City of God
Page 15
So that is the problem, the solipsistic consciousness without which there is no world yet which is itself filled to its limits with the world and therefore unable to step outside the world to see itself in it. By this paradox I propose a merger of the real world that exists apart from my perception of it and the world that cannot exist except for my mind’s perception of it. And since I grant you too the rule of this solipsistic kingdom of everything that is the case, we then have the paradox in three dimensions of what might be called democratic solipsism, each of us exclusive total ruler of the world that depends on our mind for existence. . . and none of us able to discernibly exist except as subject of others’ consciousness.
Admittedly, this is a strange and seemingly self-contradictory idea coming from the Wittgenstein who would strip from philosophy all its meaningless metaphysical nonsense.
Yet I know you Americans obsess about God. And by my language game I am trying to tell you something very simple: Perhaps the most poetic description of our tormented human consciousness that is of, yet not in, the world is found in the term original sin.
As I said in my Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. . . speaking of the idea of the immortality of the human soul. . .
6.4312. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. . .
6.44. Not how the world is, is the mystical but that it is. . .
6.52. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.
Parenthetically, I ask you to remember please that this was a very young man’s work, written mostly on the front lines with the Austrian army during World War I, where I had requested combat duty hoping for death. The pages on which I wrote were smeared with mud and the pencil shook in my fist. The light of Very flares and shellbursts let me see what I was writing. Under fire, I became terrified as an animal but in the midst of my trembling I defined courage as, and took it in, the conviction that one’s true world-creating, world-created soul. . . is finally inviolable by circumstance.
—Author’s Bio
Everett appears as a small boy child
In the lying-in hospital no bigger than a brownstone
on the corner of Mt. Eden Avenue and Morris Avenue
the borough of the Bronx, the city of New York in the year 19–.
I was a breech baby, the first of many difficulties
I gave my mother, Ruth, a resolute woman, a gifted pianist
who had at a much earlier age fallen in love with a dreamer
Her original experience of the difficult race of men,
an impetuous ensign-in-training at the Webb Naval Academy on the Harlem River
my father, Ben, who in the First World War would leap over the fence
and break into the army canteen where my mother was serving coffee and doughnuts
to the doughboys, and risk death in the wrong white uniform
to see to it that nobody interfered with her.
This was romance, though of a distracted kind
and to a pattern established earlier, when they were in high school together.
He would see her going out in the evening with some boy
to have some ice cream while the sky was still a sunlit blue over the darkened trees of Crotona Park
and come over to them, who had not asked her out himself,
and threaten the boy with chin-to-chin pugnacity
if he did not treat my mother Ruth with respect
thus ruining the date, casting a pall over her evening
with his impertinent proprietary attitude
There in the Bronx in the early part of the century
when the streets were wide and new and the trees were young in the parks
and the red brick granite-trimmed apartment houses with their small courtyards
were clean and redemptive
for the immigrant families who had managed to escape the wretched tenements of the Lower East Side,
And such courtship as was waged by Ben my father
was not yet construed as the bio-behavioral imperative to distribute his genes
Though of course Ruth married him and he did,
To my brother, Ronald, appearing in 19–
And to me eight and a half years later
a year of the Great Depression when not that many children could be afforded
least of all to Ben and Ruth,
and, I think now, to another child somewhere between us
A child stillborn in the mid- or late twenties
perhaps another brother
or a sister, who would have watched over me in the park
in the solemn responsibility engendered by my mother
and held me up to the water fountain when I was thirsty
The girl, Ruth would say for years afterward even when I was grown,
whom she had always wanted, the daughter for her loneliness in her house of males.
I mention such personal matters
only to indicate my place and time, the slender authority
I have for speaking of this century,
An observer obscurely situated
Apart from all the huge historical terrors, though there’s always time, isn’t there.
But now I confess how hard it is imagining my father as a wild kid, daring, headstrong,
Childhood being something that belonged to me, or my brother, our property, not his
and remembering him by contrast
as a serious portly man sitting in a chair by the radio
Listening to the news of the Second World War while at the same time reading of the war in the evening paper he held out like a field tent.
