[Artemisia] The Fossil State In Persona

[Dr. C. M. Helm-Clark Ph.D.]

> I think this off-topic discussion has gone on long enough.
> Now what would be fun would be to see if folks can write these in
> persona. What advances would you have seen between the time you were a
> child and 'today'?

Sorry Yumi, I sent off another fossil state post just a minute
before I saw your request in the the Aerie Digest.  But in 
persona?  I don't think the world moved that fast in period.
I think modern people take a certain amount of change as the
normal state of the world. I still use a paper daytimer instead
of some PDA-type gadget and they think me odd - but that was what
everyone used prior to a decade ago. We could get 2 TV stations
when I was a kid (three if it was a clear night out - then we
would pick up channel 2 in Boston).  Now I watch movies and
webcasts on my computer.  And this is normal - but it is really
abnormal when compared to the world prior to the 19th Century.

People have become blase' about the marvels of modern technology.
It's the same old same old. New is no longer novel. The fascination
with the evolution of the world around us due to technology is
a thing of days now past. The Gee-Wow articles in Popular Science
and Popular Mechanics, which used to have huge circulations compared
to today, no longer grab and enthrall the millions of kids and adults
that they used to.  Who today would even consider building their own
car or radio from scratch - but my grandfather built himself his own
car in 1907 and I built my own toilet-paper-tube-wrapped-in-copper-
wire radio as a kid. Books and magazines were once filled with how
to do stuff with the amazing new modern technology, even as recently
as the 70s, and now, other than O'Reilly's _Make_, that's all past 
now.

One of the great gulfs between us and people in the middle ages
is the a lack of understanding of what it was really like to live
in a world that was truly static.  

I know what life was like for my long neglected persona. It was
the same, day in and day out, year after year. Life's milestones
were the motions of moving through life or they were catastrophes.
Birth, First Communion, Marriage, Children, Death, Disaster: these
were what marked the passage of time.  

I suppose I could take the time to tell a persona story:

"Wann Gott schuf die Erde, Er schuf das Tuxertal aus dem Hohe Tauern 
wer wohnte ich alle meine..."

Oops, sorry about that  ;-) ...especially for the poor case endings

The first barrier to understanding my persona is that of words.
The mechanics of the language of grow up speaking has a physiological
and psychological effect on you.  German is actually quite different
than English in many ways.  I grew up saying that I liked certain
things but my persona grew up saying that certain things please her.
Note the difference between what or who acts on what or whom. There's
a certain default and passive gestalt in German phrasing that is lacking
in English, a certain acceptance as to the reality of the world acting
in part to determine your destiny in ways completely missing in modern
American English.  Now translate that back through time into the middle
ages.  German has changed far less than English has.  I can read late
medieval and early modern German easily but I struggle through Chaucer.
Even Elizabethan English is very different.  Pick up the Book of Common
Prayer where you can still read Bishop Cramner's majestic phrases in
the Rite I Mass and know how far we have traveled in word and thought...

Language is basic and it affects people more than they know.  For
example
Chinese is a tonal language.  One simple sound can be four different
words
depending on how the word is pitched while you say it.  Is it any
surprise
then that in the world of near-sung words in Mandarin and Cantonese,
there
is almost no tone deafness in the more than billion people who speak
these
two Chinese tongues? Of physiological effects that your language has on 
you, the examples of the inability of Japanese people to articulate the 
letter R and the inability of most American English speakers to
articulate
the rolling German R and aspirated "ch" are better known.  

