VI. Mapmaking Ancestors: Rebuilding Ships Burnt to the Waterline

I arrive here to see my ancestors in a different light.

I come to see a distant ancestor’s voyage from Europe to the Americas to survey the terrain which would become the 13 American colonies as inevitable.

To see his sacrifices as a part of the pageantry which is our human story.

To see his alliance with men who would rebuild the ships as they burned to the waterline, never looking back, but looking forward to what was required, accepting the satisfaction in the work itself.

So it is from these unmapped shores and dangerous rocky terrain from which I set sail into the most strange and beautiful territory which requires me to draw these overlaid patterns and invent new language.

I take energy to fill my sails from thinkers who went before: thinkers such as Ovid, Aristophanes, Socrates & Plato, Christ, Dante, Leonardo, Shakespeare – those who fit the very definition of human discovery.

From James Joyce & the European pantheon, and from Joyce’s descendants among the American pantheon, Jefferson, Poe, and Hawthorne, from which all of us modern American writers descend in an unbroken line from antiquity.

Considering the exponential cost of arriving here, and considering the debt we must pay today to find ourselves at such a crossroads, I can say with confidence that everything is repaid which was owed.