Disclaimer: this piece contains exactly one lie. I’ve forgotten where it is.
If you read for a living, you are likely not a hero of the human story. The intellectual instinctively thinks himself part of history because, in his arrogance, he believes that only he and his ilk can properly understand it. He believes implicitly that he might think himself into the grand stream of human history by mental effort alone. He is wrong. The humanist is a mere cataloguer of events and ideas; history is the work of actors. All that is actually required to insert oneself into history is to eat the Mona Lisa.
It is tough luck; to observe the stream of history without ever so much as dipping in one’s toes. Still, without humanists the stream flows as an untrammeled delta. The cataloguer shapes the banks, tills the ditches, and shores up the levee where it sags. He may flatter himself that his particular supposition of an actor’s motivation goes on to influence future acts. The actors are, to some degree therefore, at his mercy; history is written by the writers, not the victors.
There is dignity, and no small relief, in so removed a station. The luxury of detaching from the world is usually reserved for the old; to tend one’s garden and to put one’s faith in the children. The study and craft of history affords the student an early walk in this garden; it provincialises the present, turning remote pasts into places to be visited, making time into space. It also allows for the construction of extratemporal joys: those basically uncausal events that bob unmoored in the stream of history and exist only for the pleasure of our observing them. These following are some moments that will feature in no encyclopaedia nor history.
Four Miniatures
Moonlight on my hands. Its silver film on the skin of the river. A splash, a darting shape furry-black in the dark. Before long, two small beavers are circling each other in the water. They are in love, we decide. Don't give up, they seem to say, and the letter I am handed agrees. He tohu, e mea ana taku ngākau; he tohu aroha anake.
Good to be a bee. Your whole life culminates in a single moment of sublime violence.
Odysseus took a wrong turn at the Pillars. That's what he told everybody—really, he took one look at Scylla and thought bugger it. The water grew cold as he sailed into the fists of cloud. He saw a whale. On a far estuary he landed, hollies and marshlands scratching and sucking at his shins as he strode ashore. Strange men, peering at him from within the thickets, soon presented themselves beneath the waning autumn sun and greeted him with a gift of purple beads. He sat in their long-timbered halls and sang the stories he would tell the bards back home whilst the men looked on, silently smoking their pipes. When the talk was done, it was time to go. Godlike Odysseus walked the land for many days, following well-kept trails through the uplands. He passed rivers with no name, and in his loneliness he named their banks Troy. He saw many strange sights; a muskrat speaking, a game of peaches and chance, a man with snakes in his hair. That man, a foul sorcerer, lashed the flesh of much-enduring Odysseus, and made his legs to quiver and fail even as he dashed the sorcerer's head against the siltstone gorges. In his pain, city-sacking Odysseus sat in the lovely meadows and gazed at the slowly-grinding ice sheets on the far horizon. He looked upon them for many days, until the chill of winter set into his bones. From the swampy land, a local woman emerged with a basket of berries. Chancing upon him in his misery, she conveyed him to her long-timbered hall and gave him such medicine as she had. They lay together, enjoying the delights that closeness brings, and his last days were full of warm touches and sweet drink.
Dawn comes early, with rosy fingers. It is another time. The swamp is gone. In its place, a bustling town has sprung up, far above the blue waters. Most of it is owned by Greeks. Women still bring the berries. Men still smoke pipes. The cool breath of the lake stirs the birds long into the afternoon, and far beneath the sun-warmed earth, wise Odysseus is home.
A magic man stands on the high street, morning and night. His hat is tall and cants to the side. The magic man smiles a sleaze; come closer, yet closer, says he. Best magic in town! Best magic in town! Where does he find the time? The local newspaper wrote something about him; a suspicion, a rumour, a suck-in of breath. They beat him just off the Commons, near the anthuriums. The magic man is washing dishes in the kebab shop.
Instances
They put military bases next to reservations. “Gotta keep an eye on the Natives”, my guide says with a grin. Her dark hair is straight, and resists a braid. When she smiles she is mostly freckles. The charcoal dress wrapped tightly about her midriff blooms as she slams the driver’s door to escape the wind. We are going to a dance—everyone will be there—but first I am to be introduced to the beaches and the reservation.
