Ich schreibe aus Aegina. Ich bin hier mit Dafni, wir besuchen fuer eine Nacht. Ich hatte mein Vater und seine Frau ueber 4 Monate nicht gesehen.
Heute war’s ein echt komischer Tag. Ich habe immer geglaubt, dass Leute, auch wenn sie aelter als 40 oder 50 Jahre sind, noch aendern koennen. Ich habe gedacht, dass auch andere Leute das Leben wie ich sehen koennen: als eine ewige Entwicklung. Na ja, ich weiss schon, dass nur manche Leute wirklich ihr Leben geniessen versuchen, aber der Schock war groesser, weil dieses Mal die Situation so in der Naehe von mir war. Manche Leute einfach aendern sich nie, auch wenn sie 22 Jahre zwischen Scheidungen haben.
Meine Familie ist, besonders wenn man erinnert sich an wie klein sie ist, sehr kompliziert. Zu kompliziert. Und ich bin alein in der Mitte, ganz allein. Immer bin ich allein gewesen, damit meine ich, dass ich keine Geschwister habe, von Eltern die so viele Male heiratet geworden waren.
Ausserdem, der Nachthimmel ist sehr schoen wenn es wolkig und mondig ist und wenn man die helle Wolke reisen sehen kann… Aegina ist oft hart mit meinen Fuehlungen, aber wenn ich lass mich entspannen, die Schoenheit ist schwer zu vermissen.
How many were there of your parents? 2. Of your grandparents? 4. Of your great-grandparents? 8. Of your great-great-greandparents? 16.
How many generations until we reach 64? Only 7, going back roughly 150 years, if we assume that every birth comes 20-25 years after the last. At 10 generations back, not too long before the Greek Revolution of 1821, this number reaches 512. If we go another 10 generations back and touch the early 16th century, when the Ottoman Empire was at the peak of its power with Suleyman the Magnificent at its reins, when America had just started being conquered by the Spaniards and when Michelangelo Buonarroti was sweating under the ceiling of the Capela Sistina, the number of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents alive at the time will have already exploded to 1,048,576. At this rate, of course, and if we take into account that we humans have existed as a species for over 100,000 years (even if we steer clearly away from counting our humanoid ancestors, and before them the Common Ancestors, and before them some obscure mammals, and before them some synapsid and his lot and the beat goes on), it doesn’t take long to reach trillions of individuals and beyond, extraordinary numbers that humanity never saw, even if we put all the homo sapiens that ever lived in its history and prehistory together! To be exact, it’s said or theorised (which doesn’t count as much if you get down to it) that all of us are descended from a small group of homo sapiens that survived the last Ice Age. The answer to this apparent mystery is that there has simply been a lot of incest around — incest that we would probably not even count as such. If my great-great-great-greatgrandfather from my mother’s side was the brother of my great-great-great-great-grandmother from my father’s side, it wouldn’t remotely count as incest, etc.
Our genealogy is as mysterious and magical as is our history: we know, we can know so little about it, that we easily fill in the rest using our imagination’s colourful palette. As we do with anything unknown and mysterious, that is to say with everything.
The matter is definitely a chaotic mess. I shall incist however on the initial number. 7 generations, 64 ancestors. It seems to me like the perfect combination of control and proximity: were it larger it would soon be out of control and any form of sense of closeness to those distant ancestors would be lost; any smaller and we would lose most of the magic and complexity lying therein. Not to mention that 7 and 64 are nice, round, culturally powerful and significant numbers that please the eye, our aesthetics, and that thing deep inside of us that complains when a frame is crooked or that makes us wait observantly for the split second in which the green and red lighthouses at the entrance of the port will synchronise their flashes of different frequency.
Let us cut to the chase. In my experience, when talking nowadays about genealogy we use two terms: trees and families.
As usual, I have my objections.
Fernando Chamarelli -- http://www.galleryad.com/art/archives/art/backroom/fernando_chamarelli_pangea/
The idea of using trees to describe a family when we ourselves are the trunk, as in the image above, seems strange to me. Family trees would be OK in the representational sense if we were the trunk, our roots were the ancestors and our branches and leaves were our descendants. I have never, however, seen such a tree being used for this purpose.
Next is the family, the surname. There’s something of the question “where do you come from?” nesting in their use. It took me years to understand that this question is generaly translated as “where’s your father from” and to tell you the truth, I’m not at all sure whether “from Australia!” has been the answer that all who have asked me have wanted to know, despite the almost unbearable honesty of the reply. I was born, raised, and live in Nea Smyrni, Athens, Greece, after all!
Perhaps this is happening for the same reason surnames sport certified name of origin characteristics; tell me your surname so I can tell you who, or at least where from, you are. That’s certainly half the truth — or to be exact, much, much less than half of it: only men in the genealogy share the surname, with women losing themselves in this mixture like salt in water. Many family trees even study their family’s history not based on the people but on the name, especially in older times and in noble dynasties, trying to find everyone that shares that name and are relatives or descendants, without however giving much notice to the women that joined, and still do, the family, perhaps only because of the sheer necessity of the matter. Besides, I believe it’s relevant that in much of history, definitely in Christian and Muslim history, men wanted sons so that their family as reflected through their name could endure throughout the ages.
Thus I wanted to portray the above and more in some creative and imaginative way. What I ended up with is this (as you must have noticed at the top of the article):
Why mandalas?
Mandalas are radial, symmetrical shapes, symbols of wholeness, cyclicity and at the same time of the moment, the greatness and insignificance of the now, at least in the context of the philosophy that gave birth to them, Hinduism and later Buddhism. Carl Jung was deeply inspired by them: he used to ask of his patients to draw mandalas and he later used the results as aids for his diagnoses. He believed that within the symmetry and the shapes there was a sequence to be found, a meaning to be discovered behind the use of the various drawings that they comprised. The uniqueness that emerged was, he believed, the essence of the individual him-or herself.
