Daybook from Sheep Meadow

by Peter Dimock

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  “The idea of being overflowing history makes possible existents [étants] both involved in being and personal, called upon to answer at their trial and consequently already adult—but, for that very reason, existents that can speak rather than lending their lips to an anonymous utterance of history. Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality.” (Emmanuel Levinas).

  The overwhelming accumulation of history that gets lived never gets told. But it may always get said in ways that have yet to be accurately interpreted. The right words are never missing. This, I conclude, is the central argument of Tallis’s notebooks. But interpretations that would allow the words to inhabit a peaceful coherence lack agreement. The immediacy of historical justice eludes us as a practiced duration of thought.

  The afternoon before my mother died in the spring of 1998 at the age of eighty-two, she told me something about Sari that her manner of speaking insisted I needed to know. It was as if she had waited for the last possible moment to tell me. We were alone in the hospice-care room of her nursing home. She had always been aware of my childhood love for Sari. She was high on the morphine that she administered to herself from a pump she controlled to keep at bay the pain of lung cancer, which had spread to her spine. Out of nowhere she started to speak of an incident that had occurred when Sari and I were fourteen. She could still hear, she suddenly said, the sound of Sari’s father’s voice (Roger Moreland, a professor of literature at the college) boasting during a drunken, intimate, late-night party that he had slept with both his daughters when they were children. He did it, my mother said he explained, to prove the transcendence available to someone who truly practiced the aesthetics of ecstasy. “Everyone,” she said he insisted, “had benefited.” She said she could remember his words as if he were still speaking them aloud in the room. The sensorium, he claimed, offers ecstasy as a perfected continuity to the cultivated sensibility. His acts, he said, proved that consciousness was intended to move “from peak to peak with no descent into the troughs of ordinariness.”

  I thought my mother was hallucinating—that what she was articulating was a fragment from an unguarded fantasy created by her mind in its last disintegrating moments. The violence of the desecration of which she spoke so calmly and directly was not interpretable, I decided, even as I was hearing it—by me or by anyone else.

  I did not tell anyone what my mother had said for seventeen years. But then in 2015, Sari sent me, after her father and mother had both died, a photograph taken of my mother and her father sitting together on a couch holding drinks. The photograph seemed to have been taken in the early 1970s. The expression on my mother’s face immediately made me recall her words the day before she died. Underneath her expression’s resigned, tentative, and pleading engagement with the camera, I saw a rage of aversion. Her look seemed to betray a hatred of helpless self-doubting, and a yearning for a speech for a true history she lacked the confidence to imagine as her own. The camera seemed to have captured a silence, made from sitting next to this man that forced her to be absent from herself everywhere.

  It was after seeing this photograph, that I spoke to Tallis, seven months before he committed himself to Lakehill Psychiatric Center. I asked him if our mother had ever said anything to him about Sari’s father’s drunken confession. “No,” he said, “but I overheard the adults who had been at the party talking about it for days afterward.” (It was then that I realized that the party had happened in June of 1964, early in the summer I was away from home at music camp.) Tallis and I were fourteen.

  Tallis has known the truth of the history my mother told me for over fifty years but has never spoken of it to me. This fact transfigures me. No adult who was at that party—including my father, my mother, and Sari’s mother—as far as I know, ever did anything to try to help either child. An unsurvivable impunity of respectability held—and continues to hold—sway.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sworn Testimony Is Direct Evidence

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON July 14, 2010

  —Henceforth meditations on historical justice will require the frequent recitation from memory of the following formal definition of language: “Language is a combinatorial system capable of generating an unbounded number of creative expressions interpretable at two interfaces: the cognitive/intentional and the sensorimotor (roughly, thought and sound).” The success of the American state in creating democracy depends upon the exercise of the right of revolution undertaken to accomplish the self-evident truths of equality to be enjoyed and practiced through the exercise of the universal equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Surely historical justice consists in getting from one moment to the next inside the enjoyment of these events narrated according to the principles (and from an embodied point of view) of an ordinary shared duration from which no one is excluded and from which no one is ever found to be missing. The following is what I said, reading directly from the sworn testimony of Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert on the legal doctrine of just war, in my own sworn testimony on April 28th before the House committee hearing on the legality of the US use of unmanned armed drones for targeted assassination beyond a battlefield: Outside of war or an armed conflict, everyone is a civilian when it comes to the use of lethal force. The combatant’s privilege to kill on the battlefield without being charged with a crime applies inside an armed conflict and not outside. Armed conflicts cannot be created on paper, in a legal memo that then translates into the right to kill as if you were on a real battlefield.

