the ants go marching three by three

I: Premise

I think the flesh stores its own canister of memories that we don't always think about. And in that canister is The Place Where You Were Born. 

Entailing:

a. the soils which first fed you (grew the food which fed your mother)
b. the specific locus of the magnetic field which rose to meet you first

Birth welcomes you to a new place — a traveler from the womb to the world — and gives you the list of rules to be obeyed during your stay, most simple of which is the edict Remember That Thou Art Dust and Unto Dust Thou Shalt Return.¹ Ever heard of the traveler's belief that setting your bare feet on new lands will sync you to it? The Place Where You Were Born operates similar to that, but ever more resonant; for the grid to recognize you, you have to be embedded in it somewhere first. 

THIS IS HOME NOW, birth announces to you.² And the body listens, learns the language of it before we've learned to do anything more than cry, laugh, and whimper. Before we've even had a chance to think, already the body has jumped ten steps ahead to knowing, and it knows The Place Where You Were Born better than anything except maybe itself and its mother.³ The body also knows that birth, that first homecoming, is only half of a journey. Life in this sense is like a room with one door; we have to exit the same way we came even if the room has changed shape.⁴

So you can take the baby out of the birth but you can't take the dirt out of the nail beds. Or, I mean, you can drain the river but you can't burn away the silt.

I know, I know. Those are unintelligible words thick like oil-coagulum or god-sinew and no one has time to chew cud except for the cattle, and all those are too busy being herded to the beef barn. 

What I'm trying to say is: you can scramble all the signals but the body will still remember because even in the air full of techno-babble and electric whizzing, the flesh will not be fooled. 

II: Upward Projection

This is the hero’s journey — a reconciliation with the fact that every time we leave a place, we leave it forever. If and when we return, it is never back to that place, but to a new place grown up in the (similar, but not the) same space. Myth tries to teach us this.⁶ That feeling when you see some place from long ago and it seems smaller, the colors duller, the shapes less inspired. Or, not long ago, but the length of one turn about the block, and the houses around you all look suddenly unfamiliar, and the heft of the back door is different than you remember when you go to twist the knob. 

There is real theory about the ‘urban fabric’ and while I have read some of it and enjoyed the framework, I admit the majority of my attraction to the term is for the literary possibilities it presents. When I think of the city as a fabric, it is as one which can be patched and mended. After all, the city is a restless creature, an auto-Frankensteining Monster which bites and gnaws, rips up and knocks down, then spit-seals, retrofits, and builds anew. Even the most meticulously planned cities are entropic, forced to forever evolve or risk dissolution. Take the case of the desire line, a path that arises organically from use rather than a planned route; the amount of time it takes for the fabric to add a new stitch is very short indeed. 

I try to visit The Place Where I Was Born regularly. I also try to visit my family that lives there regularly, but you can see people anywhere and cities only where they are, so it has to be specified as a trip unto itself. (Incidentally, this is the genius of the holy place: the pilgrimage.) So I go back. My body takes me back to The Place Where I Was Born and teaches me how to hold it all in my head at once, all the (life. Always, the life, but also all the) sprawl and the congestion and the abandonment. I’d say it hasn’t stopped growing even though I have, but that truth is incomplete; it’s not just the places that change but us, too. The door shuts from both sides.⁷

The door shuts from both sides. This is a slight misdirection, or at least a sloppy use of metaphor, unless one remembers that a door has three sides.⁸ And, in truth, I have two hometowns. A mother, a father, a river, a land, a life, a death. Two two two and me makes three. In this equation, The Place Where I Was Born is always, forever, the place where I was born, but the emotional roots of the place(s) I am from stretch country-wide. The transplant is a curious case. I go half as far and change twice as much. I leave one place to better leave another.⁹ I imagine my ricochet across space like one long desire line, bound back on and over itself in a Möbius strip. 

interlude:

and on that long road cutting through the desert sands, when time passed us in a red toyota, i looked up in the sky to find a chemtrail like a spine. and i still haven't gotten over the idea that there is a certain divinity to sleeplessness, that my suffering is both deserved and righteous. and this is what i meant when i said i have prayerful knees, and i still do.¹⁰ and that long road is just the rutting of my rickety bones in the hard packed earth as i ask for a blessing on this body, and on this land. and time, the prince of the roads, is a chronic speeder with tendencies toward rage, but this is both deserved and righteous too. and i will carry you home, though the sands will shift beneath my feet, for my love is nothing if not a declaration.

III: Downward Slope

The thing about death is that thinking about it muddles it. I guarantee my dog knows more about death than most people, precisely because she is not thinking about it. Her knowledge of death is just there, something she is not actually even aware of per se but accepting of nonetheless. I’m thinking (because I like to muddle) of how even the most domesticated house pets seem to know when they are going to die and will, for sometimes the first time in their life, sneak off to get it done somewhere away, and quietly. They don’t fear the passage, they greet it. 

