Ancestors

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Paternal Grandparents

~ Recent Family History ~
a poem
by Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Looking out at us from their photographs,
mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles,
now dead for forty - five years or more,
don't recognize us, can't even imagine us.
And we are helpless to penetrate the safety
of their innocence . . .
from Collected Poems (237)

Maternal Grandparents

" . . . we start [that which] we will not live to see,
just as our ancestors could not live to see us.
And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,
as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood,
and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time."
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Letters to a Young Poet (62)
I've never forgotten a dream that I had one night when I was in my early twenties. My mother's parents seemed to be right beside my bed, sitting in rocking chairs, sipping tea (or was it Sanka?) from china cups. In reality, my grandfather was still alive at the time, though my grandmother had died fifteen years earlier. It was not a dreamy or dreamlike dream; it was more of a visitation, consisting of a single scenario and one line of dialogue: my grandmother saying to me, "You are very American aren't you?" What could that mean? They were just as American as I, born in America, as were their parents, who had immigrated several generations before. We were not new to the Country, so my American - ness should come as no surprise to them.

Upon waking, I interpreted the dream as their way of granting me permission to forge ahead into a future which, as Rilke says, they would not live to see, reassuring me that my way of being in the world was going to be different than theirs had been . . . and that this was okay with them. Over the years, I have not remembered many dreams, but this one remains as vivid to me as the night my grandparents came to acknowledge that beyond a certain point, they could no longer imagine me, yet I would always have their blessing and their unconditional love.

"We have all rejected our beginnings
and become something our parents could not have foreseen."
by Robertson Davies (1913 - 1995)
from Fifth Business (248)

I love seeing my my maternal grandmother
in these outfits, obviously some of her favorites,
that she chose for having her photograph taken.
Such stylish footwear and that extravagant hat!


Her older brother, known for his photography, had promised her a photo session, and she was hoping to model something elegant, but he had a radical idea: if she wanted another picture taken, she could pose in his baseball uniform. Not her idea of finery, but she reluctantly agreed -- the first and last time in her life to don a pair of trousers. Perhaps he convinced her by insisting that "A hundred years from now, this photo will be a family treasure, cherished by your grand-daughter!" If so, how right he would have been!

On the back, my grandmother has written:
"Rovilla in ball suit"

In another treasured photo,
here is my paternal grandmother, also defying convention.
On the back, my Aunt Sue has written:
"Our Momma in slacks.
This is the only time I ever saw her in slacks."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bristow Ancestors
Click to see slideshow & hear music by Gerry McCartney
~ Also On YouTube ~

Gerry's Paternal Great - Grandparents and Great - Aunts

We tried to recreate their unusual pose . . .

and thought it would be even more fun
to replace the newspaper . . .

with a 21st Century equivalent.

Something our parents could not have foreseen!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
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Peace Concluded 1856
by John Everett Millais

I love the uncanny similarity between the above photograph
of Gerry's great - grandparents and this painting,
depicting a wounded British officer reading the Times
newspaper report of the end of the Crimean War.

Like an Ant

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon
by Sir Edward John Poynter (1836 - 1919)

"Learn how to live
a joyful and constructive life in this world,
like ants. . . . The secret of a meaningful life
is not in the long-gone throne of Solomon and the like."
Sa'eb Tabrizi (1601 - 77)
Sa'eb's reference to Solomon's "long-gone throne" reminds me of the statue of Ozymandias:
" . . . Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies . . .
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my words ye Mighty and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)
The kingdoms of Solomon and Ozymandias did not endure, their vast achievements dwarfed by an ant and a grain of sand. Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood presents a series of existential questions concerning this same dilemma of time, size and perspective. His inquiries suggest that we may have placed ourselves too high above the ant, especially when it comes to grasping the secrets of the universe:

"Is the human individual more important
than the individual ant, and if so by a factor,
what would you say, of what?" (10)

"Will you sing with me now: Oh let us be heroes,
let us have emotions pure or not pure be men
or not men, let us buzz and rumble the hill and
dale of daily insignificance just as confidently,
just as threateningly, just as humbly in its
cute red velour as does the velvet ant?" (34)

"Is it really tenable that a person has a a soul,
whether he has a cell phone or not,
and a grasshopper does not?" (160)

[See my book blog for more insightful questions from
The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell (b 1952)]

I like the way the lines of this painting by Leonard Orr
can be seen to resemble the elaborate architecture
of an underground ant colony!
Plaster cast reconstruction of an ant nest,
as illustrated in Wikipedia

I turned to Orr's paintings, confident that I would find something to illustrate ant - ness (as in, ant colony, ant hill, ant nest, ant industriousness, and so forth). Len generously responded: "If my painting manages to convey antness (the quidditas of ant, as Stephen Dedalus perhaps said), I am pleased."

