History

Cave of Stories

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The aurochs is an extinct form of cattle that overlapped with humans for tens of thousands of years. It lived in Europe, North Africa, and western Asia; the last one died in 1627. We domesticated it: Our modern-day beef cattle and dairy cows are descended from the aurochs and some of them bear a deep resemblance to the extinct animal. (Picture a bullfight but make the animals taller and more muscular and thus the fight more even.) The reasons for the extinction are the familiar ones and can be summed up as: Humans have enjoyed beef for a very long time.

Early modern humans, homo sapiens, showed up around 100,000 years ago and really started to leave a mark on the landscape around 40,000 years ago. This is deep in our prehistory, and no one knows what our Upper Paleolithic ancestors were thinking. It just appears that thinking is something they were doing.

Awareness is a nice thing to have, and every creature with a nervous system has awareness. Some animals even have a form of memory and the ability to use these memories to their advantage in actions taken in the here and now. Some of us have pets that seem to have better situational awareness than people we deal with every day. Awareness is not thought and the use of awareness is not thinking; they are so close, though.

Consciousness is humanity’s great gift and burden.

By 30,000 years ago—discoveries announced in 2014 are pushing this date further back, to almost 40,000 years ago—our ancestors were painting on the stone walls of their domiciles and meeting places. We do not even know if the spots in what were then and are now caves were homes, temples, some form of market. Stone Age man was not writing things down; writing was many thousands of years in the future. We do not know what early man was communicating or how.

Most of the items found and dated from this period are simple tools—scrapers and blades—but some items have been found that may be tools for making other tools, which is a subtle shift but a huge one. When one is making a tool to make another tool, one is aware of something called “the future.”

The earliest works of art also date back some 35,000 years. Carvings of animals and “Venus” figurines, even a flute made from an antler have been found in different locations. What these represented in early man’s mind is not knowable, but items like these they are not tools for immediate use, like knives or arrows. And then there are the many cave paintings found throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The majority of cave paintings depict animals, animals that were being hunted, like the aurochs, and animals that hunted, like fearsome panthers and bears. The minority of paintings are a sort of declaration of “I am here” that any child would recognize: hand prints.

In southern France, the Chauvet Cave is one of the most famous. Rediscovered by modern man in 1994, the many investigations of the many drawings in the cave have narrowed the period in which the works were made to a remarkably specific 30,000–32,000 years ago. (In geologic terms, this is like saying a thing happened in “October” of a certain year.) The picture at top is is of lions hunting aurochs from that cave.

(The cave is the subject of a 2010 documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” by Werner Herzog. I believe the film is still available on Netflix, for those with an account. Herzog was given unprecedented access to the inside of the cave, which has never been opened to the public and never will be in order to preserve it. If you are like me and could listen to Werner Herzog read the list of ingredients from a box of breakfast cereal, well, enjoy. It is a great documentary.)

Cave paintings are a snapshot of the birth of human consciousness, and we may be looking at different forms of story on those walls, from journalism to fiction.

The paintings depict animals on the move. Animals they use like horses, animals they hunt, like the aurochs, animals that maybe they avoid, like bears and rhinos.

chauvetfightA fight between two animals is shown. This may be an early form of journalism; the painter or painters saw this happen. The picture at top, of lions on the hunt, demonstrates that the artist or artists had already learned how to effectively use perspective. Some of the lions are in front of other lions, blocking the view of all but the legs of the lions behind them. Their heads are proportionate in size to the perspective used. The cats are not carbon copies of one generic “cat,” but are individual.

“I saw this” is a form of reporting, is awareness. The birth of consciousness came with the idea of a future. Some of the paintings may depict something like, “You can find this many animals over here, I promise you. Next Tuesday.” Some of the paintings are the first stories, fantasies about a successful hunt or accounts of past ones. Some of them are the first lies: Boasts about the number hunted.

That is where the true birth of consciousness resides, in stories.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 23 asks, “What makes a good storyteller, in your opinion? Are your favorite storytellers people you know or writers you admire?”

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Who’s My Great-Great-Great-Great … Grand-Who?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

To the best of my knowledge, there are no murderers in the part of the family tree that leads directly to me. I have done my best to maintain this streak of successfully not murdering anyone, but if I am ever accused, I will not be the first person named Mark Aldrich to be charged with murder.

