by Peter Dimock
When I sent an earlier draft of this essay to a friend whose book on historical justice I had edited when I worked for Columbia University Press, he wrote back to say that the essay I had written was lovely. 1 I take this as the highest praise. He particularly liked the sentence in which I offered the suggestion that "historical justice is the just habitation of intervals of linguistic expression within contemporary capitalism in both public life and individual thought." "That's it," he said in his email.
I treasure his note beyond words. The sentence he liked so much came to me in trying to articulate the freedom I was experiencing in the writing I found myself playfully composing after publishing what I thought was my third and last novel. 2 For better or worse, my writing since then has been visited from time to time with a sense of joyful relief that I have largely had my say in published form within the genre that had once transported me as a child.
Fiction, I have felt, for as long as I can remember, gave me access to a state of consciousness in which I had a chance of being most fully---most uncompromisingly and simply---myself. Now as an adult, in other words, I felt I had done enough fiction writing. I was free of it. I could put its insistent, sharp, and prickly burdens---along with its accompanying distorting, grandiose ambitions---to rest.
What then, I have been asking myself, am I writing now? Why won't two images from my last novel stop haunting me? What attention are they demanding after the fiction that was in me has been published successfully?
The images from Daybook from Sheep Meadow that will not leave me alone derive from a somewhat casual interest in John James Audubon and the question of why he is so beloved by so many American historians. My last novel concerns a successful American historian who in 2010 suffered a breakdown after testifying as an expert witness before a House subcommittee hearing on the legality of the use of drones for targeted assassinations outside an active battlefield. For years my character has been developing an intricate, elaborate private template derived from a variety of memorized texts. With this template he has devised a quasi-medieval discipline of meditation upon the subject of "historical justice" and has been recording the results in hundreds of notebooks.
Before he voluntarily commits himself to a long-term psychiatric care facility, my historian gives the notebooks to his twin brother who has also been his book editor throughout his highly successful academic career. The novel consists of the brother's editing of the historian's notebooks and his explanatory notes in which the editor attempts to interpret them from his intimate knowledge of the shared family history and from his own attempt to learn and practice the historian character's "historical method."
One of the headings for the meditations of my fictional historian is derived from an incident in the life of the American artist and naturalist John James Audubon. The chapter title assigned for some meditations reads: "At the Age of Six, in 1791, John James Audubon Looks Up in Coüeron, France, Near Nantes."
There is now a voluminous biographical record on Audubon, and it is generally agreed that two vivid childhood memories of events which Audubon reports as having occurred in France occurred in Saint Domingue (Haiti after 1804) in 1790 or 1791 when he was five or six years old. Audubon was born and lived on his father's sugar plantation in the colony's southern commune of Les Cayes as Jean Rabin for the six years leading up to the Haitian Revolution. He was known, and knew himself in those childhood years, as the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon and his white mother, Jeanne Rabin (sometimes spelled "Rabine"), a former chambermaid from Nantes, who died within six months of his birth. Jean was almost certainly raised by his father's mixed-race mistress, Catherine Bouffard ("Sanitte") together with his beloved half-sister, Marie-Madeleine, born almost a decade before Jean in 1776. 3
Just days before the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, his father was able to bring both Jean Rabin and his younger half-sister Rose safely to France. Jean Audubon and his legal French wife, Anne Moynet, adopted them legally as their own during the tumultuous events occurring in and around Nantes and the Vendée during the French Revolution. Marie-Madeline was "too dark" to be brought "home" at the age of sixteen. She is reported to have perished amidst the revolutionary violence at Les Cayes sometime during the year 1792. 4
All this is necessary as background to the two images that continue to haunt me after the completion of my fiction. The first image is derived from Audubon's account of his first memory of birds. I assemble the telling of this event from a few vivid but sketchy references to it in his introductory "Address" written for his Ornithological Biography, the five-volume naturalist's text that he wrote and published (with considerable help from others) between the years 1831 and 1839 to accompany his monumental life work, The Birds of America (1827 - 1838): 5
I felt an intimacy with [wild birds]. . .bordering on phrenzy. . . . I gazed in ecstasy. . . . My wishes were for the entire possession of all that I saw. . . . The moment a bird was dead, no matter how beautiful it had been when in life, the pleasure arising from the possession of it became blunted. . . . I wished to possess all the productions of nature, but I wished life with them.
None but aërial companions suited my fancy. No roof seemed so secure to me as that formed of the dense foliage under which the feathered tribes were seen to resort. . . .
