Things That Are Evil

9/7/03


Sugar seduces
with its quenching sweetness
Island memories
Of fruit falling from the trees
settling on hips as fat;
Slowing natural energy,
Imprisoning us.

Though shoes are useful
for mountains, rocks, cold, nails and
they help us travel---
When they become convention,
required for entrance,
objects of fashion...
They separate us from the Earth
And lead us to believe that
she is not our friend.
We are her master, we think,
and not her servant
or her protector.

Clocks are evil, yes,
dividing moments,
sweet, long spontaneity,
of experience
born of natural magic
into hours, minutes, seconds---
cutting short our bliss.
Enormous expectations
stuffed into each hour
swiftly subduing
sweet experience of life.

Looking for Gems (in old journals)

......in old notebooks and journals.


9/11/1995

Psychological sensory censors.  Right now I really feel that I need to write down that phrase and remember it.  I am channeling right now.  I am the oracle.  The Oracle at Delphi.  Ask me anything, but no one is asking me questions.  So much untapped potential.  Pause.

The layers of time have peeled away and for this brief moment I am myself with the dust cleared away, clean and glowing.  I have been purified at the well.

These are the tracks of my time on this planet.  The magical word.  Every world is magical.  (did I just write world?)  WORD.

A sad tomato.

The layers of time must be peeled away so that new growth can occur.  The rose bush must be pruned.  The grain must be harvested.  The leaves must be swept away and the earth left bare and clean for winter.  I have in my mind a picture (I see a vision!  Arnold Lobel, Fables.)  The cat and his visions.  Anyway, a picture of our front yard on an overcast winter day.  The grass is short and gray- green, the sidewalk swept bare.  The concrete steps lead down into the dark street, the first drops of a cold, windy rain falling down....the yew bushes show deep green down in the corner of my vision.  I am wearing my gray gloves and my cheeks and nose are cold.  I turn into the warm, faintly glowing -with- golden- light house and put water on for tea.  I light some candles.  It is afternoon.  I have the house to myself.  It is a cozy nest.  I see myself in my surroundings.


My self is in my surroundings, mirrored there because they are my surroundings.  Is this....this here....my uncovered self??  Why did I come here so urgently this evening?  Now I am here again, not in my vision.

It feels good to be clean.  I would say that I can see clearly now, if it didn't sound so sickeningly silly.

Ha!                                                                                                                                  ^^               ^^

Breathing

June 2015

I’m lying on a narrow table, head and knees supported by foam pillows, weighed down by the hospital gown made of that pure, heavy cotton that only seems to be used for hospital linens. Every nook and corner of the room is filled with fluorescent light and white noise, an all-pervading hum as if from a powerful ventilation system, and the more immediate, slightly lower-pitched drone of the machine in front of me. The table begins to slide forward. A series of red digits appears above my head. “666,” I remember. Just beyond the numbers is a dull orange light, which speaks as I am looking at it. A voice sounding very much like that of the radiologist who had placed the pillow under my knees says, “Take a deep breath and hold it.”

A young woman is lying with her legs across my lap, trembling violently, squeezing my hand with a steady pressure. She is in the aftermath of another debilitating panic attack. “Take a slow, deep breath,” I remind her. “It doesn’t help! It’s just something they tell you, and it’s a lie,” she insists. Like a midwife’s order for bystanders to boil water and tear up sheets, the question of whether there is a real, practical necessity in taking deep breaths to disarm a panic attack seems to be debatable.

We take breathing for granted. As a former asthmatic, I know this. At our best, we are completely unaware that we are doing it. We are full of a feeling of well-being, free to think our thoughts unimpeded by uncomfortable physical intrusions. When you can’t breathe, or breathe well, it becomes all that you think about. When every breath feels like it is being drawn through a straw, the thought of death creeps in around the edges of the antique photo that is your existence, giving everything a dark and doomed cast.

When we willfully hold our breaths, the feeling of doom is absent, because we are in control. If I fill my lungs up as much as possible and hold my breath in an attempt to stop an attack of hiccups, for a moment the area around my heart and lungs feels super-oxygenated. It seems like my vision becomes clearer, colors slightly brighter. I become aware of the blood flow up and out of my chest and down through my arms and fingers. When I know it’s time to take a breath or else, it’s in my throat and ears that I feel it. Pressure, deafness, desperation. Out goes the breath, in comes more oxygen, and surprise! I have held my diaphragm perfectly still for long enough that it has forgotten to have the hiccups. It’s the same principle at work as when we have an x-ray or a mammogram (although I suspect that they make us hold our breaths during a mammogram so we won’t scream and scare the patients in the waiting room.): holding your breath renders you perfectly still. A perfectly still subject will provide a clear image, in focus.

Imagine being a photographic subject in the early 1800s, when photography was in its infancy. You’ve taken a bath, put on all of the very finest clothing and accessories that you own, labored over the tidiness and fashionability of your hair and/or mustache. . Your corset may be tighter than usual, because you want to show yourself in the most impressive possible light to future generations. You’ve laid out a considerable sum of money to have an image made of yourself by which history and your descendants will remember you....maybe the only such image of you that will ever be made. The shutter stays open for several seconds, anywhere up to a minute, and you must sit or stand completely still. You must be sure to arrange your face in a natural way, severe or pleasant depending on how you want to be remembered. You probably won’t show your teeth; nobody seems to. As you sit or stand perfectly still, you may not be holding your breath, but you will be trying not to blink. And you will be thinking about all of these things for the seconds that the shutter is open.

