WHAT’S IN A NAME?
By Lewis Turco
I. IL TURCO IN TRINACRIA
In August of 1961 I was a Poetry Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, which was directed then by the late John Ciardi. The Conference is held annually in the hills above Middlebury College, on its own summer campus where I was walking one day when I was approached by a woman named Elizabeth Guarnaccia. She introduced herself as one of the two curators at the Harry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.
Ms. Guarnaccia asked if I were Lewis Turco, and when I replied that I was, she asked me if I knew the derivation of my last name. I said, “Yes, I do.”
“What is it,” she asked, smiling.
For as long as I can remember I have known that my last name in Italian means what it says: “Turk,” and that’s what my friends have always called me. It dates, I understand, from the period of Arab rule of “Trinacria,” the ancient name for Sicily, from the ninth to the tenth centuries CE. It is not an uncommon name in Sicily where my father was born and raised, and where he was recruited to be a participant in the Turco-Italian War, fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy from September 29, 1911, to October 18, 1912.
I didn’t go into that much detail with Ms. Guarnaccia, of course, but she nodded in agreement with what I had replied, said I was correct, and went on her way. Many years later I would discover a great deal more about my family name including the fact that there was no such country as “Turkey” until the thirteenth century; therefore, the word means simply “Arab” or “Moor,” not someone from a particular place. According to Halbert’s, a Turco family coat of arms can be found in Rietstap Armorial General,1 and the shield is described as “Silver with a Turk, facing front, dressed in a blue tunic and red pantaloons; wearing a red turban on his head, holding in his right hand a silver scroll, and in his left hand a silver scimitar trimmed gold.” People with my background were members of the Syrian cavalry in classical times.
In the mid-nineteen-forties, when I was a fifth or sixth-grader living on North Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut, I was enthusiastic about prehistory, as I have been ever since. One day I walked down to Ciotti's sundries store a couple of blocks away, on West Main Street, and I purchased a pamphlet about cavemen. As usual, I walked back home with my nose buried in the booklet, and soon I was standing in front of the house where we rented a flat, showing it to Bob Strauss, my friend from across the street, who looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages. Shortly we came across the drawing of a Neanderthal, the species of early man that disappeared after the advent of Cro-Magnon, the first version of our species, Homo Sapiens. The drawing was a reconstruction of what Neanderthal man must have looked like with his strong-featured face displaying its heavily-ridged brow, a bit like the brow-ridge I have myself and that I have observed on others.
As Bob and I stood before my two-storied home reading, we happened to glance at my upstairs neighbor, old Mr. Longo, who was leaning over the second-floor porch railing. To say we were startled is to understate, for the picture in my book could have been a photograph of our neighbor. Bob and I stood comparing the man with his likeness for several minutes. There was no doubt about it -- the man and the reconstruction were practically identical. From that moment I felt certain I knew what had happened to Neanderthal man: he had not been exterminated by Cro-Magnon, he had been absorbed into the general population of our ancestors. But who were the Cro-Magnon men and women? What had happened to their contemporaries, the brutish-looking, yet intelligent race called Neanderthal man that in fact had brains that were slightly larger than ours?
For decades paleoanthropologists and other sorts of scientists had been denying that our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, and the Neanderthals had ever interbred. In July of 1993 there was an essay in The New York Times Book Review2 that discussed three new books on the subject: Did Cro-Magnon destroy Neanderthal, or did he die out naturally, cataclysmically, because of some inherent flaw in his constitution? Over the years I had grudgingly grown more and more persuaded that these unbelievers were correct and I was wrong. However, over this interval, human DNA was studied, isolated, and sequenced; finally, in the May 2010 issue of Science,3 Green et al. reported that a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals had been compared with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. described a method for sequencing target regions of Neanderthal DNA. A News Focus podcast segment and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neanderthal-related discoveries provided additional context for their findings. Neanderthal man had not entirely died out, for two to four percent of his genome continues to exist in European and Asian human beings, though not in those Africans who never left the continent.
Hence, it turns out that a sixth-grader living in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1946, judging from the picture projected from partial skeletons of a Neanderthal in a popular pamphlet and from the heavy ridge that boy himself had on his brow, turned out to be correct and the academic Homo-Sapiens living in the interim between then and 2010, turned out to be wrong.
This interbreeding did not, however, take place as I and others assumed, for the two races did not meet in Europe and simply combine. Rather, Neanderthal, who had left Africa first and spread into Europe, apparently was driven back into the Middle East by an ice age, and it was there that the two species interacted, living in the same caves at different times, perhaps, but in the same geographical locations simultaneously. This must have been the case because Neanderthal's genes in Homo Sapiens are found not only throughout Europe, but throughout Asia as well, where the Middle Eastern modern humans spread, but it is not found in African strains of our race, in peoples who never left the African continent in ancient times and thus never lived in the Middle East.
