Light On Dark Water

Bradbury, Watson, Scruggs

The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there?

–John Berryman, Dream Song 36

Berryman wrote that sometime in the late 1950s or early '60s. Well, come to think of it, it must have been no earlier than 1962, when Faulkner died, as the poem seems to have been written after that. Berryman is lamenting the departure of his literary heroes. That's the way the deaths of Ray Bradbury, Doc Watson, and Earl Scruggs–and a few years ago, Johnny Cash–have affected me. It's not that I feel a personal grief, but that they were features of the landscape. They had always been here, already famous when I first heard of them, not mortals but part of the world that was there when I first became aware of things outside my immediate sphere. When they go, a part of the world goes with them. It's as if mountains had disappeared.

It just don't seem right. The passing of my parents' friends affects me much the same way. With my relatives it's more complex, because personal loss is added to the sense of something that I had thought was permanent having disappeared. The former one expects and understands; the latter is strange.

15 responses to “Bradbury, Watson, Scruggs”

  1. Janet

    The Berryman makes me think about my older relatives. When you are young, you have these layers of people over you, protecting you, and now it’s my 86 year old mother.
    AMDG

    Reply
  2. grumpy

    It’s weird. All the connections back to the past, the people who can remember WWII for instance, disappear. And then one is oneself amongst the elders of the tribe!

    Reply
  3. Mac

    And you’re probably protecting your mother to some degree, right, Janet?
    I know–I have mused about that disappearance of living WWII memories before. Over the next 20-40 years or so the same will be true of the 1960s. I have a feeling that younger people do not see us as the elders of the tribe.

    Reply
  4. Janet

    Yes. I think that she would have liked to have done more for me the last few weeks, but Bill is used to my illnesses.
    Yes, even things like Kennedy’s assassination are fading away pretty fast. One day in history group about 15 years ago, one of the moms was trying to get the kids to remember someone who played a part in the first Gulf War. She kept saying, “Oh come one, I know you remember,” and finally it dawned on me that the oldest one there had been about 4.
    AMDG

    Reply
  5. Mac

    And that was 15 years ago. For teenagers now, the Gulf War is almost as far off as WWII was for us at that age.

    Reply
  6. Mac

    I think I’ve told this before: I had my big Kennedy shock somewhere over 20 years ago. Standing around at work, the “where were you when you found out that Kennedy was shot?” question came up. People gave their answers until a young woman, pretty recently out of college, said “Well, I don’t know where I was because I was only two years old.” Sober silence took hold of the rest of us. It wasn’t just that she didn’t remember, it was that she was an adult.

    Reply
  7. Sally Thomas

    What I think about deaths like this is that you (that is to say, I) don’t realize that you believe that some people must be immortal until it turns out irrefutably that they aren’t. I think, “How can there not be a Ray Bradbury on earth,” until I remember that for most of human history, there hasn’t been. This seems so obvious, yet so strange.
    I can’t get used to Vietnam veterans’ being old. It’s the guys who were in WWII who are supposed to be old, and the Civil War veterans who are supposed to be dead. My son Joel’s Eagle project for Scouts is an oral history of a local WWII veterans’ group, which has involved attending their monthly lunch at the Ryan Family Steakhouse. WWII doesn’t seem that long ago, until I see these very old men who fought in it toddling into the steakhouse . . .
    (and I hate to admit it, but I was negative one when Kennedy was shot. And yet here I am, middle-aged, with children taller than I am who go around interviewing WWII veterans. Time is strange. )

    Reply
  8. Janet

    Yeah, I had that same Kennedy experience at the Newman Center one November 22.
    AMDG

    Reply
  9. Mac

    “negative one”–wow. I shouldn’t be surprised, because when I was writing that bit earlier I was thinking that the person who shocked me would now be…middle-aged with children taller than she is. Of course I’ve long since gotten over that particular shock.
    “so obvious, yet so strange” pretty much sums up the whole situation.

    Reply
  10. Anne-Marie

    “as if mountains had disappeared” is exactly right. And then one is astonished that the younger people don’t know the shape of those mountains. I feel the same way about my mother and my grandmother–they are so much a part of my mental and emotional landscape that I can’t quite believe that they aren’t in my children’s landscapes. I have to remind myself that my children don’t have any actual memories of either of them.
    I’ve been on the other end of the Kennedy moment, though mine was about Vatican II. A professor said to us, “Think back before the council,” and we answered, “We can’t! We weren’t born!”

    Reply
  11. Mac

    I’ve been on that end of the VII moment, too, even though I’m of the age to remember it. Since I was an adult convert ca. 1980, “before the council” was just history to me. At first it was irritating, then it came to seem sad, to hear people my age and up hectoring younger people to throw off the shackles of the pre-conciliar Church, when the only thing they (we) knew was the sappy and daffy post-conciliar one.

    Reply
  12. Rob G

    I’m currently reading a book about the Fugitive poets, and it dawned on me this morning while reading that the first issue of The Fugitive was published in 1922 — ninety years ago. Which means that we’re nearing the centennial of one of the most important events of modern history, the beginning of WWI. For some reason it had never really dawned on me that the events of the ‘teens and twenties, some of which had a profound effect on later history, happened nearly a hundred years ago. When you’re a kid and you think “100 years ago” you think it was forever. But so much has happened since, say, 1915, that for some reason it doesn’t seem that long. It sort of hit me like a slap to the side of the head.

    Reply
  13. Mac

    I’ve already had that slap, maybe because I’m somewhat younger. Also because I spent much of my 20s thinking about Yeats and Eliot, and it was always significant to me that even then, in the 1970s, they and other big-time modernists were my grandfather’s generation, and when he was born there were no automobiles. And then there was the shock in the 1990s of realizing that there were very few people still alive who had been born in the 19th century.
    Still, I hadn’t thought about the WWI centenary coming up. It has never had a place in my consciousness as large as that of WWII, so maybe that’s part of the reason. I’m not likely to see it’s centenary though it’s not impossible.
    Anyway, now that you’ve pointed it out, I’m surprised that there isn’t more talk about this. Only two years away.

    Reply
  14. Janet

    When I was younger, I had the opposite shock. For instance, I realized that there had been people alive in my lifetime that were alive during the Civil War. And then, I read about Our Lady of Fatima when I was a child and thought of it as being so long ago and then I found out when I was in my late 30s that Lucia was still alive and that my mother-in-law had been alive when it happened–just one generation away.
    AMDG

    Reply
  15. Mac

    Thinking about it more, I realize it can hit me in both ways, depending on…I’m not sure what.

    Reply

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