Sympathy for Barbarians

Defeated (temporarily?), the Roman legionaries are stripped of their armor and humiliated: they are marched naked past the sacred grove. The heads of their generals are displayed on spikes; the children are mocking the once proud legion, their pride a contrast to the defeated soldiers. The women wail and cry out over the men who didn't return from the field of battle, and sing the praises of those who did.

In truth I'm not exactly sure what this is a picture of. I downloaded it years ago and haven't been able to retrace my steps. I'm guessing it's a classic 18th- or 19th-century engraving of a "barbarian" victory over Rome in Germania or Gaul, and probably a victory that was short-lived. But I find it fascinating because it's such a romantic view of a scene that seemingly stands the usual historical narrative on its head: the invincible Romans are being mocked and the savage barbarians are jubilant. It is said both that the victors get to write history, and that he who laughs last laughs best, but I wonder about how that is interpreted.

We are taught about the glories of Rome, about the civilization, albeit at the point of a sword, that it spread throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. To be sure the Roman Empire, decadent as it may have been, has had a lasting influence on our culture, our civilization. But that's not the complete story. Because ultimately, after centuries of glory, as all empires do, the Romans fell. If you, like me, trace the blood of your ancestors across the Atlantic to Europe, that last generations of effete Roman nobility, those ones they are not our ancestors: those were the people thrown to the flames, their children dashed to the paving stones or thrown under the hooves of the advancing barbarian horde. The people who survived were the peasants watching from the field as the villas burned, or the ones eking out a life in the wild hills and forests.

As near as I can ascertain, my ancestors weren't kings or queens or lords or princesses, they were just people. But they did make it into the history books: read as the frightened nobles shriek "the barbarians are at the gates!" That's us they're talking about. My people. Now I'm not suggesting running through the streets with torches and pitchforks, or looting prep schools and throwing aristocratic children into fires or arbitrarily smashing the good things about our civilization. Living in a yurt doesn't look fun or practical to me. I'm just suggesting a little change in perspective.

In this age of politicians trying desperately to make sure they and their friends get to hang on to the money, to the power, to the right to control other people and take things away from them, it's worth remembering the lessons of the past. Empires fall. We barbarians win, in the end, every time.

A little bit of Family Heritage

I've written before about my paternal grandmother, Dorothy Scott. She was born in Michigan in 1904 and died in California in the early 1990s. It was she who willed me the box with many old family photographs I've put up here. Looking among old papers I found a letter she wrote to me as a teenager with many old family details. As a child I felt fairly alienated from my extended family: my mother's parents were long gone and her brothers and their families all lived far from us. My father had been close with neither his own father nor his mother's extended family so we didn't really have frequent visits with relatives. I asked my gramma for some information on my roots, this would have been in the 1970s, and I was lucky enough to receive this letter with all sorts of genealogical details.

The first section was a bit about my father's family. Considering how badly my grandfather treated her I was surprised to read fairly objective facts, though key parts of the narrative ommitted some crucial details. I'll leave all that for a future post on my father's paternal lineage.

The rest of the letter is filled with facts and details. By way of offering up a bit more internet immortality to these long-gone ancestors here's a big portion of my grandmother Dorothy's letter:

"My mother, Eudora Kimble Scott, was the only child (she'd had a baby brother who died in infancy) of Alice Holmes Kimble and Ransom E. Kimble. The Holmes family (my great grand-parents were farmers near Vicksburg, Michigan. As a child I remember older people saying I resembled my great-grandmother whose name was Emily Holmes amd it was for her I named my kitty! Incidentally all the Holmes-Kimbles-Scotts seem to have been quite long-lived. Somewhere I have a photo of my sister Ruth as a baby being held by her (also my) mother surrounded by 6 grandmothers! Let's see these were Grandma Kimble, her mother Emily Holmes and Grandpa Kimble's mother ___ Kimble then Grandma Scott, plus her mother ____ Decker and grandpa Scott's mother ____ Scott.

"Grandpa Ransom Kimble's family were Pennsylvania Dutch who pushed westward and became Michigan farmers just south of the little town of Vicksburg where I grew up. They retired by the time my mother was high school age. They sold the farm, bought property and built their house in Vicksburg. They invested their farm sales money in property in Vicksburg: a couple of stores and houses which brought them income during the remainder of their long lives. Grandpa died in his 70s, Grandma Kimble at 80.

