looking for Eve

It started with just looking for a map – some reference of ‘just there’ that I thought I’d neatly sneak into a painting. Draw a map and a red dot marks the spot. This should be easy, right? I could act on the assurance that my forebears came from some tucked away village of the Rhine valley from which they were simply uprooted by wars of the modern era.

Wrong. It was not war that drove Martin (the great great) from France during the early part of the 19th century at all, but famine. And he was not of some local line of tribal blood long descended from the Celts later mixed with Romans and then Germans, but more likely the offshoot of an import from Bohemia or Austria after the area had been decimated by the 30 years war. France had helped the Bohemians in their rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire and invited these people into the new chunk of under populated land it had bought as part of the victory. It was a special area, given to periods of hyper-vigilant governing and social tolerance. For the next couple centuries it was a cross roads where people of different backgrounds and religions mixed and blended in a brew warmed by wealth and wine.

Until it was not. It became unimportant when sea trade in the Mediterranean became easy and peaceful. It became riddled with famine when the population began to explode.

So Martin the great great, he left. Family legend has him hiding in a load of hay until he got to the coast to board a boat. He arrived on our labor-hungry shores and changed his name for one that meant “courage” in his native tongue to, well, “meek”, spelled backwards. The only “from” address he had would suffer in translation to subsequent generations. I look at the map and realize… OHHHH! I was told “Wittenberg” but it’s really “Wissenbourg”. Maybe he didn’t especially wish to be connected with something back there? Perhaps circumstances forced him to exact a geographic cure unto his ailing life circumstances?

I assumed he spoke German, but it was more likely some mushy Alemanic dialect. And in his blood lay seeds from someplace further east. I’m voting for Bohemia. Perhaps this is why Czech people still look at me and scratch their heads. Those cheekbones! Surely I am Czech! Why no, I tell them, I am Alsatian. Little did I know that I may as well have told them that I was sired by a pot of gumbo.

The map of who I am, the map of where I thought my roots were, shifts each time I try to follow the trail. I look for a pinpoint but never manage to find one. Eastern France leads to eastern Europe leads back over the Urals in to central Asia. Through ice ages and long gone land bridges it finally comes to rest in Africa, maybe. I hunt through time looking for the garden of a furthest-back self

Sometimes I still just feel like an ape whose hands have been put on backwards. Something in my hippocampus feels fingers gliding across keyboard and thinks… what the fuck is that?