Dangerous Laughter Page 15
In the midst of such discussions, it was perhaps not surprising that the Tower itself should be called into question. Troubling whispers began to be heard. Was it possible that the great Tower didn’t actually exist? After all, no one had ever seen the entire structure, which kept vanishing from sight no matter where you stood. Except for a handful of visible bricks, the whole thing was little more than a collection of rumors, longings, dreams, and travelers’ tales. It was less than a memory. The Tower was a prodigious absence, a soaring void, a pit dug upward into the air. It was as if each part of the visible Tower had begun to dissolve under the vast pressure of the invisible parts, operating in every direction.
A time soon came when all those who had been alive during the completion of the Tower passed into the enigma of death, leaving behind a new generation, who had never known a world without the perfected Tower. The other Tower—the striving Tower, the always rising and changing and ungraspable Tower—retreated into the realm of hearsay, of legend. Now the new Tower was the stuff of daily life: an immobile Tower, rigid with completion. Though not without splendor, it lacked the sharp mystery of unachieved things. Even the ascent to heaven no longer seemed remarkable, though travelers still returned with tales of a dazzling radiance. As for the descent to earth, it had become little more than a humdrum journey, a change of residence such as many inhabitants of the Tower undertook from time to time.
And a listlessness came over the Tower dwellers, a languor of spirit, punctuated by bursts of excitement that quickly died away. People began to say that things had been better in the old days, before the Tower had brought heaven within reach. For in those days, they said, the dwellers in the plain lived in a continual state of joyful anticipation, of radiant hope, as they stared up at the Tower that grew higher and higher in the bright blue welcoming sky.
But now a shadow seemed to have fallen across that sky—or perhaps it was a shadow across the heart, darkening the sight. People began to turn elsewhere for the pleasures of the unknown and the unseen. It was a time of omens, of dire prophesies, of feverish schemes that led to nothing. Passions swept through souls and ravaged them like diseases. A mother strangled her child when a man with wings whispered in her ear. A young man, declaring he had learned the secret of flight, leaped to his death from the outer ramp. One day a group of plains dwellers suddenly decided to escape from the Tower, which they said crushed them by its heavy presence. With tents and walking staffs they traveled across the countryside and out into the desert. Months from home, wandering exhausted in a strange land where cattle had horns twisted in spirals, where stones had the gift of speech, they looked up and saw the far Tower, rising forever into the sky like a howl of laughter.
Others, rejecting flight as useless, argued that a new work was necessary, an all-consuming task as great as the Tower itself. In this way arose the idea of a second Tower—a reverse Tower, pointing downward, toward the infernal regions. People were struck with astonishment. How could they have failed to think of it before? The land of no return, the abode of death: the mere idea of it filled them with strange, delicious shudders. Everyone suddenly longed to wander in the domain of darkness, beneath the earth, where dim figures brushed past with haunted eyes. A wealthy woman in a high chamber held an Underworld party, to which guests came dressed as dark phantoms and pale corpses. Dim oil lamps cast a gloomy half-light. One young woman, of high beauty and mournful eyes, wore only her own flesh, as a symbol of all that passes away. Meanwhile an architect and three assistants drew up the plans of a new Tower; a committee gave its approval; teams of laborers began digging inside the base of the old Tower. They had gone down nearly two hundred feet before interest began to waver, excitement turned elsewhere, the project was abandoned forever.
In this atmosphere of weariness and restlessness, of sudden yearnings that collapsed into torpor, the Tower itself was often neglected. Here and there old cracks reappeared in the bricks of a chamber wall, the inner ramp was riddled with hollows, glazed bricks on the exterior wall lost their luster and were severely damaged by wind and rain. Piles of rubble rose on the outer ramp. The workers, whose task it was to maintain the Tower, seemed to move slowly and heavily, as if the atmosphere around them had thickened; sometimes they sat down and leaned their heads back against the wall, closing their eyes. A rumor arose: the workers had all died, only their sad ghosts drifted along the spiral paths. In the innermost chambers, the Tower dwellers often felt drowsy and would nod abruptly into sleep, like children falling into a well. Later they would wake suddenly, looking about with startled eyes. Down below, in the city, a young girl dreamed that she was pouring water from a jar. As she poured, the water turned to blood. Inside the Tower, the sound of creaking ships grew louder.