This clean-cut geometricity indeed has something soothing and wholesome about it; I can’t describe it any other way. Furthermore, the concepts of repetition and expansion and the one significant centre fit genealogy like a glove.
The symbolisms behind genealogy under the prism of the mandala are many and will vary depending on the person. The ones I choose, the connections I discovered that I found inspiring, are the below:
Man-woman equality
Any given great-grandmother is just as important as any given great-grandfather…
Devaluation of the surname.
Because, someone, somewhere, could have been a woman, and then I’d have a different surname, which I’d cherish as much as the one I have now…
…even if I’ve inherited my surname from that great-grandfather.
Disconnection of family history with surname history.
64 ancestors, 64 names (except if we have the cases of knowing or unknowing incest mentioned above). Only one prevails. Why?
Those 64 people your existence connected 170 years after their birth, are all equally responsible for your existence today.
Emergence of local roots and emmigration. Abolition of national false pride.
If I filled in my own mandala, one quarter of it would have lots of “Smyrni”/”Izmir” in it, which would soon dissolve in the depths of Turkey (and who knows where else… the city was the “New York of the Eastern Mediterranean” at its time, after all). Another half of it would have “Australia” writtern all over it but even that would turn into England, even Wales if my sources are correct, the further back I went. Again, who knows what else.
Who knows what 64 parts of the world I’m from?
Is one born or does one become Greek? Hm… Good question. My father got his Greek citizenship after he had lived in Greece for more than 20 years — what is he, Australian or Greek? Similarly, many 2nd generation immigrants, young and old, choose to be Greek because they were born and grew up in Greece. Their children — the 3rd generation– will probably search for the roots their grandparents abandoned by force, while they themselves will by then be indistinguishable from “normal” Greeks. This has happened countless times in Greece’s history. Before the Albanian emmigrations of the early ’90s, there had been many others, centuries ago. The same holds true for the Asia Minor Greeks who were treated like Turks when they first arrived to the shores of Attica and Macedonia but are now bragging about their “macedoniality”, even if their ancestors haven’t been living in Macedonia but for 2 or 3 generations (Google Translate is acceptable for this page), from 1922 onward. On the contrary, they might cut their emmigratory personal history short or forget it altogether as they prefer feeling descendants of Alexander than “merely” Greeks from Pontus, Asia Minor, Capadocia etc. Besides, the national sentiment must stand high and proud against the menacing FYROMites, North Macedonians or what have you… Just remember that those Macedonians might be more Macedonians than the Macedonians. Not descendants of Alexander or some other pitiful misguided conclusion, mind you, no: more Macedonians than the Macedonians because maybe their family has been living in the general region called Macedonia for centuries. Have I come across as wanting to be controversial? Mission accomplished!
Naturally, it’s not just Macedonians, Albanians, Pontians or other more recent immigrants that have decided that Greece should be their home country. Vlachs, Arvanites, North Epirotes, catholic Greeks of Syros (and other catholic islanders) and many others who were and are some of the greekest of Greeks, are now treated as minorities in the Greek state which is trying so hard to retain its purity and its Single Story. In vain of hatred, discrimination and national complexes, we all sacrifice eachother’s family tradition. We have no IDEA of our history and thus we believe the first simplistic fairytale we come across. THAT’s what national identity is about: leveling out and simplification. It’s a goat herder’s pen with the minimum common denominator of historical ignorance as its criteria. It comes as no surprise then that being historically ignorant we learn to disrescpect and even hate, again and again, generation by generation, all that is different — a deviation with which we might have common roots or even be descended from, more or less. Wise were the words of George Bernard Shaw: “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”
A better understanding of our individual family history can help us be a little more sceptical when dealing with simplified and kitsch national stories. It might help us see that our home town or country is of course very important when it comes to our identity but is not more than a point in time and space which is significant to us just because it is our own. In the age we are going through, let us not allow oral history, that of pain, emmigration, pain, co-existence and complexity be lost under the weight of national epics.
Never allow others to force your roots down your throat: discover them on your own.
The roots are tangled, the past is mysterious and complex.
Of course, the above isn’t at all easy to pull off. The more back we go, the more difficult –in a gemetrical progression– it becomes to keep track of everyone! Perhaps in future generations, now that we record everything, it will be easier for our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren (if we of have any, that is, for there’s also the problems of aging population and infertility…) to find us. The cases, however, of people who are alive now and know where the ancestors of their great-grandparents were from, are few and far between. We can rarely go back more than a single century, let alone two or three. This mystery, as forbidding as it might feel, is just as worth it to embrace and accept. In the example mandalas this is clear: the 7th generation is appropriately mixed up and it becomes more obscure(?) and harder to keep track of. But that’s just the way it is.
As you set out for the Past…
Creative freedom.
I think it’s very important for us to be able to colour all aspects of life and beautify them as each one of us sees fit, for us to be free to create even with and on the simplest of things.
Mandalas don’t have too many rules and they are simple enough. I don’t believe that any special kind of artistic inclination is needed for anyone to fill in their own genealogical mandala exactly the way they like.
By far the toughest part of making our genealogy into a mandala will be to give it a soul and substance, for it to be a work as beautiful as it might be complete with meaning, a piece of cultural representation that will satisfactorily represent its own story.
I put my trust in us.
Here is a blank mandala in the circular shape of the second image. Print it out or open it on Photoshop and…
…happy creations!
Colour me, draw on me, fill me in, make me yours...
