I first saw the two photographic images of President Lincoln in a book about the Americal Civil War which I was given when I was about 12 years old, and the one speaks to the other.
I collected toy soldiers as a boy. Fieldmarshall Rommell was my favourite. He was taller and unlike any of the others in my collection although unarmed carried an air of authority about him. He stood tall and upright with legs apart in his peaked hat, hands resting on the field binoculars which were hanging from his neck. He stared out over the desert as I imagined it towards Cairo wearing a fur lined jacket to keep him warm against the desert night old.
From the age of six or seven I had begun collecting, mainly British Army figures from the Second World War. Rommel was the enemy but I admired him the most. It was 1957 or somewhere near postwar, and Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister: ” 12 years is not a long time except to children”, he said. In peacetime Macmillan might have added, and perhaps he did because 12 years in wartime is an unimaginable long time: those two photograph portraits of Lincoln reminding us, four years of civil war and worlds of suffering apart.
A little older I had graduated to the grey and blue soldiers of the American Civil War, infantry figures and cavalry, officers. buglers, and standard bearers. Then size and mass began to matter more to me than anything else and I began to form regiments of infantry and echelons of cavalry, to which were now added batteries of artillery, All these small figures which must have totalled almost two thousand in all as I think back now, were located on the top of two large green painted tresils that pushed together about the size of a ping-pong table. Contours of hills were added and roads, walls, picket fences and other features. It was in fact a reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg in August 1863.
Held forever on that famous August day in time, like photographic plates we expose the images of the pastness of the past, and of special events local to nus but also echoing on in mass memory with a clarity of detail so that they become extra-local in their effects.
Last month 13th February 2013 was being remembered as the ten year anniversary of the Stop the War (Peace March) in London: not even 12 years past, and in this time that passes for peace, not a long time to recall. We still divide restlessly as to whether war against Saddam Hussein or no war would have been the greater evil, but we have to face the results of the horrors and excess of suffering caused by the war itself and since – about 700,000 additional deaths in Iraq according to an authoritative epidemiological study published in the Lancet.
”They are going to burn the forest to kill a fox” said an Iraqi artist and ceramicist Maher Samurai. It was a quote in the LRB’s issue of February 21st (P 30), a review under the title “In No Hurry”of Antony Shahid’s House of Stone . I was shocked to read that Shahid died in February 2012 aged only 44, while walking the border between Turkey and Syria, an asthma attack the review stated (or “heart failure” like Walter Benjamin in 1940). Untimely death.
Today is Purge-Day on my pilgrimage, or perhaps it was two days ago now, time is sliding by. I took a pill and a half of a local Ayurvedic preparation and awaited results. More whoosh than splat two hours later the world and all its waters begin to pour out of me. I am reduced to a hypotonic solution body bag and need to lie down. I become muzzy headed (the effects of typhoid with only water to drink would be similar and then we die quite rapidly). Time passes slowly.
I imagine being on a slow moving train again, the same continental journey which we began in 2006 on the “Orient Express” en route for Istanbul. Except now I realise from reading the same LRB review of Antony Shahid’s House of Stone, ”In spirit if not reality, the train is part of an older line and an older Middle East, the product of the 19th Century vision of the Ottoman Empire and its German allies to build the Berlin-Baghdad Express, eventually ending in Basra and running across the borderless expanse of Turkey, Syria and Iraq”.
These untimely deaths of war and the melancholy of the Lebanese Shahid which seems to echo that of the Palestinian Edward Said, and the Jewish Walter Benjamin. I also read in the next pages of the same LRB(P 31-33, “Mysteries of the City”) a review of translations of Baudelaire’s poems and prose by Francis Scarfe, and a critical work on the “first writer of modern life” by Francoise Meltzer who explores the complex metaphor of Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire’s writing.
Benjamin’s metaphor asks us to compare time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things… only the negatives is recorded which therefore cannot be seen as “the elixir that might act as a developing agent is unknown”. Benjamin sees presentiments of the essence in Baudelaire’s poems… and the idea that Meltzer presents is that Benjamin through the brilliance of his retrospective vision creates the prints on which are fixed his “theory of modernity”.
During my purge I notice my saliva is also tasting saltless. This hypotonic solution does not develop any such theory as Benjamin was capable of, since it is an immutable law of the essence of time that nothing can be world-historical twice, but in the “Late Style” of my purge, as much as on occasions during old age, senescence and loss of powers, such as the two photographs of President Lincoln which I am still unsuccessfully searching for, reenactments can sometimes be performed and the one speaks to the other.