What's in a name? A rose is a rose is a ƛ̕iiḥciip*
* "flower" in Huuy-ay-aht
1.
However much the old navigators’ names are entitled to respect, good taste would lead us at the present date to adopt the Indian names that, in most instances, are much prettier, many of them having a natural beauty of sound… Great Britain’s Colonies have enough Royal names, noble names, and titles of our grandfathers and grandmothers and birthplace names… let us differ from our neighbours of Washington Territory, with their Websters, Pierces, Madisons and Monroes and Jeffersons attached to every little group of log shanties that rise out of the bush.—William “Eddy” Banfield, Daily Victoria Gazette, 1858, from Tofino and Clayaquot Sound: A History, by Margaret Horsfield and Ian Kennedy, 2014.
these place names, then, these named places You are no doubt too young to remember when Egypt became (the) United Arab Republic, first with Syria as a full partner and then, very loosely, with Yemen, and then, after their disastrous performance against Israel, just by itself And whatever happened to (the) Trucial States, and (the) Trucial Coast before that, and South Arabia (Hadhramaut), and Muscat and Oman? And why did all these nations change their names in 1970-71? Nixon? Was it Nixon? Is Nixon once again the answer? Nixon.
2.
What most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.—Herman Melville, 1851
The view from the sunlit window: more European starlings with bright yellow bills crowding out the home-born birds. Who is to say they do not belong here? Who is to say what is right or fair or true anymore?
“Don’t hide your light,” they used to tell us. Why the fuck not? Squelch it, I say.
We are more solicitous that men speak of us, said Montaigne, than how they speak: and it is enough for us that our names are often mentioned, be it after what manner it will. To which Rousseau responded thus: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
Montaigne. Moontaigne. Seven planes up there today, streaming stitches in a blue toile, now the colours rising with the setting sun. The Olympics next week. Remember the Japanese gymnast with the broken knee on the pommel horse in Montreal, dismounting perfectly, barely flinching? Nine-point-five from the judges. Then the rings, eight feet in the air, a double somersault to a perfect two-point landing, arms raised in a perfect finish, dislocating his already cracked knee cap and ripping the ligaments in his right leg but still throwing his arms up into the air, perfection itself, or close enough for the judges, a golden nine-point-seven, then collapsing in writhing agony on the orange mat, hobbled for life.
It is enough to make you want to spit fire.
I have isolated the tooth pain; it is linked to the tuneless state of the piano. Every key strike sends ripping pain into the centre core of my skull. The safest place and position here is a fetal crouch in the bathroom door frame. But I am not interested in the safest place. I am interested in the fact that I suffered another blackout this morning. When I came to, I was not lying in bed or in my vomit on a sidewalk but standing on my feet in a very warm brown corduroy suit within earshot of the roaring crowd in the Stade de France. Blackness, then bam! Standing—no, walking—pockets empty, Monoprix receipt clutched in the fingers of my right hand, a vegan burger in my left. A crowd of people, a loud clattering chattering crowd, flowing faster than me, pushing past me and around me. It was hot. I had no idea how I got there or who had dressed me in brown corduroy. Vegan? A slim woman in a Missoni dress stepped in front, stopped, and frowned. She looked familiar.
“You ok?” Her face at the angle of quizzicality. The strangers around us stopped and watched.
“Yes. You?” This was all I could muster. Sweat brain breath breasts beauty response, eyes swinging-ing-ing wildly, incapable of focus. The Triple Jump: Run, step, hop—absurd!
She moved on, dissatisfied, I suppose, and I blacked out again. Came to here an hour ago, still standing, watching the crowds. Someone is banging metal against metal. A horrible sound. How much time has passed? There are new specialized isotopes used in brain imaging that will reveal this sort of thing. Mis-folded proteins: beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Cigarettes in my shirt pocket: do I smoke? Again?
The street, for too long a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every unclean bird, was swept clean during the rain last night by a sudden gushing torrent of gutter water. The sound woke me, the swift purl of dislodged refuse sluicing past the parked cars and slapping into the leaves and worms packed into the grates of the drains. Now the morning sun is brightly out and everything sparkles, including these thoughts, which, until last night, were as caked in dirt and bogged down in filth as the sewers outside. The parallel between outside and insde—in here, in what I am feeling—is uncanny.
