(Still trying to kick this blog to life...there will be a third start.)
“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your
childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of
glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign
land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to
aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of
'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to
places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and
conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been
looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden
for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed
everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of
Time and Memory.”
― Thomas Wolfe
The idea that we can never go home again must be one of the
most quoted in all of literature, especially when thinking about all the allied
ideas around melancholia, homesickness and so on. But with all due regard to the acuteness of Thomas Wolfe’s
observation, it also seems simultaneously true, and in a sense just as real as
the enumeration above, that we can never really leave home either. (I mean,
when it comes right down to it isn’t that Kant’s legacy?) The idea of being modern has always had
as it’s kernal the idea of ‘leave-taking’ and of subsequent rootlessness, and
that the forced march of history away from the savannahs and grass lands of
humanity’s birth places is all for the good leasing in some way, an uncanny way 'forward': Progress!!. Doesn’t it feel right to say that
the more gone we feel, the more progressive we must be? To even raise concerns
about the rightness of such is to set off cultural alarums and klaxons. From those of us in the West, all we do
is gaze in wonderment as the sheer number of (forced) migrations now taking
place around the world. But, I would contend, that pain of movement is of the
very essence of being modern.
Oh, ok I suspect you were expecting more personal testimonies
of / about the Cheathams, Robert, Sloane and Rowan, move back to
Mississippi. Well, that is coming but you know me, I can’t do anything without
massaging it thought-wise. That must also be part of my personal dealing with
home (and Home).
It would be foolish to say that I don’t have a certain
amount of trepidation with the move. Given Mississippi’s reputation as the last
on all scales, I have had to re-organize my organum regarding the Great and
Sovereign State of Mississippi.
BOOKS
“Every passion
borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate,
that suffuse the past before me are conspicuously present in the accustomed
confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to
which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as
order?”
Walter Benjamin – Unpacking My Library
I feel a sort of necessary paralysis in packing my library.
I feel as if I am undergoing an archeological excavation. A few of these books,
tattered and/or yellowed pages, I have kept from childhood. A yellowed but
intact copy from 1962 of my first copy of the science fiction magazine Analog,
circa 1962. A largely intact paperback of the early space program and its
possibilities; I even remember the drugstore in MS where I bought it as a
kid. A falling-apart paperback by
Arthur C. Clarke on incredible things that may await us in the future. At the
time I was more or less completely enthralled by the ecstatic spaces of science
fiction, the future was so bright I had to wear shades, as the song went.
Walter Benjamin’s essay dealt as much, or more, with the
collector rather than the collection. I never had any idea of building a
collection then or even, really, much later. In fact many of my books never
made it though the travails of time and its disruptions. Several of Nietzsche’s
way-beyond-tattered books of essays—most recently Beyond Good and Evil—failed
to make the passage. But even undergoing the process of triage, I find it very
difficult to let books go. I still regret letting my collection of science
fiction novels go. It comprised an entire four by eight foot bookshelf. I’m
still not entirely sure where they all went. Truly, I have no clear idea of
what happened to them all.
And of course, folks move around so much now, the baggage of
extensive collections (or assemblages) of books is the last thing people want to lug around on their current nomadism.
I’m not entirely happy with the idea of being a collector.
In such a case the idea of a collection begins to take up more of the mental
space than those items that compose it. And there is also no end to collecting
once you embark on such. Disturbing I guess in that it seems to say
completeness doesn’t exist as long as there is (always) one more piece of the
puzzle to gather, one more datum to make a dossier (of evidence? Of what
then??!).
Benjamin again: “The most profound enchantment for the
collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which
they are fixed as the thrill of acquisition passes over them.” And I have to
say that it is true for me that only when I have a copy of a book and have
lived with it for a while do I feel like I in any way ‘know’ it. Yes, I guess a
little bit of totemism leavened with fetishism there.
And although I never really thought I was collecting books.
I WAS a collector of record albums and had something like 2500 of them. But,
symptomatically perhaps, they are all gone, sold off bit by bit in a previous
life. And besides they were as heavy as hell to haul around.
And neither book nor record now has any resale value other than
to a collector and only under certain circumstances of limited edition, first edition, etc. Digitality has destroyed the middle man in one way and opened
it up in another, though the ability to sell via Amazon, etc.
At any rate, a functioning library
has always been a part of the concept home.
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