Consumer drabness pierced by pithy strings of philosophy like this. |
Postcard-sized observations taken from daily life: "When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door." - Victor Hugo
CLICK photo for full-size view.
see also anthroview
Also anthropology clippings
Consumer drabness pierced by pithy strings of philosophy like this. |
Michigan cities local history series*, "Images of America - Lowell" (zip 49331) |
As part of the 100-year celebration of the founding of modern-day Lowell, Michigan in 1931, only a year and a half into the Great Depression (October 1929) the caption to the upper photo lists the special events and exhibitions organized for entertainment and edification of visitors and residents alike. How different will things be arranged in 2031, by comparison? At the centennial celebration the first day included an ox roast, crowning the Centennial Queen, band concert, baseball game, a hot-air balloon ascension, and a pageant of progress to end the evening with a look back at 100 years. For the second day there was a parade, addresses by dignitaries, a ball game and another pageant. On the last day they held a mass picnic, a reunion of current and former residents, dancing, singing, and exhibits. There is no mention of radio or print journalism gathering stories or special pamphlets and publications, photobooths or the carnival rides and games captured by pictures in this book. But in the time before TV and Internet, the airwaves for radio and the words of newspaper writers helped to document and report stories like these to surrounding towns and villages.
Jumping ahead to 2024 it is hard to imagine all of the same undertakings being expected or allowed to proceed due to caution about large crowds spreading Covid or attracting domestic terrorist groups or mass shooters. The social fabric has a few of the old threads but is largely woven into different patterns to give a much flimsier durability and texture than in 1931. This big event almost 100 years ago presents a kind of mirror for reflecting on the present. What they recognized as 'dignitary' might be more readily understood today as 'celebrity' or 'influencer', for instance. Parades are far less common now that so many people own personal automobiles, sometimes hugely expensive things depreciating by the day. And with so many people with jet travel experience for business or pleasure, the pass of parades is not so interesting or thrilling to impatient and multi-tasking people with fragmented attention spans and weighed down by debt, social anxiety, and dark imaginings about future uncertainties as consumers striving in a race to the bottom quality and prices. With the contagion of Artificial Intelligence echoing back and infiltrating all sorts of unexpected places and times, the task of building and protecting trust becomes all the more difficult.
Credit card (top) and several digital payment alternatives accepted for online pizza order 1/2024 |
In the mood for pizza, I noticed the neighborhood kiosk gave $8.99 as the carry-out price for a large pizza with 1-item added. Out of curiosity before telephoning my order, I tried the online order website and discovered the same pizza in the Specials tab for $7.99 so I went through the ordering process there. After selecting crust (original), sauce (original), toppings (normal vs. extra; whole spread vs. half covered in A and the other half in B), it was time to review the order and proceed to the form of payment (above screenshot).
There are probably many more services to broker digital payment based on smartphone app than the ones above, but this franchise pizza shop has chosen all of these in addition to credit (and debit) cards. These days a few establishments boldly state at the entrance they accept no cash: all transactions must take some form of electronic payment. Probably "no cash" also implies no personal checks, either, since the burden of proceeds being paid in check or cash means that the owner must travel to a bank for deposit, or to pay an armored car to make that trip safely. As one small business owner put it, "all forms of payment have a fee or cost," if not a percentage given up to the app or 3rd party, then the value of one's time and the risk of banking in person. So whether it is the 2 to 4% that the business loses to financial service companies who mediate the transaction, or it is the value of one's own time for record-keeping, taxes, and travels to the bank for petty cash and for deposits, there is always part of the transaction with customers that retailers lose.
Back in the 1950s a few oil companies would issue cards of credit to customers buying gas at a branded, company gas station. Later some department stores issued cards in their name. After that the big banks began to offer their biggest or best customers a line of revolving credit on the monthly billing cycle, a sort of perpetual short-term loan one month after another. As more and more consumers gained discretionary income and mail order (catalog and telephone) shopping expanded, more and more people applied for bank cards; some carried more than one card. Once the battle for sign-ups among banks took off in the 1980s, bigger and bigger incentives to apply emerged. Consumers could cancel one card and initiate another one to roll over balances due and also to collect the incentives available for airline mileage credits, cash-back, sign-up bonus, and so on.
By the late 1980s or early 1990s a new product was invented for telecommunication orders, particularly attractive to people with difficulty meeting credit card requirements. This was the advent of debit cards in which the purchase electronically debited one's checking account almost instantly. There would be no monthly statement with balance due because the payment would have been directly taken from the account holder's funds at point of sale. The old-school credit card in its many guises (from bank, airline, hotel chain, restaurant, catalog merchant, etc) and the newer debit card dominated the field of electronic payment and recordkeeping until the spread of smartphones and apps with a family resemblance to credit cards.
