Reflections upon Identity, Maiden Castle, Dorset 2014

Standing on the high, earthen ramparts of the neolithic Maiden Castle and looking over the wide  alluvial valley towards Poundbury and Dorchester, I thought about my elder grandsons back in America. They carried a Roman name, Prather (Praetor), and with both of their maternal grandparents of lowland, Galloway stock, they could, if they wished, identify themselves as Romano-Celtic-Britons.

I imagined my grandsons' Roman ancestor slogging it up the track to Maiden in AD 47 where his well disciplined cohort must have made short work of the indigenous Durotriges tribes people of the hill fort. "Praetor", we'll call him, must have liked the place, because he settled in Nunney in Wiltshire nearby and his descendants remained even after the Romans left Britain some four hundred years later.

Our visit was an appropriate time to examine identity, for in mid-September the Scots were to vote perhaps to suceed from the Union that had lasted since 1707.

Having taken citizenship of the United States, my now dual nationality reflected my Anglo-American life. But I asked, was identity a place, a feeling of belonging, a recognition by others of one's character? Was it enhanced or diminished by time? Was it to be lost and merged in the river of humanity that the Irish mytholigise as flowing continuously like Joyce's riverdance "a way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..?"

We were in Dorset, Hardy country. "Casterbridge" (Dorchester) was just to the north close by the east-west flow of the Frome valley, while the sea and Weymouth hid behind the spinney, coppice, and wood adorned hills forming and defining the Jurassic Coast. 

Hardy questioned in his poem "Afterwards":

"When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, 

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, 

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, 

'He was a man who used to notice such things'?"

His public identity was bound to Dorset, or "Wessex," as he romantically named it and, in this poem, he plays sentimental homage to people who might observe and define him. Despite the complexity of his life, his proto-feminism in "Tess," his syphilis, his naive Great War patriotism, he seems to have succeeded in forming a strong identity for, just as Sir Walter Scott both created the myth of Scottishness and was identified by the same, Hardy had too created a symbiotic myth for himself and Wessex.

We had visited Tolpuddle, the site of martyrs fame -- the village where a group of men, paid less than a living wage for their agricultural labour had formed the world's first Union, a Friendly Society, in 1832. They were arrested, tried, and sentenced to seven years servitude in Australia. Their leader, George Loveless, wrote:

"God is our guide! From field, from wave,

From plough, from anvil, and from loom;

We come, our country's rights to save,

And speak a tyrant faction's doom:

We raise the watch-word liberty;

We will, we will, we will be free!"

They were a group of men who created their identity by their suffering and with whom all people can identify who make their labour available for hire. They were the first, the brave.

And yet there was another who lived in Dorset with the purpose of obscuring his identity, Aircraftman Ross, or T.E. Shaw, otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia, lived quietly at Clouds Hill, near Wareham. We visited his grave at Moreton and left money there for its upkeep. Until his untimely motorcycling accident and death, Lawrence wrote his "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" there. He hid from his fame, his Arab identity, which had been enhanced by the American Lowell Thomas and his publicity "With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia."

So, it was just a vacation, but chanced upon some interesting questions...what is identity? Place? Myth? Principle? Character? Class? Tribe? Loyalty? I guess we identify ourselves by a sharing the awarenesses of our lives with others, but maybe Lawrence should have the last word...

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible."

IFC 

Dorset, 

September 2014