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Oct 09, 2000
Columbus Day
Columbus Day is a confused Holiday, but an important one.It's the New World Holiday.
It's not Traditional, but it honors the idea of Tradition, by connecting us with our ancestors. It commemorates the arrival of Europeans in America, at least in theory. Here in New York, it functions largely as a celebration of Italian ethnicity, disregarding the fact that Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, and Italian power waned as the New World opened. The Pope presided over the division of South America between Spain and Portugal, but there were no Italian colonies in the West. Come to think of it, there was no Italy. The creation of the nation, and the flow of emigrants to America, were both 19th Century phenomena. In the meantime, the "Age of Exploration," of which Columbus is an exemplar, rendered the great port of Venice increasingly irrelevant. His voyages coincided with Italian decline, but our memories are short, and it doesn't seem to bother the paraders of today.
Not so sanguine are the so-called Native Americans, for whom this date marks not just decline, but decimation. Their story deserves to be told, but I have not the viewpoint to do so. My heritage is bound up with the conquering Europeans, though really with those from the North, not the Mediterranean. They came a century after Columbus, and their deeds were no less shameful than the Latins', but the true history of the peoples that they found here remains obscure. No one is really native to America, and controversy surrounds the debate over who came here, and how and when. We do know that Columbus was not even the first European, the Vikings having made it to Newfoundland five hundred years earlier. That knowledge was lost, or relegated to legend, like the history of the "Indians" (or "Skraelings," as the Norse called them) who wondered at the coming of the strangers.
We have only grown stranger since then.
We tend to think more about our Americanness than our Old World ancestry. This is not unfitting, but it may be incomplete. Incompletion is basic to the American identity, which holds out the promise of a dream yet to be realized. We are a people unsure of who we are, yet hoping still to become something more.
In this we embody the Mystery of Being as forcefully as any humans ever have.
The Land does not belong to us.
But by living on it,
and loving it,
we forge a bond that makes it ours in spirit.
Just as we belong to it.
Always it has new secrets to divulge,
teaching a Tradition of discovery.
The edge of the World is here.