[spring 11]

Recently I have recognized the descent of historical objects.  The things you once could freely visit but rarely did, now destroyed by earthquake.  The ancestors who planted food on the mountain you remember viewing through binoculars.  Our landscapes teem with sleepy memories, scraps of paper folded halfway into the ground.  We pick them up bit by bit--in the form of new things, like dirt and rocks, or in their old forms--pieces of pottery, stamped relics, photographs, tools, gravestones, bricks.  We have the written histories and the assurances of the previous generation, cupping their knowledge around our eyes.  It is a sheen, like powdery moth wings, calling attention to the sun striking us.  That eternal sun.  (Or is it?)

When a legacy becomes sacred, then dies in physical form, does the earth record its importance?  Is human memory in current, palpable form the only carrier?

Do extinct species live as ghosts?  Does it matter that we have taxidermied models to show us what they were?  Is a glimpse enough?  (A glimpse can greatly inform, I believe, if one really looks.)  When does the physical pass the torch to the metaphysical?  Do they pass the torch back and forth?

Shared experience is a true vial of the power to keep memories.  I think of people who lived with me during my greatest scenes.  They felt the power of the places that I, too, saw.  They filled me with love, and I filled them with love, and we received love from the entire landscape around us.  We even felt the same pain.  When I meet with them, we have--at least to some degree--a shared consciousness of these things.  And perhaps the physical impressions WE make, together or apart, spread some of that unique consciousness onto the earth to hold on as long as it can.

But I do truly love all the people and places I have met  in California.  I can recall those moments in an instant, and I have this inexhaustible appreciation for them.

The list is endless.  Just to think of my home in Carp, my schools, and the map spreads from there.  We really do influence each other.  What a great existence I have led (Margaux Robles and her mind, of course.) 

Granted, there were dark corners.  But I only walked away from those corners to bump into light, and so that's fine that they were there.



*Now all these thoughts make me wonder about working as a historical preserver.  The attachment weighs heavy when one chooses to fight that fight.  But one could also choose to enjoy the privilege of seeing history before it disappears from visibility, and celebrate that with others.


Museums:  Futile or crucial?
I say far more time-worthy than other commercial edifices.  I would go for it.
we dance with the ancestors one last time...