photograph by anna traverse
How do you center yourself in moments of anxiety, or (if you are like me) long, pearled strings of anxious moments? The standard advice — standard for a reason: it works — tends toward focusing one’s senses on the present. In this moment, what do I see? Hear? What can I smell, taste, and feel? Take a deep breath; exhale slowly; take another. Be here now.
Sometimes, though, I need something a bit stronger to quell a jittery mind. And no, I’m not talking about a drink — that stopped being a solution for me 15 years ago this month(!). What I’m talking about is the potent stuff of time itself — historical, pre-historical, post-historical time, and the mind-altering perspective it delivers, when we stop to consider our minute place in time’s vast flux and flow.
In her poem “At the Fishhouses” (1948), Elizabeth Bishop considers knowledge to be, like time and like the ocean, forever slipping our grasping hands. In the lines below, “it” is seawater, but much more besides:
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
As a little girl, my first experience with childhood insomnia emerged when I began to grasp how infinitesimally tiny I was (am), how tiny and fleeting were the lives of everyone I would ever know. I remember lying in my little twin bed and feeling overcome by the scale of it all, and by the tiny pinprick of … me … amidst an immense swirling darkness. The universal darkness, by the way, was in my mind more aubergine-purple than black, with sprays of silver stars. Beautiful, if I hadn’t been such a strange and fretful child.
At some point in adulthood, I’ve realized that my attitude toward the swirling darkness has shifted: Where once the scale of it all made me quiver, now I see peace and wonder. When I feel anxious today, caught up in the stressors of work and life, I’ll pause, center myself in the present, and then zoom way, way out.
First, I might try to picture the physical place where I am, but thousands of years in the past. All the buildings and roads fall away. Trees rise, majestic, from rich, deep soil. Birds sing. There is no budget spreadsheet to consider, because there are no budgets and no spreadsheets. A breeze skitters the leaves; in the distance, buffalo. Somewhere there are humans, but they are scarce, and part of nature.
Then, I hurtle myself forward in time (if time has a “forward” and “backward,” which I somewhat doubt, but these are the terms we use). In this exercise, I see a world remarkably similar to that of the distant past: Trees rise once more, majestic; birds sing. If there are humans, I don’t see any, and in this conceiving, their absence bothers me not at all. The world has repaired itself from the various indignities wrought by my kind.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about time and its flowing in the context of our September cover story, written by Chris McCoy. Chris offers a historical overview of the people and cultures who thrived, fought, loved, nurtured, and grieved here, in the Mississippi Delta, long before settlers arrived. If you’ve ever wondered, “What was Memphis like, before anyone ever thought to call it … Memphis?” — we sketch the beginnings of an answer, and suggest local resources for where to go if you want to fill in more details.
It’s not our average cover story. We usually bring you stories about Memphis of today, accompanied by historical curiosities of the past century or so (thanks to columnist Vance Lauderdale). The reality is that Memphis hasn’t been “Memphis” for very long, historically speaking — just a little over two hundred years. But cultures have been settled on this soil for millennia, including the Misissippian people who built the earthwork mounds still extant today. I’ll let Chris explain the rest (as well as staff writer Alex Greene, who penned a lovely coda that appears at the close of this issue).
I hope you find these perspectives as enriching and perspective-broadening as I have. And if you’re feeling stressed, caught up in the anxieties of the everyday, take a deep breath, absolutely. Remind yourself of what you can see, hear, taste, touch. But then, once you’ve knitted yourself back together, let time unravel you. There’s peace in the undoing.
