Secondary Sources
Why are things so different from what you were told?
I saw Martin Sexton in concert at Portland, Oregon, about 2001. Before he played “Ice Cream Man”, he half-seriously said that he learned all his music only from secondary sources. He was referring to the fact that he learned “Ice Cream Man” from Van Halen when many earlier versions had been recorded, most importantly the one by John Brim in 1953 at Chess Records.
I think about Paul Kingsnorth’s two-year—or twenty-year—assessment of how and where the world went so wrong. I keep coming back to his basic fix—concentrate on people, place, and prayer.
As he says, his alliterative phrase is secondarily sourced, referring back to French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, who said,
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind” (2003 edition), p.43, Routledge
There is a side theme in Weill’s writing about the quest for perfection. This prompts Kingsnorth who says,
There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad or become a tyrant.
This leads us to Alain de Botton saying not to strive for or look for social greatness—that quest for suavity, cleverness, control, likeability—because we are all quirkily flawed. Look instead, he says, for those differences and quirks that make us interesting. You don’t have to be amazing he says, just interesting in some way or another.
Before this Stack spins out of control maybe we should stop with a heartfelt, “Huh?”.
I really do not get the “prayer” thing, but I can talk about people and place.
Kingsnorth, as an Englishman living in Ireland, has a story about meeting a well-known Irish musician on the Irish coast who asks him where he is from. After Kingsnorth gives some awkward facile replies which the musician does not accept, Kingsnorth finally says,
… I don’t really come from anywhere. The southeast, I suppose. My family moved around. But my surname is Kentish. Kingsnorth is a village in Kent. I can trace my ancestors back there a thousand years. I’ve visited the churchyard they’re buried in.
Well then, the musician said, that’s where you’re from. Those are your people.
I spent my first ten years on a farm in Northwest Illinois, a farm my Cornish great-grandfather built around 1900. He had come to the U.S. when he was two, brought by his recently widowed mother along with several siblings, received by a loose community of other Cornish immigrants about twenty miles west of the land he bought 30 years later. The mines had played out in Cornwall and many immigrants, including those of the widowed mother’s family, had set off for the New World a decade earlier.
The European immigrants in Northwest Illinois and Southwest Wisconsin, including the Cornish, were able to continue their long-established lifestyles. For the Cornish that meant mining and farming. Northwest Illinois is the unglaciated part of Illinois, making it more interesting and attractive, than the vast prairies, now cornfields, of flat glaciated Illinois. It still has hills, bluffs and limestone outcroppings. The hillier property was cheaper than the easier to farm flatlands.
Native Americans had mined lead for centuries, but nothing like these newly arrived white invaders. I know little of Cornish mining, the bit I know comes from the TV series Poldark. I can pretend it is my heritage, for a while. Illinois lacks the dramatic coastal cliffs of Cornwall, but the Mississippi is pretty wide in some places. But, photos of my Cornish ancestors make them seem not nearly as attractive than the characters in Poldark. What the heck? I can confuse fact and fiction for a while if it makes me happy. I looked up my ancestors’ home village and someone has opened a touristy “Poldark Mine” close-by. That makes me less happy.
My great-grandfather married a Cornish girl there in Illinois, and got a sweetheart deal on a 260-acre chunk of land. He built a house and two large barns and had three daughters, creating the farm I grew up on. Despite this sounding like great good fortune, he was small fish when it came to sweetheart deals. The primo stuff came from the indefatigable power of government and corporations. Chicago was not the destination of the first railroads in Illinois. They did not go to Chicago but to Galena, in the northwest corner of the state near the lead mines—“Galena”, named for a type of lead ore. The tracks went north-south, probably to get lead down to the confluence of the the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at the southern tip of Illinois
.
How did these European grifters run the scam? Let’s see. Steal land from the Indians and get that land developed by building railroads. Even though you only need a fifty-foot right-of-way for tracks, the developers get a ten-mile wide strip of land all along the route to make it worth their while. Remember, this was the booming 1800s and that wilderness needed to be developed. Ignorant savages needed to be killed off and the way made for Europeans.
