in 1974, when I was fourteen, while browsing a musty old used bookstore in London with my father. He mentioned the book in passing and I picked it up, curious. Since we were headed for Germany in a few days, I decided to buy the entire set, so that I would have something to read while in Germany. Little did I know that these books would turn over my world and grab a hold of something in my heart that to this day has never left.
The summer of 1974 etched itself into my memories in a way no stretch of time ever did before or since. It was the summer that my parents toured Scotland and left my brother Teja and me with my grandparents in Hannover, Germany. My grandfather, grandmother, and great aunt, whom we called respectively "Opa", "Oma", and "Tante Luise", had planned a summer of travel and adventure for us. We spent a few days at a pension in the Harz mountains, where Opa took us on long walks in the woods and my imagination bloomed with images of Elves and Dwarves and Dryads among the great oaks. For two weeks we stayed at a summer camp along the northern Elbe River, where I fell in love with my first girlfriend (and one of my oldest friends) and experienced my first kiss. In Hannover Teja and I took skulling lessons on the broad expanse of the artificial lake, the Masch See. In my grandparents' apartment the rooms filled with the aroma of boiled German potatoes, rolled cabbage, fresh sauerkraut, and rotisserie chicken. The grandfather clock on the wall chimed on the hour. The coal cellar at the bottom of the echoing wooden stairwell wafted up its breath of chilly air and the acrid smell of carbon and stored gunny sacks of potatoes. The voices of my grandparents and great aunt fluted through the rooms as they bantered, laughed, and bickered in German, a language that carries the texture of time and warmth for me. And all the while, whenever I had a chance to sit or lie back uninterrupted, the Tolkein books occupied my attention and loyalties. The world of the Ring sank so deep that, one evening, while walking back with my newly returned parents, from an outdoor Handel concert at the Herrenausen Gardens, I could swear I glimpsed a band of Dwarves marching amidst the woods surrounding the Gardens.
It took me years to recognize that something about Hannover stuck with me and described a solidity in my world that the actual sifting of day-to-day experiences never seemed to coalesce. While writing my travel book about bicycling through Europe alone in 1987 it came to me just how much the spirit of the people and the town of my birth rubbed off onto my inner chalkboard. I came to realize that much as you might like to imagine that your past is a blank, or that the places you sojourn in or pass through never leave traces, in reality all the places you awake in draw scratches in the slate that forms you. Each place speaks through both its landmarks and the voices of the people and creatures that you have encounters with. It is as Gregory Bateson described in "The Ecology of Mind": all existence is a shifting of balance... nothing that happens is without significance or consequence.
While exchanging comments with Fujiko Suda over her recent viewing of the first movie "The Fellowship of the Ring" and her observation that in both the movie and the books Frodo never really made an impression on her, I spent the evening reminiscing about those first weeks with the Tolkein characters and why they seemed at the time to infuse in me an identification with the German landscape. The books invoked a yearning for connection with a place that I, with my life divided between Japan, the U.S, and Germany, never could quite grab hold of. The books took each of the characters away from the places they held most dear and which defined most succinctly who they were. The interesting development occurred in Frodo himself, who, of all the Fellowship characters, most wanted to follow in the footsteps of Bilbo Baggins and who perhaps least fit into the Shire's social structure. The further he wandered from the Shire, however, the less defined he became, and the more ephemeral and lost he seemed. For readers such as Fujiko Suda and me, Frodo never grew into a really likeable and identifiable personage... he just flickered out and turned to ashes, it seemed. On the other hand, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, who characterized the very soul of the Hobbit people, and who least wanted to leave the Shire, all began to grow and develop into more than their original counterparts, until all the strangeness and need for calling up heretofore unused emotions sculpted them into characters in full bloom. Frodo didn't seem to really learn anything, or even lose anything, perhaps because he carried little for the reader to identify with from his ancestral home.
I often wonder if that sense of identity and that sense of place, including knowing the ancestors who shaped you, arise out of being washed in the waters of familiarity with a community. Familiarity takes time and as such a drifter, by definition, cannot accumulate enough duff to be able to express the richness of a place. I've spent more than half my life living in Japan, including my childhood, and in many ways it speaks through the timbre of my vocabulary and in my body language and temperament. However, few Japanese myths or folktales have ever evoked such strong sense of identity that the myths, legends, and folktales of Europe have. The same goes for American folktales... somehow they never awoke excitement or longing in me and I easily bored of reading them. The Lord of the Rings breathed European mythology and as such sang the very notes of place that had me devouring the story. I needed something in the books that had to do with place, had to do with a long line that stretched back into time forgotten. And yet, today, I still haven't found that sigh of relief in knowing exactly where I am and exactly where I wanted to be. Like Frodo the uncertainly hangs around my neck like the Ring.
I envy those who find no crack in the mirror of the place they inhabit and who can, without a moment's hesitation, look around them and see their ancestors and feel the grounding. The place where your heart discovers rest cannot ask for description; it just knows, because all the voices down the ages rise up in one chorus. The place of belonging is a sound, not a name.
