Looking Back
On Anglesey, Wales, my wife and I walked along the endless beach out to the island of Llandwyn, only reachable at low tide, to find the ruins of Dwynwen’s church. Aside from the initial rationale for our visit here—that my wife shares this ancient Welsh name—I was struck, as I was so often in our Welsh and European meanderings, with the age of these ancient sites. St. Dwynwen died in AD 460. The ruins of the church set against the late afternoon, low-lying sun in particular seemed to emanate an aura of mystery and power, and I remembered Marjorie from Hemingway’s short story “The End of Something,” as she and Nick look at the remains of the old, late-nineteenth century ruins of a lumber mill, who thinks of it as “more like a castle.” Unlike Nick, she senses something important, more dynamic and essential in it. For her, past epochs resonate with meaning and significance.
We sat on the rock remains of the church, looked out through its arches back toward the long-low expanse of the beach, the marshes beyond, or across the bay to Snowdonia’s high peaks, rising starkly from the blue-black sea, and I worked to imagine another time altogether before the never-ceasing momentum of human innovation and invention, which has brought us most recently face to face with the terrifyingly ominous development of artificial intelligence. I tried to flex my imagination into envisioning a world where deep religious faith and pilgrimage and superstition and close interaction with and connection to the environment held much more fundamental sway on our species.
Another day, we waked a kilometer or so to one of the many unfathomably older sites on Anglesey—Bryn Celli Ddu (the “Mound in the Dark Grove” in English), some 4,000 years old! This at first glance was simply a mound of green in the center of a large field whose edges were bordered by trees, the undulations of sown and fallow fields—oddly reminding me of the landscape of the Teletubbies (yes I watched endless hours of Teletubbies with my eldest son). Unlike the church of St. Dwynwen, we have no knowledge whatsoever of the builders of this structure, and so we are left to use the few facts of its structural makeup and our imaginative speculation alone. We just so happened to visit the site on the summer solstice, and one of the few things absolutely “known” about it is that at dawn the light of the solstice lines up perfectly with the main entryway into the chamber below, illuminating it more fully than on any other day of the year. Whoever had constructed it clearly looked carefully, painstakingly carefully, to the natural rhythm and order of nature, and one can extrapolate that, as with so many ancient cultures, their beliefs must have been deeply grounded in these.
Many times now on visits to Mexico, I have climbed about on Mayan pyramids or through what we assume are “ball courts” of the ancient cities in Tulum, Chichén Itzá, and my favorite, Cobá, and felt something similar—the sense of a human past that reaches far far back, nearly beyond the reach of our imaginations, to cultures whose belief structures and practices and behavior were profoundly different than our own, awed and a little dizzy at the tremendous reach of human history.
With the advent of technology, which gathers up momentum and leaps forward at its dizzyingly rapid pace, this sense of “lost epochs,” of fundamentally different ways of being and going about the day to day activities of our lives, comes on all the more quickly. As a boy, on into young adulthood, cell phones, cars that steer themselves, computers that can be spoken to like the ones on Star Trek, video calls, high definition televisions….were all relegated to the vast future. In some ways, I was living then in an epoch as fundamentally different to the one I now inhabit as that of the world of the Druids and Mayans. The scope and shape of human society has been shifting and changing for millennia, but now more than ever new epochs arise ever more swiftly. My children’s children will wake into a world as radically different to the world their parents have known as the world I grew up in versus the world my own children know….
A Denis Johnson poem, “Proposal,” helps me to gather and process this all. In the poem, Johnson begins with a jarring imaginative/speculative account of “the early inhabitants of this continent.” He writes:
I think some of them had to chew the food
for the old ones after they'd lost all their teeth,
and that their expressions
were like those we see on the faces
of the victims of traffic accidents today.
I think they threw their spears with an utter sense of loss,
as if they, their weapons, and the enormous animals
they pursued were all going to disappear.
As we can see, they were right. And they were us.
The line that is most powerful in the context of this post is “And they were us,” the assertion by Johnson that despite the radically different worlds the first inhabitants and he occupy, the fundamental humanness of both he and them remains. We are still, despite all of our advances “tossing our spears with an utter sense of loss,” knowing the things we “pursue,” like their enormous animals and we ourselves will all soon disappear, perhaps leaving only vague remnants of ourselves for future inhabitants to ponder. With or without self driving cars or implants in our brains transforming us into cyborgs (yes, that day is surely coming) or artificial intelligence doing the bulk of our jobs for us or or or… They are still us. We are still them.
He moves on from these observations to decide to propose to a woman (Cindy, his spouse for the last 25 years of his life):
and yet surrounded by the aroma
of this Mexican baking and flowery incense
with the kitchen as yellow as the middle
of the sun, telling your usually smart-mouthed
urchin child about the early inhabitants
of this continent who are dead, I figure
I’ll marry myself to you and take my chances,
stepping onto the rock
which is a whale, the ship which is about to set sail
and sink
in the danger that carries us like a mother.
Johnson not only accepts the unchanging, essential nature of being human—that we are all still somehow nothing more nor less than spear-tossing desperate early inhabitants. Rather, he uses this recognition to ground his own proposal of marriage to someone he has fallen in love with, to make some small, ancient human gesture as a way to fend off what will ultimately only remain of our lives as crumbling stone, mounds in vast fields, maybe a poem or brief Substack scribbling.
Photos by the author.
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