II. THE MAN HUNTERS
Was there a historical Garden of Eden? Were there two people named Adam and Eve? Did Genesis take place? Was there an actual Exodus? Whether or not mankind is able to answer these questions with any degree of certainty or faith, we know logically that there had to be a first human being somewhere in the dim past; there had to be the First Mother (now called “genetic Eve”) and the First Father (“genetic Adam”) of the race, and they existed in an environment that was conducive to their survival…or two environments, rather, because they lived at different times and in different places, but it was their DNA (YDNA in the case of the male, and mitochondrial MTDNA in the case of the female) that survived and spread throughout the living species of Homo Sapiens.
I have remained interested in the subject of mankind's origins all my life since my friend Bob Strauss and I identified old Mr. Longo as a contemporary avatar of Neanderthal Man. We know that the race of Mankind spread across the globe from some point of origin in Africa; therefore, we can invent stories, like the book of Genesis or the epic of Gilgamesh, to explain our beginnings, and in those stories, though they be fiction — "lies," if you like — there will be a core of fact, and they will be lies in the service of truth.
Many things fascinate me, but the idea of evolution fascinates me to the point of awe. One of the reasons I could not become the minister my pastor father wanted me to become is that I could not believe in a Creator, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t seem reasonable to me that a creature so great and complicated could have existed a priori and have invented the cosmos because all that does is beg the question, “Who (or What) created the Creator?” It is easier for me to believe that the cosmos forever existed, exists now, and will forever exist (I will not at this point consider the so-called Big Bang theory) than it is to postulate an omnipotent Creator. He would have had to create Himself. That, in fact, may be what the Cosmos is doing: evolving the Godhead, for with the aid of science we can at least experience through our senses elements of the cosmos.
If evolution is inventing a godlike creature, and if one of the avatars of that creature is mankind, then at some point in the history of that evolution one of the predecessors of mankind must have given birth to the first true human being. What would that have been like? One of the things I enjoy is reading scientific books, especially anthropological works: I consider that Loren Eiseley’s book The Firmament of Time is one of the great works of literature of the twentieth century, and another great writer of anthropology was Margaret Mead. Sometimes in my reading I come up against a passage that arrests my eyes and causes my mind to begin to spin a fable. Such a passage was this portion of a sentence by Mead: "...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song."
What must it have been like for the first truly human being at dawn one day to awaken from her sleep, to look out on the savannah, and to realize that she was conscious of herself and of her plight and glory? To know, beyond all doubt, that she knew?
DAWN SONG
I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —
it breaks across my mind as across the eyes
of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,
and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun
in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.
I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,
breaking across my terror and my surprise;
to know that I am the beast who knows his name:
Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun
of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.
I am the first to see stone for a stone,
to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight
and know what it may do to the brittle bone
of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,
in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.
I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone
held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.
The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.
He is the child of dust. I am stone's son,
born of the first rose and the first lark's song.
If anthropologists could be good, clear-thinking scientists who also knew how to write, how to communicate their thoughts to readers and strike awe into their minds, they could also, unfortunately, be romantics who, if one thought about what they said, convey to readers ideas that fall apart under scrutiny, like Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”
As a reader of science fiction when I was young — what is called “speculative fiction” these days, I guess, and of fantasy — “magical reality” now, I soon understood the difference between the two, between, let’s say, the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and the beautiful, impossible worlds of Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed the one for its projections of a possible reality, and the other for its imaginary evocations of primal hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows. Therefore, when I run across a scientist who confuses the two, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey did in the passage I quote below, I feel constrained to comment on that confusion. How close have we come to populating the stars? So I once again put words into the mouth of a skull, as I did with “Dawn Song”:
THE MAN HUNTER
"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at?...The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." — Robert Ardrey
When I saw, spinning webs of sense and dust,
the heart-shaped spider of the womb's demands,
I raised myself upright upon the crust
of earth and issued it my first commands:
"Give me what I may take before the glass
of time is empty as a brain's white bowl
where slugs drink, where the mosses gorge and green."
I walked out of the forest, across the grass —
it withered underneath my callous sole,
for I could not forget what I had seen.
I saw the scarab in the turning earth
spinning murders from its golden shell;
I saw the rooting beast probing death,
but death must root if it would hope to dwell.
