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The spring days are chilling, though outside the air is bright like crystal. It is green here in Washington, D.C., and after all the years I had forgotten. Upstairs in my bedroom I can see the tops of trees, like when I was a kid living in the attic, its third floor, and my kinship with all who lived in the uppermost regions of branches and leaves. No wonder I want to be with birds.
Going through the endless, disgusting piles of family history, I have found some jewels, though I don't have the historian's happiness or the researcher's calm. I go through the materials like a lion trying to rip something apart that insists instead upon getting bigger and more strong as I wrestle. I know the materials are pounding me down, that I am losing the battle though I continue, merciless upon my own faltering self, going through more, and more, as though, as though ... what? What is it I think will happen? As though some golden miracle will open up the sky and rain down the answers, if I just find that one key old photograph.
But of course such a thing does not happen and anyway how would I know if it did? I sit in that musty and dusty basement, oppressed and unhappy, aimlessly wandering through the scraps of this family, finding plenty of gold, probably, but there are so many unearthed piles, so much still to look through, it doesn't seem fitting to linger with what I've got in my hands. OK, I think to myself, there it is, that's good, OK, but what's over there in that pile? Finally I made a system of 20 or so labeled boxes so that I could go back and find again what I've unearthed, these boxes laid out on the double bed incongruously sitting smack in the middle of my parents' basement. The boxes used to house my mother's old checks. They threw away everything that mattered, and kept the stuff that you could easily replace! Jeeesh! my mother says of the fact that my father sent a handyman down to the basement and had him throw away anything dated prior to, oh say, 1980. Key financial records, gone, major papers documenting the history of the family business, what they did and when, and how... gone. This is the story of my parents' one big battle. She is an accumulator, he a... what? What is the word for him, for was he simply battling against her constant tendency to gather and keep everything, what he saw as a constant array of useless junk? Or did he have inside him an equal and opposite tendency to clean things out, keep life simple and organized, to disburse away from himself what was not essential? I think he did. And I feel these two tendencies working their way through my soul. For many years I was unequivocally on my mother's side – feeling my father's sometimes cruel tendency to throw away what mattered to my mother to be what it was, a real disrespect. Still, some new tendency has come upon me, I notice, particularly as I was cleaning out my house and my life to leave Santa Cruz for a year researching my family's history. Here, take this, I said endlessly to my friends. I sold all sorts of useless (now, to me) things at a huge yard sale. This was the act of someone about to die, and this was no little metaphor but the truth as I was going through a death of a certain self, a life, an attitude – in order to absorb an even older family truth.
So now I come to understand my father's instincts even as I hate his methods. Traveling with my mother to Ireland recently I watched in amazement as she collected little shampoo bottles from each hotel, to bring home and add to her collection of hundreds of equal little bottles and shitty little shampoos. Who knows, some day we could need these things, she tells herself of her hoarding, and everyone will thank god I saved them. On the Russian flight home the stewardess tried to hand me a little doll with a bottle of cheap perfume inside, and I said No, no give it to someone else, and my mother, to my astonishment, though she had one in her hands, said she'd like to have mine too. Why on earth? I asked and she said you never know, maybe she'd give it as a gift. And I shook my head and felt my father's disgusted grunt move through me. OK, OK, I said to his ghost traveling with us, don't think I 'll go all the way into your camp. But, it is amazing isn't it? and he smiled and said Yep you know now what I mean.
And still I think, reading as I am Michael Ortiz Hill's Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Right of Passage, that some end is coming – a change of an era and with it great upheaval – and there will be those of us who prepared by divesting ourselves, and those who prepared by hoarding. At my mother's it could be that those little bottles of shampoo save us from some dirt ... assuming we have water... and who knows what else she has accumulated that will make a difference in that world where all structure has fallen apart and there is nothing left?
One dream Ortiz Hill quotes made me think of what it must have been like during the Great Famine in Ireland:
A terrible, apocalyptic time. Nature is being destroyed, everything is disintegrating, and we are all going to die. It could be the result of war or it could be something else. The most obvious aspect is the physical disintegration and chaos. In the house, everything is permeated with dirt and is disarranged. Our mood is that of people with a fatal disease who are waiting to die.
Last week I went to a lecture on the Great Famine by Joe Lee, a professor at Cork University and an Irish Senator. The figure: 1.1 million people dead. Ten times greater than any famine of this century. Over 2 million Irish emigrate to the United States and Britain. All of this in just four years, between 1846 and 1850. A population decimated and halved. Here is the trend it initiated and which continues today: 8.5 million people lived in Ireland in 1840; 4 million people lived there in 1910. Currently, 3.5 million Irish live in Ireland. And get this:
44 million Irish-Americans live in the USA. 44 million. The Famine was the death knell of a country, Professor Lee said. The Irish-speaking Ireland, the poorer classes, the ancient and historic culture of the country, three-quarters buried.
