Aufhebung at Nottoway

When the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, the American South’s largest remaining plantation home, burned last week, what was interesting was the degree to which the response was gleeful. Obviously, the media is going to focus on this response, but this was borne out by a quick foray into the social media space – something that would have been difficult to imagine 20 or perhaps even 10 years ago. And the reply from the reactionary right has been tepid, at least publicly, although I imagine what’s being said in upper middle class parlors throughout the South is somewhat less so. And this is something worth inquiring into.

 

I mean the reason people are celebrating is obvious. It’s a goddamn plantation. It’s a place built using the forced labor of slaves, and unlike, say, Monticello or Mount Vernon, the owners of Nottoway deliberately avoided using the buzzkill language of slavery – “antebellum home,” not plantation. The history section of their website says a lot about their lovingly named oak trees, and nothing about the people who were tortured and worked to death there. The picture of the couple celebrating their wedding on the property is decidedly racially ambiguous. It was, according to the owners, restored to its “days of glory.”

So before you read any further and willfully jump to any conclusions about my affiliations, I do want to underline the fact that antebellum nostalgists can fucking suck it.

But while I can empathize, I can’t celebrate. Because the fact remains that this is a historically important property, one of the sort that I think worth preserving because of course it is, especially if one wants to understand the role that industrialized slavery had in my nation’s history. The Grecian columns reflect a particularly pernicious belief among the ruling classes of their own natural aristocracy, a view of themselves as modern-day Solons. Architecture is perhaps the most potent of object lessons.

And it is/was just very pretty. In the same way a delicate moonflower blossom dripping with neurotoxins is.

So, as usual, the liberal consensus gets in my craw. I have to wonder how many of the choir of voices knew anything about the Nottoway Plantation beforehand (I certainly didn’t), and how many just checked their social media feeds for right-think, and responded accordingly. How much critical thinking about the whitewashing of history is going on here? And how much is just the kind of binary thinking that, at the end of the day, is little more than John Calvin hitting the pulpit and contrasting the total depravity of the world with the perseverance of the saints?

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves – what isn’t a product of horror? What cultural capital isn’t contingent upon suffering? Who do you think built those elegant Georgian townhomes that line the streets of London, and how many of those lords’ names are also found in remarkable number among black people in the West Indies? And who do you think owns those Georgian townhomes today, and how much unspeakable suffering do they continue to perpetrate throughout the tropical resource belt in the name of capital accumulation?

Who do you think built Rockefeller Center, and what do you think Standard Oil was up to? Is that what we think of when we see Jimmy Fallon yuk it up with background banter from The Roots?

But I don’t wish to moralize. Instead, I turn to the Marxian concept of aufhebung – a difficult term to pin down, but, more or less, holding the past condition of man and the ugly truth of material conditions, placing them in contrast, and arriving at a more humane synthesis.

History proceeds not through winners and losers, but through a more complex process. And so perhaps it’s best to admire the graceful line of an ancient oak, at the same time as one sees it nourished by human blood and sugarcane stubble. And after observing this contrast, it is perhaps helpful to admit that there perhaps really is a specter haunting the world.

Or maybe I’m just good at pissing all sides off. Worth a game attempt at honesty all the same.

The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.

Spanish, Flew

 I flew to Spain. Not because I had any grand desire. I had a week to kill and there was a cheap flight in, a cheap flight out. I knew I liked Spanish things – El Greco and Velazquez, Bunuel and Almodovar. I was in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was surrounded by Satmar Jewish women in identical sheitel wigs with babies, by goyische women in identical Patagonia fleeces with corgis and miniature poodles. I saw Woody Allen and Sun-Yi Previn looking more miserable than I, hailing a taxi outside the Kurlansky Gallery in Chelsea, and they had a miniature poodle too. And then I flew to Spain.

The outer suburbs of the city by the sea are filled with sad-eyed heroines I know from Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Hable con Ella, the prostitute dancing on the mattress and drinking cheap tinto in Biutiful, the immigrant children poking their heads out from screenless open windows above.

Of course, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I hated Barcelona at first sight. I had the misfortune to have booked a room near La Rambla, a place which, like the Old Town of Prague or the inner canals of Amsterdam, was clearly once gorgeous and now caters to the shittiest and lairiest of tourists from Great Brexit, made all the worse by it being a Barca/Real game day. Overpriced reheated tapas and streetside bars offering the ubiquitous pornstar martini (a drink that I can only imagine tasting good after the second line of molly), bachelor parties with the whole gang of lads wearing t-shirts with graphics of stick figures of brides and grooms and the phrase UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT underneath, drink specials in David Guetta-blasting nightclubs and weed vapes and sex museums, a supposed Southern naughtiness to counteract a supposed Northern primness, revealing the actual Southern desire to milk the tourist dollar and the actual Northern desire to self-obliterate. The Southerners succeed in this respect, they leave with a tidy stack. The Northerners wake up with splitting hangovers, hacking coughs, hotel rooms spread with latex and handcuffs, and just as much misery.

