Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

by Walker Evans

  Meanwhile the floor, the roof, the opposed walls, the furniture, in their hot gloom: all watch upon one hollow center. The intricate tissue is motionless. The swan, the hidden needle, hold their course. On the red-gold wall sleeps a long, faded, ellipsoid smear of light The vase is dark. Upon the leisures of the earth the whole home is lifted before the approach of darkness as a boat and as a sacrament.

  (On the Porch : 2

  (On the Porch : 2

  We lay on the front porch. The boards were unplaned thick oak, of uneven length, pinned down by twenty-penny nails. A light roof stuck out its tongue above us dark and squarely, sustained at its outward edge by the slippery trunks of four young trees from which the bark had been peeled. There were four steps down, oak two-by-twelves; the fourth, when stepped on, touched the ground. These steps were at the middle of the porch. They led, across the porch, into a roofed doorless hallway, about six feet wide, which ran straight through the house and clove it in half. There was a floor to this hallway, of wide unplaned boards. Laid across beams too wide apart, they sagged beneath a heavy foot. For ten feet toward the rear end they were only an inch from the ground. At the end they lay flush on it.

  We lay on the front porch to the left of the hall as you enter. One of us lay on the rear seat of a Chevrolet sedan, the other on a piece of thin cotton-filled quilting taken from the seat of a divan made of withes. We exchanged these night by night. The problem with the auto seat was its height on one side and lowness on the other, its shortness, and its texture. By letting the center of your weight fall far enough on the high side it was possible to effect a compromise by which you had the benefit of a fair amount of the width of the seat and yet were not rolled off it. Lying with the head on the seat, the lower end gave out abruptly a few inches above the knee: so you slept best on the back, or, curled, on the side. Sleeping on the belly, you made sustaining springs of your feet, and this was slightly and invariably reminiscent of sexual intercourse. A handkerchief or towel under the cheek was helpful while it lasted but generally managed to slip loose while you slept so that, waking, your cheek was red and burnt with the friction of warmed plush. Before long, of course, it occurred to us to level up the seat by stacking books under the low side. That was better; but even so, the springs were strong and large on one side and small and weak on the other. Our bodies learned to adjust themselves to holding a tension of balance while they were unconscious.

  Beyond a not unreasonable phobia that it contained bedbugs, or lice, or both, there was no difficulty about the pallet It was thin; the hard boards and their ridges printed themselves on the flesh distinctly through it It was short, but, being so thin, offered no inconvenience to the length of legbone. Its texture was soft and leaky. Here again you spread a handkerchief or shirt or towel for your head; and again it was liable to get away from you. Waking, feeling on your face the almost slimy softness of loose cotton lint and of fragile, much washed, torn cotton cloth, and immediately remembering your fear of the vermin it might be harboring, your first reactions were of light disgust and fear, for your face, which was swollen and damp with sleep and skimmed with lint, felt fouled, secretly and dirtily bitten and drawn of blood, insulted. This always wore off within a few moments, but always on first waking you had it full strength.

  We kept exchanging not because one was preferable to the other but because there was no way of making up our minds that either was preferable. I perhaps very slightly preferred the pallet, in part because I like the finality and immediacy of floors and too because the children were sleeping on pallets. The auto seat, like virtually everything else about us, was not so near the norm of what we were living in as we might have wished. But the feeling and sound of the yielding springs, the always slightly comic postures of your discommoded legs, and the texture of plush, like a night on a daycoach, under the lips and cheeks, made it attractive under the body, and brought with it, into a time of celibacy, a pleasing, nostalgic drift of memory and imagination. Even risking the Sportsmanlike way in which this could be misread, and which I despise, neither of them was at all a bad bed.

  The dead oak and pine, the ground, the dew, the air, the whole realm of what our bodies lay in and our minds in silence wandered, walked in, swam in, watched upon, was delicately fragrant as a paradise, and, like all that is best, was loose, light, casual, totally actual. There was, by our minds, our memories, our thoughts and feelings, some combination, some generalizing, some art, and science; but none of the close-kneed priggishness of science, and none of the formalism and straining and lily-gilding of art. All the length of the body and all its parts and functions were participating, and were being realized and rewarded, inseparable from the mind, identical with it: and all, everything, that the mind touched, was actuality, and all, everything, that the mind touched turned immediately, yet without in the least losing the quality of its total individuality, into joy and truth, or rather, revealed, of its self, truth, which in its very nature was joy, which must be the end of art, of investigation, and of all anyhow human existence.