Therefore, I walked the trench of lambs and ewes
with winter's humour snowing in my bones,
and in my web of veins the scratching, dumb
dry tongue of the beast feeding on my dews.
Then, when at last I lay down in these stones,
I knew that more of us would one day come.
And you have come to find yourself in me
here where I lie, a skull transformed to stone.
My sightless eyes look out at you and see
that under the eons we are still alone —
but we are billions now who were a few
to forsake the forest and face time with a rock,
a naked rock held in a naked hand.
We face the ages still, and we bestrew
this cairn of stars with the remnants of our stock:
a jawbone here and there wearing to sand.
Perhaps one day, many centuries from today, mankind will indeed get off the planet, a bit farther off it than Luna, and take with him the myths born of Earth. When I was young I thought that might begin to happen in my own lifetime.
FATHERS:
First Father
I see him standing on the empty plain
As dawn begins to break across his eyes.
He is alone, this first of all my fathers,
But he can sense his scions and his daughters
Following down the looming centuries,
For time has started weaving through his brain,
And he can think. He understands at last
What must become, and what’s become his past.
And here I stand upon this farthest link
Staring down the line of molecules
Twisted in a spiral arc. I gaze
The other way to where the whirling haze
Rises over dark and depthless pools
And wonder what the final man must think.
Fathers of the Tribe
His sons and grandsons travel with the tribe
As it drifts out of the immense savannah
Following the herds, but searching for
Something else as well. They must explore,
Apparently. For Eden? For Nirvana?
Their leaders are unable to describe
What they are seeking past these eastern sands,
Moving always northward to colder lands.
What have we found beyond those roaming droves
That led us into canyons made of glass?
Where do we go from here? How shall we feed
The starving myriads whose simplest need
No longer can be met on Earth? En masse
We need again a miracle of loaves.
The Final Father
And as they stop, wherever they may move,
Each scion takes his mate who bears his seed,
The generations of First Father’s loins.
Time spends these children like so many coins
Minted from the soil. The Earth has need
Of purses full of these. The parents rove
Into the mystery to make it known,
To turn the strangest climes into their own.
Now we are everywhere. The human race
Has filled the niches that the world provided.
What’s left is Easter Island duplicated
On a massive scale. We are checkmated
By ourselves; we are the tribe divided
Staring hopelessly to outer space.
III. THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
In 2006 I participated in the National Geographic Human Genome Project4 and discovered that my blood confirms what my name asserts: I am paternally a Turk through and through! Males are traced genetically through the Y-DNA marker which is passed down unchanged from father to son over generations; women are traced through their mothers’ mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter, also unchanged. Of course every now and then, at great intervals, both Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA do take on characteristics that differentiate them from other evolutionary lines, and these mutated lines can be traced.
So far as can be discerned with the data currently at hand, it turns out that my father’s branch of the Turco family is part of a group of people about which little is known. My Y-chromosome results identify us as members of haplogroup G, “a lineage defined,” my National Geographic report stated, “by a genetic marker called M201” which had its origin some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y-chromosome marker called M168.
According to Spencer Wells5 there was a single male who lived perhaps 75,000-100,000 years ago whose mutated Y-chromosome is carried by every male currently alive. Although scientists call this person “Genetic Adam,” or “Eurasian Adam,” in fact he was not likely the first fully human male, but none of the other males alive at the time have passed down to posterity their particular genetic markers. Adam’s line is the only one to have survived and proliferated.
A descendant of Adam identified by a mutation called “M94” was an inhabitant of the East African savannahs 75,000 years ago, and it was he who was the progenitor of most modern males because he was the founder of all haplogroups from B through R (haplogroup A did not leave Africa in ancient times). A later mutation on this male line called “M168” 60,000 years in the past is believed to have lived in an area that includes what is now Ethiopia in Africa, and he is the founder of haplogroups C through R.
To the north of Africa, according to Spencer Wells, an ice age was developing and drying up Africa’s ecology to the extent that at least two groups that were descended from M168 migrated from Africa. The first group left around 60,000 years ago, and they are believed to have gone east following the southern coast of Asia populating southeast Asia, Australia, southern China, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. A few appear to have been reunited with their by-then-distant kinsmen in North America about 10,000 years ago. A second wave of M168 emigrants from Africa traveled to the east and the north from the area of what is now the Sahara through Egypt and the Middle East.
