“Our world is inhabited by ghosts, all those who have been here before us. If we are lucky, the structures they once lived in remain. Deciphering what’s left is the work of amateur archaeologists, but informal and intimate.
“Walking in the woods of Waldo County, I’ve often come upon old foundations, stone walls, crooked apple trees planted long ago. Sometimes these are places I’ve heard about, places that were once part of busy communities that succumbed to changes in commerce or politics or roads. But more often they are puzzles, abandoned homes with intriguing clues glistening in sunlight.”
(Judy Kaber – Belfast's poet laureate. “Remnants of the Past.” Poets' Walk. December 9, 2021.)
Remnants of the past fascinate me. So many people, places, and things conjure old memories and emotions I felt long ago. They are more than common or proper nouns with definitions apparent to all – an overgrown path, a building, the Scioto Breeze Drive-in, the empty lot where the Intermediate School once stood. They evoke images, sights, and sounds that I long to experience once more.
The personal connotations I have for surviving traces of my past, as Poet Laureate Kaber says, do “haunt me like ghosts.” But, they effect me less like an archaeologist sifting through remains, and more like a mad scientist bent on reanimating the spirits of their being once more, I want to give life to their cold remains. I more than desire their return: I wish to re-energize them full of life and walk back into their active presence.
The Stairs
Midway on the overgrown wood road,
a farmhouse used to stand.
It has fallen down.
Nothing is left there but the stairs
going up in the air by themselves.
Today, at the end of September,
the yellow maple leaves drift sideways
and gather on the sagging steps
once worn by so many footfalls
but now abandoned like ancient tribesmen
left behind on the bank of a river
they could no longer cross.
A Micmac sorcerer
said the gods lived in the air,
a little higher than the trees. Perhaps
that’s still true. Perhaps it was here
that a man lay with his head on a stone
watching the angels
climbing the stairs as clouds do
on a rising wind, as the winter stars
pause one moment on the black edge
of the sky — and then step upward.
In this brief poem, Kate Barnes, Maine’s first poet laureate, reflects on such a remnant – the stairs of an old farmhouse and considers such a place in both her past and in time.
The daughter of Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth, she spent summers in Maine as a child and eventually returned there, to Appleton Ridge, in the early 1980s. This poem comes from her book, Where the Deer Were, published in 1994 by David R. Godine. Kate died at Harbor Hill in Belfast in 2013.
The Miꞌkmaq (Micmac "tainted" by colonialism) are a First Nations people of the Northeastern Woodlands, indigenous to the areas now known as Canada's Atlantic Provinces and the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec as well as the northeastern region of Maine.
Unique to the is the belief in a gateway between this world and the spirit world. This gateway, like Glastonberry Grove in Twin Peaks or the Tor at Glastonbury, is a tangible location known as Cape Split where twice a day water gushes through the spiked rocks as the tides change. Several Micmac legends refer to water rushing through rocks as the gateway between worlds.
The Miꞌkmaq had no need, nor did they organize themselves into religious groups with rules and rulers, however, the European missionaries were only too keen to introduce the notion of organized religion: all the better, for the purposes of control.
Marc Lescarbot was known, principally, as the first historian of Acadia who also wrote Nova Francia: A Description of Acadia, 1606. Based on his personal observations, quotes, with approval, his fellow countryman and explorer, Jacques Cartier, who had been in the territory 65 years earlier, between 1535 and 1541:
"They believe also that when they die they go up into the stars, and afterwards they go into fair green fields, full of fair trees, flowers, and rare fruits. After they had made us to understand these things, we showed them their error, and that their Cudouagni is an evil spirit that deceiveth them, and that there is but one God, which is in Heaven, who doth give unto us all, and is Creator of all things, and that in him we must only believe, and that they must be baptized, or go into hell. And many other things of our faith were showed them, which they easily believed, and called their Cudouagni, Agoiuda."
