Exhumation

The Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown, Massachusetts

In the spirit of disappearing documents and administrative amnesia, I celebrated Patriot’s Day by examining two texts that, conversely, illuminate history by reconsidering and revising official records and autobiography.

We now know that during his testimony on Thursday, Alberto Gonzales will attempt to ease our minds about a series of events that “certainly was not in any way an attempt to mislead the American people.” Thus repentant, he will clarify:

I also recall Mr. Sampson mentioning career prosecutor Deborah Rhodes for San Diego in the event of a vacancy. I do not recall my response or any other discussion. Nor do I recall the timing of when this was raised with me. Although these names were mentioned to me, I do not recall making any decision, either on or before December 7, 2006, about who should replace the U.S. Attorneys who were asked to resign that day.

Naturally. That so many statements like this one have been formulated with the expectation of eliciting anything less than indignation in its audience is a sad commentary on the amount of credit typically given to the American public. We could spend lifetimes attempting to catalogue official efforts to bury all but this country’s didactic history—the slogan, the idol, the anecdote—which Melville, true to form, succeeds in suggesting by dedicating Israel Potter to no less towering an emblem than "His Highness The Bunker-Hill Monument."

That novel, a fictionalized account of one Revolutionary War veteran's actual experiences, relays the hardships of its title character, an American soldier who is captured as a prisoner of war and spends five decades exiled in Britain. Eventually able to return home after so many years of extreme poverty, he meets no traces of family, friends, pension or remembrance.

William Carlos Williams also opted to resurrect real documents and rewrite segments of national history throughout In the American Grain. He finds the source of America's disengagement in lingering Puritanical "seeds" in our psyche, which have always caused individuals to shrink, terrified, before all things immense, whether the "New World" wilderness, religious edicts, or, for later Americans, the "giants" of our own mythology. Giving credence to his own method, he reproaches the tendency to treat history as something that will shatter at the human touch. He criticizes all efforts to “boast of our saving, stabilizing Constitution in dread, as of a glass heart, fiercely aligning ourselves in its defense as if it were something else than a mechanical shift.” Noting the accumulation of references to infinitesimal containment throughout his collection, one begins to believe that, for Williams, the image of the ostensibly liberated but helplessly “huddled masses” must have been the most accurate rendering of a national portrait.

Ever willing to sustain his unrequited love for the “red ribbons and spangles, like upspringing tongues, and sparkles of flame,” Melville's Israel repeatedly demonstrates Williams' concept of self-incarceration. Trapped in Britain, he continues to serve America unofficially, even after “all visions but those of eventual imprisonment or starvation vanished.”

The most explicit ramification of such loyalty occurs during his time as a covert courier between American sympathizers in Britain and an alliance in Paris. Having successfully returned to Britain, messages intact, he is led into temporary hiding in a secluded closet of his host’s mansion. Several days in this solitary confinement pass without word or additional supplies from his caretaker (who, we later learn, has died, along with all living knowledge of Israel’s location), during which “the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him.” With such masonry, Melville sacrifices Israel not merely to the physical terrors of space, but into the historical “origin of the cell” itself. We learn that, upon Israel’s arrival, the host had explained the chamber's prior use by the Templars as a holding cell for dissidents:

A small hole, of the girth of one’s wrist, sunk like a telescope three feet through the masonry into the cell, served at once for ventilation, and to push through food to the prisoner. This hole opening into the chapel also enabled the poor solitaire, as intended, to overhear the religious services at the altar; and, without being present, take part in the same. It was deemed a good sign of the state of the sufferer’s soul, if from the gloomy recesses of the wall was heard the agonized groan of his dismal response.

It was “with this history ringing in his brain” that the unsung and exiled Bunker Hill veteran, as invisible as those heretical predecessors but without the safety of screaming out in remorse or retraction, “lifted himself convulsively from the floor, as if vast blocks of stone had been laid on him; as if he had been digging a deep well, and the stonework with all the excavated earth had caved in upon him.”

Williams would surely agree that Israel exemplifies the unpalatable leftovers of what America, “in its hour of excitement…had promised, its declarations, its pronouncements, its Patrick Henry speeches.” He often asks us to consider whether these gift-wrapped premises of patriotism were “just expedients of war to spur to battle or was it serious?” That question, posed today, is of obvious relevance and Williams places substantial culpability on the American public for almost aspiring to historical ignorance. He sees it as no less than

an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine, we have no conception at all of what is meant by moral

And the problem, “made up as we are,” is, once again, Puritanical smallness. Those original, ceaselessly compacting individual "seeds" continue to shrivel in response to the terrifying "greatness" of our own mythology. Williams is certain that the Israel Potters will, of habit, be stifled by the Ben Franklins, the John Paul Joneses and Ethan Allens of America—all figures that one or both authors treated in the works discussed here. As he sees it, Americans, like the earliest Puritans, have not demonstrated a willingness to truly “penetrate there to see what was contained,” during those first embellished days in the “New World” and thereafter. With the exception of periodic Melvilles, Williams is convinced that, collectively, we are content to look forward, to find faith in the dream of American progress

and that this rudeness rests all upon the unstudied character of our beginnings; and that if we will not pay heed to our own affairs, we are nothing but an unconscious porkyard and oilhole for those, more able, who will fasten themselves upon us...

Just as we are often unaware of causes, each time one of America’s historical badges—person, place, thing, tragedy, etc.—is referenced in support of some new idea,

This is fixed in us without realization of the EFFECT that such a story, such a tradition, entirely the product of the state of mind that it records, has had upon us and our feeling toward the country. We scarcely know that there can be EFFECTS

Rhetorical bullying aside, Williams nonetheless helps us here by sharing Melville’s concern for the “EFFECTS” of erroneous, dead history and selective memory on individuals buried--as discussed in the two preceding posts--by the State. Both writers suggest the ease with which we seem to allow ourselves to be edited out of reality, much like the utterly forgotten Israel finally succumbs to his exile and is hired to create bricks similar to those that once threatened him with entombment. His physical escape from that earlier incident is ultimately not a triumphant one, as Melville assures us that “men and bricks were equally of clay.” Settled in this new task, Israel's poverty, failure and abandonment have conditioned him to fall in rhythm with the work and

this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness, his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration.

Williams likewise returns to his image of the blissfully microscopic man encapsulated by “austere and limpid history,” which operates “blind to every contingency, mashing Indian, child and matron into one safe mold.” Melville offers a small window of opportunity to all “reckless” individuals convinced of their historical inferiority, assuring them that “their vice was like that weed which but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.”

Seventy years later, Williams would find this ground still unfertilized, mildly incubating those imploding Puritan seeds. Over eighty years after that--Gonzales:

I have taken these important steps to provide information for two critical reasons: (1) I have nothing to hide, and (2) I am committed to assuring the Congress and the American public that nothing improper occurred here. The sooner all the facts are known, the sooner we can all devote our exclusive attention to our important work--work that includes protecting the American people from the dangers of terrorism, violent crime, illegal drugs, and sexual predators.

More diversion and misdiagnoses, seeds quaking as long as habit permits.