Daybook from Sheep Meadow

by Peter Dimock

  In the spring of 2016, I was prompted by Tallis’s publishers to go through my brother’s papers. The head of the imprint that published the three-volume edition of Tallis’s History of U.S. Civil–Military Relations, 1783–1975 wanted to know if somewhere there wasn’t perhaps a working draft of a fourth and final volume. Had Tallis not perhaps brought his major historical project up closer to the present? Given the present turmoil of contemporary political events and military confrontations, Tallis’s publisher said, he and his colleagues were eager to publish a new edition of his history with the addition of a new fourth volume covering the years 1975 to 2015. He said he had discussed this idea with Tallis from time to time beginning soon after the American invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

  I could not find any completed or partial drafts of such a work. (I did find a few preparatory notes giving tentative titles of possible additional chapters for an updated version of the original work.) In the course of my search, however, I decided to read more carefully than I had previously the 126 notebooks along with Tallis’s instructions regarding them. I read them to see if they shed light on why Tallis had not continued work on a final volume of his history with his usual discipline and thoroughness.

  In his instructions, Tallis said the notebook entries constituted what, as early as 2005, he found himself referring to privately as his “Daybook from Sheep Meadow.” As best I can now make out, the entries were composed, almost without skipping a day, between November 3, 2003, and April 5, 2015. I take him at his word when he writes, “These entries provide a rough record of my thoughts and mental condition as I developed and practiced my historical method for refusing empire after the vision I experienced in Sheep Meadow at approximately 2:00 PM the afternoon of November 3, 2003.”

  I recommended to Tallis’s publisher that he commission another historian to write a fourth volume for Tallis’s history of American civil–military relations. I mentioned that I would be transcribing, selecting, and annotating entries from Tallis’s notebooks for possible publication as an entirely separate work. Tallis’s publisher said he would be pleased to consider any manuscript I produced along these lines. He emphasized that the house could not commit to anything before they had been able to look at a rough completed draft of such a work.

  What follows are excerpts from a much longer draft manuscript of my edited and sometimes extensively annotated entries from Tallis’s notebooks. For this compilation, I have chosen entries, mostly from the later years, roughly from the time of his Congressional testimony in the spring of 2010 to his last entry, written in April of 2015. For some entries I have felt obliged to provide extensive explanatory material. This is because the entries often contain cryptic references to a family and personal history that I am able to fill in for the obvious reason that Tallis and I grew up in the same house and shared the same childhood. Without such annotation readers will not be able to follow the logic of many of the associations Tallis makes in his entries or to identify the immediate biographical and personal sources of their emotional intensity.

  Several times in the notebooks Tallis speaks of “my ecstasy of ordinary perception just before I saw the missiles strike.” For a long time, I did not know how to interpret this statement or what weight to give it in Tallis’s own practice of his method. I now believe it is his shorthand for the dislocation and destruction of agency in which he felt implicated through the US government’s illegal use of unmanned drones to assassinate official enemies and other members of hostile populations beyond an active battlefield. He uses the phrase, I think, as a placeholder to designate his own experience of the distracted, discontinuous, even pleasurable apprehension of war’s lived temporality that, as he says in another entry, “creates a rending, flaying ecstasy of complicity in the exterminatory history we are now living together as beneficiaries.”

  For all its despair, one virtue of Tallis’s experiment, I believe, is that his method proposes a habitation of the duration of American history different from any we have had before. It is a duration that cannot be measured by any narrative of peace and war we have conventionally recognized. That habitation, I believe his entries are intended to prove, entails an ecstatic reciprocity made from common speech we are all aware we know but which we have never dared to speak with the fluency that would make it our own. In the end, Tallis believed he had failed in his experiment. The pain of his silence now fills reciprocity’s evacuated space. I want to prove him wrong.

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON November 27, 2003

  —This swirl of objects, this haze of thought—the light these days cannot contain: this beginning. [I.1; II.1; III.1a–1b; IV.1; V.1]

  Template explanation (shorter version):

  I.1; The first of seven epigraphs: As soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. We begin to exchange set phrases, not noticing that all living meaning has gone from them. Poor, trembling creatures—we don’t know what meaning is. It will return only if and when we come to our senses and remember that we are responsible for everything. (Nadezhda Mandelstam)

  II.1; The first of five chapters: “Sworn Testimony Is Direct Evidence” (Part of a judge’s charge to a jury in every civil and criminal trial)

  III. 1a–1b; The first of three sets of interpretive antinomies: 1a. We are social all the way down; 1b. By far the greatest use of language is for thought and not communication, despite virtual dogma to the contrary. (Noam Chomsky)

  IV. 1; The first of a trajectory of three founding literary texts of Western civilization: Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. (Psalm 51 Unto the end. A Psalm of David when the prophet Nathan came to him after he went into Bathsheba: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness”)

  V.1; The immediacy of Anagoge (three scenes from Sheep Meadow): 1. St. Michael in Trees; 2. St. Anthony’s Gaze; 3. The Painted Word. (From two paintings by Hieronymus Bosch: The Temptation of St. Anthony and St. John on Patmos.) The texts of the template should be memorized verbatim and the paintings stored in memory for the fluency of my method to produce its full effect. [A full outline of Tallis’s historical method is provided beginning on p. 131.]

