Please excuse the most recent
paucity of writing, I’m moving again. Again. More accurately, I am homeless.
Placeless. Spatially confused. Etc.
This whole blog is dedicated to being misplaced in time, anachronistic (see blog title). This, I thought, would be perfect because when I embarked upon my doctoral program in
History several years ago, I always sensed that being a misplaced citizen of the kingdom of time simply comes with the territory of being a historian. What I didn’t expect, however,
is how lost in kingdom of spatial reality I would become. Yet, somehow, that is exactly what
has happened. Moving twelve times in the last eleven years will do that to a
person, I suppose. So will moving twelve hours south of one’s hometown in order
to start graduate school. So will moving six times in the five years since starting
those graduate degrees. So will holding temporary teaching jobs in several
states over one’s college and graduate degree. So will relocating to Germany
for a year and a half for doctoral research. So will having a boyfriend who
lives in Canada but is originally from Greece. So will conducting research not
only in German but also Latin and sometimes koine
Greek. So will attending churches whose liturgies are either solely in
Slavonic Russian or Greek. So will
relocating to Europe and coming home for a whirlwind month of moving one’s
possessions into storage, visiting friends in Canada, Wisconsin, Ohio, and …
Dizzy yet? I must be, too.
And my alarm clock is evidently as dizzy as I am. This morning, it awoke me at 7:38 for a 7:30
breakfast appointment with my doctoral advisor, Sigrun. Like most mornings, I
lay in bed for several minutes solving the existential questions of the day:
where am I? What language do we speak
here? How long am I here for? After managing to brush my hair and teeth, I
jumped into my car and drove 70 mph up the hill to the bagel shop. Twenty minutes late, I ran inside huffing and
puffing. When finally we had our breakfast ordered and the first sips of our
coffees imbibed, the sleepy haze in my mind began to clear.
“Are
you awake?” Sigrun asked, spreading her usual raspberry jam onto her sesame
seed bagel—no butter, no cream cheese. Just jam.
“Physically, yes,” I murmured, through a sip of Brueggers’
Bagels hazelnut coffee. “But in most other ways feel like I am walking around
in a daze.”
Sigrun nodded as though she understood perfectly, probably
because she actually did. She had just flown back from a nine-day conference in
Australia, before which she had just returned to Cincinnati from a summer in
Germany. For her, this was something of a way of life. She was about as lost in
time and place as I was.
“Yes,”
she commented after a while. “There’s something to be said for a settled life.”
I bit into my bagel.
“Stabilitas
loci,” I commented absently. We both nodded knowingly.
Stabilitas
loci is one of those Latin terms I just love. It means, literally, “stability of place.” Beyond a sort of poetic simplicity the phrase conjures up,
for Sigrun and me it carries perhaps an added significance, given that we are
sort of academic nomads in this world. In fact, I first learned the term from
Sigrun herself—in the first History of Christianity class I took from her the
second year of my Master’s degree. Perhaps it is because I never moved much
before college. Perhaps it is because I have this girlish notion that in my heart of hearts, I am just this small town proverbial
farm girl whose life purpose is to milk cows on the same land her grandparents have tilled for five centuries. Perhaps it’s because whenever life gets too crazy, my best friend
and I jokingly vow to leave this world behind and become nuns so that we can get some existential peace
and quiet around here ("here" being this whole living in the twenty first century thing, which we've never quite gotten the hang of). Or perhaps it’s just because I am so sick and tired of moving. Whatever
the case, stabilitas loci has got me thinking more than ever before. Words, I think, are not just words. They are, in and of themselves, entire stories, histories. Words are Worlds.Even
the dead words and terms, like stabilitas
loci, are fossils that have preserve within them the living memory of concepts and realms we still need today...
Stabilitas loci refers to a particular
way of organizing social systems in the late Roman empire (i.e. between about
250 AD and the 470s, when the western empire finally fell). It is the notion
that the head or patriarch of a family or artisan group should be devoted to
that group and its place for a long duration of time. Constancy. Loyalty. It
is the notion that political continuity and social order can only be preserved
through geographic fidelity to a community or its place.
The
Roman Empire fell officially in 476, when Rome was sacked by the Germanic chieftain with the horrendous (but cool) name of "Odoacer" (rhymes with "whacker" as in "weed whacker" 'cause he seriously weed-whacked the crap out of that city). But even if in the end, Rome may have succumbed rather quickly,
entire empires never crumble overnight. Rome
and its disparate subsidiaries had been threatened by tribes and other
belligerent forces for centuries, even if externally the empire appeared to be
growing and conquering. It had grown overstressed, overextended, even overly
diverse. And as the the late western
Roman empire began to deteriorate within itself, the cohesiveness among its territories
and political actors eroded not only at the highest levels of imperial authority,
but also on the lower levels of ordinary social networks like families and estates.