  [I.3; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.1; V1]

  I. 3; Epigraph 3: What matters in poetry is only the understanding that brings it about. (Osip Mandelstam)

  II. 2; Chapter 2: “On August 21, 1791, at the Age of Six, John James Audubon Dreams of Looking Up in Saint-Domingue in Couëron, France, near Nantes”

  III. 2a–2b; Argument by antinomy: 2a. Order is derived from public assemblies of armed men; the object of war is to secure the peace; the object of peace is to foresee war and to win it by every means. 2b. Every society tells itself an origin story that contains a narrative of the ending of the world. No one who has ever lived is ever found to be missing from a single one of these stories.

  IV.1; A trajectory of founding texts of Western civilization: 1. Psalm 51, King David’s confession of guilt: Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci; ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum iudicaris. (Against thee, and thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.)

  V.1; The immediacy of Anagoge: 1. St. Michael at the head of the armies of three religions on the last day. His approach is first evident in the violence of the wind tossing the tops of the trees bordering Sheep Meadow.

  •

  EDITOR’S PERSONAL NOTE (CRM)

  Beneath this entry, Tallis has hand-copied (with errors as if transcribing from memory) the following passage from Theodore Dwight Weld’s introduction to his American Slavery as It Is (1839):

  “The foregoing declarations … are not haphazard assertions, nor the exaggerations of fiction conjured up to carry a point; nor are they the rhapsodies of enthusiasm, nor crude conclusions, jumped at by hasty and imperfect investigation nor the aimless outpourings either of sympathy or poetry; but they are proclamations of deliberate, well weighed convictions, produced by accumulations of proof, by affirmations and affidavits, by written testimonies and statements of a cloud of witnesses who speak what they know and testify what they have seen, and all these impregnably fortified by proofs innumerable, in the relation of the slaveholder to his slave, the nature of arbitrary power, and the nature and history of man. Between the larger divisions of the work, brief
personal narratives will be inserted, containing a mass of facts and testimony, both general and specific.”

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  I write: “Confession: while assembling these entries in July of 2019, I have come to the hardest part. In the midst of a broken going on being, I have been reading my brother’s notebooks as if they could save me. Rather than give in to doubt I have been pursuing his peace made from historical justice as an available duration and recruiting others for my comfort and peace of mind. Memorization and its associations have produced durations that feel momentarily valuable—as if there were a duration of completion without regret; a duration that suspended—as if it could be dissolved—this present interval between rage and paralyzing fear.

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON July 14, 2010 (cont.)

  (Hand-copied by Tallis from American Slavery as It Is (1839))

  —“Narrative of Mr. Caulkins: The scenes that I have witnessed are enough to harrow up the soul; but could the slave be permitted to tell the story of his sufferings, which no white man, not linked with slavery, is allowed to know, the land would vomit out the horrible system, slaveholders and all, if they would not unclinch their grasp upon their defenceless victims. [p. 11]

  Testimony of Mr. William Poe:

  “In traveling, one day, from Petersburg to Richmond, Virginia, I heard cries of distress at a distance, on the road. I rode up, and found two white men, beating a slave. One of them had hold of a rope, which was passed under the bottom of a fence; the other end was fastened around the neck of the slave, who was thrown flat on the ground, on his face, with his back bared. The other was beating him furiously with a large hickory.” [p.26]

  From the transcript of a drone attack in Afghanistan in the early morning hours of February 20, 2010, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request:

  “DRONE PILOT: Can you zoom in a little bit, man, let ’em take a look?

  SENSOR OPERATOR: At least four in the back of the pickup.”

  From the introduction to The Divine Ascent by John Climacus, written about 650 CE, a work the renowned scholar Peter Brown argues “marks the end of late antiquity”:

  “The miraculous virtues of detachment: Who in the outside world has worked wonders, raised the dead, expelled demons? No one. Such deeds are done by monks. It is their reward. People in secular life cannot do these things for, if they could, what then would be the point of ascetic practice and the solitary life?”

  In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and in its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn, war is produced as the pure experience of pure being. The ontological event that takes form in this black light is a casting into movement of beings hitherto anchored in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which there is no escape. The trial by force is the test of the real.

  (Emmanuel Levinas)

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON October 11, 2010

  —Waiting for the arrival of St. Michael: lightly, lightly does it. This is the way it was always going to end. With this violence. With this grace. Don’t say the .30-caliber bullets the gunships use are alien. There is video of the event. This mechanical wind—its noise. Your pleasure—your commitment to the scene—contributes verisimilitude. Was this a battle? Was this the boy reading—dreaming himself—into a heroic murder scene? The sun’s warmth is contagious and full of lust. [I.4; II.4; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.3]

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  I hope the reader will have begun to be able to read the template notation without assistance. I will continue to provide shorthand reminders of Tallis’s memorized texts, whose full versions can be found starting on page 131.

