Do you ever share who you are?
One of the stories I sometimes tell about Ludwig Wittgenstein has to do with the time in the winter of 1936/37 when he went around apologizing to his friends for having failed to tell them he was Jewish. Specifically, he was apologizing for having allowed them to think that only one of his four grandparents was Jewish when in fact the ratio went the other way. The Nuremberg Laws were in force in Germany; these niceties of number mattered. (It should be noted that Wittgenstein's three Jewish-born grandparents had all converted as adults to Catholicism and his one non-Jewish grandparent was the matrilineal one: no beit din in Austria would have ruled him or his siblings Jewish. Nazi Germany didn't care. The surviving family got out after the Anschluss because of their money, not their Catholic education.) It was part of a larger pattern of confession that Wittgenstein was working out that winter, some for lies of omission and some for actions of which he was ashamed, and my impression is that none of his friends found it actually changed their opinions of him except insofar as some of them were not impressed by his ideas of a convenient time to come over.
Wittgenstein, of course, apologized almost constantly for being alive, which is why I personify the same tendency in myself as Tiny Wittgenstein, the gloomy little shoulder philosopher with his kite-wings and leather jacket whom![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie periodically traps inside a jam-jar so I can get something done; I find it even more relatable than his well-documented love for detective fiction and the musicals of Carmen Miranda. One of his other apologies during that confessional winter was for having let people think he had no sexual experience of women. That one fascinates me because I can't tell whether he intended to correct the assumption that he was sexually inexperienced or the assumption that he was experienced only with men, but either way it was again an apology for not having disclosed fully the particulars of himself—for existing under false pretenses.
I hope my friendlist appreciates that I haven't rung anyone up to come by and explain in person that actually I am descended in part from early American colonists, even though I feel really weird about it.
The continuity of family I was raised with was my mother's side. When I speak of my grandparents, I mean her parents. At night when I couldn't sleep, my mother would tell me the long, winding story of immigrations and migrations and marriages as far back as she knew, starting in a scatter across Eastern Europe and eventually converging, not in New York City where her parents were born in separate neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but in Iowa City where they met at the same graduate program for psychology and eloped. (An American Jewish love story, nu?) If I stayed awake, she would tell me of their travels, and of her own, and of meeting my father—this time in New York—and moving first to Philadelphia and then to Boston, where somewhat to their surprise they remain today. My father's father's side has an extremely traceable name, but we knew more about their history in Wales and Ireland (not in our case Austria) than we did about their movements here, since my father's father was born in San Francisco before 1906 and when your birth certificate is lost in an earthquake and fire you can tell people any damn thing about yourself that you please. My father's mother's side was a lacuna. Very recently, however, my father got into their genealogy and in consequence I am now looking at a scanned page attesting to the presence of her family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. This summer we determined that one of the branches ofspatch's ancestry went back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. We knew already about the ancestor who founded Newburyport, the ancestor who was involved in the Salem witch trials—I found the link to the Reverend Nicholas Noyes sufficiently weird that I wrote a poem about it. Now we're trying to figure out if we're related.
It is not a matter of innocence. I was born in America, into the history of America, and that means I benefit from its genocides and its slaveries whether my ancestors were on the spot for them or not; my responsibility to the present and the future of this country is the same. But I am used to thinking of myself as descended from people on the margins of one sort or another and for at least a quarter of myself that is not true. It feels a little alien. In other words, I am much more unsettled to find myself with a strain of the Colonial-era WASPs Lovecraft so fetishized than I would be by any equivalent revelation of fish people, which is not news to me in the abstract, but in the personal means I write about it by way of Wittgenstein, who at least knew about his ancestry all along, even if he did get hit rather suddenly with what it meant.
I suppose I should watch a Technicolor musical to complete the metaphor, but I have a crushing headache and suspect I will instead go to sleep.
Wittgenstein, of course, apologized almost constantly for being alive, which is why I personify the same tendency in myself as Tiny Wittgenstein, the gloomy little shoulder philosopher with his kite-wings and leather jacket whom
selkie periodically traps inside a jam-jar so I can get something done; I find it even more relatable than his well-documented love for detective fiction and the musicals of Carmen Miranda. One of his other apologies during that confessional winter was for having let people think he had no sexual experience of women. That one fascinates me because I can't tell whether he intended to correct the assumption that he was sexually inexperienced or the assumption that he was experienced only with men, but either way it was again an apology for not having disclosed fully the particulars of himself—for existing under false pretenses.I hope my friendlist appreciates that I haven't rung anyone up to come by and explain in person that actually I am descended in part from early American colonists, even though I feel really weird about it.
