Lydia Moyer

When we saw this piece in class, I got something entirely different out of it. You can view it again for yourself on youtube. Just search for "Lydia Moyer" and its entitled "Hyacinth." Here I've posted a line from the dialogue and then my response.

“We didn’t know how to find it, and didn’t know how to get there on our own…paid a local man to take us out”

Settlers who came to the New World for “gold, glory, and God” often relied on the knowledge of the indigenous people for survival. Assuming they didn’t slaughter all the natives at first sight, of course.

“In the pictures they’re in piles, stained jeans, dark arms entwined…”

This refers to the mass slaughter of many natives from the Aztecs to the Cherokee Trail of Tears. However, I also took it as a premonition of the end of America, which I refer to later on.

“But everything that is left has disappeared now, absorbed back into the jungle…there are no placeholders, wooden walkways, the pavilions…..

This is nature taking back the substance of the bodies and buildings and they decompose.

“only memory marks the location”

Think of how many ancient people are left only in our history books and museums. Would our own end be any different?

“If we tried to find it all over again, I wonder if we’d end up somewhere entirely different”

Could the expansion into the “New World” ever happen again? Remember that it happened before the settlers. Whether we’re talking the ancestors of the Native Americans or Leif Ericson, our beloved Columbus was not the first. Suppose someday history repeats and colonization happens again. Could there ever be another United States of America?

“How exciting it all must have been at first. A small group set out to homestead on jungle frontiers.”

The discovery and colonization of the Americas completely shook the worldview of Europe at the time. Also notice the imagery of all different races. Eventually the “mixing bowl” started to churn.

“They grew their own vegetables, built their own houses, raised their children together”

And of course this is how the early settlers would have lived.

“For a long time, people still claimed you could find the vats where they mixed the poison.”

Perhaps the poison of this country is greed?

“The fruit trees are there though, they still yield fruit if you come at the right time of the year”

The fruit trees are the families descendent from those original settlers. The “right time of year” can refer to how we control the timing of reproduction now.

“The end was so thorough that even the animals in homemade cages were not spared. The only creatures that lived were those that escaped into the cover of the wilderness”

We now have the technology for weapons of mass destruction. Entire populations could really be incinerated. A lot of people, however, think our real demise will be the destruction of the environment. The only way to prevent this apocalypse would be to learn to live in harmony with the wilderness and adopt a way of life closer to how the Native Americans lived. But now they aren’t around to teach us. And as for “caged animals”, many of our pets would not survive without us because we’ve breed them to be dependent on human care.

“There was one woman though who slept through it all. She was one of what they called their seniors. She woke up the next morning, not so much alone as the only one living”

“Sleeping through it all” can be interpreted as a refusal to participate in the destructive habits of our society.

“…an American who visits the place on a regular basis. He wants to build a marble monument with the names of everyone who died etched into it. Apparently it’s been difficult though, they never identified a lot of people. They’re buried in a mass grave in CA.”

Monuments are often built to commemorate historical events or people. Our own society may someday only be memory in history books, museums, and monuments. Most of the population would be completely forgotten. And CA was the final frontier for this country.

“There’s a picture taken in the days after the end before they moved anything or anyone of two (birds) preening on a fence above the bodies…”