Posted by butuki at 04:45 AM in Blogging and Computers | Permalink | Comments (5) CommentsYour post makes me think how familiarity and of belonging can be quite separate things.
Posted by Coup de Vent at October 2, 2003 06:54 AMA very succinct and insightful observation. I hadn’t quite thought of it in that way, but you’re right… often people who have lived somewhere forever are the least likely to see it and those who just come passing through recognize what it is about a place that makes it special. Perhaps not being familiar with a place, but being sensitive enough to recognize its value helps one come to belong to a place in its full complement. Hmm… you’ve got my gears churning again…
Posted by butuki at October 2, 2003 07:13 AMThis is a beautiful piece. How lucky to have read Lord of the Rings in that place; it’s perfect. And it’s very interesting how you perceive Frodo’s uncertainty to be like yours, to weigh heavily on your chest. This is really good stuff, Butuki.
Posted by Pica at October 3, 2003 12:24 AMWhen one can claim several corners of the world as an ancestral home, it is hard not to feel both incredibly rich and very poor in some bounty that supposedly grows from the shelter of familiarity. Add to this mix a love of stories and myths … and you get a beautiful and beautifully written account (such as your post is) of world inhabited not only by memory, but also the creative imagination!
Posted by maria at October 3, 2003 06:29 AMThank you.
Your entry “Frodo” has evoked so many thoughts and remembered feelings within me, I have been struggling to sort them out since I read it yesterday.
I too was in Germany. I was twelve. My first boyfriend there, my first kiss with him.
I left Japan not by my choosing either. My mother remarried an American, and that was that. During 18 years I lived in US, I always thought myself to be Japanese, always dreaming of one day coming back to Japan. Then when I did return, I discovered I was not really Japanese anymore inside, no matter how hard I tried. And even outside, my body language is more American than Japanese. After all these years, just this year, it has become clear to me that Americans perceive me as Japanese, and Japanese perceive me as American, and any other nationality perceive me as someone who acts American with Japanese soul.
I am now a part of a “normal” family which I wanted more than anything else during the first 35-years of my life. People constantly tells me, “You seem so happy!”. Yet I hunger for something still. It could be likened to Cruella’s craving for fur! I am now at a point in my life I search in ernest for the holy grail.
Perhaps it is our age, you and I. Just as a child learns to crawl, walk, talk, 40’s might be the age of struggle to seek the meaning of it all.
Posted by Fujiko Suda at October 5, 2003 07:27 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041206235938/www.butuki.com/archives/2003_10.html#000073
October 01, 2003
This week's Ecotone topic is Ancestral Place
I have a friend who was raised in the farmland of the St. Lawrence River valley on a farm near Cardinal, Ontario. He moved out to British Columbia for a couple of years in the early nineties, but he came back saying that he could make it out here. He said that from the time he was born he ate food that was grown in the soil of Ontario. It was as if his body had been constructed from the raw materials of that land, and when he moved out here, he resonated on a different frequency.
Homesickness for the ancestral lands is what that is all about.
This place, Bowen Island, is not my ancestral homeland. This is not the land I grew up on, and as we move into fall, I feel most acutely that sense of displacement. In fall in my ancestral land of Southern Ontario, the climate changes in particular ways, the snow starts to think about flying and the days are crisp and clear with a sky so blue that it seems as if nature has conjured up sheer light from the natural pigment of air. Here, we get to clear days, but we start in fog and soon enough, we'll be drenched in rain as the Pacific Ocean soaks us for the winter.
I think we resonate with parts of the land that live in our genes. I felt at home the moment I arrived in Saskatchewan for the first time, having never been there before. My great grandparents farmed that part of the world and as a result gave me a piece of that place for my own. Other relatives lived in Toronto, Port Perry, Grey-Bruce and a myriad of other Ontario towns and villages, some for thousands of years, some as recent immigrants.
My ancestral place is not here. As much as I love it here, the ancestral place draws me home at this time of year.
Urge For Going:
by Joni Mitchell
I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold and all the trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going
But I never seem to go
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in
I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin
And not another girl in town
My darling's heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground
Bully winds came around, pushed them face down in the snow
He got the urge for going
And I had to let him go
He got the urge for going
When the meadow grass was turning brown
Summertime was falling down and winter was closing in
Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying and all that lives is camping out
See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow
They got the urge for going
And they got the wings so they can go
They get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in.
Source: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2003_10_01_archive.html
Ancestral Places
By London and the North
I'm looking out for more exhibitions on artwork coming out of Germany.
Contemporary Berlin is, for me, an ancestral place. It's where my family lived. And quite a few family members still do live there.
What I like these days about visiting Berlin is the creative tension between the old run down corners and the contemporariness in art, streetlife, architecture. The house where my aunt lived which I visited during my growing up years is now no more. It was in East Berlin. Plum and walnut trees in the garden. The most unusual house in Pankow. For a start it was privately owned. Secondly, it was large so, after her parents died, my aunt took in paying guests who were either official guests of the DDR or Westdeutcher who came to visit their relatives.