My father generally accompanied my steps, procured birds and flowers for me with great eagerness,---pointed out the elegant movements of the former, the beauty and softness of their plumage, the manifestations of their pleasure or sense of danger. . . .
In my imagining of this scene, six-year-old Jean Rabin is watching the beauty of tropical birds flying to safety under the forest canopy through the smoke of the burning cane fields that were among the first violent stirrings of the Haitian Revolution that was to begin on August 22, 1791. When he was almost six and a half and his sister, Rose, was almost four and a half, their father made sure they escaped with their lives. Audubon's father did not bring either his older sister, Marie-Madeleine, or the woman who mothered him, Sanitte Bouffard, to safety.
The second image is derived from a scene vividly remembered and recorded by Audubon in 1835 for his sons when he was fifty and they were twenty-six and twenty-two. Though narrated by Audubon as having occurred in Nantes, the event recounted could only have taken place in the household of his father's sugar plantation in Les Cayes before he turned seven. In this document, a fragment of an autobiography titled "Myself," Audubon first lies to his sons about the true facts of his own birth which he certainly knew. He tells them his father married "a lady of Spanish extraction, whom I have been led to understand was as beautiful as she was wealthy, and otherwise attractive" in New Orleans, then a French colonial possession, and that "soon after my birth, [she] accompanied my father to the estate of Aux Cayes, on the island of Santo Domingo, and she was one of the victims during the ever-to-be-lamented period of the negro insurrection of that island." He improbably says that his first memories are from Nantes and recalls being "much cherished by my dear stepmother, who had no children of her own, and that I was constantly attended by one or two black servants, who had followed my father from Santo Domingo to New Orleans and afterward to Nantes." In the next paragraph he writes:
One incident which is a perfect in my memory as if it had occurred this very day, I have thought of thousands of times since, and will now put on paper as one of the curious things which perhaps did lead me in after times to love birds, and to finally study them with pleasure infinite. My mother had several beautiful parrots and some monkeys; one of the latter was a full-grown male of a very large species. One morning, while the servants were engaged in arranging the room I was in, "Pretty Polly” asking for her breakfast as usual,
“Du pain au lait pour le perroquet Mignonne,”the man of the woods probably thought the bird presuming upon his rights in the scale of nature; be this as it may, he certainly showed his supremacy in strength over the denizen of the air, for, walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural composure. The sensations of my infant heart at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed the servant to beat the monkey, but he, who for some reason preferred the monkey to the parrot, refused. I uttered long and piercing cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was tranquillized, the monkey was forever afterward chained, and Mignonne buried with all the pomp of a cherished lost one. 6
Audubon knew the true history of his early childhood perfectly well his entire life but never told anyone of it. He did not make his past known even to his beloved wife Lucy (to whom he seems always to have been faithful despite more than eleven years of separation) or to his two sons.
For a period of years before the Panic of 1819 and subsequent general collapse of the American economy, Audubon was the quintessentially successful rising American bourgeois entrepreneur during boom times in Henderson, Kentucky. He owned at least ten enslaved African Americans during this period and showed no hesitation, reluctance, or remorse in selling them to pay creditors---even travelling with two "servants" down the Mississippi in a skiff and personally arranging their sale in New Orleans. 7
Audubon exhibited all the traits and attitudes of the virulent white racism that permeated every facet of his era and milieu. He showed a particularly intense aversion towards the "yellow-hued" women he encountered in New Orleans---the color, presumably, of his half-sisters and the woman who raised and nurtured him between the ages of six months and almost seven.
In my writing now, I want to use these two screen memories to capture the subjective textures of the suppressed violence and systemic annihilating cruelty behind Audubon's denial of the historical truth of his own origins. I now understand the astonishing accomplishment of his great artistic work, The Birds of America, as a monstrous misrecognition of the enormities of his losses in Saint-Domingue. I see his compulsive insistence on the "life-size" capture through depiction of over 700 species in 435 hand-painted prints as an ecstatic re-creation, repetition, and deformed, always failing attempt at a totalized restoration of the absolute losses he suffered in childhood---so absolute they cannot be faced or even named.
It is important to try to recover the power of Audubon's representations of the beauty of living birds. Before the invention of photography no one had ever seen accurate depictions of life-size birds caught in the living moments of their lives. He achieved his animated posing of the dead animals he killed with such skilled abandon by pinning their bodies to a soft pine board with sharpened metal wires. The mounting board was marked off in a measured grid which Audubon then reproduced with identically measured lines on his oversize "double elephant folio" (38 X 26 inch) sheets of high-quality drawing paper to give his images their "life-size" accuracy of both scale and perspective.
