Remembering Earth and Sky

When a former student of mine asked if I would consider writing a blog, now that I am retired, I said no. The Internet is overcrowded as it is. What could I add beyond just more noise?

“Well,” she said, “why not tell us about the world before the Internet? Tell us about where you think the Internet came from, about why you don’t seem much to like it, and about what you would like to see put in its place.”

“Now that’s a pretty tall order,” I said. “There’s no way I could tell you all that. On the other hand, I can do what old men do best. I can tell you some stories.”

Like the dense fog that settles in the valley, memories crowd and clog my mind. What better way to clear the air than to turn those memories into stories? I remember, for instance, winter days on the farm when the wind would get under the house and flap the linoleum like a fan. I remember how the ten or eleven or twelve of us (the family was always growing) would gather in the one room we heated, basically just waiting for winter to be over. I remember how bleak it was after the pumpkins in the cellar rotted and before the dandelion and wild poke started to sprout in the fields.

I remember as well how, when there was nothing left to eat in the house and the fields were still winter barren, my mother would turn to my father and say, “Jim, please, tell the children a story.” I remember how my father, who was otherwise a deeply tormented man, would come to life once he felt a good story was coming his way. I remember how his eyes, otherwise so sad, would begin to sparkle, and how his mouth would slip over into a grin. I remember how we kids, caught up in his words, would quit worrying about whether dinner would be anything more than a cup of saltine crackers floating in milk.

The stage was a dilapidated farmhouse that, when we first moved in, had no running water. The actors were a father who, in the beginning, still plowed the earth behind a mule, a mother who prayed the rosary every day, and their fifteen children, of which I was number seven. During the 1950s, while my future academic colleagues were watching television in the suburbs, making themselves the first human generation to experience the world through the medium of a glowing screen, my siblings and I were in the woods, foraging for food like the hunter-gatherers of old.

When we did get a television—in 1963, just in time to watch the Kennedy Assassination—we did not take to it. Because of the surrounding hills, the reception was bad and, unless the weather was just right, all we got was static. Maybe that’s why to this day I’m uncomfortable with anything I see behind a glass screen. As for that other device crucial to the Internet, the telephone, we didn’t get one until 1968. It came in the form of a party line that we shared with seven other families scattered along the creek bed that was our only road. True, we were nudging our way toward the future, but slowly, almost painfully.

For the future was not where we Lawrences were inclined to look. If our parents shared with us one deep conviction, it was that any future not anchored deeply in the past would be unpredictable beyond bearing. As a result, my siblings and I grew up enmeshed in a web of stories, testimony to things that had already happened. When I first saw the Ohio River, what I saw was the river the Catholics from Maryland had floated down back in the 1780s. They came on big flatboats they built themselves and anointed with holy oil.

My mother, a fervent Catholic, wanted us kids to know the full story about what Catholics even to this day call the Holy Land of Central Kentucky. The story featured monasteries like those of the Middle Ages, refugee priests from the French Revolution, and a new kind of whiskey named after the Bourbon kings of France. When in 1808 tiny Bardstown, a village of 900 people, was chosen as the episcopal seat of a vast diocese that stretched from New Orleans all the way to Detroit, it was because the Pope in Rome recognized the Holy Land of Kentucky as the most likely place where the spirit of Medieval Europe could be recreated in North America. While it is true that a generation later the diocese got shifted to Louisville, Bardstown got to keep its Cathedral and the paintings that King Louis Philippe had sent from France to adorn it. 

That was the heritage that my mother lauded. Forced to leave school when she was twelve, she possessed an uncanny knack for weaving the things she had learned into grand and compelling narratives that my father always greeted with a show of skepticism. His side of the family was Presbyterian. And, as he liked to point out, they were the true pioneers. James Lawrence, the grandfather of the grandfather of my grandfather, had come over the mountains with his wife and daughter and several of his twelve sons. That was in the early 1770s, over a decade before the Catholics started moving in.

My father was proud of the fact that the man he had been named after had helped found Harrodsburg, the oldest permanent settlement of a non-native people west of the Alleghenies. This was before Daniel Boone and his crew blazed the Wilderness Trail that made subsequent immigration a lot easier. Having come in the hard way, the Lawrences were rewarded with farms that stretched from Harrodsburg all the way to Lawrence’s Station, now called Danville. My father was born on a remnant of the land that Solomon Lawrence, son of James, had chosen for himself and all of his descendants into perpetuity.

