Daybook from Sheep Meadow

by Peter Dimock

  c: The intuition of a universal mutual intelligibility and therefore of a potentially universal historical justice implicit in the fact of the natural human language faculty.

  a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; | c,a,b;

  a,b,c,c; | a,b,b,c; | a,a,b,c; | c,a,b,b; | c,a,a,b; | c,c,a,b; | b,c,a,a; | b,c,c,a; | b,b,c,a; | a,b,c,c; | a,b,b,c;

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  August 6, 2010 (cont.)

  [Copied in Tallis’s handwriting from American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, edited by Theodore Dwight Weld (1839)]:

  —“The sufferings are not only innumerable, they are indescribable…. I cannot describe the daily, hourly, ceaseless torture, endured by the heart that is constantly trampled under the foot of despotic power. It mocks all power of language. Who can describe the anguish of that mind which feels itself impaled upon the iron of arbitrary power—its living, writhing, helpless victim! every human susceptibility tortured, its sympathies torn, and stung, and bleeding—always feeling the death-weapon in its heart, and yet not so deep as to kill that humanity which is made the curse of its existence.” [Angelina Grimké, p.57]

  “There can be therefore no offence against the state for a mere beating of a slave, unaccompanied by any circumstances of cruelty, or an attempt to kill and murder. The peace of the state is not thereby broken; for a slave is not generally regarded as legally capable of being within the peace of the state. He is not a citizen and is not in that character entitled to her protection.” [American Slavery as It Is, p.146]

  01:05

  SENSOR OPERATOR: That truck would make a beautiful target. OK, that’s a Chevy Suburban.

  PILOT: Yeah.

  SENSOR OPERATOR: Yeah.

  01:07

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Screener said at least one child near SUV.

  I spent eleven winters, between the years 1824 and 1835, in the state of North Carolina, mostly in the vicinity of Wilmington; and four out of the eleven on the estate of Mr. John Swan, five or six miles from that place. There were on his plantation about seventy slaves, male and female.

  The fourth step of spiritual ascent is obedience: “The robber was astounded by the voice of the superior coming from the sanctuary. (He swore afterwards that he thought he heard thunder and not a human voice.) At once he fell on his face and he trembled and shook with fear. While he lay on the ground, moistening the floor with his tears, the marvelous healer turned to him, trying everything so as to save him and to give everyone else an example of salvation and true humility. Before all, he exhorted him to describe in detail everything he had done. Terrified, the robber confessed all, sins of the flesh, natural and unnatural, with humans and with beasts; poisonings, murders, and many other deeds too awful to hear or to set down on paper. Everyone was horrified. But when he had finished his confession, the superior allowed him to be given the habit at once and to be included in the ranks of the brethren.” (John Climacus)

  But does not the experience of war refute eschatology, as it refutes morality? Have we not begun by acknowledging the irrefutable evidence of totality?

  To tell the truth, ever since eschatology has opposed peace to war the evidence of war has been maintained in an essentially hypocritical civilization, that is, attached both to the True and to the Good, henceforth antagonistic. It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets.

  (Emmanuel Levinas)

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  September 30, 2015

  —A beginning of sense: a running forward and backward as if he were in a battle. A disciplined narrative of the possible rhythms of permanence has gone missing. A disciple of finance said that it could be defined as “time and the right to choose to have value.” How is this statement of value to be made into democracy? Unless historical justice is now funded—explicitly tied to making the past and the present whole in specified relation to absolute loss, there can be no way to distinguish democracy from a managed consent to the status quo. (Robert Meister)

  Christopher told me yesterday afternoon that the day before she died, in May of 1998, our mother told him that Roger Moreland announced drunkenly at a party in the late spring of 1964 that he had slept with his daughters, with both Sari and her sister, when they were children, as young as nine or ten. Christopher had not believed her. He thought she was hallucinating. It was true that she was under the influence of the morphine she administered to herself freely from a pump to relieve the pain from the cancer raging in her spine. There had been other instances during those last days when she spoke and laughed as if addressing and responding to persons in the room present only to her. I had to tell him that I knew that the events of the party and Sari’s father’s confession were true—that, at the age of fourteen, I had overheard the adults who had been there talking animatedly about it several times in the course of a few days. Christopher was away at music camp. I always let myself believe somehow that Christopher knew what had happened that evening. I couldn’t be the one to tell him.

  What did our mother not want lost with her death by telling Christopher this history at the very end? The truth that we belonged to a class whose responsibility for our acts lacked adequate language, adequate speech? That impunity was a legacy neither she nor we had any business believing we could honorably survive? That the truth of her complicity—in the crime of refusing to help or address the harm done to two children—needed to be said out loud as a way to open the way for registering the infinite value of all lives.

