The Familiar
parva petunt manes
The second horizon for human action is the most natural, easier to find than the first. While it might sometimes seem that we are primarily individuals, the autonomous selves recognized in my earlier discussion of the intimate, the family is actually prior to the individual. Prior in time, and more important in terms of culture.
If we go back to the most original moments of conception and birth that we experience, when the individual discovers its integrity for the first time, we inevitably find more than just the individual in them. Each individual requires parents, who themselves had parents in turn, and so on. These parents are not null quantities when it comes to the fate of their children. In simplest terms, their diet—the rhythm of life that they express before the birth of their children and thereafter—exerts a potent influence in the life of those children, extending through generations in ways that we are always marking with pregnant language and ritual. Where the ancients made regular offerings to household gods, telling tales of blood curses and hidden treasure, we moderns worship at shrines of medicine and law, muttering about epigenetics and the Maslowian hierarchy. In either case, the child that survives to recognize itself must be brought to birth in the body of a woman, and cared for thereafter in a little society of people, male and female, known to it by name. This society is variously the household, the kin-group, the clan, or as the Romans say: family.
Children enter the little society of the family as helpless takers. For years, parents and other relatives provide more care to them than they provide to anyone. But they learn. They follow their elders about, aping them, turning every action they find into games. Over time, play allows them to acquire the habits that render them capable of human action, alone and with other members of the family. At some moment, they know and do enough to assume responsibility for themselves and others in important ways, and a good family will allow them space to do so. Somewhere in this murky realm of adolescence, between childhood and maturity, kids find themselves functionally adult: this happens earlier in societies living closer to nature, without the pervasive institutional barriers that high civilizations create. As adults, the children care for others as they were once cared for, raising new generations and helping to ease the passage of elders to the lands of the dead.
The life of the family in historical societies varies quite widely, but there are some persistent themes. One is the need for nourishment. Families require food. The earliest methods attested for getting this food involve wandering about: following animals we might eventually hunt; finding plants we might eat; and noticing sources of good water, which we always need. Elders have more experience with water, plants, and hunting, the good and the bad. So they guide the young, who occasionally break away to make their own mistakes, as wanderers will. If we are fortunate, these mistakes are the kind from which we can learn. Beware the snake in the grass!
Food is not much good without shelter or digestion. For these needs, families invent the kitchen, a cooking hearth that can be enclosed or open and provide warmth for bedding as the local weather gods demand. Witness the kang (炕) developed by the ancient Chinese, or camp for several days in a high desert: the warmth of the campfire will speak peace to your bones. Cooking and shelter are powerful inventions, requiring much experimentation to perfect. Once again, the kids follow their elders, imitating and innovating. Experience leaves the survivors with strange, but potent, recipes. Don't forget to dry the cassava in the sun! The Chinese eventually remember these rules as gifts from the self-poisoning experiments of the medicine-king Shennong (神農), a primal ancestor whose death myths attribute to indigestion from a poisonous flower.
A final necessity for the family is procreation, the getting of children to take the elders' places round the hearth as these fall vacant. The basic method of our reproduction is very ancient, more ancient than the species, but history shows that we like to do it differently than many of our animal relatives. As would-be parents, we often hide from the rest of the family, telling kids stories about why they should avoid us. Never walk in the grove by the light of the full moon! They listen, then sneak or stumble upon us and run away to gossip with their friends. They also spend time watching the animals, whose likeness to us can teach sex as well as other natural processes. Sometimes, the kids practice romance with dolls, dramatizing love, courtship, and marriage.
Over time, the family's collective habits manifest as culture: a collection of shared attitudes and rules relative to important work families do to stay alive. The rules often involve separation that seems arbitrary, and sexist, to outsiders: Don't have sex before hunting. Women should not eat organ meat unless they are pregnant. The successful hunter should not carry his own kill back to the family. Menstruating women must live apart from the group in special huts, refraining from ordinary work and play. Men are not allowed to touch the coca plant. None of these rules is universal. (At the very least, we cannot all live where there are coca plants!) Some, like the taboo against incest, come close, but history shows us that they too can be broken. Within traditional societies, as in civilization, some people will always find acceptable ways to challenge rules; that is as much part of having and being a family as the rules themselves are. They were never meant to be perfect, which is good, because they never are. Like spoken language, they are constantly evolving, changing over time to meet the circumstances of new generations. But some of them persist, like some words. (Here I might mention the words father and mother, which linguists have discovered to own a very long historical pedigree.)
