To A T

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

Lewis Lapham, “The Gulf of Time,”

Lapham’s Quarterly. Winter 2008.

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/preamble/the-gulf-of-time.php

History is the story of whence we have come. It may take the form of drifting stories of men and armies, politics and power, wealth and fortune. It may take the form of daily grinds, transhumance of flocks and herds, the building of villages that become towns, then become cities and megalopoli. History is journals, poems, maps, notes, memories, neurons, essays, novels, the fluttering crumples of newsprint and the flickering pixellated images of thoughts held still or animated in the files of servers.

History allows us to revisit triumphs, to dream of a past better than our present, or worse. History is a grand segmented worm wriggling and stretching it’s scaled musculature back further and more convoluted than any human eye can trace with confidence.

History lives within our brains, our bodies, and, for those of us who find such ideas felicitous, within our souls. History is the carefully crafted works of Sidney Lens, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln or Martin King, Jr. History’s the rope around Emmett Till’s neck, traces of bloody feet on the snow at Valley Forge,  grains of ground grain in querns unearthed from the beaten floors in Catal Huyuk. It’s the traces of ochre once daubed on cave walls in the shapes of hands long diffused into earth in the Dordogne.

At the terminus of imperial sway history’s the faint memories of a past where one was raised to believe most fervently that each day would bring to itself new life, new riches and the promise of placing history itself in a quern and grinding it into the flour of a life set free from history. History, thus defined, is the chiaroscuro recognition that life continues and that the end of history, either end, cannot be touched. History’s eternal, like the breath of Yahweh, the tears of Isis.

I’ve found in my meanderings around the planet for the past fifty-odd years that history can often be a burden, a thing one desires fervently to escape and deny. Yet, like one’s shadow, it attaches itself to my feet when I enter light. It cares not for my human desires, nor the prayers I raise to Mother whose face I see only in lineaments of cattle grazing at sunset, growing stalks of corn in a furrowed field, the sunsets of Palau, ravens in Berlin, and frost sparkling and shining in the sunlight of a Pennsylvania morning while through my house others sleep and dream their dreams of our lives together, our lives separately.

In the first faint echoes of birdsong across frost and dew I find myself sipping a hot mug of coffee, wandering about my years like an old woman cleaning the ruins of a house she’s hoped would keep her safe from the exigencies of life’s sorrows and uncomfortable longings that take her from time to time as she longs for the release of her bonds to history.  She sets down these letters against time’s onslaught. I shall save a bit of this flour to bake a loaf that will feed me for the week.

Would it were that simple.

The unexpected belling of an alarm awakened me at six twenty-three this morning, bringing resentment and anger as I had expected to stay enfolded in the downy comforter and linen sheets till the sun had risen high and others’ days had begun to unfold. After all, this is a Sunday.

The unexpected ringing jarred me and mumbled words from the other side of the toasted bed caught my resentment the way a bass catches its gills in the strands of thread and rope of a seine net it swims into unknowing in the course of stalking a may fly. “Aubrey has to go to work at seven.”

Dragged from dreams I rose grumbling, fussy, and drew on my underwear, gray leggings, royal blue sweater, lavender skirt, and woolen boots on or by the chest at the foot of the bed. I stalked to the guest room and woke my oldest son; told him I’d be driving him to Jimmy’s in the absence of his Jeep, still in the shop from an accident.

He, no happier than I about the early rising, dressed and awaited my descent of the stairs on the beige couch. The living room was dark, tricked out for the moving sleep of a goldfish and the hunting at dustballs of the cats. The dog muttered from his crate as I made my way down the stairs. “Leave him until you are back again, or for later.”

We exited toward the car. I sent him back for hot water, unwilling to await the action of the car’s defroster. He poured the liquid and cleared the windscreens and windows while I waited for him to enter and settle. I felt guilty at my anger that had caught him at the worst possible time, amidst the clinging shards of a sleep interrupted. He wanted to be with me no more than I with him before seven on a Sunday. After two miles drive of the ten we had to travel together I apologized, Dr. Dan’s voice flowing through my discomfort from the speakers in the doors of the Accord.