The first smartphones began to appear in retail stores and online in USA around 2005, but only a fraction of people carried any kind of cellphone for daily personal use, and few could see the appeal or value of a smartphone costing many times more than the older cellphones. But with innovation cycles accelerating, more and more people became used to seeing others on TV or in real life talking on cellphones and keeping one charged up and its subscription paid up. Among cellphone users, more and more bought a smartphone. The idea of misplacing one's phone and potentially exposing to strangers (or hackers) any financial details or personal information kept smartphone users from whole-heartedly depositing sums in a digital wallet, much as app designers and retailers wanted the purchasing pace to speed up.
During the first years of Covid-19, from spring 2020 into spring 2023, so much of work, school, and personal life was mediated by online meetings and transactions that the presence and convenience of digital money began to enter some of the smartphone users' minds. But for those growing up with coins and paper notes, legal tender backed by "the full faith and credit of the United States of America," the ease of payment was simultaneously the ease of being hacked or cleverly talked into losing control of those funds by various forms of scam, phishing, or fake communications that spoof the name of a trusted friend or family member.
So this screenshot of the handful of contenders for digital payment is an ongoing experiment to see which brand will attract most users, biggest dollar aggregated sales, common use by retailers and the frequent app support they depend on. Maybe 12 months from now the field will narrow, or some of those visible above will disappear through merger and acquisition and a different contender will be in the line-up. Expanding the financial service providers over and over soon leads to "paralysis by analysis" (too much information to think about; too many choices). Maybe a year from now a backlash will see cash return and digital payment disappear. By contrast, urban South Korea and many parts of the People's Republic of China are thriving with digital wallets; doubtless with growing pains, scams, and identity theft, etc, but yet something they press onward to some natural conclusion.
A related transformation in financial matters is the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Some national treasuries (PRC, Central Bank digital currency, USA "FedNow" epayments) are exploring the idea of limited (special context) use digital national currency for paying taxes and issuing monthly social security checks or for health insurance matters (Medicaid, Medicare), as an example. Whether it is consumer transactions face to face and from a distance, or it is financial affairs between citizen and central government, the landscape of payment and storing wealth is slowly changing.
from city of Grand Rapids, MI newsletter, January 12, 2024 |
This morning the city council's newsletter came by email and included the following text.
55 special events on tap now through mid-summer
The City Commission approved $209,085 in General Fund sponsorships for 55 events planned in Grand Rapids now through June 30. The special events sponsorship awards are allocated from budgeted event support/reactivation dollars made available through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). These 55 events are being put on by not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations or people who have applied for funding through the Special Events Sponsorship Program and confirmed their dedication to holding open, free, and accessible events on public property in Grand Rapids that support the City’s mission, vision and strategic priorities.
By making a screenshot and then color-coding the kinds of things worth city financial support, a sort-of mirror shows the aspirations of the elected officials and the perspiration of the community organizations and businesses dedicated to bringing residents and visitors together. Although this typology of events is based purely on imagined content, based on the title of each, it may not be entirely accurate, but does distill some of the ways that modern society can still bring fragmented attention spans and unbalanced work-life conditions temporarily in repair through face-to-face mingling and meeting of others seen in the neighborhood or in other city contexts.
TYPOLOGY OF CITY-FUNDED EVENTS IN 2024
visual, performing art
charity, fund-raising
physical activity
mental wellness
food-centric
parade, visibility
neighbor/community gathering
ethic celebration
market/crafts
One way to appreciate the value of these many kinds of happenings is to imagine a city lacking such semi-structured public opportunities to interact with others in civil society: not work pals nor kin folk, but strangers who share a few basic facts of common environment and shared geography of cultural landmarks and annual cycle of events around the city.
Social observers and commentators describe "social fabric" usually in the sense of wearing thin, breaking or tearing. This metaphor is close to people's skin; it is personal and tangible. But as a metaphor, it points to the intangible layers of recognition, admiration, blame or praise - tacit or outspoken among people of a particular place and time. Social fabric that is strong or well woven can withstand stress and sudden shock, but weaker stuff unravels or breaks altogether. In this sense, the budget allocated for these 55 public happenings encourages participation and spectating by the great and the ordinary. It is a way to expand, deepen, and add detail to previous relationships to add conversations and possibly names to what previously might only consist of passing visual recognition of some of the people around the city. Although difficult to measure or even to give indirect indicators of the net effect of public events like these, surely there is more gained than lost by hosting so many kinds of things in and around the city.