"They lived only 1 1/2 blocks from us as we (my 4 brothers 3 sisters and I) spent many happy hours, days, sometimes at their lake cottage, weeks with them. I remember sitting on my grandpa's lap in front of this big coal stove listening to his tales of their first years in Michigan when much of the country was still forest. He knew many Indians, even one Indian chief (Pottawattamies I think ) all friendly apparently and from whom he learned much lore. My mother Eudora (who was always called Dora and for whom I was named) was born July 19, 1872. She went to high school with my father...

"My paternal grandmother, Maria Decker Scott, was born in 1844 and died in 1932 in Vicksburg. I'm not sure where the Deckers came from, a fairly large family. They lived in Indiana...I once knew her brother Alf Decker who moved to Montana, also his sister Mina who we knew as children. (Emily keeps walking across my papers so the cat hairs are gratis!)

"My grandfather Scott's family came from Yorkshire, England. In fact he may have been born there. William Woodhead Scott b. 1844, died in Vicksburg Michigan in 1918. When he was a child they came west to Ontario, Indiana, where they established prosperous woollen mills. He had brothers and sisters, I think. Young William joined the Union Army during the civil war. He became a captain. (After the war he gathered a lot of regalia: uniforms, swords in sheaths, beaded epaulets and such which we children used to dress up with, swords and all, and parade up and down the block!)

"As his vocation he chose to be a dentist and came with his wife (Maria) and his son, my father Clinton, and his daughters, my Aunt Clara to Vicksburg, which was then just a 4 corners with few buildings to set up what became a very successful practice. They built quite a large house with 'elegant' furnishings and became important as the village grew. He helped (with his hands) to build a church -- congregational -- and my father and aunt helped haul stone for it with their team of spotted ponies. He was quite a student -- self taught -- used to give steriopticon lectures of the Holy Lands for church and civic groups... Always on Memorial Day he led the parade and delivered the address of the day at the cemetary while the hundreds of townspeople including all the town's children trudged along carrying our armloads of flowers to put on veteran's graves.



"My father, Clinton Robert Scott, b. 1870 d. 1937...decided to be a dentist like his father, so went to Ann Arbor was graduated a DDS...They lived first in Schoolcraft Michigan, then Marcellus, where I was born, and then in 1906 moved to Vicksburg where my father practiced for the rest of his life.

She lists her siblings Ruth, Florence, Robert, William W., Lynn, Rollo and Frances. "... Interesting enough (and disappointing to my father) it was his four girls who sought and self-financed college educations. Dad would have paid expenses for the boys (though how he would have done it, I don't know. We had a good home but no money) but the boys weren't so inclined."

Though I've been to Michigan many times I've never been to Vicksburg, or to St. Joseph where she lived with my grandfather Horst after their marriage. I hope the people who live in their houses in Vicksburg today, assuming they're still standing, are nice people. Anyway, I don't believe as the Mormons do that I need to convert my departed ancestors to my own religion, but I do believe in thanking them earnestly for the lives they lived, and the steps they made that allowed my own life to be.

(Calendar at top from the office of Clinton R. Scott, Dentist, Marcellus, Michigan; my great grandfather, showing my grandmother's older siblings Ruth, Robert and Flo; 1899. The caption under the photo reads, "Dr. Scott does all our dental work." Bottom photograph shows my grandmother in 1926, the year before she married my grandfather.)

My Gay Genes

More from my treasure trove of family photos. Flying up in the air here is my great aunt Fran, full name Frances Scott, one of my grandmother's younger sisters. These two photos probably date from the early 1960s, as they appear to be taken in the A-Frame house my grandmother had built in Mill Valley, California, on a chunk of land she bought from Aunt Fran. Fran had moved to the area in the late 1950s; she was a photographer by trade. She built her own house as well as the third house on this chunk of property, a modern cottage called The Kite. I met her on several occasions as a child; she was very private and didn't really join me or my parents on our visits to gramma.

I don't remember when I was "told" about Aunt Fran, but she was a lesbian, and lived for years with a female partner right there next to gramma Dorothy.