  This situation is possible at any junction of time, space and consciousness: and just as (at least so far as we can know and can be concerned) it is our consciousness alone, in the end, that we have to thank for joy, so too it is our consciousness alone that is defective when we fall short of it. It is curious, and unfortunate, that we find this luck so rarely; that it is so almost purely a matter of chance: yet that, as matters are, becomes inextricably a part of the whole texture of the pleasure: at such a time we have knowledge that we are witnessing, taking part in, being, a phenomenon analogous to that shrewd complex of the equations of infinite chance which became, on this early earth, out of lifelessness, life. No doubt we overvalue the difference between life and lifelessness, but there is a certain difference, just as, in the situation we are speaking of, a difference is remarkable: the difference between a conjunction of time, place and unconscious consciousness and a conjunction of time, place and conscious consciousness is, so far as we are concerned, the difference between joy and truth and the lack of joy and truth. Unless wonder is nothing in itself, but only a moon which glows only in the mercy of a sense of wonder, and unless the sense of wonder is peculiar to consciousness and is moreover an emotion which, as it matures, consciousness will learn the juvenility of, and discard, or only gratefully refresh itself under the power of as under the power of sleep and the healing vitality of dreams, and all this seems a little more likely than not, the materials which people any intersection of time and place are at all times marvelous, regardless of consciousness: and in either or any case we may do well to question whether there is anything more marvelous or more valuable in the state of being we distinguish as ‘life’ than in the state of being of a stone, the brainless energy of a star, the diffuse existence of space. Certainly life is valuable; indispensable to all our personal calculations, the very spine of them: but we should realize that life and consciousness are only the special crutches of the living and the conscious, and that in setting as we do so high a value by them we are in a certain degree making a virtue of necessity; are being provincial; are pleading a local cause: like that small Nevada town whose pride, because it is its chiefly discernible exclusive distinction, is a mineral spring whose water, assisted by salt and pepper, tastes remarkably like chicken soup.

  This lucky situation of joy, this at least illusion of personal wholeness or integrity, can overcome one suddenly by any one of any number of unpredictable chances: the fracture of sunlight on the façade and traffic of a street; the sleaving up of chimneysmoke; the rich lifting of the voice of a train along the darkness; the memory of a phrase of an inspired trumpet; the odor of scorched cloth, of a car’s exhaust, of a girl, of pork, of beeswax on hot iron, of young leaves, of peanuts; the look of a toy fire engine, or of a hundred agates sacked in red cheesecloth; the oily sliding sound as a pumpgun is broken; the look of a child’s underwaist with its bone buttons loose on little cotton straps; the stiffening of snow in a wool glove; t
he odor of kitchen soap, of baby soap, of scorched bellybands: die flexion of a hand; the twist of a knee; the modulations in a thigh as someone gets out of a chair: the bending of a speeding car round a graded curve: the swollen, blemished feeling of the mouth and the tenacity and thickness of odor of an unfamiliar powder, walking sleepless in high industrial daybreak and needing coffee, the taste of cheap gin mixed with cheap ginger ale without much ice: the taste of turnip greens; of a rotted seed drawn from between the teeth; of rye whiskey in the green celluloid glass of a hotel bathroom: the breath that comes out of a motion-picture theater: the memory of the piccolo notes which ride and transfix Beethoven’s pastoral storm: the odor of a freshly printed newspaper; the stench of ferns trapped in the hot sunlight of a bay window; the taste of a mountain summer night: the swaying and shuffling beneath the body of a benighted train; the mulled and branny earth beneath the feet in fall; a memory of plainsong or of the first half hour after receiving a childhood absolution; the sudden re-realization of a light-year in literal, physical terms, or of the shimmering dance and diffuseness of a mass of granite: aside from such sudden attacks from unforeseen directions, gifts which as a rule are as precarious and transient as the returns and illusions of love for a girl one no longer loves, there are few ways it can give itself to you. Wandering alone; in sickness; on trains or busses; in the course of a bad hangover; in any rare situation which breaks down or lowers our habitual impatience, superficial vitality, overeagerness to clinch conclusions, and laziness. We were at this time, and in all the time surrounding it, in such a situation; nor could we for an instant have escaped it, even if we had wished to. At times, exhausted by it, we did wish to and did try, but even when our minds were most exhausted and most deafened such breath as we got, and subsisted on, no matter what its change of constituence and odor (and it now somewhat falsely seems to me that this change occurred with every breath drawn) was the breath of the same continuous excitement; an excitement whose nature seems to me not only finally but essentially beyond the power of an art to convey.

  We lay on our backs about two feet apart in silence, our eyes open, listening. The land that was under us lay down all around us and its continuance was enormous as if we were chips or matches floated, holding their own by their very minuteness, at a great distance out upon the surface of a tenderly laboring sea. The sky was even larger.

  Officially, so far as human beings were concerned; and literally; much of this great surface and pace of land had fallen subject to the instruments and ritual actions of human need. Much of it was cultivated for immediate subsistence or for somebody’s profit. It was scattered with houses, most of them more like than unlike the house on whose front porch we lay; thinly scattered with houses; much more thinly with towns; very remotely with cities.

  Human beings, with the assistance of mules, worked this land so that they might live. The sphere of power of a single human family and a mule is small; and within the limits of each of these small spheres the essential human frailty, the ultimately mortal wound which is living and the indignant strength not to perish, had erected against its hostile surroundings this scab, this shelter for a family and its animals: so that the fields, the houses, the towns, the cities, expressed themselves upon the grieved membrane of the earth in the symmetry of a disease: the literal symmetry of the literal disease of which they were literally so essential a part.