I've not been to see the block of flats they built on the space where the house and gardens stood. I don't want to do that to myself. I can peep out from behind a blanket at scarey movies but I don't want to see that. It was the most exciting thing after finding my own way from Checkpoint Charlie to get off the number 49 Strassenbahn and walk up the long path to the house to see my aunt, arms open, waiting for me on the top step.
Going to post-wall Berlin with Paris is like visiting a different city. And you know what, that's okay. It feels good for it to be so different for me. The old Berlin of my childhood lives on somewhere inside me. But it's gone. It's still in some of my furniture from grandparents, it's in my mother's memories, it's in the language I can use as required, it's in tales and shards of evidence of a community shattered, scattered.
And I find I prefer and trust conscious, contemporary German art to the scarey paintings of old rabbis I grew up with. Kiefer knows how to describe a very particular set of concerns which are so much more relevant to the world I feel I now live in.
[Today people writing about place through Ecotone are thinking about Ancestral Places.....]
Posted by Coup de Vent at 10:42 PM | Comments (2)Comments
I remember when, in 1995 I first visited what was formerly East Berlin. When we drove across the old border the cobblestone roads and Trabant cars bumping along everywhere confirmed my James Bond reared imagination of what East Germany ought to look like. What shocked me in more ways than I can understand was that East Germany wasn't black and white! There were green fields with tan barley and yellow rape weed, blue sea with pristine waves and a warm, golden shafts of sunlight. And the paths in the countryside were overrun with tracks of badgers, hares, hedgehogs, foxes, and roe deer. I kept asking myself, "You mean those poor, downtrodden East Germans actually were able to enjoy the sunlight? They might actually have had tans???
Posted by butuki at October 2, 2003 10:28 PM
A fabulous film to see is 'Goodbye Lenin'. Anyone who has ever been to Berlin would particularly enjoy this amusing and touching commentary on the changes through the eyes of one 'East German' family.
Posted by Coup de Vent at October 3, 2003 07:09 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040103120417/www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2003_10.html
I have no ancestral place, to speak of
By P.
I have no ancestral place, to speak of — or else I have at least a dozen. My ancestors are scattered from Cork (maybe) to Tunis (maybe), depending on how far back you go, and I know of only one of their many places, a hamlet in Sicily that Gen. Patton once roared through. In my woodpile I can claim a mainland Italian as well; a Huguenot; a Welshman and some Scots; it was an Irishman who made my mother eligible for the DAR; while one of the Germans fought at Gettysburg.
I claim the northern African by way of the family name, which might mean “assassin” and might mean “soldier” and might derive from Arabic.
Years ago, an old woman in a sun-splashed, noisy London laundromat quizzed me on my ancestry and concluded, “Well, you’re all mongrels over there.” I suspected she was insulting me, but I had to acknowledge she was right. It wasn’t till later that I realized England itself had hosted enough immigrants for her to be somewhat mongrel too.
And where, I thought, is the shame in that? From my mother’s line I inherit stubbornness and a small nose; from my father’s, a measure of intelligence and big teeth. Somehow, all the ancestral grievances went to purer lines of the family. And I can love rouladen and tortellini, Beaujolais and scones without feeling it’s anything but “mom food.” I decline to learn the Tarantella: Blood is meant to be stirred, not distilled, but I draw the line at shaking it.
Northern Climes
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
A contribution to the Ecotone Wiki's biweekly topic, Ancestral Place.
When I first moved to the United States from England, I was astonished by how important it seemed to be to people where you came from. This is of almost no consequence in England, where far more importance is placed on the way you speak, the school you went to, your name--all the important class indicators.
There are lots of class indicators here too, but they're different, more hidden. Having "come from" (i.e. having "people" who "came from") England places you on a higher social rung than having "come from," say, Serbia, or Ghana, or Armenia. Much higher. Having "come on" the Mayflower (the fact that most of the people on the Mayflower were barely literate is irrelevant) gives you the highest cachet of all. Since I do, in fact, have a Mayflower ancestor, despite my English accent, my Ancestral Place is sort of a guessing game (I get asked where I'm from at least once a week).
But it's mostly Lancashire, it turns out. Both sides. From sheep farmers to mill owners to petty bourgeois shopkeepers. Lancashire is a wet, soggy place, much blackened by the ravages of the industrial revolution and neglect from the center of power in the south, which no doubt contributed to the spread of nonconformist sects. Its inhabitants are gritty, silent, phlegmatic, and excellent cricketers (a sport that requires infinite patience). Lancastrians are given to interesting turns of phrase when particularly inspired.
I hope I have some of the resilience they are known for.
Posted by Pica at October 1, 2003 11:14 PM | TrackBack
Comments
I didn't realise you are from Lancashire! I live less than ten miles from Colne which is exactly as you describe: a soot blackened run down mill town with now only a few industries of an obscure nature. Actually it is a good place for walking - Pendle Hill with its white cotton grass and the continuation of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal going up and up over the Pennines!