Now the drains are clear and the fluids run fresh and every patterning perception is become a swan, sailing confidently on the widest span of wings. I see—I judge—everything, with the most intense and invigorating lucidity from the trembling of the earth beneath these tired feet to the graceful dance of whales in the ocean to the odour of the orange and red roses at the window to the coolest layers of gas at the absolute ceiling of aircraft flight…
Words on a page. Drunk on a sidewalk. It is truly a day worth venturing out into. The Missoni woman, too, is excited. She wants to shop, sit somewhere, listen to music, mend the holes in some socks and sketch the most interesting faces in the crowds of passers-by.
“Why not just take their photographs?”
“Not the same, is it?”
The first is a woman with a long dog face pushing a military-grade baby pram. Not so interesting, but the likeness is good. Then, a woman in Chanel strides past.
“But you,” I shout at the woman, startling everyone, “who do you say I am?”
The woman looks up, also startled. Did she hear? I move towards her. I have been drinking since noon. The Missoni woman can thread a needle bare-eyed, astonishing to watch, two thin brown arms falling together as if banging an invisible cymbal. Reminds me of Leonard Bernstein for some reason. At this precise moment her hands separate, and the right one plunges the needle into my thigh. At least, that is what this feels like. I do not crumble to the pavement. I do not black out. But something freezes me. I have only nine intact teeth left in my head. I have very recently entirely evacuated my bowels. “May I defecate in that small room over there?” I asked the proprietor of the café, pointing at his washroom. He looked at me in horror.
Washroom. Who says that? The air now is extremely fresh. Vital the word, the perfect word. The walkers-by, now, can they see this, and sense this? Human dignity, what could it possibly have to do with bodily functions? Do whales hold their breath or absorb the air directly into their veins? They are mammals, but what exactly are mammals? What determines mammal-ness? Warm blood, milk, hair? Live hatch-less, un-egged birth?
“I think I might have lice.”
My skull had been twitching inside and out.
“Can’t we just sit here?” asked the Missoni woman.
“It’s a free country. We can do what we like.”
“Why are you shouting?”
“Why are you wearing a black lace bra under a pink shirt and an iridescent blue mini dress with gold leggings and white plastic stiletto boots?”
Distance and propinquity, motion and rest, darkness and light, solidity and colour, form and position. These and her innocence—and, I suppose, her beauty, which is, as they say, unspeakable, effing ineffable and undeniable—are among the key elements semi-contained in this present picture of the Missoni woman rising from the chair so quickly that a kaleidoscope of blood spiders across the edges of her vision and she has to brace her weight against the patio table with both arms. The espresso in the cup on the table spills, extinguishing my cigarette and soaking this notebook, making the ink of these words run down the page. I do my best to mop up the liquid; one, two, three passes with a paper napkin. A shaft of light catches her hair, illuminating the blue gloss. She turns to face the light and closes her eyes. The grace of her movements is impossible to describe. Somewhere far above, she thinks, the Americans are orbiting the earth. There is a Japanese on board, a payload specialist. She breathes in slowly, curling her toes, feeling the breath rising through her body to her eyes, which open as the pressurized air reaches the back of the sockets. She thinks about water. She repeats the word water. I write it with my finger into the palm of her hand. This is our chosen mantra for the day. Water, water, water. She thinks about the dirt washed down the street in the night. She thinks about the migrating geese that fly over the Himalayan summits twice a year—at night, when the cooled air packs more oxygen. She thinks of the vultures I told her about at dinner—sucked into a jet engine over the Côte d'Ivoire in November 1974 at an altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet.
She thinks about the Nazis. She thinks about the music they loved. She thinks about the orbiter skipping like a stone across the outer meniscus of the troposphere. She thinks about the phoenix, not rising from the flames but lighting them, fanning them with its giant wings, annihilating its nest, cremating itself.
Drunk man with the baby pram now, trying to cross in the middle the street, almost getting hit by a vehicle.
“Hey!”
“Asshole!”
“ Get him!”
“Get off the fucking street!”
He bolts, disappears around the corner, leaving the pram behind.
The phoenix is unique,
It has a long beak
Pierced with holes like a flute—
It never mates, its love is absolute.
When death draws near, the death bird sings
And fans the air with its giant wings.
Last night’s quake: the tremors shook us from top to bottom. Everything froze. Everything freezes, even the facts congeal and the flesh trembles, the data packets grip the throat and rise to the eyes in quick continuous jolts. It is hard to remember the precise sequence of how everything unfolds. Is baseball an important element? Hasit ever been an Olympic event? What about frisbee golf? Frisbee is a WHAM-O product. I sometimes wonder if my mind does not just make stuff up. I go to sleep. I wake up. Where are we at in the intelligence cycle? Are we still collecting, or have we started processing? The orbiter is named after the command module of Apollo 15, which in turn was named after the ship James Cook captained on his first voyage of discovery. Hence, the British spelling. The Endeavour.
