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October 8, 2001
New World?
Jet plane, cell phone, fiber-optic cable. With these we bridge the distances. The “New” World and the “Old” are drawn ever closer. Yet on this Columbus Day the gulf between Worlds seems wider than ever. It’s widely claimed that all of us have entered a New World; that we are marked by the late events; changed: never to be the same. So it was for those who held these shores five hundred years ago, when strange craft and strange men came from the sea to give the world a new name. Even so, the peoples of this continent did not own the land, and had only come here ten, fifteen, at most twenty thousand years before. A mere moment ago, in geologic time.No one is native to America.
No one is native to this fallen World.
We are all here as exiles, trying to piece together what was broken in the Beginning.
One way by which we join, instead of sunder, is through our relationship with the Land. Itinerant animals though we may be, we do come to identify with the places we inhabit. Not that we own the Land, but we establish a bond with it. Not that the Land owns us, but it gives us Life, and continuity, if we tend it with Love. If we rape it, despoiling while returning nothing, it becomes the Wasteland, where Life cannot survive.
Half a millennium after the European arrival, we have grown close to this Land. The places where we are born, where we grow up, where we live out our lives; these are as close to Home as we will ever come in this World.
Ancestry not withstanding.
Still, Old World names are strewn about out landscape, bespeaking our nostalgia for a deeper, truer Home. We do not find it in any particular place, though our language leads us back to Britain. We live in the New York, not the true York, but we are closer here to Rome, and Troy, and to other names which remind us that our Home is located among ideas and meanings, as much as in places.
We even honor a few of the old “Indian” names, remembering the people who were not Indian, and were not native, but were here before we came.
I think it’s worth recalling that confrontation, as we contemplate our actions another half way round the world.
I don’t think anyone is proud of the way we behaved back then, but the assumptions of the time now seem so outlandish as to absolve us of current guilt.
How could we think that we had the right to come to a place and just take over?
We certainly wouldn’t do that now.
It must have been a different World.
But it’s always a different World;
mere Time excusing a blindness that’s enduring.
Sometimes I stand beneath a tree in the Park and look up at a bird, just above me, yet obtuse. It’s so close that I think I’m going to get a real “good look”, but then it’s silhouetted, shrouded by foliage, a few partial glimpses, and only of underside. Frustration, but what are you going to do? You move on, and try to find another vantage. And maybe at a distance, and with some elevation, you can get a different view into the same tree. And with the light in the right direction you can easily see that the bird is indeed just another Magnolia Warbler (as you thought, but weren’t quite sure). A beautiful, but common, species. And the rub is that at this distance, even though you can identify it, you don’t quite get the full beauty, the satisfaction of the good look.
That’s a Mystery of Vision, and of the space through which we must peer. But there are Mysteries within Mysteries, each an adumbration of one greater. Our metaphorical vision is no less bent than our eyesight, and our vision of the future is no better.
Physical or spiritual, Relativity remains the same:
a failure of Unity.
In this World, where we are separate, and not unified, Mystery obtains.
Even when things look obvious, something crucial always goes unseen, though it were right before our eyes. This we should remember when judgment appears clear, and the distance between continents collapses, even as the gulf between us grows.
It’s the same old World.
It cannot excuse us.
It must inform us.