I found this fascinating.

In the section quoted below I particularly like the idea that the local blacksmith officiated over his anvil. The master of making strong things, the master of transforming things, the master of fire and heat, the maker of horse shoes and cooking pots, the man whose face and hands are black with soot… he is the master of marriage. You could spin some deep metaphors around that simple fact. It is also an interesting commentary on the role of religion in day to day life. While the upper classes might call on the minister, those who were perhaps in the vast majority felt free to call on the blacksmith. The tradesman, not the minister, was the pillar of the community, the officiant. Think about that next time someone tries to tell you that the United States began as a Christian nation. (More here: http://www.history.org/ )

Since the Middle Ages, it had been accepted in England that a couple could have a common law—in effect, a do-it-yourself—marriage arrangement, and as immigrants flowed into the New World, they brought the custom along. The arrangement was a spoken marriage contract—in Latin verba de praesenti—taken alone or before witnesses. For couples that could not secure their families’ blessings, this was a consolation.

You joined hands and declared that you took each other to be a lawfully wedded spouse, and lived together. Henceforth you were man and wife. This short but sweet ritual went by the name “handfasting” or “spousal.” Parental permission did not enter the picture. No priest, minister, magistrate, or license was called for, although it was not unusual for blacksmiths to officiate—the anvil becoming a symbol of where long-lasting unions were forged.

The ceremony could as easily be performed in a field, a garden, an alehouse, or, as was often the case, in a bedroom. What could be easier, or more open to abuse? It’s easy to imagine a libidinous youth promising in a few words to have and to hold in order to secure his wicked way with a young country maiden, later to renege on the deal.

Sometimes these affairs ended happily, sometimes not. For young girls, it was prudent to hide a couple of friends in the closet to secretly witness the pledges and forestall backsliding. They could be summoned to give evidence in a breach of promise case if the young suitor was less than honorable and had turned his eye elsewhere. There are in court records countless stories of such skullduggery.

For spousals that were genuine and well intentioned, there was often the gift of a bent coin or half a broken silver sixpence to cement the union. The new husband would keep one half, until death did them part—or he did a runner and disappeared.

There was a version of the contract called the spousal de futuro, which was something like a modern engagement—a marriage contract to be consummated at a later date. If, as was often the case, the couple jumped the gun and began living together, and the girl became pregnant, the contract automatically was bumped up to a full-blown marriage, and the couple became man and wife in their neighbors’ eyes. To colonial communities, pregnancy made the marriage.

More here: http://www.history.org/

However, counter this (above) rather libertine version of handfasting in colonial America, Sharon L. Krossa argues that handfasting in Scotland at least was little more than betrothal, and hardly a “marriage” in itself. Whether she is describing a different understanding of the same reality described above, or a cultural difference between how handfasting was practiced in America and Scotland, is an interesting question.

Krossa says, among other things:

Note that because handfasting involved an exchange of future tense consents to marry, if a couple was handfasted/betrothed, and then had sex on the basis of that handfasting/betrothal, they were then no longer handfasted/betrothed, but married — legally, bindingly, for life, married. But if they didn’t have sex and didn’t exchange present tense consents, then they weren’t married. Handfasting/betrothal could result in marriage, whether by subsequent exchange of present tense consents or by subsequent sex, but it also could result in no marriage but only if there had been no sex at all. (So in the 1562 quote above, the betrothed couples who “continewis in manifest fornicatioun” are actually legally married, but the church leaders are insisting that they get married again, this time properly in church.)

Though the civil law remained essentially the same, the cultural customs surrounding marriage did change over the nearly four centuries between the Scottish Reformation and 1940. Of relevance to the issue of handfasting, in regularly formed marriages formal betrothal ceremonies (handfastings) faded away; it would appear that by the late 17th century, they were no longer practiced, or at the very least had changed in nature and terminlogy such that they were no longer called “handfasting” (Leneman, c. 3).

Which only proves that the more one comes to know the less certain one can ever be that he/she knows anything at all.

Or as they say at the end of every research paper: “more research is needed.”

NYT columnist Bob Herbert wrote a surprising and, I thought, unfair condemnation of Obama’s alleged “lurching.” (link here.)

Dear Mr. Herbert,

“Dave Brooks is off today” it says at the bottom, but it looks like you filled in for him.

Anybody who finds Obama’s current views inconsistent with what they thought he stood for simply was not paying attention.

The idea of inconsistency is a media frame that is so obviously a Republican election ploy that I’m frankly shocked that you Mr. Herbert have endorsed it. Obama has never been a “left wing” candidate. The revolution he has always promised, above all, is the opportunity to finally elect an African American…. and a fresh face with a brain.

Fox News efforts to paint him as a liberal have been simply ludicrous. He’s a mainstream Democrat. Always has been. Nobody is “shocked” except those who bought the opposition framing or didn’t bother to look into his writings and policy positions.