Endeavour to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
That bit is from The Wasteland, I think. T.S. Eliot. An American who remade himself a Brit. And this is when she sees the face at the window. She gasps. The sketching pencil falls to the ground. The face disappears. Did she see it? To see it properly, to represent it as something near to her with the full effect of nature, is impossible, unless she looks at it at the exact distance and height and direction where the eye or the point of sight was placed in producing it. Does this make sense? I have been working on this for hours. The Moon Shot. The The Money Shot. Mooney Shot. The Germans were the first to pierce the stratosphere, during the First World War. A shell fired on Good Friday seventy-five miles east of Paris travelled twenty-five miles into the air before descending into the roof of a church—St-Gervais-et-St-Protais—killing seventy souls and wounding eighty-eight. Four hundred such shells hit the city, cratering streets, parks and rooftops. Gerald Bull describes this in Paris Kanonen: The Paris Guns (Wilhelmgeschutze) and Project HARP (1988), two years before his assassination at the hands of the Mossad.
Nowadays, that church is mostly empty.
3.
“I saw Pat's new red suit, which she had purchased especially for this trip, being splotched, and what made it worse was that some of the spit was dirty brown, coming from a tobacco-chewing crowd.”— Richard Nixon, 1962
Newborn Bard of the Holy Ghost: a sculpture was sent up with Apollo 15, Nixon did not know this— “It’s better that he doesn’t,” said William Safire—a small human figure cast from aluminium and titled Fallen Astronaut/Cosmonaut—so called because they couldn’t get it to stand up. Scott parked the rover and snuck off camera to position the sculpture in the moon dust next to a plaque with the names of the dead. They smuggled commemorative stamps on board, hidden in their spacesuits. Two years earlier, Buzz Aldrin performed a sacrament—Holy Communion—again, off camera: “I am the vine, you are the branches,” he read. “Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit, for you can do nothing without me.” The wine was from Texas, as was the chalice it was poured into—“in the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup”—as was the Eucharist. These were the first liquids and solids consumed on the moon.
Ironically, in 1776, the Endeavour, decommissioned, sold, and renamed the Lord Sandwich, was used to embark British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries to North America to help defeat the colonial militia. It was subsequently anchored at Newport, where it served as a prison ship until the end of the war. Were the prisoners treated well? I doubt it, for some reason.
Actually, rechecking the tapes, Nixon knew about Fallen Astronaut/Cosmonaut.
“Is the artist a Democrat?”
“No, he’s Belgian.”
“OK, fine.”
A sandwich. Lord. If ever we fall down it's there, on how things look, the surface appearance of even the simplest things. All animals perceive surfaces, but only humans can read the markings on those surfaces—these words, for example, or these photographs, or the images on a screen, or patterns on a woman’s skirt and blouse, or the lines gouged into the bark of the tree out the window. These were the questions we were asking back then. Can we truly see and understand the world through a picture? What’s it like for the first-time viewer? Can we restore cortexes to a more chaste state, to a form of visual virginity? Some of the WHAM-O research took this direction—a closed path consisting of repeating nodes. Nixon liked to tell the story of the explorer who showed a roomful of “naïve observers”—Chadian tribesmen—a slide of an elephant. The projected image of the charging animal appears on the wall, and everyone flees in terror. Yet, shown a photo of her son, the Daza mother, no matter how long she looks, can never see anything beyond a smudge on a piece of paper. How is this possible? Nixon, ironically, the perfect example. A head for the whole but no eye for the details of which it is composed. We still under-estimate this, still waste our accumulated energies and expertise.