Long Island Buddha by Zhang Huan (2010–11) at Meijergardens.org |
The traditions of Buddhism take many forms in 2024 and have followed many paths for centuries across the societies where practitioners carry out their lives of service and personal development. This large copper sculpture is located on the grounds of the Japanese-style garden in Grand Rapids, Michigan. With the late morning winter temperature hovering at or above the freezing line, some of the night snow is slowly melting, sending drops of water down the face in the most direct line to the Earth, according to the laws of gravity. So while the face is tilted, the effect is to create lines of meltwater in vertical trajectories across the facial features.
One way to see this moment captured by camera lens is objectively: snow is melting and moving to the ground. Another way to see this photo is more poetically with supporting interpretation from social science, too: There is a vast literature and organizational culture (religious institutions) and folklore of Buddhism in its various traditions that is signaled by this sculptor's installation in what once had been an apple orchard before being developed as a botanical garden and sculpture park. And while some of those Buddhist things are tangible, there is also much more that is not visible: things like belief, ideals, aspirations, and lessons given by one's teachers. So in the frame of this picture is a hint of that vast iceberg of information, knowledge, and wisdom: a mountain of ideas that is below the surface, huge but intangible.
Turning to the craft of metal-smithing and ways to source, shape, and complete a sculpture in copper, this hearkens back to the time in the human story between the age of stone and the age of bronze (followed by the Iron Age). For a relatively short number of generations, there was a 'copper age' in which all-copper was used for tools and artworks. But by adding tin, then the resulting mix of bronze was stronger and more useful in shaping axes, swords, brooches, and so on. So this photo is not only a reminder of the massive traditions of Buddhism in many parts of the world today and for many generations before (and after), but the picture also points to the forerunner to the Iron Age inventions and innovations; the power of crafting things from hot, liquidy metal. Controlling metal is what much of urban life and hierarchical social life depends on.
Finally, there is the significance of melting snow forming wet streaks on the face of the Buddha represented in copper. On the one hand this religious figure stands for infinite compassion (bodhisattva figures embody this). So the wet streaks could be seen as tears: expressing sadness at the human waste of resources, of time, of goodwill, of trust, of habitats and the many creatures unable to survive when their habitats are spoiled or extracted. Or, more scientifically, the water could be seen as the active ingredient for oxidation, contributing to the breakdown (entropy) of the metal face, a process that will ultimately return the metal to the Earth. Related is the idea that "water is life," since creatures of the planet depend on water to live. By streaking the compassionate one in this life-giving substance the photo expresses the vitality of the Buddha's place in social life and personal growth.
Putting these many viewpoints together, this photo exists as a fraction of a second in the morning temperature rise from the night's snow to the noon melting of most snow coverings. But being meaning-makers by habit and by nature, viewers readily look for or attach meanings to the given facts of melting snow on the sculpted head. Taking a wide-angle view, this scene combines the ideas from Buddhist tradition, the technology history for civilization, and the emotive tears of that most ephemeral life substance - water- that freely moves between solid, liquid, and gas states of being within us and around us. Seen all together, this scene is at the intersection of beliefs, techniques, and impermanence itself: water.
credit: https://flickr.com/ogawasan/53436611120 on Jan. 2, 2024 |
This study in contrasts appears in the daily "explore" selection by photo editors at the FLICKR photo-sharing online service. Stone (cold) vs. flesh (warm), orange vs. white, light vs. shadow, and the cultural contrast of Japanese traditional clothing vs the architectural proportions and materials and details of ancient Greece and Rome. This collage of contrasts adds tension and attention in viewers' minds so that each side of the opposing pairs is amplified or intensified, much as sweet and sour recipes can make for intense flavor experiences. Were the figure an imagined, ideally shaped person dressed in period costume fitting the architecture's ancient root (say, in Roman toga), then the person and the building would be of the same style and period. Little tension or interest would come from that dimension of the picture.
In 2024 the volume of intercultural mingling and the degree of differences do not create the same shock or startling feeling of being out of place compared to 100 or 500 years ago when such intersections were less common or normalized. Many viewers today would be able to identify the cultural origins of figure and of ground. But a few generations ago far fewer would accurately recognize the source cultures. Another change from then to now comes from the presence of (bright) colors present in daily life of the average person. Today there is a riot of color-fast dyes in fabrics, of neon and LED and high-visibility materials including myriad plastics and paints. But 150 or more years ago, most people were rural and saw vivid colors only in the spring flowers and maybe (stained) glass or art on display. These relatively rare expressions of color paled in comparison to the overwhelming majority of muted, natural colors of the lived-in landscape: mud, fields, forests, and fabrics spun in a few natural dye colors.