Thus, the natural expression of the family in historical societies is religious. Elders assume a role of sacred authority relative to youngsters, who grow to become elders in turn, handing on rules and roles they have learned to the generation that succeeds them. Ancient cultures make the religious undertone explicit, recognizing the family as a special cult society, in which kin learn and teach proper methods of worshiping local deities: the gods of familiar fields and forests, the kitchen gods at home, and the spirits of dead ancestors, who are usually buried or otherwise memorialized in the local landscape. If the latter are not tended appropriately, with rites celebrated periodically each year, they are liable to haunt their families. It makes sense: Cain and Abel did not get on well before death; what makes us think they won't trouble their descendants with mutual hatred thereafter? Whenever they rise, they must be put to rest—distracted with tales, wined and dined, then tucked away to sleep. Ancient Semites might call this halloween a marzeah (מרזח). Greeks might call it a nekyia (νέκυια, cf. Odyssey 11). The Hindus practice shraddha (श्राद्ध). The Chinese have jìngzǔ (敬祖). And Ovid finds the Romans offering sollemnia dona (Fasti 2.533ff). The details of these rites vary widely, of course, but the basic program of feast and prayer recurs, as does the notion that this activity conjures and propitiates the dead, who may offer counsel or prophecy to the living as part of the exchange.
The family looms large in literature, naturally. Everyone knows the line from Tolstoy: All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is miserable in its own way (все счастливые семьи положи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему). That line opens a book about families, about the sharing of intimacy between individuals. For the individual matters in every family. That is the nature of this horizon; it is harder to vanish from it, to retreat into the impregnable intimacy of the self or the impersonal anonymity of the crowd. When Anna wishes to escape it, she must leap under a train. Even then, her memory lives on with those left behind: her son, her husband, the count. Like Odysseus, the eternal survivor, they must wander through the rest of their lives with her shadow flitting somewhere close, waiting to take them aside in a private moment and whisper sweet, painful secrets.
Odysseus is a good figure to watch for insights into the familiar horizon, as his entire myth is consumed with attempts to secure family against all things, by any means necessary. What will he do to keep wife and son? Feign madness. Lie. Steal. Brave the sea, and the bed of witches. Kill all the suitors, and not the way Achilles would. Travel inland with an oar over his back. His patroness among the Olympians is Athena, the same schemer who supports Orestes, another hero trapped by family. While I certainly could quote some potent lines from Sophocles or Aeschylus on the house of Atreus, I prefer to offer the speech of Elpenor's ghost to Odysseus. When the latter consults the spirits of the dead in the nekyia mentioned briefly above, he meets his old friend, who utters these words:
Odysseus! The cunning one
Sprung from Zeus, Laertes' son
A wicked fate has ruined me
Drowned with wine disastrously.
On Circe's roof I laid me down
No thought giv'n to the ground
Plunging from that perch I fell
Broke my body, seeking Hell.
Now I clasp you from behind
A soul like others, lost to time
Remember me, I beg you, lord
When your ship has left this shore
When you come to Aeaea, then
Think upon your one-time friend.
By your wife, and father sooth
Who cherished you in tender youth,
I charge you do not leave me thus!
By your own son, Telemachus,
The only child you left to sail
Do not let my memory fail!
Do not leave my dirge unsung
Corpse unburied, rites undone.
Take me off with all my gear
Burn it up lest wrath appear.
Raise my barrow by the waves
A warning there for future knaves.
Beyond the tomb, just one task more:
Fix in it my useless oar
The one with which I used to row
Living with my friends, the crew.