A mutant marker on the M168 line called “M89” inhabited what became Mesopotamia or “Erech,” now Iraq, perhaps 45,000 years ago. As the founder of haplogroup F, this male was the ancestor of all the members of haplogroups G through R which include almost all Middle Eastern, European, Asian, and native American males. Several groups of M89 males traveled in various directions to a variety of places, but the founder of haplogroup G appears to have lived around 30,000 years ago in the area of the Indus Valley in what is now northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Up to around 10,000 years ago the members of haplogroups G through J were hunter-gatherers, but those people who lived in what is known now as the “Fertile Crescent” developed agriculture, and “settled civilization” became possible — not only possible, but established, and disseminated far and wide. Populations expanded, farming and farmers followed the pioneers along the shores and through the islands of the Mediterranean, into the lands now called Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Indo-European language and its offshoots were soon to be found in northern India — including the Indus Valley — the Middle East, and Europe.
The Indus Valley civilization was the largest of the four great early civilizations including Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, South Asia, and China, but it is the one that is least known and understood because, unlikely as it may seem, it was discovered only in the 1920’s! How it was possible for modern mankind to live unwittingly among the ruins of this Indus civilization in one of the most populous regions of the Earth is confounding, but so they did, and still do. Archaeological researches are in their infancy there, and very little is known of the early tongues of the Indus because few language-bearing artifacts, most of them square stone seals with indecipherable symbols and animal motifs, have been found. So far, for lack of a Rosetta Stone, none of those scripts can be read, but we can recognize the animals, in particular the mythical unicorn, the bull, the rhinoceros, and the elephant. However, some of the major Indus cities have been identified and explored to a certain degree.
The first, Harappa, discovered in the western part of South Asia during the early 19th century, flourished from about 2600 to 1700 BCE. Its inhabitants built with bricks of the same size as were found in other Indus cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira. Harappa had well laid-out wide streets, public and private water supplies and distribution-drainage systems. Remnants of this Indus civilization exist in the south from the former Bombay in India to the Himalayas and Afghanistan in the north, and in the east from beyond New Delhi in Uttar Pradesh to Baluchistan, Pakistan, in the west, adjacent to the border of Iran.
Since there is evidence that trade existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, some of those members of haplogroup G living in its western portion must have gravitated toward the major centers of the Middle East. The westernmost Harappan site is Sutkagen Dor, located on the border of Pakistan and Iran on what once was, apparently, a navigable inlet of the Sea of Arabia and thus part of the trade route to Mesopotamia — in particular the fishing trade — between 3500 and 1700 BCE. This is the route, or one similar to it, that the early Turcos must have taken on their way to Sicily.
Looking at a map of the world one notes that a straight line drawn between the Indus River and a spot just below Sicily in what is now Tunisia, the ancient site of Carthage (not that our forebears followed anything like a straight line) crosses Iran (once Persia), Iraq (once Mesopotamia), Arabia, Jordan / Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Other modern countries in the area between the Indus and Tunisia are Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Israel / Palestine.
Family Tree DNA is the name of the Internet organization that administers the DNA results of those people who have been tested and agreed to have their results publicly posted. Subgroups of FTDNA include organizations that follow individual haplogroups, including the Haplogroup G web group. There are other specialty groups including the Turk Name group, and the Sicily Project, to all three of which I belong. Peter Christy, administrator of the Haplogroup G organization, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Our haplogroup is seeking members from the Middle East and adjacent areas, but with little success. There are a number of ‘high profile’ members of the Saudi royal family, as well as a claimant to the throne of Iraq, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, that are members of Haplogroup G. Perhaps by your efforts to publicize our haplogroup in Saudi Aramco World, [to the editors of which I wrote a letter on October 25, 2006, to which I had not had no response] readers familiar with that part of the world may come to realize that they are a significant source of additional members.
“We have been attempting to contact those who have already been tested, but with little success. Bill Van Hemert has been using modal matching to profiles of known members of our haplogroup to find candidates who are registered at Ysearch. As you might expect, few of our emails even get through to the intended recipients and even fewer respond. All we have is some tantalizing clues left by a long list of potential Haplogroup G members with names that start ‘Al-‘ e.g., Al-Blais, Al-Bukhary, Al-Khalili, Al-Kureishi, Al-Qureshi, Al-Rikabi, Al-Ruwaili, Al-Sada, Al-Saman, Al-Shaibani, Al-Suwaidi and Al-Wazzan!”
The history of the swift spread of Islam is amazing. Muhammad was born in the Arabian city of Mecca circa 570 CE. Around 610 he experienced a revelatory vision, began to write what became the Koran, and in 613 he began to preach publicly. He left Mecca and settled in Medina in 622, and he died in 632 CE. Only sixty-five years later Islamic Arabs, many of them Moors — a mixture of Arabs and Berbers — lived in North Africa and occupied what was left of Carthage which had been destroyed in classical times and was again destroyed in 698. Today it is a wealthy suburb of Tunis.
