Daybook from Sheep Meadow

by Peter Dimock

  This sudden memory gave me access to another memory from later that same year. Sometime in October, a few miles from that same pond, I am standing in the back seat of my grandparents’ Buick sedan holding on to the back of the front seat as we traveled along a dirt road through second-growth forest. Again, it was in late-afternoon light. My grandmother was driving. Her lips were quivering. I had first noticed this newly acquired habit a few days previously. Suddenly, Grandfather, who was sitting beside her in the front seat, ordered her—impatiently, angrily—to stop the car. His voice sounded both excited and panicked. As he reached beside him on the seat, I saw for the first time the stock of the breached double-barreled shotgun resting there, barrels pointing at the car floor. The next thing I knew I was standing beside him outside the car, looking up to his face as he silently aimed the gun at the sky. A loud, dry clatter of wings had just risen from the underbrush beside the road. After the second explosion I saw an object falling from the sky. It fell straight down with a terrifyingly swift finality of unwinged, weighted catastrophe. Moments before I had felt the rush of Maggie, my grandfather’s retriever, bumping me in her frenzied leap through the car’s open back door.

  With what I experienced then, and still think now, was love, Maggie leaped to retrieve the fallen bird and carry it back to Grandfather in her soft mouth. Maggie’s trembling body seemed to express an ecstasy of purest joy. In one breath, Grandfather cursed her and himself—himself for missing his first shot, her for leaving before he had given her the permission of his command. My grandmother did not get out of the car. The trip home was filled with a tense, desolate silence that radiated a violence I had never before encountered.

  With the remembering of this scene came the realization that I had never spoken of this event to anyone. I realize now, as I try to reconstruct the occasion’s details, that Tallis must have been with me. I hope to ask him about this when he recovers. I will not be at all surprised if he says he remembers that afternoon perfectly. If so, I will ask him why we have never once spoken of it to each other in all these intervening years.

  Tallis Martinson Sr. was not present at the birth of our father, Justin, who was born on December 19, 1917. This was because our grandfather was among the first American soldiers to arrive in France in June of 1917. He had volunteered to fight as an enlisted man. He sent home word that he wanted to have a holster with a loaded pistol hanging from one of the bedposts during his first son’s birth. His wish was complied with. Tallis Sr. had volunteered to serve as a member of the Fifth Field Regiment and was assigned in October to fight alongside the French in the trenches around Nancy. He participated in the American victory at Cantigny on May 28, 2018. He was part of the artillery support for the American offensive at Belleau Wood between June 6 and June 26, 1918, in which 10,000 US troops were killed, wounded, or missing in action. He returned from World War I in June of 1919.

  Emma Wright, our father’s favorite cousin (Father himself never spoke to Tallis or me about any of this), told me when I asked about my grandfather that as a child she overheard uncles and aunts saying that Grandfather Tallis returned from WWI utterly changed. He had shed, they reported, the spontaneity and exuberant playfulness for which he had been known. His infectious optimism, his faith in things, was gone.. Clearly, something had happened to him in the war that left him embittered, moody, quick to rage, watchful. He seemed both aggressive and fearful. He appeared both frightened of being overwhelmed and angry that he could not overcome his fear. Emma recalled family members’ shock at barely being able to recognize him. Our father, Justin, never spoke of any such traumatic transformation in his father’s life. I don’t think he could let himself recognize it. His childhood was filled with the arrival of brothers and sisters—six—all but one of whom lived into adulthood.

  What came to me when I remembered this scene was the sudden knowledge (a knowledge I do not think Tallis shares) of the significance of his emphasis in his entries of our father as a young soldier reading Dante in Italian, a language Justin did not know before 1943. The fact is that this story of our father reading Dante in a broken room open to the sky near Naples was the only story our father ever told us of his wartime experiences. He spent more than two years fighting in Europe during World War Two. (He landed in North Africa in the spring of 1943 and ended up in Vienna in 1945.)

  I think I now know that our father had to find a way, in order to help or even rescue his father, of not knowing that his father never returned home as a coherent self to his wife and infant son from World War I. Denial of this truth created a devouring hole at the center of everything. For Justin to be loyal to his impaired father and still return whole himself (how could he survive his world war if his father had been unable to?), our father had had to experience himself anew in a language that gave him his sudden ecstatic doctrine of “no translation.” Does war destroy the coherence of everyone who experiences it close up—both living and dead? Is it the refusal of this knowledge (whose family history Tallis’s notebook entries document) that Tallis himself was trying to break through?

  Our father devoted his scholarly career to writing a book analyzing the aesthetic and moral unity of Homer’s Odyssey. I asked him when I was young why he did not prefer the Iliad. He said then he had no answer to that. I now think it was because the Odyssey is about a warrior king’s successful return from war to wife and son after twenty years. I think our father used it all his life as an unacknowledged, uninterpreted counterhistory with which to pretend that his soldier father returned to him whole from France in 1919.