Imagine the psychological torture, says Professor Lee. Does a starving family feed the breadwinner in the hope he could earn enough to buy food for the rest, or feed the weakest, the child in immediate danger of dying? These were heartbreaking day-to-day decisions, made within the family, by the mother usually. There were cases of cannibalism, Professor Lee said, but the bulk of the Irish died decently, sometimes in one other's arms. And this evoked for me
W. B. Yeats' opening lines in "Sailing to Byzantium":
That is no country for old men. The young
in one another's arms, birds in the trees,
– Those dying generations –
The famine decomposed a society, says Professor Lee, killed from the inside out. Although there were work-house deaths, deaths on the roads and in ditches, most deaths occurred at home within families. Death from starvation, he says, takes about two months. Death from famine fever, apparently the more common way famine struck, took 11 days. Think of the decisions regarding the allocation of food, think of it. The calculation necessary, a kind of constant form of life-boat economics – which loved one gets thrown overboard, and who first?
Professor Lee is interested in memory. By definition only survivors live to tell the tale. And who are they? How do they live? The poorest died, simply. Those with some little money kept some members of the family alive, perhaps sent one son or one young couple away. They held an American Wake, for those leaving were as good as dying, would not be seen again. There was tearful breaking away as the survivors were put upon a boat and all prayed it would arrive safely in harbor, for so many boats sunk in the rough Atlantic during the 1840's that they were called coffin ships. And what is the memory of a famine survivor? They have sailed away, and again the metaphors do not do justice, for they themselves are in a sinking ship, they may not survive the passage, and still, and still, it is the sinking ship of their mother country that they cannot bear to leave and must leave, to become the ancestors of those 44 million in America. To live when so many of the rest will die.
They were filled with a sense of guilt, not anger, but guilt – why me? Why did I survive? And here, Professor Lee says, Holocaust oral history helps, for though the Great Famine is by no means the Holocaust, still there is a common theme of response of survivors to great extremity. Irish-American history in the 1850's shows a "seething vortex of hideous memories... combustible victimhood, a sense of inarticulate rage." Letters that made their way from Ireland to America surely contained some hideous news, the death of a parent, often, and there was a sense of great failure, in a culture with family so central to identity, to miss a funeral. It was a rupture, the sense of breaking, with many a wound raked over anew. And the children in an immigrant family – Where's granny? Where are the memories? How are they transmitted? Where is the continuing relationship with Ireland, and what shall that be, if anything? H ow is collective memory transmitted? What is transmitted, Professor Lee asks, and what is lost?
We are the descendants of the dying culture of Ireland, of the survivors who ultimately sailed to these shores and stonily looked ahead. I am the granddaughter of an Irishwoman whose father and mother were born into the ravaged aftermath of the Famine, a country dumbstruck with shock. Annie Breheny Flynn arrived on this land in 1914, a laughter-filled beauty whose throat was filled with silences. They never talked about anything, says my sister who spent her summers with Grandma Flynn and Aunty May. The silence was thick as the air, transmuted into endless family battles, alcoholism and despair. Silence consumed us, flooded the half-whispered family stories as they leaked out over the years. It bled from my Aunt Pauline's womb as she and her first child died in childbirth in 1945. It thickened as my Aunt May as a young woman crashed head-first into the windshield of her lover's car. It rattled in the furious tremors as her sister Peggy died an alcohol-induced death twenty years later. Silences explode us from within, like famine eats us, so that we die from inside out. The oppressor no longer need do a thing. What dies inside continues to kill, if it has not been able to die all the way, properly into the realm of the dark. What has died but does not really die looks for any kind of refuge and crouches there. Whole selves remain crouched in those places for entire lifetimes, alone and unknown, even to themselves.
I find myself thinking of my Aunt May, who I loved, and the life she lost in the windshield and the life she could never recover because silence is a long-learned and harsh ruler. Her accident became confined to a black box, fairly bulging, of what was not to be spoken. What is not spoken cannot be grieved, healed, known or, ultimately, released. These were survivors, and descendants of survivors. As am I. My grandmother Annie Breheny Flynn was determined to come to the U.S. and make a future out of air for her children. And I imagine her daughter May as a young girl living in a household with three families in two bedrooms – gazing in the mirror for afternoons at a time, seeing a beautiful, separate creature there, someone who had the possibility of escape. All cracked as the mirror shattered in front of her, as she was thrown through a windshield. Afterwards mirrors became death-wielding things which she covered in black, evoking a funeral, for a girl had died, and desperation had been born. It wore a face with scars that eventually healed but the eyes of a heartbroken soul.
Sometimes in those early days of our childhood Aunt May could glare at you across the room as though the devil owned you and only her eyes could begin to assess the damage. It seems Aunty May was always yelling at us, says my sister. And there was some problem between her and Aunty Peggy, but they never talked about it so I never really knew...
