Daybook from Sheep Meadow

by Peter Dimock

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  November 1, 2010

  —We caused this to happen—this history. The sound of fire inside the walls of the house. The play of our lethal contradictions. The autonomy that the language faculty implies cannot be repealed: this sweetness in the mind due to the construction of a duration made from the mutual reciprocity of equals. When representations of historical justice cease to be hallucinatory, peace will occupy the silence of intervals like the smell of rain. [I.5; II.4; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.2]

  I.5; Epigraph 5: “The piles of heads disappear in the distance. I am diminished there….” (Osip Mandelstam)

  II.4; Chapter 4: “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970”

  III.3a–3b; Argument by antinomy: 3a. The history we are living is narrated to us as a military emergency in which order itself is at stake. In such circumstances the unlimited violence of power becomes its own self-justifying argument. 3b. Fundamental change occurs when poets turn themselves into instruments of the metamorphosis—the withholding and unfolding—of the literary time the rest of us have ceased to hear.

  IV.3; A trajectory of the founding texts of Western civilization: The piles of heads disappear in the distance. / I am diminished there. No one / will remember my name. / But in the rustle of pages / and the sound of children’s games / I shall rise from the dead to say: / “the sun.”

  V.2; The Immediacy of Anagoge: 2. St. Anthony’s Gaze.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON November 4, 2010

  —A fall into history—this book of November reveries from gardens of earthly delight: a Puritan drone against the play of interpretations: a master narrative for lyrical presence—a hypocritical opening onto power’s unanswerable impunity. An event—however inconsequential—implies a redemptive logic by virtue of its coherence: listening to birds without distraction, listing their sightings with a pencil in a battered notebook. The wind blows raw and cold against the unprotected skin of wrists and face: St. Michael in Trees—rumors of his promised victory. [I.2; II.4; III.2a–2b; IV.2; V.1]

  I.2; Epigraph 2: By far the greatest use of language is for thought and not communication, despite virtual dogma to the contrary. (Noam Chomsky)

  II.4; Chapter 4: “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970”

  III.2a–2b; Argument by antinomy: 2a. Order derives from public assemblies of armed men. The purpose of war is to secure the peace; the purpose of peace is to prepare for war and to win it by every means. The trial by force is the test of the real. 2b. Every society’s founding myths include one that narrates the end of the world. No one is ever found to be missing from a single one of these stories.

  IV.2; A trajectory of civilization’s founding texts: Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 77”: The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear; / And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste…. / These offices, so oft as thou wilt look / Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.

  V.1; The immediacy of Anagoge: 1. St. Michael in Trees: the sudden violence of wind in the tops of trees; the rush of meaning in the bending branches next to Sheep Meadow: “Holiness is presented not so much as a pattern to be imitated, but as a power to be harnessed, and a source of intercession to be supplicated.” [Eamon Duffy, introduction to Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend]

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  From the recent practice of my brother’s method (April 13, 2018):

  There will be revenge instead of justice for the civil war we didn’t have—the one we have postponed until now. We have destroyed countries and populations in the service of a triumphalism whose logic of impunity no practice of democracy has ever interrupted. We were so young then. The fires in the city’s streets later that night of May 1, 1970 bore no interpretation we dared to recognize as the nation’s end. But fire sometimes stands in for history’s accomplishment of embodied universal redemption; such a thought, I think, was in the air. The idea of a self splayed open unrelated to any sign, to any narrative continuity beyond the presence of force constituting its own self-justifying duration. What entitlement is there to ecstasy? Sari’s beauty against the backdrop of the gray and white sea: “You may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,” my mother used to tell me. The necessity of reciting the “neck verse”: Under Medieval canon law a death sentence could be commuted to lifetime servitude under ecclesiastical authority if the convicted person invoked “benefit of clergy” by reciting from memory Psalm 51 in Latin: Miserere mei, Deus, secun-dum magnam misericordiam tuam. [Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness.] Professional criminals were said to learn the sounds of the Latin words by heart without any understanding of their meaning in order to reproduce them before a judge at their sentencing. We were all together briefly that afternoon on May 1, 1970, on Crane’s Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts: Tallis; Sari; Sari’s father, Roger Moreland (he came later in the afternoon); Cora Mason; Sari’s boyfriend, Gilliam; and me. I cannot remember anything that we said. The sea and the Scotch pines growing on the rocky ledges were beautiful. I remember thinking that the two women’s unanswerable beauty overflowed all thought. [I.5; II.4; III.3a–3b; IV.3; V.2]

  I.5; Epigraph 5: “I am sorry that it has come to this.”

  II.4; Chapter 4: “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970”

  III.3a–3b; Argument by antinomy: 3a. The history we are living is narrated to us as a military emergency in which the principle of order is itself at stake. 3b. Fundamental change occurs when poets turn themselves into instruments in the metamorphosis—the withholding and unfolding—of the literary time the rest of us have ceased to hear.