Today the sensory environment of the average person is predominantly urban or suburban, surrounded by cascades of color-filled images in still and moving (digital) form, and comprising cultural features and language elements from multiple sources, not confined to geographically local or adjacent origins. In such an ocean of cultural citations across eras and cultures, modern viewers may well take for granted juxtapositions like the one photographed above. Instead of sensing artistic tension and attention, perhaps people looking at the picture today will perceive little more than the abstract expression of geometry, light, and accent color. The scenes is no more than "a graceful lady in some famous building; beauty on beauty to represent a synergy of more beauty than the sum of each of the parts" instead of "East meets West due to global flows of ideas and travel and leisure pursuits." Both interpretations are true: this is an intersection of so many contrasts, but if those things seem unremarkable to modern eyes, then also this can be seen as the additive effect of putting one cultural tradition of beauty together with another one.
Around the time of Thanksgiving the Christmas lawn art goes up |
The figures in the photo include the 1966 cartoon adaptation of Dr. Seuss' (1957) How the Grinch Stole Christmas (reindeer dog and green Grinch), the Snowman from the 1964 stop-action animation of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and at the right edge of the frame, partly protected by the roof overhang, is the standard Santa Claus (or Saint Nicolas) figure in costume. Both of the Christmas TV special productions concern gift giving, cold weather, community spirit, and wishes fulfilled in spite of obstacles faced by the protagonist(s). And the Santa (or British and colonial Father Christmas) also has roots in the church calendar and stories, too. None of the figures quotes Bible scripture or sings church hymns, though. But this ensemble has a cultural logic that makes this mix of figures coherent.
There are many ways to view the scene, depending on one's own interests and beliefs about the best way to kindle a Christmas spirit and acknowledge the holiday's original and its present-day meanings. Some will foreground the happy, fun, and spendy feeling of the weeks before and maybe a few days after the December 25 calendar date. Others will mainly feel a communal and nation-sized synchronicity with fellow citizens all doing something along the lines of celebrating good things in life (or grieving the absence of those things due to recent losses, change in fortune or health, and nostalgia for not achieving remembered and imagined heights of Christmas celebrating). Worshipers organized into religious bodies will celebrate congregationally with seasonal food and music and orders-of-worship to retell the story of Jesus' birth and its lead up, too. A few may resist the headlong consumerist compulsory gift-giving and disengage from the swirling mass media, pop culture, and annual merry-making; not disrespecting all those others enjoying themselves, but withdrawing from the general busyness of the season and clinging to the somber theme of the shortest days and weeks of the Earth's rotation around the Sun at winter solstice. None of this approaches is mutually exclusive of the others since a person can feeling all of these things to some degree in sequence or at the same time. Many others have religious life other than the Christian calendar at the end of the year (or none at all). So all the special efforts present a prominent, dominant, but otherwise low-relevance repeat each year.
Compared to 50 or 100 years ago, some dimensions of the Christmas season remain the same, while others bear little resemblance to what came before. As a young child the whole transformation of routines at home and out in public is wondrous and seems effortless: it just happens, like a force of nature. As an older child there is less magic and more active participation in the making of Christmas decoration, food, atmosphere and socializing. As an adult with or without children there is much more involvement in producing Christmas for others to see, to participate, and to reflect on prior experiences, too. So those life-cycle perspectives probably are similar in 2023, 1973, or 1923. But the scale, expense, and excesses of the business cycle of today surely dwarf the way things went in those earlier lifetimes.
Seeing this photo in daylight, or again against the darkness of short days, the first spark of meaning from the season's figures brings a smile of recognition and the associated positive memories when having first seen the stories they belong to. But by thinking beyond that initial reaction, it turns out that there are many layers of meaning, depending on a person's age, formative years (decade), budget, social obligations and network, primary connection to the holiday (religious or not, businessperson or not, USA born or newly immigrated) and so on.
Maiden Castle hillfort (c.600 BCE); Ft. Geo. Ardersier (1745) |
Being a prehistorian first, Pryor is particularly at home in the lives and lands before written records began to be made. Not all documents persist for people today to study, of course, but there are enough sources to fill in a lot of detail; sometimes personalizing the place or event. In a very few cases, glimpses of the prehistoric societies encountered by the literate outsiders leaves some description, too; for example, Pytheas the Greek, who included an account of people met in Prytannia (Britannia) in c. 325 BCE. In general, though, the archaeological lens for looking at lives ancient or modern depends on physical objects and their surroundings - big picture of the time as well as in the immediate context of other finds of similar vintage and what came before and after in layers of deposition. As such there is an unvarnished honesty when looking at aftermath of activity and the actions of time.