  Authorization for the meditative application of this template to texts and thoughts requiring our interpretation is provided by eschatology understood as knowledge concerning last things—death, judgment, heaven, hell, the end of history, and the end of a sustainable natural world. A French prisoner of war who spent three years in a German internment camp during World War II wrote after his release:

  The eschatological notion of judgment implies that beings have an identity before eternity, before the accomplishment of history, before the fullness of time, while there is still time. The idea of being overflowing history makes possible beings called upon to answer at their trial and consequently beings that can speak rather than lend their lips to an anonymous utterance of history. Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religion) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The certitude of peace is not to be obtained by a play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed. (Emmanuel Levinas)

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON July 10, 2013

  —My artificial ecstasy of vision in Sheep Meadow on Monday, November 3, 2003: Let yourself see this: the unarmed black helicopter, with no markings, hovers deaf-eningly above the field in which all the couples stand beside their small children and embrace each other—some standing, some prone—in the sudden summer warmt
h of November’s surprising sun. The temperature that afternoon reached a record high of seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit by 1:00 PM. The poet sings from the side of the hill beneath a terraced tree while the helicopter’s loud rotors create a maddening, illiterate wind. Everyone suddenly understands that the loud noise provides cover for the sound of the copilot’s voice inside the helicopter’s cockpit calling the drone strike in. [I.6; II.2; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.3]

  I. 6; Epigraph 6: Daughter, from far away he visits you / whom you have come to love / out of the river of yourself, / 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)— / a stone, white water.

  II. 2; Chapter 2: “John James Audubon, Aged Six, in Couëron, France, in the Midst of Revolution, Dreams of Looking Up in Saint-Domingue in 1791”

  III. 3a–3b; Argument by antinomy (third of three sets): 3a. Our present history of permanent wars is being narrated to us as a military emergency in which the principle of order is itself at stake. Under these conditions the violence of power becomes its own self-justifying, self-legitimizing argument from which there is no appeal in political or moral speech. 3b. Fundamental historical change occurs when poets turn themselves into instruments for the metamorphosis—the withholding and unfolding—of literary time that the rest of us have ceased to hear but which gets narrated to us nevertheless as the source of determining cultural structures. Between the act of listening and the act of speech delivery there is another activity that come closest to being performance and constitutes its essence, so to speak. The unfilled interval between listening and speech delivery is silent, absurd to its very core. We cannot obtain meaning by asking others the truth of our passage across that interval in language generated by thought. (Osip Mandelstam)

  IV. 3; A trajectory of the founding texts of Western civilization (third of three): 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 cannot 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. (From the last letter of Daniel Somers, dated June 10, 2013)

  V. 3; The immediacy of Anagoge (three scenes from Sheep Meadow, third scene, The Painted Word (after Hieronymus Bosch’s St. John on Patmos)): The radiance of joy in the Virgin’s glance as she effortlessly dictates the words for the imminence of the Apocalypse through an angel with a peacock’s wings to the handsome, smiling youth, Saint and Scribe, holding the upraised quill on Patmos. The tiny merchant ship entering the harbor far below is on fire. Nothing that will ever happen can possibly disrupt or detract from the unbounded happiness of this scene.

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (Christopher Renthro Martinson [CRM])

  At the risk of pedantry, I will now proceed to use this entry of July 10, 2013, to present, in a more complete form, as clearly and succinctly as I can, using Tallis’s own words wherever possible, the rules he devised for practicing his “entirely new method of enacting historical justice.” Here is how he explained his procedures for composing his notebook entries in a long letter to me dated January 12, 2015:

  “I eventually learned to compose each entry after performing a preliminary mental exercise visualizing our father, Justin Martinson, in the early fall of 1943, just outside Naples, reading the first three cantos of Dante’s Inferno for the first time in Italian. Our father is reading from a battered, once expensive, leather-bound volume he had found lying unscathed in a pile of books scattered across the floor of a room without a ceiling. Looking up, Father’s gaze is open to the sky from inside the ruins of a villa American planes had bombed earlier in the week. This happened near the town of Avellino sometime around September 28, 1943. Father had been drafted at the age of twenty-five from Yale graduate school, where he was an advanced Ph.D. candidate in classics. The army sent him to Officer Candidate School. His knowledge of German and linguistics made him valuable as a cryptographer. After officer training, he was assigned to the Signals Intelligence Corps.