“For one priceless moment,” Nixon had said, over the phone, his words, not Safire’s, in “the most historic phone call ever made,” as he liked to call it. “For one priceless moment in the history of man all people on this planet are truly one.” But he wasn't a part of it. He didn't really know what was at stake or to what extent he was right. He wasn't there at the moment of commitment when the umbilical arms were pulled back, the nearest people some five long miles away, the bravest of the brave alone, buckled into the nose of a tin can, waiting, praying, ready to die, their last vision the flag out Collin's rear right window flapping and snapping in the stiff breeze at the top of the scaffolding. Bill and I spent hours banging out a catastrophe speech: “Fate has ordained that these men who went in peace will stay to rest in peace. These brave men know that there is no hope for their recovery, blah, blah, and are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.” Nixon refused to even look at it. Fate has ordained fuck, he said. Truth and understanding, my ass, he said. Just make it happen and get them home again. He never thought much of Bill, not just because of what he was (the anti-Semite stuff about Nixon? Mostly smokescreen.) but because he was from Agnew's camp. “Spiro’s fucking Biro,” he called him, “too worried about words to understand issues.” Which was funny, because Nixon obsessed over words, over wording, much more so than images. Remember how hot he got about adding “Under God” to the module plaque? “We Came in Peace for All Mankind” it said and he wanted to add “Under God.” The President is big on God, how Flanigan put it. “Billy Graham's here nearly every Sunday,” he told us, which made us giggle. We finally caved in, said we'd add it, then conveniently forgot all about it. The plaque had already been soldered to the side of the damn thing; besides, it wasn't as if he could go up to the Sea of Tranquility and check. So who would know? God, of course, with whom the President obviously wasn't on the closest of terms.
Who among your types feel their thought as immediately as a hypersonic exhaust blast of an orbital launch? The lump rising in your throat as they rose in the air. The transition from being on the ground to being in the air was so gentle, and their voices, patched in soft from Capcom to Houston to us, as unmoved, as matter-of-fact as taxi drivers calling into their dispatchers to say, “We're on Elm Street, and we're headed downtown.” These were great men. Where we were or where we weren't doesn't matter. Those who cannot foresee the future are condemned to live in it. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to believe Tucker Carson. Where are we now, that is the question. Who are we? The people at WHAM-O. Has ever a more preposterous idea presented itself? Our first joint project was the bomb shelter, marketing the plans and parts for a hundred-dollar do-it-yourselfer; then, over in Chad, during the prelim stages of that most royal of fuck-ups, Otto and I were shown a species of fish that laid eggs in mud during the dry season. When the rains came, the eggs hatched, and fish emerged. Instant Fish, they wanted to call it. Sell chunks of mud, add water, and, voila!, instant aquarium. Perfect: get out of the racket, close up shop and retire to Bamfield. Millions of dollars in orders, but when we brought the fish back to America, they wouldn't mate. No fish eggs, no mud, no money. Then there was the Huf'n'Puf blowgun, which shot soft rubber darts. Redesign of the Chad model. Made it to market but went nowhere.
4.
Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy and Korea and Valley Forge for this? Road not taken my eye. Fuck Frost. He fabricated news stories for The Eastern Poultryman. He was a chickenshit and a hack. Girth my old whalemeat instead with your blasted incendiaries. I will light up the sky.
Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones, Once living men — once resolute courage, aspiration, strength, The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.
Did you read those three lines? They are from “The Wallabout Martyrs,” Leaves of Grass, 1891. From here on in it’s Whitman’s way or the highway—he is America. The pathbreaker, the beacon, the guiding voice. “I light up the skies / The songs of life bursts from my blowhole” is also from the Leaves, I forget where, Google will track it down. “In an old vault, mark'd by no special recognition, lie huddled at this moment the undoubtedly authentic remains of the stanchest and earliest revolutionary patriots from the British prison ships and prisons of the times of 1776–83, in and around New York, and from all over Long Island; originally buried—many thousands of them — in trenches in the Wallabout sands.”
Written more than a century ago, describing a massacre of revolutionary patriots a century before that. Should that not be the arc and aim of this, our history? Not dumbed-down MAGA scattershot but higher, ever higher, — “above the domes of loftiest mosques these pinnacles aspire.”
“Don’t fuck with that shit.”
“What shit, cool cat?”
5.
“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1962
The Evening Noise: where were you when Martin Luther King was killed? Where were you when Reagan was shot? Herman Melville was visiting an orthopaedic surgeon on the day of Lincoln’s assassination. We have no records of his thoughts and feelings. Walt Whitman spent it in Brooklyn with his mother, “who prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass’d them silently to each other.”
This passage is included in Specimen Days under the heading, “The Stupor Passes—Something Else Begins.” What?
This is how he begins the passage: “But the hour, the day, the night pass’d, and whatever returns, an hour, a day, a night like that can never again return.”
I feel nearer than ever to this.
6.
