Daybook from Sheep Meadow
Page 1
PRAISE FOR
GEORGE ANDERSON: NOTES FOR A LOVE SONG IN IMPERIAL TIME
“Peter Dimock … possesses the rich, intricate, and subtle patternings of the verbal lacemaker’s craft.”
—Toni Morrison
“How can we live with ourselves? I mean, really? How can we? This is the book’s prevailing question, one that rises from the pages less as a pretty love song than as a helpless keen. Fales invents and pursues his method as a way to fix history so he can live with its implications.”
—New York Times, Heidi Julavits
“George Anderson is indeed this ambitious, a work of great ethical force and historical scope, written in the singular form of what might best be described as—try to imagine it—an epistolary, synesthetic, anti-imperial self-help manual … What a remarkable novel: for a few radically hopeful lines at a time it imagines that a new history might be possible, imagines what it might mean to imagine this. Perhaps we cannot see and hear this history as clearly as its protagonist can. But we have for a moment felt his moral devastation and his hope as our own—no small feat for a novel in imperial time.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books, Hilary Plum
“George Anderson requires some heavy mental lifting, but Fales’s seeking voice and the book’s innovative structure make it more of a calling than a chore. The rewards here are great: a fresh perspective on some of the thorniest events in recent American life, alongside enduring questions about history, art and narrative. Dimock’s slender, sturdy investigation into their meaning should inspire anyone who wants to think deeply and philosophically about this great nation.”
—Washington Post, Veronica Esposito
“Peter Dimock’s new novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time is about torture and politics, making it so well suited for America’s contemporary dialogue, but it’s also about the difficult (and dishonest) things that language can and cannot do. Stretch that last part a bit further and it’s also a novel that’s trying to find out what novels can and cannot do.”
—Bookslut
“Bordering on narrative madness (and/or genius), history meets method in Dimock’s second novel, an experimental instruction manual aimed at revolutionizing the way we experience the past.”
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
ALSO BY PETER DIMOCK
A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family
George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time
Daybook from Sheep Meadow
Daybook from Sheep Meadow
The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson
Peter Dimock
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas,Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © 2021 Peter Dimock
First edition, 2021
All rights reserved.
Support for this publication has been provided in part by a grant from the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture’s ArtsActivate program.
ISBNs: 978-1-64605-059-8 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-060-4 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2021933576
Front cover design by Justin Childress | justinchildress.co
Interior Layout and Typesetting by KGT
Printed in the United States of America
For Ariana
Contents
INTRODUCTION Learning to Practice My Brother’s Method
CHAPTER 1 Sworn Testimony Is Direct Evidence
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
CHAPTER 3 On Burdick’s Hill
CHAPTER 4 The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970
CHAPTER 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
CHAPTER 6 You Must Not Blame Yourself
INTRODUCTION
Learning to Practice My Brother’s Method
A broken going on being for which there is remedy in speech offered in air to welcome the immediacy of another’s infinite value.
—From the first entry in the Notebooks of Tallis Martinson, dated Monday, November 3, 2003
I DECIDED TO LEARN TO practice my brother’s method after I found three entries from his notebooks transcribed onto a folded and frayed sheet of ordinary typing paper.
The folded white sheet lay loose inside one of the three boxes that held all 126 of his handwritten notebooks.
I still often recite these entries to myself from memory:
April 28, 2004
—This use of time—water over stones—the sound of it, as if this were victory—an overturning, an uncovering—this catastrophe, this action—a gesture—restraining apocalypse—for the ear there is never an end to hearing; for the eye, never an end to seeing—now is the time for order and for carrying children in our hearts like words—for speech in a landscape in which the painted bird sings, then flies. [I.1; II.1; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]
November 7, 2004
—Sweetness in the bone—a new kind of light—this failure of democracy and the success of empire—a lust past all possession fulfilled in light—a violence no one wanted to survive—an ecstasy of unanswerable force past every betrayed possibility of reciprocity. I felt my thought and ordinary ecstatic American perception become one. [I.2; II.1; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]
April 2, 2005
—For meditations on historical justice it is helpful to memorize verbatim the following strict, formal definition of language and keep it refreshed in the mind so that it is always ready for spontaneous use: “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).” [I.3; II.1; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]
In the late fall of 2015, my brother, the respected American historian Tallis Martinson, left instructions that the boxes holding his notebooks be placed in my custody and be made subject to my editorial control during his residency in the mental hospital to which he voluntarily committed himself. The facility’s name is Lakehill Long-Term Psychiatric Care. It is located in upstate New York. Tallis’s instructions specified further that all his unpublished writings were to be put in my possession and under my editorial control in the event of his death. Beneath the folded piece of paper with the notebook entries lay another loose page on which Tallis had typed what appeared to be journalists’ brief summaries, in chronological order, of several events from the Iraq War. The first three events bore dates corresponding to the dates of the notebook entries. I present these documents and their circumstances to introduce the reader of these initial selections from my brother’s notebooks to the sound created in the mind by what Tallis called his “entirely new method for enacting historical justice.”
