TRANSCRIPT
Looking back on my life, adult life especially, a life in which I’ve spent so much time exhuming my past, studying my history, studying the history of my childhood, studying the history of my childhood feelings, my childhood experiences, my buried childhood experiences, studying my trauma, studying the truth of my family, I have a big question, and that is: why me? Why did I do this? Where did it come from? Why did I want to do this? Why did I engage in it? And I don’t always have a good answer.
When I see other people who do this, who have such motivation to really know who they are, to study their history, the history of their traumas, the history of their childhood, the history of their buried feelings, I don’t often know why they did it. Why then? Why did life pick them to be someone who is going to do this when so many people, the majority of people, the far majority of people, don’t do this? When some people don’t remember anything of their childhood and don’t put any effort into studying their history, they don’t want to. And I wonder why, why, why, why?
Well, one piece of the puzzle that I have come up with when I ask “why me” is throughout my childhood, I loved history. I didn’t love the history of my childhood, the history of my feelings, because I didn’t even know that was a subject yet. But I loved history in general. And what I think is that love for history in general was a precursor to what I would become as an adult, which is someone who studied the threads of history, who studied where things came from, why things came to be the way they did, what happened in the past that led to the present tense, led the present tense to turn out the way that it is.
So I want to very briefly describe four, five, I don’t know how many different areas in my life in which I loved history and which history was alive to me. The first is folk music. As a child, I loved folk music, and part of why I loved folk music is it told stories. It told stories of the past, the time that no longer existed, and it told them in beautiful, alive ways. There were so many folk songs that I just loved. I had a book called The Fireside Book of Folk Songs, which had beautiful pictures. There was a volume one and a volume two, and I still remember it. The song “The Streets of Laredo,” it happened in Laredo, Texas, maybe sometime in the mid or late 1800s, about a young cowboy who cheated at cards and got shot. He was dying in the street. I remember the picture of the cowboys carrying his coffin along, and I remember feeling so sad for him and thinking, what was life like back then? What was it like to be a cowboy a hundred years before I was ever born? Oh, “Shenandoah” and the wailing songs and “Frankie and Johnny,” all these songs of history, of times and places that no longer existed. It fueled my imagination. It allowed me to think, what happened then that led to the world like it is now?
The second area, it’s actually related to folk music, is literature. I loved reading when I was a kid. We would go to the library all the time. I would get out so many books and read and read and read and read stuff, not just about modern history, but read about earlier parts of the 20th century, mid-twentieth century. There were children’s books that I loved that were set in the 1800s: Little House in the Prairie, The Great Brain. There were so many, so many beautiful books that really painted a time and a place that no longer existed. Now in my life, it was no relation. There was no connection to my world now, so it gave me a chance to think, what was life back like back then? What could life be like now? What has changed? What is different? But it really opened me up to the world being different and studying the roots of our modern world in the past.
Now, you could say, “Oh, you studied history in school.” Well, I hated history in school, and part of why is the teachers were boring. They weren’t good storytellers. The curricula were boring. It was stilted, it was less honest, and it was so dry. The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny? God, just reading Little House in the Prairie was a thousand times more interesting than that! Oh, we’d read about slavery, and it was so boring. And then I think when I was 12, 13, 14, 15 years old, I read the book Roots by Alex Haley. I thought it was nonfiction. Then I realized, no, it’s a little bit more fictional than that. But man, it opened my eyes. I never looked at slavery the same after that. And where did slaves come from? West Africa. It was like a world that I’d never imagined, and it just gave me so much more insight and curiosity about the world. So literature, that was the second area of my life in which I really got a chance to really study history.
