History

“What kinds of movies do you like?” the Frenchwoman asked. We had just finished watching the film Carnivale at the Seattle Alliance Francaise. I had agreed to volunteer for the night, collecting tickets at the door.

“Ones with lots of color and spectacle, good music and pageantry. Each shot should stand alone as a composition. I like the films of Tarsem Singh and Shekhar Kapur, Baz Luhrman and Jane Campion,” then, mindful of the company, “and Michel Gondri and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.”

“I prefer ones of ordinary life,” she said. “For anthropological reasons. In a hundred years it will be good to see and hear how people of the last century acted.”

I have wondered what it would be like to spend a day with every one of my ancestors who shared my last name, tracing back thru centuries till I landed somewhere in a forest in mediaeval Britain. But to be balanced, it seems best to let microscopes and mitochondrial mapping taking me as far as they lead through the matriarchs, beyond any name can say. It would pass thru Italy, but Italians have come from somewhere. Greece? Turkey? Mesopotamia? Ethiopia?

Go back further than families to the collective tale of the Earth, and history reads like the foundation of Greek myth, with its cast of beloved and tragic characters bullied about by time:

Pangaea breaks and divides Tethys into the several oceans. Blue turns to green and the green marches over the land. Seeds split. Cells divide. Trilobites proliferate and disappear, the dinosaurs rise and fall. Life makes space for life. Animals walk out of the sea, then bargain away their legs and slip back. Birds keep their wings and forget flight. Somewhere in Africa, someone drops from a tree and does not climb back up. And out beyond the Earth, stars separate from nebulae, flame, and spin off planets of their own. A unity divides and divides and divides.

The rest is history.

The human life-span is too short to take in the scope of something so great and so ancient as the Earth. We can’t even begin to compare to some of the other organisms. There are oysters that live for several centuries, trees for millennia, and there are lichens that may even be approaching the tens of thousands. (I would like to be indignant that a lichen gets to spend 10,000 years clinging to a rock, but I can’t argue that my scant 26 years have so far been that much more influential.)

And I don’t have the memory of a Bristlecone pine, laying down the years by millimeter till they tally some 4,000 together – fat rings when the summers were good, sparse ones for famine. A tree that old knows how the world has done for itself in all that time.

For myself, though, every event that led up to the year of my birth – and for most thereafter – I have had to go on faith alone to believe. I was not around for any ‘magna-this’ or ‘declaration-of-that.’ I don’t know what a passenger pigeon looks like, let alone tastes. With difficulty, I can imagine all of Canada under ice, or Antarctica a jungle, as the bone-collectors and rock hounds maintain. All of this I had to read somewhere or hear off of someone, or sometimes even watch a movie about it, and believe that the divination was right.

I want to believe and I want to see. I want to see Glacier National Park while it is still worthy of that name, and not believe alone that there had once been ice there. I want to see the space between the mountains before they get mucked up again in some new-fangled way. I want to be a traveler in the grizzly kingdom while its still an unconditional monarchy. I want to see now what people of a hundred years will want to know.

I think now I understand the Frenchwoman’s point. But I wouldn’t care to watch a movie about ordinary life, or to make one, even if it were mine. Especially if it were mine.

Screw the anthropologists.

I'm not interested in leaving behind testament. I’d rather be out, somewhere in the trees, folding little origami cranes and teaching them to fly.