Posted by: Coup de Vent at October 2, 2003 01:08 AMI suppose 'where we're from' is evident in our respective voices. Enjoyed hearing your British roots, which I suppose you will never lose, nor want to. I am often told "you don't sound like you're from Alabama" which I accept as an intended compliment of the back-handed sort; but the southernness of my spoken roots runs deep. Hope you find that Lancastrian resilience when you need to call on it!
Posted by: fredf at October 2, 2003 01:40 AMYou do. Have Lancastrian resilience. I've experienced it for the past, oh, ten years or so. And then there's all that War of the Roses stuff way back in there somewhere, too.
I, on the other hand (as you know), get, "I thought you said you're from California. But you're . . . SMART!" With what's coming up here in the next week, I guess it's better to be here than somewhere else, getting looked at funny.
Posted by: Doc Rock at October 2, 2003 06:25 AMJust how big was the Mayflower? It's always a little funny to hear people speak of their Mayflower heritage... there are so many people who've told me that they have ancestors who came on the Mayflower you would think it was an oil tanker or that no other ships ever came to the Americas! (it especially makes my right eyebrow lift when a black person tells me that they have ancestors from the Mayflower...)
Not that I don't believe you, Pica. Maybe this is an example of six degrees of separation. But I would like for someone once to tell me that they had ancestors who came across on the Nina! Or the Cutty Sark!
Posted by: butuki at October 2, 2003 02:15 PMI think there were 134 passengers or something tiny. But these people, and their children, were vastly prolific. So yes, it's meaningless (except it's so interesting how very important it seems to be, in this culture, certainly in New England).
Posted by: Pica at October 2, 2003 03:16 PMI didn't know you were from Lancashire ... must be quite a change for you from those northern climates to the sunny, dry part of California -- about which you write so well!
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Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/10/01/northern_climes.html
Ancestral Places
By O'DonnellWeb
When I stop to think about ancestral places, a spot on the earth where I know my forefathers walked before me, a place where I can still see what they saw, feel what they felt, connect with my past, only one place comes to mind.
The ODonnell side of the family hails from Boston. Of the six siblings, my father is the only one who ventured far from the nest. He joined the USAF at age 18 or 19 and never looked back. That decision cost me my chance to be a New Englander and all that goes with it. Even though we've spent plenty of time in the Boston area visiting, I've never felt like one of them. I don't have the accent or the point of view of the folks that hail from Boston. Boston was never home to me.
Fenway Park is different. I feel connected to the past there. My great grandfather attended games there. He almost certainly saw Babe Ruth, Cy Young and the greats of that era. My grandfather would have seen some of that era too. My father, growing up in post WWII Boston, would have seen Ted Williams, Dom Dimaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky play. I never lived in Boston, but most summers he was stationed in the states included a trip to Boston and a game at Fenway was always on the agenda. My Red Sox heroes were guys like Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk, Dwight Evans, and Bernie Carbo. My kids have been to Fenway too, making them the 5th generation of ODonnells to see a game there. Posters of Nomar, Manny, and Pedro grace the walls of my son's bedroom.
The stadium itself has not changed much since Babe Ruth patrolled the grounds there. The field dimensions are the same, the stadium layout is pretty much the same, and according the locals, the same family of rats still occupy the bowels of the stadium. (Although I suspect the rat family is several hundred generations old by now - sort of puts my 5 generations to shame).
When I'm at Fenway, I can imagine my father and his father sitting in the same seats enjoying a game, complaining about the Red Sox pitching, bitching about the Yankees, and bemoaning the Red Sox lack of success in the postseason.
I guess that would be the unfortunate side of things not changing.
But this year is different. Go Red Sox!
This week's Ecotone writing subject is Ancestal Places. Permalink
Comments
Wonderfully evocative picture of Fenway, where I first learned to love baseball, and am now in mourning because they blew it last night... we watched the game at a friend's house (ardent A's fan). Sigh. Here we go.Posted by: Pica at October 2, 2003 10:28 AMI felt the same way about Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. And I still remember my first (and only) trip to Fenway. I was a Red Sox fan before Toronto got a team in 1977, and Fenway was a storied place for me.
Sorry they blew it last night.
Posted by: Chris Corrigan at October 2, 2003 12:09 PMI love Fenway. I remember my dad dragging me to games (I have 2 younger brothers) and growling as I fell asleep on the bleachers. I have a soft spot in my heart for that park and freak out everytime there's talk of tearing it down to build something newer and better. THAT would be a tragedy!
Posted by: Mala at October 3, 2003 03:01 PMThanks for this reflection and participating at Ecotone, Chris! Appreciate your insights.
Posted by: fredf at October 5, 2003 07:39 PMThanks, Chris, for this good post and your off-beat, refreshing response to the Ecotone question.
Posted by: beth at October 6, 2003 09:54 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060103210119/www.odonnellweb.com/mtarchives/000717.html#000717
ancestral place
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's biweekly topic: ancestral place.
Ancestral place, for my family, is a tale twice told, an imaginary land, a landscape of bones, blood run dry in the sepia-toned photograph, the rusty ridge in the scrimshaw frieze of stories we have been carrying with us from town to town, from country to country, from continent to continent ... from language to language.
