by Bruce Olds
See them? The carvers out there queued up to do their surgery? Carnivores, the lot, wearing their absent scruples like weaponry:
Muskets
(Brown Bess)
Rifles
(Baker)
Carbines
(Paget)
Pistols
(Tower)
Bayonets (17-inch &c), lanzas (8-8 ½ foot &c), curved sabers, straight swords
Grenades and Congreve Rockets, mortars, howitzers
Canister, shotted grape, solid and shell
Felling axes, crowbars, scaling ladders, rams (&c)
(You must pardon me, please, while I puke.)
I suspect that what awaits us are the shrapnels of hell
But then
Men die miserably everyday for want of a few new words
Anyway.
So remind me. A rising tide lifts what? Again? Exactly?
The moltens that blind the seasickened eye
Churned wall-high
Vaster than the vision of vultures?
So much depends upon
all that I think
being all that I see.
Now it begins: Tick. Tock.
(…history returns, and so can I, having told myself these things. And keeping them in readiness to tell again.)
So events, as events will, had taken an irreversible, entirely predictable turn for the, I hesitate to say diabolical, but certainly the gothic. Speaking omnisciently. Out of school. At narrative distance. Possessed of just that brand of faux clarity that too often stems from the illusion that clarity at such moments matters more than does shitting oneself in horripilating fear of catching a bayonet fuck in the neck.
No. The ones too soon to come would, I suspected, be but moments but slantwise glimpsed. Hoy aqui, mañana se va, insofar as one might count upon mañana arriving at all, the very one that is promised, after all, to none of us. This geometry of fracture. The way any battle shatters proprioception.
Life is grotesque when it is imprisoned inside a story, much less one hijacked by the leitmotivs of history. It is grotesque anyway, any which way, but doubly so then, since thought as it relates to memory inevitably is selectively anachronistic. But then memory would be of little use were it factually accurate, since it is in the re-collected inaccuracies—omissions, conflations, compressions, refractions, avulsions, transversions, blurrings and warpings and cantileverings, unwitting elisions and embellishments—and in their re-arranged patchworked permutations and re-sequenced juxtapositions, that our true identity reposes.
It is precisely the forgetting of our history that makes us ourselves. Real selves. Who we really are. Human selves. Fatigued, flawed, forgetful selves. The ones jigsawed of fraught, fallible, fascicled memory. Too fickle, feckless, fa/cet/ed memory.
So much must be forgotten to remember anything at all.
History can only be compromised history. Counterfeit history. Ersatz history. One incomplete version in the moment among other incomplete versions in other moments.
Imposters each, forever revising themselves disfigured by their after-the-fact re-configuration, since memory always arrives in flashes coming forward from, not in calibrated steps going backward to. Memory emerges, it does not retrieve, much less spit out its facsimilies stamped, dated and framed tidily in that timeless context absent which there can be no real meaning.
Memory is not knowledge, hindsight never 20/20. The mind’s eye altering, alters all, to paraphrase Blake, who knew what my mother also knew—that to remember clearly, “use your eyes to forget.” Because it is only when one comes dumb to the names of what one is looking at, only when the eye is stunned by that which it is looking at, only when the eye “sees strange, unfamiliar, fresh, when it wonders, disbelieving,” only then “that it sees true what it sees, and not what it thinks it sees,” what the mind has accustomed it to seeing.
And even then. Even then to understand that nothing that one sees, means what one is seeing. Explains it. Can explain it. Ought be expected to explain it.
Post mortem, ex post facto, the moribund discarded pieces, the bloodless orts of what little is preserved, is preserved as mummy, mock-up, masque, relicts of ambered artifact stuffed and reshaped for display as trophies mounted upon a wall. Chapelyard wall.
We glimpse them there. So much taxidermy.
Compositioning that which is decomposed. Transmuting ash to strokes of ink. Would be alchemy. An aesthetic exercise. The performing of a form. Of darkest magic.
Let us vow an end to his-story-telling then. Let us lift from his grave, my grave and yours, the available poetry.
