This last weekend, my little adopted town in East Tennessee held a annual three-day festival, a big deal. Takes a week to set up, with tents and booths and bandstands and vendors and competitions spread over many acres. Thousands of people gather, laugh, eat and drink, buy and sell, play or listen to music, compete in games. I was there both days, and Sunday afternoon sat in the beer tent drinking and talking with friends for hours as evening closed in on us. Then today, Monday, I went back to help tear it all down. In one day it was virtually gone, and by tomorrow it might never have been.
I’ve had similar experiences. I used to go to an annual music festival where we’d arrive Sunday with a couple thousand other campers and pretty much build a small city in one day. For the next week, activity was virtually nonstop: People doing what people do when we gather. Then, the following Sunday morning, we’d wake up and within three hours, it would be gone. And a few years after my father died, we sold the family home and the new owners moved the house away to clear the lot. I visited the site and sat on the foundation piers, gazing around me at the tiny area that had been our life. Forty years of all that a family is, now just bare sand where nothing grew.
It’s all too surreal. What is reality and what is not? We live our lives in dimensions so ephemeral and artificial, they only really exist in what we take away, in the memories and emotions and personal changes wrought within. It’s not hard to understand the bonding and exclusivity and protectiveness engendered in nomadic peoples like gypsies or bedouins, or plains indians who moved with bison. Their individual identities were bound up tightly within a collective identity that existed only within tribal memories and customs and histories, all of it gone once their race pulls it tents for the last time.
You cannot step twice into the same river for new waters are ever flowing in upon you.
—-Heraclitus of Ephesus, 6th Century BCE
I hadn’t thought of this quote in this context, but I like it. Thanks.
That said, it’s doesn’t quite hit the point I was driving at in the post. It wasn’t so much change, per se, that motivated me. It was the nature of human community and it’s connection to context. Also, that after the physical context is lost to change, what remains is only the memory in the individual and collective psyches of those who experienced it. It’s those collective memories that bind us, one to another, and perhaps what distinguishes and separates cultures and ethnicities. And, once the physical context is gone, that collective exists solely in shared remembrances and stories…in reality nothing more than a particular alignment of chemicals and molecules in the physical environment of the brain. How critical to our sense of cultural self, yet how quickly and easily lost…
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
—Tennyson