April 28, 2004
First airing by CBS of report documenting systematic torture by US personnel of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib
November 7, 2004
The Second Battle of Fallujah begins and lasts until December 23
April 2, 2005
Battle of Abu Ghraib prison
April 5, 2010
Release of gunsight footage from July 12, 2007, of an air-to-ground attack by two US AH-64 Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed seven unarmed men, including two journalists, and severely wounded two children
April 18, 2010
Iraqi Special Operations Forces
kill ISIL’s leadership, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. A US Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter supporting the operation crashes, killing a Ranger sergeant and injuring the aircrew
August 2, 2010
The New York Times announces partial withdrawal of US troops
August 18, 2010
The official end of US effective combat operations in Iraq
August 19, 2010
Operation Iraqi Freedom officially ends
November 4, 2010
Ayman al-Zawahiri threatens new attacks on the US
January 27, 2012
A suicide bomber in Baghdad kills 33 people and wounds 65 others
August 16, 2012
A series of bombings kills more than 90 people across Iraq
March 2, 2015
Coalition of Iraqi Armed Forces and militia numbering around 30,000 launch an offensive against Islamic State positions in Tikrit
Tallis’s first notebook entry is dated November 3, 2003; the last is dated April 5, 2015. On April 28, 2010, Tallis gave sworn testimony as an expert witness before a House subcommittee hearing on the legality of the use of armed drones by US armed forces and government personnel for targeted assassinations beyond an active battlefield. He was invited to testify by the committee’s chairman, Representative Darryl Carlyle from Massachusetts. Carlyle, an undergraduate classmate of Tallis’s at Harvard, had previously consulted Tallis in 2008 because of his expertise concerning the history of US civil–military relations. Early during the first term of the new Democratic administration, Carlyle was engaged in setting up the US House of Representatives Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During Tallis’s testimony on drones two years later, he seemed distraught. He chose, at the last minute, simply to read verbatim from the testimony of a previous witness, the legal scholar Mary Ellen O’Connell. Her work focuses on international law and the use of force. Tallis then proceeded to go beyond his allotted time to read quickly and disjointedly some paragraphs from a paper he had published some years before on President Eisenhower’s January 1961 “military-industrial complex” speech. Tallis clumsily made a rushed argument that what that speech cast as a warning about a looming future danger was in fact a cloaked confession. He said he had found a document that proved that outgoing President Eisenhower was in fact announcing, in a veiled way, that he had failed to prevent Pentagon generals’ usurpation of control over US military and foreign policy through their retention of all important decision-making over US nuclear weapons and war planning.
The last words of Tallis’s testimony were from a memo he had discovered in a folder holding several early drafts of Eisenhower’s speech. The memo came originally from the archives of the Truman administration and was written by a staff member at the Pentagon. Tallis read aloud the military aide’s comment that “from that moment in August 1946 on, there was a general agreement at the highest levels of government that henceforth the civilian branches would continue to pretend to give orders and we in the Pentagon would pretend to obey.”
After his testimony at the end of April 2010, Tallis gradually descended into a state of near total silence. In 2015, his doctors diagnosed his condition as a rare form of “severe adult selective mutism with occasional apparent symptoms of malignant catatonia.” As I write this introduction to selections from his notebooks, Tallis has resumed his silence after some months recently of having exhibited increased verbal and affective responsiveness both during visits from myself and his daughter, Cary Martinson-Winslow, and in interactions with staff.
I believe that Tallis’s present emotional and psychological state can be traced back to what he experienced on the morning of April 28, 2010. For the entire twenty-minute duration of his sworn testimony before the committee, I believe he was experiencing the intense shock of the absolute loss of faith in the power of the words by which he had hitherto lived. I believe he suddenly experienced the loss of the sense that he could trust the world he had previously confidently known and helped to shape as a responsible beneficiary and highly regarded narrator and interpreter of American power. Until the moment of his testimony he had believed in what he considered to be the fundamental good faith of the underlying democratic narrative of his nation’s continuity. At that Congressional committee hearing his faith in that narrative suddenly became impossible to sustain. His participation in its logic, he wrote later in an entry, suddenly felt criminal.
From the moment of his testimony before the committee, I believe Tallis retreated into the composition of his notebook entries as a place of refuge—a temporary respite from personal terror and panic. He had been keeping notebook entries almost daily since he experienced a quasivision in Sheep Meadow in Central Park in November of 2003. After what he experienced as his “failed testimony,” he tried to use his notebooks as a means of creating, “at whatever cost,” “an entirely new method for practicing historical justice.”