In the ninth century CE, around 820, the Tunisian Arabs began to set up trading posts in Sicily. Incredibly, they were soon invited by Euphemius, a Byzantine general, to invade the island, and on June 13, 827, they did so from the town of Sousse, 120 km south of Carthage, with ten thousand infantry and seven hundred cavalry. According to Sandra Benjamin, “Although the invaders originated in many parts of the Muslim empire (including Spain), most of the men were Berbers (from the North African coast) and Arabs (from farther east).” Seventy-five years later, on August 1, 902, the Arabs captured Tauromenium, the Byzantine capital and the last unconquered Sicilian city. All the inhabitants were slain and the city burned to the ground.5
Surnames began to be used only about 1000 years ago, so the surname “Turco” dates from about 1000 CE, the eleventh century or 100 years after the Arab conquest of Sicily, that is to say about the same time as the Norman conquest of both England and Sicily. Sicily was the earlier to be conquered, by the brothers Hauteville, Robert the elder and Roger the younger who did most of the fighting, conquering Massena in 1061.
The Hautevilles’ success is said to have inspired both the envy and ambition of their countryman William the Conqueror who invaded and subjugated England in 1066. Although he never ruled there, he pretended to the kingship of Sicily as well. It was William who ordered the Domesday Book of England to be written in 1086, and it was in this statistical survey that surnames were first assigned to every family. Something similar during this period was occurring throughout Europe, including Sicily.
Michael Maddi who administers the FTDNA Sicily Project, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Have you noticed that out of 81 yDNA results in the Sicily Project, 10 are in the G haplogroup? That’s about 12%. This has been the biggest surprise to me so far in our Sicily Project results. My guess, based on my previous reading, was that we would have maybe 5%.
“I have always wondered what the Arab contribution is to Sicily’s genetic pool. It’s hard to figure out how many people of Arab ancestry remained in Sicily after the crackdown by Frederick II on Muslims about 1230. (Frederick actually had good relations with Muslim rulers and spoke Arabic and appreciated the scientific knowledge promoted by Muslim scholars. It was the Vatican which demanded that he expel Muslims from Sicily.) One book I read recently [see Benjamin, op. cit..} said that 1/3 of Sicily’s population was ethnically Arab when the Normans defeated the Muslim rulers around 1075. The town where my paternal grandparents were born, Mezzojuso, was founded by the Muslim rulers in the 10th century. It remained a majority Muslim town until about 1220, when Muslim rebellions in western Sicily and the subsequent crackdown led to many Muslims fleeing their towns for mountain refuges.
“I think our [haplogroup] G results, if they continue to stay above 10%, indicate that there is significant Arab deep ancestry in Sicilians and Sicilian-Americans.”
The branch of the Turco family to which I belong has long resided in Riesi, a village in south-central Sicily. The closest city of any size is Licata, on the south coast. Although I know for a fact that a number of my relatives still live in the area, at the end of 2006 I was the only person worldwide with the surname Turco who has been identified through DNA analysis as belonging to haplogroup G2. (My son and my brother and his sons may be presumed to be members in this country.)
IV. GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU
Those who are interested in such things as epics are likely to know that The Epic of Gilgamesh “is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script,” the Academy for Ancient Texts avers on its Web page. “It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk [Erech, modern Iraq] (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).” In fact, however, it is an amalgamation of two stories, the older having to do with the adventures of a most likely mythological person named “Enkidu,” and the second about an ancient King of Erech.
Over the course of no one knows how many centuries, the two tales of Enkidu and Gilgamesh became intertwined and it is in this form that Gilgamesh has come down to us in various versions and languages. In order to blend the earlier tale of Enkidu with the later doings of Gilgamesh, apparently in order to ascribe to the latter many of the feats of the former, the pair came to be seen as in some essential ways twins, even to the point where they look alike, for the King is a bit taller, it seems, and his close companion Enkidu shorter and broader.
What I have attempted to do The Hero Enkidu10 is to cut away from the Gilgamesh epic those actions and events that can quite clearly be ascribed to the older Enkidu and to write his own tale in the manner of the author of the anonymous Medieval epic titled Gawain and the Green Knight, that is to say, in cantos of the strong-stress metric line called Anglo-Saxon prosody with appended five-line accentual-syllabic metrical tails called “bobs-and-wheels.”
