found to truth, to clarity, to independence.
“Emptiness is the track on which the centered per-Lost son moves,” said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word “track” in Tibetan: shul, “a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All of these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there. A path is a shul because it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, which has kept it clear of obstructions and maintained it for the use of others. As a shul, emptiness can be compared to the impression of something that used to be there. In this case, such an impression is formed by the indentations, hollows, marks, and scars left by the turbulence of selfish craving.” In Yiddish, shul means a synagogue, but I was trying to send this missing ancestor not to temple but to a path through an uninhabited expanse where heaven seems to come all the way down to your feet.
For a long time I imagined that she was the woman in Lewis Hine’s 1905 photograph “Young Russian Jewess at Ellis Island.” For a photographer known for his social documentary work, it’s a strange image, with its brooding, intense face and its indistinct, soft-focus background. Ellis Island, which in most photographs appears overrun by people, is empty and still here. The only indication of place is the blurry bars of the fenced walkways through which lines of people were processed in the Great Hall. This image of such a private and solitary moment in the packed bustle of Ellis Island is a document of an anomaly in the place and in the work of Hine. It’s not about social conditions. It’s about the soul. A woman with a scarf or shawl pushed back, just far enough to show her dark hair, parted in the middle and not recently washed, looks at something past the camera, neither intimidated nor engaged by it. Only her cloth coat with its asymmetrical closure places her as being from the far eastern fringes of Europe. Up close she is nearly beautiful, young and somehow tender, but from further away or with a smaller or darker reproduction, you can see the skull in the set face of this emigrant, as though through hunger, exhaustion, fear, she is close to other borders than national ones. Above her shadowed eye sockets, her forehead gleams as white as the sky behind her. It’s as though we can see through it to the same distant pallor that is the sky, or as though both are only absences on the photographic paper.
Long after the image of the woman stepping onto the prairie was secure as a talisman, I was told that my great-grandmother didn’t disappear. Her husband had her incarcerated in a mental hospital when she arrived in California, and her three children arrived to find that their father had married again, this time to an American woman, and had a new daughter. I imagined the rest, my grandmother arriving to find that she had been supplanted by a half-sister fluent in the English she would have to learn and would speak with a heavy accent the rest of her life. She seems to have found her way at first, joining according to another photograph a ladies’ hiking club: stalwart young women in knee-high lace-up boots and bloomers so uniform they look like a military group, up in the young, piney mountains of Los Angeles. I cannot pick her out of the group of olive-skinned maidens with hopeful gazes. She married my grandfather, another immigrant from a nearby town in the Russian Pale sometime in the later 1920s, brought over by his older brother after he was caught up in the throes of the Russian Revolution. They met in a Jewish hiking club, someone once mentioned, and this fact doesn’t fit in with anything else about them, for they seemed utterly urban, shrunk into their bodies as tenements of flesh, not as instruments of adventure in the open space of the New World. This is the closest in fact these ancestors get to my fantasy of getting off the train in the prairie.
My great-grandmother disappeared from her children’s lives. And the question is whether this woman chose to disappear or couldn’t find her way out of her own thoughts. Was she lost only to them because she had found another way, or was she lost to herself as well, bereft of the ability to navigate the world and her own mind? The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit. There’s a Buddhist story about a man galloping by a monk who asks, Where are you going? Ask my horse, says the man. And this uncontrollable emotion doesn’t let you pick your destination or even see it. It’s the simplest form of madness, one most of us taste some of the time.
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