My mother's ancestral place was a capital city along the muddy banks of the Danube. When she was born, the city was still splendid and glittering from an imperial veneer, barely touched by a war that played havoc with the borders of her world. There was sweet pastry and plenty of violins to make her heart beat in measured feelings under the canopy of stately chestnut and plane trees that lined the wide avenues. Her roots went deep beneath the pavement, and she felt as solid as an oak in her wooden expectations that she'll waltz through her life with the grace her own parents had.
My ancestral place is a little darker, a bit more mysterious in its obscurity to those who treasure reason's focal length. A town with Roman roots and medieval scraps in the near hinterlands of what some consider properly Europe -- the place of my birth was past any glory in its shabbiness and poverty made that much more so by a string of wars. There was little sweetness to be had there, unless you count the few weeks when lilacs, peonies, or roses were in bloom and teased your senses, until you knew the meaning of desire better than any French structuralist could ever imagine.
My earliest memories in that place have to do with standing in line on streets carpeted with patterns of dust, waiting for some store or other to open so that we could redeem our allotted coupon for bread or sugar or butter or flour. The music I remember is the cacophony of languages (Hungarian, Romanian, German, Romany) at the weekly market, mixed with the squawk of chickens and hens, in the spring, the bleating of lambs whose atonal chorus grew thinner each time the axe came down, following as successfully negotiated transaction.
The ancestral place of my sons is no home to me. I will always be an alien -- an Other -- here, betrayed by my accent in all manner of things, not just in my speech. Here in these sunlit hills of Marin, California, the towns have known no wars -- nor imperial glory. In spite of the abundance of light that teases forth an embarrassment of riches from the soil, my imagination is rootless, unable to send deep shoots into the land that's my children's home, the rock beneath their feet.
Posted by maria at October 2, 2003 10:26 AM
Comments
Your writing certainly doesn't carry any accent... it is beautiful! Well I understand that sense of dislocation that you feel in your new home. When I lived in America is was mostly the natural world that voiced the spirit of the landscape, not the human settlements, which seemed to me still rough and unkempt. But then, you're in California, which is quite a lot different from such places as New York or Boston. And I did find the deep roots among Native Americans that I met and got to know though. They speak both the names that arose out of millenia living close to their land and the collective stories of generations that went before them. America does have a long history... it is just not told in the palaces of the European immigrants.
Posted by: butuki at October 2, 2003 12:14 PM
My Jewish mother-in-law who grew up in Chicago said that when she first arrived in California she couldn't bear the sun, the perpetually smiling tall blond beautiful people, the abundance--it made her feel so alien. Your piece reminded me so much of how she described this.
Your writing is beautiful, full of the richness and sensuousness--and promise--of a sprig of lilacs. Thank you for sharing it with us.
Posted by: Pica at October 3, 2003 06:55 AM
Beautiful, evocative post, Maria.
Posted by: beth at October 6, 2003 06:57 AM
Yes sound or smell is as much to do with place as colour, landscape. At times it is people who make "place" - it's what they do in it. I wonder also if you are of a generation like so many who are culturally between the places of your parents and your sons? One could say that *your* place then is in time and as a witness to the ownership by others of place.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at October 14, 2003 11:48 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051219230653/www.ashladle.org/archives/000223.html
Ohio Roots
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
A note on Ancestral Place for the Ecotone Wiki.
Both my parents grew up in Ohio, they meeting as undergraduates at Ohio State University in Columbus. My father's side was the more recent arrival in the state; my mother's side arrived first and settled in Lorain County, a bit west of Cleveland, around 1840 or so. There they stayed for well over a hundred years, apparently staying out of the limelight, working as small farmers and laborers.
One of these years I'll poke around Lorain County to learn what I can about the lives of my ancestors and their land. In the meantime I'll content myself with resources such as the Lorain County Genealogy page, and a memory of a winter birding trip up to Lake Erie during which I saw my first rough-legged hawk and northern shrike, and returned via the ancestral territory.
Oh, and I pronounce "root" with a short vowel. Is that an Ohio thing?
Posted by Numenius at October 2, 2003 10:40 PMSource: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/10/02/ohio_roots.html
Saturday, October 04, 2003
By Cassandra Pages
This post is a very belated contribution to the recent Ecotone topic, Ancestral Place.
I’m back home in New England, and in that transition period that feels like twilight, half here and half there, my head filled with vivid comparative impressions of two places and two lives: myself as a child and young woman, myself as I am now.
This has been a very intense week and a half for me and for my family. If it’s possible, we all got to know each other better, and became even closer. I’m reluctant to write too much about any of the personal details, but I have thought a great deal about “place” during this time: how that particular place on earth where I grew up, and where some of my ancestors have lived for centuries, formed and shaped me -- and how deeply I carry it with me despite time and distance.
During the worst, most frightening and uncontrollable recent moments, I realized the land was steadying me. The Cooperstown hospital is set into one of the loveliest glacial valleys imaginable, at the foot of Otsego Lake, a long ”finger lake” much like the ones further west in the state. Fall was just beginning to come, with a branch of red here and there among the maples, and the air was crisp and cool, the night skies as I walked back from the hospital brilliant with stars.