I like these photos because the people in them are having so much fun: and I presume one of the two women here is Fran's partner. The top photo is inscribed by my grandmother on the reverse "that kid sister" and the bottom one "Ann, Fran, Kenny, Eral [Eval?]." There's a couple more in this series that involve dancing and one that involves something improper with a lampshade. While my Grandmother was most definitely heterosexual, this party seems evidently something not so strictly so, and its before-Stonewall vintage speaks to me of a sort of prehistoric time.

I wish I had known Aunt Fran better; but I'm glad that one of the family legacies I shared with her were a set of gay genes.

Family Ghosts

My grandmother Dorothy Scott passed on in the early 1990s. While her last few years were spent in a demented Alzheimer's fog, she he had lived a good long life, born in southern Michigan and died after thirty years in Mill Valley, California. I belatedly inherited a box of family photos from her just a couple years ago, passed on to a friend and set aside for those many years before they finally got to me. It's an odd collection of photos; many of them older than any visual evidence of my family I'd ever seen before. They range from 19th-century tintypes through 1970s snapshots. Most of them are not labelled, and I have no idea who many of the people in these photos are; many are my ancestors, many lost distant cousins, many I have no idea whatsoever. I met several of my grandmother's sisters when I was a child so there is some familiarity: but she came from a very large family, even though the genes she passed down to my father seem not to have included that trait. There's a magic quality to these pictures, and yet also, something vaguely sad. Although I hope that other forks of the Scott and Kimble and Decker families have revered and remembered their ancestors better than mine has, it makes me melancholic to consider these faces and figures so full of life in these photos to be now so randomly anonymous.

The beautiful photo above shows my grandmother's older sisters Ruth and Flo Scott wading in Lake Michigan, probably with their father--my great grandfather--probably about 1900.


This one shows my grandmother's grandfather William Scott with his sister Clara Scott, his wife, nee Decker, and his mother in law "great grandmother Decker" and a cousin whose name I can't read, sitting around their dining room table in Michigan, Marcellus or Vicksburg; it's not dated but it's probably the 1880s or 1890s. He's the hero of the family who served in the Union Army.


This is the Kimble house in Vicksburg, Michigan, undated but probably from the 1870s. These are the Kimble women; the child is my grandmother's mother Eudora Kimble, later Scott. It's Dora's mother, grandmother and great grandmother in the photo with her. This one really needs to be seen larger; click on it to see these people in better detail.

I feel like I owe these people some immortality, especially since I'm not passing on my genepool to anybody. It seems impossible but without all of them I wouldn't be here; and these are only a handful of my ancestors, the ones from my father's mother's line. They're like ghosts now, long gone to their rest, but they're also, well, still here, peering out from these photos.

Welcome, ancestors, to the internet.

Echoes of a Past Life - A Pile of Witchcrap

One of my goals in The Cahokian is to hold up a mirror to the world: to explore what "we" say about ourselves, whoever that "we" might be. "We" have a remarkable ability to delude ourselves, and to create defining myths out of wishful thinking. There are many good things about the United States, for example, but most of us living here would rather not think about all the things documented in my "Anti-Americana" series. Of course these outsider images of America are caricatures themselves, telling a different version of the story but not necessarily a complete one either.

The communities I have participated in all have their own identity myths; myths which are informed by facts but surely by the selective reporting of them. We fool ourselves in taking these myths too literally, I think. The politically active "out" lesbian and gay community loves to harken back to Stonewall, for instance, to the police raid on a corrupt mob-owned gay bar and the ensuing riotous aftermath. There's nothing wrong with seeing Stonewall as a landmark event in the struggle for gay equality and social acceptance, but focusing solely on it discounts a lot of other things that happened inside and outside the gay community in the 1960s and 1970s that led us to where we are today. Wherever that may be.

The Neo-Pagan community was all about self-invention. Neo-Pagans can be brilliant miners and archaeologists of library texts for discovering ancient practices to resurrect in modern times, usually omitting such excesses as human sacrifice. But they can also be poseurs, picking and choosing and blustering, experts at omitting inconvenient facts, and somewhat heartbreakingly gullible to the slightest suggestion of actual ancestral continuity. The foundational myth of Wicca is that Gerald Gardner learned witchcraft from a secret coven of witches in an English forest who had practiced pre-Christian Celtic religion in an unbroken ancestral line since before the middle ages. He validated his tale with some idyllic but questionable anthropology supplied by Dr. Margaret Murray, and voila, Neo-Paganism's instant pedigree.