My father was born on the land, but did not receive it as his inheritance. History had intervened, first in the form of a bloody Civil War and much later in the form of the Great Depression. A family once proud was shattered, the ancestral farm taken from them. After a boyhood cultivating the earth, my father found himself living—unhappily—in the city. But unlike so many others who had taken refuge in the cities, he was determined to go back to the land. That’s how he ended up in the Knobs of Central Kentucky, the forested hills that formed the perimeter of the Catholic Holy Land. The farm he bought, the one I grew up on, was fifty miles north of the one Solomon Lawrence had extolled as the earthly extension of heaven. 

The only piece of land my father could afford, the farm was heavily eroded, having seen its best days in the past. Most of its hundred acres were covered with woods and scrub thicket that was connected, by a narrow hollow, to the eastern side of a sixteen-thousand-acre forest preserve where my father was hired as a game warden. It was his job to prevent our neighbors, none of whom were well-disposed in the first place to an outsider, from hunting where they had always hunted, often out of a very real need for food. That’s the reason why, when I was a small child, my father and one of the neighbors used to shoot their rifles at one another. The feud didn’t end until that same neighbor shot a policeman and got carted off to jail.

A few years later, when I was a teenager, my father was at it again with another neighbor. This time I did some of the shooting myself. Fortunately, none of us ever got more than nicked. As for the irate neighbor, it was his own son, in seventh grade at the time, who shot and killed him. What happened is that the boy could not bear the sight of watching his father beat his mother with a baseball bat. Enough was enough.

Such was the world I grew up in. Apart from the sporadic incidents of violence, life was mostly just tedious hard work. In the summer my brothers and I hoed tobacco and corn, baled and stacked hay, while clearing thickets to make more pasture for the cows. In the winter, we stripped and bundled the tobacco and brought it to market.

But work was not all there was to life. On Sundays, we children were granted full liberty to explore a forest so vast that, out our backdoor, we could hike fifteen miles without seeing another house. If we crossed a road and continued on into the Fort Knox Reservation, we could have hiked another thirty miles. It’s something we never did though. It’s where the army practiced for war and was littered, our father warned us, with mines and artillery shells that could explode into our faces. Freedom was boundless, but it also had limits.

The forest was more than just a vast playground. It was where we gathered walnuts and hickory nuts, pawpaws and mushrooms; where we tapped maple trees for their sap and used smoke to calm bees while we made off with our share of their honey. In times of hunger, we even gathered acorns, which are edible and can be turned into bread. What we were doing, out in the woods that way, was what connected us to our ancestors. Back when the English and Scottish branches of the family had first come into Kentucky, the whole of what was to become a state was densely forested, the hunting ground for half a dozen Indian nations. And because our mother’s grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee, my siblings and I felt an even deeper connection. We were proud that, even before the early settlers came pouring in, something of us had already been there, as ancient as was the land itself.

Our progenitors, after all, were not some one thing, but many things. Men and women, some had been in America for multiple generations; others were more recent arrivals. While we were assured that some had been large property holders, we had little doubt that most had been as poor as we still were. We knew that we had ancestors who (on my mother’s side) had been slaves and others (on my father’s side) who had been slaveowners. And while our parents were divided between Catholics and Protestants, we knew that a portion of our blood had come from Cherokee warriors who worshipped trees and therefore saw no reason to clear the wilderness with an axe.

We knew that even ancestors long dead were still alive in the stories we had been told. By virtue of the entanglement of those stories with older stories still, we knew that memory, like a vast subterranean cavern, contained chambers long sealed in darkness, some to be pried open, most to remain sealed forever. Unlike memory in a computer, fixed and therefore dead, human memory is twinned with forgetfulness. Hell, forgetfulness is most of what it is. Because it always has to be recaptured and recreated, human memory is dynamic and alive. What flows out of it is the complex mixture of chronicle and myth that is the only guide we have for finding our way through the obscurity of the real.

