by Peter Dimock
You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.
To force me to do these things and then participate in the ensuing coverup is more than any government has the right to demand. Then, the same government has turned around and abandoned me. They offer no help, and actively block the pursuit of gaining outside help via their corrupt agents at the DEA. Any blame rests with them….
Since then, I have tried to fill the void. I tried to move into a position of greater power and influence to try and right some of the wrongs. I deployed again, where I put a huge emphasis on saving lives. The fact of the matter, though, is that any new lives saved do not replace those who were murdered. It is an exercise in futility.
Then, I pursued replacing destruction with creation. For a time this provided a distraction, but it could not last. The fact is that any kind of ordinary life is an insult to those who died at my hand. How can I possibly go around like everyone else while the widows and orphans I created continue to struggle? If they could see me sitting here in suburbia, in my comfortable home working on some music project they would be outraged, and rightfully so.
I thought perhaps I could make some headway with this film project, maybe even directly appealing to those I had wronged and exposing a greater truth, but that is also now being taken away from me. I fear that, just as with everything else that requires the involvement of people who can not understand by virtue of never having been there, it is going to fall apart as careers get in the way.
The last thought that has occurred to me is one of some kind of final mission. It is true that I have found that I am capable of finding some kind of reprieve by doing things that are worthwhile on the scale of life and death. While it is a nice thought to consider doing some good with my skills, experience, and killer instinct, the truth is that it isn’t realistic. First, there are the logistics of financing and equipping my own operation, then there is the near certainty of a grisly death, international incidents, and being branded a terrorist in the media that would follow. What is really stopping me, though, is that I simply am too sick to be effective in the field anymore. That, too, has been taken from me.
Thus, I am left with basically nothing. Too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be at war. Abandoned by those who would take the easy route, and a liability to those who stick it out—and thus deserve better. So you see, not only am I better off dead, but the world is better without me in it.
This is what brought me to my actual final mission. Not suicide, but a mercy killing. I know how to kill, and I know how to do it so that there is no pain whatsoever. It was quick, and I did not suffer. And above all, now I am free. I feel no more pain. I have no more nightmares or flashbacks or hallucinations. I am no longer constantly depressed or afraid or worried.
I am free.
I ask that you be happy for me for that. It is perhaps the best break I could have hoped for. Please accept this and be glad for me.
(The last letter of Daniel Somers, dated June 10, 2013)
1.6. Daughter,
From far away he visits you,
A true believer,
Whom you have come to love,
Out of the river of yourself—and not the Yalu
Or the Mississippi.
Here, his different eye—
Presence is the knowledge that when you renew the world
All worlds will be renewed—
White water.
1.7. I remember as a child trying to love my grandfather and failing. (Epigraph added to Tallis Martinson’s historical method by his editor, Christopher Renthro Martinson)
II. Five Chapters
11.1 “Sworn Testimony Is Direct Evidence”;
11.2 “On August 21, 1791, at the Age of Six, John James Audubon Dreams of Looking Up in Saint-Domingue in Couëron, France, near Nantes”;
11.3 “On Burdick’s Hill”;
11.4 “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970”;
11.5 “The Immediacy of Anagoge; Three Scenes from Sheep Meadow: 1. St. Michael in Trees; 2. St. Anthony’s Gaze; 3. St. John on Patmos or, The Painted Word”
III. Three Pairs of Antinomies
III.1a: We are social all the way down.
III.1b: By far the greatest use of language is for thought and not communication, despite virtual dogma to the contrary.
III.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.
III.2b: Every culture possesses origin stories that narrate the end of the world. No person, living or dead, is ever found to be missing from a single one of these stories.
III.3a: The history we are living is narrated to us as a state of historical emergency in which order itself is said to be under immediate threat. Given these conditions, we are led to believe that the violence of state power constitutes the self-evidence of its own legitimacy. Given the stakes, the appeal of empire to the right of self-defense encompasses the self-granting of quasi-legal permission to use essentially unlimited means of violent force—extending to torture, targeted assassination, and mass murder. Empire demands impunity as the sign, instrument, and self-evident legitimacy of the unlimited reach of its violence.