Just look at his less ambitious (than Hillary) “universal” health care plan: it wasn’t Hillary who would leave 5% uninsured and emphasize the voluntary nature of participation. How much more did anyone need to understand he was more moderate than Hillary?

Religion, death penalty and guns? He’s not taking those positions to entice anyone. I’m quite confident he’s taking issues off the table… issues that in the case of death penalty and guns he doesn’t believe really matter… and compared to the problem of fascism in America really don’t matter to me.

In the case of religion he came of age doing social action with churches. It was a core formative experience. Why would anyone be surprised that he still believes that churches have a role in changing lives? He’s not deviating from anything he’s ever been… he’s deviating from what people THINK a democrat should believe in. It’s hardly a pander… it’s who he is.

Watching the news, and now even you Mr. Herbert, find “inconsistency” in his public statements leads me to question the collective sanity of the media elites. My mind is simply boggled by the word “lurching” in relation to Obama. It is simply and objectively not true.

As a progressive I’ve always been troubled by Obama’s moderate positions, such as his pretend universal health care plan, but nothing matters more than fighting the fascistic and authoritarian regime that is developing in the U.S. If he wants to take guns and death penalty off the table by agreeing with what a majority of people in key states think is right, more power to him. He takes those positions off the table not because he will advocate those issues strongly, but to prevent anyone from saying he is against punishing child rapists or allowing gun ownership. He’s doing it because he is NOT running his campaign on those “distractions” and doesn’t need them on the table.

Please get outside the east coast media bubble (that’s where I imagine you sitting) and rethink your participation in the dominant framing.

I generally enjoy your columns, but I think you’ve got this one all wrong,

Miles

This is my guide to getting rid of stuff. By “throw it out”… I mean recycle it, give it to someone, take it to Goodwill, sell it on E-bay… but get rid of it. And no using E-bay as an excuse to prolong things. If it doesn’t sell fast, recycle it.

1) You do not need old shoe boxes to keep “stuff” you might need to put in a shoe box someday. First find the stuff… then worry about the box. For now, just throw the damn box out.

2) If you haven’t used it or needed it in the last year, you don’t need it. Throw it out.

3) If it’s clothing and no one you know would wear it, then for you and yours it is not clothing. Maybe someone else will value it. Throw it out.

4) Just because you needed it to write your dissertation 10 years ago, that’s no reason to hang on to it. Throw it out.

5) With a few rare exceptions, if it’s a toy for young children, and your children are 7 and 11, don’t save it for your grandchildren. Throw it out.

6) Make a list of what matters to you. Call it a mission statement. Make every object pass the mission critical test. Do I need this particular piece of dusty plastic to do what I am most about doing on planet Earth? Don’t expect that much is going to meet that test, and consider that a good thing. Apply the list, and throw stuff out. Then throw the list out too.

7) I used to feel (back in the 1990s) that a home full of books was a statement about who I was as a scholar and intellectual. Now the library and the intertubes can meet every imaginable information need for adults. If you haven’t used or read that book in the last few months… throw it out.

8) Children’s books? Well you can’t throw those away… not while you have children.

9) If you don’t need it but still can’t give it up, then take a photo of it. Print the photo. Put the photo in a notebook. There. You have the memory, and a photo takes up a lot less space. Now, throw it out. (Next year you can throw out all the inexplicable pictures of forgotten basement junk.)

10) You’re not the problem… it’s your spouse, right? If only he/she could be made to focus on the junk and get rid of stuff, then the basement/attic would suddenly be clean. Well, sit down together and do the mission/goals/plans exercise together, for each of you and for both of you. Then poke around the basement and ask her/him how the rocking-horse and the bungee cord and baby puzzles are connected to his/her mission… and to your joint mission. If the two of you can’t connect an object to your separate and joint purposes on Earth… throw it away.

11) While you are sorting through the stuff by yourself, make a pile near the door. That’s the stuff that you are definitely done with. Invite your spouse to go through it and see if you’ve accidentally included anything of value. But gently force the question, simply by asking it. This is the stuff that I’d like to get rid of… how do you feel about that? With any luck your spouse will realize, most of the time, that the only thing to do is… throw it out.

12) “This might be useful someday” is not a reason to keep something. Be real. What will it be useful for? And how does that use relate to your mission and purpose? Come on, just throw that bamboo pole out. And the extra hangers and the bead doorway divider and the broken glass vase that maybe you’ll fix someday. And the dead laptop (recycle that one.) And that weird basket with the broken handle. Even if it would be useful someday, you’ll have the joy of not having to posses it and move it and trip over it and be annoyed by it for all those years between now and that beautiful moment when you, in your dreams, discover that the basket with the broken handle is just the thing you need. So throw it out.

