From A Distance

What does Ravel have to do with goats, getting old and Sherwood Anderson?

In the past 5 years or so the old in our neighborhood have been dying. They had collectively an institutional memory. They were containers of wisdom. The little things they did became like vast edifices that the Greeks and Romans built for their gods. Our old neighbors built it by letting their goats roam the dam. They kept the grass short which is important dam upkeep. But the old have been dying and the goats are long gone. I wonder how many people in the neighborhood know about the goats.

What has come in their place? New neighbors thankfully. The place not yet set to rot like the many small hamlets that dot the Korean countryside that my wife and I sometimes fantasize about moving to. Places where children are prized as golden calfs. Here in our small suburb of former farmland off the highway, couples move in spurts. They are mostly childless or have grown children. They come instead with a vengeance for anything old or suspected of bringing the maladies of the old. Trees are the first to be dispatched with a brutal vigor. I am always amazed at how efficient these people are—they must have been very good at their jobs. A whole crew is engaged to take down a shingle oak and its sister in a few hours. The once shady street takes on the appearance of a new neighborhood. These trees were particularly magnificent and large because, as the old neighbor Dotty told me with a smile on her face, “that’s where the septic field was.” See, institutional memory.

Nothing is left untouched. Dotty’s house is gutted. Even the driveway is smashed, leveled and laid anew. This single story ranch backs up to a small lake that is dyed blue every spring. The dock is sunk and rebuilt. A garden of perennials and berry bushes is ripped out and turf is put in, followed by little signs that say CAUTION PESTICIDE. I like to the think the sign doesn’t so much as advertise real danger then to deter pedestrians from trodding upon the new grass. Cars, being impervious to pesticide, receive their own signs that sternly warn DO NOT PARK ON THE GRASS. In turn the new humans never touch the grass; the mailbox is reached via the driveway or stone path. It is as if the dock, the garden, the trees signify something deeply rooted in the past. And this must be avoided at all cost. Open carports are filled in to make garages. The more ambitious new neighbors raise the roof to 10 or 12 feet. It is like they dream of the day their improved house will go on sale, of seeing the shiny photographs of elegant stainless steel and tessellated tile on the realtor website. They must first see themselves here in the public in order to live at home in the private. Both states must exist for a home to be livable in the modern age. They are unrooted in the present, and no longer connected to the past.

Once these antiquity erasing projects are finished the new mover's heart does not rest, does not let him rest. Instruments of modern leisure are rapidly constructed. A hole is dug and 20 Hispanic workers converge on the pit. Grass is etched off the earth. A pool is installed as well as an extensive patio of polished granite stones. The pool is filled with water and the pool sits. The pool is quiet and menacing. Then the black metal fence. The pool sits and burbles chlorine. Its surface is a cool cerulean blue. No one swims. A basketball hoop goes up.

One day a man dressed like an astronaut prowls in the backyard. He is holding a leaf blower. On his back is a tank twice his size. How odd, I think. I watch dumbfounded as he roams the perimeter. Out of it comes a white smoke. He sprays the trees, the grass, the very air. I am weak and sensitive. I feel like throwing up. I hurry to shut the windows. The astronaut cosplays a chilling vision of the earth depleted of life.

What is old must be measured by human life, given its oldness by successive generations, preserving and beginning ever anew.

There's piece of music by Maurice Ravel that speaks to oldness. Ravel, a French composer who lived during the Impressionist era, was one of many European composers utterly taken by American jazz— the newest kind of music at the time. It was so new in fact to decry any connection to the old counterpoint lessons that Ravel took at the Paris Conservatoire. Lessons evidenced by the sheer craftsmanship of his compositions, works that were as intricate as his father’s inventions (perhaps not the “Vortex of Death” that Barnum put on in America). The piece is called Noctuelles, a depiction of moths tracing fililgrees of light in the dusk. The score is beautiful to look at. Dense black shapes are interspersed with directions in French: Tre léger, expressif, sombre et expressif, Pas trop lent, lointain. Despite how new, how sparkling and daring the harmonies are there is something old, even anti-diluvian about Ravel’s music. Before the final, moonlight drenched flight of fancy we hear an echo not of mere physical distance (lointain) but of the distance from things past: the moth’s grandchildren remember Dotty's old shingle oak as the cicadas do.

One writer who is at risk of being forgotten by institutional memory is Sherwood Anderson. In Poor White he chronicles the transformation of a small, berry picking town called Bidwell, Ohio into an industrial powerhouse. Hugh McVey invents a cabbage picking machine. By the end of the novel Hugh has achieved his wildest dreams. He’s now rich and famous. He’s married the daughter of the richest man in town. Yet he's dissatisfied and unhappy. Around him the old apple trees have been cut down and houses for factory workers sprout like weeds. He misses lounging in the sun with his deadbeat father. Black smoke from the new forge fills the air. He spots two brightly colored stones. The stones remind him of the old times, when he was a dreamer, when the new things of the world did not suffocate, did not remove the potential of the old, of the potential for things to become old.

It’s hard to live as long as an old tree, to get that old and not be disturbed by nature or man. The newness of American culture dissolves like a moth's dusty wings. It can't grow old. Not all the potential old things have been identified yet. It is not readily apparent why the potential old thing will bring us satisfaction, yet we know it will: try walking in one of the few remaining old growth forests and not feeling the preternatural sense of awe of so many old things. Perhaps this is what artists like Ravel and Anderson do. In their painstaking obsession with creating a canon of everlasting work they are growing the potential of old forests.

-David Kiser (July 2025)

The final moments of Ravel's Noctuelles