Journey to the Underworld
I've been gone for a lot of reasons. First, I was working on my novel, tentatively titled "Happily Ever After." Then I had a flurry of violin gigs, and around the same time the exigencies of moving reared their hydra heads. Now I am full-on sorting and packing 24/7, except right now I have a tiny bit of downtime.
The difficulty of sorting is due not only to the mountains of books our family of readers has accumulated over several generations. I am making my heroic (or quixotic) way through my grandparents' heavy-handed moral, sentimental, and religious tomes, my aunt's poetry collections, my father's instructional musicological texts, as well as some literature by his friends and acquaintances, my mother's art historical and Egyptological books, an assortment children's books from multiple generations, my daughter's complete works of Tennessee Williams, together with a good dose of Carson McCullers, my son's history and film collection, and my husband's and my own English Ph.D. libraries.
More time-consuming are the mountains of letters. Thank goodness for the evanescence of the telephone and the email, or I would never be finished. It's's not just that there are so many letters, either. There are a lot. For example, I sent the Center for American War Letters about 160 communications between my grandmother and my grandfather in World War I, and there's more material from World War II from the next generation. But that was primarily a sorting problem, since I had read a lot of the letters before. The hardest thing is reading the letters that resonate with me emotionally in a painful way. It has been especially painful to spend so much time in the mid-twentieth century. I know American life was far from perfect. Oberlin was a privileged community, but more for white males than anyone else. Nevertheless, my mother, my father, and every one of my father's colleagues, fellow artists, and former students who corresponded with him were talented, interesting, engaged and energetic people, dedicated to culture and civilization. It is hard to read of their deaths and to think of the aspirations of the world of my childhood all come to naught as we enter an age of fascism and ignorance.
Adding to this sense of tragic loss is the feeling I get disposing of Dad's musical scores and those of his students and colleagues. To be clear, almost all of Dad's scores are archived at the American Composers Alliance, and I am not throwing out any that aren't. The students, friends, and colleagues took responsibility for their own scores, I hope. Still, since Dad had to hand-write every note and hand-copy each part for his works, and they are all that is left of the art he dedicated his life to, it's hard to watch them go. I feel similarly, though not as intensively, about throwing out my mom's laboriously collected and organized slides of art, even though that material is readily available on the internet now.
Return to the Land of the Living
Once when we were visiting my husband's history-buff uncle in Nebraska and went down in the basement to look at pictures of the old family farmhouse, old newspapers, and V-mails, the uncle's wife stuck her head around the door at the top of the stairs and announced, "If you're ready to return to the land of the living, lunch is served." I will now throw a similar bucket of cold water over my own head and return to my own attempts to carry forward a cultivated, civilizing (in all the best and none of the colonial or racist senses) legacy.
I am, however, quite behind in chronicling these attempts. Despite my distractions, I have produced stuff, and things have happened in my writing life. I plan to describe all this in briefer posts going forward, so here I will just call attention to my poem, "Power," which is in the "soup can" complaint anthology linked under the picture at the top of this post (thanks, Red Focks). In my poem, Power is presented allegorically as a bad internet dating hookup. As Power persecutes both the narrator who summoned him and a person described initially as "a bum," both the "bum" and the narrator are humanized. I like what I did there.
If you are likewise feeling discontented with anything going on in our world, pick up a copy of that anthology and connect with fellow metaphorical soup-can throwers. You are not alone.
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