"Although not immediately obvious,
there are quite a few people hiding here it seems."
~ facebook comment to Leonard Orr from Andrea Livingston ~

I decided on this painting, in part because of the accompanying commentary. Livingston's remark fits right in with the question of how different, really, are humans from ants. When I mentioned that I also wanted to include the passage about termites from Samuel Beckett's novel Watt, Len was one step ahead of me:

"For the only way one can speak of nothing
is to speak of it as though it were something,
just as the only way one can speak of God is to
speak of him as though he were a man,
which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time,
and as the only way one can speak of man,
even our anthropologists have realized that,
is to speak of him as though he were a termite." (77)

Samuel Beckett (1906 - 89)
In the following poems, it is the family dog whose superior comprehension of the meaning of life edges out any knowledge that we mere humans might possess:

from Her Grave
Does the hummingbird think he himself invented his crimson throat?
He is wiser than that, I think. . . .

Do the cranes crying out in the high clouds
think it is all their own music?

A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you
do not therefore own her as yo do not own the rain, or the
trees, or the laws which pertain to them.

Does the bear wandering in the autumn up the side of the hill
think all by herself she has imagined the refuge and the refreshment
of her long slumber?

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the
smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know
almost nothing.

Mary Oliver (b 1935)
from New and Selected Poems (14 - 16)


Trickle Up?
Does human evolution have a future?
Even our dog is troubled by the limited
significance of our presence. He whines
at the door wanting to get out.

Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
from the Collected Poems (278)

Does the bear wandering in the autumn up the side of the hill
think all by herself she has imagined the refuge and the refreshment
of her long slumber?
~ Mary Oliver ~

Beautiful watercolor evocation
of autumn and bear - ness
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, December 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Thanks David Kimbrel ~
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Back to School:A Scent of Knowledge

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS? LOOK CLOSELY!

Thanks to my husband Gerry McCartney for this slide,
which he uses in his presentations to illustrate the challenges
of classroom instruction -- chatters, sleepers, daydreamers!
It was ever thus!

Henricus de Alemannia Lecturing his Students
from Laurentius de Voltolina, 1350s
Back to School! Always such a heady time of year! That could be a pun, as in Oliver Goldsmith's 18th century characterization of the "Village Schoolmaster": "and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew." But, seriously, it's an energizing, optimistic time, a new season, especially with the weather changing from summer to fall. Breathe deep!

British novelist Andrea Levy captures the exhilaration of a new school year in a sensory passage I recently quoted on my book blog: "My favourite task was to hand out the books at the beginning of term. Those children all had new books, whose turning pages wafted a fragrance of sun on sweet wood; a scent of knowledge" (emphasis added). I remember that scent -- and everything that went with it! Notebooks, pencils, index cards and graph paper; chalkboards, lockers, desks, the library, and best of all -- a cigar box! All those promising, familiar smells that go with education! All that back - to - school shopping; or as Ben and Sam -- raised in the age of Harry Potter -- called it, our annual trip to Diagon Alley. No matter where you get them, there's just something about those school supplies that signifies knowledge itself. Even for college kids.