Some material possessions are nice. Most are encumbrances. They weigh your life down, particularly the ones gathering cobwebs in your basement. Possessions are parasites. They infect the host (you), and they persuade the host that they are part of the host… no bother at all. Just ignore me, they say, while I digest your internal organs. Pay me no mind while I infect your nervous system and cause you to climb the highest nearby point, die, burst open and spit out my spores (see “Entomophaga grylli”, commonly referred to as “summit disease, which attacks grasshoppers.) That’s what the boxes in your basement can do to you.

Objects and things thwart your mind/soul’s immune system’s ability to recognize the foreign as foreign. It is only by recognizing bits of plastic detritus and 15 year old scientific article reprints and baskets with broken handles as foreign that we can eject them. That actually requires a fairly deep level of self-understanding, in the sense of knowing who one is, and who one is not, what one cares about and where one is trying to go. Self-understanding makes it possible to see and understand that which is within us, but not part of us. Such is the spiritual path of the attic or basement cleaner.

—

Said Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Very well, but how large was his basement? To contain our own multitudes, it wouldn’t hurt to clear some space in the basement.

Today was basement cleaning day, and that was heavy. The cleaning I am doing involves some deep history. Boxes of papers from the 1990s… boxes of papers from the 1980s… even boxes of paper from the 1970s. Many boxes of paper. Articles from my time at UCLA in Health Services Research. Articles from my time at USC writing a doctoral dissertation on genocide. Copies of the Reed College “Quest” student magazine. Papers and memorabilia from Hollywood High School days. Boxes not opened in 30 years. Boxes containing diaries and juvenilia… aka bad teenage poetry. Boxes marked “DO NOT OPEN!” to prevent my parents from examining them while I was at college. (The seal was still unbroken, after 31 years, with a small internal thread designed to reveal opening by unauthorized persons still firmly attached to both the lid and the box!) Third grade report cards. High school debate score cards. Pretty good drawings from my 7th grade drafting class, the best class I ever took in Junior High School, but in which I only received a B from Mr. Landsman, forever discouraging me from pursuing a career as an architect. Hall passes - yes I saved hall passes. Love notes from teenage girls. Short stories from Le Conte Junior High School. A calendar from 1974. A diary kept on index cards in high school and regularly shuffled because “time has no meaning” according to me, in 1975, at age 16. And on, and on. Well most of the personal stuff I describe here will not be thrown out, yet. But the vast bulk of the material, mostly scientific and academic articles, from my dissertation and later work life was today judged ready for the dust bin of history.

Why had I held on to it this long? Inertia yes. It costs little for boxes to sit in a basement. But I also kept them because to throw away the past we have to be done with it, and I wasn’t quite done with it until now.

It seems as if there are two things that have to happen. On the one hand, we must internalize those ideas/objects so that all the parts of them that we care about are within us. “I know everything I need to know about that subject or time in my life.” On the other hand, we must externalize the ideas/objects and come to accept that we have what we need from them within, and that the ideas/objects themselves are therefore extraneous to who we are. Forgetfulness helps. Becoming a different person helps. Most of the cells in my body from that time have disappeared. I am a different person now.

Then also there is feeling of genuine closure. It’s not just the I can’t remember or don’t care. I’ve genuinely finished with those issues. What little I need is inside me, and mostly I’m done with them as living breathing concerns.

I preserve memory, in practical terms, for example, by keeping a copy of my doctoral dissertation, a few books about its subject, genocide, and a diploma somewhere. That’s enough. The boxes and boxes of articles about genocide and violence and war whose reading shaped that document between 1992 and 1994, seemed for many years like part of the project, almost like the dissertation itself. But this time, looking through them, I could only shake my head and laugh. Sometime in the last five years, a little more than a decade after receiving my doctorate, I moved from entanglement with them to a point of detachment. I observed them, even observed them with a certain fondness, but I also no longer cared about them. They were old, turning brown around the edges, and merely vague memories of a less happy time and a different person. It took over a decade to get over that period of my life, but looking at those myriad studies of genocide and violence today I just laughed and heaved them into the recycling bin with complete confidence that I was done.

When you are done with a period of your life, you are done. You just know it. Maybe it takes some of us a little longer, but is nice to know when the moment comes at last.

I’m not much of a do-it-yourself person but recently I acquired 2 large (about 8X12 feet) $10 rolls of “linoleum” at the Rebuilding Center, a knife, some glue and a few other particulars, and spent about 3 days fixing the concrete floor and laying out, cutting and gluing the linoleum. I made a lot mistakes, but now that I’m done I know to do it if there is ever a next time. My office, which looked rather dingy now seems bright and clean. Sure almost everything I used is a product of the petrochemical industry, but the whole job, paints, patch concrete, tools, came in at under $80. I’m happy.