Barrycdog
Major
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2013
- Location
- Buford, Georgia
On the eastern rim of the Chattahoochee basin is (or one might almost say "was") the town of Cassville, Georgia, in present-day Bartow County. In the early 1860s Cassville was a prosperous town of fifty-some-odd residences, two colleges--a male and a female college--and, they say, a lively artistic community. In May of 1864, sometime between the Battle of Chattanooga and the Battle of Kennesaw, there was a brief skirmish there between the two armies--the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Joseph E. Johnston and the invading army under William Tecumseh Sherman. Later, General Sherman sent back a contingent of Ohio cavalry to burn the two colleges and all but three of the fifty-something residences.
My great-grandmother--newly married--loaded her precious wedding gifts into a buckboard wagon, including a large "secretary" that now stands in our living room. She drove the mule-drawn wagon into the woods, near an ancient cemetery, and there unhitched the mule-team and drove them away. Then she piled brush over the wagon and its contents, crawled beneath the wagon, and remained in hiding for two or three days without food or water, there saving herself and the few provisions that survived the holocaust.
Forty years later, this same woman, no longer the young bride who hid in the woods from Sherman's soldiers, wrote of a visit to the now desolate place that had once been her home. The piece, entitled "A Walk Over Sacred Ground," was published in 1905:
During a recent visit, the first in nearly ten years, of my sister from southern Georgia, we left the breakfast table one morning bareheaded as in childhood, for a stroll about the yard and garden; but as the morning was cool and cloudy we extended our walk far beyond our first intentions.
We left the grove and went up the way that was once a back street of our village, and at the end of it had a plain view of the old college hill, up which we had so often climbed in company with the friends of long ago. And as we viewed its steep and now rugged pathway, and faces and names were recalled, an irresistible desire seized us to tramp once more in the footsteps of early friends and classmates departed. As we reached the brow and turned to look back at the little village at its decline, we were reminded of Goldsmith's deserted village "Once the fairest of the plain," but now only modest homesteads mark the place where once were many prosperous, lovely homes. Across from this hill stood another, dearer to us still. Then greater became the longing as we again stand upon the spot that was home to us when days were always sunny and skies bright.
As we neared the grove, before reaching the exact place where the dear old house stood, we marked many trees under which we had played, gathered chestnuts and upon whose gnarled roots we sat for an hour's quiet study when an extra lesson, or one of unusual length, or difficulty, had to be learned. We found where once rested the sills and hearthstones of our then cherished home; a garden had been made and vegetables in profusion were running riot o'er the sacred spot. I did not wonder at the luxurious vegetation, for twice had houses of good size been burned on the same spot and the fertilizing properties of the ashes lent to the perfection of nature .... Scarcely would we have been able to locate the walks about the place, but for the brick with which they were laid, the gateposts even having been charred and almost gone....
The sweet-shrub hedge, from which our childish fingers plucked the fragrant brown blossoms and treasured for days to inhale their rich aroma, was entirely gone, but there [were] "the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild wood, and every loved spot that our infancy knew." An old peach tree at the edge of the yard where once we knelt in prayer for the restoration of an idolized brother was still standing, but with bent form, that reminded us forcibly of our first real sorrow.
As we looked and thought of the past, almost mute with sorrow the falling rain arrested our musings and we noticed the gathering clouds and knew that we must seek shelter. A colored family now occupied the once large kitchen a few paces from the "big house." And under its roof we found refuge, but here again came memories thronging, both sad and gay. On the spacious old fireplace had been cooked my wedding supper and there within those walls my sister had stood at the hymeneal altar. The first just before the war, when things to cook and servants to prepare them were both plentiful, and the last just after, when kitchens and barns were converted into homes for the returning refugees.
The shower was soon over and after a visit to the old well at the foot of the hill, then known as Cassville Heights, we drew again from its cool depths and quaffed once more, and we knew for the last time together, its limpid water. Then wended our way back, the trees still dripping, as if in sympathy with tears that were falling and with voices too tremulous with emotion for conversation. It was an almost silent walk to Spring Brook, the adjoining farm and home of Lila Land Chunn. (The Cartersville News, August 24, 1905).