A coming storm or the coming storm? The last rays of light ignite the northern shore; the leaves' colours glow on the water. The sun, filtered, struggles to conquer the growing gloom, to break free. The darkening cloud in the southern sky mimics the sweeping circles of the lake and the snow-topped mountains. The blackest part of the cloud hides the peak closest to the right edge of the frame. The water is poised, motionless.
Melville, transfixed in front of it, still wearing the black armband for his slain president, could not have been closer were he waist-deep in the becalmed water, watching the storm build, waiting for it to engulf him. The principal actors are the giant boulders on the far bank, two sentinels pushed into place by glaciers. His eye was drawn to these enormous erratics, back and forth, from the larger in the hillside grove to the smaller on the shore. Both are tipped in fiery light. The same light kindles the leaves of the wind-hit trees, bold brushstrokes of red, gold, and amber.
A genius, this painter.
On the other shore, past the soft mist at the centre, the clouds boil, the lake turns to pitch, and the mountaintops disappear. The wind is up. The boulders are precarious. We, as placidly reflective as the lake, are about to be consumed. Melville had seen Edwin Booth’s Hamlet twice. The actor bought the painting four short years before, then loaned it to the artist for the show. The fire in the leaves reminded Melville of a painting he saw in Paris—a young slave boy on all fours with his cheeks puffed out, fanning flames that lick the pages of giant books piled in a pyre. The austere saint on the stairs above, Saint Paul, dead centre, right hand upraised, left holding open the good book. The rest, the bad and wicked books, were cast into the kindling fire.
Is this my errand in the wilderness? he asks himself. Is this my fulfilment?
Two months before, on February 26, 1865, a shallow event in the earth’s crust liquefied a village in the northwest of England. A major seismic event will burn San Francisco to the ground in the coming fall.
All feeling hearts must feel for him
Who felt this picture. Presage dim —
Dim inklings from the shadowy sphere
Fixed him and fascinated here.
A demon-cloud like the mountain one
Burst on a spirit as mild
As this urned lake, the home of shades.
—Herman Melville, "The Coming Storm", 1866
When his son, Malcolm, was born, Melville had thought of naming him Barbarossa, Adolphus, Grandissimo Hercules, Bonaparte or Lambert. “It takes three nurses to dress him,” he mock boasted to his brother. “He is as valiant as Julius Caesar.... a perfect prodigy. If the worst comes to the worst, I shall let him out by the month to Barnum, and take the tour of Europe with him.”
The worst will come to the worst, he is thinking now, staring at the painting. There are benches to sit on, but he remains standing. The best work in the room is by Frederick Church but Melville never sees it. He is seeing the Gifford only, but his mind is filled with other images.
The only books spared in the Paris painting are the good one in the saint’s hand and the ledger into which an old scribe notes the value of the wicked ones: fifty thousand pieces of silver.
The value of his books? His books are worthless. His first volume of poetry, published the following year, will sell so negligibly that the publisher will sue his family to recover the production costs. Subsequent volumes will be self-published. None will be reviewed. When he retires, nineteen years from now, he will be earning the same miserable wage he earns today.
In a London gallery full of gems he saw Poussin’s Assumption of the Virgin. The Gifford Storm has some of that same ennobling power. Green meadows and woodlands steeped in haze. The Poussin filled him with a profound calm. This fills him with an inextinguishable dread.
But Shakespeare's pensive child
Never the lines had lightly scanned,
Steeped in fable, steeped in fate;
The Hamlet in his heart was 'ware,
Such hearts can antedate.
No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare's core;
That which we seek and shun is there — Man's final lore.
Not A Coming Storm. The Coming Storm. There is nothing indefinite about this deluge. Melville’s poem, the poem occasioned by this experience, will have the following prefatory note: “A Picture by S.R. Gifford, and owned by E.B. Included in the N.A. Exhibition, April, 1865.”
Postscript
At the end of their dark-garlanded train ride the two Lincoln caskets will be temporarily interred in a receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery in the President’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. In December, they will be moved to another temporary vault further up the hill, where they will join a third, Lincoln’s second son, Edward, dead of consumption fifteen years before. They will be moved to the new Lincoln Tomb in 1871. In 1876, a gang of counterfeiters will attempt to steal the President’s corpse, which will lead to the construction of new housing for the casket inside a protective cage and concrete box. In total, his remains will be moved seventeen times, and his coffin opened five.
The stupor passes—something else begins.
There's so much in here, it's hard to comment ( I need a nap!), but as a matter of interest, I believe Sanskrit is a sound-based language. Where did I hear that? The sounds themselves have meaning, not the words. Or something like that.