(life is grotesque when we catch
it in quick perceptions—
at full vent—history
shaping itself)
….in collage with time
Travis Diary, Feb. 24, 1836:
53 degrees. Word circulates that today is S.A.’s 42nd birthday; so feliz cumpleaños, Señor Diablo, and may it, god willing, prove your last. Word arrives as well that Colonel Bowie is collapsed, that the fever and bloody black flux have left him too weak to rise from bed. I am told that he vomits regularly, vomits green, vomits buckets, is sunk sidewise in delirium. Because our doctor, Pollard, fears contagion, we have arranged to quarantine him in a barrack room along the South Wall east of the Main Gate. There he is nursed with arnica compresses by his sister-in-law, the selfless Mrs. Juana Alsbury. In consequence, our short-lived experiment in shared command is ended. His words to me not some two hours past uttered in a croaking, ecclesiastical whisper were, “It is all on you now Buck. Do not fret. I know these men. They will follow you into hell.” My words to him, this festered soul whose lungs I fear now are less filled with the fresh air of liberty than fraught with the cancers of regret, my words to him likewise were, “Let us pray, Jim, that it does not come to that.” Nor, frankly, do I believe that it will. We will be succored because we must be succored. If we are not, and soon, Bowie is correct—hell awaits. (I had thought to deposit with him our single Nock Gun, but considered that doing so would only mean squandering it upon a man too weak to wield it, its seven braze-clustered barrels of .52 calibre firepower. Perhaps I shall keep it for myself, this weapon we have taken affectionately to calling, “the Hellblaster.” Something whispers to me that I may yet have need of it.) Meanwhile, as we are running perilously low on water, we have taken to rigging up sluiceways and catchbasins while praying for rain and sending out nightraids to the pond to our west. Whether six at night or three in the morning, the men can see the flicker-glow of my candle through the open window of my billet midpoint along the West Wall, the same window through which they can hear the unceasing scritch of my quill. It is, I suspect, a sound that can only rankle them almost as much as does the enemy’s relentless cannonade. I am not so oblivious that I fail to understand that they think me at best an inkhorn, at worst a feckless fop. What kind of man is it, they can only wonder, who seems never to sleep while subsisting on little but pot after pot of black coffee? A man who would place more stock in the written word than he does in their welfare? Who prefers the company of his words, to that of his men, and labors longer over the recursive construction of his sentences, than he does the re-construction of the North Wall? And, in truth, I have squidded the world with enough ink to blue and black the sky twice over. Perhaps, it would not surprise me, they believe that what I have in mind is to language the enemy into abandoning its siege. Narrate it into submission. Poem it to death. Would/ that I/could.
Quill in hand, I sat ensconced at my desk in my West Wall quarters composing by wicklight whatever came to me as it came to me to compose it. In fact, it all but composed itself. It, I sensed, was much composing me.
This, what I was about here, was important. More, it was critical. Not to the world, of course, but to us. To those of us, that is, who composed us. To we paltry, beleaguered few, nothing could have been more so. Everything—life, death, love—hinged upon it.
And so, if I began to think too
long or too deeply about what I was writing—more to the point, what was writing itself—if I permitted my brain to intervene, to meddle, I knew that I was going to lose control of it, the flow of it, by endeavoring to control my lack of control of it.
A great discipline, you see, self-discipline, the discipline to step aside, to let go, was involved in this sort of composing, in its shaping the shape it insisted upon shaping upon the page. The way it unfolded there, unfurled itself to its fullest, most fully manifested unfurling, as if my quill was a chisel and the composition a sculpture developed angle by line from some block of virgin granite. The shapes—remarkable!—floated up, lifted, drifted to the surface emerging gouge by gouge, chip by chip, flake by quillstroked flake.
And I knew, I did not know just how I knew, but I knew, had never been so certain of anything in my life, I knew that if I stopped now, if the writing stopped, I would become a lie. My entire life, a fiction.
Commandancy of the Alamo
Bejar
Feby. 24th, 1836
To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World—Fellow Citizens & Compatriots—
I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna—I have sustained a continual bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man—The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion otherwise the garrison is to be put to the sword if the fort is taken—I have answered the demand with a cannon shot & our flag still waves proudly from the walls—I shall never surrender or retreat. Then I call upon you in the name of liberty, of patriotism, of everything dear to the American character to come to our aid with all dispatch—The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country.
VICTORY or DEATH
William Barret Travis
Lt. Col. Comdt.
Slotting the quill in its inkwell, I went back, read over what I had written, re-read it, word by word, read it again, then aloud, then to myself, a third time, a fourth.
No. Decidedly not. Something was wrong. Off. Something was missing.
If the words were far from the worst I ever had committed to paper, still, they would not do. They fell flat, far short of where they needed to fall. Inadequate, insufficient, infested with pleonasms, superfluities, with the bacilli and spirochetes of incursive foreign bodies. I could not put my finger on them, could not pinpoint, but no, they would not do, not at all. They did not work the way I needed them to work, the way they had to work, if they were to work.
I decided to underscore VICTORY or DEATH twice more, to furnish the phrase—fine phrase if a tad overdramatic (though if ever there were an occasion when a little melodrama was called for, surely, I thought to myself, this could only be it)—with more kick, some additional oomph, in triplicate.
Better, yes. But still, no.
Fisting the paper to a ball, I dropped it dismissively—no, disdainfully, no, contemptuously—to the floor. Then, at no little length, after an elongated moment, several seconds of second thought, I reached down, retrieved it, uncrushed it, smoothed it face up across the desktop ironing out its creases.
Holding one corner, top left, over the tallow flame, I studied it as it singed some, caught, curled, crimped, was consumed with flame, the fire spreading in a scorch that blackened the flattened paper even as it crumpled to an ash-crepe that floated away in flakes falling in featherings to the floor; these wisps of wordless black confetti.
Lost words. Lost words well lost.