  The prime generic inescapable stage of this disease is being. A special complication is life. A malignant variant of this complication is consciousness. The most complex and malignant form of it known to us is human consciousness. Even in its simplest form this sore raises its scab: all substance is this scab: the scab and the sore are one. Taking shape and complexity precisely in proportion to the shape and complexity of the disease; identical with it, in fact; this identical wound and scab fills out not merely all substance and all process and contrivance of substance but the most intangible reaches of thought, deduction and imagination; the exactitude of its expression may be seen in the skull that scabs a brain, in the deity the race has erected to shield it from the horror of the heavens, in the pressed tin wall of a small restaurant where some of the Greek disease persists through the persistence of a Renaissance disease: in every thing within and probably in anything outside human conception; and in every combination and mutation of these things: and in a certain important sense let it be remembered that in these terms, in terms, that is to say, of the manifestations of being, taken as such, which are always strict and perfect, nothing can be held untrue. A falsehood is entirely true to those derangements which produced it and which made it impossible that it should emerge in truth; and an examination of it may reveal more of the ‘true’ ‘truth’ than any more direct attempt upon the ‘true’ ‘truth’ itself.

  A few words also on symmetry:

  On perfectly regular land, of perfectly regular quality, under perfectly regular weather or rhythms of weather, this symmetry would have the simple absoluteness which in fact it approaches in parts of the middle west of this country, just as by other roads, under other pressures, it approaches simple absoluteness under the imposed rigors of a city, a company town, a series of machines, utter poverty, a flower, a strongly organized religion, a sonata, or a beehive. But it is a symmetry sensitive to shape and quality of land, to irregularities and chances of weather, to the chance strength or weakness and productivity of the individual man or mule, to the chance or lack or efficacy or relative obsolescence of machinery, to meteorological, geological, historic, physical, biologic, mental chance: to other matters which I lack the imagination here to consider. Yet of these irregularities of complex equations, which are probably never repeated, inevitabilities infallibly take their shape. Symmetry as we use it here, then, needs a little further examination. Because it is a symmetry sensitive to so many syncopations of chance (all of which have proceeded inevitably out of chances which were inevitable), it is in fact asymmetrical, like Oriental art.* But also, because it is so pliant, so exquisitely obedient before the infinite irregularities of chance, it reachieves the symmetry it had by that docility lost on a ‘higher’ plane: on a plane in any case that is more complex, more comprehensive, born of a subtler, more numerous, less obvious orchestration of causes. This asymmetry now seems to us to extend itself into a worrying even of the rigid dances of atoms and of galaxies, so that we can no longer with any certitude picture ourselves as an egregiously complicated flurry and convolved cloud of chance sustained between two simplicities.

  This hearing and seeing of a complex music in every effect and in causes of every effect and in the effects of which this effect will be part cause, and the more than reasonable suspicion that there is at all times further music involved there, beyond the simple equipment of our senses and their powers of reflection and deduction to apprehend, ‘gets’ us perhaps nowhere. One reason it gets us nowhere is that in a very small degree, yet an absolute one so far as each of us is capable, we are already there: and we take another step still closer when we realize that the symmetry and the disease are identical. In this small but absolute degree then, we are already there. That is one strong argument in favor of art which proves and asserts nothing but which exists, as has been dangerously guessed at, for its own sake. (It could also be said of ‘problem’ art that severe and otherwise insolvable human and spiritual problems are solved in every performance of, or for that matter in the silent existence of, say, Beethoven’s quartet Opus 131.) It is a still stronger part of an argument, which, I grant, cannot apply on all ‘levels’ in all contexts, against art of any sort from the most ‘pure’ to the most diluted or the most involved in matters supposedly irrelevant to art How many, not only of the salient and obvious but more particularly of the casual passages in our experience, carry a value, joy, strength, validity, beauty, wholeness, radiance, of which we must admit not only that they equal in their worthiness as a part of human experience, and of existence, the greatest works of art but, quite as seriously, that the best art quit
e as powerfully as the worst manages, in the very process of digesting them into art, to distort, falsify and even to obliterate them.

  Without any qualification and if necessary with belligerence I respect and believe in even the most supposedly ‘fantastic’ works of the imagination. I am indeed ready to say, because with fair consistency I believe, that works of the imagination (chiefly because* in a certain degree they create something which has never existed before, they add to and somewhat clarify the sum total of the state of being, whereas the rest of the mind’s activity is merely deductive, descriptive, acquisitive or contemplative) advance and assist the human race, and make an opening in the darkness around it, as nothing else can. But art and the imagination are capable of being harmful, and it is probably neither healthy for them nor, which is more to the point, anywhere near true even to the plainest facts, to rate them so singly high. It seems to me there is quite as considerable value (to say nothing of joy) in the attempt to see or to convey even some single thing as nearly as possible as that thing is. I grant the clarifying power in this effort of the memory and the imagination: but they are quite as capable of muddying as of clearing the water and frequently indeed, so frequently that we may suspect a law in ambush, they do both at the same time, clouding in one way the thing they are clearing in another.