Why History, Why Funerals?

Hux, Samuel

WHY HISTORY, WHY FUNERALS? Not for the reasons you may think. SAMUEL HUX He lived gaily, a fluttery starling. By turns amorous, careless, tender; Somber, sometimes, like a dreamer Till he heard...

...for Jew and Gentile should know that that advice is condemnation of millions to be never more in any way...
...I'm guessing that my remarks make more sense to a Jew than to a Gentile, my insistence that the dead must be honored...
...and the moment is leaden, the letting the dead one go preceded by chill and stupor...
...they seem to repeat the mistakes they learned in school...
...Explain it to me without the emotive evocations...
...Any attempt to "Let us now praise famous men" is no insurance that we will remember to add "and our fathers that begat us...
...In The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby FoOte recalls a Union soldier found dead at the battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864: in his pocket the burial detail found his diary, in which was written, the last Samuel Hux is Professor of English at York College of the City University of New York...
...Odd that we need remind ourselves that history is about people who died...
...But why...
...They must be honored because, to put it as precisely as possible, life is tragic...
...And about funerals...
...Have done with it...
...And why do we read history...
...William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples is a fairly technical thesis about the place of epidemic in history, an explanation of certain historical problems in terms of the impact of infectious disease...
...the clergyman is talking about someone he probably knew no better than the mailman did, and...
...And the "shape" of history is not merely the chronological sequence of promise followed by the long waiting...
...Somber, sometimes, like a dreamer Till he heard someone ring at his gate...
...History is about death...
...But, by the peculiar and generous logic of poetry, they are remembered by the poet, although Moment/63 their names are perished, so that they are not quite "as though they had never been born...
...Before the Old Testament it is all repetition of sameness, and past events occurred in some vague long ago— some events before others, or maybe it was after others, the sequence uncertain, it was all one long moment called the past...
...It's as if Judaism said that the Lord has a lot of work to do, cannot be a celestial landscape gardener, and pays His covenanters the compliment of relying upon their memories to perform a task that must be done...
...There is, after all, a place the dead go, independent of our thinking of them...
...I beg a question, I suppose, in assuming that we do, outside the academic discipline that goes by that name...
...When I am dead a few people will mourn me...
...But prior to those lines, just following the reference to those "that have left a name behind them," occur some of the saddest words in the scriptures, "And some there be, which have no memorial...
...But most often now we affect a kind of wise cynicism sanctioned by our times: "The dead are dead, for goodness' sake, and half the people there couldn't care less, don't give a damn...
...He was indolent, so goes the tale, Let the ink dry up in its jar...
...who are perished, as though they had never been...
...I was killed...
...A Jew, I'd guess, might say, "Why the insistent tone...
...Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes...
...Perhaps my terms are wrong, response to diction too subjective...
...And a few lines later the poet, Ben-Sira, writes the following verses, evidently referring to those within the Covenant, who are remembered by virtue of being within: But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten...
...It's a question about history...
...This was, I know, a self-conscious gesture—but somehow right...
...It is important that we read the friar's and the soldier's words...
...I have neither the desire nor the competence to enter Judaic scholarly debate about the precise meaning of "eternal life," but it seems to me— as I stand necessarily outside—that in Judaism the matter is not so firm, the place not so placeable...
...I recently visited my hometown for the first time in years, and there I paid my respects before the grave of my father, who's seldom out of my mind for long...
...but I think the impression is right...
...but I have to note that they are what they are and not something else...
...Given the threat that our consciousness puts at the center of our existence, forgotten at times but brooded over at others, any person, be he indolent or industrious must feel at some point: "Why did I come...
...It's a little more difficult to grasp the Union soldier's intention...
...Or if that is put too extremely (strategy for giving heft to an uncertain surmise), then it's as if Judaism counsels the covenanter he should not presume that the Lord save him memory without expecting him to use it in all its most creative ways...
...And even if our culture does believe that one should read history (whether one does or not) to avoid the mistakes of the past, that is a way of saying one reads history for one's own sake...
...But I should not presume upon the reader by assuming we agree on this matter of honor for precisely the same reasons...
...we'll precede another, in the same way...
...Even my students know that, although they know next to nothing about this thing that's so very, very important...
...Because I myself will want to be heard...
...At least I think there is...