But beyond this empirical logic of scientific precision, viewers of Audubon's art have always sensed behind these images, and the animals' poses, an artist's will to recreate the things he loves most in a sublime, "pristine" element, "freed," as it were, from the contaminating presence of the hunter's or any other human presence.
Behind the success of Audubon's masterful, blustering, operatic self-invention as "the American Woodsman," there is always the sense somehow of the blasted destruction of a small child's soul. The paintings perform an almost magical cancellation of any point of view from a "natural" or "ordinary" "civilized" White European human perspective. This insistence of a "non-human" perspective suggests to me an enactment of an absolute abandonment in which the unmastered rage resulting from the violent denial of a related self is momentarily overcome in the recovery of a primordial merger with a pre-human, pristine wilderness. The paintings seem to offer an almost forbidden and disavowed knowledge (or fantasized promise) that redemption will ultimately come only in the form of the beauty of the non-human world. 8
I understand the two paragraph-long concluding sentences of the autobiographical fragment "Myself" to be an unwitting confession and quasi apology to his children of his own destructive disconnectedness from them and from the truth of his own origins. I read these sentences as an unintentionally accurate self-portrait of his subjectivity as a self-rescued suicidal white child trying to mourn the beloved woman and older sister who mothered him without any intelligible verbal form of loving reciprocity with which to recognize them:
One of the most extraordinary things among all these adverse circumstances was that I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way that I could; nay, during my deepest troubles I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me, and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests; and many a time, at the sound of the wood-thrush's melodies have I fallen on my knees, and there prayed earnestly to our God.
This never failed to bring me the most valuable of thoughts and always comfort, and, strange as it may seem to you, it was often necessary for me to exert my will, and compel myself to return to my fellow-beings.
Biographers, art critics, and historians differ as to whether Audubon's monumental, all-consuming project of creating and publishing The Birds of America was or was not a commercial and entrepreneurial success. The four-volume work was drawn, produced, and distributed to some 300 subscribers (not all of whom stayed subscribers over the entire eleven years of its production time). Between the years 1824 and June 1838, Audubon created (with the help of literally hundreds of mostly unacknowledged other people) some 250 to 300 copies of 435 plates containing representations, almost all drawn from life, of 497 species of birds in 1,065 figures). 9 In his biography, Richard Rhodes vividly describes the physicality of the four volumes. He notes that they are as "large and nearly as heavy as flagstones, large enough to require two people, one at each end, to turn the thick, luxurious pages." 10
Audubon himself estimated that, not counting the expenses of himself or his family, he spent $115,640 dollars or the equivalent of $3,361,000 in 2022 American dollars on the project. 11 Rhodes points out that Audubon's entrepreneurial ability to do this with his family members' dedicated, unstinting collaboration without institutional or contractual commercial backing of any kind, and coming out financially slightly better than even is astounding. 12 Rhodes further remarks that in his business man's ability to sustain himself and his monumental artistic project over the course of twenty years in the volatile conditions of emerging industrial capitalism, Audubon was his father's son. 13
Today, in the world of rare books, the later octavo edition of Audubon's The Birds of America is known as "probably the greatest commercial success of any color plate book issued in 19 th century America." 14 The octavo edition, a "popular" much smaller format made possible by advances in printing technology just after the 1838 completion of the "double elephant folio" first edition of The Birds of America, was prepared largely under the supervision of Audubon's sons and was published in many editions beginning in 1840. Its publication made Audubon and his family wealthy---wealthy enough for Audubon to purchase "Minnie's Land" (named for his wife) consisting of 14 acres of land fronting 550 ft. of the Hudson River between present-day 155 th and 158 th streets at a time when New York City did not extend beyond 14 th Street. 15 (By 1850, the family had lost most of the money in a disastrous California Gold Rush investment and expedition undertaken in 1849-1850. In 1847, Audubon began to exhibit signs of dementia, probably from early onset Alzheimer's. He died in January of 1851 having lost all long- and short-term memory.) 16
Monetizing Audubon's artistic success in this contemporary way, however, is fundamentally misleading. It distracts from recognizing what it was that enabled Audubon, after his descent into debt, bankruptcy, and penury resulting for the nation-wide economic collapse after 1819, to successfully cultivate his self-image as an aristocratic, self-sufficient American gentleman of indominable physical force and acute esthetic sensibility. He successfully presented himself, even in abject poverty, as a self-sufficient artisan and artist who, to realize himself and his responsibilities to himself and his family, had to abandon his wife and young children to pursue the creation of a book for roughly the eleven years between 1823 and 1834.