Almost every person with the last name Aldrich in the United States is descended from George Aldrich of Derbyshire, England, a tailor who was born in 1605 and emigrated to America in 1631, a decade after the Pilgrims. He is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and probably the only one whose name I will know. George and his wife Katherine Seald Aldrich settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, had 10 children (one, a daughter who died in infancy, bore a classic Puritan name, “Experience”) moved to Braintree, and then moved to Mendon, Massachusetts, where his name is inscribed on a monument naming the town’s first settlers.

His second son, Joseph, is the great-great-great-great grandfather of Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter Abby, married John D. Rockefeller II and was the mother of several prominent Rockefellers. One son, Nelson Rockefeller, carried “Aldrich” as his middle name.

Another son, Jacob, had a dozen children, and those from his son, Joseph, were early settlers (in the 1740s) of Mattituck, on the east end of Long Island, and the Tafts, including President Taft.

One of Jacob’s other sons was named Peter, born in 1686, and he is my direct ancestor.

The sheer proliferation of Aldriches in America—when ten children have ten children, the family tree suddenly has a lot of branches on it—makes research a challenge. The genealogies have notes like, “Jacob 2 and Jacob 4 both had sons named Jacob who married wives named Sarah, or they are the same Jacob.” I exaggerated that a little.

Thus I do not know which line in upstate New York produced Mark Aldrich. The one in 1801. The Mark Aldrich from upstate New York born in 1968, that one is me, last I checked. But in 1801, Mark Aldrich was born near Lake George, New York, son of Artemus Aldrich. He is not my namesake. By the date of his death, September 1873, in Tuscon, Arizona …

Tuscon?

His death notice in the Arizona Citizen fills in some blanks: “Hon. Mark Aldrich died in Tucson, Sunday evening, of old age. … A very large number followed his remains to the grave. The Masonic Brotherhood took charge of his remains and buried him in accordance with the rights of the order.

Mark Aldrich. Not me.

Mark Aldrich. Not the me Mark Aldrich. The other one.

The deceased was seventy-one years of age. He was born in the state of New York, but subsequently settled at Warsaw, Hancock County, Illinois. We know but little of his early history, but are informed that he was three times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and served with Lincoln, Douglass, and other distinguished men who have since written their names high on the roll of fame.He came to California in 1849, and we believe engaged in mercantile pursuits. Of his history while there we are not informed.

He came to Arizona in the latter part of 1855, and has since resided in Tucson. He was the first American merchant in this town, the first postmaster, and the first alcalde.

“Mercantile pursuits” in California in 1849? Whatever might those have been? That was the year the Gold Rush started. The first alcalde of Tucson? “Alcalde” is spanish for “Mayor,” so he was the first American mayor of Tuscon, Arizona.

But the early history that the newspaper writer “knew little of?”

Hancock County, Illinois, in the 1830s was where Joseph Smith had led his followers in the Latter Day Saint Movement. Aldrich tried to sell Smith and his followers some land that he owned but Smith did not purchase. After renting the land, however, Aldrich turned into one of the worst landlords (or best, for Mormon history) and started changing the terms of the lease at whim. Smith and the early Mormons left and settled what became Nauvoo, Illinois; Smith named himself mayor and announced a run for President of the United States. Aldrich went bankrupt.

Nauvoo is in Hancock County, the same county that Aldrich’s land had been on. Now a vocal opponent of the incipient LDS movement, Aldrich was also one of those figures one still sees a lot of in small-town America: he seems to have always been in at least one elected or appointed position wherever he resided. He was a major in the Illinois State Militia, and in June of 1844, Joseph Smith had been arrested and was being held in the Carthage City Jail.

Smith was charged with ordering the destruction of the Nauvoo newspaper facilities because the paper, founded by former associates who turned against him, had printed stories accusing Smith of polygamy. The newspaper was declared a public nuisance and its press was destroyed, but so was its building. When a neighboring town issued a warrant for Smith’s arrest, he declared martial law in Nauvoo, which turned the issue into an Illinois issue and the governor ordered Smith put on trial.

Smith was held with his brother in the Carthage City Jail and on June 27, 1844, a mob of hundreds stormed the jail. The two prisoners were killed. Someone had to have let the mob in. Someone had to have directed the mob. Aldrich, a militia major with men under his command who took part in the mob, was charged with four other men. A trial was conducted and an all-non-Mormon jury acquitted the five. Aldrich ran for sheriff of Hancock County the very next year.

When I lived in Iowa, near Nauvoo, a friend invited me to visit Nauvoo. She did not know this history and I decided against risking matters.