...If there's one thing clear about history it's that whatever an individual may learn in his experiences, societies or nations seem to learn very little considering the collective knowledge of the past available to them...
...but in some way—technical matters aside—the title says enough...
...it suggests a respect of a sort for those who committed the past that we might learn...
...And Yesterday, or Centuries before...
...and are become as though they had never been born"—the implication I take it being that those "which have no memorial" have none precisely because they are without the Covenant and the collaboration of memories it commands...
...I don't think this a very profound knowledge, but I suspect it's a near forgotten knowledge in our culture...
...Now in spite of my gloomy . observation and prognosis, we of this culture "know" that written history, whatever its fate on the market, is important—very, very, we'll all agree, very, very important...
...The first seems to me something one speaks of with a kind of wary certainty: if one believes in it one believes it exists with no help from him...
...Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Nth Century recalls Brother John Clyn of the Friars Minor in Kilkenny, Ireland, during the Black Death: Brother John kept a record lest "things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from memory of those who come after us" and before he died of the plague himself wrote, "I leave parchment to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape the pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun...
...It's easy enough to grasp what Brother John was doing;-in fact, he tells us...
...Item: the fanstastic success of work such as Barbara Tuchman's, and were Bruce Catton alive...
...And the way history is read in our culture is, on the other hand, not so much to the point here as the fact that so often it isn't read...
...Item: lively debate continues among professional historians—radical historians of the dispossessed and conned masses versus traditional consensus historians, social history versus history of political institutions, narrative historians versus cliometricians, and so on...
...Yet I think we should be able to say that...
...To die is comprehensible, but not comprehensible is the idea never again in any way to be, to simply vanish with no traces left behind or picked up in the future...
...I mean to say that the continued existence-in-some-fashion of the dead does not really depend upon a collaboration of memories...
...A Gentile might say, "I'm not averse to the idea...
...Another part of me is, naturally, pleased to know I'll not be forgotten immediately...
...Barbara Tuchman in her chapter on the bubonic plague of the calamitous century, " 'This Is the End of the World': The Black Death," quotes Froissart's chilling estimate of the mortality rate and suggests it was fairly accurate: "a third of the world died...
...I call it a "discomfort at not being Jewish," an incapacity to adjust satisfactorily to what I am, a Gentile...
...The counsel that there's a time to forget, I cannot accept...
...But the way history is written is not so much to the point here as the way it is read in our culture...
...I think I grasp why I placed a pebble—obscure gesture...
...But in the Bible, although "there is no new thing under the sun" the movement of the sun measuring time matters, and there will be a new thing, promised at Sinai and to be fulfilled with time...
...I would imagine it hurts like hell...
...I doubt that he's in any Elysian fields that he certainly didn't believe in: when I was baptized he sat in the church, a stranger, smiling wryly at this foolishness of women and preachers...
...Indeed history is the story of those who have died...
...Item: in the academy history courses tend to go begging for enrollments...
...While it's true that if we don't know the past we'll probably repeat the past (which js not to say that if we do know we won't repeat), the formula itself is too easy to pronounce, too accessible to the kind of sophistication that characterizes pop wisdom...
...I remark it only for the sake of another observation...
...and are become as though they had never been born," that they would have envied the natural death of my father, for they were dying anonymously at a moment when, as Gunther Anders once put it, natural death had become "an exceptional occurrence" and "being killed was thus the most common form of dying"— and they were dying because they were or were judged to be within the Covenant...
...We've probably always known this, down through history, but today we know it so well it has become pop wisdom...
...And if "place" now receives quotation marks to remove it from the threat of scientific skepticism or even pedestrian realism, the faithful Christian still has faith that the "place" exists, somehow, in some way more than metaphor, where the dead have their afterlife...
...Their bodies are buried in peace...
...Dickinson knew that a funeral is the way we live the other's death, experience it ourselves, is a ritual drama through which we identify with the dead person and thereby honor and celebrate him and keep him alive the only way he can be alive—or, another way to put it, a ritual through which we die a little with him...
...His "casual words" she calls them, and that's right...
...Who will read ours...
...And what I would like to be able to say is, "I can hear you...
...For I do not believe in an afterlife—except in the imperfect human memory...
...Those for whom my revisiting does, in a literal sense, nothing...
...Then, with no more ado, he stretched himself out Trembling, frozen deep in his coffin...
...I would like to believe that Tuchman's deserved popular success portends something about American attitudes toward the past, toward the recovery of it...