Our conversation was brief and somewhat tense. He’d returned home after two and the four and one-half hours sleep weren’t anymore to his liking than my eight had been to my own. We arrived at Jimmy’s and I told my son I love him and he to me. I drove away, his bulk stooped to look through the glass of the office set between Jimmy’s home and garage, as if by looking Aubrey could summon a light to the darkness inside. He wondered, no doubt, if his boss would waken to allow him into the warmth of the room or would lie abed with his wife for another half an hour, sleeping while my son would grow progressively colder, waiting.

Now I sit at this screen, fingers brushing the flat keys to bring words and my thoughts. I am thinking of my history. The history of others like me. I am thinking of how we neglect history because … because, I think, it makes us all uncomfortable. I think of my dreams of becoming, truly and without shade or shadow, the mother of daughters and sons. Of how the betrayal of body, of history writ in bone and heart, makes one other than what she’d longed to be.

I sit here typing, wondering how many others share my chagrin. I wonder how Aubrey would, if he were able, change his own history. I contemplate the life of a nineteen year old American man struggling to work in a time when jobs are scarce and how imperial numerology has crashed into the wisps of mist that define the current economy. Those wisps appear to serve as fine feed for brokers and CEOs, less well for chefs and mechanics, cabbages and kings.

How does he cope with that and with me? What dreams of his own have been brushed by my history and made rubble strewn behind him like the small bones of an eaten capon? Is vanity the summation of every life? Or simply of my own? What changes could I have summoned years ago to change history and still keep his history, the histories of his brother and sisters? There are lives I would not erase to make my own different. There are stories that must, I think, be told for the grace and comfort that will come with their telling. Caitlin, Rachel, Gabrielle, Aubrey, Ian, MacKenzie, Riley, Quinn, Annabel and Lilah.

Children and grandchildren, history writ in bone and flesh, growing, subsiding, walking and laughing, weeping and sighing, troubled and joyful. My history, like it or dislike it. It is there and along with it comes a love that would not have them, any of them, erased, become dust that might have been and not, as they have, become dust animated. How like the woman in the house at the top of the ridge at Catal Huyuk I must be. Surely, that sister had a name, and children. Surely she wondered at the antics of the headman, or the headwoman, who planned the expansion or the subsistence of that worn away village. Like me, perhaps, she grumbled when awakened untimely from sleep. Another day, more grain to churn in the stone quern.

They, that ill-defined mass of human beings who study such things, tell us that those like me have been among humans since there were humans to have been among. Unlike their professional colleagues among the psychiatrists of the APA, they inform us that we have a history, that we are not merely deranged aspects of modern human existence whose longing for another sexual form is the embodiment of a mad want to worship that which we aren’t, to make a shrine of our bodies so that we can embody the form of our goddess.

That explanation, as well, is history: the flights of imagination that those who are interested in other minds bring to bear on the histories of people they do not know well, but have thoughts about, unable in their own health to find health in others unlike themselves. Thus, Freud, although finding himself feeling an empathy and admiration for Anna was unable to bespeak the madness of the father who used her to further his own desires and to make her life one of hysteria.

We are all writ with history’s letters. Our lives and words become twisted with the human tale, regardless how horrific or maudlin it may be. One finds something that approaches truth. Discards it, that shining truth, for what one perceives is the good of one’s self. We discard the nugget for the vein. It ever seems thus. For the victors, those who draw power and wealth, prestige and mandates of heaven to themselves by chance, comes the writing of the history, the convolutions of explanation of “what happened and how.”

What were Anna’s dreams? What were Anna’s fears? What was Anna’s history? Sigmund’s we know, writ in the language of a man afraid to affirm what he knew beyond his slightest doubt was true, yet denied for the good of himself and his career. Condemnation comes most easily to one’s thoughts in such a light. “You should have told the truth.” Yet, which of us might winnow truth with morning’s harvest of grain to separate wheat and chaff truly? Just so, there’s always some chaff in the grain bag, always wheat grains fallen to the threshing floor for birds and beggars.