It was not until Audubon found himself in the heartland of the new industrial wealth of northern England and Scotland, where he had gone to take advantage of the technical printing capacities his book required and that only Europe could provide, that he discovered a commercial pathway to success---both for his project and his family. With his French background and his father's Caribbean slave-trader and sugar plantation owner's former wealth in the background, Audubon was able to represent himself effectively as a free Aristocratic gentleman wholly above commerce and selflessly devoted to natural science for the general benefit and improvement of mankind. In this role, Audubon was able to find himself on intimate social terms with the American sojourning nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, the naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte. He added to this image of himself by claiming, against all evidence, to have been a student of the acclaimed master painter Jacques-Louis David, renowned artist of the French Revolution and, after 1804, official court painter of Napoleon's imperial regime.
Audubon convincingly combined this presentation of himself to his industrially moneyed, would-be English patrons and their families as a Byronic artist and man of science with a simultaneous performance of himself as the original, wild, "American Woodsman." His paintings and extravagant tales of his exploits in the untamed natural world revealed him as a self-made embodiment of a free inhabitant of an Edenic sublimity that cultivated Europe herself had lost touch with. It was not only his astonishing art (that his new patrons helped him put on lucrative display in salons and the meeting rooms of scientific societies) that created Audubon's initial, breakthrough European success. It was equally the persona he successfully projected of the isolate, white European male alone in the wilderness with nothing but his senses to access a transcendence of history itself. This transcendence, Audubon's art and persona implied, was available through a "direct," esthetic immersion in the sublimity of a "pristine," "still untamed," "untouched" natural world which Europe's historical development had made tragically unavailable to a cultivated, striving, newly rich, White industrial ruling class.
I cannot help but see Audubon's artistic, publishing, and commercial triumphs as, in a fundamental way, a displaced imitation of his own father's accomplishments. Jean Audubon, one of thirteen children of a poor fisherman, started his career as a twelve-year-old cabin boy. He rose to become, through naval captaincy, slave-trading, and sugar plantation ownership, a self-made man of temporarily enormous wealth, power, and prestige. Audubon's biographers depict him as someone who cannily seized the financial opportunities of slave trafficking, slave trading, and sugar plantation ownership while presenting himself simultaneously as a genteel, liberal devotee of progressive, Enlightenment values and the new knowledge made possible by the natural sciences.
Both father and son, it seems to me, pose for the present the central question of how does the "self-made," autonomous, free, white, European male, as agent and beneficiary of the secular history of possessive capitalism, justify his existence as a continuous, ethically accountable self within secular time? Possessed of the impunity of possessive authority conferred by colonial imperialism within the successful regime of global capitalist development, how does this "imperialized white self" negotiate his relationship to, and responsibility for, the unbounded violence inherent in the capitalist ownership of "life itself." 17 In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this violence of capitalist ownership took the undisguised forms of systematically eliminating Indigenous populations, enslaving fellow human beings by assigning them the legal status of chattel, and the indiscriminate, proto-industrial, exterminatory slaughter of wildlife for profit and sport.
World capitalism's totalizing claims of determining, measuring, maximizing, optimizing, and potentially realizing all value through monetization continues to postpone the question of the intra- and inter-subjective content of non-monetized value. The question of the sustainable, just, universal, social relatedness of the subjectivity of the possessive capitalist self still awaits the universally political (as opposed to economic) formulation that the emerging ethic of universal democratic equality practically demands. A politics of universal democratic sustainability demands an adequate language of historical justice. The consequence of not achieving such a language will be that language itself as an independent domain of value creation will be wholly subsumed within capitalism's exterminatory regime of monetized profit maximization.
From this perspective the economic question about Audubon's art becomes not, "How much?" but, as I have tried to suggest, "What is the historical value of the sovereignty achieved through monetized possession when it entails the abrogation of all principles of expressive and linguistic fluency from which to create ethically coherent relatedness among equally valued lives?"
"Both Audubons, father and son, lived hard, impressive lives," I find myself wanting to write. But ethically, I want to say, the historical costs of those lives' achievements are most truthfully narrated as unbearable---not least to themselves.
In the writing I do in the future, I want to try to use the screen memories Audubon himself has given us in a historically enriching way. Those memories, when juxtaposed with the images of birds Audubon created, I believe, can be used to accurately evoke a subjectivity of an absolute failure of continuity in American history. Such a negative continuity is precisely what our national narrative of triumphant exceptionalism has been constructed to prevent. But having lost a survivable, stable environmental and ecological futurity into which to project a continuously deferred but eventually realizable American perfectibility, we now stand in dire need of just such a narrative of absolute failure. From the subjectivity of that narration, it seems to me, it is possible that a new ethics and verbal fluency conducive to democracy might still arise.