(Mare Lescarbot. Nova Francia: A Description of Acadia. 1606)
One folklorist, Sister Catherine Jolicoeur, collected and classified 20,000 Acadian legends from New Brunswick. Jolicoeur's collection includes over 400 variants of legends concerning the Mi'kmaq, and more than 350 of these variants associate the Mi'kmaq with sorcery.
Acadian informants tell the story of Mi'kmaw sorcery that follows a similar pattern, whereby the magically empowered Mi'kmaq arrive at Acadian homes in search of charity or to sell their hand-made baskets and other wares. Many of these encounters occurred between Mi'kmaw women, called taoueilles, who were believed to be the more virulent form of sorcerer. It was advisable to never disappoint their Mi'kmaw visitors; for they would surely cast a malevolent spell in reprisal.
Conversely, the Mi'kmaq adopted European witchcraft beliefs into their shamanic traditions, whereby a puwowin, or shaman, adopted certain European attributes. Prior to contact, both the Acadian and Mi'kmaw cultures stressed the importance of interdependence, whereby social transgressions concerning notions of reciprocity invoked the power of a retaliatory act of sorcery or shamanic reprisal.
The resulting fear of offense served the purpose of controlling social behavior and became the central theme in stories of Native sorcery within both communities during the post contact years.
(Susan Janet Harmon. “Mi'kmaw Shamans and Acadian Sorcerers: A Study in Cultural Transmissions, Transferences and Transformations.” digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu. December 2014.)
Remnants – sorcery, ghosts, or just powerful reminisce? Perhaps these pieces of the past have qualities of all three. Scholars, poets, and scientists all agree that taking time to listen to another person reminisce gives the powerful, unspoken message that “Who you are, what you have done, and the things you care about are very important to me. I believe in you; I accept you; I want to know your story. And, even more, I receive what you have to offer as a gift.”
Consider how important old songs can be. This is confirmed by new research into "music-related memories in adulthood" and "reminiscence bumps" – evidence is reviewed that for older adults the period from 10 to 30 years of age produces recall of the most autobiographical memories, the most vivid memories, and the most important memories. It is the period from which peoples’ favorite films, music, and books come and the period from which they judge the most important world events to have originated and greatly contribute to identity.
Findings shed light on why some songs we absorb during our teenage years become deeply embedded in our memory banks and have incredible lasting power.
Compared to the music we encounter later in life, songs from one's adolescence tend to trigger a disproportionate amount of nostalgia, according to the latest "reminiscence bump" research. This cross-sectional study (Jakubowski et al., 2020) was recently published in the open-access journal Music & Science.
Jakubowski's latest study into music-related autobiographical memories across a lifespan expands on previous "reminiscence bump" research (Rubin et al., 1986), which posits that older adults (over the age of 40) tend to reminisce frequently about their younger days. As we approach midlife, reminiscence bump theory suggests that middle-aged people recall a disproportionate number of nostalgic memories from adolescence and young adulthood. In general, our teenage years are especially ripe for robust reminiscence bumps.
(Jakubowski et al. “A Cross-Sectional Study of Reminiscence Bumps for Music-Related Memories in Adulthood. Music & Science. October 23, 2020.)
Scientists tell us that time, repetition, and emotion all contribute to whether we remember information or an event, and the basic rule is that events and information with significance are remembered. Remembering recent events is likely to be more relevant for functioning than most things from long ago: You want to remember where you parked your car this morning, but remembering where you parked last Wednesday can be counterproductive for finding your car today.
Of course, information that is repeated over and over is likely to be more important than one-off events.
The emotion related to the experience also strengthens the formation of that memory and causes an indelible and easily retrieved memory that lasts long into the future. In the laboratory, stories and images that trigger emotion are remembered in more detail and for longer than similar stories or images without emotional connotations.
And, some people even have “highly superior autobiographical memory” (HSAM) (Parker et al., 2006; LePort et al., 2012), remember almost everything about events from their lives—yet they lead normal lives, exhibit normal IQ, and are indistinguishable from others across a range of other cognitive functions.
(Aurora K. R. LePort, et al. “Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory: Quality and Quantity of Retention Over Time.” Front Psychol. 6. 2017.)