  His discovery, he said, in the midst of war, that because of his previously acquired knowledge of Latin, Greek, German, French, Hebrew, and Sanskrit, he could speak and read Italian without having studied it felt to him like a miracle. The Inferno, he said, was the first poem he had ever made his own without any effort whatsoever. When I was fourteen (the year was 1964), Father spoke to me with an urgency and intensity that seemed to assert (with an authority beyond argument) that I would understand what he was about to say. He told me it was ‘as valuable as life itself to learn Italian by sound if only to be able to take inside the body through one’s own voice and mind verbatim all 414 of the first three cantos’ lines.’ After you do that,’ he said, ‘translation will forever register on your ears and mind as irrelevant—translation will always be for you a contradiction in terms.’

  After our father’s death and after my vision in Sheep Meadow, at the age of fifty-four, I finally memorized the first three cantos of Inferno for myself. After months of effort, I began to decipher without a translation the syntax and the sound assembled crudely from my faulty knowledge of Latin, French, Spanish, and a little German and Greek. I refused to put pressure on myself concerning what this obsessive, doubling activity of mine might mean. After my failed testimony before the House committee in 2010, I newly understood the necessity of our father’s and now my discipline to create, in the midst of the self-canceling hypocrisies of complicity, rules for a principled refusal of a militarily imposed continuity.”

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  After successfully beginning my compilation of selections from my brother’s notebooks, I suddenly became stuck for a whole year. I could not proceed. The entries kept coming back to Tallis’s meditations on the moment our father, Justin, read Dante for the first time as a young American soldier near Naples in a room without a ceiling in a bombed-out villa. I could not understand why. I sensed it was somehow where Tallis understood our father came to himself in language without constraint—without the burden of failed or betrayed interpretations. After a year of not knowing why I was stuck, I decided to give up on the entire project. It was at this moment that I suddenly experienced the intense memory of the following scene. It was a memory I could not remember having brought to consciousness in over thirty years. All at once I felt flooded with an understanding of why reading Dante in the bombed-out room without a ceiling meant so much to Tallis. It meant so much to him because of what I thought I now understood it had meant to our father—and yet now I think I know that neither Tallis nor our father, Justin, ever let themselves acknowledge its real import or its true source.

  The event that left the memory I am referring to occurred in either 1955 or 1956, I’m not sure which. I am five or six years old and looking up into the wild, terrified, abject cruelty and violence of unresponsiveness—an annihilating coldness—of the eyes of our grandfather, Tallis Martinson Sr. His gaze is his incomprehensibly unreciprocating answer to my own spontaneous look’s attempt to express the unprotected depth of my love for him. My joy in him is that he is the father of my father, Justin Martinson, his firstborn son. Therefore, I am his. I am trying with my look to honor him as my father’s and my own invaluable, indispensable, unbounded source. Grandfather was born in 1891. Grandfather Tallis and I are alone and standing in summer afternoon light on the banks of a pond in upstate New York. He is supposed to be taking me fishing, but I can see now he only wants to return to the house to be by himself at his desk cutting out scenes of animals from hunting magazines. He is desperate and enraged and suffocating. My look has interfered with his failing internal efforts to suppress his constant, terrified rag
e. I am overwhelmed with the knowledge that something in me has failed him.

  Even now in memory I find myself desperately trying to love him and failing. I remember myself as a child realizing that this was a new kind of knowledge. I remember knowing even then that it could not be used. If I did not love him, I knew I hated him. The surprise of it made me wonder what knowledge was for.

  There was no protection for my crime. In my reaction to my grandfather’s gaze I now realize I directly felt what our father had once felt toward the same man—before and after language. As an infant he had waited with his mother in a huge house in Elizabeth, New Jersey, endlessly desiring (through her) his soldier father home from World War I. Trying to love my grandfather and failing, I suddenly thought I knew what our father, Justin, had never let himself know as an adult. No father had ever returned to him, aged eighteen months in June of 1919, in this man’s disastrous homecoming from the battlefields of France.

  Looking at my grandfather that afternoon in 1955 or 1956, I knew suddenly that there was only brokenness. I felt my own fury that he was using the adult violence of his authority to force me to go through the motions of pretending that he stood there whole as the completed man who we (I, Tallis, my sister, my mother, Grandmother, and above all, my father) needed him to be. I felt his refusal to reciprocate the neediness of my loving gaze silently condemning me without appeal for a primordial betrayal that I was not entitled to survive.