Phylogeny

Stockholm again. It might be evening or it might be afternoon. I don't know. I can't see the time stamp.

I guess it emerges from travel. Or it might be the product of many evenings on no sleep, or as many evenings nad nights spent exploring the depths of family histories: you know the kind with obscure anecdotes and punch-lines which require the juggling of some half dozen characters where "he thought that she said the dogs and the goats belonged to the new guy but it was all really a ploy...". I suppose it is a counterbalance to the barriers put up by language. A reacquaintance with the history of family and a rehashing of the wampeters of some ancestor's karass.

Don't accept what they tell you: in this country and in this open, unstable society we choose our relevant others--the ones whose stories and meandering phylogenies we choose to give a shit about, the ones who inspire these rambling cries of a dispossessed, rootless cosmopolitan cat at some unknown hour at some on-again-off again dying Swedish keyboard, fax machines and televisions and 15 years worth of catching up all around. Anyway, I don't accept the essentialism of family, appealing as unconditional love can be at times. But I am leaning more toward accepting my ancestry and looking at how heritage before my time came to define me: how I think and how I twitch and how I speak and how I do or do not solve problems; how I write and what parts of the temendous historical frescoes I deem relevant--that is a huge Question for me, salience. What comes from accepting all the innumerable goatherds, petty and important aristocrats, thieves, nomads, Communists, monarchists, alcoholics, fools, bards, romantics, merchants, Jews, madmen, poets, warriors, educators, housekeepers and beggars that in their way contributed to me? I know the cheapness of a list of adjectives, so I will stop. But try to understand their stories: their trials are part of my oral history, my handed-down mythology for better or worse. Try to read between the lines at the conversations in smoky kitchens I participated in or overheard. How divorce bowed my poor mother down. How other women never recovered. How I was conceived as the first child of petty bourgeois aspirations: destined to be a doctor or lawyer or high-ranking journalist. Can you see? Suddenly music lessons and alternative schools make sense? The upshot of all this musing is, as usual, a visceral re-affirmation of some hopeless truism: that we cannot know who we are until we have some ideas of where we come from, what expandin historical lineage we are supposed to promulgate. Phylogeny is essential for studying evolution in any meaningfully interesting way. Interesting to realize that phylogeny is just family history on a large scale.

It is what counters my language barrier separation anxiety. I cannot--thouh it hurts to accept--grasp all the breadth of the world's stories and cries, al lthe world's fearful anxieties and dreams, but there exists--below me, if you will--an untapped source that is me and is not me.

But don't forget that we are free to choose. There is half of my family history that I stand ambivalent on: the male-line descent which I'm sure would be as interesting and silly and harrowing were I to forgive and forget and start giving a shit. Maybe I will, one day. Maybe I will undertake that modern spiritual journey to the Old Country to chase the shade of my father. If there is money. As far as it stands, a mild brush with that balkanized part of the world is quite enough for me.

Somewhere back there I started talking to myself. For that, I am sorry.

Consider: "Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."