#64, August 16, 2005
Traversing Clio (11)
Mea Culpa,
Lee!
This poem marks the triumph of poetry over prose. It began as an essay outlining the specifics of a graduate school exchange and then turned into a poem. As if that wasn’t enough, the original prose file, saved inexpicably in html, was saved copied and replaced by the poem, so that now only the poem exists. Poetic justice, I suppose.
This poem is
dedicated
to William
Carlos
and William
Appleman,
Williamses who knew
a thing
or three.
Without their interventions
this poem
just would
not be.
* * * *
I probably should apologize
to many
for the things I have said
and written.
They weren’t always nice,
not always judicious,
and professionally
they just were not at all
astute.
There was my dinner with André:
between mouthfuls of cherry pie,
arguing about our debts to
and differences with
the founding father
of Social History:
Was not E.P.
colored by the imperial?
Was not his working-class
void of all color—
black Irish, black Africans,
and those from Rushdie’s
subcondiment?
You disagree?
Oh well, you would!
There was an assault
on Thompson’s père
for being a “friend
of
or imagining himself thus;
and, on C.L.R.
for believing that we could step
beyond the boundaries
of empire.
There was the declaration
that African American migrants
making their way north
to the so-called “Promised Land”
had been portrayed as a group
with lady.
There was that La Pietra
syndicate,
making the world safe
for American history,
sharing its decrees
with all and sundry—
and, surely, someone needed
to burst that bubble.
There were pronouncements
about gatekeepers—
those colonial officials of the discipline—
who decide who gets published,
who will get the jobs,
who will be tenured,
what kinds of history will be taught,
and for what purpose.
There were all these faux pas,
and others,
but only the very first of them all,
never published
and seemingly almost forgotten,
seems unacceptable now,
an arrogant act –
and one wonders
why?
Are these all not the same?
Is not the idea alone sufficient?
Isn’t everything fair game?
Thompson contra Althusser?
Marxist contra neo-classical?
Revisionists contra traditionalists?
Continuity contra Change?
Women contra men?
Post-Revisionists contra
afternoon post-revisionists?
What of it?
Provided there are stars in the sky
and lights on the street,
are we not all one as shadows?
Who can tell the fat or lean,
the historiographically sound,
the theoretically weak,
by their shadows?
We are all meat for transcendence!
All part of that dialectic—
antithesis to thesis, synthesis
for both, new thesis
to be revised,
at a later date.
What of it?
Why should one assault differ,
in “the silly world of history,”
from any other?
And yet this one did.
All the others were just sniping
at the pantheon,
or mere insurgencies against
the establishment;
they would be ignored,
or they would be swatted
like the bug infestations
that they no doubt were—
redoubts that cannot protect the self
from doubt—know doubt—
the gods of the discipline
and their lords and ladies
would remain unmoved.
But ours was a classroom
and corridor exchange.
No more.
A mere disagreement over
the reading of a text—
Eric’s text—
someone with whom I had never been,
and would not be
on a first name basis.
Your reading,
that of the seasoned scholar
engaged in polemic,
was less charitable
than mine,
that of the fresh graduate student.
The fact that you were,
I now think,
probably right in your reading—
that march of freedom
is a little overblown—
is besides the point.
I was emulating you.
You were assaulting the theories of Donald,
and Foner;
I was confronting you.
But your “once more unto the breach”
was in the pages of your book,
mine was in your classroom.
As you took me into the corridor
to discuss the points further—
to avoid embarrassment perhaps—
while the remainder of the class
were told to take a breather—
how many times did you halt your class
in this way?—
you turned and said, wistfully,
and with great regret,
“I don’t know why Eric
will not speak to me anymore.”
This could almost have been a warning—
swashbuckling is bad for your health,
it doesn’t get you jobs,
it doesn’t get you friends,
it doesn’t even get you Truth—
but it went unheeded.
But I now know why Eric
never talked to you again,
and you did too.