When the pressure gets to be too much, we need to take a breather. When we remove ourselves from the source of our stress, we can breathe freely. Maybe this is why we love to take vacations in locations that are full of wonderful smells. There’s the ocean, with all of its clean scents tinged with a faint trace of fish and marsh mud: salt water, and the ever-present wind laden with tiny droplets of briny moisture that quickly become an essential part of your hair, skin, and clothes. At night, there are the pine trees that release their sharp fragrance in the wind that is forever blowing through their long, soft needles with a gentle tossing sound, faintly whistling like a breath over the top of a beer bottle. The smell of sun-warmed tar and gasoline hovers around the dock in the afternoon, and makes you think of ropes and planks and sturdy shoes. Or maybe you retreat to the woods on a mountain, where you will sit on a porch, stare at the trees, and enjoy a parade of scents as they waft past your stressed-out nostrils: hidden honeysuckle and glow-in-the-dark blackberry blossoms, the almost exotic patchouli-like aroma of dark brown humus formed from decades of slowly decaying leaves and bark, the peculiar and unmistakable ozone scent of an imminent thunderstorm. And then there is the clean, woody, rocky, herby, mineral smell of creek water. It smells like turtles and winking sunlight filtered through green leaves.

“Now, breathe.” The orange light speaks again, and the table slowly slides back out of the shallow tube. Only a second or two has passed.

Two days later, I sit with my doctor in front of his laptop as he shows me image after image of my heart, liver, stomach, kidneys, uterus, vena cava and aorta, as they slowly spin in time-stop animation, precisely arranged and coiled around the bright white vertebra, cradled in the sharp- edged frame of the pelvis, perfectly clear, delicately shaded and detailed. 

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The Gallows Trap - A Weird Folklore Thing

 Gallitrap
 Location: Lew Trenchard (Devon) - Unknown field in the area
Type: Other
Date / Time: Nineteenth century
Further Comments: A piece of this parish was thought to have a Gallitrap (or Gallows Trap), a section of land which if a person guilty of a heinous crime enters, they will wander around 'lost' until a parson and a magistrate are summoned. The former will break the spell while the latter hangs the person in question.

The AWOL Season

A few years ago, I promised a post talking about why so many people in the 40th Virginia went AWOL in the Fall of 1862.

A lot of time has passed since then, but I've finally gotten around to looking at the service records of some of the men.  I've also done more reading about the war experience for soldiers, and the incidence and manifestations, during and in the years following the Civil War, of what we would now call PTSD.  I'm not saying that these men were suffering from that, but records so far indicate plenty of reasons for particularly high stress at this time.

Here is what happened with my great-great grandfather and his three brothers.



In 1860, in the Stony Hill district of Richmond County, Virginia, there were 15 households headed by Baldersons.  For the most part, they were farmers, but not BIG farmers...the largest Balderson farm having a real and personal value of $10,500, and the next largest, $600.  Most were much, much smaller, averaging out at $806.  By contrast, Robert Wormeley Carter, the largest landowner in the district, had a farm worth $325,000.  This is the same parcel on which Ebenezer Balderson, my many-times-great-grandfather and a Scottish immigrant, had worked as an indentured servant during the first half of the previous century.

It's in the household headed by James Bailey Balderson, age 56, that our great-great-grandfather Presley lived.  In 1860, Presley was the only son living at home, along with a younger sister, Margaret.  The oldest Balderson brother, Charles, was a shoemaker who had been teaching his younger brother, James, the trade.  James lived in the home of Charles and Charles' young family.  Charles and James, 33 and 25 years old, both enlisted in Company B of the 40th Virginia Regiment on May 25, 1861.  Both were musicians, but I have yet to find out what instrument(s) they played.

The second oldest brother, William (29), and Presley, the youngest at 23 (and my great-great-grandfather,) enlisted ten days later, in the Richmond County seat at Warsaw. Both were in Company D, along with some other Balderson cousins who enlisted on the same day.

William was the first casualty among the brothers.
Wounded on June 27, 1862 at the battle of Gaines' Mill, he died 2 weeks later, on July 13 at a hospital in Richmond.  For a long time, I was unable to find out where he was buried, but recently I found scanned copies of his service records.  Balderson is misspelled as "Bollison" on the records; interestingly, this is exactly how my father, as a small boy, pronounced his grandmother's last name, and she even signed his birthday card "Grandmother Bollison" when he turned three.   This might be  how everyone pronounced it where they lived.  Anyway, Uncle William is buried in the soldiers' section of Hollywood Cemetery, the famous Confederate cemetery in Richmond City.  Probably in an unmarked grave.

