Things Are Tied Together

History is, among other things, the repository in which all known human behaviors are stored. All these behaviors--from the uncommonly noble to the unspeakably vicious, may be examined, studied as something that fascinates us, avoided as something that repels or just bores us, or entered into as something to be experienced vicariously. 

Our personal histories, and the family histories we've all lived in are part of this larger pattern, and can embody surprising ranges of those human behaviors, both in the realities we inhabit and in the fantasies we entertain as we think about novel ways of being in the world, or as we cast what-if scenarios that reflect our dreads and longings. Some fantasies may simply help us think through what we need to prepare for. 

We're all together in Heraclitus's river of process and time. In his last novel, A Place to Come To, Robert Penn Warren writes:

Something is going on and will not stop. You are outside the going on, and you are,  at the same time, inside the going on. In fact, the going on is what you are. Until you can understand that these things are different but are the same, you know nothing about the nature of life. I proclaim this.

In another novel, Flood, one of Warren's characters says: "Things are tied together. . . . There's some spooky interpenetration of things, a mystic osmosis of being, you might say." This "osmosis of being" is a major theme of Warren's. It means we can't live outside history, that we can't separate ourselves from the human condition just as it is. 

Some of the memories in my own history are sources of much pleasure, even from a distance. Moments of suspended time in conversation with friends are among these pleasures, as are times of deep joy watching my daughters. In one scene from their childhood, they are picking daffodils in a spot on the farm where my wife grew up. The girls, on a day early in March, gather the bright yellow flowers against a backdrop of still-brown field and woods. Their faces and the flowers in the scene are heartrendingly bright and vivid. On a spot near the place where the flowers grew, a house once stood, one built well over a hundred years before the day we spent there. The flowers must have been planted by someone who lived there generations ago.  

Other memories bite. Some of them just never get peaceful, never lose the tinge of anger or sadness. I've had times of feeling trapped and degraded in my workplace. From observation, and lots of conversations, I know I'm far from being alone in this. The poet James Richardson includes these lines in his "Vectors 2.0: More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays": "Institutions are the opposite of God: their periphery is everywhere, their center nowhere." In an institutional context, people often become less centered, and far less than authentic. 

A number of years ago I recall a meeting with an agency that funded a program I worked for briefly. The program's director gave me a visual signal during the meeting that said I'd offered something in the conversation that was taking up time that should have been his. Problem was, the director was absent from the day-to-day operations of the program and really didn't have detailed knowledge of some of our work. But he still had the need to be seen, when speaking to our funders, as the sole interpreter of everyone else's activities.

The less pleasant memories, those often painful pieces of personal history, are just as much a part of our identities as the history we like. We can edit our stories, but we can't edit ourselves.