...The Messianic age will come—but until then...
...the concepts do not seem to me interchangeable...
...They are not offered because not enough students want them, which says something about the audience for written history when the present generation of book-of-the-month subscribers lets go, and because history is not required by the university faculty, which says something about the commitment of those you'd think ought to be committed to the life of the mind, present-past-future...
...Two images from two historians haunt me...
...Emily Dickinson, a survivor, wrote: After great pain, a formal feeling comes— The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore...
...But not even poetic generosity is sufficient today...
...It was Death, so he asked him: Please wait Till I've crossed the t's on my sonnet...
...Perhaps sentimentalists, and those resistant to fashion for whatever reason, believe that the ceremony with which we lay the dead away is a way of honoring them...
...There are those whose pain I do not wish to be the cause of...
...That is, with a motive kindred to that with which one goes to funerals—if one goes...
...In Christianity, it seems to me, one is "allowed" to forget...
...But what of when my survivors themselves no longer survive...
...back then, there was something of a collective obituary about historical narrative...
...My mind often runs a rut...
...But those whose names I may not even know, or of whose precise existence I have no specific knowledge, but whose times I can revisit with the aid of scholarship and imagination...
...Enough...
...Their seed shall remain forever, and their glory shall not be blotted out...
...that is to say, it is the sort of thing a moderately educated person with some claim to sophistication prides himself on believing—even if he's not sure it's true...
...A funeral is a kind of regulating of passion...
...obviously he wasn't leaving any news that wasn't already apparent...
...It is only an observation about the ways we tend to view history now...
...And when time was up and this life lost...
...Episodic...
...Basta...
...and I have occasionally wondered if they have ever felt as I have felt of others: as Shakespeare said, "This thought is as a death, which cannot choose/But to have that which it fears to lose...
...It's significant that I've felt no need to ask that question up to this point, have felt that I could presume upon the reader's nodding agreement that honoring the dead is necessary whether or not he or she agrees that the historical imagination is one way of doing it...
...And is it true?—I wonder for instance if it really helps, soothes, a person to say Kaddish year after year...
...The one thing certain in life is its"end—and that's the one thing that's totally unacceptable...
...Nail into coffin...
...Which is no reason not to say it...
...as Von Sinnentdecker says...
...Of course they must be honored...
...if we can't, we are living in bad faith...
...There is something honorable in this idea: it suggests a much tried faith in the power of human reason...
...End of chapter...
...I placed a pebble upon his grave-marker...
...Or we affect that sophistication I mentioned earlier, equally sanctioned by our times: "Of course one knows what the funeral was traditionally supposed to mean, but its real meaning, its deep structure of purpose, so to speak, is to cure the pain of the survivor by giving him a ritual task by which he exorcises the pain, therapeutically puts himself at a distance from it so that he may return to the normal rhythms of the living...
...Perhaps we knew this better back in the days when written history was primarily the story of "great men" instead of the plotting of the process of dialectic movement...
...But all the more chilling for being so casual...
...The shape has drama to it—exile, return, exile, destruction, return...
...That's not a question about audiences, and not a question to be asked by a writer wondering about the fate of his work...
...I've heard it so often that I've lost track whether it was Santayana or someone else who said that people who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat the past...
...I suspect he was crossing the f's, placing the final period himself, asserting thereby some control over his own death, stretching himself out in his coffin himself, making a funeral gesture to make sure he had one...
...Why do we think it so important...
...a funeral is nothing but formalized hypocrisy, and if the bereaved are really so broken-up let them stay home and weep in private...
...In the now fairly typical public university in which I labor, historians pitch in to help with freshman composition-^that to their salvation, since hot enough history sections can be offered to fill up their teaching schedules...
...The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation will show forth their praise...
...I'll not set myself up as a theologian, but I have some impressions nonetheless which I hope I do not express too extremely...
...It preceded our moment...
...And then I imagine that a Jew might reflect, out loud or silently depending upon the mood, "And we are very practiced at this— we have many dead...
...There's very little that's surprising about this...
...It is impossible now to read the poet's lines only as I judge he intended them...
...In some way, history might be defined as the repetition of errors down through the centuries...
...but their name liveth forever-more...
...But if a Jewish preoccupation with history is to some degree with history as progression, or with history from which to learn how not to repeat—"Never again...