So, this is where those ghosts and sorcerers do their work – they practice re-creation in the human mind. Mere traces of the past can evoke good or bad memories that somehow survive in our brain. As we deal with memory bumps and the vivid emotions they produce, we continually question the meaning they contain. We must deal with the effects of our reminiscences as those Europeans did with Mi'kmaw sorcery – let us not offend the spirits in fear of terrible retaliation.
Maybe that's why I am so susceptible to inviting the reanimation of the past into my mind during my remaining days on earth. I have a friendly, reciprocal relationship with those fragments. They help me deal with a world that increasingly becomes more alien. And, as long as I respect the memories, they ease my fears and help me find ways to cope through the culture shocks of the 21st century.
After all, death effectively extinguishes the past. It nullifies any need for contemplation about pieces of what remains. In its ultimate finality, death allows us to transcend the physical world and climb the steps that angels tread … we “pause one moment on the black edge of the sky – and then step upward” away from this earth into the stars.
The Past
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The debt is paid,
The
verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed.
All
fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death
forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering
hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods
can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down
forevermore.
None can re-enter there,—
No thief so
politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink,
or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or
forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend
eternal Fact.
But, don't get me wrong. I'm not close to being ready to climb that stairway to heaven. I have learned to find solace in the remains of my past. The people, places, and things that reside mean me no harm … perhaps they wish to cause me a little unrest for my trespasses … but no haunting too severe.
To close, would I favor a step back in time? Yes, but not a physical awakening in the 50s or 60s but a true realization of the value of what may be lost forever. The music I love is a prime example of what I mean. The songs I treasure – the melodies, the harmonies, the rhythms, the styles, the themes – to me are timeless. I employ their healing powers all the time and wish everyone could do the same. As I consider that they will soon be relegated to the ranks of archaic and dated sounds, little more than traces of the past, I mourn. I really feel sad that this music will eventually be largely silent.
Get it while you can,
someone said. The past is there for examination. Sharing the
experience with others is what counts. It always has … and, I
assume, it always will. So much of the value of fragments and
remnants from this past depends upon their presentation. Just ask
world-class documentarian Ken Burns about the laws of storytelling
and introducing large stories through small details. The fragments
reveal sacrifice, courage, generosity, and redemption so that, in the
end, love and reconciliation can take place. Isn't that what we want? Make my road bumpy, please!
Prodigal Son
The Rolling Stones
From Beggars Banquet
Written by Robert Wilkins, a reverend who recorded Delta Blues in the 1920s and 1930s
[Verse 1]
Well, a
poor boy took his father's bread and started down the road
Started
down the road
Took all he had and started down the road
Going
out in this world, where God only knows
And that'll be the way to
get along
[Verse 2]
Well, poor boy spent all he had, famine
come in the land
Famine come in the land
Spent all he had, and
famine come in the land
Said, "I believe I'll go and hire me
to some man
And that'll be the way I'll get along"
[Verse 3]
Well, man
said, "I'll give you a job for to feed my swine
For to feed
my swine
I'll give you a job for to feed my swine"
Boy
stood there and hung his head and cried
Because that is no way to
get along
[Verse 4]
Said, "I believe I'll ride,
believe I'll go back home
Believe I'll go back home
Believe
I'll ride, believe I'll go back home
Or down the road as far as I
can go
And that'll be the way to get along"
[Verse 5]
Well,
father said, "See my son coming after me
Coming home to
me"
Father ran and fell down on his knees
Said, "Sing
and praise, Lord have mercy on me
Mercy"
[Verse 6]
Oh,
poor boy stood there, hung his head and cried
Hung his head and
cried
Poor boy stood and hung his head and cried
Said, "Father
will you look on me as a child?"
Yeah
[Verse 7]
Well,
father said, "Eldest son, kill the fatted calf
Call the
family 'round
Kill that calf and call the family 'round
My son
was lost but now he is found
'Cause that's the way for us to get
along"
Hey
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