The Walls of the Present

I remain in the generation of my Generation. We are all "here" and "now" in different places and times -- everywhere at all times. When I see someone being here and now, I have to suppress laughter: a human being fools no one pretending to have no history or hopes.

Edmund Wilson (b. 1895), that Red Bank critic born of an attorney who went insane and a mother who went deaf, provides a succinct explanation for Why:

When describing the impact of Yeats, Proust, and Joyce -- his selection of authors was somewhat arbitrary but served the immediate context of his review at that moment -- he wrote that they "break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art."

Wake us. Exalt the trying. Open the infinity of art. Think of origins, middles, and never-endings.

Cahokia and the 53 women in Mound 72

I am an apologist for the native and the immigrant, the builder of cities, and the nomad wanderer, or the brave immigrant looking for a place to raise a family. Still, let's accept the tangibles, the facts you can hold in your hand.

We have only recently unearthed the Mississippian cultures which reached a kind of apex in Cahokia -- at the confluence of three great rivers, and the soft riparian "bottom land" of America. The grayware is beautiful, the stone-ware stunning, the lay-out -- with its own solar Wood-henge -- is impressive. The symbols are almost all around the sun and fertility, almost none about war, and nothing has yet been unearthed that looks like blood-letting and human sacrifice.

Except there is that deep pit inside a charnel house with 50 men tossed contemporaneously and carelessly into it. There is the door-less stockade built by itself which appears to be a prison. While there is little evidence of war-loving or anthropophagous habits, there is this evidence of at least intermittent reprisal and severe punishment.

And Mound 72 -- at the edge, and askew by 90 degrees. The burial of a Lord, accompanied by four men whose hands and heads were removed, and by 53 women, laid in in two ranks, and apparently strangled.

There are many mysteries, but there should be no mystery about our Lords. They manipulate us with beliefs they themselves do not cherish, and they behave entirely differently than they require of us.

And we have only excavated less than 5%...? The past is the thing that haunts us. Is it possible to live? Knowing what comes out of the dirt of our past? The facts are damning.