Some of my earliest writing projects took place at my elementary school, where I labored to ink up my pages with stories of my family, my neighborhood, and my imagination. One project we had came in the form of a contest: the city of Los Altos sought to distinguish a historic site and allowed its youngest and finest minds to define a "Historic Site", the contest winner was to be announced along with the lucky building. Perhaps we should have read as a sign that the rumblings beneath our feet in 1989 were the growing pains of a situation so young that the earth was still trying to throw it off.
I chose as my subject a sepia-toned house in our neighborhood. It stood on the corner in brown shingles and smoke stained window dressings among a dusty dirt field where there grew stunted fruit trees that only produced brown fruits. I hated the house, it wasn't scary, it didn't house a grumpy oldster, nor a hundred cats, but it's complete brownness annoyed me like a scab on my knuckle. You can't go about your life without noticing it there, existing, annoying. I chose the house because it was old, erected between World Wars I and II and my case for its historicity stopped there. The final project was weak, and I knew it as a fourth grader. Pleading, I thought after printing it out, the desire to preserve this house as civic historic relic just have the passion to convince. I sighed at its amateurish arguments, but the due date approached and I turned in my beseeching paper, hoping against hope that it would win and the house would not.
More than a decade later in my final year at Berkeley I had a professor of 20th century English lit that bored me to tears, lecturing ingeniously in a robotic tone of voice that never changed. He vented from his pulpit as he turned ancient notes without looking, divining their words like Ms. Cleo reading a fortune. As a result of his class I have some strange doodles and a remarkable portrait of the man eating plant from "Little Shop of Horrors". One day though, riffing away from his notes on the topic of earthquakes, bay area geography and it's history, he mentioned a fact that impressed me so much that I wrote it down in the middle of a blank sheet and commenced to doodle a magnificent frame for this knowledge knugget: Two-hundred years ago, in this place (the Bay Area) there was nothing. . . no Memorial Stadium, no Golden Gate Bridge, Coit tower, no paved road, no port, no park. A smattering of rugged frontier ranchers, native Costanoan tribes, and the missionaries who came to convert them. Nothing as we know it.
From that moment on I began to consider the relative newness of the place where I come from. Below our feet, Californians, there is precious little but earth, an earth that shakes us up from time to time. Where then, is the history that we call our own? Is it in films? Is it ghost towns left from the gold rush? Is it The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby car culture of LA surface routes? Is it the new-age Lulu Lemon tall yoga latte we like to drink on our way to work? It must be all these things. Except for a few artifacts like leftover boomtowns, California history is remarkably contemporary. When trends and fashion are history in minutes after their conception, what is the true history of the place?
It is obvious that I am leaving out so much of California history: Missions, Manzanar, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Donner party to name a few. However, there is a conspicuous lack of durable, plastic evidence of California's history. Our houses are built of wood, they rot and go up in flames. Furthermore, we have an obsession with renovation (a word we took right out of French when the Normans invaded England in 1066). Our lack of tangible history and constant desire for newness has led to a distortion on our lens of history (probably shared by most states in our republic) making it seem that it is something distant and disconnected from the lives that we live today.
Coming to France, and to a degree my time in India, has helped me make a more personal connection to history. For my whole life I have understood why it is important to understand the past but it stood before me like El Capitan. Where do I place my hands to climb a wall of rock when there is no handhold? Suddenly I now find myself in a place where history is around every bend in the road. It is every bend in the road. I can take my scooter just a minute from where I park it down the ancient Aurelian Way to Glanum, a ruined Gallo-Roman city. From there I can follow a path to Les Baux, a medieval fortress city settled in 6000 b.c. and more recently the seat of a powerful feudal lordship that sought to control the region of Provence. Not to mention the 15th century Jewish cemetery I crossed yesterday on the route near Glanum. There would be no end to my list if I tried to name all the leftovers of history in this place.
When history abounds not just in quantity, but in it's reality, it is suddenly hard to believe, but as you climb through the arcade of a Roman arena and watch the traffic swirl around in the streets just below, a place once only dreamed of in myth and fairytale materializes, it's magic. As I have to end this rambling post somewhere, look where you are, what surrounds you, what thoughts are in your head. All that stuff is history, we are sitting on loads of it, and most of the time we don't even notice.
Bon courage!
mercredi 17 septembre 2008
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1 commentaire:
FYI the king at Les Beax, don't know the date as that is Lukes specialty, used to find entertainment in forcing un-parollable prisoners to leap off the highest part of the fortress. Just a little Mr.Ripley-esque gore for ya. Love love love.
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