This apology of decay
The nastiness of history.
The nightmare always associated with
Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man.
So of course
the schools now avoid all the bad news by packaging history up as problems, pro
and con, possible solutions… sometimes they call in over-looked voices,
witnesses but always contaminated with the myth of critical thinking and the
so-called uncovering the secret suppressed history and the inevitable
conspiracy of some sort is urged into being so as to nudge nudge their students into the know…
An absence
of any sense of chronological history sticks young people and most people in a
constant present so that they can be shaped by whatever is the current
powers-to-be… to be set in a present moment when to have any thoughts of the
past is to be forbidden under the pain of being thought old-fashioned, out of
touch… so yes it was boring for teachers to listen to students reciting the
list of presidents, the monarchs of England, the wars of the various
countries… but not boring for a young
person as he or she would always be aware that whoever is the current rascal in
charge is just that… the current one, no better and no worse than what has gone
before… and so the inevitable hesitation before responding to the well crafted
campaigns to sway, to give up thinking, to give up memory…
Now, the sad
reality constant disillusion to be replaced by a fake revival of some recent
fashion while waiting for the next “new” enthusiasm
Which might
all be throat clearing for the pleasures of reading the new Library of America: THE WAR OF 1812 Writings from America’s Second War of
Independence. You might know which one: the Battle of New Orleans and Andrew
Jackson’s victory over the British after the treaty of peace had been signed…
yeah, the writing of the Star Spangled Banner… some naval battles… and as Bob
Dylan sings in his song “Narrow Way” on
his latest CD: Ever since the British
burned the White House down…
Of course
the Library of America has been doing some strategic planning of its own: the really complex wars, the nastiest
with still unsettled consequences: the
Mexican American War, the Spanish American War, the Korean War and the First
World War…
Just
reciting the list: I leave out the more
than a hundred years war against the Indians…
allow me the old-fashioned word… that war which could never be resolved
as to being either a simple war of conquest or of extermination.. but a hundred
years war… that was something that happened in Europe…yet it continues on today, of course
Such are the
thoughts and why these LOA books are so important..
But the
nightmare… Hannah Green in her
singularly visionary book THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE has a theme: the history of
Ohio and while she is now herself long gone I can imagine sharing with her this
description of the aftermath of a battle between the Americans, the English and
their Indian allies. A sixteen year old
Englishman John Richardson reporting
later in life on what he saw in an Indian village: …were to be seen the
scalps of the slain drying in the sun, stained on the fleshy side with
vermilion dyes, and dangling in air they hung suspended from the poles to which
they were attached together with hoops of various sizes, on which were
stretched portions of human skin taken from various parts of the body, principally
the hand and foot, and yet covered with the nails of those parts, while scattered
along the ground were visible the members from which they had been separated
and serving as nutriment to the wolf-dogs by which the savages are accompanied…
stopping at the entrance of a tent occupied by a part of the Minoumini tribe we
observed them seated round a large fire, over which was suspended a kettle
containing their meal. Each warrior had
a piece of string hanging over the edge of the vessel and to this was suspended
a food, which it will be presumed we heard not without loathing, consisted of part
of an American… Any expression of our feelings as we declined the invitation
they gave us to join in their repast, would have been resented by the Indians
without much ceremony.
Later in
that year the same Richardson saw: A
tall powerful man--- a chief whom I well
knew… when within twelve or fifteen
paces of the rifleman, he raised and
threw his tomahawk, and with such precision and force that it immediately
opened the skull, and extended him motionless on the earth. Laying down his rifle, he drew forth his
knife, and after having removed the hatchet from the brain, proceeded to make a
circular incision throughout the scalp.
This done, he grasped the bloody instrument between his teeth and
placing his knees on the back of the victim, while at the same times he
fastened his fingers in the hair, the scalp was torn off without much apparent
difficulty and thrust, still bleeding, into his bosom. The warrior then arose, and after having
wiped his knife on the clothes of the unhappy man returned it to its sheath,
grasping at the same time the arms he had abandoned, and hastening to rejoin
his comrades. All this was the work of a
few minutes.
And here is
Shadrach Byfield--- what a wonderful Biblical name---Shadrach-- how few are the
names now available in the current moment of this blog… describes the result of
being wounded at the age 25: After
a few days our doctor informed me that my arm must be taken off, as
mortification had taken place. I consented and asked one of my comrades who has
lately gone through a like operation: “Bill, how is to have an arm taken
off?” He replied, “Thee woo’t know, when
it’s done.” They prepared to blind me,
and had men to hold me, but I told them there was no need of that. The operation was tedious and painful, but I
was enabled to bear it pretty well. I
had it dressed, and went to bed. They
brought me some mulled wine and I drank it.
I was then informed that the orderly had thrown my hand to the dung
heap. I arose, went to him and felt a
disposition to strike him., My hand was taken up and a few boards nailed
together for a coffin, my hand was put into it and buried on the ramparts. The stump of my arm soon healed and three
days after I was able to play a game of fives for a quart of rum.
But that
sort of glib comment of Stephen’s.. a comment I have known, chewed upon, used
and heard used: John Lukacs writes about
Gyula Krudy, He knew something that the
psychiatrists of this century do not yet know, which is that on our dreams we
really don’t think differently, we merely remember differently.
And the last selection in the book is
a memoir of the life of an American prisoner in Dartmoor. It is said 20,000 Americans were held as
prisoners. Of course there were
incidents and Lewis Peter Clover recounts the result of one of those incidents
when their English guards turned on the prisoners: On the floor opposite
where I messed lay a handsome youth, of about fifteen years of age stiff, and
sold as marble, pierced through the heart by a bayonet. A few yards farther on, lay another: a ball
had entered his forehead, and passed out at the back of his head. I examined the spot the next morning and saw
part of his brains which had been dashed against the wall nearly opposite the
prison door. Among the wounded… another had a most miraculous escape with his
life; a musket ball had passed through his mouth from side to side, taking out
nearly the whole of his teeth. I saw him
after he had go well: he could take no food except with a spoon.
A PROPOSAL
From ABC OF READING
by Ezra Pound: Teaching. The problem of
education. If I could acquire a PhD, a
fancy sober sounding name for a corporation, the ability to say what follows in
say 200 pages I’d be a millionaire, as now:
The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognizes his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an
hour.
France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership
of Europe when their academic period was cut down to forty minutes.
I also have lectured.
The lecturer’s first problem is to have enough words to fill forty or
sixty minutes. The professor is paid for
his time, his results are almost impossible to estimate.
The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in
a very few words. The economic problem
of the teacher (of violin or of language or anything else) is how to string it
out so as to be paid for more lessons.
This apology of decay is from Gottfried Benn… that the
prose books of Gottfried Benn are not available in English is a constant proof
of the sheer incompetence of all these presses devoted to translation and the
same goes for their failure to translate the famous three pamphlets of Celine…
which remain un-translated for entirely different reasons as does the continued
failure to translate the Diaries of Ernst Junger and his various collections of
essays…