Standing one evening on the edge of a field while J. took some pictures, I noticed the rocks scattered every inch or two in the dark, plowed topsoil – rounded rocks, grey, an inch to three or four in diameter, so integrated with the soil as to be part of it. Glacial till. I smiled, realizing I hadn’t seen anything like this in Vermont or New Hampshire, and yet how familiar it was. Glaciers shaped these low hills and valleys, dug the lakes, made the ridges where tertiary roads run, hugging the sides of the hills. The terrain has a particular shape and form that I associate with “home”, and have never seen anywhere else. Other landscapes have more grandeur and drama, but none has ever struck me as more beautiful.
Back at my parents’ home, about forty miles west, we talked about the difficulty they’ve had keeping the lake level low this year. A few weeks ago, some of the men finally discovered that the lake outlet had been dammed by a beaver. Yesterday afternoon I walked over to check out the dam. I went through the woods across the road and couldn't believe how much they had grown up in 25 years. You cross a fence line and break out into a beautiful meadow that right now is planted with clover - it was corn the last time I was there. I followed along the outlet – the stream flowing form the lake to the river - walking in the furrows. A lot of deer had been there before me - there were sharp pointed hoof tracks in the mud and I found myself trying not to walk on top of them, I liked seeing them so much. Then the outlet became a swamp, and almost a pond above the beaver dam, which was close to the river, a very smart spot just before the old culvert and above a grove of willows. There was water flowing over it pretty strongly since the dam had been knocked down, but I saw a freshly-chewed tree, so I think the beaver is still around. I loved it - there were frogs and minnows and a lot of bright yellow-green duckweed, and I wanted to just sit down and watch for a few hours. And it was wonderful being there again. I used to walk through these woods and over to the river when I needed to get away and clear my head. The field is always breezy and quiet, with a few big hickory trees in one spot, and the woods between you and civilization. You’re alone with nature, and in a place that few people ever come to.
From the dam you can walk right over to the river. I saw a deer path and followed it and there was a whole "wallow" where the deer had knocked down all the grasses and laid down to sleep. I also saw muskrat holes in the bank and surprised a mallard who flew off down the river a little ways. When I saw the river I realized I've had a dream of this exact spot many times over the years. It's pretty fast there but shallow, with long grasses trailing off the sandy bottom, like tresses of emerald hair in the current. It’s nothing like the river near my own home at all, flowing through a field rather than rocks: everything about the geology is different, not to mention the lack of people and suburban sensibilities.
Yesterday, coming back from the nearby college bookstore, I watched the cows coming home at Red Gate farm. Mom says the farmer, who came down here from Canada, has about 600 head. There are black-and-white Holsteins, brown-and-white Holsteins, Jerseys and Guernseys, and they were all making their way back across that big field just above the lake to the barn for their afternoon milking. It was nice to see them -- their big dumb faces and lumbering gait and swaying swollen udders -- and thinking about how they do this every single day made me feel calm. That’s the comfort of real rural existence. The land lies under everything: underneath time, under your days, under the seasons. Rocks, trees, wildflowers, the deer and the coyote, the heron and goose, the horse and cow and goat and the man and woman who care for them all have their place and their role. I grew up this way, even though I gardened rather than farmed as my ancestors had done, and it still makes sense to me: a woman with her laptop, speeding between worlds.
8:50 PM | postCount('106531500155497879'); Comment (0)
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_09_28_cassandrapages_archive.html#106531500155497879
Ancestral Place
By bird on the moon
It has only been recently that Ive really considered the blood that flows beneath my skin as a transmission from the past, a ruddy sea of names and faces, graces and infamies that exist as shadows within nucleotides and tracings on yellowed, dog eared family records. We all contain within our mere bones memories of whole villages, kingdoms, islands and prisons whose stories somehow remarkably lead up to this very moment. From this moment, what shall flow from us? We tread daily across the backbone of the ancestors, and breathe thoughtlessly the wind of our successors.
As a child growing up on the banks of the Delaware River, I began to uncover my own peculiar place in this flux. I would toss out driftwood, pretending it was a sailboat, pretending it was a wish. Id watch it disappear into the muddy currents and toss another maybe some other kid would pick up the same gnarled, wave-tempered branch and christen it with yet more hope. On the beach, softened glass; blue, pink, green as smooth as gull flight, shattered a forever ago against the rocks, to be perfected, a boys jewel. In the pocket. Pieces of china, blue and white faded and crackled, but occasionally youd find a familiar shape; a leaf, a flower, lines of colonial ink frozen into a tiny shard, speaking for a former whole, like the remnant of an archaic word. This was a slight history lesson in a boys hand, of people that had gone before, built the town, and dashing their plates on the rocky shore. The rocks themselves, ancestors of us all the exhale of volcanoes and extinct seas, collected by little hands, scoured for uniqueness, pocketed for remembrance. Id skip rocks into a future filled with wonder, and trembling. Then my father would call from the house for dinner. During the whole meal, there with one half of what made my body, Id be silent, thinking of the river, the reeds, and wishes downstream to the bay, the ocean.