I wrote the humorous bit of fiction below when I was feeling rather peevish toward Neopagans, perhaps after one too many Pagan festival with overlapping ren-faire/trekkie convention sensibilities, one too many obviously-invented ludicrous traditional claim, one too many bits of play-acting. In truth I think that the time is ripe for a relevant, reverent modern nature religion, and NeoPagans are to be commended for building a real established faith that even has the Pentagon granting pentacle-emblazoned tombstones to fallen Wiccan soldiers. But there are plenty of mysteries of faith upon which to meditate and expand one's consciousness without resorting to making up stories about the magic herbs granny kept in her secret stash, or inventing tales of egalitarian womyn-centered ancient utopias.

Anyway I don't remember what exactly set me off to write this piece, which I didn't finish nor publish (until now!), but I thought it would be funny to tell a de-romanticized shaggy-dog creation myth send-up of Pagan practices. Perhaps, no definitely, it was also obnoxious of me. I was leading up to a punchline I don't entirely remember about the word "witch" deriving from the word "twit." And yet, I think I'm actually making a valid point about how we tell the story of how we got here.

The relationship of our creation myths to the truth is not linear. This dates from about 1994.

The True History of the World: A Pile of Witchcrap
by Ian Scott Horst
(unpublished, unfinished manuscript)

Time: Approx. 30,000 years ago
Place: Somewhere in Europe

It was a cold winter, and the people stayed in the cave for weeks on end to avoid the winds and snows. Since soap had not yet been invented, it was smelly in the cave. Worse, the people were very bored, since yahtzee had not yet been invented either.

Ooga the hunter sat playing with her rocks. She had four of them, and arranged and re-arranged them on top of a bigger rock. There were, of course, lots of rocks in the cave.

Ooga's little son Urggie was playing with mud in the back of the cave. His hands were filthy. Well, actually, he was filthy all over. But as he tried to stand (something he had recently learned to do) he almost fell forward, and he braced himself with a dirty little hand on the cave wall.

"Urggie," said Ooga, looking up from her rocks, "look what you have done! You've gotten little hand prints all over the wall of the cave. Bad little cave-boy! Why don't you come over here and play with these rocks?"

Grogga, who lived with her sisters around the stinking pile of mammoth skins next to Oooga and Urrgie's stinking pile of mammoth skins, sneered at Ooga. "Ooh," she said to her sister Glogga. "I hate that Ooga. She's such a twit, always playing with those rocks. And that brat of hers. Look what he's done to the walls."

"Oh come on, Grogga," replied Glogga. "It's not like there's anything else to do around here. Besides, she says it's kind of like magic how playing with those rocks helps pass the time."

"I still say she's a twit."

Eventually, Ooga died of old age when she was 32. Her children continued to play with rocks, and taught their children how to play with rocks. Their neighbors always called them twits, too.

Grogga and Glogga died a year later when they were eaten by a saber tooth tiger. The tiger thought they were yummy, though the lice in their hair gave him indigestion.

Time: Approx. 10,000 years ago
Place: Somewhere in Europe

Kraka was really upset. "I am so sick of elk burgers. Elk steaks. Elk chops. Elk soup. Is that the only thing around here to eat?" She sat playing with three rocks and an elk bone which had been handed down through her family for generations. "At least I'm not bored, too." Actually four rocks had been handed down to her for generations; she'd lost one of the rocks a few summers ago after drinking too much fermented elk-milk.

There was sudden commotion outside her elk-hide hovel. Kraka heard shouts from the men and women assigned to guard their encampment. She stood, and stepped out of the hovel to see what the commotion was about.

"Let's ask the Twit, she'll know what to do!" said a man dressed in filthy elk skins. A loud murmur of agreement passed through the assembled crowd. The crowd moved toward Kraka's hovel.

"Oh great Twit, we have captured a stranger. What should we do?" From the center of the crowd, a burly man in a dirty elk-leather kilt shoved a small figure before him to the ground at Kraka's feet.

The man was slightly built, and his skin was darker than that of her people. "Hmmm. Too bad. I was hoping you might have found something good to eat," said Kraka. "OK, who are you and why shouldn't we kill you?"

The small man stood, and spoke in a thick Indo-European accent. "I am called Agri in my land, which is far, far from here. I come from the soon-to-be-fabled Fertile Crescent. Madam, if you would please introduce me to your chief I would have a few words with him."