Then there was a third area. I grew up in western New York, also in central New York. Well, for a time, I spent a lot of time growing up in the Finger Lakes region of Central New York on Cayuga Lake. And Cayuga Lake, once upon a time, was the land of the Cayuga Indians, one of the nations of the Iroquois Eastern Woodland Indians. I think they pretty much left, got kicked out by continental America, George Washington, people like that. They left around, mm, 1780, 1790s, went up to Canada. Some came back, but I spent a lot of time growing up on land that had been theirs. And I spent my whole childhood looking for arrowheads because I had heard, I’d heard from farmers, I even heard from some older relatives that there were arrowheads somewhere out in the woods there. I looked and looked and never found any. And then one day, when I was 17 years old, I was off climbing in a gorge because it was a land of streams and valleys and gorgeous. I was climbing up a gorge, and I was climbing up a cliffside, and I pulled myself up with my hands. And there, on a little stone ledge, right before my eyes, in a completely random and unexpected place, where the last thing I was looking for is what I found. I found an arrowhead, and it was just sitting there. I pulled myself up, took the arrowhead, climbed the rest of the way up the gorge, and then looked at it. It was perfect. It was beautiful. It had been carved by some human being two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years earlier. It probably had been sitting there the whole time. I could only imagine it had been shot by someone, probably at a deer or a grouse or a squirrel, the same animals that lived there now. It had been shot, and probably an arrow that had gone wayward and ended up somehow landing on this little ledge halfway up a gorge, and nobody found it because it was such a random, difficult place to reach. And slowly, the shaft of the arrow, the wooden shaft, had worn away, and the sinew that was holding that Flint Arrowhead onto the shaft, it also, you know, it also wore away and dissolved and decayed. And all that was left was the little piece of stone that I had.
I remember looking at it. There was a profound moment. It was like I was holding history in my hand, and suddenly it was like, it was like it opened a portal for me in time. And suddenly I was like, I felt so connected to some human being who hundreds of years ago was the last person to hold this. And I did find one other arrowhead, I think about four or five years later. I was camping out there in the same woods, only a few hundred feet away, and I had a little campfire going. And right between me and the campfire, I was cooking some beans, I think, there sticking out of the ground was another Flint Arrowhead. And I pulled it out. It was a little bit more damaged than the first one, but it was again the same profound moment where history just came, and it was like I could just imagine a world, a world that I knew so well now.
Later, but hundreds of years before, it was a completely different land, a completely different world. People by a humanity with a completely different culture, different language, different lifestyle, different food. Really got me thinking something very profound about it.
Now, the final way that I thought about history, and it was such a deeply important part of my childhood, also happened on the same land. This land of gorgeous valleys and hills, that inside of the earth, in this land, inside of the rock, it sedimentary rock, rock that had been piled up on top of each other, mud that had turned into rock over millions and millions of years. And inside of this rock, this rock that had been piled up something like 300, 400 million years ago, inside of it, when you opened up the layers, were fossils. And fossils of creatures that no longer existed, that never could have survived in the land that was there nowadays. The freshwater, the lakes and the streams, it was saltwater animals. And they were animals inside. There were little snails and brachiopods and trilobites and crinoids and clams, all these different things from a warm, shallow saltwater ocean that covered all of upstate New York how many years ago? 300 million years ago.
And for me, there was something profound about it. There were some reminders that life is very, very long and that my little life and that humanity’s little life is just a tiny, tiny little sliver in the vastness of geological time. And somehow that helped me in my childhood. That helped me survive the pain that I was going through, the lies that I was living with inside my family, the trauma, the suffering. It gave me hope. It made me think, yeah, as much as one day, one week in my life, one week in my horrible, traumatizing school, this terrible one year is awful and it feels like eternity, it’s not eternity. There’s a whole other life that went on hundreds of millions of years ago that’s recorded for all of history inside the rocks in these fossils.
And for me, it opens something up in me, some reminder that someday I’m gonna get out. Someday I’m gonna live a bigger life than this little sliver of a life that I’m living now. Somebody, I’m going, I think unconsciously, I knew this. Somebody, I’m going to make sense of my history. Someday I’m going to come back and look at the fossils of my unresolved trauma, the fossils of my acting out behavior, the fossils of the abusive things that happened to me, the fossils of my buried feelings. My buried feelings were like fossil fuel. They were buried. They were all inside of me. They were all stirred up, and they were waiting to come out.
And when I did start accessing them, they were fuel. They were power. They were power for me to make sense of this, to look at it, to look at it honestly, to look at what happened to me, to say how did this happen? How did it come to be? How did my parents come to be these types of people who would do these things to me? Who were their parents? Who were their grandparents? Where did they come from? Why did they do this? Why did they not study their history? Why did they not have the strength to make sense of it? Why did they not have the motivation?
And for me, it became a mission for me to become a self-archaeologist, a self-historian, to look at the history of me, to look into the sedimentary rock of myself, of my past, of my soul, of my character, and to make sense of it and to know truth and to know the truth of me, the truth of my past, the truth of my present, and hopefully more of the truth of my future.