I want to use my attempt at apprehending the subjectivity of Audubon's denial, evasion, self-deceit, and racist bad faith to ground my own commitment to contributing something towards a language and subjectivity of historical justice that is useful to the present. We need a language of possessiveness more adequate to the history we are living than the triumphalist narratives of justice and empowerment with which we seem determined to continue to indulge ourselves.
For several years I have been re-reading the modernist novels that enchanted me in my youth. I am trying to understand why I no longer experience them as transformative. At the same time, I have been playing with a way to write something about John James Audubon and historical denial without the need to call it novelistic fiction.
Most recently, I have been re-reading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus.
Between 1942 and 1946, from his highly prominent German war refugee writer's exile in Pacific Palisades, California, Mann undertook in this novel to explore a humanist subjectivity adequate to address Nazi Germany's genocidal bid for the capture and control of the trajectory of modernity's historical development through total war and exterminatory conquest.
At the level of craft, Mann's novel puts on display an astonishing willed---conservative---confidence in the contemporary novel as an esthetic form adequate to the task of rendering the abyss of contemporary history within a humanist continuity of artistic forms and liberal protocols of political discourse. He is even confident enough of the novel as a medium of effective ethical persuasion to offer the liberal reader the frisson of the imaginative possibility that the novel we are reading is the discovery that European history has betrayed its world-historical civilizational promise but that its redemptive role is still capable of being preserved and fulfilled through art.
Doctor Faustus is written in the form of a fictional biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Leverkühn 's artistic musical genius is based on the art and accomplishment of Mann's Hollywood neighbor and fellow German war-time exile, Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's radical re-grounding of Western classical music's organizing system of tonality functions within Mann's novel as a figure for the possible renovation, but also potentially demonic dismantling, of modern humanism's continuation of the promise of Europe's Renaissance-derived cultural and spiritual leadership of world historical development.
We never directly hear the notes of Adrian Leverkühn's music in Doctor Faustus. The novel's stuffy, self-admittedly unimaginative and crushingly dull conventional narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is thoroughly unreliable concerning the actual sensory transactions and exchanges of esthetic transcendence. He merely asserts his desperate faith in their possibility and collective necessity. This comic reserve and hedge keeps the novel's storytelling joyfully and mordantly alive, but it suspends the crucial issue that Mann also wants his readers to take seriously: is art redemptive? Is the power of art capable of regenerating historical hope in the wake of Nazism's demonstration that a genocidal, exterminatory logic of absolute power can create an unanswerable argument leading to a consenting rationality's perfection of the exercise of unlimited violence?
What if Mann's novel had been less content with the sufficiency of suggesting art's inevitable participation in the demonic aspects of the world? His novel, it seems to me, ends by leaving the problem of historical capitalism's destructiveness, indecisively and almost complacently, up to time and liberally educated human ethical responsibility to resolve or fail to resolve. What if his last great novel about the absolute moral and ethical failure of a historical world had tried, in the moment of that world's collapse, to voice what the creation of another language of valuing human continuity might sound like in words?
Instead, Mann lets Schoenberg's project of transforming classical European musical composition (Mann apparently showed no interest in listening to Schoenberg's actual musical compositions) stand in for the universal renovative and generative possibilities of the tradition of Western esthetic creativity. But if Mann refrained from directly applying the implications of Schoenberg's radical re-making of classical music's compositional techniques to composing novels in words, shouldn't we nevertheless acknowledge that that is a path the reading of Doctor Faustus today might lead us to consider?
Schoenberg did not abolish Western music's tonality. He forced everyone to hear it in a new way. His twelve-tone or "serial row" technique and rules of composition revealed that Western music could be extended beyond its exhausted traditional harmonic structures. His new way of composing showed that the European classical musical tradition's enormously rich but spent structures and conventions of tonal preparations, suspensions, and resolutions to convey meanings and ideas through sound need not finally define it. Schoenberg's innovations allowed Western tonality to be heard freshly and disruptively again and encouraged the idea and hopes that esthetic forms could be made commensurate with the extremities of the expressive needs and demands of modernity's crises. 18
Allen Shawn, in his musician's understanding of Schoenberg's accomplishment, emphasizes that Schoenberg's self-imposed rules of musical composition force the ear to hear music outside the conventional, and, by 1921, worn-out Western structures of sustained linear harmonic coherence, drama, and emotional climax wrought by the comfortably familiar fixed tempered system of keys and the interplay of their possible juxtapositions and transformations. Instead, by forbidding any note in a composition to be used again before all the notes in the composition are sounded, Schoenberg's system treats each note as its own musical center, significant as a sound and moment for its own sake---not dependent, as previously, upon its position within the continuity of a given scale or scales within given keys (or within the interplay of fixed keys) for its musical or expressive coherence.