Kraka looked doubtful. She sized up his scrawny thighs and thought that maybe he would be a nice change from elk meat. "Not a good enough answer. You there, Zug, get a spit and light a big fire. Our guest is staying for dinner!"

"But wait! I can show you many miracles!" chirped the small man.

"Look, I'm the Twit of this tribe, and miracles are my department. But OK, I will consult the sacred oracle." Kraka went back into her hovel and picked up her four rocks. Well, her three rocks and one elk bone. She shook them around and threw them in the dirt. Well, OK, there was a lot of dirt in the hovel: She threw them in the part of the dirt that she had specially tamped down for the purposes of magic oracles.

She gazed at the pattern of objects. "Hmm. The three of rocks and the one of bone. That's the same answer I got last time. This... this... is a synchronicity!" Kraka went back outside. "The oracle has spoken. It says to explain your miracle. And it it really is a miracle, we may let you live."

Agri reached into a small purse hanging from his waist and held out a handful of seeds. "This is the miracle."

"It looks like a handful of wild elk-feed to me," said Kraka, eyeing the seeds dubiously.

"Yes, it does. But if you place these seeds in the ground and water them well they will grow plants that bear a hundred more seeds. And when they grow you can grind them, mix them with water, and cook them and eat them."

The gathered members of the tribe began laughing wildly. "Elk-feed! He wants us to eat elk-feed! Hah hah hah..."

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," said Kraka. "Who would want to eat elk-feed but an elk? Go on, Zug, get the spit."

"I beg of you, give me a chance!" cried Agri.

Now Kraka, being a Twit and all, thought maybe she shouldn't be so rash. "OK. Plant your elk-feed. If what you say is true we will spare your life."

Agri carefully dug rows in the dirt and planted his precious seeds. The guffaws of the crowd were deafening.

A week later Kraka had grown impatient. She had been right; the thigh meat was lovely juicy change from elk.

But not long after that little shoots appeared in the dirt that had been furrowed by the late foreigner. And not long after that, the shoots grew into a field of lovely tall plants. And soon, as the foreigner had promised, thousands and thousands of little seeds sprouted from the tops of these plants.

Kraka was still skeptical, but recalled the words of the foreigner anyway. "What was that he said? Grind them and mix them with water?" She did as she remembered and soon had a messy yellow paste. She wrapped the paste in leaves and placed the bundles carefully around the edge of her fire. Soon a delicious aroma came from the bundles. She unwrapped one and nibbled at it. She couldn't believe it, but she had never tasted anything so delicious. It was crunchy and crispy (because yeast would not be invited until her great-great-great-granddaughter's time) and sodium free. She realized that her world would never be the same. Her head whirled with the thoughts of the potential of this new food. She realized this new thing would change her people's culture forever.

Kraka called together her people. "My people," she proclaimed, waving a piece of her hot-baked goody, "I have made a miracle. I name this new food after me. We are nomads no mo. We shall build permanent huts instead of hovels. We shall cultivate the fields. Let the arts and sciences flourish, whatever they are. And let our new ways, our new culture, be named for the mysterious stranger who brought the first of these seeds to our land. I proclaim the birth of Agri-culture!"

Months passed and the people flourished. Many of them, including Kraka herself, got very fat on the new food. No longer was it just elk burgers, but now elk burgers on whole wheat or white crackers, chicken-fried cracker-crumb-breaded-elk in white gravy, and elk popovers. Rigda, one of the tribal artisans, and the world's first chubby chaser, fell immediately in love with Kraka.

"Oh Kraka, I worship you. Let me carve a statue of you," he pleaded with her, basking in the glorious afterglow of one of their 30-second joinings.

At first Kraka was unsure of Rigda's intentions. But after seeing how lovingly he carved stones and bones into a curvaceous interpretation of her ample pulchritude, Kraka was overjoyed. Soon her new field-side hut was filled with little statuettes carved in her image.

Time: Approx. 9,950 years ago
Place: The same place in Europe

Azarak was Kraka's grandson. He was not the Twit of the tribe, though many thought he was a twit indeed. His older sister had inherited the spiritual reins of the community. In truth, Azarak was a bit of a laughing stock.

Once he, his sister Grelda and their friends were exploring a cave not far from their village. The cave was dark and deep, and their torches illuminated many strange and eerie paintings on the walls.