Notice how she weaves the lines from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770) into the narrative. The place, the old homestead at Cassville, not only evoked memory, but also, because it was a real place--where memory, common bonds, community habits, sorrows, and love come together--it evokes song. One cannot simply describe it: to do so is too abstract. One must evoke the feel of the place--even if through silence. One must come in touch with what Jim Kibler, after the manner of the ancient Greeks, calls the genius loci, the spirit of the place.
Now I have promised to speak of the importance of "place" in what might be called a Southern sentiment. But so far I have only told stories and remembered songs and witticisms about places. But I hope that you will see that I did so in order to make good on my promise in a more direct way.
The first thing we have to notice is the fact that it is difficult to be abstract about "place." The only abstraction that works is this: a place is not abstract. It is the opposite of abstraction. More than that, it is prior to any abstraction.(n2) Our world, the world shaped by modernity, is one that has attempted to reduce reality to time and space--both of which are abstractions that derive their meaning from place. Even time, which seems at first sight to be of a different category, is understood in reference to place. Without place there is no time, for there is no reality within which things happen. And time, being only a measure of things that happen, unhinged from place, has no meaning at all. Even our references to time are thought in terms of place. Time renders itself in a before and an after--that which we face (before) and that which falls behind (after). Thus without the concreteness of place there is no time.
Modern times are characterized by a spirit of conquest. The discovery of the New World was thought of as the "conquest" of the New World by a large segment of the emerging modern population. The advent of new kinds of financial ventures (joint stock companies, for instance, which began in the seventeenth century) allowed a kind of conquest from a distance--the reduction of economic interests to the abstractions of stock shares and entries on an accounting table. Science began to be thought of in terms of its ability to "make men the masters and possessors of nature" (Descartes). Knowledge was conceived as "power" (Bacon). The world was no longer a reality within which one learns (through science, history, tradition, law, and manners) to participate; but it is a reality to be conquered. This is the primary shift in sentiment that characterizes modernity.
The idea of place, however, is an embarrassment to the modern mentality. One can think in terms of the conquest of time and space--and in some important ways it can be said that such a conquest has taken place. But remember that time and space are abstractions, that draw their reality from place. When we are pushed back to the primacy of place we find ourselves in a very different relationship. We only "conquer" place in the most ephemeral sense. In a more real sense we are always limited by place. Not only do we have an effect on place, but it has an effect on us. It is always itself, and subject more to its own laws than to ones we might impose. We can improve it, and cultivate it, and build it; but also it is always and only itself: we work upon it, and with it; we are its stewards; but never in any real sense its conquerors. Europeans coming to North America did not make a new Europe. It made them Americans, and as unlike Europeans as any race on earth.
This is the reason "place" finds such resistance in the modern mind. Abstractions can often be thought of as subject to "mind." But "place" imposes a limit. Modernity is about the dream of always transcending limits. "Place" always ties us to the earth, to the land, to the dust from which we came, and to the good creation that is not our own creation but is made by Another. "Place" humbles us; but it also causes us to think (as Gerhart Niemeyer used to say) about real possibilities instead of possible realities.
For Flannery O'Connor this was a problem that affected modern attitudes towards literature. She put it this way: "The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit [which by the way is the same as pure abstraction and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art."
"Place," however, is not the same as "nature" in the Romantic or the Transcendentalist traditions. The notion that what is primitive, what is natural in the uncultivated sense, is somehow superior to that which has been subject to cultivation, and refinement is, of course, a part of the modern resistance to restraints of any kind. It was, only in part, a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. In a more strict sense, it was an expression of Enlightenment desire for human autonomy. Thus the idea of "place" we speak of here is not the Romantic's ideal of a spot in the wilderness, or the primitive virtues of uncultivated humanity. Place, instead, as James Kibler showed in his Our Father's Fields,(n3) is a piece of nature that has been perfected through the use and the cultivation and dwelling of generations of families. It is very often a "built" place and a place of habitation, such as Versailles or the Vatican. It is almost always associated with community.
William Gilmore Simms made the proper distinction in both poetry and prose. He was often contrasting the primitive and rootless Indian, or the nomadic American frontiersman, with those who settled a land, cultivated and "improved" its fields, planted trees to give shade to generations, built the dwelling places, and over time provided abundance for themselves and for a whole community. "A wandering people," he would say, "is more or less a barbaric people." They are rootless people; they are people without a place. Furthermore, this was a temptation to which Americans were especially subject. The temptation was to draw the richness from the soil with a single crop, and then move on to another parcel of land, leaving nothing but waste in the wake of such selfish endeavors. The point of cultivating land, he said, is to improve it--to leave it berber, not more impoverished, than one found it.
