hanging around in the lost and found

If you're a student of ancient history, you've probably stumbled across silphium, or something like it.
Silphium is all over the literature of the ancient Mediterranean. It was used extensively by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and probably the Phoenicians and the Berbers and other North Africans--that is, anyone near enough to the areas it could be found to grab a handful. And "extensively" is not an exaggeration: the Hellenes record using silphium as a sovereign remedy for everything from headaches to fevers, as a birth control and an abortifacient, even as a popular cooking spice. An entire city's economy ran on it, and ran well. It was pictured on currency, pastoral pieces were written about people harvesting it, ancient doctors raved about its myriad uses. It was considered priceless.

There trouble is, we don't know what silphium was.

We know silphium was a plant that grew wild around the Mediterranean, especially along the African coast, and that it was hard to cultivate its most potent varieties in any kind of quantity, so it was encouraged to grow wild all over the place. We have rough pictures of it, stamped on coins and painted on pottery. We have descriptions of the way it was processed down into medicine, down to the ungodly reek that potsfull of its resin produced. We even now have documents pointing out other plants that some of its proponents believed were similar or related to it; asafoetida, which we still have, was considered a poor substitute by Roman physicians, for instance. But none of those ancient readers felt the need to identify which plant silphium was in any detail.

The trouble for those of us now reading is that there was never any need to explain what silphium was, or describe it in detail, because it was so ubiquitous that it must have seemed silly to do so. Nobody in a modern conversation or a modern novel hands a bottle of aspirin to a friend, pausing to note, 'This is an aspirin pill, a small bit of compressed powder of synthesized willow salic, a chemical derived from the bark of the willow tree. We use it as an anti-inflammatory and painkiller despite its deleterious effects on the liver and stomach.' And indeed, few of us reaching for that bottle of pills know where aspirin comes from. It's everywhere. There's no need to know; you can trust that the people who made it knew what they were doing and where they got it, and that when you put it on your grocery list, whoever reads it will know what you mean. Casually describing the rest of it comes off as redundant, pretentious, and unnatural.
We know where silphium fits in the ancient Mediterranean. We have a rough idea of what it might have looked like, a few snatches about the smell, some idea of other plants related to it. We can guess, with reasonable accuracy, that it was probably an extinct relative of fennel and parsley, of all things. But nobody felt the need to leave us an elaborate map pointing at where to find this sovereign remedy, this popular cure-all. They assumed it would always be around, and that our parents would be able to tell us, and their parents tell them. And somewhere around a thousand and a half years ago, that got shaken up, and it was gone forever, due to overcultivation, or desertification of the southern Mediterranean, or simple neglect. Maybe there's still a few clumps of it in Tunisia that someone drives by every day without knowing.

History is full of these things, no matter where you go, things we can circle around, draw rough outlines of, even make very good educated guesses about. But we don't have them any more, and we're different people now, and nobody thought to leave us careful instructions because they just assumed that what they had would always be there. There's an entire genre of Song Dynasty Chinese poetry that's really song lyrics, but we don't have the tunes any more in part because they were so popular they didn't need to be written down. There are buried cities that periodically turn up all over Arabia that we don't even know the names of, any more--huge capitals of trade and art just vanished, when once everyone knew where to go to find them.

When I first began my transition, I searched desperately for context. I grew up in a small town surrounded by miles and miles of sagebrush and juniper and lava rock, where storms would come rolling down from the north and have nothing to stop them for the length of another three states. Nobody gave me patterns for what I was going through. Nobody gave me a starting place. I was off the map. So being who I am, I ran for the library, and I pulled out every book I could. And in between all of the autobiographies and sociology and theory, I was shocked to discover that there were all these rough pictures, throughout history, of people going through something that looked similar.

It wasn't the same, I later found out. They had other cultural contexts, in different times and places, with different tools and ideas to manage what looked very much like gendered lives outside of a biology-bound binary. I looked, though, at those stone tablets, at those translated manuscripts, at those colonialist records of destruction, and I found not only people familiar to me, but societies that had places for them.
Often enough, it wasn't explicit. There were words that were considered hard to translate, or that had no English equivalent at all. There were pictures of people who didn't seem like the other men or women in their societies. There were references, here and there, to crossing boundaries of physical sex. There were records of social and work roles. Some were more complete and detailed, though often colored with the confusion and disgust of colonizers and cultural imperialists. Some were the vaguest of conjectures. Some were just indications of where certain kind of people fit, how they dressed, what they ate, what they did, who they loved, without specifying who they were; why do so? Everyone knew who was being talked about. It was elementary.
Like many before me, I ran up against too many missing pieces to get those shattered pieces of human life back. Even extant examples of living, breathing people in parts of the world far from me were irrevocably altered by colonization, globalization, and the inevitable turning of time, and I found little desire to exacerbate that process with my own intellectual invasions. I had substitutes to find, and bits of culture or idea that, by crude replication or convergent evolution, performed similar work in my own cultural context, in my own life. There were relatives in that family tree I could cobble together. But those histories, no matter how important and how much they informed my own approaches, were histories. What they recorded was gone for good, and even if I could take it back I in most cases had no right to. Ci songs had gone tuneless. Silphium was extinct, or missing, but certainly out of reach forever, and something else would have to take its place if its kernel could not be found hiding somewhere. Whatever was left of it was changed enough to be unrecognizable, buried under centuries of sand and silence.

Somewhere in there desertification set in, or maybe over-farming, or maybe unsustainable harvests, or maybe simple neglect. Maybe it was just wholesale murder. One way or another, the gears and tides of history moved on, and something our ancestors or their neighbors had--had so much of they took it for granted, that they never felt the need to explain it for posterity because it was elementary, because it was easy, because it would always be around, because it was so normal as to be an absurd object of study--went away and didn't come back.
There were cures that disappeared, people there stopped being room for, solidarities that were so commonplace as to be unremarkable until they dissolved into dust or were stomped into oblivion.
Some of them we need now, and we find that empty space, between the potsherds and the pastoral poetry, where once was something that could have done us some good. And we're left with the task of finding it again, or finding replacements. Human stories and human objects and human lives were lost. How do we rebuild? How do we cobble together new cultural spaces, new cure-alls, new places to fit something that we ourselves will someday take for granted so thoroughly that our descendants will scratch their heads and wonder what we're talking about?
And when we rebuild--how do we preserve it? How do we take these tools and keep them safe so our descendants will know what they were, and be able to make use of them? How can I describe my life, and written where, so that it will be helpful to those who come after? How can we make our hearts' work stick, our solidarities solid? How can we make sure our replacements don't need replacing?

There were times and there are places not my own, where someone like me might find a place that looks like home. I, and others like me, am tasked with finding something that works for me and for those on whose behalf I've chosen to work in the here and now. We have to cultivate, and harvest, cures for our own society's stumblings and sicknesses. And if we succeed so thoroughly that what we distill is accessible to everyone, what then? How do we weather history? How do we keep the places we build, the growth we achieve, the linked arms and shared voices we hold together from losing their meaning the more they grow?

Maybe we need to start by looking at what's already been lost. Maybe we need to understand what's missing and that much of what we ourselves become will someday go missing, too, and that it's up to us to make sure the important parts are still there for those who will come after us. Maybe it's just a matter of not assuming that these things we hold dear will be there when we're gone, and doing a little more work to make sure that even if our own fields are someday empty of them, that they grow wild somewhere else.