Forest

The command to be biologically productive orients us to ascend through an imagined homogenous time, but in the labyrinth each moment contains every past moment, growing outward like rings as the past echoes internally like video feedback.

Billy Burkhalter, great-grandchild of Dionysius, threw his voice into the forest, to the delight and confusion of all the children. Was it Billy speaking or was it the forest? Whose voice is here?

The dungeon built from data asserts its own authority and solidity, but relics, carried by players through the maze of Grotto, provide slippages and portals from one time and person to another. Ahmed continues to play with the connotations of words in describing a sort of queer pathfinding that cuts through the assertion of straight genealogical hallways—

Queer orientations are those that put within reach bodies that have been made unreachable by the lines of conventional genealogy. Queer orientations might be those that don’t line up, which by seeing the world “slantwise” allow other objects to come into view. It is no accident that queer orientations have been described by Foucault and others as orientations that follow a diagonal line, which cut across “slantwise” the vertical and horizontal lines of conventional genealogy, perhaps even challenging the “becoming vertical” of ordinary perception. (Ahmed 2006)

Akenson reminds us that genealogies are narratives that serve cultural desires. In the case of cultures that emphasize patrilineal lines, they may even be fictional narratives, as paternity can only be established for certain very recently. In the case of the Latter Day Saints, the narrative of genealogy follows a very strict grammar. It’s a patriarchal structuring of humanity that disappears social arrangements that don’t fit within it. While Ahmed’s work focuses on the ways in which queer experiences are excluded from dominant cultural narratives, Akenson’s book explores how family histories are often constructed to support preconceived notions about identity and heritage.

In stepping through the architecture of my family dungeon, I located rooms that corresponded to two of my mother’s cousins. The Burkhalter brothers were two gay boys, one of whom was an amateur ventriloquist (who amazed the family children by throwing his voice into the nearby woods). Their father was physically abusive and dominated their immediate family. My mother remembers the time her Aunt broke down the Burkhalters’ door and struck the father in defense of the boys, throwing the house into turmoil. The genealogy data that I have access to gives me only the driest impression of them— that they lived and died, one young. It doesn’t tell me that one of the brothers died by his own hand, just that he served in the Korean-American War. It tells me that the surviving brother married, had children and divorced. It’s only through a surprisingly candid obituary that I can see that the longest-lived of the two brothers came out as a gay man late in life, and his funeral was attended by his partner of many years. “I remember at a family funeral he came up to me, smiling,” my mother said of her cousin, “and he took my hand and asked, ‘Sheryll, have you had a good life?’ ” Reading a name from the obituary, I inscribe a room in the database for this partner, and a relic traces a slantwise path between the pair. ¹

1. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.