  IV.3; A trajectory of founding texts of Western civilization: 3. “I know how to kill, and I know how to do it so that there is no pain whatsoever.”

  V.2; The immediacy of Anagoge: 2. St. Anthony’s Gaze

  •

  EDITOR’S NOTE (CRM)

  The second element of the meditative template Tallis supplies for each of his notebook entries (designated by the Roman numeral II) refers, he says in his letter of “meditative instructions,” “to titles of chapters, as if from a long narrative.” Chapter 4, used in my entry above, is titled “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970.” Beginning the afternoon of Monday, November 6, 2003, Tallis seems to have started to plot these storylines as a backdrop for what was to become his “disciplined silence.” The five chapters were filled in and were established in their roughly final “form” by the late fall of 2010 or early 2011. By then the chapter titles had stabilized as: 1. “Sworn Testimony Is Direct Evidence”; 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”; 3. “On Burdicks’s Hill”; 4. “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May, 1, 1970”; 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.”

  In his 2015 letter appointing me his literary executor, Tallis informed me that in the fall of 2010 he became convinced that it was his duty as an American citizen to summon all of us who had been together on Crane’s Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts, on Friday, May 1, 1970, to meet with him individually on Burdick’s Hill. That May Day in 1970 was the day after President Nixon had announced to the nation that United States and South Vietnamese armed forces had invaded Cambodia. The five of us who spent a stunned morning and afternoon in that beautiful place were Tallis, me, Sari, Cora Mason, and Sari’s then boyfriend, Gilliam Kell. Sari’s father, Roger Moreland, joined us late in the afternoon. When we returned to Cambridge that evening, we joined rioters in the streets. Storefront windows were being broken and trash cans were burning. Tallis wrote in his 2015 letter that after 2010 he devoted his notebook compositions to preparing himself to question each of us closely a
bout how we narrated to ourselves the continuity we had lived since that day on Crane’s Beach. In the late spring of 2013, he said, he even came to believe that he had issued to each of us an urgent invitation to speak with him alone, “face to face,” on Burdick’s Hill. He thought for a while that our silence meant that we had refused to answer his call. But he came to realize, he said, that in reality he had never contacted us because he himself was at an absolute loss how to answer his own question “within any possible context of good faith.” After my own practice of his method, I take my brother at his simplest word: there is an American imperative to make the failure of narrative whose coherence is empire valuable for thought.

  From my recent practice of my brother’s method:

  My terza rima of thought, not sound, in patterns of three over four (third set):

  a: This patched scrim made from fragments of American nationalist triumphalism.

  b: The intuition of a euphoric counterhistory to the history of American slavery in the service of a universal justice waiting to be lived.

  c: A new history of print literacy based on verbatim memorization of texts and the reciprocity to be derived from the universal natural language faculty. “Learning to read,” he said to his wife concerning me, “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” “It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things…. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” (Frederick Douglass)

  a,b,c | c,a,b; | b,c,a; | a,b,c; | etc.

  a,b,c,c; | a,b,b,c; | a,a,b,c; | c,a,b,b; | etc.

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  December 12, 2013

  —These birds fly outside the windows of thought: the history of modernity happened to everyone everywhere all at once. This fusion of comfort and Apocalypse. The angel leads his armies of light to certain victory. Yet his expression suggests reluctance, as if he had wanted to postpone the battle a while longer—he has more armor to put on. A greave that fits his unprotected left leg leans against an oak tree. History comes to us through unguarded speech and spontaneous thought. How are we to inhabit unsustainable durations while listening to sworn testimony? [I.3; II.4; III.1a–1b; IV.3; V.1]

  I.3; Epigraph 3: What matters in poetry is only the understanding that brings it about. (Osip Mandelstam)

  II.4; Chapter 4: “The Invasion of Cambodia on Crane’s Beach, May 1, 1970”

  III.1a–1b; Argument by antinomy: 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.3; A trajectory of Western civilization’s founding texts: 3. “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.” (Last letter of Daniel Somers, dated June 10, 2013)

  V.1; The immediacy of Anagoge: 1. St. Michael in Trees.

  FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF TALLIS MARTINSON

  November 4, 2010 (cont.)

  (Copied as if from memory in Tallis’s handwriting)

  Narrative and Testimony of Sarah M. Grimké

  Miss Grimké is a daughter of the late Judge Grimké, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, and sister of the late Hon. Thomas S. Grimké.