  CHAPTER 3

  On Burdick’s Hill

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON October 30, 2010

  —This light, this wealth, this entitled ecstasy—too intense to value…. The wind, when it comes, will counsel caution and bring a plague. Your armies are scattered. Bright metal reflecting a child’s perfect will. We caused this to happen. Soon there will be no time in which to remember it—no place from which to know the perfection of its logic as a sweetness of mind. [I.1; II.3; III.2a–2b; IV.1; V.3]

  I.1; Epigraph 1: As soon as thought dries up it is replaced by words. A word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal, and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such things have in magic. We begin to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone from them. (Nadezhda Mandelstam)

  II.3; Chapter 3: “On Burdick’s Hill”

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  In the 2015 letter to me that Tallis left inside one of the boxes holding his notebooks he said that after his testimony before the committee in late April of 2010 he took it upon himself to invite those he “deemed it essential to confront” to meet with him in person on Burdick’s Hill in Central Park, overlooking Sheep Meadow. There is a bench there, beloved by bird watchers, that he liked, in good weather, to occupy from early morning to mid or even late afternoon when he was free. During the first months of the sabbatical leave he took after he testified in Washington, Tallis stayed with me in New York and visited Burdick’s Hill almost every day. In the letter he said he made appointments through the fall of 2010 with seven people, including Cary and me, to meet with him there individually over the course of several weeks but that none of us had ever showed up at the agreed upon time. The people he said he had summoned were Daryl Carlyle, the Democratic chairman from Rhode Island of the House subcommittee hearing on drones (whom Tallis had known in college and who had invited him to testify); Roger Moreland; Sari Moreland; Sari’s boyfriend, Gilliam Kell; Cora Mason; Cary; and me. Now that I have learned to practice his method myself, I believe that by the fall of 2015 Tallis had confused his invention and meditative practice of his method with actual conversations with significant others. I remember the sometimes lost, affectless drone of his voice during that period in 2010 when
he stayed with me. It was then I also began to notice his increasingly prolonged intervals of agitated silence. It was as if his internal experience of his self’s continuity were losing touch with some way to trust a general common ground of mutual engagement. In the autograph manuscript version of the notebook entry for October 30, 2010, the following words after the template marking of [I.1; II.3; III.2a–2b; IV.1; V.3] have been crossed out: “This method, this moment, this combinatorial event instead of memory.”

  III.2a–2b; Argument by antinomy: 2a. Order is derived from public assemblies of armed men. The purpose of war is to secure the peace; the purpose of peace is to prepare for war and to win it by every means. 2b. Every culture has an origin story that contains within it a narration of the final destruction of the world. No human being who has ever lived is ever found to be missing from any of these stories.

  IV.1; A trajectory of founding literary texts of Western civilization: 1. In finem. Psalmus David, cum venit ad eum Nathan propheta, quando intravit ad Bethsabee. Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam; et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam. Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea et a peccato meo munda me. [Unto the end. A Psalm of David when the prophet Nathan came to him after he sinned with Bathsheba: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.]… 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 might be justified when thou speakest and clear when thou judgest.]

  V.3; The immediacy of Anagoge: 3. The Painted Word (the smiling, joyful recorder of Apocalypse’s happiness on Patmos, taking dictation directly from the angel standing upon a hillock): Far below, the tiny merchant ship is seen entering the harbor. It is on fire. This ship, its crew we do not see, the scudding white-capped waves, the associations that enable all meaning to be made visible—each moment now belongs to the immediate joy of all things. The artist’s patrons have paid handsomely to own this work and have placed it in the private chapel built from the new wealth that flows to them from the New World:

  These bright birds of argument—this sugared wealth of absolute possession—this commons of achieved abundance in which we refuse to choose democracy over empire.

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  As I assemble these selections I find myself increasingly adept at practicing Tallis’s method. I find my thoughts are more fluent than before. I have suddenly remembered myself on the bank of the pond in upstate New York at the age of five trying to love my grandfather and failing. I now sometimes even think I can see the war in France that still holds him, still keeps him from returning to his wife and infant son. What makes every action’s accountability to a universal peace of reciprocity seem impossible? When I was eighteen, Father told me that his father, Tallis Sr, once told him, out of the blue, that “what women have to bear is unforgiveable.” Because I have now read about the brothels in the villages and towns that were part of the battlefields of World War I, my association goes there. One for officers (marked with a blue lantern), one for the enlisted men (marked with a red one): the long lines of waiting men. How do we imagine a duration of completion that we will not regret? I now feel myself able to get from one moment to the next more easily across the distance of a father-soldier’s—two generations gone—constant rage and paralyzing fear. What transcendence—what woman’s presence—did our father feel reading Dante without translation near Naples in the fall of 1944? Why do women stay with these broken men?

  My terza rima of thought not sound (three over four) guiding my practice:

  a,b,c; | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; etc.

  a,b,c,c; | a,b,b,c; | a,a,b,c; | c,a,b,b; etc.

