ELLIOT RUCHOWITZ-ROBERTS, PRESIDENT, TOR HOUSE FOUNDATION
“…there’s a kind of shell-mound,” Robinson Jeffers writes in his poem “The Last Conservative,” “I used to see ghosts of Indians/Squatting beside the stones in their firelight….” The signs of The Rumsen People who preceded him on Carmel Point were everywhere to be seen: the shards of abalone shells glittering in the sun; whole shells unearthed when the foundations were dug for Tor House and Hawk Tower; the remains of a fire pit revealed right where Jeffers was to place the fireplace for the dining room.
Jeffers was keenly aware of “the brown shy quiet people who are dead” with no one left to tell their story. (“Hands”) They find their way into his lyrics and his narrative poems. He knew how important it is to remain connected to one’s history: “…man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history…for contemplation or in fact…/Often appears atrociously ugly.” (“The Answer”)
Recently, while walking along the path by Thuban, the rock that is a cornerstone of Tor House, I chanced to catch the glitter of shards of abalone in the soil at the edge of the property that slopes down to Scenic Road. That section of the property, left untended, has flourished with a return of native plants. As I stood there, finding respite from the disturbing events of these times, the fragments of abalone, glittering in the sunlight, brought to mind the Stolpersteine I had chanced upon several years ago in Berlin.
After three weeks in Madagascar visiting my granddaughter, a Peace Corps Volunteer, I traveled to Berlin with my partner to visit friends and family. We spent the first two nights with friends in an apartment on Giesebrechtstrasse. It was September, and fallen leaves covered the cobblestoned streets. Standing outside the building, we happened to look down and noticed, hidden among the leaves, something with a glitter. When I brushed the leaves aside with my foot, there were five brass plates, each about four square inches, embedded in the cobblestones. One of them read:
HIER WOHNTE
ERNESTINE KATZ
GEB GLAUSTEIN
JB, 1880
DEPORTIERIT, 1942
THERESIENSSTADT
EMORDET 14.12.1942
“Here lived,” the brass plate read, “Ernestine Katz, née Glaustein, born 1880, deported 1942 (to) Theresiensstadt, murdered December 12, 1942.”
As we stood there looking down at the stones, a woman came up to us to show us that there were brass plates in front of the apartment building next door, in fact, in front of all the buildings on the street.
These were Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones,” created by German artist Gunter Demnig to commemorate those peoples taken from their last known freely chosen residences and murdered by the Nazis: the vast majority were Jewish, but there were also Sinti, Romani, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, blacks and political opponents.
Stolpersteine in Prague, by Christian Michelides, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia Commons (image cropped)
Michael Friedrich-Friedlandler, a craftsman who has, since 2005, engraved Stolpersteine by hand, says, “I feel responsible. When you know the history and see what’s happening today, there’s just so many parallels.”
Now, in 2020, looking at what is happening in the world and in our country, Jeffers’s words, like shards of abalone, like Stolpersteine, glitter in the sunlight, reminding us how important are our connections to “earth and stars and [our] history,” and how “atrociously ugly” we appear “dissevered” from them.
We have dissevered ourselves—for contemplation and in fact—from the cruel history of our nation, from the systemic racism that has so profoundly affected Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and other peoples of color. The Black Lives Matter movement, in part, asks us to remember, to acknowledge and to accept our history. Gunter Demnig often cites the saying from the Talmud: “A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.”
#SayTheirNames—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile—asks us to remember, to acknowledge, to honor and to act; to become a part of history rather than just observers.
Tor House and Hawk Tower sit on land once occupied by The Rumsen People. Shards of abalone shells document their past presence. It is so easy to forget the history of those who preceded us. But the hands painted by The Esselen People that Robinson Jeffers found “Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara,” “are now like a sealed message” conveying two truths which are the starting points for reconnecting with those peoples from whom we have dissevered ourselves: our common humanity and our common fate. “’Look,’” the hands tell us:
‘….we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail
You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human.’
(“Hands”)
There are no Stolpersteine, no #SayTheirNames for The Rumsen People who have “vanished” from Carmel Point. But there is Jeffers’s poetry, memorializing them and offering us the knowledge and the wisdom to confront this moment in our nation’s history.
Esselen Hand Prints, Photo by Erik Reese
Quotes from: “’Stumbling Stones’: a different vision of Holocaust Remembrance,” The Guardian, (Feb. 18, 2019); and “Stolperstein,” Wikipedia. All Jeffers quotes from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (ed. Tim Hunt)