As a man having entered my eighth decade of life, I know this much: I carry an entire village inside of me, populated by all of those, living and dead, who have left their impression on me. But because everyone in the village has memories and ancestors of their own, the village is itself a town, even a city. Beyond that, it is the whole complex web of nations that is the whole of humanity. What is specifically mine is but a tiny encampment within a hall of memory, vast beyond comprehension, where tribes and nations have met and still meet. To follow their traces is to go back a million years in time, to when we were one people and Africa our common home. In the richness of what mostly has been forgotten, I am connected, as we all are connected, to a life that has at times been called, rightly I suspect, everlasting.  

The best stories are those alive with the spirit that binds us all together. What they show is that—even across deep cultural and political divides—persons strange to us are yet not as strange as we may think. None of us is so citified as to be incapable of understanding a redneck. For that matter, none of us is so pure as to be incapable of understanding a monster. These are things we have to know. If most of humanity has left the countryside to move into cities, most of humanity remains capable of feeling the same tug of the land that my father felt long ago.

Is it possible that memory can provide an antidote to where we find ourselves now, entrapped as we are in an economic system that borrows so heavily from the future that the only way it can survive without crashing is to keep the foot on the accelerator at all times? Transfixed by the rush of change, we stare too much in one direction, obsessed with everything that is coming at us. If we look backwards at all, we do so seldomly in the spirit of thankfulness for what we have been given. More often what we see is only the hell we are trying to escape.

Having experienced hunger and violence as a child, this is an impulse I understand. At the same time, though, I remember the beauty of the forest, the bounty of the land, and the sublimity of the sky. I know that what we are doing in the age of globalization is just an extension of what our ancestors were always doing, crossing as they did oceans and mountains in a constant search for some piece of paradise that they could bequeath their children. What I worry about is that too many people, alive today, have been given the impression that the only world that matters is the one that began once people started pointing cameras at the world.

But the world is older than that. Deeply rooted in nature, it is entangled in a past that, but for vivid paintings on cave walls, would have been wholly forgotten. What began with small groups splitting off from larger tribes to venture out into the great open of the world has morphed into a frantic rush of all humanity into the unknown that is the future. In the face of that unknown, we respond just as our ancestors always responded to what they did not know. Clustering together into groups of the like-minded, we say, as they said, let the things we constantly repeat count for us as knowledge. Just as Himalayan Buddhists had prayer wheels that turned round and round, we have the Internet to say ever again the same. Designed to create a global community, it has in fact created a new era of warring tribes.

What our glass screens show us is a world caught in strife. It is as if we are on a gigantic rollercoaster, one that careens wildly through a virtual landscape generated by a bigger-than-the-world Hollywood studio. Gone, it seems, are the hidden valleys where a Solomon Lawrence could declare, “this is land for me and for the children of my children and for their children into perpetuity, for it is over that ridge yonder that the sun will always rise.”

Gone, it seems, or perhaps not gone at all. Were the warehoused servers to overheat and melt down, were the Internet for whatever reason to crash, what we would discover is that earth and sky are still there, waiting to catch us.

My parents, wrong about so much, had one thing right. Memory remains the safest, and sanest, way into the future. As true as it is that our earliest origins have been lost in the obscurity of the past, of one thing we can be sure. Somewhere in the deep heart of Africa, we all once belonged to the same tribe. Gathering the bounty of the earth and its forests, we gave thanks to the sun and the rain that had made it possible. Deciding to stand on two feet rather than four, we lifted our heads in wonder. Captivated by glimpses of infinity in the sky, we began an exodus that continues to this day.

For me, the long trek started in a ramshackle farmhouse in Kentucky. Where I find myself today is in the stately apartment I share with my Norwegian wife. Located in France, it is right across the river from the corner of Germany where I received my doctorate in philosophy. I sometimes have the sense that the entire journey I have been on is a metaphor for the much broader sweep of human history. Sifting through the shredded fabric of layer after layer of memory, I try to find meaning in what vanishes as quickly as it appears.

In such moments, I recall the words of a redneck old farmer I knew in Kentucky. “True, we forget most all of it,” he said. “But that’s so that what we remember in the end is only the essential.” It is with an eye on the essential that I try to stay clear of static and noise. What makes me leery of a machine that remembers every little thing is that it might make us forget what is important. Stardust, scattered on the earth, our lives are interconnected. Walking on two feet, eyes ever shifting from earth to sky, we have made it this far. Mindful of where we started, we will get to where we are going. The woods seem endless, but the path will take us home.

© 2023 Joseph P. Lawrence