I don’t
know how many of you enjoy Finding Your
Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s wonderful show on PBS, now in its 5th
season. Yes, one might wonder if some reactions of the famous participants are
really spontaneous – but I focus on the many clearly genuine emotional
responses which Gates artfully elicits, which are the heart of the show. Gates
is a master of consistently seamlessly interweaving the homespun, the intellectual,
and the spiritual.
What I value
most is Gates’s politely insistent celebration of inclusion, individuality, and
the great societal good of excavating and collectively witnessing lost (and
suppressed) history. If this show were assigned high school civics class viewing,
showing, person by person, how America has been great, but also as it has been terrible,
we’d be a better country for it.
Apropos
the state of our union, the other day I watched the episode that aired the
night of the recent SOTU. The regularly scheduled new episode of Gates’s show didn’t
air – and anyway, I doubt I could’ve endured watching those two slick
hypocrites Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. In any event, in its place, PBS aired a
repeat of Episode 5 of Season 3, and I am very glad it did.
It was
a great episode, which I first watched 2 years ago, but my 66-year old brain had
forgotten most of it. The “stars” were Richard Branson, Franky Gehry, and Maya
Lin, and I confess that the one I recalled least was Lin’s. A sad admission
about me 2 years ago, but also positive evidence of how I’ve learned to be more
alert to my own unconscious gender and racial bias, e.g., as to what I find
“interesting”.
I
really enjoyed the entire episode upon re-watching it, and found the genealogical
stories of all three subjects compelling; but my favorite moment occurred
during the Maya Lin segment, and it is the one that prompted me to write this post.
Maya Lin is, as many of you know, the designer/architect/artist who, at the
tender age of 21, was given the honor of creating the Vietnam War Memorial in
DC. I’ve visited it a couple of times, and everyone agrees that Lin knocked it
out of the park --- it is stunningly powerful, a non-statuary inspiration as to
how to recognize the huge human cost of war, without romanticizing war itself.
With that
prologue, here then is a link to a video of the whole episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfB98S4vqP8
(please forgive the speeded up audio,
which makes Gates sound like he inhaled a tiny shot of helium!) For those who don’t want to watch it all, you
can scroll straight to the 2-minute segment that begins at 42:42 in running
time, and ends at 44:42, which is my focus. Please at least watch that part first,
and give it some thought, and see what comes up for you, before you read my
take on it, below:
SCROLL
DOWN
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As I watched
Gates hand Lin a copy of the document his investigative team discovered in a
Chinese library --- the family “Japu”, a scroll containing her entire Lin family
tree --- I recalled the brief shot earlier in the episode (at 10:54-11:00) of Lin’s
Vietnam War Memorial, which consists, of course, of a very long granite wall.
As Lin unfurled the full 20-foot “Japu” scroll listing hundreds of names of
honored Lin ancestors, drawn from 3,000 years (or 100 generations), I found
myself re-seeing Lin’s granite memorial as itself a kind of "scroll" unfurled
out to its full length, containing the names of 58320+ U.S. honored dead from
the Vietnam War!
It is a
stunning parallel, and so very apt --- the reverence Maya Lin expressed as she
held and gazed at this tangible symbol of her own ancient lineage, seems so similar
to the awe which we, as Americans, feel when we walk along and touch Lin’s granite
“scroll”, listing all of the fallen dead from the tragic national mistake that
nearly ripped our country apart 50 years ago.
But
there’s even more. The punster in me took delight in the treasure trove of
variations on the word “tree” which permeates Lin’s portion of this episode. Gates
explained to Lin that the family surname Lin meant “Forest”, a name derived
from the original Lin family patriarch, a male child born as his mother, so the
legend goes, held on to two trees. And the facsimile “Japu” Gates gave to Lin is
a scroll of paper (which of course is made from trees) containing a
genealogical “tree” for a family whose name, Lin, both in the shape of its
written Chinese characters and also its meaning, is a group of trees! And even Lin’s
granite wall resonates, because, as Gates pointed out, the granite does not
stand ON the ground, it is actually set deep IN the ground --- which makes the
entire wall a “forest”, with each of its many sections a “tree” rooted in the (civically)
sacred soil of our nation’s capital – or, if you will, Lin’s granite wall is a tragic
“limb” of our national family tree, consisting of 58,320+ “branches” cut off
before their time.
Which
leads to one final question. Neither Gates nor Lin mentioned any of these
parallels between the wall and the family tree, nor any of the puns on “trees”.
My guess is that they did recognize them, but, just as part of the mysterious power
of Lin’s memorial lies in its subtlety and implications, so too do I believe
that Gates and Lin elected to leave these meanings submerged and implicit, as “easter
eggs” to be found and savored, by those viewers who pause and take the time to find
them.
One of
my favorite lines in Jane Austen’s fiction is Elizabeth Bennet’s cryptic
aphorism, one which never makes it into any of the film adaptations: “We all
love to instruct, but we can only teach what is not worth knowing.” I long ago
recognized it as Austen’s own metafictional alert to her readers, a zen koan
that asserts a seeming paradox -- that what is worth knowing, such as the
lessons we take from wars, cannot be learned passively. Rather, the wise
teacher comes in by the back door, and creates a space where the student can actively
discover truth – as both Lin, with her memorial, and Gates, with his TV show, both
understand very well.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
onTwitter
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