Yesterday's talismans
Powers, Thomas
regard it with love or reverence, to see ,it as a possible killing ground, is a sign of what we think of humanity. This is a religious issue, as slavery was, as war always is, as the arms...
...The true value of that |ndian motorcycle--so miraculously preserved--could not be measured in dollars...
...Originally its color had been olive drab...
...You can fake a painting, perhaps, but you can't fake a plane, or a ship, or an old car...
...If Congress can take to itself the right to say what human life is, it can equally say what lives are not human, or at least what lives can be dealt with as if they were not...
...The treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamun are enough to put anyone into a thoughtful mood...
...Not long after the auction a friend and his wife came for drinks and we got to talking about comic books...
...The collecting of comics is a robust industry, with trade magazines (called "fanzines") and annual conventions...
...People wander slowly from stand to stand, solemnly fingering the artifacts of the recent past...
...What is not commonly seen is that it is religious on both sides: the people who oppose the anti-abortion movement on what they consider reasonable democratic grounds are, more often than not, believers in a world view as undemonstrable as that of their opponents...
...and Harvey Kurtzman, a man of manyfaceted genius (he practically invented Mad, among other things...
...It had been painted red...
...Olive drab tarpaulins covered the two engines and the cockpit...
...After the raid the planes had to be ditched in China or Southeast Asia, I forget where...
...The seat was the sort they call a bicycle seat--triangular in shape with a generous cupping curve in the rear supported by two large springs The feel of the seat was deep and liquid...
...They were ours...
...That is, plainly, religious...
...That was a time of confidence that things were getting better...
...The tires were fiat, there were holes in the wing, we could see inside the fuselage through a missing door...
...Now these things have been found, they'll soon be lost, dispersed, and destroyed for good...
...The gold masks and jewelry and painted boxes looked pretty much the same in both places: breathtakingly old, fragile, and alien...
...It's different now...
...In that story was all the blind meaningless waste of war...
...There goes his childhood, which can no longer be disturbed...
...My friend and I tried to find an explanation for the appeal of these artifacts...
...The pro-life people believe that life's value is inherent in the fact of its being there at all...
...JOHN GARVEY I Of several minds: Thomas Powers YESTERDAY'S TALISMANS THE HIDDEN MEANING OF THE FLEA MARKET L AST SUMMER, at an auction in Vermont, I saw a 1940 Indian motorcycle...
...I believe that human life begins at conception...
...They believe that life is given...
...They reminded us of our childhood...
...We understood him perfeectly...
...It is not at all uncommon for the originals to bring $25 or $30 a copy, and the last time I checked, the price of the first issue of Action (the original home of Superman, the appeal of whom escapes me...
...I was about eighteen months old when Doolittle made his raid...
...Or so I imagine...
...My friend hadn't even been born yet...
...So did a number of other men...
...It looked like a Chevrolet of 1937 or '38...
...Recently I came across an old photograph dated unmistakably by a car...
...1940 is perfectly preserved...
...It turned out my friend and I had liked many of the same titles, especially the EC line which flourished for three or four years--the very briefest of Golden Ages--between 1950 and 1953 or '54: Two-Fisted Tales, Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, and so on...
...They were bright and sensational...
...One is on one's good behavior...
...For one thing, of course, they were good of their kind...
...The objects precious enough to display there are a kind of proof how utterly dead and gone is the world which created them...
...The distance between us and them is very great...
...In large letters the sign reads: "'LOS ALAMOS PROJECT MAIN GATE...
...Some congressmen have tried to get a congressional resolution passed which would simply define human life as beginning at conception...
...Age has little to do with it...
...My friend remembered many of these artists and stories too...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 362...
...The names and styles of the artists are still vivid in my mind, people like John Severin, who did the best Indians--I mean American Indians--in the history of comics...
...They stood there arms folded, admiring the solid curve of the front fender, the headlight on a swivel mount, the brass fuel pump...
...Congress to endorse his work...
...All the same, the B-25 Mitchell bomber is a relic of our past...
...They couldn't carry enough fuel for a round trip...
...Behind the onestory cinderblock building was a bomber...
...A rumor went around that a buyer for Robert Redford -- or maybe it was Steve McQueen--had come a thousand miles just to bid on this machine...
...It was a long, low, heavy, fat-tired machine, and I lingered around it, for reasons I can't easily explain, the better part of two hours...
...In a sense they are safe, as we were too--then-had we but known it...
...We went out back and walked around the plane...
...In that story was all the blind meaningless chance of war...
...And so on and so forth...
...It is religious insofar as it involves attitudes toward life and life's meaning which lie beyond the realm of proof and disproof...
...19 June 1981: 36t A museum is a way of reminding us that all things pass...
...Things that are past are ours...
...But none of these explanations touched the heart of their appeal, the thing they share in common with all the other residue of their time--the baseball cards, Coca Cola trays, World War II "loose lips sink ships" posters, movie stills, 45 rpm records, bomber jackets, Flexible Flyer sleds, table radios in wood cabinets, "I Like Ike" buttons, Mickey Spillane paperbacks, toy soldi.ers, Donald Duck watches, Lionel trains, old copies of Fortune filled with Packard and Cadillac ads, Stanley wood planes, wicker porch chairs, Prince Edward tobacco tins, gooseneck desk lamps...
...Nobody doubted it...
...The complete Two-Fisted Tales, for example, has been republished in four large volumes on heavy stock, $65 for the boxed set...