Poor Azarak suddenly had an attack of flatulence, the embarrassing noise reverberating in the darkness for several minutes. His sister and her friends made him feel like a fool, running around him in circles in sing-song childish voices teasing about the echo his farting had caused. [Wow, that is one seriously mean in-joke! "Ekko ekko Azarak!" is an allegedly traditional Wiccan chant. --ish]

He grew up unhappy and miserable, and vowed his revenge. The moment came when a travelling trinket salesman passed through the village on his way to the coast. Well, actually, he was not, strictly speaking, a salesman, since selling had not been invented yet. He was really a travelling barterman.

Azarak was sitting in the dirt outside the family hut scratching his fleas when the barterman walked up.

"Say, lad, I'm trying to invent commerce only I can hardly find anything in these parts worth bartering for. Everyone already has plenty of elk hides. Do you have anything I might be interested in? I'll make it worth your while."

Azarek remembered his sister's cherished collection of figurines handed down to her from her grandmother. "Well, I might. Come on in."

He lead the barterman over to a particularly squalid corner of the hut, and pulled aside a tattered, mouldering elk-hide. "My sister says that her grandfather made all these statues of my grandmother. He said he worshipped her."

The barterman remembered how on his travels far and wide people were always asking for figures. "I'll take them. What do you want in return?"

"What do you have," asked Azarak.

The barterman opened his elk-hide sack. "I have sticks. I have stones. I have elk bones. I have..."

Azarak's eye caught something in the sack. "What's that?"

"That? Oh that's very special. It's a new invention. It's called a bowl. It's been carved from a piece of wood far, far away from here. You use it to eat with."

"To eat with! What's wrong with using your hands?"

"No, no. You put food in it. They you stick your hands in the food."

"Oh, neat. I want that."

"Well, it's quite rare. You'll have to offer me something else as well."

Azarak thought a moment. "My sister has magic rocks. You can have of them." He looked around the hut and saw a particularly worn elk-skin bundle. He unwrapped it, and pulled out one of the three rocks inside.

"You say these are magic rocks"" asked the barterman. "What do you mean, magic?"

"My sister is the Great Twit of this village. She uses these rocks to consult the oracle."

"Well in that case, it's a deal. Here you go sonny."

And the barterman handed Azarak the rough wooden vessel, grabbed the proffered rock, and began to load the figurines into his sack. Azarak rubbed his hands together in glee, knowing how mad his sister would be upon discovering that one of her magic rocks and all of her family heirlooms were gone.

"Thank you, lad. Well now, I'll be on my way. I'll be back this way again in the spring. You see if there's anything else you want to trade. Remember me, the name's Hum-El. Bye, kid." And with that the barterman walked out of the hut and down the worn and rutted path out of the vilage.

Azarak's glee soon began to turn to worry. "What if my sister is angry with me? What have I done! She's the Twit!" He looked at his new prize with a sick feeling in his stomach. He farted.

"I better put this thing in place of the magic rock. Maybe she won't notice the difference,"he thought, as he stuffed the wooden bowl into the bundle containing the two remaining rocks and the elk bone.

And lo and behold, soon thereafter his sister was called upon to throw the sacred oracle. She cast the contents of the bundle into the dust and looked at the results with shock and disbelief. "I don't believe it! The two of rocks. The one of elk-bone, and one of, what is this thing? Some kind of cup or bowl? That's the first time this reading has ever happened. This is a powerful omen!"

And much to Azarak's dismay, his sister's standing with the tribe increased. His disappointment was short-lived, though, as he died soon after from eating some rotten elk-meat that had, it should be noted, turned completely green after sitting in the wooden bowl for two entire weeks. His sister always remembered the time she had teased him, and vowed to be kinder to her other brothers ever after.

Time: 3,000 years ago
Place: Still someplace in Europe

Gwindel thought of herself as a sharp dresser. And it was only right for the Twit of the tribe to care about her appearance. Gwindel would sit by the pond outside the village gaze at her reflection. She stuck leaves and flowers in her greasy, stringly hair and marvelled at the effect. The she would wrap a piece of elk skin around her head. This she loved even more. Once, she held an elk-skull to the top of her head. This was her favorite. She strapped the antler-bearing bones to the top of her head with strips of elk-leather and pranced about the paths of the village, singing rhymes her foremothers had passed down to her.