  The second set again:

  a: The undecidability of the word.

  b: The exterminatory productivity of neoliberal global capitalism.

  c: The intuition of a universal mutual intelligibility, convertible into democratic justice, intrinsic to the natural human language faculty.

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  October 30, 2010 (cont.)

  —Transcribed from memory: “The writer acknowledges that the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so, necessarily, for this reason—that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it is would be a work which could not be read; and all works which ever mean to give pleasure must draw a veil somewhere, or they cannot succeed.” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854))

  From American Slavery as It Is: Testimony from a Thousand Witnesses: “READER, you are empanelled as a juror to try a plain case and bring in an honest verdict. The question at issue is one both of law and fact—‘What is the actual condition of the United States?’

  “One of Mr. Turner’s cousins, was employed as overseer on a large plantation in Mississippi. On a certain morning he called the slaves together, to give some orders. While doing it, a slave came running out of his cabin, having a knife in his hand and eating his breakfast. The overseer seeing him coming with the knife, was somewhat alarmed, and instantly raised his gun and shot him dead. He said afterwards, that he believed the slave was perfectly innocent of any evil intentions, he came out hastily to hear the orders whilst eating. No notice was taken of the killing.

  “Mr. T. related the whipping habits of one of his uncles in Virginia. He was a wealthy man, had a splendid house and grounds. A tree in his front yard, was used as a whipping post. When a slave was to be punished, he would frequently invite some of his friends, have a table, cards and wine set out under the shade; he would then flog his slave a little while, and then play cards and drink with his friends, occasionally taunting the slave, giving him the privilege of confessing such and such things, at his leisure, after a while flog him again, thus keeping it up for hours or half the day, and sometimes all day. This was his habit.”

  01:07

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Screener said at least one child near SUV.

  SENSOR OPERATOR: BULL [expletive] … where?

  SENSOR OPERATOR: Send me a [expletive] still, I don’t think they have kids out at this hour, I know they’re shady but come on.

  SENSOR OPERATOR: Well, maybe a teenager but I haven’t seen anything that looked that short, granted they’re all grouped up here, but …

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: They’re reviewing …

  PILOT: Yeah, review that [expletive] … why didn’t he say possible child, why are they so quick to call [expletive] kid but not to call a [expletive] rifle?

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Two children were at the rear of the SUV.

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  I think our father, Justin, always dreamed that reading might become for everyone what it had been for him once in Italy: the end of all translation. I think he always wanted to find that moment again but lost the ability to understand the source of his own desire for such a state of consciousness. Why did he never do anything to try to help Sari—to protect her from her father, his friend and colleague? In what sense, precisely, was there “nothing anyone could do under the circumstances”? Was not my father leaving her all alone to face the same childhood violence in which his own father had failed to return to him in 1919? And why for all those years could I not discern that something had happened that endangered Sari beyond bearing? On her deathbed in 1998 my mother gave me an unnarratable duration requiring the truth of historical justice.

  “Look,” Father once said to me when I was sixteen, explaining the meaning of Inferno’s Canto 2 excitedly, “look at what Dante is saying: the moment has come for everyone to be themselves inside vernacular speech before its truth is controlled by others.” Universal thought resides in immediate de
sire’s attention. There is no distraction of interpretation except as aftermath. Vernacular speech is more noble—more deserving of being held in memory—than literary Latin, Dante said, because it is the only language we never have to be taught and constitutes the heart’s thoughtful fluency shared by children, women, and men. If only father himself had used it to bring his own father home by recognizing what had happeneed to him. My own thought now, in 2018, reading my brother’s words, is “If only someone had used their art to help a child by completing by ordinary act the movement of:

  e venni a te così com’ella volse;

  d’innanzi a quella fiera ti levai

  che del bel monte il corto andar ti tolse.

  [And so I came to you as she desired me to; / and freed you from that creature / that stole from you the short way to the beautiful mountain.]

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  October 30, 2010 (cont.)

  —A popular harrowing—I will read this phrase out loud again before too long. Imagine historical justice as something immediately possible.

  In his Divine Ascent, John Climacus says, concerning obedience (the fourth step of his spiritual manual’s ladder): “A monastery is heaven on earth, so let us tune our hearts like angels serving the Lord. It happens occasionally that those living in this heaven possess hearts of stone. Yet by means of compunction they acquire consolation so that they escape from conceit, and they lighten their labors with their tears…. I have often seen such things as these, as Job says (cf. Job 13:1), that is, souls burdened sometimes by slowness of character and sometimes by excessive eagerness. I was astounded by the variety of evil.”

  Morality will oppose politics in history and will have gone beyond the functions of prudence or the canons of the beautiful to proclaim itself unconditional and universal when the eschatology of messianic peace will have come to superpose itself upon the ontology of war.