One who cherishes place sees its natural setting differently than does the Romantic or the Transcendentalist. For Thoreau, for instance, nature provided a place to escape the community. It allowed him to be more "selective" in his company. (Reading between the lines in Walden [1854], it is not hard to detect that he did not really like his neighbors; and even today--so they tell me--Concord does not really love him.) For the writer of Southern fiction, on the other hand, nature provides some of the character of the place: and the character bears fruit in a certain kind of community. For one, nature is a refuge from community. For the other, it is the setting for community. For one, the object is solitude; for the other, the object is life together.(n4)
Furthermore, the community is not a "selective" community as Thoreau wished for, but it is a community of people as they exist, with all of their sins and shortcomings. Robert Frost had it right in his "The Death of a Hired Man' when he said "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in." The power of Flannery O'Connor's fiction is that she did not clean up her characters before she put them on stage. And for her, "the best American fiction has always been regional," because real people live in actual places, with all their regional peculiarities. Thus Richard Wilbur defined place as "a fusion of human and natural order, and a peculiar window on the whole."(n5)
This takes us to our final point. When Lila Land Chunn spoke of Cassville, she spoke of a place that she remembered, as did a few of her generation. Cassville is still there; but it is in many ways the deserted village that she alluded to, and there are no longer any alive who remember what it was like before that Ohio cavalry set torch to its settled homes, its churches, its opera house, and its two colleges. Whatever one might say against General Sherman, one can say in his favor that he recognized the power and the significance of "place." And he was intent on leaving his enemies as few of those places as possible.
Yet when Mrs. Chunn speaks of Cassville, I think I am not mistaken to say that she speaks to us all: to all who have memorable places in their background; to all who can grieve; to all who feel the loss of that which can never be regained; to all who have a sense of that which can never in any real sense ever be lost. There is something about a particular place that is, as Flannery O'Connor would refer to it, on the order of the sacramental.
Why the Chattahoochee Sings: Notes Towards a Theory of 'Place'. By: Conyers, A. J., Modern Age, 00267457, Spring Civil War Times 2001, Vol. 43, Issue 2
http://www.knowsouthernhistory.net/Articles/Culture/the_there_down_there.html
My great-grandmother--newly married--loaded her precious wedding gifts into a buckboard wagon, including a large "secretary" that now stands in our living room. She drove the mule-drawn wagon into the woods, near an ancient cemetery, and there unhitched the mule-team and drove them away. Then she piled brush over the wagon and its contents, crawled beneath the wagon, and remained in hiding for two or three days without food or water, there saving herself and the few provisions that survived the holocaust.
Forty years later, this same woman, no longer the young bride who hid in the woods from Sherman's soldiers, wrote of a visit to the now desolate place that had once been her home. The piece, entitled "A Walk Over Sacred Ground," was published in 1905:
During a recent visit, the first in nearly ten years, of my sister from southern Georgia, we left the breakfast table one morning bareheaded as in childhood, for a stroll about the yard and garden; but as the morning was cool and cloudy we extended our walk far beyond our first intentions.
We left the grove and went up the way that was once a back street of our village, and at the end of it had a plain view of the old college hill, up which we had so often climbed in company with the friends of long ago. And as we viewed its steep and now rugged pathway, and faces and names were recalled, an irresistible desire seized us to tramp once more in the footsteps of early friends and classmates departed. As we reached the brow and turned to look back at the little village at its decline, we were reminded of Goldsmith's deserted village "Once the fairest of the plain," but now only modest homesteads mark the place where once were many prosperous, lovely homes. Across from this hill stood another, dearer to us still. Then greater became the longing as we again stand upon the spot that was home to us when days were always sunny and skies bright.