Continuity, in this way, is constructed not through the underlying organizing harmonic structures of background-supported and determined meanings but solely from the spontaneous, present, un-predetermined acoustic experience of the interval between any given note and its immediate neighbors. 19
What if we tried to hear the words of a classical novel from within a system that allowed us to hear them beyond our expected, worn-out, but nonetheless self-confessedly exterminatory conventions of thought and feeling? What if, instead, we chose to hear a novel's words in our minds within a self-consciously devised and arranged grid of other texts of absolute refusal of the status quo of liberal narration that we have chosen to memorize, recall, and regenerate in real time at will from memory?
Might not such a technique, applied to language and its generative associative capacities (generally designated by the phrase "free association" or "stream of consciousness") give us a way to experiment with revaluing words? Couldn't reading language in an analogous way unlock new energies in our sensory processing of language and historical continuity?
Might not such a controlled method of self-consciously active generation of spontaneous associations through the juxtaposition and internalization of linguistic material prove revealing and enlivening? Might not this exercise go against the grain---and even give us the chance to refuse at the level of interior thought---the algorithmically prescribed continuities constantly being offered our managed attention as surveilled consumers of entertainment and profitable subjects of managed well-being?
I doubt that "a well-made novel" can be written from the Audubon story that I sense most urgently needs to be told. It is more important, I think, to experiment with words that might be able convey a lived subjectivity of historical denial as extreme, as intense, and as common as Audubon's operating in our own present. 20
We---all our "we's"---need to confront a profound national historical denial that blots out, moment to moment, from daily consciousness any explicit recognition of the extent to which our lives are saturated with the intolerable experiential history of white supremacy, slavery, and their readily identifiable systemic continuities in the present. We need to understand that we can no longer afford an infinite future of developmental "progress" through which the predatory, exterminatory extraction of neoliberal capitalism can be aligned with bad faith promises of universal freedom and material well-being.
Many years ago, now, Toni Morrison called for "a racialized, non-racist account of American history." What would such a narrative, grounded in a rigorous, post-capitalist imaginative framing of historical justice, sound like?
Wouldn't such a history have to use the common language we have but whose use included the recognition of liberal humanism's complicity in the failure to prevent or sufficiently oppose the catastrophic exterminatory violence of financialized global capitalism's drive to maximize the accumulation of monetized power with impunity at the expense of the sustainability of life itself?
I have given my present, roughly drafted, writing-in-progress the title "John James Audubon Looks Up in Haiti." It now consists of a series of exchanges among three characters from my previous novel Daybook from Sheep Meadow. At its center is Tallis Martinson, a once successful American historian suffering from adult mutism (with malignant catatonic episodes), voluntarily living in a long-term psychiatric care center. In my current draft, he regularly corresponds with his brother and daughter who visit him sometimes weekly and sometimes monthly.
The historian's brother, Christopher Martinson, has served as his editor for many years and has initiated a regular weekly meeting that includes the two brothers and Tallis's daughter, Cary. In these meetings and in their written correspondence they exchange their own experiments in using Tallis's eccentric and baroquely intricate templates for "practicing historical justice." The method consists in memorizing texts of "valuable thought" of each person's choosing and using these memorized texts as silently heard notes from which to generate free associations and spontaneous fragments of narration. The meditative discipline is to inhabit the intervals between the words to imaginatively get from one moment to the next without relying upon conventional, pre-determined narrative tensions, arcs of continuity, or resolutions.
In Tallis's method, which Christopher and Cary have agreed to adopt and practice as preparation for their in-person discussions, "three-note verbal phrases" are discovered from silent meditation and stream of consciousness. These phrases are then "rescued" through being written down and are assigned, according to the associations they spontaneously generate, to one of four chapters whose titles have been previously memorized. Within that designated "chapter" these phrases are then each assigned (for the moment) to act as associative material for one of three of Audubon's paintings. (Tallis has chosen "The Great Egret" (1821), "Wood Thrush" (1823), and "Golden Eagle" (1833) as his initial three choices for his method. Christopher and Cary have chosen to make associative use of the same three images in their initial trial of Tallis's method. All have agreed to look at one of the images without distraction for a few minutes each day.
