Oh, he shouldn’t be surprised, he’s a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia — my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again. But even if he martyred himself like that, what would it amount to? just another thread in the fabric, another figure in the eternal tableau, one more little exemplary parable for the hucksters to amuse themselves by, sell a few more books and papers. So much for terrible happenings, good intentions. Two years ago, he came here and stole away, on July the Fourth, a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It was very heavy. Perhaps he thought he could beat down his cell walls with it. But though he pressed his whole body against it until it turned yellow with his fear, he was unable to read what it said. He tried to pretend, but he got mixed up. “It is interesting to read these words,” he wrote bravely to Ethel, “concerning free speech, freedom of the press and of religion in this setting. These rights our country’s patriots died for can’t be taken from the people even by Congress or the Courts.” Perhaps, he would often think, squinting helplessly at the quirky script, I need new glasses.
Today, in any case, he is not here, they are not here. Their cells have been stripped and so have they, and they have been moved into the Halfway House in anticipation of the Times Square spectacular, and subsequently, though they will presumably miss this, their own climactic hour on the great slabs. Ethel is now clothed in terrycloth slippers and a cheap green dress with white polka dots, a frowzy second cousin to the one the model’s wearing on Tablet 25; Julius has been dressed in a loose T-shirt, buff-colored slippers, and fresh khaki pants. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs have not lost hope; in fact, they feel pretty certain they’ve won the day, and all these execution warm-up rituals are just one more last-ditch effort by the government to frighten them into confessing. Well, it won’t work.
But if the Rosenbergs are absent this morning, they are not missed. No one is missed here. Or recognized either. For curiously, these same slabs which bring pilgrims together each morning in meditation and wonder, creating a fund of common tropes and expectations, also somehow isolate them. The demand made by these tablets on the faithful is quite literally monumental, and they often experience the illusion suffered by mystics throughout the ages: the Spirit, annunciating reality, displaces it, and the tangible world dissolves even as it is being proclaimed. Thus, one may need to read here tomorrow what momentous events were transpiring just behind the slab one stood before today. People press themselves against the Father’s Day advertisements and crisis tabulations, fail to notice the people leaping out of buildings, girls being raped on subway platforms, the colliding traffic. They vibrate before the reported joy of the Rosenbergs at news of their stay and the editorial on moustaches (Julie’s has been shaved off), but cannot see the crowds gathering outside the Supreme Court building, the writing on the subway walls: OBJECTIFICATION IS THE PRACTICE OF ALIENATION!
Ah, this strange eventful History, witness of the times, the light of truth and a tissue of crimes, the true poetry, distillation of Rumour, mockery of human affairs, chart and compass, this whimsical prophet with his face turned backwards, reciting the manners, the pursuits, the peoples, and the battles of the race. “Aghast I stood,” Pope once said, though ignorant of The New York Times, “a monument of woe!” RAIL LABOR CHIEFS / ATTACK EMPLOYERS. Greeks Repulse 3,000. MARIE IS REJECTED / AS FRENCH PREMIER. Rhee Rebuffs Eisenhower. PARAKEET ELUDES JAY. POLO GROUNDERS / TRIP REDLEGS. REDS ACCUSE US. Double Jeopardy. F.B.I, ENTERS CASE. Eternal Son and Patrol Triumph. DAVID AND GOLIATH: A miracle of fit and flattery. Remember, too, that in Hitler’s Germany it started by burning books in the streets…and ended by burning people in the ovens of Buchenwald. ‘Wishful Thinking’ Seen. SOVIET GUNS / CALM SECTOR…
Then an Atomic Thriller
This is a story about what might have happened if the Russians had planned to set off an atomic bomb at the Coronation Naval Review that took place at Spithead last Monday….
Spithead, Goliath, Frankenstein, Eternal Son: as always, it is names that provide resonance to the experience of the daily pilgrimage. Guilmartin, Frauenglass, Finerty, and Krock. Kirk. Ike. Braque. Bortz, Bricker, and Bobo Olson. If anything on these slabs is sacred, it is these names. It’s an ancient maxim of the tribe: If you violate the name, you violate the man. Even if he is dead. In the old days, before The New York Times, if you wished to destroy a man, you inscribed his name on a pot and smashed it. Or stuck a clay image with a pin. Now you attach his name to a sin and print it. Such an act is beyond mere insult or information, it is a magical disturbance of History. It is a holy act and an act of defilement at the same time. It may bring peace and prosperity, it may result in madness and disaster. Is Alger Hiss a Communist? Is Joe McCarthy a Fascist? Is Justice Douglas a Traitor? Is Richard Nixon a Farting Quacker who dreamt of selling his pajamas at Coney Island? What matters is: where are such questions being asked? The great experience of the twentieth century has been to accept the objective reality of time and thus of process — history does not repeat, the universe is not changeless, masses dissolve and slide through the fingers, there are no precognitions — and out in that flow all such assertions may be true, false, inconsequential, or all at the same time. Such things are said every day, and no marvels ensue. But The New York Times transforms this time-process into something hard and — momentarily anyway — durable: it is as if these slabs, these great stone tablets, were being hurled out into the timestream, causing the river evermore to eddy and swirl around them. And thus the danger. Envoûtements have been known to destroy the priests who practiced them: the keepers of The New York Times, though fascinated by the possibilities, are cautious, and they do not stray often into this dreadful domain. Ike’s hard-on is not here this morning. Instead, they report that Dutch Schoch is hopeful. Universal-International wants Ruth Roman to share the adventuresome life with James Stewart in “The Far Country.” Timothy J. Doody has entered bankruptcy proceedings. The President had breakfast with Bridges, Dirksen, Magnuson, and Dodge. RHEE IS ASSAILED BY HAMMAR-SKJOLD. They hie to the world where the commonplace unfolds, the place of freedom and property and ease and security, the land of the more or less likely. They celebrate the names — Sinclair Weeks! Virgil Trucks! Bojangles Robinson and Jabbo Jablonski! — but they avoid the sorcery, the terrible center, the edgeless edge. Louis Appelbaum will be buried today. Okay. And Barfield, Bluhm, and Carrie Batt. BERKMAN — Joseph. You are always with us. Jeremiah Troup. Teresa Love, Eva Roller, and Kathryn Ripberger. Sacred stuff, to be sure, but ritualized. QUICK START FOR MISS SWIFT. Catch Ma Perkins at 1:15. No breakaway wildness, no terrible conjurations, just the easy knell of names in mild parade. General Withers Burress. Coach Callow. Nero. Ifu-de. MISS BAREA LAMB / BECOMES FIANCEE. Marie Trotzky. Corliss Lamont and Licurgo Costa. Leo Tolstoy. Walt Dropo. Sugarfoot.