I was watching a documentary about Islamic Spain [googled link, good quotations and images] on New Mexico public TV that truly opened my eyes: what an astounding city Cordova was!

By the beginning of the ninth century, Moorish Spain was the gem of Europe with its capital city, Cordova. With the establishment of Abdurrahman III - “the great caliphate of Cordova” - came the golden age of Al-Andalus. Cordova, in southern Spain, was the intellectual center of Europe.

At a time when London was a tiny mud-hut village that “could not boast of a single streetlamp” (Digest, 1973, p. 622), in Cordova “there were half a million inhabitants, living in 113,000 houses. There were 700 mosques and 300 public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. The streets were paved and lit.” (Burke, 1985, p. 38) The houses had marble balconies for summer and hot-air ducts under the mosaic floors for the winter. They were adorned with gardens with artificial fountains and orchards”. (Digest, 1973, p. 622) “Paper, a material still unknown to the west, was everywhere. There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries.” (Burke, 1985, p. 38).

Not bad, eh? And in the same vein,

During the end of the first millennium, Cordova was the intellectual well from which European humanity came to drink. Students from France and England traveled there to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars, to learn philosophy, science and medicine (Digest, 1973, p. 622). In the great library of Cordova alone, there were some 600,000 manuscripts (Burke, 1978, p. 122).

But all good things must come to an end, apparently. The caliphate fell apart, and Berber rebels burned the whole place down in 1012 A.D. Those manuscripts in the great library represented the most valuable intellectual, philosophical, and scientific works of Greek and Roman civilization, painstakingly translated into Arabic. A lot of them ended up elsewhere, safe for the time being, but the library itself was destroyed in 1013 A.D.

This reminded me of many things. The American desecration of Mesopotamia, for example. (If someone did that to Alabama, we’d nuke the bastards and deep-fat fry the corpses.) But I’d been feeling too self-absorbed to concentrate on little things like that, being much more interested in swirling unfilled needs and anxieties rising to the surface. Something was stirring the mud at the bottom of my puddle, all right. Attachment and fear of loss? Perhaps.

One of the reasons we’re looking for new housing is so my wife and I can have all our things in one place. Sounds simple enough. We’re not missing a lot, anyway, mostly boxes of history and clothes still in the storage unit. A typical old adobe has no closets at all, you understand. This comes from traditionally having two pegs on the wall instead: one for the outfit you wore during the week, and the other for the one you wore on Sunday. That was a great system, but we have too much crap to get by so easily. (Uh, unless we just get rid of stuff…)

So there’s always this conflict, like with the family history. I had stacks of ancient photo albums and other artifacts given to me by my aunt in Maine. She’s in her 90s now. The pictures were priceless, and my grandmother had annotated most of them by writing on the pages. Nothing like a fabulous medieval library, but we’re getting there. A few years ago, however, she asked for them back. As I’d always considered myself the custodian of the Farr family records, the request did set me back, especially since there was vague mention of having the albums “redone.” (Yes, let’s “redo” the Dead Sea scrolls while we’re at it, I remember thinking at the time.) The proposed project may have been related to her canonization by the local historical society, a donation-fueled stretch of reason if I ever heard one, given that she hadn’t ever lived there before retirement. Sigh.

Empathy is not a family trait. I knew she’d never comprehend the emotional blow, and that hanging on to what I’d stored away would only make me angry every time she brought it up. Just the fact that she had was bad enough, so much so that the only thing for me to do was pack up everything (an entire shipping trunk’s worth) and ship it north. I even threw in things my grandmother had given me years before: a wooden mallet, hatchet, and saddlebags that had belonged to my great-grandfather, for instance. My aunt had even mentioned those — which seems astounding to recall now — and I knew she wanted them.

So that’s what I did. The only way I could free myself from this idiotic, hurtful game was to just let everything go. If I’d grown up in what passes for a normal weird-but-loving extended family, there’d have been lots of sitting around together looking at these things, telling and listening to stories that would now be shared genealogical knowledge. As it was, I was going to have to do extraordinary work to decipher the archives, if I ever got around to it. Now I don’t have the pictures, the notes may well be lost, and the only person alive who might be able to answer, “Who the heck is that?” is thousands of miles away and not on the top of my list. Well fine, BACK INTO THE QUANTUM SOUP IT GOES! All of it!!!

[plop, gurgle, hiss...]

Except it’s not fine, not really. What am I missing out on? I’ll never know. And my mother’s own guilt-ridden self-estrangement from her own family long ago ensured no interaction with those relatives. I can’t even name all my aunts and uncles on that side, much less my first cousins, and I haven’t seen most of them for over 30 years at least…

Sometimes I feel like an orphan, and sometimes I feel just fine. I don’t know if any of this matters or if it should. Seems like it’s all a dream, anyway.