My father has been dead for forty years as I write
And I confess, dispirited, that the longer he is dead the more mysterious he’s become in my memory
The personality fading, or becoming more complex,
we are left with a confirmed but invisible fact
a spirit without fallible character though remembered as a fallible man
Who did some things right and some things wrong
But who exists now as pure soul that suffered life and finally was done in by it
Though I keep and cherish my images of him against this sad truth of the characterless soul that is to me a meager consolation for the failure of brilliant life to maintain forever its rich specificity.
He played tennis in white ducks, I have a photograph
taken with one of those foldable Leicas of the time
that extend their accordioned black boxes along two tracks
A smart forehand at the risen end of the swing,
the body pointed forward,
a white long-sleeved shirt, dark hair, a dark mustache
A figure on the far side of the net, most of the picture being of the ground
A public court of brown clay, with an anonymous back just passing the corner of the lens in close-up
Chasing the ball forever, forever unknown
The apartment houses of the Bronx in the background
Everything circa 1925 in sepia.
She played too, my mother,
They would go out and hit into the 1930s
while I stood outside the chicken-wire fence
and nagged them for my turn.
She is buried next to him
in the Beth-El cemetery in New Jersey
But having survived him by thirty-seven years
is a lingering personality in my mind.
During her last illness she celebrated her birthday
an Intensive Care patient, just off the respirator.
Congratulations, Mother, I said. You’re ninety-five today.
One eyebrow rose, the eye opened, the slightest smile was called back from her fading life
:
Ninety-four, she said.
It was our last conversation.
And I feel her death now, some years afterward, as an uncharacteristic silence,
a silence from someone who should be telling us what she thinks of our taste, or our ways of doing things
While announcing that she does not give an opinion unless it’s asked for.
The last technology that she didn’t understand or trust
was the phone answering machine: “Call Mother,”
is all she’d allow herself to say to my recorded request for a name a number a message
Clearly, sensibly, speaking not to a human being but to a machine, and speaking machine-talk to it.
Call Mother is what I would expect to hear today
had we installed a telephone in her grave.
In 1917, my father’s naval training completed he received his ensign’s commission
and shortly thereafter sailed as a signal officer on a troopship to Europe
Still in the wrong-colored uniform
Among deckloads of backpacking, leg-putteed doughboys.
But then, mysteriously, or perhaps not all that mysteriously,
His rank having been conferred by an institution that wasn’t Annapolis
He was assigned to land duty in the trenches
as a naval observer of ground-war communications.
It is true, communication was his specialty
as it has been the specialty of all men in my family
at least since my grandfather came to America in 1887 and took up the printer’s trade.
Of course he knew that light shutters and semaphoring depended on the open sea
but telegraphy and telephony, on which the army relied, were just as useless in the trenches
when the barrage that preceded every German attack blasted away in a couple of salvos the cables and wires
so painstakingly laid to battalion headquarters,
And when the telegraph lines strung on poles
along the supply roads, and railroad spurs, and past the ordnance dumps and field hospitals
from regiment back to division
needed only one pole of shaved and creosoted pine to rise in the air as if launched
by the thousand-pound shell of a heavy howitzer and as if it were a lance thrown by Achilles with streamers of wire like a comet’s tail
to leave a general as ignorant of the truth of his battle
as some wretched infantryman crouching alone inside his uniform
and the protracted, continuous roar of a distant bombardment
the answer in impenetrable war code to his inquiries.
My observant father understood this at a glance,
It didn’t take an Einstein he said to me with a laugh,
War was the emergent property of human thought,
As stolidity is the emergent property of molecules of oak.
Responding to the navy’s deepest hopes for him
he cross-dressed, donning the khaki tunic and tinpot of the dead signal lieutenant who had been his host
And while the air whistled and concussed and the earth all around him rose and fell like the heaviest sea
he took command of the surviving soldiers of the signal company
still from their giant wooden spools unwinding new lines of communication as the old ones were blown to bits
Or lofting from their upraised hands the carrier pigeons
that returned magically as spiraling clumps of blooded feathers,
And re-created them a company of runners, dispatching two-man teams to carry the front’s intelligence to headquarters and relay the staff commands to the front,
because runners were the only thing that worked,
although the news they brought
might be an hour or more behind the action.