Charles had been ill shortly before William's death, and was sent to Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond. Three days after William's death, possibly even from the same hospital, he was furloughed and then discharged from service. He had a wife and a few children already at home.  He returned to shoe and boot-making, and lived on into the 1890s.

The third brother, James, was a musician like Charles; they had both this and shoemaking in common. In James' records, he is listed as AWOL in the fall of 1862, just a couple of months after William died and Charles subsequently became ill and was discharged home.  We  don't know where James went or what he did in the months he was gone, but his records include a report of him being a prisoner, paroled on November 25, 1862. By January 1863, he and Presley had returned to service, the only two Balderson brothers remaining in the Army after less than two years of service.

The fourth and youngest brother, Presley, was sent to Chimborazo Hospital for the first time beginning a month after the death of William and Charles' illness and discharge.  This was immediately following the regiment's engagement at Cedar Mountain, and he may have been the one casualty listed on the muster list.  The reason for his hospitalization was "debilitas," in other words, weakness or feebleness:  exhaustion.  He remained in the hospital until October 23-- a period of over 2 months, after which he was furloughed and instructed to report back for duty on December 1.  He was absent without leave for the month of December, but returned in January, along with his brother James. 

That May, the war became very eventful for the brothers with the battle of Chancellorsville. James found himself so close to an exploding artillery shell that he lost his hearing. During the following 6 months, James was hospitalized more than once, going  AWOL again in July and August of 1863.  He was contracted in the spring of '64 to make shoes for Walker's Brigade, possibly 'alternative' service, due to loss of hearing or other wounds or illness.

Also at Chancellorsville, Presley received a gunshot wound through the left shoulder while defending the regimental flag after its bearer became a casualty (this is the story.....) This wound is renowned in family lore because of the harrowing treatment it received from the surgeon:  a red hot poker was driven through it. It's moments like this that can change the trajectory of the future.  His hospitalization at Chimborazo and the furlough that followed meant that Presley missed the events in Gettysburg, which proved close to disastrous for his regiment.   

Fate intervened again at Weldon Railroad near Petersburg in August of 1864. During the dark and confusing violence, in the pouring rain, Presley was wounded through the left hand, an injury that would cause him pain and difficulty for the rest of his life as he supported his family by farming. While at home recovering in the late summer and early fall, he married his second cousin, Mary Ann Coates, who was probably a relative of Charles' wife, Virginia.  Family story says that his old rusty (or bloodstained) bayonet  hung over the fireplace at the home of his grandson, Sherwood (my uncle) in Howard County, MD. Sherwood's stepson may have taken it, and its whereabouts are unknown.

So, all of the brothers became absent for a period following immediately, or within a few months of their brother William's death.  Charles never returned, and was discharged for reasons unknown. 

___________________________________________________________________________ 

During the course of the next twenty four years, Presley and his wife Mary had 5 sons --- Burlington Lafayette, Valverde Manco, Franklin Lesley, Elton Presley, and Wilmore Earle; and 3 daughters --- Dorothy "Dora", Margaret "Maggie", and Emma.

The youngest of Presley's children, born when he was about 50, was my great-grandfather, Wilmore. Wilmore is small and his face is serious in the tintype that was taken of him with his elderly parents in around 1895. His mother appears severe, even a little frightening, dressed in mourning; Presley looks tired, but is smiling broadly as he stands behind his wife and youngest child.  Later, when he was a young teenager, Wilmore was the only witness to his mother's death, after a sudden collapse while she was sweeping.  She never regained consciousness.  At this time his father, who had always been a farmer, was a disabled war veteran, unable to do much work of any kind in his later years. He was finally granted a small pension in 1915, ten years before his death at the age of 88.

When Wilmore grew up, he married Landonia "Tully" Minor, a young woman who had grown up in the same small corner of Virginia.  According to my father, her family felt that they were somehow better than my great-grandfather's family.  

Wilmore and Tully's first child, a daughter, was born in January, 1912.  Her mother almost died following the birth, and Aunt Dora, her husband's big sister, came to the rescue.  Aunt Dora took care of the baby for the month or so of my great-grandmother's recovery, and at some point during that time, she named the baby after herself:  "Dorothy."  Not everyone was thrilled that she did this.  Baby Dorothy was my grandmother.

 Aunt Dora had married Robert France in 1896, a man whose father had served in the war alongside her father. Their fathers' lives traveled parallel paths and these two must have had some common experiences growing up; they were raised on the same war stories, and probably grew up within each others' sight.  They eventually moved up the peninsula and north to Washington D.C., where they had a son and adopted a daughter by the name of Isabelle Galahan.

A little over a year after the birth of Dorothy the younger, Letitia Countee, the local midwife, came to the farm in Newland to deliver Tully's second baby, a daughter.  Sadly, Mary Althea lived only 6 hours.  She was named after both of her grandmothers.

When Dorothy was very small, her father studied at Lynchburg College to become a minister.  Soon after graduation, he and Tully became the parents of a boy who they named Sherwood. In the years that followed, Wilmore and his young family moved here and there in Virginia, the D.C. suburbs, and  as far southwest as Harlan, Kentucky, on assignments at different churches.  A few years later a third child was born, a second boy named Tennyson Carlyle.

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