One afternoon a boy playing in a street beside a whitewashed wall looked up at the Tower and did not move. Suddenly he began to run. In another part of the city, a woman drawing water from a well raised her eyes. The handle spun round and round as the bucket plunged. High up in the Tower a pilgrim on the inner ramp reached out a hand to steady himself against a wall. On a table in a high chamber, a bowl of figs began to slide. Down below, on one of the buttresses, a row of sparrows rose into the air with beating wings, like the sound of a shaken rug. A wine cup rolled along the floor, smacked into a wall. A wagon, beside a sack of grain, fell through the air. Far away, a shepherd looked up from his flock. He bent his head back, shading his eyes.
HERETICAL HISTORIES
HERE AT THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
WE HERE AT the Historical Society are tireless in pursuit of the past. Although we work from eight-thirty to five-thirty, Tuesday through Saturday, and Sundays from twelve to five, many of us may be found here in the evenings as well, often as late as midnight, to say nothing of Monday, our official day of rest, for there are always new artifacts to label and classify, facts to assess, reports to be written, projects to be advanced. Despite our long hours, about which no one complains, our labor represents only the outward sign of an inward devotion that never ceases. At home, among our families, we think about some piece of business that hasn’t yet been completed, on after-dinner strolls along the maple-lined streets of our town we recall a memorandum that needs to be consulted before tomorrow’s meeting, in the midst of our most intimate embraces we picture, for a moment, the new report that awaits our attention, and even in sleep our minds are invaded by images of bursting walls and falling towers that we recognize, upon waking, as nightmare visions of piles of unpacked crates in the shadowy storage rooms beneath our exhibits. All things considered, I think it’s fair to say that we never stop working, here at the Historical Society.
It is therefore misleading and, if I may say so, wildly irresponsible for anyone to suggest that certain recent changes have somehow called into question our love for the past. The past is our passion and our life. It is our reason for existing. We’re proud, here at the Historical Society, to occupy the same building as the founders of our association. Located on historic Old Main Street, directly across from the town hall on the green, our white-shingled dwelling, shaded by two-hundred-year-old sycamores, was erected as a private residence in 1867 and purchased by the town six years later for the use of the new Historical Society. With its steep central gable and its ivy-covered chimney running the length of one wall, our home retains the essential shape of the original residence, while benefiting from two major alterations: the addition in 1899 of two rooms in the back, and the construction in 1945–46 of the handsome south wing, which now houses our research library and our extensive archives. Despite serious problems of space—we can scarcely accommodate our steadily growing collections—we resist all temptation to move to a larger and more up-to-date building, for from our front windows we can look out across Old Main Street at the eighteenth-century town hall and the war memorial commemorating the Revolutionary War dead. Both stand on the seventeenth-century green itself, where a granite boulder with a bronze plaque marks the year of our incorporation, 1648. In one of
our second-floor exhibit rooms we have a musket dating from the Indian wars of 1646–47, which resulted in the ceding of a large tract of land (our present North End) by the Setaucus Indians, whose hand-carved flint arrowheads and quartz tools, some of them dating back to the fifteenth century, are on display in a Plexiglas case in a nearby room.
