2. Can I borrow your atoms for a while since you are dead anyway?
A complement to this month's essay. Hope you enjoy it. And if you do...
Fulfilling some curiousity, I submitted a DNA sample to one of the leading companies now providing these sorts of things. The result claims that I am 92% Southern Italian, specifically from Puglia, with small traces of Greek and Balkan ancestry. I also seem to have slightly higher levels of Neanderthal DNA than the average person – empirical evidence of my wife’s up to now unproven assumption – and there were some DNA traces that came in from the Fertile Crescent area and West Africa. Those entered at some point between mid 1700s and mid 1800s, and it turns out they are present in my mother’s DNA. Understanding that all the males from whom I came resided in Francavilla because they were anchored to the land and the properties, I checked out the locations from where their wives, my past mothers, came from. In five hundred years there were two from Mesagne, 14 miles away, a couple from Oria in the early centuries, a town so close we can throw rocks at each other, one from Fasano, a little further out, at 32 miles, and the longest distance is my own mother, from Terlizzi, about 90 miles away. And thanks be for that and the opening of the gene pool, because in half a millennium this is it. Almost all the generations of my family came from within the same few square miles, blocks sometimes.
Indulge me if you will, as I write through a side path, because these notions about my family’s permanence on Francavilla and the land around it are what have guided this project. So here it goes:
A time came when humans learned that from seed comes the plant, and subsequently that the plant could be made to grow where most convenient, and so, at different times and in different places they stopped searching for the plant and started growing it where it pleased them most. In a stationary existence, a symbiotic relationship between humans, animals, plants, and the soil they lived on and in was established. Plants and the animals nurtured the humans who in turn made plants and animals dependent on their care. The soil became the depositor and redistributor of a community of atoms that from the earth were resurrected into plant or animal or human life, before returning, after a lifespan, into the soil, in a process that created a regional communion of life. Whatever you may think of that, it is the way I like to imagine life around Francavilla for the past three millennia.
As a child, being alone on a summer day, hands deep into the red dirt and back resting against a centenarian olive tree trunk, looking into the clouds or the workings of ants all around me, listening to the buzzing of insects, I was home. I felt in every cell of my body that I belonged there, that I was part of it, and that everything around me, alive and not, knew it. The tree, the weeds, the birds, the cicadas and butterflies, and even the dirt knew it. We were all one and the same, along with the atoms of my dead relatives, kept alive in my imagination by the stories I had been told about them, and the notion that they may also have sat under that same tree, with hands in the same dirt. I was connected to them by that multi-centenarian olive tree, sprouted from that dirt before they were born, that same tree that will still possibly be there after I become one with the dirt. If it survives the Xylella disease that is, but that story will come further on down the line.
I have often been attracted to writings about atomism and other such things. From Marcus Aurelius - currently the resource for a blossoming cottage industry of Stoic commentary- to Lucretius in De Rarum Natura in which he retransmits the ideas of Epicurus of a world composed of miniscule ‘atoms’, to Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600 for promoting those ideas, all the way to Wisconsin environmental writer Aldo Leopold who in his Odyssey envisions the journey of a single atom and its membership in different incarnations in a North American environment, I have come to embrace and love the comforting, to me anyway, notion of bodies being composed by a vastly complicated assemblage of tiny particles that once released by the abandonment of the life force that kept them together, will scatter around and become parts of other bodies, becoming part of a tree, or a cow, and through the grass, through a worm, potentially back into a human, an unending cycle almost as long as this sentence that my high school English teacher would slash to pieces in red ink, but which I am thoroughly enjoying writing.
I find pleasure at this notion of a community of atoms that assemble and disassemble to become part of all living and inert things within a region over centuries and millennia. Could an atom that was part of one of my ancestors, or part of a sheep, a cat, or an olive tree pruned by one of my ancestors now be part of me? I am not sure if that is a scientific possibility, but I hang on to that notion regardless, because so much in Francavilla has been passed on through the centuries. We walk on the same stone paved streets as our ancestors, and inhabit their buildings, and eat the fruit from the same olive trees, hear the same stories, worship in the same churches they built, and intermarry the same families on the same land. Francavilla historian Pietro Palumbo wrote in his Francavilla history, referring to the Argentina and other leading families of the 19th century, that: “those families were so mixed that no one could tell in their parentage where one family ended and the other began”. Something is getting passed along, though at times through a somewhat more reduced gene pool than might be desired.
Fossilized remains of wild olives in Salento have been carbon dated to pre-Neolithic times; by the early Neolithic age humans were cultivating them, and by the 12th to 9th centuries BC, through artificial selection they developed varieties of olives with traits they desired. During the Hellenic period of the 4th to the 1st centuries BC, new varieties specifically for oil production were cultivated. Later, under Rome, pressing facilities were built and olive oil became a commodity that rode along with the legions to the new lands they occupied along the Mediterranean. There are a few millenarian olive trees alive today that have been producing since the days of Caesar. For all we know, some of us may have tasted oil made from the same trees as the oil that Anthony brought to Cleopatra, and why not believe it, it ain’t gonna hurt us.
The deep roots of these multi-centenarian plants not only have economic relevance for the region, but they also intertwine with the genealogical ancestry of families who have lived on the same land with the trees for generations; those trees are ancestors who still live. Images of contorted ageless trees standing on a field of dry red earth have been one of the first environmental memories for many who have lived here, have been ever present and familiar every day of their lives, and on deathbeds near a window may have been the last images of their terrestrial existence. The intergenerational significance of the olive tree in Salento is best expressed by the popular saying that olive trees are not planted for one’s benefit; they are planted for the benefit of one’s grandchildren and their progeny. Olive tree growth is so slow and life expectancy so long that, when planting, a farmer has faith in the continuance of future generations on the land and the desire to do well for them. It is the very manifestation of a confident society that plans to stay put in a place for a long time.
When I taste olive oil that I know was pressed from fruit of ancient trees in Francavilla, it is for me a rite of communion and transubstantiation that connects me to those who lived and died there decades and centuries before.
The multigenerational companionship of the olive tree and the humans in Salento may be coming to an end. The humans are distracted with other things and have been neglecting their responsibility to the symbiotic relationship with the land. The trees are hurting and many have died by the thousands in the past decade alone. What was once permanent could soon be no more.
Image from the wonderful book: Resta, Giovanni. Ulivi di Puglia: La Voce della Natura nell’Anima dell’Uomo. 2014. Congedo Publishing. Galatina (LE), Milano, Italy.
A great academic source on the history of the olive tree in the region:
Caracuta, Valentina. “Olive Growing in Puglia (Southeastern Italy): A Review of the Evidence from the Mesolithic to the Middle Ages.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, January 2020, 595–620.
Hey y’all, if you are enjoying this stuff and know others who also may get something out if it, please share this substack and ask them to subscribe. It’d make me happy.
If you need a new book and like the sort of thing I have been writing about, I would like to suggest…nay…strongly encourage you to full steam to a copy of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve. I have fully read it three times in the past few years, and the author’s exploration on how the knowledge of the past moves its way to later generations and societies has earned him a Pulitzer Prize. It has been an inspiration to me, it is absolutely accessible for general readership, and it is hard to put down.
OK time to go…here is my companion song for the month. Yeah, I know, it’s cheesy…sue me. I love it anyway and it fits this theme.
“…Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
I'll be back again and again and again and again and again and again”.
In the October essay we will poke around the times when Giovambattista Argentina first arrived to the area in the mid 1400s, thus beginning the establishment of the family in Francavilla.
A truly enjoyable read, thank you.