It is gorgeous. Which in the age of Instagram is a curse, and Barcelona’s own Antonio Gaudi has the misfortune to be the most Instagrammable architect. In much the same way that increasing access to information leads to greater stratification in terms of consumer goods – demand shoots up for every quality piece of cookware, for instance, promoted by culinary influencers – social media has created a stratification of locations, with the Barcelonas and Lisbons and Tbilisis of the world playing host to rapacious Airbnb owners and braying digital nomads. To visit Sagrada Familia you need to buy tickets a week in advance. And download the fucking app.

But as I move further away from La Rambla and the more conspicuous Gaudi buildings, my heart grows with each glass of Monastrell and Penedes, every Miro painting, every braised pig’s trotter and screamingly fresh razor clam. And when I reach the Parc de la Ciutadella, my heart absolutely sings, elderly couples, families with kids, groups of Goth teens smoking weed, African migrants, solo readers, people engaging in more or less every musical and athletic pursuit imaginable, all united in their desire to enjoy a perfect sunny afternoon surrounded by cypresses and Canarian palms and bitter-orange trees and Catalan tilework, without being charged for the right to do so – something akin to what I imagine my ideal society to look like. The sort of thing Orwell might have written an homage to.

Yet this the landscape of the charming Mediterranean fringe. The innermost country is an arid, sandstone land punctuated with olives and grapevines, distant views to the snow-capped Pyrenees over the barren, chalky soil, a landscape closer to the harsh scrublands of, say, Eastern New Mexico than lush, decadent Mediterranean fantasy, cruel and wind-whipped, the sort of place where windmills could readily turn into enemies, where Torquemada’s ghost is not far behind, leaving a whiff of burned flesh in his wake.

And at its heart is a city few people could say much about. Because what do you actually know about Madrid as a place? Its sights, its architecture, its local culture, its music scene, its gastronomy? Probably not much at all. I know I didn’t.

After breezy, Mediterranean Barcelona, Madrid was freezing cold and consistently raining – a rarity for this semi-desert city. The mist gathered in the Gran Via and the Plaza del Sol, Madrilenas shivering in their skimpy tulle-and-lace Halloween costumes, the lights of taxis flashing in the drizzle, with neon advertisements on glorious art-deco skyscrapers, posters for Spanish-language stage interpretations of Hollywood cinema (Legally Blonde becomes Rubia Legal), and one could be forgiven for thinking not that they are in Castile but Times Square.

I was there with a primary purpose, to see the wonders of the Prado. To see the greatest manifestation of that semi-arid land, the haunted and contorted saints painted most famously by El Greco, less famously by Jusepe de Ribera, deathly pale bodies in the darkness of Spain during its ostensible Golden Age, failing to rise to the light of heaven.

And when I saw the singular, dark room, the dead-end gallery of Goya’s Pinturas Negras, how could I do anything but scream? Sure, we all know about Saturn eating his children – but that is perhaps the least horrifying… this is Goya’s index of every senseless stupidity, cruelty, and violence inflicted upon the world, every gathered mob, every sickly midnight cackle. And at the end of the room, there is a painting of a single dog, barely peeking through the distorted charcoal gray and burnished gold background, eyes straining to find some kind of hope in the sheer misery. And devoid of any context, it breaks your fucking heart. 

And then to step out into the streets, to the palaces and cathedrals built from the corpses of the massacred natives of Mexico and Mindanao.

The so-called leyenda negra, the myth of Spain’s uniquely rapacious and perverse colonial history, is often dismissed nowadays by modern historians as a product of the quivering and prim Protestant imagination, an attempt to rationalize the colonial projects of more northerly countries as civilizing missions, while condemning the Spanish Empire as a den of iniquity. But that is to ignore the fact that during its largely hegemonic period, the conquests and tortures carried on, and woe to any Navajo or Mapuche who stood in their way.

And it’s hard not to see that legacy percolate down through every Opus Dei self-mortification and Francoist lockstep that was to follow.

But the thing about darkness is that it has a way of preserving things forgotten, and it even allows a few flowers to bloom.

The rain fell heavy as I made my way through darkened streets, to the old sherry bar where the Amontillado and Palo Cortado were poured from heavy oak barrels, faded posters of the World Sherry Festival 1977 or whatever, cheeses and sausages dangling from the wall to be sliced into hearty drinking snacks by the aging punk bartenders, my bill written in chalk on the marred wooden counter. And I felt for an hour or so, like I was in the last real place on earth.