Odyssey 11.60-78
my translation
This prayer captures almost everything in the familiar horizon. What distinguishes it from the intimate is that it is shared with others. Do not let my memory fail. Raise a marker by the sea. These are not things you tell yourself, or if you do, their meaning changes significantly. As a son, a friend, a lover, a spouse, a father, a grandfather, and a dead ancestor, I speak to, with, and for people who are not myself, who share with me a kind of intimate integrity that arises from long and close association. That is the familiar. It cannot belong to the Only One of Max Stirner, for it is Ours. Elpenor addresses Odysseus in terms of their association, not as a random stranger. The Greek word I have rendered barrow is simply sema (σῆμα), or sign, reminding some readers of the signs or marks by which Odysseus will later reveal himself to family in Ithaca. Only someone in the family can read its signs. To outsiders, they appear as gibberish, when they appear at all. Knowing them requires time and effort, the kind of effort that parents and children regularly offer each other in families that have not been destroyed by external demands--such as the Greeks' war against Troy. Therein lies the power and the threat of the family: in its ability to share information that escapes larger horizons. It allows more than the intimate, but demands more, too. Within it, we must negotiate not just with our own schizophrenia, but with the schizophrenia of others, who will know our faces and history as we know theirs. The integrity we find together with them will be different than the integrity we discover alone, by ourselves, and both will differ from the integrity we discover elsewhere, acting on other horizons.
Part of the reason I write these essays is to illustrate how many different civilizations recognize and respond to what I would call the same horizons. So I will end here with another Chinese poem, this one from Wei Ying-wu (韋應物), a Tang poet and court official who lived in the eighth century AD (a little later than Hanshan). This poem is one of several written to mourn the passing of the poet's wife, which left him quite lonely and sad (not unlike Odysseus at the court of Alcinous, in Phaeacia, cf. Odyssey 8.83ff). I have not found an easily reproducible Chinese text of the poem, alas, but I offer this translation from Red Pine (In Such Hard Times §52):
Like silk that's been dyed
Or wood that's now ash
I recall the person I lived with
gone and not coming back
to whom I was wedded for twenty years
who respected me as if we just met
our betrothal occurred
during troubled times
during troubled times
our separations were due to disasters
a model of gentleness and simplicity
she was courteous and always proper
but public office has no room for oneself
and my duties undercut her beauty
this morning when I entered
the women's quarters
the women's quarters
the rooms were covered with dust
ever since this person left
whatever I touch is painful
a widower now I pass the time
wiping our children's tears
I try to push my fantasies away
but these feelings are hard to stop
suddenly my daydreams look real
startled I begin pacing again
this heart is utterly relentless
and our house is surrounded by weeds.
Red Pine notes that the expression this person (ssu-jen) is traditional in the Book of Songs (Shijing, 詩經), where it means wife. Today some would doubtless read such phrases, and perhaps this entire poem, as emanating from an ingrained cultural tendency to look and talk down to women (or other persons in the family, which expanded in many ancient cultures to include not just children and friends, but also dependents who in some cases might be slaves). Without denying such readings their place, I still find it significant to recognize that this is not how most ancients read, or write, poetry such as we have here. The grief in Wei Ying-wu's writing is sincere, and when he notices the lack of his wife in their home, it is not because he misses her ability to remove dust. What matters, what strikes relentlessly at his heart, is the constant reminder of the association he has lost. He does not love his wife because she was courteous and proper only; rather, he misses her, and regrets the time he will not be able to spend appreciating her company now that she is gone. All too keenly he feels the cruelty of politics: public office has no room for oneself in Tang China, as in the ancient Mediterranean. Like Odysseus, he wastes years separated from family by political disasters. He is not proud of this (in this poem or elsewhere, that I can call to mind), but it is his lot, and he accepts it, sadly. That is what we do with family: we take whatever we get, and spend the rest of our lives recovering. Sometimes, this is more pleasant than not. Other times it is agony. Always, it involves some regret, some occasion to remember when things happened otherwise than we wish.
ante diem VI Kalendas Novembres, anno Domini MMXIX --JGM.
ante diem VI Kalendas Novembres, anno Domini MMXIX --JGM.