October 9, 2001
The potato boiling authoress’ book party reminded me of something that I had forgotten about her. She is one of many good looking sisters. A many sibling’d splendor. Her closely shared DNA can be found orbiting about her in many permutations. In a room she and her family are their own galaxy. One sister is present at the party with two of her own offspring; two girls stamped in their familiar gene foundry. The leit motif of feature, a varied palette of eyes and hair, but all with the echo of their own blood. Displaying that ability some families have of apparently subsuming the other half of the genes: “look no daddy, we cloned them.” Celebrating the way that a large family derives a degree of buoyancy from its own mass, creating a mythology out of its members.
I once had a roommate with a similarly large, predominantly female family. There were six sisters. I couldn’t keep the sisters names or the various strains of their soap operatic lives straight in my head. I was drowning in sisters, apparently I was living not with one sister but with all of them. Such proliferation of life both fascinated and repelled me. My own family always felt like a drifting triangle, winding down, two-stepping with entropy. Being without siblings, without offspring, and at the end of a series of small, withering families perhaps I merely console myself with this theory out of cold necessity, but somehow it has always felt like a suitable arrangement to me. I harbor a perverse pleasure in the fact that we are dying out. Relieved that the tribe is ready to relinquish its double helix at the gates of extinction. Prepared to revel in the ecstasy of dénouement, the accelerated pleasure of ending. To clock out from the factory of evolution. A delicious blasphemy.
A friend’s grandmother used to say on bringing her and her siblings to one of the vast Irish beaches and finding other humans present on it, even two or three, “Eugh, people....” She would turn on her heels, dragging the army of small children she had custody of for the day and seek out another beach. Fortunately for all involved it is not impossible to find an Irish beach empty of people. There she was with her tribe, gregarious with her own flock but not willing to descend onto the planes to mingle with the great soup of humanity. I have missed out on this grandmother’s conviction that one’s own are more than merely “people”, and on the pleasure she derived from being surrounded by the delicious infinity of variation she witnessed in her family, that which rendered her extended family simultaneously transparent and acutely visible to her.
I was looking down at the beach delighted that there were people there, people that looked very different from my own tribe; I went and joined them.
write on!!!
People like Ben Wattenberg are very concerned about falling fertility rates, which have historically characterized nations in decline. Others think it might be a good idea to let things wind down a bit. The Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply comes from the most primitive level. It's basically what animals do: try to stay alive and make more of yourselves. Humans are unique in sometimes going out of their way not to do this. It's part of the impulse I call Asceticism. Even if we don't quite approve for ourselves, we think somebody should be withholding. Catholicism is a classic example: promoting big families, prohibiting birth control, but insistent on clerical celibacy. This doesn't really have anything to do with Jesus: it's because distance from mainstream behavior makes you into a different person. In culture, Asceticism is both central, and marginalized. In a sense, it's breaking with "Natural" behavior that makes us Human: not what we do, but what we don't do.
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The potato boiling authoress’ book party reminded me of something that I had forgotten about her. She is one of many good looking sisters. A many sibling’d splendor. Her closely shared DNA can be found orbiting about her in many permutations. In a room she and her family are their own galaxy. One sister is present at the party with two of her own offspring; two girls stamped in their familiar gene foundry. The leit motif of feature, a varied palette of eyes and hair, but all with the echo of their own blood. Displaying that ability some families have of apparently subsuming the other half of the genes: “look no daddy, we cloned them.” Celebrating the way that a large family derives a degree of buoyancy from its own mass, creating a mythology out of its members.
I once had a roommate with a similarly large, predominantly female family. There were six sisters. I couldn’t keep the sisters names or the various strains of their soap operatic lives straight in my head. I was drowning in sisters, apparently I was living not with one sister but with all of them. Such proliferation of life both fascinated and repelled me. My own family always felt like a drifting triangle, winding down, two-stepping with entropy. Being without siblings, without offspring, and at the end of a series of small, withering families perhaps I merely console myself with this theory out of cold necessity, but somehow it has always felt like a suitable arrangement to me. I harbor a perverse pleasure in the fact that we are dying out. Relieved that the tribe is ready to relinquish its double helix at the gates of extinction. Prepared to revel in the ecstasy of dénouement, the accelerated pleasure of ending. To clock out from the factory of evolution. A delicious blasphemy.
A friend’s grandmother used to say on bringing her and her siblings to one of the vast Irish beaches and finding other humans present on it, even two or three, “Eugh, people....” She would turn on her heels, dragging the army of small children she had custody of for the day and seek out another beach. Fortunately for all involved it is not impossible to find an Irish beach empty of people. There she was with her tribe, gregarious with her own flock but not willing to descend onto the planes to mingle with the great soup of humanity. I have missed out on this grandmother’s conviction that one’s own are more than merely “people”, and on the pleasure she derived from being surrounded by the delicious infinity of variation she witnessed in her family, that which rendered her extended family simultaneously transparent and acutely visible to her.
I was looking down at the beach delighted that there were people there, people that looked very different from my own tribe; I went and joined them.
- rachael 10-09-2001 9:13 pm
write on!!!
- Skinny 10-10-2001 2:56 pm [add a comment]
People like Ben Wattenberg are very concerned about falling fertility rates, which have historically characterized nations in decline. Others think it might be a good idea to let things wind down a bit. The Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply comes from the most primitive level. It's basically what animals do: try to stay alive and make more of yourselves. Humans are unique in sometimes going out of their way not to do this. It's part of the impulse I call Asceticism. Even if we don't quite approve for ourselves, we think somebody should be withholding. Catholicism is a classic example: promoting big families, prohibiting birth control, but insistent on clerical celibacy. This doesn't really have anything to do with Jesus: it's because distance from mainstream behavior makes you into a different person. In culture, Asceticism is both central, and marginalized. In a sense, it's breaking with "Natural" behavior that makes us Human: not what we do, but what we don't do.
- alex 10-19-2001 10:12 pm [add a comment]