[Note to first time readers of this Substack. I am publishing stories from my most recent collection, That’s Life (as we know it). Because Substack renumbers footnotes, starting with 1,2,3 in each post, they don’t work going back to previous stories. So in the footnotes below I have included the originals in square brackets.] [Like so.]
*****
Way, way, way back, in the Bronze Age, and possibly even before that—because who really knows what went on before people could write important things down?1—recall also that this was B.M.2 so people weren't sleeping well—some clever someone scratched a symbol on a rock. Something like this:
Kind of amazing. Inventing art and math at the same time! Sometimes great leaps forward come all at once like that. Of course, numbers were still a long way off, but I think we can all agree that this was a plus. We can just imagine how proud the inscriber would have been, dragging friends over to the limestone cliff-face to see his etching.3 Sometimes while they were roasting guinea pigs4 over an open fire, some among the tribe would gaze at the thing and marvel at how it all added up.
Sadly, once the idea of scratching things on dolomite caught on, graffiti became a thing. I recall hiking in the coastal wilderness in Olympic National Park and finding some scribbles scratched into a rock including the plus sign mentioned above. They were the kind of figures a child might draw. I shook my head and muttered something about people having no respect for an international treasure and spoiling the unspoilt wonder of the place for those of us who came after.
Later, in a visitors' center, I discovered a photograph of the figures accompanied by an explanation of Makah Native American petroglyph art. Oops. [Rush to judgment much?5]
So, before long, when Artist #1 was off hunting guinea pigs with his buddies, Artist #2 came by and added a bit to the project. She had just inscribed two lines when she heard the hunters laughing and joking as they came back to camp with their quarry, so she hastened away, not wanting to risk their anger.
“Oh man, somebody wrecked your masterpiece!”
“That is so awful!”
“It's like somebody subtracted from it! Two minus signs!”
Artist #1 studied it for a bit, and then looked at the plump guinea pig hanging from the pole supported on the sturdy shoulders of two of the hunters. “I think this brought good luck.”
Since Artone had created the image the others had to agree. But the mischief was not over, no no.
The next time the band went off in search of the mighty guinea pig, Artwo snuck back into camp and finished the job.
“Look! They wrecked it again!”
“Bummer, man!”
But Artone looked at it and traced the pattern with a finger, then looked at the three guinea pigs strung on the pole. “I think this brought even better luck.”
And so it began. You could reasonably say such ideas added up pretty easily because the symbol or it's reverse was invented and reinvented around the world by tribes and cultures of all sorts—almost always with good meanings attached.
The modern name for the symbol comes from Sanskrit: स्वस्तिक, or svastika, meaning "conducive to well-being."
To a tribe in the San Francisco Bay area it represented the four mountains in the four directions, to several southwestern tribes it symbolized good luck, for the Hopi it symbolized the wandering Hopi clan, for the Navajo it was the whirling log of healing. Among the plains natives the Dakota regarded it as a solar wheel and said "the year is a circle around the world.” For the Gunapeople of Guna Yala, Panama, it represents the octopus that created the world (being pre-numeric they couldn't count the arms)and in several Indo-European religions it represents lightning bolts attributable to the thunder god.
In 1920 it was adopted by the U.S. 45th Infantry Division, based in Oklahoma City, as a badge with a yellow swastika on a red diamond, honoring the local Native American population.
Meanwhile it was also in fairly wide use in Europe in the first years of the 20th century, and generally used in a positive framework.
Of course the Nazi's spoiled it for everyone. But how did they happen to adopt the graphic? Historians would have you believe that it had to do with secret societies and the nationalist völkisch6 movement. But, unsurprisingly (one supposes), that's not how I think it landed there.
You see, my father started out as a child. I still have a photo of him astride a pony—when he was small—taken at some sort of dude ranch or tourist camp in South Dakota. He must have been about seven years old. This was before he was hit by a car in East St. Louis t age 87. My grandfather, from Lagrange, Indiana, and my grandmother from Yankton, were vacationing in her home state, first visiting her parents, then visiting the Yankton Sioux reservation, though, truth be told, I don't suppose they penetrated the reserve much beyond the gift shop.
[This was back in the good old days before America honored the First Peoples by carving the faces of four Great White Fathers on the side of a sacred mountain, so I'm pretty certain my kinfolk didn't traipse over to Rushmore.]
Little Cecil was quite taken by a small sterling spoon fashioned by a Sioux silversmith and my grandparents, in the first flush of Big Cecil's8 recent promotion decided to spring for it.
Then, too, grandma had just received word that she had passed her audition and would start as pianist with the Chicago Symphony® in the fall. So the flushness was full circle and she decided that a similar spoon would be just the gift for her favorite cousin. In Germany.
That part of the story gets complicated.
Grandma's parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine, together with most of their village, sometime around 1881, but they were originally German pacifists.
In the 18th century the Holy Roman Empire® was gradually falling apart, but that didn't mean they weren't trying, and trying meant war. At the same time Catherine the Great® over in Russia needed to boost farm production and announced that the children of farmers who settled in Ukraine would never be conscripted into the Russian army. Around that time Napoleon® was headed east toward Prussia, so my anti-war forebears on the German side of the family took Her Greatness up on it. They created a prosperous little village called Нойфельд in Ukranian, but Neufeld in Deutch, or “new field” in English—which makes perfect sense given their move—and everything was hunky-dory for a century.
But then Tsar Alexander III came to power. He developed a reputation as a peacemaker. His theory was that peacekeeping required a bigger army—and, “Hey! Look at all those strapping Deutsche farm boys pitchforking hay in Ukraine!”
Most of my crowd packed up and headed for the Dakota Territory, a landscape and climate not dissimilar to Ukraine. One uncle, however, decided to cleave to cultural roots and go back to Germany, hopeful that the settlement at the end of the Franco-Prussian War would allow a period of quiet.
He and his frau had a daughter and both survived World War I, though his wife succumbed to the 1918 influenza epidemic. During those years they had sent the girl to Yankton for safety, and the cousins had grown close.
When the smoke cleared in Europe cousin Paula returned to Munich, which is where she was living when the spoon arrived in the mail. She thought it was a wonderful gift and showed it to her dear friend Franziska Braun and Franziska's eight year old daughter, Eva.
QED.9
1 [24] See page 17. And should it be “write down important things”?
2 [25] Before Mattress.
3 [26] This proto-mathematician may also have invented seduction.
4 [27]Reminding us of “Knot My Problem,” on page 26 of the fabulous collection Waist Not, Want Knot, Brave Ulysses Books, 2020.
5 [28] Though I'd argue that we can't know if it was art or graffiti in it's time.
6 [29] Deutsch!
7 [30] He survived! Didn't want to leave you in suspense.
8 [31] Yep. I come from a string of 'em.
9 [32] Of course I made this up (except the spoon) but it gave us the opportunity to discuss so many interesting things that I think it was worth it. Don't you?