I can not pretend to know what it might have been like to be my persona
just on the basis of language alone. But then there is her static life
too.
Since we are all theoretically at least "gentle" in the old class sense
of
that word, I imagine that my persona was the daughter of a person who
was
a Ritter or minor manor holder from the Tuxertal, an area in fief to the
von Trautson family whose bezirk seat was at Matrei, over the Tuxerjoch
(joch is a tirolean dialect word for pass) in the Brennertal (the valley
leading to the Brenner pass between the Tirol and Lombardy). Certainly,
if
my persona had lived back then, she spent much time in the Tuxertal or
Zillertal, and was perhaps sometimes fortunate enough to be visit
Innsbruck
20 miles away, to the once-yearly fair to buy finer cloth than that
made 
locally, or spices, or some exotic small thing from the Holy Land - to
be
paraded in the marriage market. No doubt my persona was married to some
other member of the local gentry and went to live at some other manor
farm
operation in the Tirol, with a perhaps a dowery of the famous (very high
milk fat content) Tux breed of cattle (a famous antique breed now near 
extinction, less than 300 left). No doubt my persona had a life of
shopping
in Innsbruck, perhaps rubbing shoulders with her betters at court, but
otherwise spent a life filled with raising a family (assuming she
survived
the high-mortality profession of bearing children) and looking at a lot
of
sheep, cows, chamois and pooftah nobles from court looking for a few
days of
hunting in the mountains.  The frequent visits to Maxmillian to the
Tuxertal
to go hunting and the advent of the butter trade into Innsbruck were
probably
the biggest things to happen in Tux between the coming the Romans and
the
arrival of the railroad.

The founding of Tux is lost in obscurity but from its name and from
archeological
finds of Roman artifacts and coins, Tux was clearly once a Roman
settlement of
the early empire, conjecturally a garrison station guarding the high
pass of the
Tuxerjoch between the main highway of the Brennertal and what is now the
SudTirol
subdistrict of the modern Austrian Tirol.  Tux itself first shows up in
records
of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne's grandsons in 899. In the
middle ages
is was known mostly for dairy farming and the quality of its chamois
hunters. It was
a seven mile walk to church down the Tuxertal to the Zillertal.  It was
a six mile
climb over the Tuxerjoch, however, to be buried in the nearest
consecrated graveyard.  Don't ask me why cause I don't know.

Any time prior to the reign of the Emperor Maxmillian, life would have
looked amazingly the same. There was the pass to guard and there were
cows.
There were chamois to hunt. There were sheep, lots of sheep, and lots of
wool
to card and spin and weave.  Day in and day out, people would tend the
flocks
and herds, go hunting, milk the livestock, trade dairy products for
barley grown
lower down, the pass clear, go to church.  It wasn't until the rise of
Hapsburgs 
and the Hapsburg rotation between various crown cities that things
changed in Tux.
The frequent residence of Hapsburg family members in Innsbruck turned
the little
villages of the Tirol into dairy farmer heaven.  The folks of the
Tuxertal entered 
the growing market economy by making butter, packing it in salt in small
tubs, 
strapping the tubs to wooden external frame backpacks (you can see
surviving
examples in the Volkskunstmuseum in Innsbruck) and hiking that butter
into the 
boomtown of Emperor Maxmillian's Innsbruck to meet the demand of
supplying the 
Hapsburg court. It was a dangerous hike up the Tuxerjoch and down into
Matrei, 
10 miles.  Then the butter went by cart from Matrei 10 miles into
Innsbruck. The
butter trade hiked into Matrei lasted until the first train line into
the Zillertal,
whose terminus was a mere 4 miles down the valley with no passes in the
way.

The Emperor Maxmillian was big into hunting and the Tuxertal was one of
his preferred
hunting grounds. The butter hikers of Tux were also known for their
hunter guide
skills and local lore has it that Maxmillian tried to hire into his
retinue the
guides from the Tuxertal by bribing their wives with a lot of money -
but it didn't
work. As the story goes, when you live in Tux, what is there to spend
that much
money on...?

Yep, I think a big change in the booming village of Tux might be along
the lines
of the arrival of a new butter churn...

So for all of you who are in on the cow jokes that float around my
house, it seems
somehow malapropos that my persona of Therasia von Tux grew up in a
place famous for
being a cow town... 

ttfn
the owner Therasia von Tux's persona