  “As I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar; but this may not, cannot be; they come over my memory like gory spectres, and implore me with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Savior, in the name of humanity; for the sake of the slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the southern prison house. I feel impelled by a sacred sense of duty, by my obligations to my country, by sympathy for the bleeding victims of tyranny and lust, to give my testimony respecting the system of American slavery,—to detail a few facts, most of which came under my personal observation. And here I may premise, that the actors in these tragedies were all men and women of the highest respectability, and of the first families in South Carolina, and, with one exception, citizens of Charleston; and that their cruelties did not in the slightest degree affect their standing in society.

  “A handsome mulatto woman, about 18 or 20 years of age, whose independent spirit could not brook the degradation of slavery, was in the habit of running away: for this offence she had been repeatedly sent by her master and mistress to be whipped by the keeper of the Charleston work-house. This had been done with such inhuman severity, as to lacerate her back in a most shocking manner; a finger could not be laid between the cuts. But the love of liberty was too strong to be annihilated by torture; and, as a last resort, she was whipped at several different times, and kept a close prisoner. A heavy iron collar, with three long prongs projecting from it, was placed round her neck, and a strong and sound front tooth was extracted, to serve as a mark to describe her, in case of escape. Her sufferings at this time were agonizing; she could lie in no position but on her back, which was sore from scourgings, as I can testify, from personal inspection, and her only place of rest was the floor, on a blanket. These outrages were committed in a family where the mistress daily read the scriptures, and assembled her children for family worship. She was accounted, and was really, so far as alms-giving was concerned, a charitable woman, and tender hearted to the poor; and yet this suffering slave, who was the seamstress of the family, was continually in her presence, sitting in her chamber to sew, or engaged in her other household work, with her lacerated and bleeding back, her mutilated mouth, and heavy iron collar, without, so far as appeared, exciting any feelings of compassion.

  “A highly intelligent slave, who panted after freedom with ceaseless longings, made many attempts to get possession of himself. For every offence he was punished with extreme severity. At one time he was tied up by his hands to a tree, and whipped until his back was one gore of blood. To this terrible infliction he was subjected at intervals for several weeks, and kept heavily ironed while at his work. His master one day accused him of a fault, in the usual terms dictated by passion and arbitrary power; the man protested his innocence, but was not credited. He again repelled the charge with honest indignation. His master’s temper rose almost to frenzy; and seizing a fork, he made a deadly plunge at the breast of the slave. The man being far his superior in strength, caught his arm, and dashed the weapon on the floor. His master grasped at his throat, but the slave disengaged himself, and rushed from the apartment. Having made his escape, he fled to the woods; and after wandering about for many months, living on roots and berries, and enduring every hardship, he was arrested and committed to jail. Here he lay for a considerable time, allowed scarcely food enough to sustain life, whipped in the most shocking manner, and confined in a cell so loathsome, that when his master visited him, he said the stench was enough to knock a man down. The filth had never been removed from the apartment since the poor creature had been immured in it. Although a black man, such had been the effect of starvation and suffering, that his master declared he hardly recognized him—his complexion was so yellow, and his hair, naturally thick and black, had become red and scanty; an infallible sign of long continued living on bad and insufficient food. Stripes, imprisonment, and the gnawings of hunger, had broken his lofty spirit for a season; and, to use his master’s own exulting expression, he was “as humble as a dog.” After a time he made another attempt to escape, and was absent so long, that a reward was offered for him, dead or alive. He eluded every attempt to take him, and his maste
r, despairing of ever getting him again, offered to pardon him if he would return home. It is always understood that such intelligence will reach the runaway; and accordingly, at the entreaties of his wife and mother, the fugitive once more consented to return to his bitter bondage. I believe this was the last effort to obtain his liberty. His heart became touched with the power of the gospel; and the spirit which no inflictions could subdue, bowed at the cross of Jesus, and with the language on his lips—“the cup that my father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” submitted to the yoke of the oppressor, and wore his chains in unmurmuring patience till death released him. The master who perpetrated these wrongs upon his slave, was one of the most influential and honored citizens of South Carolina, and to his equals was bland, and courteous, and benevolent even to a proverb.”

  01:47

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Looks kinda like blankets, they were praying, they had like …

  PILOT: JAG25 KIRK97 We get a good count, not yet?

  SENSOR OPERATOR: They’re praying, they’re praying…. This is definitely it, this is their force. Praying? I mean seriously, that’s what they do.

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: They’re gonna do something nefarious.

  01:50

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Adolescent near the rear of the SUV.

  SUV SENSOR OPERATOR: Well, teenagers can fight.

  MISSION INTELLIGENCE COORDINATOR: Pick up a weapon and you’re a combatant, it’s how it works.

  01:52

  SENSOR OPERATOR: One guy still praying at the front of the truck.

  PILOT: JAG25 KIRK97 Be advised, all pax [passengers] are finishing up praying and rallying up near all three vehicles at this time.

  SENSOR OPERATOR: Oh, sweet target. I’d try to go through the bed, put it right dead center of the bed.