Contemporary American poet Barry Spacks offers a collegiate version of the first day of school in his poem about Freshman Composition as a rite of passage. I have always loved Spacks' image of the English Composition teacher as a "thought-salesman" with a sample case; and I began to love it even more a couple of years ago when a friend, in reference to my enthusiastic endorsement of a few recent works of new fiction, referred to me as a salesperson -- not a teacher in search of an audience, but a salesperson! Come to think of it, perhaps the two roles go hand in hand, as Spacks suggests:

Freshmen
My freshmen
settle in. Achilles
sulks; Pascal consults
his watch; and true
Cordelia -- with her just - washed hair,

Stern - hearted princess, ready to defend
the meticulous garden of truths in her highschool notebook--
uncaps her ball point pen.
And the corridors drum:
give us a flourish,
flourescence of light, for the teachers come,

green and seasoned, bearers
of the Word, who differ
like its letters; there are some
so wise their eyes
are birdbites; one

a mad grinning gent with a golden tooth, God knows
he might be Pan, or the sub-
custodian; another
is a walking podium, dense
with his mystery -- high

priests and attaches
of the ministry; kindly
old women, like unfashionable watering places;
and the assuming young, rolled tight as a City
umbrella;

thought-salesmen with samples cases,
and saints upon whom
merely to gaze is like Sunday --
their rapt, bright,
cat-licked faces!

And the freshmen wait;
wait bristling, acned, glowing like a brand,
or easy, chatting, munching, muscles lax,
each in his chosen corner, and in each
a chosen corner.

Full of certainties and reasons,
or uncertainties and reasons,
full of reasons as a conch contains the sea,
they wait; for the term's first bell;
for another mismatched wrestle through the year;

for a teacher who's religious in his art,
a wizard of a sort, to call the role
and from mere names
cause people
to appear.

The best look like the swinging door
to the Opera just before
the Marx Brothers break through.
The worst -- debased,
on the back row,

as far as one can go
from speech --
are walls where childish scribbling's been erased;
are stones
to teach.

And I am paid to ask them questions:
Dare man proceed by need alone?
Did Esau like
his pottage?
Is any heart in order after Belsen?

And when one stops to think, I'll catch his heel,
put scissors to him, excavate his chest!
Watch, freshmen, for my words about the past
can make you turn your back. I wait to throw,
most foul, most foul, the future in your face.

by American Poet Barry Spacks (b. 1931)

What a cast of characters! I recognize them all, from both sides of desk. As a student (back in the day before all the smart kids were shown how to test out of Freshman Comp), I was one of those fair Cordelias, my heart an open book. A few years later, there I was, a beginning instructor, rolled tight as a city umbrella, religious in my art, requiring answers to the soul - searching questions: Is carelessness as bad as dishonesty? Worse than? Can Gatsby change the past? What comes after dark vapours have oppress'd our plains? How can a verb be infinite?

Office Hours: In my cubicle awaiting the Freshman

In the following short poem, Ernest Sandeen's recollection of undergraduate days is similar to that of Spacks, who points out that the Freshman Comp instructors are "paid to ask" students troubling existential questions. In turn, Sandeen's poem is a brief speculation of where all that moral questioning has led:

College Yearbook, 1931
How can we forget how eager
these professors were to disturb
our young, unexamined lives
with their own ardent doubts and beliefs?

And now here they lie as if
snugly tucked into their graves.
Did they find no further place
to go than here into our mortal memories?

from the Collected Poems
of Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Notre Dame Professor and Poet

I like the way these two poems are connected. Spacks sees the freshmen as "Full of certainties and reasons, / or uncertainties and reasons." Sandeen notices that not only the students but also the professors are filled "with their own ardent doubts and beliefs." Plenty of doubt and uncertainty to go around! Sandeen can't forget how determined, how eager his professors were to disturb the youthful freshmen. Spacks remembers the tightly wound, earnest "assuming young" professors, equally keen to upset the students by throwing "most foul" the future in their faces. As I recall, not only was the future thrown in our face, so was the past, so was the present. Sometimes that scent of knowledge can take your breath away. Other times you have to swallow hard, without breathing.

The Good Old Days?

To conclude with a bit of fun, how about the whimsical college curriculum described by Robert Benchley in his hilarious essay, "What College Did to Me." I am never able to read his course list without laughing out loud, in part because it sounds rather similar to a few of the classes that I really took -- no joke!

The History of Flowers and Their Meanings
The Social Life of the Minor Sixteenth-Century Poets
History and Appreciation of the Clavichord
Early Minnesingers: Their Songs and Times
Doric Columns: Their Uses, History, and Various Heights
French 1C: Exceptions to the verb etre

The History of Lacemaking
Russian taxation systems before Catherine the Great
North American Glacial Deposits
Early Renaissance Etchers
Early English Tradewinds
Benchley says "This gave me a general idea of the progress of civilization and a certain practical knowledge which has stood me in good stead in a thousand ways since graduation."