But of course you knew, dear sister, of course you knew, you ate it in your summer stew and shit it out each night in the little cramped bathroom. Of course you knew, because silence looms so loud that children imbibe it via the pores of their skin, and through the openings of their souls that are so able to hear invisible songs. Children know everything and we forget this because we are the children who once knew everything and had to forget. There was steep punishment for coming near to truth. Ma Flynn could grab a grandchild by the ear and squeeze until she'd squeezed out the gallons of tears she wanted. She swam in those tears and us children did too, and we remembered, then – we remembered to forget; it wasn't to be spoken and it wasn't to be said and it wasn't to be known. We became adults who had known everything and who had swum in and drunk up our own forgetting.
And the children in our arms – we've forgotten too that they know everything, and when they show us their knowledge some forgotten fear rises up inside us to kill the thing, for that is what we learned all survival depended upon. Kill the thing the rage rose up inside us and however we managed it, we too tried to smother the knowledge in the young around us. We too, we could not escape, though the times were different and we'd drunk in the Beatles All you need is love, everybody now... And though the bitter juice my generation sipped was more likely from a synthetic bottle rather than our mothers' breasts, the formula as sure as ever contained the right combination of chemical-induced intoxication from truth. We were of a different era and we said we'd do it differently and we did, we did, we really did, but we were of a different kind not a different order. One cannot escape one's ancestors, the shouting within us, and voices strewn across the drowned landscapes of our souls. We all swim that landscape together, us and the dead around us, except now the dead are not so afraid of truth and are tired of the silences they taught us so well. Tell the story! they cry out but we all say No Grandma! I don't remember! Don't you remember what you taught me? And some remnant ghost of that accordion-playing Annie Flynn cries out Tell the story! Tell my story! I don't want to die forever....
And so this is it. This is what the ancestors want, and who can blame them? They don't want to die forever. They want to live in that elusive thing Professor Lee was talking about, they want to live in memory and who does that fall to but their descendants? It is our job to sing them into memory, and with them all who came before them. But we don't know their stories, we don't know their heartaches, their truths, and who cares about this, who cares, but the ghosts, the dead ones, the ones aching, aching. For what? They are now in a realm in which they see all. They are themselves and they are not themselves, they are like those children with open souls who could drink invisible songs, it's all around them now and it doesn't kill – It doesn't kill, they want to shout to us, no matter what we thought when we were with you – The stories don't kill, but the loss of them does. You don't have to die that silenced, famine-struck death. You are not wrong to be the descendants of survivors, you are not wrong to be on this earth. Don't believe what I taught you! Don't believe what I inscribed on your soul! Listen past that to this song as the trees rustle next to you. That's me, I tell you, that's me! I'm trying to get to you! What are the tools I have but this earth, conspiring to help me tell my tale...
And so, my father did his duty, threw out everything with stories, threw out anything that was dusty and ugly and shouted history. He was taught well and with strong, determined hands. He loved his mother Ma Flynn with the kind of love the Irish do so well – a kind of veneration bordering on sainthood and the equal sense that mothers are flitting creatures to be protected and chuckled at. Mother looms large and is ignored in equal parts by Irish men, and by mother of course I mean The Mother writ large, the She who inspired so much poetry and awe the first many millennia of human culture. Now dead in a bathtub, now imprisoned in someone's backyard. ...now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, writes Yeats in "The Second Coming." We are at the end of the twenty centuries and surely something is coming, some rough beast, its hour come round at last... And we whose life purpose is to face this coming, this beast, this chaos born of change as some new cycle is painfully born and something old dies, what of us? I am the child of this apathy and this hostility, this twenty centuries of nightmare, and I sit in my parents' basement surrounded by the ancestors' lives and their stories and all I want is to flee in terror. The bile rises in my throat and wasn't I taught, too, wasn't I taught that it is sacrilege and the stories are dangerous? I sit in the burning basement and the hidden stories are full of heartbreak, though the people in the photographs are smiling, mostly, the stories are napalm to my skin and death to the song in my throat. Suddenly I can't breathe and I think it's the mustiness of the basement and I think I've got to work somewhere else, I can't work here. I open the little basement door and outside there is sunshine and dogwood blossoms and probably a mourning dove will sing to me if I wait long enough. In here are the stories and I say: Forget it. What did you think, I could just simply fly out of your legacy and become someone else altogether? What did you think, that I was immune to the heartache, and the terror? Forget it. Isn't there sunshine outside that door? Why must I live here and drown here? Someone said a basement is like a fallout shelter, where one can go to escape, but in truth it is the place we face ourselves. Well, I don't like what I see. I've got to get a little sunshine or I will surely die, expire onto these piles of photographs screaming their unsaid stories, like so much flattened memory. Is that what you want, for me to join you prematurely? I'm getting out of here, and out of here and far away from here.
And the ancestors say, Yes go. It is right. You are the instrument of our faith. So go, dear one, fly away. Surely it is us who taught you to fly all those years ago, and surely it is us who will bring you here again, down into this basement. But birds do need to fly and in that flight, look down and see what even we sometimes can't. So go, dear one. Go. You will be back.
From New to North America: Writings by U.S. Immigrants, Their Children and Grandchildren, Burning Bush Publications, 1997
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