As we neared the grove, before reaching the exact place where the dear old house stood, we marked many trees under which we had played, gathered chestnuts and upon whose gnarled roots we sat for an hour's quiet study when an extra lesson, or one of unusual length, or difficulty, had to be learned. We found where once rested the sills and hearthstones of our then cherished home; a garden had been made and vegetables in profusion were running riot o'er the sacred spot. I did not wonder at the luxurious vegetation, for twice had houses of good size been burned on the same spot and the fertilizing properties of the ashes lent to the perfection of nature .... Scarcely would we have been able to locate the walks about the place, but for the brick with which they were laid, the gateposts even having been charred and almost gone....
The sweet-shrub hedge, from which our childish fingers plucked the fragrant brown blossoms and treasured for days to inhale their rich aroma, was entirely gone, but there [were] "the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild wood, and every loved spot that our infancy knew." An old peach tree at the edge of the yard where once we knelt in prayer for the restoration of an idolized brother was still standing, but with bent form, that reminded us forcibly of our first real sorrow.
As we looked and thought of the past, almost mute with sorrow the falling rain arrested our musings and we noticed the gathering clouds and knew that we must seek shelter. A colored family now occupied the once large kitchen a few paces from the "big house." And under its roof we found refuge, but here again came memories thronging, both sad and gay. On the spacious old fireplace had been cooked my wedding supper and there within those walls my sister had stood at the hymeneal altar. The first just before the war, when things to cook and servants to prepare them were both plentiful, and the last just after, when kitchens and barns were converted into homes for the returning refugees.
The shower was soon over and after a visit to the old well at the foot of the hill, then known as Cassville Heights, we drew again from its cool depths and quaffed once more, and we knew for the last time together, its limpid water. Then wended our way back, the trees still dripping, as if in sympathy with tears that were falling and with voices too tremulous with emotion for conversation. It was an almost silent walk to Spring Brook, the adjoining farm and home of Lila Land Chunn. (The Cartersville News, August 24, 1905).
Notice how she weaves the lines from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770) into the narrative. The place, the old homestead at Cassville, not only evoked memory, but also, because it was a real place--where memory, common bonds, community habits, sorrows, and love come together--it evokes song. One cannot simply describe it: to do so is too abstract. One must evoke the feel of the place--even if through silence. One must come in touch with what Jim Kibler, after the manner of the ancient Greeks, calls the genius loci, the spirit of the place.
Now I have promised to speak of the importance of "place" in what might be called a Southern sentiment. But so far I have only told stories and remembered songs and witticisms about places. But I hope that you will see that I did so in order to make good on my promise in a more direct way.
The first thing we have to notice is the fact that it is difficult to be abstract about "place." The only abstraction that works is this: a place is not abstract. It is the opposite of abstraction. More than that, it is prior to any abstraction.(n2) Our world, the world shaped by modernity, is one that has attempted to reduce reality to time and space--both of which are abstractions that derive their meaning from place. Even time, which seems at first sight to be of a different category, is understood in reference to place. Without place there is no time, for there is no reality within which things happen. And time, being only a measure of things that happen, unhinged from place, has no meaning at all. Even our references to time are thought in terms of place. Time renders itself in a before and an after--that which we face (before) and that which falls behind (after). Thus without the concreteness of place there is no time.
Modern times are characterized by a spirit of conquest. The discovery of the New World was thought of as the "conquest" of the New World by a large segment of the emerging modern population. The advent of new kinds of financial ventures (joint stock companies, for instance, which began in the seventeenth century) allowed a kind of conquest from a distance--the reduction of economic interests to the abstractions of stock shares and entries on an accounting table. Science began to be thought of in terms of its ability to "make men the masters and possessors of nature" (Descartes). Knowledge was conceived as "power" (Bacon). The world was no longer a reality within which one learns (through science, history, tradition, law, and manners) to participate; but it is a reality to be conquered. This is the primary shift in sentiment that characterizes modernity.
The idea of place, however, is an embarrassment to the modern mentality. One can think in terms of the conquest of time and space--and in some important ways it can be said that such a conquest has taken place. But remember that time and space are abstractions, that draw their reality from place. When we are pushed back to the primacy of place we find ourselves in a very different relationship. We only "conquer" place in the most ephemeral sense. In a more real sense we are always limited by place. Not only do we have an effect on place, but it has an effect on us. It is always itself, and subject more to its own laws than to ones we might impose. We can improve it, and cultivate it, and build it; but also it is always and only itself: we work upon it, and with it; we are its stewards; but never in any real sense its conquerors. Europeans coming to North America did not make a new Europe. It made them Americans, and as unlike Europeans as any race on earth.