Within a decade, Aldrich was an early settler of Tuscon and its first American mayor. And his body is, to this day, buried under the streets of Tuscon. The cemetery in which he was interred was closed by 1890 as the city grew into city-hood and paved things. Most remains were moved to other locations in subsequent decades but no record exists that states that any Aldrich relative claimed the body of the former mayor and accused-but-acquitted murderer of the founder of the Mormon Church.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 19 asks, “We all have that one eccentric relative who always says and does the strangest things. In your family, who’s that person, and what is it that earned him/her that reputation?”

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Good Old Days Ahead, Right Behind You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler published “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” a book that has remained in print ever since. (The first edition and the second edition use Fowler’s sentences; the third edition, which was published in 1996, is a substantial rewriting of the classic and uses the Fowler name as a form of brand.) Fowler’s book is not a dictionary of definitions, like Johnson’s or Webster’s, it is a usage dictionary, an instructional manual for better using this beautiful tool we have devised called the English language.

Its entries give instructions on pronunciation, offer the pros and cons of employing a variety of idiomatic expressions, and argue again and again for simplicity in expression. Many style guides have followed—the MLA, the AP, the Chicago Manual—and each one is more useful in answering day-to-day questions about one’s writing than is Fowler but none is as entertaining as his. His fight was a fight against cliché, obfuscation, and empty rhetoric.

He fought against pointless rules. One might think from the description of his work that he is the reason for the commonplace rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. The opposite is true. In a two-page essay on the topic (two pages!), titled, “Preposition at end,” he writes:

It was once a cherished superstition that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late (‘They are the fittest timber to make great politics of,” said Bacon; and ‘What are you hitting me for?’ says the modern schoolboy). ‘A sentence ending in a preposition is an inelegant sentence’ represents what used to be a very general belief and it is not yet dead. […] The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by English in putting its prepositions late and omitting its relatives is an important element in the flexibility of the language.

Fowler then gives many examples (two pages!) of worse blunders made by pointlessly hewing to this nonexistent “prepositions go here” rule. And the way he uses his examples, for instance his pairing of the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon with generic “modern schoolboy,” displays his desire to keep a light hand on one’s writing.

His entry on the use of the word “literally” anticipates the world in which we now live, a world in which that word means almost nothing in the way we use it:

We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression, ‘Not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking,’ we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate. Such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. (Emphasis mine.)

The “literally” problem has literally bedeviled anyone who cares about precision in language for almost a century.

Fowler wanted writers to avoid using the obscure metaphor merely because it is commonly employed. Hence his entry on the idiomatic expression, “salad days”:

Salad days (one’s raw youth) is one of the phrases whose existence depends on single passages (see Antony and Cleopatra, ‘My salad days when I was green in judgement’). Whether the point is that youth, like salad, is raw, or that salad is highly flavoured and youth loves high flavours, or that innocent herbs are youth’s food as milk is babes’ and meat is men’s, few of those who use the phrase could perhaps tell us; if so, it is fitter for parrots’ than for human speech.

Avoid the empty turn of phrase unless one is making a point of the phrase’s emptiness.

Fowler died on Christmas Day 1933, at the age of 75. He had recently completed his work on the first edition of the “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,” a two-volume version of the full, twenty-volume, 20,000-page, Oxford English Dictionary. In 1928, a few years before his death, Oxford offered to pay the wages of a servant to help him speed the work along (dictionaries always take longer to put together than first supposed) and he refused the help in a memorable letter. At age 68, he described his day thus:

My half-hour from 7:00 to 7:30 this morning was spent in (1) a two-mile run along the road, (2) a swim in my next-door neighbor’s pond—exactly as some 48 years ago I used to run round the Parks and cool myself in Parson’s Pleasure (an Oxford locale). That I am still in condition for such freaks I attribute to having had for nearly 30 years no servants to reduce me to a sedentary and all-literary existence. And now you seem to say: Let us give you a servant, and the means of slow suicide and quick lexicography. Not if I know it: I must go my slow way.

Help meant a slow suicide but a faster dictionary. Fowler needed no cliché to tell Oxford that he was living in his “salad days” in the here and right-now. If the friend I quoted above had not overlapped with H.W. Fowler on this planet for a year or so, and if reincarnation was an actuality … well, it would appear they were cut from a similar cloth.

For most of us—not all of us, certainly, because sadness and horror and terror are ever-present and ever-possible, but for most of us—these are the good old days. And “tomorrow is just your future yesterday,” as one former late-night host once sang it.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 18 asks, “Is there a period in your own personal life that you think of as the good old days? Tell us a story about those innocent and/or exciting times (or lack thereof).”

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