At his new blog, Sycamore & Flow­ers, Dale Smith has been writ­ing lovely, strange, and wreathed med­i­ta­tions of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal kind, old photos accom­pa­ny­ing, clearly a book in progress. And what a book it will be. It puts me in mind a bit of Sebald, though it’s very much, cer­tainly, of its own nature. In his crit­i­cism and in prose works like Black Stone and The Flood and the Garden, Smith has shown him­self as an impres­sive, ele­gant styl­ist. And this gor­geous, often moving prose, where per­sonal memory and social his­tory are in subtle, con­tra­pun­tal con­sort, may be his best work ever. Here’s the most recent entry. Check out the rest.

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Tonight I trace words, fol­low­ing little threads; my mind drifts into barely vis­i­ble prints on the pat­terns of family his­tory. It is not the truth sup­pos­edly latent in the tree dri­ving me onward. All those branches with little leaves of gen­er­a­tion. The names of those now decayed in Smith County soil come out of the past like tal­is­manic fig­ures, just as mys­te­ri­ous, sullen, even, in the sense of fore­clo­sure that accom­pa­nies their memory to my pres­ence. There is the long life fig­ured in my clan’s most recent prog­en­i­tor, John Henry Bonner, born 1842 in Mis­souri; he died 1930 in Tyler, Texas. Served five terms as mayor of Tyler. And the names after him arrive, bur­bling up out of the peace of nonex­is­tence: Mattie Bonner, Charles Well­born Boon, Well­born Bonner Boon, Mar­garet C. Sledge. Har­molean Bonner, James John Cov­ing­ton. I recall as a boy meet­ing on sev­eral occa­sions Martha Cov­ing­ton, born 1901, and Bascom B. Watson (we called him B. B.). To my knowl­edge, he is the only man I have ever known to serve in the First World War. And his mem­o­ries trailed back through the South to vet­er­ans of the Con­fed­er­acy. I pos­sess still a buck­eye top, purple, that he gave me before he died in 1977. Martha was Well­born and Luther’s cousin. Her family his­tory reaches toward the ghosts of other eras, and per­haps this is why her hand­writ­ing leans strongly to the left. As she aged it became almost impos­si­ble to deci­pher. I remem­ber learn­ing of car­di­nals and chick­adees, fly­catch­ers and dick­sissles, through the parch­ments she would send. Her writ­ing became almost impos­si­ble for me to follow. I wrote her, per­haps for the last time, in Cal­i­for­nia. It is ter­ri­ble that we dis­ap­pear from one another. Her writ­ing slowly van­ished from me. The shape of her let­ters was gripped with what looked like Parkinson’s, squig­gly and yet vio­lently wager­ing some sense onto the impos­si­ble shapes that reached out into the white space of her ele­gant sta­tion­ary. “This is a nota­tion con­cern­ing Martha Ellen Wade,” she wrote, “who was the wife of William Neval Bonner—Her father was Mica­jah Wade—Born Feb­ru­ary 8th, 1777 in N. Car­olina. His mother’s maiden name was Sarah McCormick. She was the daugh­ter of Dorcas and James McCormick. James McCormick was a sol­dier of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and fought gal­lantly for the lib­er­ties of the Colonies through­out the seven years strug­gle. This is where the name Mica­jah came into the family.” The facts of names and dates, and the acci­dents of rela­tion to events, wedge into his­tor­i­cal record. In time objects accu­mu­late and are ori­ented to cer­tain names or moods. The first bursts of autumn bring resid­ual feel­ings of har­vest. I have no memory of the fields. My imme­di­ate family embraced machines and tech­nol­ogy, aban­don­ing the farm. I often reflect, how­ever, on the lists of names that come into my pos­ses­sion. For instance, I have dreamed into the names of those descen­dants of the first par­ents. The book of Gen­e­sis is where the records of birth and death begin in the Protes­tant line I hap­pened upon by birth. The first ones are there by name alone. I often have imag­ined into spaces between the words of those great lists lead­ing through­out the Old Tes­ta­ment to the birth of Christ. For hours as a child I would dream into a small bible with pic­tures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abra­ham and Isaac. I do not know why that boy shares any­thing with me still. So much of the world seeks the fail­ure of his vision and intim­i­dates him into non­be­ing. He is no more “me” than I am any of those others recorded by per­sis­tence in the family archives. It is only with great strug­gle that I come to see my image, or my name, among those others, not because I dread the com­pany of the dead, but because I have not been often enough vig­i­lant to what hovers just beyond reach of living habit.