These exhibits are of the first importance, here at the Historical Society. The suggestion that we might use them to promote questionable ends is malicious and absurd. It’s precisely by means of our exhibits that we attract the vast majority of our visitors—the groups of elementary school children brought here by their teachers, the residents mildly curious about their town’s history, the outsiders with an idle hour or two who have exhausted the modest pleasures of Main Street, the young couples holding hands and stopping in for a look on their way to a beach party or a backyard barbecue. This is in no way to diminish the importance of our valuable research library, with its more than 4,000 volumes on the history of our town in every period, its 500 linear feet of archival material (deeds and legal documents), its manuscript holdings, and its wide-ranging collection of photographs, microfilms, maps, genealogical papers, cemetery records, immigration lists, and military pension registers. Nor do I in any sense mean to slight the numerous activities that are a vital part of our relation to the town: the walking tours, the children’s workshops, the preschool crafts program, the adult lecture series. But it remains true that it is principally through our exhibits that we connect most immediately with our visitors, who look to us for some sense, however confused and uncertain, of a common past. Even residents of Portuguese, Italian, and Slovakian descent, whose roots in our town rarely go back before the mid–nineteenth century, are often to be found peering at the illustrations on our eighteenth-century china dinner plates or looking curiously at our display of Puritan costumes. Our holdings include a number of popular permanent exhibits—the Setaucus arrowheads and stone tools, the Revolutionary War artifacts (including a cast-iron eight-pounder fieldpiece and three cannonballs), the seventeenth-century parlor—but we also present a broad array of well-attended temporary exhibits with shifting themes: Costume Fashions in the Victorian and Edwardian Doll, the Setaucus Village, Eighteenth-Century Farm Implements, the Puritan Schoolhouse, Main Street in 1895, the Coming of the Railroad.
Despite the variety and abundance of our exhibits, the artifacts on display represent only a fraction of those stored in our basement rooms, where we have a carefully cataloged and highly heterogeneous collection not open to the public. There, among some twenty thousand objects, you may find telegraph keys, riding crops, glass stereopticon slides, tin windup toys, cedar butter churns, Victorian dollhouses, tulip-globed brass cigar lighters, blunderbusses, Philco radios, Civil War uniforms, oaken well buckets, Edison phonographs with wax cylinders, spinning wheels, hoopskirts, and mahogany folding cameras with nickel trim. This large and always growing collection of artifacts, from which our displays are selected, is itself an incalculably minuscule fraction of objects haphazardly rescued from our past. At best they may be said to possess a representative value. The same is true of our other collections—the letters, diaries, photographs, and official documents of every variety that we accumulate in order to reveal a glimmer of all that’s gone. The knowledge that our evidence about the past is fragmentary and incomplete and, like all incomplete things, dangerously inaccurate spurs us to acquire still more evidence, while at the same time we realize with terrible clarity that we can never begin to approach the fullness and precision of the past—and this double knowledge, combined with a gradual change in our conception of history, has led to striking new developments, here at the Historical Society.
The immediate sign of a change is our series of new exhibits, mounted over the past two years. All have come under sharp attack. Perhaps our critics, who are so fertile with objections, might find it refreshing to pause for a few moments and consider whether their views may suffer from a narrow, facile, and insufficient grasp of the historical process. The new displays, mixed in with more conventional ones, include a large glass case filled with four shelves of carefully labeled pieces of litter (cellophane from a lollipop, a scrap of candy wrapper, bits of paper from Popsicles and toasted almond bars, pieces of potato chip bags and cigarette packs, torn straw wrappers); an eight-hour film showing nothing but the view from above of a backyard lawn containing grass, dandelions, chickweed, and clover, with the shadow of a garage moving gradually in from the left; and an audio booth in which one can listen to snatches of random conversation recorded in the aisles of our largest supermarket. Our critics accuse the displays of being uninstructive, uninteresting, and above all unhistorical. We believe the animus is directed against a change in the understanding of history itself.
