A Rhyme

Historical consciousness is often out of joint, wrenching awareness away from the present, submerging now in then, coloring then in now‘s diffused tinctures. At present, for instance, the past appears to me a blood-red sea, and blood is all I can see of history.

Historians have other ways of inhabiting and appraising time, though they too, I imagine, have moments of confusion: moments when the past seems to encompass the present, while remaining out of reach, and when the present no longer seems the past’s successor. As a mode of analysis or understanding, this uncanny or untimely experience of history can be an achievement, a way of knocking the present off its pedestal. For not all successors are deserving. And sometimes, it takes a crisis to appreciate that.

This experience of history can also be alienating. Encompassed by the past, the present loses its autonomy, and we, as creatures of the present, lose ours, held captive by a past we thought to have escaped. In such a circumstance, the best we can hope to do is sever ties with the past, break off from those who would retain them, commence anew. A necessary, revolutionary program that is also, to some extent, a self-annihilating one, since the consciousness that rids itself of history is itself historical. The ordinary work of generations, frightening because it occurs in a flash instead of at the stately pace of centuries.

There is, however, an aesthetic version of this alienation: a sudden recognition of similitude between two finite moments, past and present coming together with just that shade of difference needed to keep them from collapsing together, yielding in their conjunction the pleasing qualities of a rhyme.

An instance of that rhyme today: a torn up old copy of the Democratic Review, found in a used book stall in Bangor, bought for a dollar. It contains many interesting literary artifacts (one of Whittier’s “Songs of Labor”; and an early work of Whitman’s, “Tale of a Murderer Escaped”), but what really caught my eye was the opening editorial, “Statue to Jackson.” God help us, will we ever be free of these statues? And Jackson, of all monstrous precedents; truly a rhyme with our present rogue populist. The entire text is reproduced below.