Juneteenth (5 page)

Alarmed by the image’s stubborn persistence, the Senator felt
imprisoned in an airless space from which he viewed the placid scene of the chamber as through the semitransparent scrim of a theatrical stage. A scrim against which the heraldic symbols in whose name he served flashed and flickered in wild enigmatic disarray. And even as he forced himself to continue his address, he was aware that his voice was no longer reaching him through the venerable chamber’s acoustics but now, sounding muted, metallic and stridently strange, through the taut vibrations of his laboring throat. Leaning forward and controlling himself by grasping the lectern, he recalled the famous cartoon which presented a man struggling desperately to prevent a huge octopus from dragging him into a manhole while a crowd thronged past unnoticing. For despite the disorder within his vision, the chamber appeared quite normal. Listening attentively, his audience was apparently unaware of his distress.

In whose name and under what stress do they think I’m speaking?
the Senator thought.
For whose hidden interests and by what manipulation of experience and principle would they hang the bird on me?
But now, upon a flash of movement from above, the eagle appeared to leap aloft, reducing the rich emblazonment of the Seal to an exploding chaos of red, white, blue and gold through which the Senator’s attention flashed to the distant gallery where with the amplified roar of his echoing voice he became aware of a collectivity of obscure faces, staring down.…

Anonymous, orderly and grave, they loomed high across the chamber, receding upward and away in serried tiers, their heads protruding slightly forward in the tense attitude of viewers bemused by some puzzling action unfolding on a distant screen which they were observing from the tortured angle provided by a segregated theater’s peanut gallery. And as the Senator’s words sped out across the chamber’s solemn air the faces appeared to shimmer in rapt and disembodied suspension, as though in expectation of some
crucial and long-awaited revelation which would make them whole. A revelation apparently even now unfolding through the accelerating rhythms, the bounce and boom of images sent flighting across the domed and lucid space from the flex and play of his own tongue, throat and diaphragm …

The effect upon the Senator was electric. Reassured and pleasurably challenged by their anonymous engrossment, he experienced a surge of that gaiety, anguished yet wildly free, which frequently seized him during an oration, and now, with a smooth shifting of emotional gears, he felt himself carried swiftly beyond either a concern with the meaning of the mysterious vision or the rhetorical fitness of his words onto that plane of verbal exhilaration for which he was notorious. And thereupon, in the gay and reckless capriciousness of his virtuosity, he found himself attempting to match that feat, long glorified in senatorial legend, whereby through a single flourish of his projected voice the orator raises his audience to fever pitch and shatters the chamber’s windowpanes.

Do that
, the Senator thought,
and without a single dissenting Heh-ell-naw! the gentleman from Little Rock will call for changing the outlandish name—of Arkansaw!

Stifling an upsurge of laughter the Senator plunged ahead, tensing his diaphragm to release the full resonance of his voice. But as he did so it was as though his hearing had been thrown out of phase. Resounding through the acoustics of the chamber, his voice seemed controlled by the stop-and-go fluctuations of a hypersensitive time-delay switch, forcing him to monitor his words seconds after they were uttered and feeding them back to him with a hollow, decaying echo. More puzzling, between the physical sensation of statement and the delayed return his voice was giving expression to ideas the likes of which he had never articulated, not even in the most ambiguous of rhetorical situations. Words, ideas, phrases were jetting from some chaotic region deep within him and as he strove to regain
control it was as though he had been taken over by some mocking ventriloquistic orator of opposing views, a trickster of corny philosophical ambition.

“But … but … but … now … now … now …” he heard, “let let us consider consider consider, the broader broader implication … cations of of our our current state. In this land it is our fate to be interrogated not by our allies or enemies but by our conduct and by our lives. Our … ours … ours is the arduous burden burden … den privilege of
self
-regulation and
self-
limitation. We are of a nation born in blood, fire and sacrifice. Thus we are judged, questioned, weighed—by the revolutionary ideals and events which marked the founding of our great country. It is these transcendent ideals which interrogate us, judging us, pursuing us, in terms of that which we do or do
not
do. They accuse us ceaselessly and their interrogation is ruthless, scathing, seldom charitable. For the demands they make of us are limitless. Under the relentless pressure of their accusation we seek to escape the intricate game-work of our enterprises. We make for the territory. We plunge into the edenic landscape of our natural resources. We seek out the warm seacoasts of leisure, the quiet cool caverns of forgetfulness—all made possible by the very success of our mind-jolting revolution and the undeniable accomplishments of our labor and dedication. In our beginning our forefathers summoned up the will to break with the past. They questioned the past and condemned it and severed themselves from its entangling tentacles. They plunged into the future accepting its dangers and its glories. Thus with us it is instinctive to evaluate ourselves against the examples of those, humble and illustrious alike, who preceded us upon this glorious stage and passed on. We are a people of joy and anguish. Our joy made poignant by our anguish. Of us is demanded great daring, great courage, great insight, prudence and even greater self-discipline.

“For we are like those great birds which, moved by an inborn need to test themselves against the mystery and promise of the universe, take off on powerful wings to be carried by fierce winds and gentle currents to great heights and far places. Like them we are given to maneuvering miraculously through treacherous passages and above marvelous plateaus and fertile valleys. It is our nature to soar and by following the courses mapped through the adventurous efforts of our fathers we affirm and revitalize their awesome vision. We are reapers and sowers, destroyers and creators, wheelers and dealers, finders and keepers—and why not? Since we are also generous sharers of that which we discover through our dedication and daring.