History is the study of the past—but what is the past? It is everything that has happened up to the present. Precedence tends to be given to the distant past, which is separated from us less by time than by the absence of immediate sensual knowledge, so that the smallest fragment of a bowl from a seventeenth-century merchant’s family seems to contain within itself the revelation of a vanished world. But that same fragment, historically speaking, is of no more importance than yesterday’s teacup. The pastness of the past infects all artifacts equally. Cathedrals, stone ax-heads, cereal boxes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—all are leveled in the long democracy of the done. For just as, in a single moment of the distant past, an Egyptian comb is of no less historical interest than a pyramid, so in the vast stretch of all pastness a pyramid is of no more historical interest than a Coca-Cola bottle. Our task, as members of the Historical Society, is not to hierarchize the past, but to collect and preserve it.
This view of the past, which began to gain ground among us during the last years of the old millennium, has led to a new conception of the present. It’s our view, here at the Historical Society, that the present is the past made visible. Close your eyes and open them: in that instant of darkness, the entire world has fallen into the past. It is replaced by another world that itself is only a newer and more visible past. The science of optics informs us that the act of vision is a direct seeing of the past, since we see only after streams of photons, striking the photoreceptors in the retina, are transmuted into electrical impulses that travel along the optic nerve and make their way to the visual cortex. The present is our most recent past. It is also our most complete past. Indeed, we no longer use the word “present,” here at the Historical Society, but speak instead of the New Past.
Even the future, viewed historically, is only a past that hasn’t yet revealed itself, a past that is taking shape secretly, in dark rooms, behind closed doors that any day now will suddenly fly open from the sheer pressure of accumulation.
Our goal is clear. For the first time, we here at the Historical Society have the chance to capture the past completely, in all its overwhelming variety and luminous, precise detail. Our well-trained staff of researchers and assistant researchers go out each day to observe and classify a world that is already a part of the historical record. Our account includes measurements, descriptions, digital photographs, and, wherever possible, samples of every stop sign, fire hydrant, and telephone pole in our town, every roof slope and chimney, every Monopoly piece and badminton racket, every cobweb in every corner of every attic. We include every soup spoon and sugar maple, every design on the back of every deck of playing cards. As we pursue our work, our desire for completeness increases, and our categories grow more exacting. There are assistants who count the needles of every fir tree and the specks of mica in every roof shingle, others who study the patterns of grass blades flying up behind a power mower and settling onto the cut grass. We record the sounds of dishes and silverware in the kitchens of our town, the exact fall of the shadows of fence posts and street signs. We investigate the bend in a blue rubber band wrapped around a morning newspaper lying on a sun-striped front porch.
In an undertaking of this scope, criticism cannot be eluded or ign
ored. There are those who say in the accents of self-righteousness that we should stick to the “real” past—to our Indian ax-heads, our Puritan utensils, our Revolutionary War cannonballs. Why else would anyone wish to visit the Historical Society? To such critics we reply that the past you look for is a delusion, a dream composed of a fistful of images snatched at random from the fate that awaits all things. But look around you, in the streets of our town. What do you see? You see, alive in all its vividness, the one past you can fully grasp. History is a scrupulous record of missing evidence—of lost cities, smashed statues, ruined libraries. Now is the only past we’ll ever know.
And our past is expanding. The official history, published in 1998, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of our town’s founding, comprises two volumes of 464 and 432 pages, respectively. In the year 2000 we started the Supplementary Series, which grew to 24 volumes in the next few years, and in 2005 we launched the Supplementary Series II, an online project that, if printed, would fill more than 500 volumes. Here one can find the most detailed record of a historical period ever attempted. Nothing is considered too negligible for the attention of our researchers—indeed, the Negligible itself has proved an unusually rich field for investigation. Here, every drawer pull and jar lid and pot-cover knob is accounted for, every hair wave and shirt weave. Here, we record the shapes of lines on the soles of sneakers, we follow the flight of dandelion puffs as they separate from the stalk and drift through the air. This is the exact and multifarious evidence of the New Past, which future generations will study closely while glancing with impatience at their boxful of broken pieces from the Old Past.