By contrast, the lens of history privileges written records first and only secondarily (if at all) turns to the physical record of excavation and layout of cultural landscape for confirmation (or challenge) to the interpretation woven from the threads pulled from documents and sometimes visual media, too. An innate difference between the world of logic, logos, verbal expression versus the material traces of livelihoods and locations both public and private is that words can easily slip between fantasy and reality, fake and genuine. In other words, the writer can include aspirational along with actual description whereas the artifacts and their settings almost never are deliberately staged for the benefit of latter day excavators to find. That is a qualitative contrast. As well, often there is a quantitative difference for some centuries and parts of the world: written records by locals or outside observers can many times be abundant, compared to the merest traces of long-ago prehistory extracted from soil, layouts, and environmental records fitting that period of investigation. In other words, both lenses can be usefully applied to understanding times gone by, and by extension, to look at the present day, as well.
The above snapshot collage of pages 268ff (Maiden Castle hillfort) and 524ff (Fort George) from Pryor's 2010 book nicely illustrates the different lens quality and quantity when using archaeology or history to understand a place and time visible today in the cultural landscape. When the author is describing what is visible, confidently known, and reconstructed is a mix of reasonable conjecture from similar excavations and time periods then the pages of his book quickly go from one page to the next in a smooth panoramic sweep of big picture that alternates with close attention to detail and individual lives connected to the spot. In the second half of his career, Pryor has ventured into all parts of the British historical landscape, avidly consulting historical experts, their interpretations, and the (primary) source documents they depend upon. In these chapters there is rich detail and wide-angle context, too. But since he can write something like an historian while also being an archaeological thinker who keeps his feet, his trowel-wielding hands, and his sharp eyes accustomed to spotting tiny but sometimes telling fragments on the ground. But from a reader's point of view, how do the chapters differ before history is recorded and after history becomes available?
Perhaps the best analogy is family genealogy writing and knowing the past that goes with it. The people in one's family tree that are part of living memory are real, three-dimensional lives and places and events. There is so much more than birth-marriage-death (BMD) dates and sometimes locations. There are personal habits, preferences, high and low-points in the person's life, aspirations and hurdles run into. In short, the amount of detail is rich and includes many dimensions that leave no record in writing or the material traces of artifacts made, bought, or used, nor the (built) landscape associated with the person or persons. This degree of personal knowledge and personality is analogous to the rich sources sometimes available to historians for their lens on past life.
On the other hand, going back in time before one's own living memory, there may be stories associated with the generation before that; or maybe in one or two cases the story could predate that generation beyond living memory and come from the one before it. Going back in time even further from the present, though, unless there are published materials and public records (including photos or visual art), the most that a genealogist can know are the BMD dates and locations. From those meagre facts, though, a little of the person's life can be inferred from the dominant employment available in that day and place; from local and more distant events the ancestor would know or at least be affected by; and based on technological innovations (and the forms of accomplishing work and life that were displaced by that innovation). In other words, a certain amount of the BMD can be fleshed out in a reasonable way: did the ancestor die young or old, of natural causes or some other circumstance, was it a large family of siblings and later family of offspring or small, was the person male or female, rural or urban, highly educated or not, low-middle-high wealth, physically imposing or slight (when body details can be known), affiliated with formal religion or not, and so on. This sort of educated guessing does exercise the imagination, but like a good detective story it can sometimes be surprisingly accurate in suppositions; other times with erroneous elements, though. Whereas the genealogy for ancestors of living memory is analogous to the historian's lens. This more distant genealogy sleuthing corresponds to the archaeologist's lens, relying on context and inferences by induction (surrounding conditions that guide the guessing) and deduction (firmly established facts that can extrapolate to one implication after another).
In the case of The Making of the British Landscape (2010), Francis Pryor necessarily writes of the oldest places and events, technologies and economies, rituals and cycles without knowing names or genealogical relationship of the players in the picture. But for the Roman occupation (43 to 410 CE) there are sometimes names and personality traits recorded, including occasional genealogy to include in the version of events being recounted or lists recorded (e.g. ancient historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (d. 120 CE) was son-in-law to General Agricola who was active in Britain during the historian's lifetime. In other words, prehistorians normally dig up places, including bodies, anonymously. Historians more commonly scrutinize their subject with named characters. In the case of Historical Archaeology, there is a mix of digging in the ground and digging in the documents, surveying the landscape and surveying the literature. And when proposed excavation sites are not anonymous, sometimes a living descendant will object. That is unlikely for archaeology of ancient kingdoms of Egypt or the less ancient civilizations of Meso-America, but for Korean nobles from 2000 years ago, there are still some families that tie themselves to those ancestors and so excavations have been very few and thus have been approached in this non-anonymous way.