Still, knowing that his degree program might sound on the frivolous side to some, he appends a disclaimer, which, as you'll soon see, he then turns right around and retracts:

"The foregoing outline of my education
is true enough in its way and is what people
like to think about a college course.
It has become quite the cynical thing to admit
laughingly that college did one no good. . . .
I had to write something like that to satisfy the editors.
As a matter of fact, I learned a great deal in college
and have those four years to thank for whatever I know today.
(This note was written to satisfy those of my instructors and
financial backers who may read this.
As a matter of fact, the original outline is true . . . .)"
Haha! ~ Thanks Robert Benchley & Ned Stuckey - French!

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, September 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Poems for Memorial Day

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Memorial Day Service ~ Caney, Kansas ~ 2010
Headstone For My Parents
in Sunnyside Cemetery ~ Caney, Kansas

#1: Memorial Day

On this day every year
our dead afflict us with
a kind of solemn astonishment
at how close to us they remain.

The dates on their headstones
reveal that even in their graves
they grow older year by year
just as we do. They are all still with us.
We are all going in the same direction.

#2: In this once country graveyard

In this once country graveyard
now caught in the tentacles
of a noisily expanding city,
we can feel more intimately than ever
the heavy demands made upon us
by the dead. Here they stand
idling, day and night in the din
of traffic, as mute as time
itself, as still as stone.

They require nothing less
of us than our lives.

#3: How Time Is Kept

In the flurry of our beating hearts
there is never time enough for what we dream of.
Our intimate dead, however, lie calm of face
as if to say, no need for hurry.
They idle in such a wealth of stillness
it can never be wholly spent.

Yet they are close, deep in our one affair.
Don't disturb us, they say, we are busy
at the leisure of not breathing. It takes all our time,
it takes more time than being alive.

All three poems from
the Collected Poems
of Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Notre Dame Professor and Poet

In Barbara Kingsolver's sad but magical novel Animal Dreams, the narrator, Codi Noline, joins the people of Grace, Arizona, for "the town's biggest holiday, the Day of All Souls." They walk together to the cemetery to weed and tend the family graves, decorate with marigolds, and enjoy the traditional skull-shaped candies with the children:

"It was the bittersweet Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, democratic follow-up to the Catholic celebration of All Hallows. Some people had business with the saints on November 1, and so went to mass, but on November 2, everybody had business at the graveyard." (158 - 59)

Whenever November 2nd and May 30th roll around, I always wish I lived nearer to the cemeteries where most of my loved ones and ancestors are buried so that I too could pay a visit and decorate the graves in the time - honored fashion. When I was growing up, months and months might pass between visits to our grandparents, but we never missed Thanksgiving or Memorial Day weekend.

No matter what the weather, on Memorial Day we spent a good part of the day at the cemetery, attending various ceremonies and speeches in honor of the Veterans and the War Dead; placing wreathes and potted plants; sometimes even planting flowers that would bloom throughout the summer. Nobody really says "Decoration Day" anymore, but that's what I remember calling it when I was small -- because we decorated! If I was lucky enough to spend a week or two of summer vacation with my grandparents, we spent the evenings one of two ways -- sitting on the porch or taking a walk to Sunnyside Cemetery. Those were happy times for me, tagging along, picking stray flowers, and listening to the old stories about those at rest there.

At Thanksgiving, when the cemetery was bare and empty -- no parades, podiums or bands; very few visitors, very few flowers -- even then we didn't miss the opportunity to wander from grave to grave, paying our respects. I guess that was our Midwestern way of observing All Souls -- just three or four weeks late.

These days, I live only a few blocks from the nearest local cemetery and can spend a reflective hour there anytime, thinking of the old days, reading the names of strangers, but it's not quite the same. As Codi says:

"More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own" (165).
~ Reposted from The Quotidian Kit ~

Sunnyside Cemetery on Thanksgiving Day 2007
Caney, Kansas
A Grace for Memorial Day
"Let no wars impede our thanking
God above for this our bread
That our song may end the battles,
Let us feed on that instead."

by Beverly Coyle
from the story "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing"
in The Kneeling Bus, 95
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, June 14thth

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com