Way Out in Washington D.C. II
There is a goddess green with years
Who stands in freedom's name,
Holds high the torch of Liberty
Above the sea and land.
To claim her promise multitudes
Braved, tempest tossed, the deep.
To tyranny each back was turned,
By hope each face was lit.
Once by a passage through the waves
The Israelites were led
Out from a land of bitter toil
Towards their promised home.
Horatius with blood on brow
Had faced alone the foe,
Then headlong plunged into the deep
And swam the Tiber's flow.
But conquest has its rivers too,
Much suffering brings much power,
For Joshua crossed the Jordan,
Caesar the Rubicon.
This is the law of history,
Shall be as it has been,
But if the root is bitter
Then bitter is the tree.
For if we hate the tyrant
More than his tyranny,
The morrow are our foes our slaves
And the tyrants we.
In history's chains our feet are bound,
My hands are bound to thine.
Should one but suffer perfectly
His kingdom shall not fail.
What I remember about the greater part of that day was not so much the thing I saw and heard as how I felt. I had been subject to moods of black depression since my father's death, and it was another of those days when each passing minute awakens the horrors of the pit and the pendulum. Were these not but the symbols of passing time to one acutely conscious of the presence of death in life, who sees the particles of time slip through his fingers before he can hold them and call them his own for a moment, however brief?
After looking at the White House I visited a museum belonging to the
Smithsonian Institute. It was devoted to American history and particularly its sociological and technological aspects. There were life-size tableaux showing scenes from the time when there were slaves and indentured servants, Indian uprisings and palisades. An original Model T Ford motorcar was on display. I thought of Henry Ford's famous quip about history being bunk.
Maybe, Mr. Ford, but whatever history is, bunk or otherwise, you're part of it now. When "now"--our "now"--becomes "then," what of all the great issues for the sake of which we, collectively, are prepared to exterminate millions of our contemporaries, thereby giving them an alibi for doing the same to us...? Oh, I'm sure brother Bill would have an answer. Compared to so great an Atlas as he, I, foot-loose, irresponsible and free, must cut a very puny figure. Then I thought of Rachel. In my mind's eye I saw her with a lamp in her hand. She was not bold and resolute like the Statue of Liberty, nor was her lamp as imposing as the torch held by the goddess, but it, and it alone, shed light in the cavernous gloom by which I was surrounded. By the time I left the museum, the mist had become so dense that even passers-by seemed to flit by like the denizens of the underworld in the epic of Gilgamesh. The graceful templelike buildings of classical Washington had become the silhouettes a dead past cast on the thin shroud of the present.
I bought a copy of The Washington Post at a corner kiosk and went to a self-service restaurant for a bite. The leading article was about Franco, who had died a day or two before. I thought of the large team of doctors and nurses assigned to the task of keeping him alive and immortal for as long as possible. According to my psychiatrist, I was depressive, but not a particularly severe case. Yet I knew that mental suffering and the power of insight were often coterminous, particularly when normality is taken to signify those states and attitudes of mind that best allow us to function in society and at work. A feeling of nausea still prevented me from enjoying my food. I spent the afternoon "researching" in libraries and museums. "Researching" in this case did not mean systematic study in terms of poring over information held on microfilm or microfiche. Evidently I was in no mood for that. I simply browsed through various literary works at the behest of an irresponsible curiosity itself stimulated by promptings of the most tenuous associations. Tenuous associations, however, are often the most interesting and revealing ones, for they most resemble the flights of imagination at work in the mind of a composer, an artist or a poet. I read a bit of Byron here, a bit of Poe there, then a bit of Shelley, a bit of Browning or Wordsworth, and so on. Thus it seemed to me that I read not merely from the works of individual poets but poetry. That sounds banal or platitudinous, I know. Perhaps this poem can better express the thought:
LONG EARS
In many styles, in many forms,
in prose or verse or song,
on parchment, scroll, on page or leaf,
and in the tongues of every land,
reeds numberless as stars
whisper sweet and bitter truths
in the ears of Joseph's corn.
Two are the hands of time.
The hour has no second chime,
yet one the hand that holds the reed
while shepherds play and ploughmen weave.
The state of depression itself predisposes the sufferer to having a deep insight into any poem that springs from the poet's anguish at recognizing the misery well as the greatness of the human soul. Is not this silent suffering - with love the chief spur to creativity ~ the pain of never forgetting mortality even in the moment? of bliss the implicit truth behind every description and symbol? With new eyes I read Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib," that poem known to many a schoolboy doing recitation homework.
"Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown
That host on the morrow lay withered and strewn"
These lines recalled the opening verses of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and their evocation of fallen leaves, those "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,/ Pestilence-stricken multitudes." Then the penultimate line of Byron's poem:
"And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail."
Horses again! Here the symbol of vainglorious ambition, the lust for power and empire and, as the poet Gray declared long ago, their end. Death only? Each pole implies its contrary. What of Roland in Browning's famous poem? Did he not bear 'the Good News' of deliverance and salvation to the people of Aix? If religion and art help us to face the dark realities of death and life's transience, do they not both in their several ways, here by the assertion of faith, there by wresting beauty and truth from the lion's jaws, promise the ultimate conquest of life and love and the defeat of death?
As far as secondary literature was concerned, I read an article in a literary magazine on Robert Browning's four music teachers when he was still a boy. One of them had been the Jewish musician Isaac Nathan, the very man who years before had prompted Lord Byron to write the Hebrew Melodies to which "The Destruction of Sennacherib" originally belonged, as the words to be set to certain "ancient melodies" purportedly originating in the days of the Temple at Jerusalem. The article suggested that this personal link between the great Romantic and the great Victorian had been passed over by literary scholarship, for music posed the underlying theme in so much of Browning's poetry. One should not forget the general title Bells and Pomegranates under which "The Pied Piper of Hamlin" first appeared, for it alluded to the golden ornaments belonging to the High Priest's vestments at the time of his entering the Holy of Holies to fulfill his sacred duties as the mediator between God and people. Here golden bells betokened the sublime mediating role of music in elevating the human spirit. Music! Religion, Poetry and Love! Music, inspiration, the point where sense ends and the ineffable begins:-
"And to know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star".