Reading Pryor (2010) straddles the anonymous (prehistorical cultural landscapes and stages of development) and the non-anonymous (historical places, people, events, developments) chronologies. The first chapters are dominated by inference, detective work, and rolling up sleeves to get maps and hands dirty in the physicality of a place and stratum of lives unearthed at a particular depth. As such the writer and the reader freely sweep from imagined individuals or the terrain that is physically measured and the particular settings known through empirical work on site on the one hand and the much bigger picture he refers to in the environment, in the types of habitat used, and in the movements of people over the landscapes on the other hand. When he writes about events brimming with written material, then the nature of the inquiry changes from filling in blanks with probable and reasonable (generic) details to filling in the blanks with names (sometimes faces, too, on statue or other visual media) and events. In other words, the tone and intentionality change from generic to specific; from non-documentable individual lives to people with some kind of paper trail.
Naturally, a different lens produces a different visual impression. Reading The Making of the British Landscape (2010) and its tip of the hat to Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape (1954), there is a definite sea change when Pryor's interpretations are enriched by a layer of written source material. He does not switch hats from being an archaeologist to being a card-carrying historian, though. Instead, he sees places and people as a prehistorian while also making full uses of available written accounts and primary documents on which those writings are based, too. The interplay of anonymous and non-anonymous social observation and analysis puts the subject into a different light. By using both kinds of light, a particularly valuable portrait is possible to paint for others to see.
Lighted north-south passage under the bridge protects campers from prevailing west wind |
This photo is from October 2023 in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. The juxtaposition of one of the multi-story condominiums or apartment rental buildings puts the thin fabric of 21st century tents in stark contrast. With many gaping cracks in the USA system of social, medical, mental health, financial and educational support, even relatively secure members of society can go through a series of unfortunate events and have no fixed abode; sometimes sleeping in car or truck and other times losing even that piece of personal property. Perhaps some segments of the city dwellers in ancient Roman also went through loss of means, of property, of dignity, too. But for 2023's "richest" country it seems impossible that cities and also rural areas across the continental USA and indeed in all states and territories count among their residents so many who are visibly unhouses; and many others who "pass" (not visibly unhoused).
Described in the language of computer studies, this problem of no roof over one's head is the result of at least three categories of failure. One is "hardware"; that is, places and physical standards of minimum care, wellness checks, and so on. Another is "software"; that is, policies and organized groups of people, but also social institutions both religious and secular to serve those lacking an address. Finally, there is "heart-ware"; that is the often unwritten rules, expectations, reward and punishments woven into the relationships, attitudes and ideals of the society. In 2023 USA the overpowering celebration of youth, consumerism, and rugged individualism all contribute to "making invisible" people who do not fulfill these models. A person who is no longer youthful, who has no discretionary income to spend, and who does not strive to be some kind of Epic Hero does not attract praise or even validation of their identity and place in life.
Elephant ivory carving, probably 1820s Japan |
Ripping out bushes on October 18 for museum expansion project |
West Michigan Genealogical Society guest speaker Oct. 7, 2023 |
Something like 50 people were in the audience, mostly above the age of 50 or 55. Perhaps it is most natural to take a personal interest in ancestry around that time as one's own parents and grandparents have died or are dying. One's own mortality usually comes next in order, although there are also many examples of a child dying before the parent. Thinking about the wealth of digital sources and ways to find and then engage with them, the present moment is a particularly fine time to pursue family trees. Much like the detective skills of TV dramas, there is also an art to building up a mental picture of the person one is chasing after. The transformation of a living person with a history and with aspirations to become a mere mention in the branching structure of a family tree seems inevitable as stories, images, and preferances are seldom recorded or written down, hence lost to memory. But turning the bare details of name, dates, locations into something more three-dimensional and palpable takes a little imagination.
Looking at the transformation from 3-D person filled with life to flattened, streamlined name and dates can be sobering when considering one's own place in the tree; an ancestor yet to be. And even if somebody in the distant future were to wonder what sort of person was one's own self, there are limits to what that can know. Perhaps there are video clips and photos that describe some of one's moments and decisions. Finding a signature invokes a kind of surrogate presence; a proxy for one's own hand and by extension, one's whole self. Anything you author may partly reflect something of one's voice and worldview, too. Personal writing like journals, diaries, or letters offer a lifelike trace of oneself. But even if a future person had the benefit of all these sorts of clues, along with the generalized context of the historical moment, probate records of one's chattels at time of death, and census records of basic household particulars for a place and a time, the resulting composite image of the person would not be filled with breath, words, and glint of eye. So bringing the names on a family tree back to life is only a dim reflection of what was once a fully formed social calendar and cultural landscape.