This is the reason "place" finds such resistance in the modern mind. Abstractions can often be thought of as subject to "mind." But "place" imposes a limit. Modernity is about the dream of always transcending limits. "Place" always ties us to the earth, to the land, to the dust from which we came, and to the good creation that is not our own creation but is made by Another. "Place" humbles us; but it also causes us to think (as Gerhart Niemeyer used to say) about real possibilities instead of possible realities.
For Flannery O'Connor this was a problem that affected modern attitudes towards literature. She put it this way: "The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit [which by the way is the same as pure abstraction and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art."
"Place," however, is not the same as "nature" in the Romantic or the Transcendentalist traditions. The notion that what is primitive, what is natural in the uncultivated sense, is somehow superior to that which has been subject to cultivation, and refinement is, of course, a part of the modern resistance to restraints of any kind. It was, only in part, a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. In a more strict sense, it was an expression of Enlightenment desire for human autonomy. Thus the idea of "place" we speak of here is not the Romantic's ideal of a spot in the wilderness, or the primitive virtues of uncultivated humanity. Place, instead, as James Kibler showed in his Our Father's Fields,(n3) is a piece of nature that has been perfected through the use and the cultivation and dwelling of generations of families. It is very often a "built" place and a place of habitation, such as Versailles or the Vatican. It is almost always associated with community.
William Gilmore Simms made the proper distinction in both poetry and prose. He was often contrasting the primitive and rootless Indian, or the nomadic American frontiersman, with those who settled a land, cultivated and "improved" its fields, planted trees to give shade to generations, built the dwelling places, and over time provided abundance for themselves and for a whole community. "A wandering people," he would say, "is more or less a barbaric people." They are rootless people; they are people without a place. Furthermore, this was a temptation to which Americans were especially subject. The temptation was to draw the richness from the soil with a single crop, and then move on to another parcel of land, leaving nothing but waste in the wake of such selfish endeavors. The point of cultivating land, he said, is to improve it--to leave it berber, not more impoverished, than one found it.
One who cherishes place sees its natural setting differently than does the Romantic or the Transcendentalist. For Thoreau, for instance, nature provided a place to escape the community. It allowed him to be more "selective" in his company. (Reading between the lines in Walden [1854], it is not hard to detect that he did not really like his neighbors; and even today--so they tell me--Concord does not really love him.) For the writer of Southern fiction, on the other hand, nature provides some of the character of the place: and the character bears fruit in a certain kind of community. For one, nature is a refuge from community. For the other, it is the setting for community. For one, the object is solitude; for the other, the object is life together.(n4)
Furthermore, the community is not a "selective" community as Thoreau wished for, but it is a community of people as they exist, with all of their sins and shortcomings. Robert Frost had it right in his "The Death of a Hired Man' when he said "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in." The power of Flannery O'Connor's fiction is that she did not clean up her characters before she put them on stage. And for her, "the best American fiction has always been regional," because real people live in actual places, with all their regional peculiarities. Thus Richard Wilbur defined place as "a fusion of human and natural order, and a peculiar window on the whole."(n5)
This takes us to our final point. When Lila Land Chunn spoke of Cassville, she spoke of a place that she remembered, as did a few of her generation. Cassville is still there; but it is in many ways the deserted village that she alluded to, and there are no longer any alive who remember what it was like before that Ohio cavalry set torch to its settled homes, its churches, its opera house, and its two colleges. Whatever one might say against General Sherman, one can say in his favor that he recognized the power and the significance of "place." And he was intent on leaving his enemies as few of those places as possible.
Yet when Mrs. Chunn speaks of Cassville, I think I am not mistaken to say that she speaks to us all: to all who have memorable places in their background; to all who can grieve; to all who feel the loss of that which can never be regained; to all who have a sense of that which can never in any real sense ever be lost. There is something about a particular place that is, as Flannery O'Connor would refer to it, on the order of the sacramental.
Why the Chattahoochee Sings: Notes Towards a Theory of 'Place'. By: Conyers, A. J., Modern Age, 00267457, Spring Civil War Times 2001, Vol. 43, Issue 2
http://www.knowsouthernhistory.net/Articles/Culture/the_there_down_there.html
Bringing the