Sundays wed make the journey to visit my grandmother. Her house was a museum of whod gone before; my late grandfathers upper-crust honky-tonk in the basement was perfectly preserved, untouched except for my little fingers, looking through dim bottles, imagining a hubbub of grown-ups, laughing, clinking glasses, doing incomprehensible things. There were photos of my great-grands, and great-great-grands, facing the camera with stoic, firm jaws and piercing eyes. Calendars frozen in time, this was a wonderland. I may have easily slipped down the rabbit hole, fascinated by what may family had at one point done with such style and abandoned in such haste. I didnt know them as a child, and their past was only spoken of in whimsy and passing. The house, the epicenter of the family, where we all gathered, yielded few answers. Perhaps thats why I still dream of it it was the encasing of many generations history, and little was ever spoken of it.
Now, a lifetime has passed since those days when I was a short, towheaded and impulsive child. Now I can say, somewhat, that this is where I came from. I wish I could speak of more, of lines further back, exact places and dates. I cannot. My mothers family is kept behind a heavy, creaky-hinged door inside her heart. When she speaks with lips so like my own, its of pain and disdain for what they put her through. I can easily be walking on her forefathers footpaths and be oblivious. The ground beneath me now is mixed with the lives of Cherokee, Scots, Germans and the mournful dust of slaves. When I drink apple cider from the produce stand, the water is someones ancient mother. I live on land where I was not born; Ive had to nurture a connection, find stories, and weave them into the place in the soul reserved for our own kinships. I have a name, but I know little of what made it. So I must accept all ancestors as my ancestors, that this shelter is built upon an earth that budded an aspect of my beingness, somewhere. It doesnt matter. Were all gifted with a temporal entitlement to cast a shadow and make light, and our brevity is shared by every twist and turn of the branch of humanity, ultimately originating from one thick trunk, roots embedded deeper than imagination. My mother, so far away, is in these mountains. My family is as close as the dewy October grass that I run my fingers through, just to say hello.
When Ive crossed boundaries and time zones to cast myself into the willed alienation of being far beyond my cultural context, I find myself at home. In Hungary, in the gypsy settlements and the Turkish bathhouses, certain faces would poke through my fascination and seem to remind me of those old photographs and well-worn photo albums that bind legacies in camera smiles. Familiarity, connection, relation, suddenly and oddly shining clear as I clutch my passport and straighten my backpack straps. In Prague, the cobblestone arc of the St. Charles Bridge seemed to belong to some part of my soul that knew it, some blood cell that was jumping up and down and hollering in recognition, for indeed my genes carried a memory of walking across the Karlovy Most, even if my mind didnt the flux of time bridged over the Moldau. I remember thinking, walking that moonlit, violin-strung span, that ancestry, and place, are mutable, and depending simply on how much Id want to relate. On a train just outside of Auschwitz, my eyes welled up for the heavy air still screaming over that Polish plain where some of my own life must have been heaped in piles of ghosts shoes.
In Haiti, a land of people whose skin contrasts from mine but whose composite soul drums in the place where I go to dream, I felt instantly at home, utterly surrounded by family, by great-grands and great-great-grands whose portraits do not adorn the walls in my grandmothers house. The bare mountains, the steep hillsides cultivated almost vertically, the sound of the conch whistle and cacophonic roosters were as much a homeland as Delaware or western North Carolina, if not oddly more. The ground there still swells with blood of runaway slaves and the colonial oppressors they overturned, so far removed from my youth of manners and contrition, yet it swallowed me as easily as it swallowed the sun on my first day there, tossing up iridescent reds against a sky scented with wood fires. In the presence of some original soul, some ancient predecessor of what now moves me, I wept under blazing moonlight from the roof of an orphanage as I watched a procession of candles, drum and song disappear into the night. Somehow, some way, we are kin; an ancient lineage was intoned as distant chanting filled the air. The soul knows this even if the body doesn't.
The legacy that flows within you exists for the sake of the continuation of love, and the same could be said of this sweet Earth we are graced to experience, for all its trials and struggles. All of my ancestors, whoever they were and whatever they did, came into being through the same sensual passage, and made do with the land and time they were allotted by fate to harvest. One day I shall lay in the same dewy grass and become it, and people will walk or run upon it and suddenly see themselves bubbling up from the green, running their fingers through it. Or they may simply keep walking, whistling whatever tune thats fit for that eventual sunny day. You are soil and dandelions, on the verge of becoming, in cosmic time. You yourself are an immortal, an ancestor, and the stuff that makes your own brave brow may one day become the ploughs and troughs of a new and unreckonable culture.Where you are now shall be a homeland staked by countless names, now waiting inside the pulsing of cells.
Every place is the dwelling of ancestors. Any time, they can emerge from the ephemera and viscera of the everyday and surprise us with elder wisdom. Even today, at the elementary school where I work, an African ballet performed for the children, and amid the twitter of giggles at the funny costumes, many little heads of every shape bobbed in time to the drum and dance, the stage became holy ground of venerable names, and perhaps, who was then speaking through the rhythm every one of us could call grand, and great-grand, and great-great-grand here before us, that we may continue the legacy to savor the present.
