Sunday, June 13, 2010

Faded Photographs...and Other Traces


"Memories light the corners of my mind...

Misty, watercolored memories of the way we were."


I don't believe in an afterlife in heaven or hell. I think you only last in the hearts and minds of the people who remember you, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the stuff we loved and touched and cherished contains a part of us that lives on beyond the memory of mortals.

I have kept tons of stuff from my parents and theirs and even of great-grandparents I never knew. Only some of them actually constitute treasured memories, and yet...it's hard to let that stuff go. Why?

I'm wrangling with these questions because of all the stuff. (Yes, I love and believe George Carlin's ramblings about stuff!) I love the stuff because it triggers memories and because it belonged to family and loved ones. But I don't need them to remember the person, and much of it has become a sort of psychic burden. Why is it so hard to let things go?

My friend Chris recently and admirably let stuff go with a vengeance. And she was an only child whose parents both died within six weeks of each other. She knows her extended family well, and still she has let stuff go. I'm in awe.

I'm actually dismayed at what I don't know and will never know about my family history. I didn't ask in time. I didn't care in time. So why does it matter now?

James Hillman, in his book The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, says:

"[Our] uniqueness is reflected in the stuff left on the dresser, the reading glasses on the nightstand, the trivial accumulations in the desk drawer that no one knows what to do with but are handed down as 'valuables.' Useless irrelevancies, yet now imbued with the specialness of art objects. Does the irreplaceable soul of the deceased pass into these ordinary bits of matter?...

"Is our image located only in the memory of those who remember us? Or does character remain in the objects collected, the tools used, the places inhabited. Perhaps history lives in the world's memory beyond human rememberings."

He wonders if we project onto the objects or if the objects reach out to us. Has the departure of these things' living companions transferred to the objects some of the person's former life?

He goes on..."Can a person become an epiphany? Can we entertain the idea that all along, our earthly life has been phenomenal, a showing, a presentation. Can we imagine that at the essence of human being in an insistence upon being witnessed -- by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself -- and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display? The image will out, and the last years [of life] put the final finish to the image.

"We are left as traces...lasting no longer than a little melody, a unique composition of disharmonious notes, yet echoing long after we are gone. This is the thinness of our aesthetic reality, this old, very dear image that is left and lasts."

Perhaps this idea is reflected in the value of provenance when people sell old stuff.

In which case, no damage is done by letting all that stuff go.






Monday, June 7, 2010

Irrigation — the Stuff of Life

Heat brings desert conflagration
Cool is river irrigation
There's a line of demarcation
'Tween the green and brown.

If you fly into Grand Junction during the summer, you see a verdant valley rimmed crisply and abruptly in brown. This is the line between dry desert and irrigated desert. Life abounds in both areas, but it clusters in the green. Happy Valley. Pleasant Valley. Grand Valley.

The Grand River runs through it. That grand river is now known as the mighty Colorado. Canals off the river carry water to land that without it would be as brown as the surrounding public land, which isn't irrigated.

We moved here from Austin, Texas. Hot. Huge. Humid. Green. We'd never seen swamp coolers, or seemingly infinite amounts of public land, or ditch irrigation.

Irrigation is a miracle. A life saver; a life giver. Nothing new to most people, but to us, with a little ditch running through our property, it was a revelation.

I arrived April 13, 2001, and it was already running. A tiny but enduring moat that cut our main yard off from the front parking lot (it's big) and the pastures. I instantly became a Ditch Bitch. I loved it then; I love it still.

It runs from April to November, every year, all the time, a constant flow of Colorado river in our front yard. A miracle of human engineering as old as the desert itself. You expect a river to flow and flow, but a ditch? In your front yard? Water you can use tor seven months to make your little homestead a productive, living thing of beaury and bounty? For $100??!!!

Yikes. We have 5 acres, no small amount of land to keep from turning back to brown desert. And keeping it green through a hot and dry summer is no small feat to accomplish without pipe, knowledge, time, and perseverance.

But even if the land around it does go back to desert, the mere fact of two feet of water streaming endlessly through a tiny ditch is incredibly amazing. We can tell when it rains in the mountains above Aspen. The ditch runs red and muddy, colorado in Spanish. Then we have to clear the filter so our sprinkler system works.

No matter. It's all just wonderful. At night during the full moon, you can stand and look at your very own Moon River...and it seems as grand as the river that feeds it. I love it.