Then I recalled that the Pied Piper played three notes before playing the tune so alluring and fatal to the rats, so enchanting and wonderful to the children. Were not these the first three rungs of the ladder wherewith the mortal race may scale the Heavens, or they reach down to man--Jacob’s ladder? Rachel, as long as the music of your name rings in these ears, not even the dark dungeon of Giant Despair shall cut me from the light of Heaven.
I felt alive again. I left the library and its rows of musty books with spring in my step, a sense of exuberance at being alive and with the channels of perception made hypersensitive to impressions of sight and sound. The fog had lifted, though dark clouds obscured the western sky save where they yielded to pattches of a beautiful turquoise blue. When I reached the Mall, a demonstration was taking place. It was the twenty-second of November and the twelfth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination.
One placard read:
WHO KILLED JFK?
Another:
NO MORE WATERGATES, NO MORE VIETNAMS!
According to one speaker, the fall of Vietnam was a salutary warning from Heaven to teach America once more to do what it said on every dollar bill: "In God we trust." Let the nation's true strength lie in its moral example and not in firepower and atom bombs alone.
There was a cloudburst, and the crowds began to disperse. Through a parting in the rain clouds a flash of golden light lit up the dome of the Capitol against the dark canvas of the eastern sky. I hurried across the Mall in a northerly direction; my earlier nausea had given away to the healthy urge to vacate my bowels. I entered a self-service restaurant, which offered the requisite facilities. While drinking coffee, I pondered my next move. I thought of taking a taxi straight back to Arlington. Then I remembered something that Blake guy said and decided to pay Ford's Theatre a visit. I had checked its position on a street plan. It could only be a few blocks away. On leaving the place, I walked down the street to the next crossing, where a group of black youths was standing. I asked them to direct me to Ford's Theatre on Tenth Street.
"I can't tell yer where to go, man, 'cos you're standin' on 10th Street."
"Say, Britisher, aincher?" inquired another member of the group.
"Yer wanna be careful with them Britishers, they're capable of burnin' down the White House."
"Well," said another, "if you got the convictions, I got the box of matches."
I thanked them all for their help and walked on only a few steps to find myself right outside the theatre. I fancied it might be some kind of a museum now but was surprised to discover that it was still the home of living drama. I ascended the stairs to the gallery. The interior evinced a simple elegance. The edge of the graciously curving gallery almost seemed to touch the stage and the box to its right where President Lincoln and his wife were sitting on that fateful night.
Just then a group of tourists came in. The leader began:
"It was in April, 1865--the Civil War had just ended--that Abraham Lincoln, our great president and the liberator of Negro slaves, was cut down in his prime by a deranged fanatic, John Wilkes Booth. On that night, the President and Mrs. Lincoln were sitting in that cosy little box watching a performance of a play with the title Our American Cousin. Now it was in the intermission that the President, in high spirits now that the war was over at last, discussed with his wife their projected tour of Europe and the Holy Land. His last words were: ‘There is no place I should like to see so much as Jerusalem.’ Then the doors flew open. The assassin, who as an actor himself, would enter the theatre at odd times to collect his mail, shot the President at blank range with his derringer. He then leapt onto the stage and, brandishing a dagger, cried: "Sic semper tyrannis-- Virginia is avenged!" That bit in Latin means--"So be it to all tyrants." The President was carried to a tailor's house across the street, where he died a short time afterwards. The assassin managed to get away from the theatre but was followed to a deserted warehouse and surrounded. He was never caught alive. It remains uncertain whether he died from his own bullet or from that of a pursuer. That's the story."
After a slight hesitation. he added. "And Lincoln wasn't the last president to be killed by an assassin."
The listeners gave each other knowing looks.
"In fact, this century began with the assassination of an American president," said the guide as if to test the historical knowledge of the group.
"MacDonald, wasn't it?" a lady suggested. The guide corrected her, adding: "At least we all know who the next one was...”
Everybody assented.
"Which president came after Lincoln?" a gentleman asked.
"Andrew Johnson," the guide answered.
"Johnson?" someone said. "Say, it was Lyndon B. Johnson who came after Kennedy?"
"I once read an article in a news magazine," said a lady with a Texas accent,” that listed a whole string of funny coincidences linking the two deaths."
"Such as?" a sceptic asked.
"Well, apparently, both the presidents were warned not to go either to the play or to Dallas. Yeah, and Lincoln's private secretary was a Kennedy, and Kennedy's a Lincoln, or something like that."
"Strange"--"How eerie!"
"It's "Fate, I suppose!" scoffed the sceptic. "What fate? You mean coincidence. It's all a matter of statistics. I once knew of a case when a guy was dealing at cards. The players looked at their cards in blank amazement. Each had got a complete suite of hearts, diamonds, clubs or spades. With all the millions of card games being played, it's bound to happen sometime. You call it the law of averages."
Just at that moment I heard someone chuckling. Such strange, sinister chuckles, it made a shiver go down my spine. I looked round--just as someone left. No, it couldn't be...that grey habit again. I would have run down the stairs to see who that person was, but a commotion started when an elderly gentleman had a funny turn. He slumped onto a chair and began muttering incomprehensibly. He seemed to be trying to say something to do with the stairs, to judge from the direction in which he was pointing. His chalk-white complexion was like that of a man who has seen a ghost.
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