I flew in from New York, where I encountered the horror and ugliness of contemporary power in every repulsive luxury design condo, every Succession extra jogging along the High Line, every once-proud warehouse turned into co-working space for those who would better serve the world as nourishing cadavers, agents of the powers that be.

I flew out from Madrid, where I saw the million flowers that grow from the ashes of the old powers that were.

Walking With Sebald

When I read Carole Angier's recent biography of W.G. Sebald, Speak, Silence, which, while much-feted, is really quite a pointless tome, the one thing that I kept coming back to is the degree to which Sebald the writer is absent from Sebald's novels, despite the fact that, “he,” W.G. Sebald is the main character of all of them, morosely wandering through Antwerp and the East Anglian marshes. We don't get much of Sebald – sure, we get a few biographical descriptions, but even when he talks about himself, he never talks about himself as he is now, but about his childhood on the southern fringe of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and the sense of dislocation from that particular time and place. Really, it's the time and the place that take center stage.

Perhaps this seems a heresy in which an age in which, given the relative anonymity and disconnectedness of digital interactions, one's existence boils down to one's identity markers. How many comments have you seen prefaced with “As a...” online? Despite the fact that all of Sebald's novels are ostensibly rooted in personal experience, he refuses to categorize himself, and lets the absences do the talking – absence of family and close friends, absence of nation, absences of language, memory, sight, thought.

It seemed inevitable, given my trajectory through Borges and Calvino, that I would inevitably arrive at Sebald, but it was only when I was 20 or so that a copy of The Rings of Saturn was lent to me by the woman who had once been the girl down the block.

The plot, such as it is, is impossibly simple – Sebald attempts to walk the length of Suffolk. As he explores landscape, he meditates on the many ways in which his experience is coded in geography, biology, anthropology, and history, particularly the history of the many violences that constitute the story of human civilization.

Which made perfect sense for a grumpypuss like me. And so as I expanded my own horizons, Sebald's ghost became more apparent.

Consider:

Late last year I was walking outside the old Bohemian town of Aussig (Usti nad Lobem since 1945), in one of those anonymous stretches of European semi-countryside, with steel I-beams littering the marginal ways and 1960s panelak apartments abutting the rye fields, an occasional beer sign referencing the peasant idyll, a soft autumn rain falling along the Elbe.

And yet as I approached the star fortress at the end of the road, I felt a sudden spasm in my right leg, as if the very ground beneath me was bound to give out, and despite the pain, I persisted forward through the vacant streets of the garrison, its sides lined with brick ramparts, the homes once occupied by Jews in their last ghetto before deportation to points north and east now occupied by Czechs with dented Volkswagen hatchbacks, waves of pain radiating through my shin muscles as I traced the brick-lined tunnels of the fortress.

I stumbled back into the town square, my leg in agony, to find a little shop with the word “coffee” written out in little red light bulbs, to get a desultory brown Americano and some little pastries spread with jam made from aronia berries, a small and peculiar berry with a deep and astringent taste reminiscent of ruby port, native to the Eastern woodlands of North America and yet transplanted and more popular here in the Slavic forests, yet recently introduced into commercial agriculture in the boggy lands of Northern Iowa, the vicinity in which Antonin Dvorak, himself a son of the nearby Melnik District, composed his New World Symphony – another of the many ways in which the route of the Cedar River mirrors that of the Moldau.

This would be a Sebaldian moment regardless. What I had forogtten was that Sebald's Jacques Austerlitz had walked this same path, on his way to the garrison town of Theriesenstadt, built by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18^th Century around a star fortress, a specialty of Austerlitz's, and he had walked this road twice, first as a child and then as a man retracing his own paths. And yet I had somehow forgotten the location of this critical journey, despite my having remembered the character of Jacques Austerlitz as an expert in the history of the star fortress, his childhood during the ghettoization processes, and his visit to the spa town of Marienbad, his ice cream stiffened with potato starch remaining unmelted. The reason for this lapse in memory remained uncertain – I didn't even think about it until later that night in my hotel room in Prague.

And that moment, the sudden spasms of agony in my leg. It seemed remarkable to me that Sebald's other novels are marked by moments of intense physical distress, the hospital stay in The Rings of Saturn, the sudden attack of blindness in Vertigo. Is it Sebald's ghost? Or is it some unspoken universal pattern of physical pain and psychic gloom, the transformation of oneself into a lens?

So what can I say about the artist who called me the other day from the cliffsides of Nice, asking me what I knew about star fortresses?