I do not claim to have restored the Enkidu epic, nor am I writing history: I am still writing fiction, like the original author(s), and I could not absolutely separate Gilgamesh and his companion. What I do claim is that I have given back to Enkidu what pretty clearly is his tale, and I hope I have written it in a comprehensible and interesting way for modern audiences.
___
1”Turco Coat of Arms, Historiography,” Bath, Ohio: Halberts, n.d.
2The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 4, 1993.
3Science. May 2010 issue.
4National Geographic Human Genome Project, on-line at www.NationalGeographic.com.
5Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man—A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2004.
6Indus River Valley civilization, etc., on-line at www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html
7Sandra Benjamin, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.
8Morris Jastrow Jr., and Albert T. Clay, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, etc., New Haven: Yale, 1920.
9Robert Lebling, “Monsters from Mesopotamia,” Saudi Aramco World, Vol. 63, No. 4, July-August 2012.
10Lewis Turco, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 107, 2015.
Correspondence with a Nephew
CORRESPONDENCE WITH A NEPHEW
By Lewis and Steven Turco
Steven Turco wrote (on 11/07/09):
Dear Uncle Lew,
I read La Famiglia1 over the last week on my work trip to Denmark (coincidentally, I surmised from your book that I am approximately 1/8 Danish). I must say I was quite enlightened by the amount of detail it gave me about my family history, especially my grandparents and obviously you. I've often wondered how Grandpa Luigi from Sicily found his way to be a Baptist minister in the U.S. He had quite a life, rich with experience, and overwhelming passion for his beliefs. I'm glad he had the opportunity to see the birth of a grandson and, although I don't remember him, the time we spent together in that first year apparently brought him great joy; knowing that will always live within me.
Grandma Turco was very special to me. Dad and I and in later years Scott too would visit her almost every Friday evening. She'd greet me with kisses all over my face and have a plate of spaghetti waiting on the table. After dinner she'd always do her favorite trick for me and take out her dentures and put them in a cup of water. Obviously as a young child that scared the hell out of me but fascinated me at the same time.
Her house was a mysterious adventure land for me, especially the attic, and I loved to explore it every time I visited. The old rooms, books, clothes, knick knacks everywhere stimulated my imagination to a degree that I will never forget.
And then there was the typewriter. I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth. I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time, which is how I still type today, although I'm pretty fast at it. What I never really thought about and what struck me when reading your book was that typewriter was probably the same one that Grandpa Luigi used to write his weekly sermons. Thinking back now, I remember how Grandma would love to see me at that typewriter. She'd bring me cookies and help me if I had a question but never interrupted me as I "banged out" another story. Maybe it was just the sound of the typewriter that brought a sense of familiarity back into her household and gave her peace in a time of loneliness in her life. I sure hope it did.
One of the things I've always regretted was not spending more time reading your books. I always thought it was the coolest thing as a child to see your name on a book or better yet go to the library and look up one of your books and show one of my friends. On many occasions I would open the book and begin to read but very quickly become lost and/or confused and eventually just put it down. The poems that were sent at Christmas always struck me as "dark" and "non-joyous."
I've never regarded myself as a "reader," but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes, though I could never seem to connect with your books. After reading La Famiglia, though, I not only have a better understanding of my family, its roots and fascinating history (on both sides), but of you, your experiences and the many reasons why you write what you do.
I learned a great deal from this book, not only of who we are as a family but the trials, tribulations and hope and inspirations that affected many in our past and present and, more important, how it will positively influence the generations to come. I am extremely pleased that this book is dedicated to the future of the Turco clan and especially to my boys, who are the joy of my life.
I attempted to write a book like this utilizing my past experiences and recollections, as I used to have a photographic memory, it just never fully developed.
Steve Turco
Dear Steve,
I'm puzzled by several things you say in your letter. One of them is, "I used to have a photographic memory...." How can you "used to have" one of those? Short of a stroke, I would think it would be impossible to lose such a thing. It's just the way one's mind works. You seem to use that as an excuse for not writing the memoirs you planned to write. My memory is far from "photographic," but I remember enough things from my past to write memoirs. I'm sure everybody does. Take a look again at the memoir in La Famiglia that was written by my cousin Ann Badach.2 She was never a writer, and that's the first thing she's ever published. The stuff she remembers is amazing and compelling.
You also say, " I've never regarded myself as a 'reader' but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes." Isn't that the definition of a reader?
You say, too, "I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth." So did I, but I never quit. I used to walk to school making up stories for my friends as we walked. How does one manage to lose interest in telling stories? It's baffling to me. What happened to you anyway?