The continuity of family I was raised with was my mother's side. When I speak of my grandparents, I mean her parents. At night when I couldn't sleep, my mother would tell me the long, winding story of immigrations and migrations and marriages as far back as she knew, starting in a scatter across Eastern Europe and eventually converging, not in New York City where her parents were born in separate neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but in Iowa City where they met at the same graduate program for psychology and eloped. (An American Jewish love story, nu?) If I stayed awake, she would tell me of their travels, and of her own, and of meeting my father—this time in New York—and moving first to Philadelphia and then to Boston, where somewhat to their surprise they remain today. My father's father's side has an extremely traceable name, but we knew more about their history in Wales and Ireland (not in our case Austria) than we did about their movements here, since my father's father was born in San Francisco before 1906 and when your birth certificate is lost in an earthquake and fire you can tell people any damn thing about yourself that you please. My father's mother's side was a lacuna. Very recently, however, my father got into their genealogy and in consequence I am now looking at a scanned page attesting to the presence of her family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. This summer we determined that one of the branches of
spatch's ancestry went back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. We knew already about the ancestor who founded Newburyport, the ancestor who was involved in the Salem witch trials—I found the link to the Reverend Nicholas Noyes sufficiently weird that I wrote a poem about it. Now we're trying to figure out if we're related.It is not a matter of innocence. I was born in America, into the history of America, and that means I benefit from its genocides and its slaveries whether my ancestors were on the spot for them or not; my responsibility to the present and the future of this country is the same. But I am used to thinking of myself as descended from people on the margins of one sort or another and for at least a quarter of myself that is not true. It feels a little alien. In other words, I am much more unsettled to find myself with a strain of the Colonial-era WASPs Lovecraft so fetishized than I would be by any equivalent revelation of fish people, which is not news to me in the abstract, but in the personal means I write about it by way of Wittgenstein, who at least knew about his ancestry all along, even if he did get hit rather suddenly with what it meant.
I suppose I should watch a Technicolor musical to complete the metaphor, but I have a crushing headache and suspect I will instead go to sleep.
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Er. As I was saying. A large part of me suspects that for many USians, tracing our ancestry back that far is a matter of... I don't know how to put this. The subliminal racism that suffuses white existence in this country. The fundamental belief that blood descent matters, whether or not it's explicitly to prove pure whiteness (my maternal side, with the Norman knight, was definitely the type to sweep any Black or Native ancestry under the rug), or to prove aristocracy, or to assuage any guilt over being white invaders and prove some kind of metaphysical right to be here (my paternal line, with the Scot of questionable baronhood, also went in for the "Indian princess" thing i.e. claiming descent from a Native chief). There's a lot of echo-chamber impetus to assume we're all related and aristocratic, is what I'm saying. ;P
(Also to pass along tall tales about one's ancestors. Some people take it rather humorously, with tales of horse thieves and pirates; some get entangled in proving their ancestors were ideologically Correct, whether that be in fighting for slavery during our Civil War or being deported for Jacobitism rather than anything less noble. Admittedly the questionably baronial Scot did arrive here right around 1750 so the suspicion that he had Jacobite leanings is not entirely unfounded, but it's also not documented at all, so he may merely have been a sheep-stealer or just trying to get out of an increasingly inhospitable region. He was Border, not Highland, so you can see why I take that also with a grain of salt.)
Um. I'm rambling again. What I was trying to say, I think, is that genealogy in this country definitely has a major helping of hagiography involved, and I definitely understand feeling odd about it. My people have been here a long time, but I can't prove whether any of them personally owned slaves or not. Does it matter? Not really. Would I feel very strange to see documentation that they did? Definitely. I may not actually believe that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, but you don't grow up USian without getting some of that ingrained Puritanism, I think. Perhaps if your family actively combats thr tendency, but still.
Anyway. That was a lot. I will leave you with the anecdote I was trying to get to in the "tall tales" paragraph before I got distracted, which is that I have seen, in a published book, a photograph of the sword with which one of the Norman knight's descendants supposedly slew a dragon. ^_^
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Some Norman knights are perfectly provable! And if you had British ancestry in the 19th C or earlier, we're all related to Edward III anyway. Statistically, at least. :-D
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It's hugely mythological. And I think a lot of it comes out of—or feeds into; it might just be mutual parasitism—the concept of whiteness as a blank slate which can be colored in with exciting exotic touches so long as no one has to suffer the institutional-social penalties for being too far from the center nowadays. I'm used more to the mindset of a diaspora where it matters where your people came from because it's how you maintain continuity across a scattered community. Bragging rights or deflecting rights feel different. I don't want to get caught up in either.
I may not actually believe that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, but you don't grow up USian without getting some of that ingrained Puritanism, I think.
I think I got to skip it with respect to family, fortunately; without details, I have in my lineage people I know did terrible things and I don't feel controlled by them or even affected except in the way that behavior passes in widening rings down the generations and managed to arrive at mine in a mostly dilute state. (I do feel that if I'm not working myself to death every second that I'm conscious I don't have the right to stay alive, but I think our entire society right now is organized to inculcate that mindset and at least I know it's murderous bullshit.) It's nice to be able to be proud of your ancestors, but I'm not sure that's the most important part of your relationship with them. This entire conversation is making me think of the folk noir Moonrise (1948), which is probably one of the reasons I liked it.
I will leave you with the anecdote I was trying to get to in the "tall tales" paragraph before I got distracted, which is that I have seen, in a published book, a photograph of the sword with which one of the Norman knight's descendants supposedly slew a dragon.
Hurrah!