What are Radha’s dreams? What are Radha’s truths? I cannot, will not, give them all to you. Even could I, I wouldn’t. They are what they are and anneal the edges of this narrative; just as your hidden truths anneal the edges of your own narrative. Would you give those to me for the asking? How bare could you publically be and feel at all comfortable with the feeling? Yes. Just so.

Just so with those who walk among you who are, or were if they prefer it, transsexuals. We keep some of our secrets, our histories. For everyone knows, overtly or covertly, that to write one’s history, to tell it, is to give it away to be rewritten, remoulded in ways we may not care to experience. The victors write the history. The victors’ children or enemies write the history of the victors. Such it ever was, until the mind of man runneth not to the contrary.

To deal with one’s children, one’s lovers, one’s acquaintances, colleagues and clients is to deal with one’s history. Some fashion in their homes a new history for themselves. We all do so. There are gaps in memory, stories we might tell had we the recall of them, that would shed some sort of light on our lives, bring a kind of truth other than the truth we establish. But, one asks herself, would the addition of those stories make the truth somehow different, add understanding to the warp and woof of the narrative? What would those lacunae add to the story you read just now?

Through the years of communing with transsexual sisters, and the occasional transsexual brother, I’ve discovered the comfort we can each seemingly find by secluding our histories from others. In some senses it’s a matter of a victim not wishing to trudge about with her victimhood available to every one she comes to know. In other cases, perhaps, there’s a re-telling that must be told that pushes a difference held in mind that should one discover the facts would become a different story than the one heard now. In the words of Carol Shields, “There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.”

Thus, history is forever mutable. We change it as we live and tell the telling of our living. Each one sees a life from a different angle of vision and writes her history as she’s comfortable with it. The woman of Catal Huyuk told her story to her children and eventually they moved away, told the story to their children or they were slain before they told the tale of their mother. Eventually her story merged into the innumerable stories of lives past: David and Bathsheba, Culhwch and Olwen, Cúchulainn and Emer, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, on and on.

So too, our stories last a season and disappear, accrete to themselves other myths and take on a life that transcends the mundane recounting of gathering harvests and birthing children. Emer always wears only the whitest linen and the gold around her neck and waist always glints in sunlight, no smudge or ash disturbs her beauty any longer. Her life has become a story for the fireside on a winter’s night. Should our tales live in the minds of humans so long as her’s then they will, as well, become the myth-stuff as has her’s.

Across the drive forsythia bloom. In the forecourt tiger-lilies have pushed eight inches above the earth, just three weeks after the snow melted. This afternoon sometime I’ll take the car again and pick up Aubrey. He’ll gather his weekend pack and then I’ll drive him back to New Jersey, and for another two weeks his story will leave my own, weave its own history to be told or held or to wisp away like mist in the early spring dawn.

Somewhere there’s an intersection between public truth and personal truth. In another place there’s an intersection between the truth of a common life and that of the life of a nation-state. The intersections are hidden. They reveal themselves reluctantly and the revelation may or may not partake of a metaphysical truth. Only Mother Herself will find those intersections and discover the truths that lie hidden from Her daughters and sons.

For now, there’s another cup of coffee waiting, a trip down the road to the UU Church and, as it fell out, a recounting by Colin of a history of his mind and teaching of the children of Trenton. It brought me a good deal of joy and admiration. I found there the focus of why I was there among the other white suburbanites.

But, just for now, I leave this patchwork to add to another day. Into it I shall weave flowers as they bloom, children as they grow, a few tales of love lying sleeping abed and an endless pastiche of days and thoughts. For now the quilt’s just begun, again. The sun’s falling down across the western walls of the apartments across the drive having found a separation in the gray cloudbank of this day, and the burden of history feels no burden at all. It’s, instead, the rising of a joy and promise that this day already full can only grow more full.

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