Every entry in the notebooks bears a notation Tallis calls its “template marking.” In the original notebooks many entries bear more than one. A few entries bear as many as six. My best surmise is that the first template marking almost always identifies the place within the cycle of Tallis’s meditative practice of his evolving “method of historical justice” that generated the composition of that particular entry. Subsequent template markings designate, I believe, meditative returns by Tallis to that entry and his decisions about where his associations while rereading it led him to place his immediate contemplation within his overall system of “creating durations of a just reciprocity.”
In this presentation of selections from the notebooks I have elected for the most part to use only one of the template markings for each entry, always the first unless otherwise indicated. In a few instances I have been governed by my best understanding, through my own practice of my brother’s method, of an entry’s indispensable contribution to a full understanding of my brother’s vision. In these few cases, I have listed an entry’s multiple template markings and have left it to the reader to decipher the implications for that entry’s overall importance to Tallis’s method as he himself practiced it.
Tallis’s method, he wrote in an entry late in 2010, was the only way he could conceive of “getting from one moment to another in a bearable way.” “From now on,” he wrote, he was determined to make his method his “exclusive means of combining intervals of duration with ethically coherent continuities of expression.” He wrote that his notebooks were his “laboratory for my urgent experiment.” “New durations of historical justice,” he said, “are what I find myself most wishing for myself and others as citizens of our country and beneficiaries of empire.”
I suggested to Tallis’s doctors that what he considered his culpable failure to influence policy through his testimony before the Congressional committee triggered the onset of the acute phase of his illness. They did not, as I expected, summarily dismiss my theory of his present condition’s origin.
As I have said, in early December of 2015, Tallis voluntarily committed himself to the Lakehill Long-Term Psychiatric Care Facility in upstate New York near Lawrence College, where he taught for over twenty-five years. By then he had stopped speaking almost entirely and displayed increasing signs of disorientation and dissociated thinking. The doctors said their diagnosis was highly unusual but not inconsistent with behaviors sometimes exhibited by patients of Tallis’s high intelligence and intellectual background. The doctors emphasized that they based their cautiously optimistic (despite the severity of Tallis’s symptoms) prognosis regarding partial or perhaps even full recovery partly on the extremely labile but ideationally rich content of his interior thought revealed in the notebook entries I showed them. Tallis has resided at the Lakehill facility for almost three years now.
I write this introduction to a selection of entries from Tallis Martinson’s notebooks as his longtime editor and younger brother—“by eight minutes.” We are identical twins. I am now also his legal guardian an
d the literary executor of his estate. Tallis’s one request of me was a promise that I would never permit electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—electroshock—to be used no matter how severe the symptoms of his illness might continue to be. I gave him my word I would not. It was a promise I could not keep.
I have devoted myself over the past two and a half years to learning to practice Tallis’s historical method. My hope is that eventually this will help me reach him despite the persistence of his prolonged silence during my most recent visits. I want to find a way to get closer to him. I find myself wanting something entirely new to happen between us. I sometimes find myself imagining a sudden change occurring in both of us simultaneously, perhaps during a walk on one of the forest paths winding through the facility’s extensive wooded grounds. Or maybe the change will come as we wordlessly sit facing each other in the large dayroom on Lakehill’s first floor. I hope such a moment comes soon.
Thankfully Tallis’s mutism is no longer accompanied by the acute and prolonged episodes of anxiety and muscular agitation he experienced during his first weeks of hospitalization. The doctors continue to be optimistic that the mutism will eventually lift. They continue to remind me that with continued good health, he could regain his powers of intellect and ordinary personal communication at any moment.
For the past three years, Tallis’s daughter—my niece, Cary—and I have visited him at least twice every month for a day. Sometimes we stay for two. We often make the trip together. Each of us also visits him separately as our schedules permit. Both of us live in New York City, so we are able to adhere to this regular visiting schedule without too much difficulty. Until very lately, Tallis’s condition has shown signs of moderate improvement. Until his recent and, we hope, temporary setback, he had come to recognize us immediately on sight in the visitors’ dayroom and even seemed at times to welcome our company. I am happy to report that he no longer stares vacantly and indifferently around the room, avoiding our gaze. He sometimes smiles, and recently each of us, at different times, has had the feeling that, just for an instant, he wanted to engage us. Then with a frown and vigorous flailing of his arms, he seems each time to reject the impulse. We and the doctors are nevertheless cautiously optimistic that Tallis’s mental deterioration has been arrested and that recovery is not impossible. Cary and I are careful to counsel each other not to expect too much too soon.