Deduction is a powerful way to invent some probable details of the person's life, based on contextual circumstantial particulars. The state of the art for medicine, transportation, (tele)communication, and so on can be pictured for most points in history and possibly fine-tuned according to location (rural vs. urban, semi-tropical vs. temperate) and social patterns for people similar in socioeconomic status (education, employment, wealth). According to the guest speaker, though, until about 1960 many local papers would chronicle individual accomplishments, travels, and other notable experiences of interest to the general readership. These "society pages" gradually disappeared after that, though. But finding one's ancestor's doings there can bring them back to life, if only for a moment; making them flesh and blood, again, something greater than the "born__ - died__" hyphenated lifespan. See the guest speaker's notes and illustrations in blog form at https://genealogyframeofmind.blogspot.com .
Putting one's branching ancestry into visual representation produces a fan of bifurcating lines, something like the branches radiating from a central tree trunk. But the custom of following a single surname on the father's side leads to less effort and therefore knowledge of the surnames collateral to the father's own line, and neglect sometimes of the bloodline of the mother, as well. When asked how many generations to travel back in time before the many lines are too confusing or blurring into a point of relatedness to thousands of others, the guest speaker said her practice is to continue until there are no more records to go back in time.
In an immigrant society, one's own image (presentation of self) and one's own abilities for successfully doing particular products and services is more highly valued than one's status resting in a family name. In other words, you see yourself and others define you by what you DO, not WHO you are. As a result, roots and relatives are overshadowed by the luster of gainful work and peer-praised recognition. But by middle age and into elder years, the urge grows stronger to know one's roots and to know where one fits into the larger family tree. The surprises turned up in the genealogy process may be happy or sad, or something in-between. But thanks to software and personal computers interacting with online databases, there is a pretty good change that one's searches will bear fruit: names and dates will come up. Then it remains to turn the dust-dry data points into real lives, if only long enough to trace into the family tree in fullest form.
wetland and surrounding park in north Grand Rapids, MI |
from about 1999 to 2024 voice calls seem now to be secondary |
Boardwalk to wetlands of Meijer Gardens - berries on leaf |
Cast iron replaced by newer pieces 5/2023 zip code 49505 |
Going back to the formation of planet Earth and the circumstances that led to this iron ending up in iron ore that was close enough to the surface for humans with their mining gear to extract it, this life story can begin from those mines perhaps 50 or 100 years ago; very possible from the Mesabi (Missabi) Iron Range around Duluth, Minnesota or the iron ore sources in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Trucks moved the ore to crush it to sizes suitable for rail travel to the lakeshore loading ports where waiting ore carriers hundreds of feet long took on the ore and delivered it to mills where iron could be separated from the rock; maybe Gary, Indiana or Cleveland, Ohio, for example. Depending on market prices and customer requirements the newly pooled iron could go to one of several processes to end up for use in cast-iron, steel sheets, rods, beams, or thinly rolled form. The pieces in this photo all are cast-iron products of specialty foundries like the ones at Neenah, Wisconsin and East Jordan Iron Works (EJIW) in northwest Lower Michigan.
Local governments will order cast-iron pieces for sewer lines and water supply to create and maintain their infrastructure and basic services. Accidents, upgrades and newer technology, and wear and tear of age all lead to the retirement of the old pieces with new replacements, as shown in this example. Thanks to a profitable market for certain scrap metals, it is probable that one or two years from now these old pieces will be reborn as another type of cast-iron fixture. The energy to mine, crush, transport, smelt, do business, and arrange delivery to final user is many times more expensive than to bypass the first steps and begin from smelting, foundry, and delivery. Of course, each municipality is different: some may take this heap directly to the scrap buyer or foundry operations. Others may wait to fill a railcar or two before transacting the sale. For small towns, it could be that heaps are built up for many years before they look for a rising market price to sell their scrap. So without knowing the details in this city, it is hard to predict where these pieces go next, where they end up in a few years, and how long this cycle of use and recycling for recasting (reuse) goes on into the future. But as long as this kind of civilization with sanitary treatment of wastewater and door to door supply of clean water continues, there is no reason to think that iron will not be in demand over and over again, century after century.
In the case of ghost towns, evacuated disaster sites, and other catastrophic situations, though, the pieces of cast-iron in the ground may well remain untouched and unused indefinitely. Fast forwarding thousands of years, if there is moisture and oxygen in the surrounding soil then the process of rusting eventually will turn the solid forms into flaking particles, not bound into ore but still distributed in the soil structure as an orange or reddish coloration in the ground. Thus, there are many story arcs for iron present at the Earth's origins and once mined then fashioned into useful products to be used, scrapped and remade anew again and again, except in a few cases when the structures are abandoned. The ones in this picture, though, seem likely to go to a fiery future to be remade by the foundry into somebody else's infrastructure taken for granted in daily use.