A sound snakes between the firs. Bridges touch the banks gingerly; from the sand many fishing-lines stretch outward, dragged by the wide-moving water. We drive for about forty-five minutes. There are no houses on the reservation, but an administration centre and a church are hidden amongst the long paths between the trees. A cemetery lies up a small, rocky trail near the church. Dappling light falls into the clearing, thickening on the stones that mark the known graves. They are few.
At one time, all the men were enslaved and sent to the Caribbean. They planted sugar and bled salt. The sun, once a kindly ancestor in old New England, was the unforgiving god of the islands, rising in an angry chert-flake flush of pinkgrey and grinding across the sky. In the evening, the workers below melted into the tides. Eventually they would return home. They were part-African, part-Native, part-elsething. Without them, life had gone on; the language going and the preachers talking and the sun brushing gently the birchwood groves. In the end, back at the reservation, it had been two generations without Native men.
Much of getting recognised involves playing Indian. Adopting Plains headdresses and buffalo imagery, clearing the trees from the flat area near the baptism brook for a powwow-ground, growing more mystical and eye-squintingly remote than anyone around here ever thought possible. Some folks always have to be more sacred (“sacrit”, jokes my guide) than others. “Redbones”, she says, with a roll of her eyes. Having at one point been detribalised, the tribe, now legally reconstituted, today numbers in the low thousands, keeping the books firmly closed to new members—even children. Most of the property abutting the reservation is owned by settlers. The love story she tells me, her parents’ chance meeting at a bright washing-hole with a blush of nephews in tow, probably couldn’t happen nowadays. The draping of a thousand ribbon-skirts wouldn’t obscure the hollowness, felt here as everywhere else, that pervades the community; kinship is found only in instances.
The road grows long and straight. Green boughs hang at a man’s height above the road. We pass houses and a two-storey building of stone, cedar, and glass. “This is our longhouse”, she says. “It was also supposed to be a community centre, but our medicine man took it over and won't let anyone use it. He uses it as his private palace.” Without the medicine man’s longhouse, the whole tribe can only get together in earnest for the annual powwow, though nobody in the old days would have heard of such a thing. His shingle fiefdom glows in the fading light, glinting once in our rear-view mirror.
The beach rose is a small, pink flower that claws its way out from birdsnests of tangled leaves before flopping morosely toward the ocean wind. It grows along the banks of a high, stone walkway that traces the garden hems and drainage ditches of Gilded Age mansions. Few are still lived in. Little people click-clack along the blackpepper concrete, the great yellow façades cragging and scowling above the fences shivering pig-iron in the breeze. The sullen sea, which seems only to throw the odd breaker when directly observed, glances blues and whites up at us as we walk along the cliffs. It is airy, wet, and over soon. We go home to change.
At some point during my visit, some time early in the morning, I had burst out of the waves, salt licking at my browning cheeks. I had squinted against the glare coming off the water, and paddled robustly to get my bearings. Unfortunately, this was to be the opposite feeling to the one I get on the dancefloor that had been set up on the quad. Something not quite like Frank Sinatra whistles by in a crooked bow tie and a horn fill. Around the corner, an indeterminate number of plausibly Jewish seniors bob in floor-length bell bottoms to convincing covers of Fleetwood Mac; seniors but for the drummer who had played at every Campus Dance since, judging by the state of his curls, the late nineteenth century. Twelve thousand people twirl, step, stumble, and swing across the orange-lit grass, not one dancing better than the blue-blazered old man resolutely occupying the hinterland of the moshpit beneath the main stage, which in turn is occupied at opposite ends by, respectively, a middle-aged rock group and a geriatric big band. It is all shadows and colours and brick; it is all indistinct. It is beautiful, unequivocally beautiful, but feels still like no less of a single instance draped about with string lights, or perhaps a set of instances seen through a beaded kaleidoscope. It, like everything on this holiday, seems difficult to touch.
When I leave, the driver and a woman who gets on at Springfield will fall in love up the front of the bus, although they won’t know it. He will have already asked for her number. She will say “We just met!”. They will talk and the light will go and I will not see the end of their story, because I get off upstate and the bus keeps going.