...But this is more than enlightened self-interest: even had I no desire to be honored myself, who am I to say that the already dead should not be...
...It's often argued, and true, that history is a Hebrew invention—that is, history as a sequence with a shape instead of only a collection of tales from the days of yore...
...and our fathers are mostly the unknown...
...That's clear enough, but, strange to say, it's seldom thought of that way...
...I've written of this phenomenon in these pages before ("Beyond Philo-Semitism," January-February, 1979...
...First, it's hard to believe we really do believe in an idea so violated by experience, so violated by history, one might say...
...The Feet, mechanical, go round— Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone— This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go— The difference between Dickinson's vision and that confident knowing-ness above is the hurt and its danger: after the loss, the ceremonious nerve, the heart stiff, the feet mechanical, manner wooden, and the contentment barely achieved is like quartz, hard and transparent...
...if wind or rain has not removed it I'm sure some ground-keeper has...
...There is a difference between "afterlife" and "immortality...
...And ultimately I think that's what Brother John was doing too— something more than what he said he was doing...
...The dead I want honored are not merely my own—they go without saying...
...With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant...
...But I doubt that even He foresaw the twentieth century and the incredible demands that would be made upon the human memory, how herculean would be the task of remembering the dead...
...The second seems to me to imply a necessary complicity of the living...
...The problem is obviously more complex than I'm allowing it...
...I'm no more capable than anyone else of accepting oblivion...
...And a part of me wishes that were not case...
...It's in Ecclesiasticus after all that it's written, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us...
...That is, I do not imagine that I am writing to that vast citizenry for whom Burke's ideas that a human society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born" would be incomprehensible—or just boring...
...Wished to know all, knew nothing at all...
...and there they "are...
...We're not willing to accord to others what we're going to want accorded to us...
...this preoccupation has not obscured the other purposes of the art of history and the act of historical thinking...
...There is something honorable in the notion when we mean it, but I'm not satisfied we always do...
...It is more significant that the lively debate among the academic professionals is just that: among themselves, outside audience doubtful...
...but I suspect that what it actually means is that she is one excellent narrator, her books move like panoramic novels, she is a "good read...
...Most of us tend to think of history a.s a sequence of progressions instead of mortal interruptions...
...And Jew and Gentile would then deserve themselves to be forgotten...
...When, one winter evening, he gave up the ghost, He went away saying: Why did I come...
...entry, "June 3, Cold Harbor...
...and perhaps most important of all, the survivor recalls the letting-go, if she outlives it, as a freezing victim does the ice, that is as a kind of death itself...
...His pain ours, our survival his...
...The Jewish faith, tradition, experience, whatever—that lively dialectic of the secular and the transcendent in which which is which is not clear to the confused Gentile—is in some sense a collaboration of memories, a belief that among the greatest of sins is that of forgetful-ness, that if one forgets, he is less than human...
...Thus, when we take funerals seriously we tend to do so in terms of what they do for us, members of the "culture of narcissism...
...Not only the great and renowned—they are in any case, at least formally: in monument, portraiture, institution, coin, stamp, what-have-you...
...From "Four After Nerval: Imitations," by Evelyn Hooven, The Literary Review, Summer, 1978...
...and their most immediate potential audience, the academic "community," does not seem to care very much...
...for with the experience of our century we know something he could not have known, we know that they are legion, those "who are perished, as though they had never been...
...Actually, the signals from our culture are very confusing as to the vitality of written history...
...it gives the survivors something to do, serves as a formalized transition easing them to a state of existence without the dead one, gives their tears a place to happen and then to end...
...There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported," the poet of Ecclesiasticus continues...
...This is no brief for a return to the "great men" approach, Heroes and Hero Worship and such...
...I do not put these qualities down, indeed I celebrate them...
...His work has appeared in New Republic, Worldview and Dissent, as well as in MOMENT...
...But why need one honor the dead, one's own aside...
...With certain clear consequences for the dead...
...And since I'd like to be recalled in it, to some minute degree, vague as it would have to be, I have an obligation to practice that imperfect memory myself...
...And yet, somehow, something...
...And while one might admit that maybe there is something to the old notion that one goes to a funeral at least partially for the sake of the deceased, one is not very liable to say that a principal reason for reading history is to honor the dead, lest "things which should be remembered perish with time...

Vol. 6 • June 1981 • No. 6


 
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