We
speak of this time period as “late antiquity” or the “late Roman empire.” It
was, one could say, the autumn of antiquity. The vibrance of cities, not to mention the
roads connecting them, was slowly changing, falling into structural and
political dilapitation from the life-giving trunk of Rome. Social networks and
communities slowly followed suit. Soon, the cold death of winter would follow,
to which some people refer as the “dark ages,”(1) that lasted from about 500 to 800 AD. What was dead during this
wintering of western civilization, was an overarching political authority and
social order. Cities—a staple of stable, centralized governance--disappeared
and in their place, tribal and frankish clans looked after their own. Isolated groups
across the European countryside built their own settlements, warring against one
another for food and territory, leaving precious few artifacts of culture and
civilization behind.
With the chill of Europe’s harsh civilizational winter
setting in, stabilitas loci soon
became a forgotten notion of the antique past, an ideal.
~*~
One
way we try to make sense of circumstances and changes in our lives is to speak
of “seasons.” I’m going through a “season,” we say, of change, or a “season” of
struggling, or a “season” of a heavy workload. One reason we talk like this, I
think, is to convince ourselves that the status quo pattern of life dictates difficulties
to be temporary. Once nature runs its course, once this current sorrow has had
its proper effect, the season will fade away. Rarely, for example, do we speak
of “seasons” of unbridled joy, or “seasons” of financial affluence, or
“seasons” of having uncommonly tasty food in our houses for whatever reason.
Probably because we want to believe that these good things are not mere
seasons, they should be the norm. Anything that diverges from this status quo,
that is anything negative, is a season.
But
what if
a “season” of change does not, well, change?What if it lasts not for weeks or months, but years? And years? I’m
asking myself this, because I am experiencing it. I am and have been
experiencing ongoing change in every facet of my life for much longer than a season, by any stretch of the imagination. Graduate school in general. Family crises. Converting to
eastern Orthodoxy. A serious relationship. Financial ups and downs. Relocating
for a year and a half to a different continent, after which I don't know where--or what country--I will come to reside in. For
months and months now, and for months and months to come, I have felt in the
deepest corners of my heart that the only thing constant around me is constant
change. At the heart of these changes is what feels like continuous geographic
upheaval. There are days I wish to be nothing more than a snail—oh, the sanity
of being able to carry one’s home upon one’s back; oh, the peace of moving
slowly from place to place, too small to be noticed, hurried or in anyone’s way.
This
liminal modus operandi has given rise not only to a new sense of life, but also a new sense of dying. The new sense of life turns up when, for example, I slim down my
list of possessions by a third or half. When I know I am not as beholden to
physical things as I used to be. When I feel just as at home in my old
apartment as I do in a plane flying halfway across the world, or a train
chugging from one end of Germany to the next. When I look around me—no matter
how unfamiliar the terrain is—and can feel in the very marrow of my bones that God
is the same today as yesterday as tomorrow; that He truly is everywhere and
fills all things, that He is the giver of life to all people in all places of
His dominion. There is even a certain feeling of life when saying goodbye to
people I love; to feel the love well up inside me, to feel the grief of turning
away and walking down that corridor to my gate. There is new life even as I sit on the plane, I feel the distance between me and those I lovce wedging and spreading itself between us like a thick, mysterious blanket of snow. And I feel that blanket covering me with the icy chill of a
geographic expanse; of the oceans, winds, languages, cultures in all the nooks and crannies of that blanket. There is life when I hold
within me the warm hope, deep down, of future reunions.
Those
are the embers of life I find in change. But there are moments of death,
moments of despondency. Moments, days, months when my mind seems to work more
slowly; when every conversation I have is either a momentous hello or goodbye. And sometimes the moments of life and hope I described above to not feel at all like life andhope, but instead like latent disconnection between me and everyone else. It is a disconnection that Rilke describes perfectly in one of his laments, which cries in its opening lines "Oh how all things are far removed!" Because I am human, and humans need constancy. They need connection, unity between discordant things and people. We need to be gounded in place as in time. And some
days, I feel that I have lost that, and I don’t know how to get it back.
But sometimes places, too, are seasonal. Or perhaps,
life itself is just a season of upheaval within eternity? After all, that autumnal season for Roman civilization
lasted years, if not a century or more. In the midst of the deadness
encroaching upon the empire, some interesting things were happening besides the
doom and gloom of a failing empire, particularly in the spiritual realm. Before
the life of cities were fading, we see spiritual men and women fleeing the
urban centers of the Church and state, opting instead for desert or wilderness
landscapes wherein they could devote their lives to solitary pursuits of God
and His son Jesus Christ. It’s like they knew something was happening to the
fabric of social and religious life around them in these cities, and they
needed to get away from the coming tumult to commune with God. Today, they are
known as the Desert Fathers of ancient Christianity, but there were also
important “desert mothers” such as St. Mary of Egypt (ca. 344-421), who lived a
life of prostitution and worse before having a conversion experience in
Jerusalem and living out the rest of her years in the desert, experiencing a
powerful and sustaining relationship with God that is said to have nourished
her not only spiritually but physically and nutritionally. For these desert fathers, who lived only in
loose—if any—connection to one another, the sole aim was the pursuit of the
life of God.