Humanity, though, dreams of immortality. But these dreams don’t come preloaded as some evolutionary distinction between us and every other living creature. No, I would suggest that just as they say no child is born knowing how to hate, no child is born fearing death — it takes time and observation, encounters with affect and effect, for that fear to develop. One could argue that children don’t even know about death, never mind fear it. This could be a sticking point, except I’m less concerned with the literal truth and more with approximations — I’m suggesting that children understand endings intimately because everything in their life is marked with beginnings, and isn’t death just one particular kind of ending? You know what they say: as one door closes another door opens. Well, when you’re a child the whole world can fit into a single hallway.

[This is a self-indulgent pause in the text. One that asks, Have you noticed the themes yet? Have you started asking whether life is a room with one door or a hallway with infinite? To this I would say: every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square, and, Didn’t you die a little last night? Ask anyone who keeps a journal, they can set you straight — the self that writes today is not the self of yesterday.¹¹]

I am not a child anymore. My endings are less frequent but no less devastating. When I went all the way across the ocean, still death followed me. There, walking on black sand and hearing the crash of unfamiliar waves, I found three dead gulls, piles of bleach white bones that protruded from the drifts as if arranged. And while other footsteps parted the corpses with some (un)natural aversion, mine took me to them. Body first, then eyes. Eyes first, then heart. I was not thinking. The gulls presented themselves to me, three unmuddled truths. 

The sentence I have been trying all this time to arrive at is this: Death is instinctual as much as it is inevitable.

IV: Exem(ripe)plum

Throughout my childhood, my older brother and I and our two friends went with our dads on an annual camping trip to the mountains each summer. Two pairs of siblings, two fathers, two tents. On these trips we laid in beds of grass like a small herd of deer, rolled logs of coyote scat with mud from the ground and our own shedding hair, piled rocks in the freezing cold creek to put on a spa, roamed ragged, and feral, and barefoot. 

We also, on these trips, met with ritual and formality and built up a deep, profoundly honest respect for the natural world. On long hikes through sweet smelling trees, we collected handfuls of sticky sap to bring back with us, so that our earth-pungent hands could make pinch pots from river clay and, once hardened in the camp fire, we could glaze them.

This was one use of fire. Another was conducted in solitude and quiet. Each of us went out to collect twigs and grasses, little pebbles and colorful leaves. These we bound together into miniature rafts, set with balls of sap like pitch, and when the sun had sunk truly down below the horizon and the dark of the mountains had swept over us all, we took them down to the creek with torches lit by the campfire’s flame, and sent them down the dark waters, burning like caught stars or chained comets until eventually they drifted into an eddy or against a big slimy rock and were extinguished, one by one. We made wishes on these rafts, sometimes. Or promises to dreams, or longings for desires. Mostly, I think, I was just trying to feel the edges of things. 

One particular summer, we found a third use for fire. We were out, hiking down what felt a very long trail. We might have had woven baskets for gathering mushrooms. We might have been in flip flops. We might have wandered off the trail and deep into the woods to make wands from split pine needles or collect heart shaped rocks or gather more sticky sap for ceramics or boats or tangling in each other’s hair in a moment of devilish trickery. Of all that I am not sure, and not inclined to try and remember. What I do know is that we found a dead caterpillar and rounded it, chorusing for a naming first, then a proper laying to rest. Charlie the Caterpillar, we decided, should be cremated. We arranged the body, encased it with twigs and moss, then got a match. 

Children are good at ritual. Experienced at it, at its solemnity, its self-reverence. Thresholds aren’t passed without learning at least a little grace. So when the fire was lit and there was sweet smoke on the air, we rounded again, this time circling round and round in a line, a procession, a chance to chant in tune with our foot-stamps. And we did. It makes me laugh now to imagine another group of hikers coming across us in that moment — four pre-teens in dirty clothes marching around a small fire and chanting a funeral dirge in low voices — and wondering onto what set for what indie film they had stumbled upon. It must have looked gravely (ha) serious. 

After a few rounds of chanting we realized that cremating a caterpillar is a lot harder than you would think, and we put the fire out. We buried the lightly charcoaled remains of Charlie the Caterpillar and marked the spot with some large smooth rocks and handfuls of wildflowers, and scratched his name against the flat of the rock with a stick dipped in his own small bit of ash. So it goes.

