Pure grit

It's Yetta! 

Been paging through a lot of old photographs lately, not only admiring fashion (above, clearly a candidate for Advanced Style), but trying to just conceive of my past, my family's past. Not least, trying to understand what it means to travel to my great-grandmother Yetta's birth country.

This is becoming an exercise in necessary fictions - photos, other people's memories, all the stories we tell ourselves in order to live (quoth Joan Didion). I've found my own past, for example, involved a sailor suit straight off the Good Ship Lollypop:

Mostly, I am curious about the relation between past and place. Between memory and place - if our bodies "remember" places we've never seen.  What would such a connection to a country feel like?

Only in rare moments here can I feel truly connected to environment. Suburban Illinois does afford the odd swatch of prairie or wood, or baby deer sightings, but everything basically looks like everything else. The never-seen-yet-familiar becomes impossible as the actual earth's chewed up, raped by strip mall and subdivision. Familiar, but sterile and bland familiarity. Think Eliot's The Waste Land. 

Is it too grandiose a desire, for felt recognition in Ukraine, as in "this has always been in me"? I don't expect anything like Yetta ghosting my steps around Kyev. Nothing so simple or sentimental.

Perhaps it will come in language. As I begin to learn Ukrainian, I wonder what threads might bind the hard, involving-one's-entire-mouth consonants of Cyrillic languages, and the farmland and forests of Eastern Europe. 

Right now I'm reading a terrific book by Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. He connects the English language's development with its environment - wintry, wind-swept, difficult. Read a line of Old English and you know these were a sturdy folk: My favorite thus far, by Cynewulf, is "ic wordcraeftum waef," meaning "I wove my word-craft." 

The point of this digression (besides my new ambition to learn the grittiest of Anglo-Saxon poetry) is that place, and deep-felt connection to place, bears out a like lexicon. Myself a lover of gnarled Germanic words, I already feel a growing bond with Ukrainian - I mean, one of its letters is pronounced "shch"!! Can't wait to see how being there, walking the land, and growing in fluency will all relate, and how they'll influence my weaving of word-craft.

Oh, and T-minus 2 days until I leave for staging. Terror and excitement go without saying.