Gwindel loved to put things on her head.

[And sadly, dear reader, that is where the manuscript ends, except for a couple notes for future chapters, including one line of dialogue: "Ann, you have harmed none. Do what would wilt it." --ish]

New Tenants and the Folks Who Used to Live Here

Nicaragua doesn't have any pyramids. Further south than the historic homelands of the monument-building meso-American civilizations of pre-Hispanic times, it does however have many stone figures carved out of ubiquitous volcanic rock. I photographed this one on the island of Ometepe in the largest lake in the center of Nicaragua in 1986. To my dilettante's eye it looks far more Aztec in style than Mayan. It looks a bit like the "eagle knights" of Aztec military aristocracy.

I was walking around my neighborhood in Brooklyn today, which was pretty much entirely constructed in the first decade of the twentieth century on what had been farmland for the previous several hundred years of American and European settlement. My block of brownstones was thrown up in 1907, a bedroom community for the industrial zone along the shore. Its first residents were a wave of Scandinavian immigrants, though its many classically-styled Lutheran churches are pretty much the only remaining trace of northern European ethnicity here; today it's a melting pot of Latin and East Asian immigrants, with smaller numbers of South Asians and "white" people (recognizing that color is a particularly imprecise measure here). Anyway it feels like an old, established, somewhat decaying neighborhood...and it's barely a hundred years old. No matter how many holes you dig, try as you might, you're not going to find anything man-made here older. The next neighborhood over has a stone farmhouse and few wooden frame ones going back a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty years more, but that's it.

I often wonder how that lack of a visible past affects our consciousness. In Mexico, in Europe, the past is all around you, layer on top of layer. But in Sunset Park, even the Mexican immigrants whose ancestors' civilization's remnants are clear to see back home are as rootless here as the rest of us.

The presence of Native Americans here before the Dutch and their bags full of clocks has an imaginary quality about it: we know they were here before but you can't easily prove it. Sure in upstate New York, even out on Long Island, there are Indian Reservations with real-live people in them descended from those original inhabitants, doing what they can to survive and preserve tradition and identity in a melting-pot world that has treated them particularly badly. But there's not even any stone statues here reminding us that this place used to be different. And whether, or maybe how, that state of difference was better or worse than today becomes a minefield of conflict between nostalgia and progress, racism and consciousness, evidence and imagination. What are our obligations of respect, of gratefulness, of acknowledgement?

There's no pyramids here either.

My Great Great Grandfather

I've written elsewhere about the journey of my father's father's family from Russia to the United States. Here's a little bit about my father's mother's family. It's the most "American" branch of the family: unlike the immigrant Volga-Germans, German-Germans, Irish, and secret Jews comprising the rest of my ancestors, the Scott wing seems to have come to these shores before there was an actual United States. I was recently sent a box of old photos from my grandmother's estate--she's been gone a long time but these were floating around somewhere--and included is this amazing photo of my great great grandfather William W. Scott, of Vicksburg, Michigan. He's shown in his Union Army uniform in 1865. I don't have a lot of documentation of any of my family roots, but I know at least that William Scott was born in Indiana in 1844, and died in 1918. He was married to Maria Decker, and among his children was my grandmother Dorothy's father, Clinton R. Scott, a dentist in Marcellus, Michigan (who married Dora Kimble--sometimes spelled Kimball), born in 1868.

It's amazing to see this young man of 20 or 21, just before starting his family, perhaps on discharge from service in the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Here's another photo, undated, but apparently in some sort of parade in the 1910s. On the back is pencilled in "Dr. W. W. Scott".

The Scotts had lots of children. I'm sure my distant cousins are legion. I don't know when they settled in that part of Michigan: but my father was born there and my grandmother didn't leave there until the 1950s. My grandmother herself was one of many siblings: I met her oldest sister Ruth once, the beloved daughter of the family who died in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a nursing home in California. The photos of the Scott children in the early 1900s show pampered middle-class children in tree-lined small town idle. My great aunt Frances Scott, gramma's sister, was a photographer--and more-or-less out lesbian--in Mill Valley, California from the 1950s through her passing in the 1980s. It makes me wonder, given this family blessing, what it would have been like to be gay in William W. Scott's generation: was it always a suppressed and hidden inner struggle, or were there blue-coated brothers in some former secret army of lovers?