Sewer line replacement: road surface cut, 8-inch cast-iron pipe, fire-plug replacements [zip 49505] |
Obviously, the petroleum powered machines, the vast amount of specialized steel found in many parts of the pipes, the equipment, and the non-power tools, as well, would amaze them. Image - a self-propelled vehicle. And the laying of hard road surfaces (and removing them) atop a roadbed that is more or less the same design as Roman Times would capture their attention, too. Maybe most amazing of all is the relatively small crew performing these tasks with the aid of massive machinery and fossil fuel engines (and plastics and other products coming out of petroleum). For ancient Romans to excavate sewer (or water) lines, replace pipes, then rebuild the roadbed and cover it with a hard surface would take hundreds of workers (slave or paid or corvee labor commandeered) and many more weeks than it does for the team of workers in 2023.
People speeding past in their modern, high-powered cars with windows up and air-conditioning or heating adding comfort to the trip, maybe entertained by radio or another medium, hardly think twice about road construction projects during the work season of March to November. But what goes unnoticed or taken for granted perhaps is equally important as the other things taken for granted, too: air, water, food, shelter, and so on.
Morning coffee line at Detroit Metro Airport, Saturday 2/18/2023 |
Liminal spaces and times connect a situation that was before and another one that is after the event or ritual. It is this in-between status that can be unsettling since it is neither here nor there. This 7:30 a.m. photo shows the terminal concourse traffic Saturday looking in the direction of the morning coffee drinkers lined up as others pass by in various states of leisure or haste. After 30 minutes the number doubled. People present at the airport gate area fit into many different types: foreign or domestic, seasoned travelers and first-timers, business and leisure, fulfilling a dream or fulfilling an obligation, variation in age-gender-generation-region-income/SES, group trip versus lone traveler, and so on. Then there are aircrew both new and old-hands who may know this "workplace" like the back of their hand. Similarly, the concessions workers know the concourse area very well, hardly paying attention to the ebb and flow of passengers and crew. Some workers are there daily, others are project or limited-time contractors. Still others are responsible for the infrastructure, rather than retail business with travelers: cleaners, security, maintenance, or the person in a high-visibility vest marked in all capital letters, "contract auditor" (employed from 3rd party lowest bid agency? or full-time airport worker whose job is checking on contract business performance?).
Depending on the person's status (long-term home base in the terminal building versus just passing through to some distant destination), they will notice the surroundings of the place and the people there is different ways. Someone who knows the place like a "local resident" will see small changes or positive and negative details that people just passing through probably do not see or do not consider significant. A solitary traveler may be aware of the building, the weather, and go one to reflect on the subject or about any other topic that is triggered by airport impressions. But a couple, family, or group tour may confine their attention to the social bubble they occupy at the moment. Probably only an architecture or engineering fan will pause to scrutinize the concourse features and decisions going into the building. With travelers' and workers' minds in so many places, few will consider the long scale of weather changes, although momentary attention on a sunrise or sunset, stormy changes, and so on may draw the eye of many who are in the building.
This portrait from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW) on Saturday morning gives hints of the familiar metaphor about a lifetime or a daily frame of lived experience parallels the nature of leaving one's familiar home area to visit a place for the first time or one seen many times. For example, just like the diversity of people whose paths cross this morning, in life there is a similar intersection of strangers, occasionally punctuated by a spark of recognition when seeing someone known elsewhere. And the mild sense of anxiety when moving through an unfamiliar place like an airport concourse is also like the times of life when there is a lack of familiarity. Furthermore, the "tunnel vision" of travelers in search of their assigned gate fits with the kinds of people in life who focus on a goal to the exclusion of the surrounding situation and its ambience or possible meaning. As well, some people in the world are very much "passing through" rather than dwelling on the here and now of a locale: their body is present, but their mind is engaged with future plans and opportunities and threats. For people who see the world from the perspective of having arrived at the destination (not looking for someplace far away) like the concourse retail workers or the airport authority, there comes a sense of settled ease or non-striving. They are in their workplace, on duty, fulfilling employer expectations. Finally, the number of people who stop to reflect on all of this are relatively few and far between, too. If the airport represents a complex habitat with layers and layer of design and engineering know-how, most of those working or traveling take it all for granted, just like life itself that so often goes unexamined and unappreciated. So, watching the streams or food traffic of the airport terminal concourse offers a kind of mirror to the human experience: mortality, traveling alone or in the company of others, sometimes settled but other times on the way to other destinations. All these layers and facets intersect moment by moment, putting together fellow travels - of the airport, or of life's roads.
In conclusion, pause to look around at the many lives co-present and moving at different speeds. You may well see yourself in the picture, too.