All this, of course, this had to be done properly. Take care of the rich guys, the first-tier, right off the bat. They get their 10 mile strip of land extending the length of the state, 400 miles, so they could sell land to the poor, but in many ways fortunate immigrants. An interesting wrinkle is my great-grandfather did not buy his land from the railroad corporation. Instead, he bought it from the son of the railroad president. My great-grandfather got a good deal, but I suspect the railroad president and his son got an even better deal on that land—and in fine American tradition—transformed public wealth into corporate wealth and that went right into their personal bank accounts.
My grandmother and my father grew up on the same farm. I lived there until I was ten, moved into town, and left after college for the Pacific Northwest. I was surprised how many NW Illinois, SW Wisconsin natives I met there. Many told stories of drawing mountains in grade school, mountains they had never seen. We all found Illinois a boring place it seems by America’s bicentennial in 1976. The Pacific Northwest was a little better but going straight to hell and in 2014 my wife and I moved back to Europe. We ended up in France, for no particular reason. I just could not tolerate the land of opportunity, the land of the free and the home of the brave any longer.
So, that’s my people and place. I am mystified by the prayer part though. I did not even think about it too much until I saw all these big rocks in Burgundy that they say the Druids set up. Well, then there was also Naomi Wolf saying saying the same mothers who scanned apple juice labels for GMO ingredients were injecting their children with untested messenger-RNA. Not only that, but demanding everyone else do the same and treating them like shit if they did not do it. Wolf implied evil of this magnitude had to come from the supernatural. Now, she is even more convinced.
If that does not get you thinking about prayer, what does?
And the others we have talked about? Paul Kingsnorth is a fifty-something Englishman living in Ireland. Former environmental activist, he is getting the prayer part big-time. He went from being Buddhist, to Wiccan, to Christian Orthodox—all in a mystical way. It is a big thing lately it seems. Another Substack Irishman, Martin Shaw, did the same, as did many, many others. I seem behind on the prayer stuff.
Naomi Wolf is getting it, though. As Western Occult expert John Michael Greer says, give her loads of credit for going public with the suggestion that the supernatural is descending upon us. But let’s keep in mind there is a long, long history of progressive materialist rolling onto the spiritual sidewalk just before the car hits the bridge.
That is hardly walking the spiritual path. Maybe there’s something better—walking the dirt path centuries of ancestors walked before, listening carefully.
And Martin Sexton? He came from humble New England origins. He played on the street for years and has spent decades writing songs and covering others’ songs as well or better than anybody on earth.
Some version of Ice Cream Man was probably around quite a while before John Brim recorded it.
Simone Weil probably did not write the original people, place, and prayer story, either. We are all a mix of what came before and what we run into.
Ah, but what is primary? There always seems to be an even earlier version, a versional more original. And, more real.
As with everything, the French way of raising children is becoming more American all the time, but there are still big differences. Pamela Drukerman wrote a good book on the subject.
One thing we notice different here is that there is little of the constant hovering of American parents during normal kid activities. I saw a the French version on top a landmark rock in Southern Burgundy, Solutré, that stands several hundred feet above the Pouilly Fuissé vineyards. The walk to the top is quite popular and there are no guard rails anywhere.
I have been up there several times and seen toddlers wandering near shear drop-offs. My American parental sensibility kicks in big time. Who is watching these kids? They could slip and go straight down onto the rocks below. Well, their parents are watching. They are watching, not hovering, not fussing—not putting on a show for others where they broadcast endless episodes of “Best Parent”.
I saw the way it works one afternoon when a toddler started to walk to the edge of the drop-off. Rather than scream and rush forward, his mother appeared, seemingly from nowhere, took his hand and said, “Let’s walk together” as they approached the edge and looked over…
Let’s walk together, right to the edge.
Jack- Simone had a point when saying: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” I couldn’t agree more and I’m glad of this reminder.