Shifting Baselines
Earlier this year, while Georgia was still deep in quarantine, I was working at my desk when something sharp and brilliant erupted in my peripheral vision. My office desk abuts a window, and I turned toward the light expecting it to shift as well. But the light stayed in place. Even facing it directly, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I looked into the empty winter canopy of my neighbor’s neglected back lot. Foil caught in the treetops, I thought, a deflated mylar balloon. I watched for a long time, and the longer I stared, the wilder the abnormality of light became.
Then the wind calmed, and I saw that it was just English ivy fluttering in the winter sun. The dark, glossy leaves are as reflective as tin. The ivy runs up the southeast side of my neighbor’s trees. It’s beautiful in the winter landscape, but this is a mirage — glamour, to use an older definition of that word. The same magic Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur’s half-sister, is said to have used when some knight she fancied wandered through her woods.
I favor the analyses of Le Fay in which she never quits fighting her brother’s stodgy Christian court, not because she’s jealous or power hungry, but because she knows what will be lost if Arthur gets his way. At his round table sit no women, no Moors, no Jews, no peasants. There’s no space for Le Fay’s shape-shifting in Arthur’s court either. A person can be only one thing in Camelot. The ivy in my neighbor’s back lot belonged more to Arthur’s lineage I decided, an interloper prioritizing its own needs and wants. Already it had killed some trees.
I grew up about twenty miles from where I live now. There was a pair of brothers who lived across the street from me briefly, a year at most, and they were terrified of everything. Lizards. Lightning bugs. Instead of showing these boys the wonders of the neighborhood creek, I bullied them. I caught grasshoppers and opened my palms so the insects would whir out in their faces. I chased them with toad pee and cricket spit on my hands. What strikes me now is not only what a jerk I was, but also how easily I could find an insect or amphibian or reptile in my yard. The grasshoppers and crickets lived in the long grass at the bottom of the short drainage between my house and the house next door. There was usually a lizard warming itself somewhere on or near the front porch. Under the rocks lining the front garden were roly-polys and little black beetles.
Shifting Baseline Syndrome is the term for what happens when we no longer remember what we’ve lost. Recently, on a walk around my parents’ neighborhood with my niece, we stopped on the road to look down at the creek. “Your dad and I played in that creek all the time,” I said. “Why?” she asked. This stretch of creek is a straight, slime-coated passage through red, raw banks now, its waters flecked with foam. But once the banks were lined with hardwoods, and the creek meandered softly, creating little beaches of pale, coarse sand. This creek of my memory is still a degraded creek though. I never knew the creek when the land around it was farmland, or before that when it was untimbered native hardwoods. My sense of normal for the land where I grew up is the lawn of my parents’ home, their trimmed green lawn, the crickets in the ditch, the lizards sunning on the porch. Had I not bullied the boys across the street, I might not even remember this.
A few months ago, while creating the curriculum for a class I’m teaching in the fall, I encountered a YouTube lecture from a faculty member in the Department of Education at the University of Alberta. Dr. Dwayne Donald is a descendent of the amiskwaciwiyiniwak (Beaver Hills people) and the Papaschase Cree, and the starting point for much of his work is the understanding that a culture’s stories are expressions of that society’s values. Curricula, he argues in the lecture I watched, are stories that present “a model of a kind of human being.” Talking gently, affably, he creates the model citizen of standard Canadian and American curricula: “. . .rational, individualistic, utilitarian, calculated and instrumental in economic matters. Essentially a dollar-hunting animal. Human life is given meaning when the human is engaged in profit seeking.”
Story both shapes and reveals consciousness. Morgan Le Fay fought to keep Avalon, and she lost. It doesn’t matter if King Arthur is based on a real figure or if he’s a myth. On the historical horizon, as Camelot falls, genocide approaches: the Christian Crusades, the witch burnings, the transatlantic slave trade, western colonialism, westward expansion. Illness is coming too. The Black Plague will crash in deadly waves across Europe for three centuries.
Eventually, a ship will deliver my distant grandfather to what is not yet America, where he’ll settle in the colony of Georgia. He is white and English, and he’s not the first in his lineage to have emigrated. My forebears in that line were French Huguenots. They left first for the Netherlands seeking religious freedom, then carried on to England seeking the same. I don’t know what my great+ grandfather sought in Georgia, but I know what happened once he arrived. Not in his heart — there aren’t letters or journals revealing him as an individual — I can only understand him within the broader context of history. I identify with Morgan, but I must also claim the lineage of Arthur’s knights, of the Crusaders, the witch burners, the slavers, the settlers. My recent ancestral history reveals sharecroppers and bootleggers, millworkers living beholden in the milltown, laborers of all sorts. This lineage I prefer to Arthur’s knights as well. But within the context of the sixth mass extinction, over a hundred species lost each day due to human profit seeking, those who ruled Camelot and those who built Camelot all hail from Camelot.
And what of the people Camelot slaughtered and enslaved, those crushed by nation building and profit seeking, or refused a point of entry into the dominant narrative of model citizenship, however flawed that model might be? A family member’s DNA test revealed west African blood, and just as I prefer my feminists and working class heroes over my Crusaders and settlers, I yearn for some story where this African blood comes from love, not rape. But, again, there are no letters, no journals. So I have to turn to history, and that means looking the slaver in the eye. This is the version of the story I’m called to hold at this moment in history. In These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, philosopher Bayo Akolomafe writes “Resolutions in the cumbersome tapestry of entanglement are locally enacted — that is, things gain their thingness in very specific intra-actions, but they never do this in a final way.” Despite Arthur’s mythic efforts, it’s not possible for a person to be only one thing. I may be closest to Le Fay in the long arc of my ancestral, genetic shapeshifting.
So it saddens me that my home state’s Republicans have joined the movement to legislate against teaching critical race theory in public schools. Georgia was the thirteenth colony and the fourth state. It’s currently one of the more socioeconomically and ethno-racially diverse states, at least according to WalletHub, a helpful site for dollar-seeking animals. When I went to the University of Georgia in the 90s and first took a gender studies course, my sense of the world and my place in it cracked open. This wasn’t easy, but it was a relief. What I was learning to see had been there all along. I’m reminded of my childhood dog and how she would look at me out of the corner of her eye when she was in the process of stealing the stuffed purple cat from my bedroom, as if by avoiding direct eye contact neither of us would realize what she was up to. In my understanding of critical race theory, the primary request it makes of us is that we work to recognize and claim our many entanglements. It’s possible to leave one country as the persecuted and arrive in a new country as a persecutor. It’s possible to create systems that are visionary for their time and also must be changed over time. It’s possible that the model of human being we most want to be isn’t who we actually are. While the planet slips further into the Holocene extinction, may I get better at fighting against Shifting Baseline Syndrome. May I not forget crickets, frogs, and clean suburban creeks. May I not forget my neighbors.
Ginger Eager’s first novel, The Nature of Remains, won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as a 2021 Books All Georgians Should Read. Her essays, short stories, and reviews have been published in journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, and West Branch. Ginger teaches in a variety of settings, including nonprofit writing centers and homeschool co-ops.