...Naturally, with such an unmistakable nudge from the authorities, one speaks in whispers...
...No one personally misses Periclean Athens, but 1940--that was ours...
...It didn't last long, and now the bombers can circle the globe...
...I don't know enough about motorcycles to tell you much about this particular model...
...All sorts of answers jumped to mind...
...I've forgotten what it went for, but it'was a good deal-- as much as a new car with a lot of extras...
...The men told motorcycle stories or World War II stories or just talked numbers--engine size, tire pressure, the price it might bring, the year Indian started in business, the year Indian went out of business...
...We are hardly alone in this...
...It is parked in front of a small white frame building with a large sign on it, and an immensity of sky behind it...
...But looking at a Greek bronze, or a suit of French armor of the twelfth century, or even a Pre-Raphaelite painting is not at all like looking at a 1940 Indian motorcycle...
...If you've ever been to a flea market you'll know what I mean...
...Many pro-choice people want a surrender to their worldview, which was born at the Enlightenment...
...Can anyone in this world imagine the national museum in Cairo, or the Met in New York, will last 3200 years...
...Greek bronzes can stop you in your tracks and elicit a kind of cathedral mood, but there's a formal quality to the encounter...
...When an old car passes down the street, everybody turns his head...
...a museum reminds us that soon there will be no bridge at all, hardly more than the memory of a memory...
...They were completely outside the official culture crammed into us at school...
...Given-ness implies a giver, and a value conferred in the simple fact of existence...
...In the national museum in Cairo, where I saw them in 1975, they were badly lit, crowded into display cases, erratically labeled, in no comprehensible order...
...Another was abOut a house built by a Korean family, destroyed at the end by a single artillery shell...
...You could pick your year and, given a little time and money, rebuild the vanished era down to the smallest detail...
...These are interesting emotions and are one reason we have museums and visit them once a year, when it's raining on Saturday and the kids are restless...
...In the nineteenth century the recent past did not exert such a'tug on the emotions...
...You can't entrust things to men...
...The old was synonymous with the worn-out, the useless, the outmoded...
...Perhaps this is the result of the typical museum setting--especially in this country where Greek bronzes are reverently displayed in rooms of immaculate white, dramatically lit from above...
...But that isn't the only difference between the truly ancient and the barely antique...
...It isn't the religion most Americans are comfortable with, the publicly acceptable variety which endorses the way we live...
...I certainly didn't have that kind of money for a motorcycle I might ride twice a year and neither did any of the other men, but | don't think any of us thought the buyer a fool...
...Their resentment is that an older orthodoxy is not willing to accept their victory, and die quietly...
...Behind the seat was a pair of commodious leather saddlebags with chrome buckles, and in the righthand pocket was the original owner's manual...
...A couple of weeks ago a friend and I, returning to the city from the country, passed an old Army & Navy store alongside the highway...
...The people of that time were great chuckers-out...
...This is an appalling notion: it would extend the power of the state to a final and terrible degree...
...Neither one of us had ever seen such a plane before, outside of the movies, and we stopped to ask what it was...
...It has been doing this in practice for years, but I would hate to see it made official...
...They'd survived in the tomb since 1325 B.C...
...Finding those objects, and putting them on display, is our way of destroying them...
...Below it in smaller letters is the legend: "Passes must be presented to guards...
...Their survival is a kind of miraculous accident, considering the treatment they got and the 'paper they were printed on...
...Things are moving quickly...
...and Wally Wood, who did the best interiors of space ships...
...For me, at any rate, it has a charged talismanic significance...
...This is a religious issue, as slavery was, as war always is, as the arms race is and will be...
...the viewer was grabbed by the lapels and given a good talking to...
...They are no longer published...
...But to argue that life has no inherent value, or to argue that if there is such a value it matters so little that we may agree to disagree and stand by while lives whose value cannot be proven are destroyed--this is to argue something equally metaphysical, equally undemonstrable...
...It didn't really...
...There is no easy way out of the dilemma...
...Mere decades are as distinct as geologic ages...
...I heard somebody say it had been built for the U.S...
...Perhaps that is the source of their magic...
...regard it with love or reverence, to see ,it as a possible killing ground, is a sign of what we think of humanity...
...Army but was discontinued after the first thousand...
...There is something curious about the charged talismanic significance of objects of recent origin...
...It says that value is conferred only, or at least most importantly, by human beings...
...Both times I remember thinking: this is our last chance to see so deeply into the past...
...Kurtzman may have been the greatest of them all, the perfect marriage of style and substance...
...At the Metropolitan Museum in New York the cues of lighting and' setting could hardly have been more emphatic...
...make much difference...
...They are unmistakably of their time--something we have outlived...
...but to each his own) was around $1,000...
...Kurtzman did a number of stories about the Korean War--one called "if," for example, about a GI fatally wounded by a stray mortar round...
...but I cannot imagine that God has waited for the U.S...
...The wife of the owner told us it was a B-25 Mitchell bomber of the sort Doolittle used in his raid on Tokyo only a few months after Pearl Harbor...
...Things speak unmistakably of their time...
...A great poet might write a great elegy on this subject...
...In a flea market it's all still there...
...the first Mad, the great Mad) and an artist of formidable power...
...Back then there was a strict limit to the range of a bomber...
...That's all "there is--the car, the building, the sign, and the.sky...
...Everybody wanted the latest...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 12