  I. 4; Epigraph 4: 709 Hard Year. Sir Gottfried died. (Annals of St. Gall)

  II. 4; Chapter 4: “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970”

  III.1; Argument by antinomy: 1a. We are social all the way down; 1b. By far the greatest use of language is for thought and not communication, despite virtual dogma to the contrary. (Noam Chomsky)

  IV. 1; A trajectory of texts: Psalm 51

  “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

  Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.”

  V. 3; The Immediacy of Anogoge (three scenes from Sheep Meadow): 3. St. John on Patmos or The Painted Word

  CHAPTER 2

  On August 21, 1791, at the Age of Six, John James Audubon Dreams of Looking up in Saint-Domingue in Couëron, France, near Nantes

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON August 6, 2010

  —A tangled darkness has taken over the light in the former openness of the neighbor’s fields. His abandoned farm expects no future—no moment of remembrance. Brightly colored birds fly and sing. Doesn’t every child who has loved a parent attempt to do this: inhabit a “hermetic enchantment as a young hero within the timeless”—“establish a nunc stans (to use a formula of the scholastics) to embody the word’s aim to be that which it speaks, forgetting the condition of life as a condition of narration—throwing overboard all the god-conditioned forms of human knowledge”? (Thomas Mann) [I.3; II.2; III.3a-3b; IV.3; V.2]

  I.3; Epigraph 3: What matters in poetry is only the understanding that brings it about. Imagine something intelligible, grasped, wrested from obscurity, in a language voluntarily and willingly forgotten immediately after the act of intellection and realization is completed. Poetry is not a part of nature, not even its best or choicest part, let alone a reflection of it—this would make a mockery of the axioms of identity; rather, poetry establishes itself with astonishing independence in a new extra-spatial field of action, not so much narrating as acting out in nature by means of its arsenal of devices, commonly known as tropes.

  (Osip Mandelstam)

  II. 2; Chapter 2: “On August 21, 1791, at the Age of Six, John James Audubon Dreams of Looking Up in Saint-Domingue in Couëron, France, near Nantes.” Bankrupt in 1819, Audubon sells two slaves in New Orleans. He has traveled with them for two weeks in a skiff down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Henderson, Kentucky. He must procure money to repay his debts. One of the slaves he sells may have been the servant who saved his life when he fell into quicksand while shooting birds. Audubon never wrote a word about any of these events. We know them now only indirectly from public records.

  III. 3a–3b; Argument by antinomy: 3a. Our present is narrated to us as a state of emergency in which order itself is at risk. The exercise of the unlimited violence of state power has become the self-evidence of its legitimacy. The appeal to the argument of “self-defense” to justify impunity (as in the use beyond the battlefield by the most powerful state in the world of unmanned lethal weapons of war against targeted individuals with attendant collateral civilian damage) is a non sequitur. 3b. Fundamental cultural change occurs when poets turn themselves into instruments for the metamorphosis of literary time—the withholding and unfolding of the literary time the rest of us have ceased to hear but which nevertheless gets incessantly cited to us as the basis of so-called “cultural structures.”

  (Osip Mandelstam)

  IV.3; A trajectory of founding texts of Western civilization: 3. “The piles of heads disappear in the dis-tance; / I am diminished there. / No one remembers my name, / but in the rustle of pages and the sound of children’s games, / I shall return to say: / “the sun!” (Fragment from Osip Mandelstam’s “Ode to Stalin”)

  IV.2; The immediacy of Anagoge (three scenes from Sheep Meadow): 2. St. Anthony’s gaze: You can’t describe it: Sari’s beauty. In the painting depicting the saint’s temptations, these signs of evil and of many pleasures; these demons
under the tree—this violence, this fragmentation—this brokenness in all its common uninterpretable signification. Reading and writing won’t save you—not then, not now. Just letters on a page like the other rendered details—God’s word. The saint looks up from the book he holds to return your gaze. The only scripture to be deciphered now—in this moment (the kindness in his eyes implies)—is the human heart. “He could not endure to learn letters, not caring to associate with other boys. All his desire was, as it is written of Jacob, to live a plain man at home.” (Athanasius) After his own battles with demons alone in his cell, Anthony was able to cure hallucinations and the pains of ergotism: St. Anthony’s fire. All his happiness.

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  I have not yet recorded my own response to this entry using my brother’s method. I have, however, applied to it the following terza rima of thought not sound, arranged in the usual pattern (three over four):

  a: The undecidability of the word.

  b: The exterminatory productivity of global capitalism.