Pastoral (continued)
By Robert Olmstead

Observations. All we have to open the past and know the present are the five senses. And memory. And imagination. Place to me now (often sadly) is an element of fiction. People are characters. Conversation is dialogue. Life is a dramatic movement.

Standing outside the closed circle of reality in this way makes one peculiarly immune to motivation and stimulation and needless to say, ill at ease with love in general and love of place in particular. Of course, I am desperate to know what was and what is, but primarily for the sake of my imagination. Moments fall like gems into my mind and a search for words begins. I am the constant stranger looking at the ever familiar.

But as to place. We must confess: we cut our coats according to our cloth, which is to say, we only know what we know. We must painfully acknowledge that place is indifferent to us, to our existence, whether it be place natural or constructed, place primeval or synthetic, place unconquered or banal.

These days it seems America is more than ever the distillate of capitalism and christianity. It seems there is no place left, no land, no landscape and there is only property. Place is sacred and yet for the right price, it can be ours. Place is, alas, a commodity, a thing bought and sold. Is it possible that all relationships in America, even those we share with nature, are commercial?

Still, we persist. In place we find refuge, a soothing balm to allay the anxiety of being. This is because place is not transient, is not whimsical. It can be held like a lover, whereas life for most of us is unreliable and has a way of changing. But in finding our place do we hold too tightly, do we settle for the standard happy ending? Is surviving place a triumph of virtue and husbandry, however unsure we are of our motives and passions? Can we say that any portrait of place is ultimately the description not of place, but of the one describing? Shall I say love of place is actually love of self? Or would that be uncharitable?

This is the black curve that is inside us. Name it the confusion of our feelings. We fervently wish to return to our innocence, to find our heaven on earth. Our utopian aspirations mandate a return to the Edenic garden, that we might be closer to our guiltless past. It is interesting to note that the derivation of utopia is no + place = no place. Utopia is no place.

***

Tonight. I am in St. Petersburg, Russia. The miracle-working Tikhvin Virgin icon, painted by St. Luke and absent the country since WWII has arrived at the Kazan Cathedral. Thousands wait in line to pay their respects. The smell of cut grass finds my window. On the television a babushka fondly strokes the chin of her Holstein. The smell, the gesture, the barnyard, they are as familiar to me as home. Russia means beautiful and is personified as female and maternal--the motherland.

When Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893 the American frontier to be closed, the Russian frontier, then as now, was limitless, shapeless and formless, simultaneously nurturing and malevolent, a frontier untamed and deeply seated in the Russian mind. The same year Turner declared the American frontier closed hundreds of thousands of settlers swarmed onto sections of land in Oklahoma and a black man in Paris, Texas was burned at the stake. The great Chicago fire killed three hundred people and in Peshtigo, Wisconsin a forest fire killed fifteen hundred and wiped out a county. The Monadnock region was already owned and settled, its hillsides denuded by sheep, its people in economic depression.

Recently opened archives suggest not ten or twenty, but fifty million Russians perished during World War II and it is speculated the eastern front consumed seventy-five per cent of the German war machine. In St. Petersburg eight hundred thousand, give or take a hundred thousand, died during a nine-hundred-day siege and are interred in mass graves at Piskarevskoye and Seraphimovskoye. It is beyond imagination that these cemetery acres are more dense with human remains than earth itself. These are places sublime and beloved. Such strange words we attach to cemeteries.

For New Englanders it is the anodyne air and enamelling light, the greeness that pleases our eyes. But so too is found a love of place in ruin, destruction and unreasonable sacrifice. Love and affection for place is equally found where life is a very thin ribbon. But in the end we must understand that place is not a sentient. It is incapable of requiting our love. It does not love us in the least and I cannot help but wonder how relieved the garden must have been when man was finally driven from it.

I have no choice but to confess my Monadnock to be an imaginary one. So too the Connecticut River, Spofford Lake, Alumni Field, Cheshire Fair, Canoe Meadow, Horatio. They no longer exist and perhaps they never did. But wherever I go, I am there and they are with me and my relationship with them is fierce and possessive. When I die I will be the seventh generation of my mother's family buried in Westmoreland's North Cemetery, half way between the house where I grew up and Horatio crossed the river. It will be familiar ground to me as I used to play in that cemetery. When I die I will finally return home and will remain there far longer than I was ever away. I will be dead and disencumbered of all natural laws.

But for now I am just a man trying to keep a boy alive.