Picking up the quill again, I started over, began again. To write. Re-write. To get right what so stubbornly insisted upon being gotten so wrong. To bare, at last, the cat’s claw contained occluded in the calamus. To hear aright, for pity’s sake, if no other, the proper purring of the page.
Seguin
When I spotted Captain Juan Seguin sprinting past the open door of my West Wall quarters, I welled my quill, sprinkled a dash of silica across the paper upon which I had been writing as if scattering a handful of birdseed, gingerly shook off the excess, carefully slid the sheet from my desktop, rose to my feet and strode beneath the lintel out through the threshold, calling, “Juan! Capitán Juan Seguin! ¡Ven acá! Necesito hablar contigo. I need to speak with you.”
“Sí, mi Coronel. Este canon es…”
“Tranquilo, Capitán. Let them launch their potshots as they will. Haven’t singed a hair on a single of our vasos yet. Ni uno.”
It could only have been Jueves, Thursday. Night three of the siege. The enemy’s cannonade, as it had been since its arrival, had been an on-again on-again affair, day and night nonstop, siesta time notwithstanding. No surprise, then, that its hammering had begun to grate on more than a few nerves, though the worst any of us had suffered to date was a few cuts and bruises from random flying rockchips.
Now, if Bejar could have been said to have a First Family, it was the Seguins. Johnny’s grandfather, Santiago, had been one of the town’s founding fathers over a century ago. His father, the 53-year-old open border advocate, Don Erasmo, was its first postmaster, quartermaster and mayor, organized its first public school, had been Tejas’s sole representative to Mexico’s Constitutional Convention some 12 years earlier, and as proprietor of the nearby 31,000-acre Ranchero de Casa Blanca, was one of the territory’s largest landowners. In the words of Stephen Austin, “Were it not for the good offices of Don Erasmo, our colonies would have died en útero.”
“¿Cómo te va, Juan?” I asked. “¿Cómo llevas? How are you holding up?”
“Esta bien, mi Coronel. Bellas. Estoy bien.”
When a shell burst out in the plaza, not far to our left, hailstoning the space with jagged rockshard, I noticed Seguin wince and cross himself.
“¿Y sus hombres?” I asked. “¿Cuántos son en última cuenta ahora? How many are your men at last count?”
“Veinticuatro, mi Coronel. Two dozen. Están bien así.”
“Glad to hear it Capitán, porque as I believe I have made clear, I do not like this elecciones business, your having been voted by the men to deliver to the world outside our walls news of the inclining hopelessness, la desesperanza de montaje of our situation.
“Not that I think you incapable, Juan. To the contrary. En mi opinion, no man here is more capable. If anyone has a chance, una oportunidad of making it through the enemy’s lines unscathed, I have no doubt, none at all, that it is tu.
“Pero, that is precisely the point. I know sus hombres are loyal to you, leal unto the very muerte, but—y perdoneme my bluntness Capitán, mi franqueza—once you are gone, need I be concerned that they will they remain loyal to our cause here? My own influence with them, after all, cannot begin to approach your own, and Colonel Bowie’s, whose can, is far too ill to exercise it.
“I scarcely am insensitive to the fact that you and your men find yourselves at, shall we say, cross-purposes these days, lodged between the proverbial rock and its hard place, el diablo y el profundo azul, damned if you do, damned if you do not.”
“Puedo garantizar nada, mi Coronel,” said Seguin. “I can guarantee nothing. Pero, debo decir la mitad. I should say half. La mitad will stay and fight.”
“Esta bien,” I said. “Thank you for your candor, Capitán. Still, to spare you just now is a great sacrifice. Un gran sacrificio. I should want you here close by should the occasion arise that I need to parley with Santa Anna. There is no one I trust more to wring from my words, mis palabras, their full meaning, su significado completo, account for their every nuance, todos los matices, every intonation and inflection, than yourself.”
“Gracias, mi Coronel, muchas gracias.”
“Now, Juan, I shall be wanting you to take Bowie’s caballo. He has no more use for her and she is the best in the fort, so they say. A skewbald named Blaze. And let us pray that she lives up to her nombre.”
“Pero, Cor
onel, I have my own. She is not the más rapido, es verdad, pero…”
“Blaze, Juan. You will take Blaze. Try Gonzales first. He should be there. If not, they will know where he is. But you must find him, Capitán. You must find General Houston. Everything depends upon your doing so, and with all right alacrity, con todos los celeridad adecuada.
“I cannot emphasize enough, Juan, tu es nuestra esperanza última, mejor y único. You, tu y tu solo, are our last, best, our only hope. Each of the couriers I have dispatched over the past fortnight, all the many appeals I have penned, for all it has profited us I might as well have written each one in agua upon these paredes.”
“Sí, mi Coronel,” said Seguin. “Consider it done. ¡Mision complida!”
“Here then,” I said, handing him the dispatch. “Guard this with your life, con su vida. Deliver it sano y salvo, safe and sound. Vaya con Dios, Vaquero. Y que los santos a mantenerse a salvo. Dios los bendiga, Juan Seguin.”