A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  Many governments particularly subscribe to this mysticism of blood now, notably the Israeli and the German. The Irish Republic now only grants citizenship to children and grandchildren of emigrants, but for Germany there is no statute of limitation. Ethnic Germans who settled in Russia three centuries ago have been repatriated in the reunified Germany, while second-generation German Turks—and all the generations of their descendants born in Germany—will never be eligible for citizenship under the current law. Israel itself was founded on the idea that the legacy of blood entitled the Jews to a legacy of land, an even more extreme version of the authority of origins. I’ve always been as much appalled as awestruck that a people could not only retain their distinctness during the nineteen centuries between the fall of Jerusalem and the founding of Israel, but could remain so attached to an absent place of origin that everyplace else could be framed as temporary exile, no matter how appealing, no matter how long they stayed. Becoming native is a process of forgetting and embracing where you are.

  The linking of blood to ethnic nationalism found its strongest advocates in the rhetoricians of the Third Reich. “. . . who could ward off, / who could divert, the flood of origin inside him?” says Rilke in the same prescient poem, “. . . he waded down into more ancient blood, to ravines / where Horror lay, still glutted with his fathers.” The metaphors that were the foundations of the Third Reich invoked a mystical Germany that was a single person of one blood, and blood and soil were the Nazi way of describing the allegiance of a people with a place, with ethnic nationalism. In this vision of a single body, a unified blood, the status of the Jews was almost inevitable. Hitler wrote, “How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! . . . we shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.” And he spent so much time talking about blood as though all Germans were one body and the Jew as though all Jews were one virus invading it that he seems to have come to believe his allegories were literal truth. The historians Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann write that he “made no distinctions between German and foreign, rich and poor, liberal, conservative, socialist, or Zionist, religious or nonreligious, baptized or unbaptised Jews. In his eyes, there was only ‘the Jew’.” It’s a fascinating potent metaphor, the nation as body and the people as blood, but Hitler, like the new ethnic nationalists in Europe and white supremacists in America, never examined his metaphors very carefully.

  Blood’s most significant quality is that it circulates, though the Western world only found this out with Harvey’s experiments in 1628. Which is to say, despite the archaic idea that heredity and identity are situated there, literal blood is not so much like the reservoir or bank vault of the body as its interstate highway system or its rivers: blood is what mixes things up, imports and exports, keeps them moving. And blood itself is not a pure, a singular substance, but a compound, made up of red and white blood cells, T-cells, oxygen, hormones, and other internal messengers and regulators, wastes, nutrients, antibodies. A healthy bloodstream is a very mixed community, and an updated metaphor based on blood would have to be one of multiplicity and mobility. Blood and soil make an even less appropriate pair for grounding identity racially and spatially, since they are both zones of profound transformation. The ecohistorian Paul Shepard describes soil as “a skin, mediating the mineral and biological communities.” Just as blood moves through the body importing and exporting diverse substances to the outside world, so worms and microbes course through the soil, aerating it, turning it over and transforming things at the ends of their lives—corpses, wastes and decay—into fresh soil where the cycle will begin again. Soil is a festival of corruption and reinvention, the alpha and omega of all corporeal things.

  Hitler wanted it both ways, wanted the vitality of blood and soil with the unchanging solidity of what would have been truer metaphors, bone and stone—but bone and stone signify the permanence of death. A country can never be exactly like a body, for its borders are even more permeable than skin, and usually only island nations have much topographic reason for their national boundaries. Nationalism is to some extent a fantasy of making the skin impermeable enough to keep out what lies over the border, and conservatives tend to speak of the purity of the body and the nation in identical terms, with words like alien and foreign and contaminant applicable to both (the great hostility toward homosexuality that Wilde and Casement, among others, have encountered seems to come from an anxiety about the penetrability of the borders of the male body; as Irishmen they were already viruses in the English cultural stream). A local population might once have been but no longer is like the old metaphorical blood of the metaphorical national body, for it has been mingling more than ever in recent decades. Ireland’s renewed mass emigration is often referred to as a hemorrhage, another metaphor that prizes containment—but perhaps the impulse of blood, to make the metaphor modern, is to circulate. A nation is like a body up to a point, but it’s a metaphor that intentionally dead-ends in a dangerously simple picture.

  Family trees and roots tend to impose some of the same fantasies. The shape of trees, the diversity of roots and branches, the unifying trunk, makes them a useful metaphor for many things. In writing about whiteness and racism, for example, the historian David Roediger says, “If, to use tempting older Marxist images, racism is a large, low-hanging branch of a tree that is rooted in class relations, we must constantly remind ourselves that the branch is not the same as the roots . . . and that the best way to shake the roots may at times be by grabbing the branch. Less botanical explanations . . . are in order.” Trees provide a useful image of many ancestors or many descendants, though here too forgetting is as useful as remembering: ancient generations almost never culminate in the single descendant drawn on some family trees, nor does any family descend from a single illustrious ancestor. An accurate family tree going back a few centuries or so would more resemble a forest of interlaced branches or some other such tangle than the neat trees one gets; even for our own Irish ancestors, my uncle had to draw up several trees, a small grove, which pushed the unknown back several generations but hardly did away with it altogether. And to take the metaphor seriously is to open up new possibilities (a secular English Jew once said, in the historian Simon Schama’s hearing, “Trees have roots. Jews have legs”). Trees must have either seeds that fly, like the winged seeds of maples, or roots that go back forever to a true origin, to the point before ethnic groups emerged, back to the mythological common ancestors in Eden or the biological ones in Africa. Which is to say, you can find yourself in origins, though you may have to choose an arbitrary point—a great-grandmother, an ancestral home, the Irish Cliffs of Moher—and beyond that you can lose yourself in origins.