  In support of my theory, I feel compelled to add that in Canto 26 of the Inferno, Dante tells the story of Ulysses quite differently from the way Homer does. In Dante’s account, Ulysses refuses father, wife, son, and home and, for the sake of knowledge, sails not to Ithaka but west through the Gates of Hercules to the end of the world. There by the divine malice of a sudden storm he is plunged, unrealized and unfulfilled, with all his men, to the bottom of the sea from within sight of the gate to redemption and the path to paradise. In a poem whose meanings our father swore resisted all translation (whose meanings were identical to their words’ sounded duration in the immediacy of air) he found a way to experience the contradictory truth of a narrative whose true generative logic he never found a way to permit himself to know.

  It is not my purpose in making Tallis’s notebooks public to expose family secrets. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add to this account of our grandfather and our father’s relationship to him another family matter that concerns me personally. I include it here because it strongly affected all my relations to the history that animates my brother’s notebooks and my present annotation of them.

  Along with the notebooks in one of the boxes Tallis left in my custody, I found six bundles of family letters tied with string. The number totals more than 175, and they cover a period of more than forty years. (In his accompanying note, Tallis appoints me the letters’ owner and literary executor and gives me control over access and all publication rights.)

  The earliest letter is addressed to Tallis from Sari Moreland, the daughter of a close friend and colleague of our father at the college, Roger Moreland, a professor of English. The envelope bears a postmark of late May of 1970. Sari was born the same year as Tallis and I. I have stayed in touch with her at long intervals over all these years.

  Since the content of the letters will prove relevant to how Tallis’s notebook entries will be interpreted and how his method will be used by readers, certain personal family matters do need to be divulged here at the beginning. I had fallen in love with Sari at first sight at the age of five and boldly announced to Tallis that whether or not he loved her too, I would never love anyone again the way I loved her. Nothing, I immediately told him (at the age of five), would ever stop me from marrying her. I knew beyond doubt that we would be joined forever just the way protagonists are married at the end of fairy tales. In fact, when we were six, at Sari’s instigation, we performed a weddin
g ceremony for ourselves beside a trash can of burning waste-paper in the backyard of my parents’ house. We had been assisting my father with that weekly chore. He had just gone back inside the house after asking us to keep an eye on the fire for him. When we were eighteen, Sari rejected me as a boyfriend. She preferred by then the company of other, more rebellious, more dangerous men. “You feel too much like a brother,” she said.

  Even as I write these sentences, I can still feel the pulse and spell of the evening light (I cannot remember now if it was spring or fall) of our first childhood meeting. We stood facing each other in the front hall of her parents’ home. She stood against the curving banister leading upstairs, the animated grace of her child’s form framed against the backdrop of the white banister’s spindles that seemed about to be set ablaze by the splintering light. She seemed to appear from the pages of an illustrated children’s book. Its unknown story was my happiness. I knew from that moment I could trust my desire. The world needed no revision. Sometimes practicing my brother’s method I have felt that moment continuing into the present.

  I cannot remember for certain if Tallis was with me during this moment. I assume that he was. I vaguely remember worrying that he might feel exactly what I was feeling. Then I remember thinking there was nothing I could do about that—that nothing could stop me from loving her and the consequences were what being was for. I am preparing myself to ask Tallis when he feels better if he recalls this moment that I have kept so carefully in mind all this time.

  Tallis’s letter to me explaining the rules of his method contains a reference to his memorizing the cantos from the Inferno as instructed by our father:

  “Each morning after recalling from memory in the original language, as Father taught us, one of the first three cantos (I have not progressed beyond these three), I allow myself the luxury of free, associational speech derived from the applicable generative template I have pre-assigned to that day’s meditation.”

  In my own efforts to interpret Tallis’s notebook entries I have found it useful to keep in mind this practice of reciting the Inferno cantos in the original Italian as a preliminary exercise to recording his spontaneous thoughts. It was his way perhaps of trying to join our father in his refuge from his estrangement from his father (Tallis Sr.’s) unacknowledged brokenness, his—to a child—untranslatable failure to return as an intact soul from France in 1919. Tallis doesn’t mention Dante further in his template directions but goes on to say the following:

  “I created the template for spontaneous association gradually in the course of the four months following my vision in Sheep Meadow in November of 2003. I have altered the template slightly from time to time to keep it up to date. These variations are minor and do not need to be dwelt upon here. (The one major revision of the template is the substitution, after June 22, 2013, of the last letter of Daniel Somers in place of Osip Mandelstam’s fragment from “Ode to Stalin” as the fifth epigraph in the first section of the template and as the third text in the trajectory of founding texts in Western civilization in the template’s fourth section.)

