And then over the horizon
The Season of War ended when the soldiers fell asleep. Dreaming. Once so consumed with fight, now nothing but memory — memory and desire. And Estelle is an historian whose dead father was a poet. And the yet named Season, the one she and all the children were born into, is about to end; This era that had come to its twilight so pleasantly. In her essay “Summer Solstice,” Nina MacLaughlin describes the warm season as a fallow period. Not days stretched into the late hours of sunlight, but night encroaching ever forward as the sunset draws closer to autumn: “Darkness unspools so slowly it looks like light. The end unspools so slowly it seems like the start.”
And the Grey Hands are a mutual aid organization who look like a Works Progress Administration poster, and they want everyone to forget the memories that haunt this Season. Can make everyone forget the memories that haunt this Season. But this Season is not without its loss. The Season is the dead fathers and sons, the undelivered mail of families and lovers, the infrastructure turned ruin. It’s the southern gothic: “The history that remains/once the waters recede/revealing the land that couldn’t reject or contain it.” In Season, you choose what to remember — what gets to be remembered — but you can also choose to forget.
In the aftermath of the Great War, Eliot declared April “the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” And in the Tieng Valley, the followers of the old gods linger enough. Memories seep from saturated purple flowers. Something in the ground can erase them. Something the Grey Hands have dug up. And I think Eliot might know something about history that only the terrible men that make it could, but I too choose to forget. To omit a young boy’s memories of his father, to not record a sacred melody, to pray at the altar of Void and feel the power of a god. This Season of Haunting is a post-apocalyptic dreamscape. I remember it forever in golden hour. It looks like autumn. It looks like America.
On Gorée Island, where millions of African slaves purportedly departed their homeland for the Americas, the poet Clint Smith writes, “Memory, for me, is often a home where the furniture has been rearranged one too many times”. Though the figures are well documented exaggerations, House of Slaves curator Eloi Coly tells Smith: “The number of slaves is not important when you talk about memory.” Smith winds across the country, records in prose the landscape and documents what the people say. And then over the horizon. Curators, prison guards, Sons of the Confederates, each speaking as if ghosts roam the land, as if history is not past. “America’s haunted history is its Black history,” writes Leila Taylor. “There’s a difference between history and nostalgia,” offers a Monticello tour guide, “and somewhere between those two is memory.”
The Grey Hands want to liberate the world from its past. To lift the curse that weighs, tear down the ruins in your mind, and see the world as if for the first time — as if suddenly transformed into FMV. Ahmed: “Wonder is an encounter with an object that one does not recognize.” And the Grey Hands would walk the floral path. Suspend historicity — recreate, redo. Forget the dead, the separated families, the ruins. They do not imagine that such loss can be felt without history, and to their ends, they would forget all that was Tieng Valley. Ahmed: “Or wonder works to transform the ordinary.” And isn’t that the ultimate lesson of history? That none of this was inevitable, none of it natural. Call it a history of feeling. Let it be an incomplete record of all they took from us. Tell them: It is not too late.
And I wish the preeminent Florida writers were the Floridians who noticed for the first time what amongst the familiar was extraordinary. Not the generations of New Yorkers who came here to find an encounter with what they could not recognize and revisit that place we all were before our memories began. Like the travel-weary Polo, who recounts the wisdom of Isidora from the gardens of the great Kublai Khan: “Desires are already memories.” And as I get reacquainted with my skin each spring, I think about how in south Florida where I grew up the indigenous tribes are best known as road names and casinos. How all that remains of a 20th century Japanese farm colony was turned into a park and we call that road between Boca Raton and Delray Beach Yamato Road. How the Yamato people too colonized the land that is now their namesake. And that maybe history is like writing an elegy; I can only show you what was lost.