This post prepared for the bi-weekly topic "Ancestral Place" over at Ecotone Wiki. Please join in and enjoy the responses of many excellent writers.
jaybird gave you this @ 20:10 in "Journaling the Infinite" | Birdfeathers (1) | Moonbeams (0) | PermalinkComments
Thanks for this very thoughtful post. You bring up the point that as we mature, identifying with our specific, individual ancestry can become less important, and yield to a greater identity with all of humanity. I wonder if this is hard, or even impossible, unless we come to some understanding of (and security about)our own roots first...?
Posted by beth at October 10, 2003 09:29 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031231153718/birdonthemoon.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=722
Discussion
Funny...here we are again. All place writers writing about other-than ancestral places.
Is this kind of distance from one's own roots a prerequisite for writing about place? Do we need to be "out of the fishbowl" to write about the fish? Can Tuscans write about "being Tuscan" or do they just write about "being me?"
-- Chris
Not everyone in the world is a "pureblood". And not everyone in the world has lived exclusively in one place all their lives. Not everyone in the world knows everything about their ancestors. Not everyone in the world can even define what "ancestral place" means. And not everyone in the world sees "place" as purely a physical location. The word "home" is not even a concrete noun... you can't always use an article like "the" or "a" with it, because it is not something you can touch. Yet to everyone it is a place.
--Miguel
So many of the contributions seem to be from people who are themselves, or have descended from immigrants. I wonder how many generations have to pass before you can "adopt" the local ancestors.
--Geoff
I guess that's my point Geoff...travelling gives us eyes to write about place...it gives us the distance between the seer and seen that is necessary for analysis of place and landscape. I think ancestral places are probably those places where we are so embedded that we cannot think of ourselves as seperate from the land. We are literally rooted there. Only with the human experiement of migrating to we learn to see other places in the context of where we have come from. That difference allows us to gaze outwardly upon something rather than dwelling entirely within. -- Chris
Chris, maybe the writing that we have in this discussion group reflects the way modern society has altered from what we tend to see as givens in the way humans have inhabited places. Certainly Americans are some of the most mobile people in the world. When I lived in the States, for a total of 20 years, I moved a total of 30 times, whereas during my 22 years here in Japan I moved only 5 times, and 3 of those because of changes that took place in the States. In general Japanese tend to move, until now this is, very seldom throughout their lives. Now with money and greater ease of transportation they are beginning to move in ways they never did before and are losing nearly all of their traditional connection to their roots. I have met very few Americans who have not moved a number of times in their lives. This mobility must make it extremely difficult to adopt any kind of sense of "ancestral place". How does one embed onself within a place if one only passes through? And how does one come to identify with any place or people if one does not belong to any of them, as I don't? You asked earlier for Tuscans to write about being Tuscan, but as a German-Danish/ Filipino-Chinese/ African-American-Cherokee-Jew from South Carolina/ who grew up in Japan, the United States (New York, Oregon, and Boston), and Germany, exactly where do my loyalties and roots lie? I am not alone in this. The modern world is breeding a new kind of human being... call them uber-mongrels, if you will... who arose out of all those people migrating continually around the world. Ancestral places, as traditionally defiined, are dying out.
-- Miguel
Nice comments Miguel. I think this actually speaks to post-modern notions of identity. Which leads me to maybe seeing if we can't add a topic to the BiweeklyTopics? list on Place and Identity.
At any rate, I think you have produced your contribution on that. I love the idea of "moving in different ways." I think we are all learning how to do that.
-- Chris
Miguel, I think you put your finger on one of the reasons behind another aspect of American culture -- that one is defined by one's profession ... rather than by one's place.
-- P.
What an interesting discussion! P. makes an importnat point, I think. I know that my own concepts about ancestral place are shaped by the fact that I have really only lived in two places in my 50+ years: central New York, and Vermont/NH. That's it, and it's rather unusual nowadays. As Chris so rightly comments, you can't write about a place until you've left it, but I also think you can't necessarily have much to say about a place until you've lived there for a good while. Thus many of us are rather place-less, and have had to find other ways (such as our work) to define ourselves. For me, as I've gotten older and analyzed this more, "identity" involves both my physical relationship to a real place, with its landscape, rocks, trees, fauna and so forth, (a relationship which was ingrained in me from a pre-language point in my life) and a more metaphysical sense of inner identity that is independent of any particular place and yet has a certain sense of groundedness or "location" about it. I find that these two interpenetrate and inform each other quite a lot. --Beth
That's really the irony isn't it Beth. I mean, you can write about a place you've never left, but then you are just writing about life. You don't know that your place is any different from any other.
I think too that writing about place, especially a new place is a great way to get into it deeper, interpreting and pulling apart the threads that make it up. When you show that writing to others and they see themselves relfected, it's pretty groovy. -- Chris
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051217215822/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?DiscussAncestralPlace