Karl's Preface to Now That Memory: In Kansas they call the squared or rectangled spiral in the fields in cultivation or harvest ‘rounds’, one for each circuit, ending in the middle. A square is not a circle, but is a round (in agriculture or family or politics or religion) to a rough center. I cannot seem to square words to ideals to ‘things as they exist.’ That model would to be strictly visual, or mathematical, and I couldn’t find a center. So the squared circle. The center does not hold, and not quite as Yeats had it, it is serial. The point here is as physical as a field, an illusive center tilled toward, but never to a lasting resolution. Each field leads to another, worked and reworked, for various purposes in successive seasons, from tillage to harvest. And recurrent, year to year. The objective is more than visual. We must become open to the intimate physical knowledge of the terrain, open to a life (and to remembered lives), open to attention itself. Karl Gartung, Now That Memory Has Become So Important. MWPH Books, Fairwater, WI. 2008. $13.50 + $2.50 s&h.
I grew up in Liberal, Kansas, a place and a contradiction. My father and mother were descendants of pioneer farm families. The clouds of the dust-bowl and the Great Depression, then the sometimes violent aftermath of WWII were real in my childhood. Dad was a veteran of the Pacific Campaign, and Mother was a legal secretary and community volunteer. He wanted a ‘traditional’ marriage and she wanted a career. These desires became an intractable conflict. They were divorced when I was ten years old. Even so, neither of them could or would leave Liberal. Each of them loved the place. With their deaths, no Gartung lives in Liberal, only remains. Their memory is carried only by a few old friends and family, on my mother’s side. The name Gartung itself has vacated the premises, except on some stones.