V: Point, Sharpened

When King Priam begged before Achilles for the return of his beloved son Hector,

war ceased for eleven days so that the great breaker of horses could be given over to proper rest. I think it could not have been King Priam alone who wanted his son back, but all of Troy, all of his homeland, begging for that final homecoming. Discomfort had even grown among the Greeks, with the exception of Achilles — for Achilles, made less than half-man in his grief, forgot that being half-god is not enough to defy the earth. Proper burial, in myth, is a holy obligation, one attuned to an ultra-reality that supersedes the laws of man and their conflicts, too. It is not and cannot be swayed by the troubles of mortals. 

Go from Troy to Thebes, into another myth, and we find this situation again in the twin struggles of Polynices and Antigone. Polynices's dead body — made dead on the wrong side of a battle — is trapped between pollution and purity, and is kept from achieving true death, 

which is to say a godly death. Antigone shows us that it is not solely the will of man to cover a dead body; rather, it is the unstoppable appetite of the earth, our one chthonic mother, who seeks to cover the body. Man is just the vessel for her intention. 

The hunger of the earth can only be sated when the body is subsumed, when it is taken back into the womb of The Place Where You Were Born. And when that is denied? Well, then the body brings back mold

and rot, and needs hot blood to keep it even half-human.¹⁵ Signs across myth, folklore, and religion suggest that the flesh of the human is the flesh of the earth.¹⁶ And the earth keeps close watch 

on its children.

All this is to say Are You Smarter Than a Fourth-Grader is clearly built on a premise that underestimates fourth-graders, because they know with clarity

what the rest of us are left to guess at. 

1 Genesis 3:19, although a god is not required to learn this lesson. 

2 As Marc Hudson writes, “In each of us, there is a country—” and that country is The Place Where You Were Born. This poem, aptly-titled “Home,” is one of my favorite poems, and it fits this piece perfectly. If you read nothing else linked in the footnotes, you should read this. (link)

3 For the sake of building this conversation up, I want to mention here a tremendous piece by Natalie Diaz titled “The First Water Is the Body” (link) and, because it is referenced in the text, this article by John Berger (link), and, because I find it related, this interview with the classicist Emily Wilson about her translation of The Odyssey. (link)

4 This is as good a place as any to suggest reading Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocle’s Antigone, styled as Antigo Nick (2012), and, in turn, Bertolt Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles (1947) which is referenced in the former text. Antigone will come back later in this post. Carson writes in her introduction (titled “the task of the translator of antigone”): “I keep returning to Brecht / who made you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back / a door can have diverse meanings / I stand outside your door / the odd thing is, you stand outside your door too”

5 Bruce Springsteen, Springsteen on Broadway, “My Hometown (Introduction Part 1)”.

6 A piece on The Odyssey is on the docket…

7 See footnote 4 about Brecht’s Antigone.

8 This is an invitation to read the archives, beginning with part one and with particular attention to part five of the story about you, and the girl who lives on the moon.

9 An interesting pair to this conversation of the hometown and the outbound journey is this poem by Hieu Minh Nguyen titled “Outbound.” (link)

10 From the archives. (link)

11 If none come to mind, see Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook.”

12 Book 24, lines 590-591 of The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles. 

13 This quote is from Antigone, Sophocles I, edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore, lines 245-247. I would like to add to the discussion what the Guard in Carson’s telling says of this event:

I shut my eyes and when I sneaked a look there she was the child in her birdgrief the bird in her childreftgravecry howling and cursing she poured dust onto the body with both hands she poured water onto the body with both hands I seized her I charged her it made me sad but still that’s less than my own safety you like nouns here’s some Dustlibation Donedeal Deadreckoning

Two two two and me makes three. And, of course, I am reminded that Grief is the Thing with Feathers, per Max Porter (link) and also Aria Aber (link).

14 “L’Esprit de L’Escalier” by Catherynne M. Valente is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in which Orpheus does not look back. (link)

15 Think also of vampires. 

16 “In the past, they used to bury people in the foetal position, which symbolised death as homecoming, the tomb as a womb. People used to carry soil from the home inside a medallion when they travelled, and if someone died abroad, they tried to throw a handful of their native soil onto the grave.” (link) I’m desperate to add more sources to this particular point. I went into this piece with a strong conviction that there was a tremendous precedent for this kind of thinking — that there were oodles and oodles of cases where the necessity of being buried in the proper dirt is emphasized, and, although I couldn’t think of them at that particular moment, I thought I would be able to find them quickly and easily. That has not been the case, but my conviction remains. 

17 So says Antigone in Carson’s Antigo Nick.

18 Sorry. I have to add one last note about Carson’s Antigo Nick, because her Antigone says it so well:

you ask would I have done it for a husband or a child my answer is no I would not a husband or a child can be replaced but who can grow me a new brother

19 Written by a student about the recent death of a family member, from this essay for the Poetry Foundation, ‘The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too)” by Hannah Gamble. (link)