OUR GE(NE)OLOGICAL RECORD – Stratigraphy and Storytelling in Akron, Ohio

Abstract

Methodology: split into pieces. Go around the family gathering with cupped hands. What can you tell me about where I come from and why? The answers you receive will allow you to rebuild yourself, but not in a pattern anyone in attendance is familiar with. They’ll move to corners when you enter a room. That’s not what we told you about ourselves, they’ll say. It was never about yourselves, but about your self, my self, the singular I I I ascending like a scared cardinal through the screen door of the sunroom. You can say: this is what you told me, and I am the truth coming through the cracking pavement of disparate accounts, and I am he on the wing, who sticks in the screen door and tatters the cloth, who does not run from the party when his cloak has been stolen, and I have patched together your remnants to cover my nakedness. Your story was never going to be something they’d recognize as their own. Each new outfit fits you different. They don’t even have to tell you they like it.