  Even Irish identity depends as much on forgetting as on remembering, on forgetting that the Celts were not always Irish and the Irish were not always Celts, on forgetting that for all the conservative, stubborn tradition, they have also changed drastically again and again since the days when they were pastoralist tribes. Science denies blood; the existence of real races in the species, and provides even more fluid and slippery origins, back to the bones of eastern Africa, then to the point where the distinction between humans and other species begins to blur. And if you go far back enough, biologists say, the internal pulse of the blood becomes the external tide washing over the most primitive creatures in the primal sea; blood and seawater still have the same salinity. The point of origin for human beings, however, is said to be the upright bipedalism—the walking—that grew out of the species’ move to the plains or savannahs of Africa. I like walking as the first thing anthropologists regard as having made humans human, that point at which they leave the forests and stretch upright like trees themselves, a rootless tree reaching for the sky. Go back, go back further, go back to the origin of the species, and you find not a fixed point but a walker, or rather walkers, not necessarily all walking in the same direction. So one morning in June I walked to Lisdoonvarna.

  12

  Rock Collecting


  I was on vacation. Everyone else was on holiday. I left my knapsack in the hotel-cum-hostel with pub in the center of Lisdoonvarna and walked to Ailwee Caverns. I went less for the sake of caves than for the route, through the barren windswept expanse of limestone on the southwestern lip of Galway Bay called the Burren, from an Irish word for a rocky place. It was a long walk, and it was raining. Up a crest, past one of the horrible tree plantations, which had picnic benches scattered around its impenetrable mass, on the apparent assumption that a forest is a scenic recreation site place no matter what. Over a slope where stone was breaking through everywhere and some of the fields were not really fields but pavements of warped, riddled, hollowed-out pale limestone, in which little pools of water gathered, sweeping toward the misty distance. Past the place the map said had a side road going to the Blessed Bush, where the imprint of St. Brigid’s knees can be seen, in stone that must be less complicated than the terrain I was wandering through, for such a slight impression to be noticeable.

  Down Corkscrew Hill, apprently named for the zigzag road down its steep side, into a more inviting landscape, with trees along the stone walls and soil rather than stone as its primary surface. Past a field, where a primeval white horse, with thick legs and Roman nose and stiff short mane, came up to greet me, to a country hotel. Inelegant rain garb shed, into the hotel, a sort of poor man’s stately home, with its tattered prints and old volumes from scattered sets. Tea on a sort of settee in the room with the bar, a table away from the only other guests there, a well-dressed English family, three generations of women who looked like unhappy dolls and men who looked as immobile as the furniture beneath them. Outside again, the hills looked like topographical maps, because they had eroded into ledges or sills as regular as elevation lines, but beyond them was the sea. The cave was like many caves—long sinuous corridors resembling bodily passages, the literal bowels of the earth—and the tour guide was a young man with a good memory but no flair for recitating from memory, like most cave guides, but it was pleasant to be out of the rain. Then I ran into the Giantess on the road. She was better at vacation than I was: she had stayed in a town much closer to the caves and walked much less and met a man in a pub in Doolin who looked like Mel Gibson, but virtuously declined him. I thought we might keep running into each other, bound up on some parallel track of chimera chasing, but I never saw her again.

  The next day it was raining harder. I walked to Kilfenora and bought a packet of chips and a chocolate bar in a dusty store where strangers or women must have been infrequent sights, because the man who sold them stuck his head right up against the dusty window and goggled after me, his tongue balled up between his teeth in concentration or wonder. The church in Kilfenora—technically a cathedral whose bishop is the pope—was half in ruins, full of graves, and had on one wall a carved fourteenth-century Bishop making a sign of benediction with the same two-fingered gesture drivers now salute each other with as they pass. No one passed me, however; the Burren on this stormy day seemed like an abandoned landscape, like the surface of a planet whose inhabitants had all vanished an indeterminate time ago. No cars, almost no birds, and signs of cattle in the fields but no cows, just a flat rocky expanse to the horizon, scoured and gnawed by wind and rain—nothing but botany, geology, meteorology, and ruins. The wind was making the rain so horizontal it tickled my inner ear. There were pockets of water in the hollows of the limestone, and the slabs all fit together like pieces of an eroded puzzle, with long fracture lines making rows of rock. Even the whitethorn trees seemed lonely, each set at a distance from the next along the walls.