The goal of the method is for each participant to try to value their spontaneous associations generated by voluntarily undertaken memorization of valued thoughts and ideas as landing and departure points for experiencing meditative durations of time freed from the immediate coercions of the passive acceptance of the conventional narratives dominating most of our lives. The characters have agreed to let themselves be generally attentive during their meditative practice to the following overarching ethical question: "How do we justly inhabit the intervals of linguistic expression within contemporary capitalism in both public life and individual thought?"
Whatever the result of this writing experiment will be, I expect it will be within the novelistic tradition of a dialogic record constructed by readers and writers trying to experience and value possibilities of linguistic reciprocity within uncoerced intervals of linguistic expression. In teaching his method to the others, Tallis tells them he is hoping above all to experience durations of non-monetized value. He suspects, he says, on his better days, that the intimate familiarity of that duration will astound everyone.
Excerpts from "John James Audubon Looks Up in Haiti"
(In the following passage, Cary, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of Tallis, an American historian who has committed himself to a long-term psychiatric center, is reluctantly complying with her father and her uncle's request that she keep a journal of her attempts to practice her father's "historical method." The three characters, Cary, Tallis, and Christopher, meet regularly in the hopes that their conversations will eventually help Tallis leave the supervised care of the facility. For the moment all three are using the template of memorized texts originally chosen by Tallis at Christopher's request. The understanding is that everyone will eventually choose their own texts once they have helped each other develop the possibilities of this way of reading and meeting together. The novel will eventually consist of Christopher's editing, with the others' consent, of extended excerpts from each of their notebooks.)
--
Cary: I get so tired of it all---listening to my father, his eyes much too intensely bright, saying to me, as if I were an abstraction, as if I were always ten years old struggling to be anyone at all: "Sometimes you read a sentence that says everything all at once." Then he says, "We need some syntax for refusing narratives of a future vindication of perfected violence's ecstatic present: some far-off perspective under a philosopher's floppy hat. You need to join your thought to the sound of another speaker's voice."
Template to Be Used for Generating Possibly Memorable Associations for an Alternative Continuity:
[1. Note 3: Possession: "Possession is pre-eminently that form by which the Other becomes the same by becoming mine" (Emmanuel Levinas); 2. Chapter I: "The Complicity of Presence"; 3. Audubon's Birds 3: "Golden Eagle" (1835)]
Golden Eagle (image: audubon.org)
--
Tallis: It's just a bird on a page. Why say or see more? Why try to hear speech in a bird's urgency of song? But you're trying to tell me: Jean Rabin (or "Jean Rabine," the records differ), not John James Audubon, is crying at the age of six-and-a-half. He is seeing her with no way to reach her through the thickness of smoke and survive. (Other hands are holding him.) He is seeing the beauty of birds in flight instead---stopping time---their safety above the smoke under a canopy of trees. She can no longer hold him. Now, in the historical coercion of a compulsively narrated and profitably postponed forever, he refuses to remember her. This refusal derives from his own unhindered will to fulfill his own possessive self-interest---and to a lethal loyalty to their shared father (the small, handsome Frenchman whose burning fields still perfect our forgetting). Jean Rabin refuses everything except the sound of her name: Marie-Madeleine. This is now all we have for the sound of his crying. She is his half-sister, nine years older than he, born in 1776. She and her mother, his father's mixed-race mistress and head of the enslaved household of his sugar plantation in Les Cayes, raised him in Saint-Domingue---cared for him in intimacy until his father called him back to France. But Marie-Madeleine's skin is still too dark for her father to bring her "home" to safety and political revolution in Nantes in 1791.
Template to Be Used for Generating Possibly Memorable Associations for an Alternative Continuity:
[1. Note 5. The State: "Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the state and the non-violence of the totality without securing itself against the violence upon which that non-violence rests. The truth, which is supposed to reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. The universal presents itself as impersonal. This is another inhumanity." (Emmanuel Levinas); 2. Chapter III: "The Idea of Universal Equality is a Historical Accomplishment"; 3. Audubon's Birds 2: "Wood Thrush" (1823)]
Wood Thrush (image: audubon.org)
--
Christopher: In the middle of the administered commonness of our consent to power, we lose track of the story of our freedom to interpret it. The mind loses sight of the inward, invisible threads of its individuated continuity---recoils from the clairvoyance supplied by a spontaneous moment's loquacious habitability.