III.3b: Historical change occurs when poets turn themselves into instruments of the metamorphosis—the withholding and unfolding—of the literary time that the rest of us have ceased to hear but which nevertheless gets narrated to us as the foundation of “cultural structures.” What matters in poetry is only the understanding that brings it about. The usurpers of the Papal Throne could not but fear the sounds which Dante rained down on them, although they could be indifferent to the torture by instruments through which he betrayed them in heeding the laws of poetic metamorphosis. However, the breach in the Papacy as a historical structure is envisaged in the Commedia and acted out insofar as the infinite raw material of poetic sound—which is inappropriately offered to culture as proper, which is ever distrustful and offensive to culture because of its suspiciousness, and which spits culture out like water used for gargling—is revealed and brought to light. There exists an intermediary activity between the act of listening and the act of speech delivery. This activity comes closest of all to performance and constitutes its heart, as it were. The unfilled interval between the act of listening and the act of speech delivery is absurd to its very core. [Poetic] material is not [poetic] matter.
IV. A Trajectory for Founding Texts of Western Civilization
IV.1: Psalm 51 (Miserere mei)
IV.2: Shakespeare, “Sonnet 77”
Sonnet LXXVII
William Shakespeare
Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste:
The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book this learning mayst thou taste.
The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth may know
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Look, what thy memory cannot contain
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nurs’d, delivered from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.
IV.3a (Until June 22, 2013): The piles of heads disappear in the dist
ance; / I am diminished there. / No one will remember my name, / but in the rustle of pages and the sound of children’s games, / I shall return from the dead / to say: “the sun!”
IV.3b (After June 22, 2013): The Last Letter of Daniel Somers, dated June 10, 2013 (“I am sorry that it has come to this”)
V. The Immediacy of Anagoge; Three Scenes from Sheep Meadow:
1. St. Michael in Trees; 2. St. Anthony’s Gaze; 3. St. John on
Patmos or, The Painted Word
(“St. Anthony’s Gaze” and “The Painted Word” are derived from two paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony and St. John on Patmos, respectively.)
Ten Entries Arranged for Meditative Practice
From the entry dated April 18, 2010:
—Every moment flows evenly toward a white field filled with commonplace thoughts and the sound of untranslated—suddenly untranslatable—speech. [I.4; II.2; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1
From the entry dated August 2, 2010:
—Sweet Lord: This hand toward her in the New World light: This destruction was not planned. I swear this by what I know. This mechanical revolution—this absence of help: Now this lust amid the screams of the heathen: This perfection of Grace lying behind what we did: I will guard admittance through its door: A lasting joy. A coyote lopes across a field bordered by stone walls that were made and abandoned years ago—the last time Englishmen pushed this far into the alien land. [I.5; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
From the entry of August 18, 2010:
—The November sun, this warmth of wind heard in the upper branches—against nature, as if the birds were speaking their enormous happiness in human tongue—untranslatable by anyone. Then, as we begin to hear it, we realize that it is the sound of helicopters’ rotors that we have been waiting for all along—ever since we left Saigon. St. Michael in Trees. [I.6. II.2; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
From the entry of April 5, 2010:
—Lyrically—lightly—does it—St. Michael in Trees; St. Stephen getting even: The child shot by American soldiers from the helicopter after the journalists were killed: the left leg severed just below the knee: “This one will live.” This question of knowledge; this question of fact; this question of act and its disclosure. [I.7; II.3; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
From the entry dated August 19, 2010:
—The wind when it comes will counsel caution and bring a plague. Your armies are scattered. Bright metal reflecting a child’s perfect will and purpose. We caused this, and it happened: there will be no time soon in which to remember—no place from which to know the perfection of its logic as a sweetness of mind. [I.1; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.1; V.3] [I.1; II.3; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
From the entry dated November 4, 2010:
—A fall into history—this book of November reveries from gardens of earthly delight: a Puritan drone against the play of interpretations: a master narrative for the sake of lyrical presence—an opening onto absolute power. An event—however inconsequential—has to imply a redemptive logic to be coherent—listening to birds without distraction, listing their sightings with a pencil in a battered notebook; St. Michael in Trees—rumors of his promised victory. [I.2; II.2; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.1] [I.2; II.3; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
From the entry dated January 27, 2012:
—Print literacy’s fixed narrative point of view enforces the deferment of justice until some narrative end to all of history. Until then, we victors are off the hook—accidental enablers of perfection behind the back of our own actions in collusion with the state—however criminal its official acts formally may be judged to be at the end. By then we will have learned to repent and achieve the reconciliation necessary for final victory. [I.3; II.4; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
From the entry dated August 16, 2012:
—There is goodness too in history. It shouldn’t be so hard to find: this ability to create wealth out of flows through the body—and flows of bodies—in time. Why does love give way to the rage to possess beyond the limits of a just reciprocity? In the moment of thought we are each other. Unlimited possession is also a lasting duration we have made no provision to survive.