"I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time...." So did I. The Navy taught me to touch-type, but when in high school I worked at the Meriden newspaper, most of the journalists used the hunt-and-peck method, just as you and I and your grandfather did.
Finally, you write that the Xmas cards I sent every year "always struck me as 'dark' and 'non-joyous.'" Where did you get the idea that writers are supposed to write stuff that's "joyous"? The world is a dark place, Steven, and that's what I often write about. Just this past week: people gunned down at Fort Hood; the D.C. sniper executed; more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, etc., etc. Have you ever read Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," the most popular poem in English literature? T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," perhaps the greatest poem of the 20th century? Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Shelley's "Ozymandias," Poe's "The Raven," just to name a few exceedingly popular ones? Even the "joyous" poet Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "A Noiseless, Patient Spider."
I'm attaching a book review titled "Happy Days" that appeared in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday.
Love, Uncle Lew
HAPPY DAYS
By Hanna Rosin
(New York Times, November 5, 2009)
BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, By Barbara Ehrenreich, 235 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.”
Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.”
What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.
Ehrenreich is the author of several excellent books about class — “Nickel and Dimed” is the best known. In this book she also reaches for a conspiratorial, top-down explanation. “Positive thinking,” she maintains, is just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers. I don’t exactly buy this part of her argument, but the book doesn’t suffer much for the overreaching. I was so warmed by encountering a fellow crank that I forgave the agenda.
Ehrenreich’s inspiration for “Bright-Sided” came from her year of dealing with breast cancer. From her first waiting room experience in 2000 she was choking on pink ribbons and other “bits of cuteness and sentimentality” — teddy bears, goofy top-10 lists, cheesy poetry accented with pink roses. The sticky cheerfulness extended to support groups, where expressions of dread or outrage were treated as emotional blocks. “The appropriate attitude,” she quickly realized, was “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” The word “victim” was taboo. Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” while another survivor described the disease as “your connection to the divine.” As a test, Ehrenreich herself posted a message on a cancer support site under the title “Angry,” complaining about the effects of chemotherapy, “recalcitrant insurance companies” and “sappy pink ribbons.” “Suzy” wrote in to take issue with her “bad attitude” and warned that “it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Kitty” urged her to “run, not walk, to some counseling.”
The experience led her to seek out other arenas in American life where an insistence on positive thinking had taken its toll. One of the more interesting chapters concerns American business culture. Since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1936, motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” Corporate managers transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments and hunches.” Corporate America began to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling” and “deep listening” all now common staples of corporate retreats.
This mystical positivity seeped into the American megachurches, as celebrity pastors became motivational speakers in robes. In one of the great untold stories of American religion, the proto-Calvinist Christian right — with its emphasis on sin and self-discipline — has lately been replaced by a stitched-together faith known as “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God wants believers to be rich. In my favorite scene of the book, Ehrenreich pays a visit to Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, now the nation’s largest church. She arrives a week after a court has dismissed charges against Victoria, accused of assaulting a flight attendant who failed to deal promptly with a stain on her first-class airplane seat on the way to Vail. One would think, Ehrenreich suggests, that the largely working-class, multiracial crowd might sympathize with the working stiff on the plane who happened to be African-American. But no, Joel is shown dabbing his eyes on the video screen, and Victoria crows about the “banner of victory over my head” as the crowd cheers.
“Where is the Christianity in all of this?” Ehrenreich asks. “Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’ ” Ehrenreich is right, of course, in her theological critique. But she misses a chance to dig deeper. I have spent some time in prosperity churches, and as Milmon F. Harrison points out in “Righteous Riches,” his study of one such church, this brand of faith cannot be explained away as manipulation by greedy, thieving preachers. Millions of Americans — not just C.E.O.’s and megapastors but middle-class and even poor people — feel truly empowered by the notion that through the strength of their own minds alone they can change their circumstances. This may be delusional and infuriating. But it is also a kind of radical self-reliance that is deeply and unchangeably American.
Hanna Rosin is a co-editor of Slate’s women’s Web site, DoubleX, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Thanks for the response, Uncle Lew. The "photographic memory" line was just a jab at humor, a pun (not fully developed), I didn't mean it literally. I do read a fair amount of books so I guess I would be considered a reader, but my point was more that even if I do consider myself to be a reader I don't currently have the passion to make it more of a priority in my life. Maybe someday that will change, but for now I feel satisfied with the balance I choose between my home life, work life and how I fit my reading into both.
I never lost interest in telling stories, I love to tell stories, I just chose to do it verbally, it saves time.