Template to Be Used for Generating Possibly Memorable Associations for an Alternative Continuity:
[1. Note 6. Thought: "But to say that one can remain completely other, that he enters only into the relation of conversation is to say that history itself, an identification of the same, cannot claim to totalize the same and other. The absolutely other, whose alterity is overcome in the philosophy of immanence on the allegedly common plane of history, remains transcendent in the midst of history. The same is essentially identification within the diverse, or history, or system. It is not I who resist the system, as Kierkegaard thought, it is the Other." (Emmanuel Levinas); 3. Chapter II: "We No Longer Know What Meaning Is"; Audubon Birds 1. "Great Egret" (1821)]
1 Robert Meister, author of After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) and Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
2 Peter Dimock, Daybook from Sheep Meadow (Dallas: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021).
3 I believe Audubon refers at some point in a reminiscence of his early years to a "beloved" older sister named Marie-Madeleine who died as a teen-ager, but I cannot find the reference. [Ford, John James Audubon, 8, 12, 13? Cited by Carolyn E. DeLatte, Lucy Audubon, 21, where she mentions Marie Madeleine as JJA's half-sister].
4 See Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Vintage Books, 2004) and Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
5 Ornithological Biography can be found online at: <https: data-preserve-html-node="true"//www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56989>. For The Birds of America see: <http: data-preserve-html-node="true"//audubon.library.pitt.edu>
6 John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings (New York: Library of America, 1999), 765-6.
7 Enslaved Black people constituted roughly 20% of the population of Kentucky in 1810 numbering some 113,000 persons. Owning ten slaves in 1810 would have placed Audubon well within the top 10% of White wealth holders in the state. I do not believe such calculations can be used to make accurate direct comparisons concerning individual or social well-being in the United States between the early 19th and early 21st centuries. Such monetized comparisons are used here merely to indicate the material basis for Audubon's subjective sense of himself both as a well-born (even aristocratic) gentleman dedicated to the leisured pursuits of the natural sciences and European fine arts and simultaneously as the isolate "American Woodsman" who is determined to find both success and transcendence by immersing his humanly abandoned, innermost self in---and trusting his natural, spontaneously cultivated, unbounded ambitions and talents to---the pristine violence, beauty, and sublimity of the "untouched," "unspoiled," "undeveloped" American wilderness. As it turned out, the technical skills and sophisticated industrial capacities to reproduce and publish Audubon's life-size paintings as individually hand-painted prints pulled from hand-engraved plates were to be found, at first, only in Europe. Likewise, only in Europe and among the highest ranks of the entrepreneurial innovators of maximized industrial extractive production did Audubon's innovative updating and appropriation of "the noble savage" myth gain immediate recognition and unconditional, enthusiastic acclaim as both science and art.
8 I recognize that Audubon's changing relationship to, and understanding of, Indigenous persons and peoples as rightful "possessors" of the American land and "Nature" he purported to see himself in transcendent, ecstatic merger with is an important subject that this essay (perhaps fatally) leaves entirely unaddressed. Obviously, I believe it is indispensable to any formulation of historical justice in relation to American national experience and identity to see the question of Audubon's art and its enduring popularity in relation to the violent possessive appropriation of the value of "life itself" in new forms, intensities, and exterminatory magnitudes made possible by slavery and genocide in the New World. I believe strongly that one possible key to formulating practical, just responses in the present to historical injustices of the past is to find a common language which would allow everyone to imaginatively understand and explore the psychological possibility that, from the perspective of the good faith assertion of universal equality, the history of capitalism has been, and continues to be, unbearable.
9 "Archival records show that some 300 subscribers eventually signed up to receive five plates at a time, several times a year. Each installment included three small birds, one medium-sized bird, and one large bird. Audubon and his collaborators supplied a title page for each group of 100 plates (134 in the case of the final group) and many subscribers had their prints bound in four volume sets. The total cost for the 434 plates and Audubon's accompanying text, the five-volume Ornithological Biography, was about $1,000--approximately $25,000 in 2017." https://beineckeaudubon.yale.edu/news/double-elephant-folio
10 Rhodes, 403.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 404.
13Ibid., 17, 145, 146-53, 70-75, 116
15 See Rhodes, 416.
16 Ibid., 432.
17 See Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1971).
18 My non-musician's understanding of Schoenberg's significance and accomplishment comes from Allen Shawn's
Arnold Schoenberg: His Journey (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002).
19 See Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg's Journey (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), .____.
20 See Lee Zimmerman, Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change: Literature, Psychoanalysis and Denial (New York: Routledge, 2020).