  “My rules were admittedly patchwork but also a successful solution to the immediate crisis of my need for another continuity of American history to assert moment to moment. I now realize this procedure need not be as desperate as I so often make it out to be. Though arduous, I do not hesitate to recommend that you commit each element of my template to memory. This will take time, but I dare to hope you will find the benefits worth the effort.

  “I hasten to add that you are by no means confined in your meditations to the template I have devised. My method will prove its usefulness if it leads you to devise a different one with another set of rules of your own invention that you are able to hold constantly in memory and employ effectively. The task is always the same: to narrate without complicity your own success in refusing the permanence of American wars.”

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  Here again is the second of the notebook entries typed on the folded piece of frayed typing paper I found lying loosely in one of the cardboard boxes holding the notebooks. The entry is dated November 7, 2004. The transcription of it below bears a different template designation from the one given it on the loose piece of typing paper [I.2; II.1;III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.2]. The transcription below bears the template designation that appears in the original of this entry recorded in the notebooks [I.1; II.2; III.3a.–3b; IV.1; V.2].. The event in the Iraq War corresponding with this date was the beginning of the Second Battle of Fallujah, which lasted until December 23, 2004. In time you will get used to bringing to mind from memory verbatim the same notebook entry while using the different template notations assigned to it to generate variant associations. “The contrasting patterns of association this mnemonic procedure generates,” Tallis writes later in a note to me, “will help you to use my new method for accomplishing historical justice effectively to traverse the interval between one moment to the next without unwarranted constraint or fear.”

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON November 7, 2004

  —This 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 delight—a violence no one wanted to survive—an ecstasy of unanswerable force, a place of ease past every betrayed possibility of reciprocity. In Sheep Meadow that afternoon a year ago, I felt my thought and ordinary American ecstatic perception become one. [I.1; II.2; III.3a.–3b; IV.1; V.2]

  I.1; Epigraph 1: As soon as thought dries up, it is replaced by words. A word is too easily transformed from a meaningful sign into a mere signal, and a group of words into an empty formula, bereft even of the sense such things have in magic. 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 has vanished from the world. It will return only if and when people come to their senses and recall that we must answer for everything. (Nadezhda Mandelstam]

  II. 2; 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”; Audubon, his biographer tells us, was born a bastard in 1785 on his father’s Les Cayes sugar plantation in Saint-Domingue (soon, in 1804, to become Haiti). His mother was a French chambermaid who died just months after his birth. He was raised on the island until he was six with his younger half sister, Rose, daughter of his father’s “quadroon” mistress, Catherine “Sanitte” Bouffard. Of these lives we know almost nothing. His illegitimate birth and early deep association with slavery were closely held secrets all Audubon’s life. There seems to have been trauma, one biographer suggests, mastered by a manic, obsessive love for wild birds. The slave uprisings on nearby islands and the beginnings of revolution in France and Saint-Domingue led his father to sell the plantation shortly before the Haitian Revolution began on August 21, 1791. His father sent for him and his sister from Nantes in June of that year. There is no record, this same biographer says, of what happened “to whoever mothered him on Saint-Domingue.”

  III. 3a–3b; Argument by antinomy: 3a. Contemporary history is narrated to us as a state of military emergency in which the exercise of the violence of state power constitutes the self-evidence of its legitimacy. The violence of power has become its own justifying argument asserted in the immediacy of real time. 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 source of “cultural structures.” (Osip Mandelstam)

  IV.1; A trajectory of founding texts of Western civilization: Psalm 51 (Miserere mei) The Psalm of David when the prophet Nathan came to him after he went into Bathsheba:

  “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

  Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall
be whiter than snow.

  Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

  V.2; The immediacy of Anagoge: 2. St. Anthony’s Gaze: “Now since you asked me to give you an account of the blessed Antony’s way of life, and are wishful to learn how he began the discipline, who and what manner of man he was previous to this, how he closed his life, and whether the things told of him are true, that you also may bring yourselves to imitate him, I very readily accepted your behest, for to me also the bare recollection of Antony is a great accession of help. And I know that you, when you have heard, apart from your admiration of the man, will be wishful to emulate his determination; seeing that for monks the life of Antony is a sufficient pattern of discipline.” (Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria)

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON November 7, 2004

  (continued later in the afternoon):

  —This painting instead—Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of Anthony’s temptations, the ecstasies of them: the naked woman in the hollow tree draped in crimson cloth, all her beauty forfeit; all the cities are burning; all the writings are snares; the sudden immediacy of God’s presence in the human heart (this subjectivity was made possible some say by the influence of the desert fathers on popular consciousness after subjection to Roman occupation and rule)—this immediacy of God’s unlettered presence has become the new text to be deciphered. Before Anthony’s example the church fathers’ authority had been derived from mastery of philosophical writings (Christian and Pagan) preserved on the expensive pages of rich men’s codices.