As the cracks in the structure of the Roman empire continued
to grow, Augustine penned his prolific City
of God. This theological work offers a wide-lens glimpse of the world
around him, a panorama of a world in decay. The city of man, Augustine argued,
is one that is fading, falling apart at the seams. It may not be there
tomorrow. The city of God, however, is one that is unseen and eternal, and
dwells in the midst of men who seek it out of the woodwork of temporal
reality. Augustine is grappling with a
reality that was becoming more apparent by the day, that the city of
man—Rome—was not the eternal city everyone thought it would be. Perhaps it was
partly this mentality that compelled so many of the desert hermits (whence the
term “eremitical” derives). Isn’t it ironic that even while Augustine was
putting his thoughts into words, so many men and women were abadnoning the
cities of man, living in the most remote wilderness territories of the eastern
and western empires, to pursue the city of God? In this way, the tendencies of
monks predates and foretells the future abandonment of cities that would take
place on a wider scale with the fall of the roman empire.
But
what were the desert fathers giving up in order to gain this fuller life of
spiritual devotion? They were, I think, giving up a sense of place. A sense of
connection to a certain physical space, because part of what grounds us to any
sense of space is our community ties. Spatial landmarks. The give and take of
daily life in contact with others. They were exchanging a sense of home for
life in a cave or wilderness, often without basic amenities or nutritional
necessities. They may have renewed some sort of connection with their little
dwelling place, but I think the whole point of living in the desert in solitude
was to deny oneself the sense of
home. To fast from having a home in order to find one’s grounding in God.
Whereas stabilitas loci had once been
wrought through tying oneself to collective community networks of the family
and estate, these ascetics found their stabilitas loci in God, in the middle of
the most uninhabitable terrains.
For
a few days, this comforted me. In the midst of my travels and moving, I tried
on the whole desert father thing for metaphorical size. Packing, moving,
dissertation—these things, as I saw them, became my desert. Shedding my
possessions to the thrift stores, sorting everything into like-sized boxes, living
out of a suitcase for weeks, months, a year or more on end. This is freeing.
But for three days in a row, 8:30PM was the first time I could sit down to eat
a real meal all day. I was averaging 4-5 hours of sleep a night. On top of it
all, I was toiling the day long in good, old fashioned Cincinnati heat and
humidity. All of this was done not out of spiritual discipline or reenacting
the life of a desert father, but rather out of reality. Or letting reality take
over my sanity.
Finally,
on the third day of this, I sat down at 9pm to a bowl of brown rice and ham
cubes (one has to clean out one’s fridge) all the while mumbling incoherent
comments about my stressful day through crocodile tears and a mouthful of pork
to my boyfriend over skype. Evidently I would have really sucked as a desert
father.
I
was learning, as a novice learns. And the lessons I was learning about myself
and human-ness was rather inconvenient. No matter how one tries to rise above
the here-and-now, to be disattached from one’s place, to be ready at all times
to travel, one will always remain a here-and-now creature with here-and-now
needs. God has built us with these needs to eat, sleep, drink, and rest as
though placing threads within us that root us to our surroundings—wherever our
surroundings happen to be. And yet, as it says in Ecclesiastes, he has also
placed eternity within our hearts. Being
a human is much like being suspended in a hot air balloon, tethered above our personal
place in space and time: we can’t fully cut those tethers, else how will we
obtain sustenance brought forth from the earth? We hover our whole lives, never
fully rising above the distant horizon, yet never far removed from the heavens
either.
And
that is me, too, in a way: hovering between this place and all the other places
I’ve been and shall be in. Hovering between this world and the next. Wondering
when will I finally get to touch the ground or, perhaps, the clouds.
____
FOOTNOTES:
(1) I personally don't like the term "Dark Ages." I find it a little racist or time-ist or something. As some historians, more popular in the 19th and mid 20th centuries, would have it, the dark ages and middle ages were little more than a period of stupidity and barbarism in Europe. Europe would only fully recover from the dark ages with the En-LIGHT-enment. (Get it? Dark? Light?) This is a flawed approach to understand history, because there was a lot happening in Europe during the dark ages, middle ages and reformation periods. Just because it does not look recognizably modern does not mean the people were simply dark or ignorant. Likewise, there was a lot happening in the Enlightenment that would have disastrous consequences for modernity. Secular thought, for example, did not necessarily mean less violence or brutishness. In fact, the wars of modernity would prove to be more violent and destructive than of the dark ages.