The world is what it is. It's as bright as it is dark. For every horror story that happens on a daily basis there is a story of love and kindness as well. Life is short, I choose to focus on the things in this world that make me smile, laugh and bring me happiness. I know the ugliness is out there, but why would I want to bring that into my life? I've chosen early on in my life to be a decent person with a positive outlook. To do that I choose to surround myself with people, books, art, places that bring me "joy" rather than listening or reading about the depressing horrors of our society. Fortunately I've never had any severe hardships in my life that would turn me to the "dark" side like some of the authors you mentioned (Gray had an abusive father, Eliot had a nervous disorder) but if I did, I believe that it is still my nature to turn them into positive aspects (as Lance Armstrong did with his cancer) and continue to see the good in life. And although some of these authors that you mentioned may be highly regarded academic poets, they were certainly not people I would want to emulate my life after (Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to run off with a 16 year girl and Poe was an alcoholic drug user.)
I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich 100%. There is a lot of "positive thinking" bullshit out there that can cloud peoples' minds and affect their judgment, especially in corporate America. I see it every day. I don't think that just because I have a "positive outlook" on life that good things are going to come to me, or I'm going to become wealthy or not get sick, those things are going to come to me because I work hard and take care of myself. I'm a realist, I always have been, but I see no reason why I can't be a realist with a positive attitude.
Love.
Steve
Ah, Steve,
Nobody ever asked you to be anything but "a decent person with a positive outlook." I've always known you to be that, and it's one of the reasons I'm so fond of you. You're a lot like your dad, who is the same sort of person. He's a very decent guy and I've always been very fond of him, too. But I don't understand why you would condemn people like Gray and Poe and whoever for being who they are and writing out of their experience and their humanity. I've always thought I am a decent person too, who likes to surround himself with art, music, and all the things you mention, as well. That doesn't prevent me from seeing that the "balance" you mention doesn't seem to me to be a balance unless I'm able to observe and write about the rest of life. I can sing a happy song, but I can also sing a sad song, and the only thing I demand of any song is that it tell me the truth and be beautiful.
Case in point: One of my colleagues at Oswego was a German Jewish economist named Richard Heiss. He was married to another native German called Jo Heiss. He came to SUNY Oswego in 1961, four years before I arrived, and he was active in the Oswego Opera Society for which Jean and I sang in the chorus most years. Jo was a ceramicist and a member of the Oswego Art Society like my Xmas card partner George O'Connor. While we were in Oswego last month I thought about them, wondered if they were still alive at ages 89 and 87 respectively. I thought about them while we were on our daily walk in Breitbeck Park at the bottom of the hill where we live on West 8th Street because we used to run into Dick and Jo sometimes when they walked there as well.
On Monday last, while we were driving back to Dresden, Dick and Jo Heiss each took massive amounts of prescription narcotics, but before she died Dick shot Jo in the back of the head with a pistol. People found their bodies a couple of days later. The police determined that no third party was involved. Dick and Jo were also decent people, usually with positive outlooks. They did volunteer work and had many friends, but they had no children, no other known family in the U. S. Why would a good old couple die by murder-suicide at a great age? They must have hurt a great deal — why else would they have so many narcotics on hand? — and it was known that they were ill.
Here's the question: What should I think about them? Should I dismiss them for their unforgivable actions? Maybe they were somehow psychically injured by having grown up in Nazi Germany. Maybe a husband should never be forgiven for killing his wife, no matter what the reason. But I understand how Dick and Jo could have done this to themselves (they injured no one else), because I'm getting old, too. Should I reject the idea of writing a poem for them? Because that's been revolving in my mind for a couple of days now as I read the developing story on-line in the Oswego Palladium-Times and hear from other colleagues via e-mail. Or should I just dismiss them from my memory as being unworthy subjects for an elegy? Because if I write it and do it well, I will show the few people who read it how human Dick and Jo Heiss were, and how sad their passing is.
Lew
Uncle Lew,
I guess it comes down to what "balance" means in each individual's life. For me, I tend to balance out the good stuff with the great stuff and shield out the bad stuff. You take it all in and go from there. I guess that's what makes the world what it is.
Sorry to hear about your friends. I'm sure whatever you write will be honest and lasting.
Steve
_____
1La Famiglia: The Family, Memoirs, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: www.BordigheraPress.org, VIA Folios 57, 2009, 196 pp., ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback.
2Ibid., “A Letter to My Cousin,” by Ann Badach, pp 185-189.
April 04, 2018 in Americana, Books, Commentary, Correspondence, Criticism, Essays, Family, Italian-Americana, Literature, Nonfiction, Poetry, Reminiscences | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: dark, light, poetry