“Time flows past beneath us as we soar. History erupts and boils with its age-old contentions. But ours is the freedom and decision of the New, the Uncluttered, and we embrace the anguish of our predicament, we accept the penalties of our hopefulness. So on we soar, following our dream. Sometimes our clouds are fleecy and translucent, veiling thinly the sun; sometimes dark and stormy, lashing us with the wickedness of winter. We toss and swirl, pivot and swoop. We scrape the peaks or go kiting strutless toward the void. Ofttimes, as appears to be true of us today, we plunge down and down, we go round and round faltering and accusing ourselves remorselessly until, reminded of who we are and what we are about and the cost, we pull ourselves together. We lift up our eyes to the hills and we arise.

“God enclosed our land between two mighty oceans and, setting us down on the edge of this mighty continent, he threw us on our own. Our forefathers then set our course ever westward, not, I think, by way of turning us against the past and its lessons, although they accused it vehemently—for we are a product of those lessons—but that we should approach our human lot from a fresher direction, from uncluttered perspectives. Therefore it is not our
way, as some would have it, to reject the past; rather it is to overcome its blighting effects upon our will to organize and conduct a more human future. We are called a consumer society and much is made of what is termed the ‘built-in obsolescence’ of our products. But those who do so miss the point: Yes, we are a consumer society, but the main substance of our consumption consists of
ideals
. Our way is to render ideals obsolescent by transforming them into their opposites through achieving and rejecting their promises. Thus do our ideals die and give way to the new. Thus are they redeemed, made manifest. Our sense of reality is too keen to be violated by moribund ideals, too forward-looking to be too long satisfied with the comforting arrangements of the present, and thus we move ever from the known into the unknown, for there lies the more human future, for there lies the idealistic core.

“My friends, and fellow citizens, I would remind you that in this our noble land, memory is all: touchstone, threat and guiding star. Where we shall go is where we have been; where we have been is where we shall go—but with a difference. For as we proceed toward our destination, it is ever changed by the transformations wrought by our democratic procedures and by the life-affirming effects of our spirit. Here we move ever toward past-future, by moonlight and by starlight, soaring by dead reckoning along courses mapped by our visionary fathers!

“Where we have been is where we shall go. We move from the realm of dreams through the valley of the practical and back to the realm of rectified dreams. Yes, but how we arrive there is
our
decision,
our
challenge and
our
anguish. And in the going and in the arriving our task is to tirelessly transform the past and create and re-create the future. In this grand enterprise we dance to our inner music, we negotiate the unknown and untamed terrain by the soundings of our own inner ear. By the capacity of our inner eye for detecting subtleties of contour, landmark and underground treasure,
we shape the land. Indeed, we
shall
reshape the universe—to the forms of our own inner vision. Let no scoffers demand of us, ‘How high the moon?’ for not only can we supply the answer, in time we shall indeed fly them there! We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.

“Committed we are to maintaining its involved and complex equilibrium.

“Committed to keeping it soaring ever forward in the materialization of our sublime and cornucopian dream. We rush ever onward, and often violently, yes, but on the adventurous journey toward the fulfillment of that dream, no one … no … one … not one, I say, shall … shall … be … bee … bee … denied … denied.…”

Thinking,
Am I drunk, going insane?
, the Senator paused, sweeping the curve of anonymous faces above him with his eyes.

“No,” he continued, “no one shall be denied. An enormous task, some might say, a rash dream. Yet ours is no facile vision. Each day we suffer its anguish and its cost. It requires effort of an order to which only a great and unified nation, a nation conditioned to riding out the chaos of history as the eagle rides out the whirlwind, can arise. Therefore it is our duty to confront it with subtle understanding. Confront it with democratic passion. Confront it with tragic insight, with love and with endless good humor. We must confront it with faith and in the awareness of that age-old knowledge
which holds that it is in the nature of the human enterprise that great nations shall not,
must
not,
dare
not evade their own mysteries but must grapple with them and live them out. They must solve their innermost dilemmas through the expenditure of great physical and spiritual effort. Yes, for great nations evolve and grow ever young in the conscious acceptance and penetration of their own most intimate secrets.

“Thus it is that we must will to remember our defeats and divisions as we remember our triumphs and unities so that we may transcend and forget them. Thus we must forget the past. Indeed, our history records an undying, unyielding quest for youthful sages, for a newfound wisdom fired by a vibrant physicality. Thus again we must forget the past by way of freeing ourselves so that we can reassemble its untidy remnants in the interest of a more human order.

“Oh, yes; I understand: To some this goal appears too difficult. To others, too optimistic, too unworldly—even though they would agree that we are indeed a futuristic people. Ah, but in the face of this bright and inescapable intuition, dark doubts afflict them. Dark realities inhibit their powers of decision. They succumb to the shallow, somber materiality of our bountiful power and pursue it blindly, selfishly for itself. They yearn for a debilitating and self-defeating tranquillity. They falter before the harsher necessities of action, whether that action calls for the exercise of force or charity, charity or force. And before those ever-present dilemmas requiring the exercise of charity supported by force they oscillate pathetically between olive branch and arrows. They lose their way and in their stumbling indecision they reward aggression and justify indolence. In their hands charity becomes a force of cancerous malignancy, and power a self-destructive agency that destroys themselves, their children and their neighbors.

“Nevertheless, we must accept forthrightly that arduous wisdom
which holds that those who reject the lessons of history, or who allow themselves to be intimidated by its rigors, are doomed to repeat its disasters. Therefore I call upon them to remember that societies are artifacts of
human
design and that they are
man-
determined. Human societies float like great spaceships between earth and sky, dependent upon both but enjoying the anguish of human will and initiative. Man is born to act, to make mistakes, and to die. This all men know. But in the graceful acceptance of his fate, and in his protracted and creative dying, man builds his monument, he structures and makes manifest his accusation of the universe. He secures his earthly gains, sets the course of the ever-receding future and makes art of his yearning.