  I had the dead for company at the eleventh-century church in the cross-roads called Noughaval, another roofless stone structure being strangled by ivy, like a nervous system choking its bones. The surrounding cemetery’s headstones amid the wet grass and nettles ranged from a past weathered into illegibility, tombstones become plain rock again, to the near present with plastic flowers for remembrance, all ringed round by more stone walls. I had been walking a long time in the rain when I finally arrived at the great portal tomb of Poulnabrone. There were a few cars parked on the roadside and, despite the No Entry sign, figures wandering the stony field on which it reared up, a vast slab of stone held up high by a few uprights on a low mound of unshaped stones. The uprights had kept the slab balanced as a roof for four and a half thousand years, in defiance of gravity or celebration of balance. The roof hovered at a slight angle, so that it didn’t echo the horizon but pointed beyond it, soaring. As I stepped across the treacherous footing of hollows, ridges, rows, and dips, I saw a figure in ink-blue clothes approaching from another angle. He reached the tomb at the same time I did, and because the rain was coming down harder, he invited me inside with a hospitable gesture. These are always where there is much wind and water, he said as we stood on the low mound under the slab, and added, I come from Brittany, where there are many such things.

  He was at ease and set me at ease too by immediately assuming affinity, as though since we were sheltered by the same megalith we must care about the same things and could skip the preliminaries. The Bretons, he declared in his French-accented English, are blueeyed Celts, though he was darkeyed and blackhaired himself, and he asserted that Breton was the most widely spoken of the surviving Celtic languages, spoken by far more people than speak Scottish, or Welsh, or Irish—he spoke it himself. I tried out a passage of Rimbaud on him: “I have my ancestors’ pale blue eyes . . . only I don’t butter my hair,” but he didn’t recognize it, at least not in English. We wandered together over the rocky ground to the next field, talking of stones, Celts, fairies, pilgrimages, and old places. We had both been down the old pilgrimage trail of Santiago de Compostela, which begins in Paris, but he had gone the whole way, and on foot. He was more beautiful than Mel Gibson, but this is not a novel: his mother was waiting for him in the car, a cranky Colette in leather pants unimpressed by the wet pre-Celtic monuments he had brought her to see.

  There were places in the Burren that had never been inhabited and hardly disturbed, and when the Office of Public Works tried to build an interpretive center for tourists in one of them a few years ago, it prompted one of the most heated environmental campaigns in Ireland, a campaign to leave the place undeveloped that was at least temporarily won. In the daytime it seemed possible to believe that human beings were rare, solitary creatures who existed largely to rearrange the stone according to slowpassing fashions into tombs, stone forts, churches, walls, and that there was no other scale of time but the eons of geological formation and erosion, the millennia of architectural styles, the decades of building, and the hourly shifts of clouds and wind and rain. Every place exists in two versions, as an exotic and a local. The exotic is a casual acquaintance who must win hearts through charm and beauty and sites of historical interest, but the local is made up of the accretion of individual memory and sustenance, the maternal landscape of uneventful routine. The Burren seemed to be an old local place that was becoming almost exclusively exotic (which is not to argue against the pleasures of promiscuity or for never leaving mother). The decline in population since the Famine has nowhere been more precipitous than in the west, and of all the places I visited, the Burren felt loneliest for its abandonment.

  At night things were livelier. A group of Welsh people was staying in the place I was, and they were an energetic bunch. By day they bicycled, kayaked, and climbed, less out of any evident enjoyment than out of a dogged sense of propriety: these were their holidays, and this is how holidays are spent. But in the evening they drank and sang in the pub attached to our hostel and looked happier. The first night, there were hired local musicians too, and the proprietor’s three young daughters came down and gave us a show of step dancing. They wore elaborate, stiff costumes with full short skirts, and the information circulated that the three had won many awards. Stiff and immobile from the spine on up, their grave faces suggesting their upper body knew not what the lower was doing, no matter how their skirts flipped up a
nd their feet flew. I always think step dancing must be an elaborate allegory about conscious suppression and unconscious expression of erotic energy, with its impassive head and body and aggressive legs, but that’s another story.

  The following night, a Friday, the young English busker who’d been moping around the place drifted into the pub with his guitar. His first song was “Dirty Old Town,” a song very popular as a description of Dublin, and his dirgelike monotone suited it well. But he flattened the next song into the same melancholia, and the next. The crowd of young Dubliners who’d driven straight to the pub for their bank holiday and surrounded me in my corner seat couldn’t bear it; they rushed out to their car, came back with a pair of guitars and politely wrested the evening from his mournful grasp. They sang pop and rock songs with cheerful tunefulness and with lined notebooks full of lyrics and chords to keep them on track. When they weren’t singing, they chattered and poured pints of Guinness down their throats at an impressive rate and kept quantities of cigarettes smoking in the ashtrays. The Welsh gang chimed in, requested songs, and joined the banter. One of them played an Irish drum—a bodhrán, it’s called—and one had a theatrical baritone of awesome volume, and between songs they bantered with the Dubliners.