Our father, Justin, falsely gentle—a fierce child; our father, against translation—believer in the immediacy of the word, bringing his father home in his mind from France in June of 1919 before a child has access to word-logic, aetat eighteen months: all the guns in Europe in both the infant and his father’s failing thought. [I.4; II.4; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
From the entry dated March 2, 2015:
—No peace beyond the line. Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange [There is a blessed lady in heaven who feels such pity] / Haiti just above my head: These painted birds. [I.5; II.4; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
From the entry dated April 5, 2015 (The Notebooks’ last entry):
—Birds at an angle of flight—something is falling there beneath them—inside a place of thought: St. Michael will lead God’s armies of light—in what substance will his certain victory over every evil be made manifest? Oh, to be among his foot soldiers on that day! [I.6; II.5; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
Author’s Note
Daybook from Sheep Meadow is a novel of linguistic dispersion that attempts to refract the lived immediacy of an American present of permanent war through a prism of historical justice. Its linguistic syntax tries to reflect accurately an interior consciousness deformed by a failed accommodation to the untold violence of a failing empire’s exterminatory exploitation of Earth’s limited resources. Language itself becomes a casualty when severed from the transcendence intrinsic to coherent narratives attuned to a universal general welfare of equally valued lives.
For this novel’s form and content I have relied heavily upon the following works:
Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us? Language and Evolution (2016)
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988)
Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (2013)
John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (ca. 600 CE)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961)
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope (1970); Hope Abandoned (1974)
Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante” (1934); The Voronezh Notebooks (1936); “Ode to Stalin” (1935)
Robert Meister, Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century (2021)
Theodore Dwight Weld, ed., American Slavery as It Is: The Testimony of a Thousand Voices (1839)
Hayden White,The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987)
Thank you all for your support. We do this for you, and could not do it without you.
PARTNERS
FIRST EDITION MEMBERSHIP
Anonymous (9)
Donna Wilhelm
TRANSLATOR’S CIRCLE
Ben & Sharon Fountain
Meriwether Evans
PRINTER’S PRESS MEMBERSHIP
Allred Capital Management
Robert Appel
Charles Dee Mitchell
Cullen Schaar
David Tomlinson & Kathryn Berry
Jeff Leuschel
Judy Pollock
Loretta Siciliano
Lori Feathers
Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk & Joshua Frenk
Matthew Rittmayer
Nick Storch
Pixel and Texel
Social Venture Partners Dallas
Stephen Bullock
AUTHOR’S LEAGUE
Christie Tull
Farley Houston
Jacob Seifring
Lissa Dunlay
Stephen Bullock
Steven Kornajcik
Thomas DiPiero
PUBLISHER’S LEAGUE
Adam Rekerdres
Chris
tie Tull
Justin Childress
Kay Cattarulla
KMGMT
Olga Kislova
EDITOR’S LEAGUE
Amrit Dhir
Brandon Kennedy
Dallas Sonnier
Garth Hallberg
Greg McConeghy
Linda Nell Evans
Mary Moore Grimaldi
Mike Kaminsky
Patricia Storace
Ryan Todd
Steven Harding
Suejean Kim
Symphonic Source
Wendy Belcher
READER’S LEAGUE
Caitlin Baker
Caroline Casey
Carolyn Mulligan
Chilton Thomson
Cody Cosmic & Jeremy Hays
Jeff Waxman
Joseph Milazzo
Kayla Finstein
Kelly Britson
Kelly & Corby Baxter
Marian Schwartz & Reid Minot
Marlo D. Cruz Pagan
Maryam Baig
Peggy Carr
Susan Ernst
ADDITIONAL DONORS
Alan Shockley
Amanda & Bjorn Beer
Andrew Yorke
Anonymous (10)
Anthony Messenger
Ashley Milne Shadoin
Bob & Katherine Penn
Brandon Childress
Charley Mitcherson
Charley Rejsek
Cheryl Thompson
Chloe Pak
Cone Johnson
CS Maynard
Daniel J. Hale
Daniela Hurezanu
Dori Boone–Costantino
Ed Nawotka
Elizabeth Gillette
Erin Kubatzky
Ester & Matt Harrison
Grace Kenney
Hillary Richards
JJ Italiano