Now for the longest time the American general Pershing
had kept his fresh armies intact under his own command
But in 1917, with things getting worse for the Allies
Whose total dead, British and French, by then numbered something over four million men
most of them having died obedient, young, dumbfounded, and in the enlisted ranks,
elements of the American Second Army, to which my father had been attached as naval observer,
were deployed under French command
along the southern reaches of the broad battleground
that stretched from the Belgian coast on the North Sea
southeasterly in a great crescent of devastation to the Swiss border at Bernevesin.
So I picture my father in the state of war a state neither French nor German nor American but founded to contest all sense and meaning.
Very flares lighted the night sky a radiant mustard
Shells blew in sizzling flashes, like ground lightning
And in the acrid white fog of the following sunlit morning
when the German infantry was understood to be finally advancing
behind the forward-creeping bursts of mortars and field pieces
that were the footfalls of approaching Death to the young men in the trenches
he found himself the last surviving runner of the signal company he had come to observe but had passionately adopted
The man beside him having flung out his arms and dropped to his knees for a final prayer
in their open-field run back to the trenches.
Now I have no proof of this, but in the years I was his son at home,
his older son Ronald away at his world war
my father liked to take us to the Sunday games of the New York football Giants.
They played in the old Polo Grounds at Coogan’s Bluff.
We sat in the sun, I ate a bag of peanuts, he smoked his cigar.
And he would be knowledgeably silent amid the noisy expertise of the men around us.
I loved the green grass field with the white stripes and the sound of the punt that would boom through the stadium
a long moment after the ball was kicked. I rooted for the Giants, always, but he liked close games
and plays that outsmarted the opponent, no matter by whom.
He loved the runners of the game, for instance, in the post-war, “Crazy Legs” Hirsch of the L.A. Rams
who brought a crowd to its feet with his quick cuts and feints and spins
and who, with his leaps over tacklers, his high-
stepping, heart-stopping evasions of sudden arrest, all suggestive of a comic intelligence,
could make a run, no matter how short,
last longer than anyone had a right to expect.
And I have no proof of this, but I think my father remembered his own runs under fire as an inexplicable survival
and sought to soothe his terrible remembrances with the aesthetic abstraction of football
a military game with lines and rules and no great or lasting consequences.
In any event, he had brought the orders to retreat but found them anticipated.
The ranks were falling back the way he had come.
In the trenches dead men were slumped in small heaps as if consoling one another in their grief for the damage they’d sustained
Or they stood, bayonets fixed, floridly alert poised and awaiting the attack
their internal organs having ruptured
in the concussed vacuum of a shell burst.
He made his way transversely through the zigzagged trenches
looking for someone to whom he could report
but finding only rats cavorting in the shit and mud among the stores of biscuit and torn limbs,
Rats trajecting like small shells in every direction as he approached.
He stumbled over a young soldier lying with the muzzle of his own rifle in his mouth and his head resting in an amalgam of brain and mud.
My father stopped and hunkered down and, for the first time since coming to France, felt close enough to someone to mourn h
im.
This boy had been unable to endure the hours and hours of cannonade
that my father had barely heard
as he took upon himself the urgencies of battle.
But now it opened up on him, as if he were this fellow’s heir,
The terrible din, mechanical yet voiced as human, a thunderous chest-beating boast of colossal, spittingly cruel, brutish, and vindictive fury
which he imagined as the primordial conversation,
when a tank loomed above him, the muddied treads rampaging in air,
and in a great grinding spankling roar spanned the trench and brought a rain of oil in the darkness upon him.
Now friends I know this is Ancient History as ancient as our grade school teachers
whom we hold in our memories with the same condescension.
I know that. I know the bones of the First World War are impressed in the continent’s tectonic plates
under the weight of the bones buried over them.
That Europe’s beaches are adrift with sanded bone
That her farmers in their fields plow up loops of chained vertebrae
Her rivers at night are luminous with the risen free radicals of calcification
And the archaeologists of her classical cities find skulls in tiers under the streets.
But listen for a moment. All history has contrived to pour this beer into your glass,