Let this play…
Sometimes it is through song that I am able to locate a feeling to write. Youtube suggested a Pink Floyd performance at an amphitheater in Pompeii that was recorded in the late 1970s. It was the years following the conflict in Vietnam and American hegemony was beginning to crack as policies of containment began to falter (to be really reductive about it). This was about ten years before my birth, and I grew up loving history though not really fully understanding any of the world around me. I still don’t; not to my liking anyway. But somehow the British counter-cultural stylings of Pink Floyd resonate with me today, as they did yesterday.
When I was in high school I connected my southernness to my father’s artistic curiosity about “the marble model”— General Robert E. Lee—as a purely aesthetic icon. The clastic nature of the symbol would break under much scrutiny, but cognitively, a teenager might take that symbol and stir it with some Pink Floyd—as I did. The resultant high-school art project might be a painting of young Robert building an emotional wall from the historical father figure “Lighthorse Harry Lee.” I knew just enough to make bad art that amalgamated Syd Barrett’s problems with his father as tantamount to the issues of the greatest figure in the Confederate past having absentee father issues. Maybe Bobby Lee as a hero was less a stretch in 2001, which was when I was scribbling down the images, long before the BLM movements to obscure his marble image emerged as they have in recent years. At the risk of sounding like a time and space odyssey I’ll move forward in my laser-show-worthy-ramble, hopefully before the reader has a chance to connect my own projected father issues.
I don’t want to overgeneralize Pink Floyd fans but most look like they belong on the set of Dazed and Confused. These are not the folks that are typically known for their memories of the collective past. But here goes…
When I was young I lived in Jackson, Mississippi. I remember a young friend of mine who lived up the street had a father who was missing a leg, because he had lost this limb in a mine explosion in the jungles of Vietnam. I remember him gardening a lot, and then I remembered my grandfather Willie’s signage in his yard that was a Rudyard Kipling quote: “Nearly all a Gardner’s work is done on their knees.” It was fitting that my grandfather, the Anglican priest, would quote another Anglican in his garden. Somehow the sign’s location in the dirt cancelled out any tinge of sanctimonious reverence for prayer in my mind.
Willie was from Gadsden, and was born in 1920. He graduated from Baylor in Chattanooga, TN, at age 16. Within our family lore he was very strong in English, and did a summer program at Woodberry Forrest to prepare him for the University of Virginia. He must have performed well enough to gain admission to Princeton, which he loved all his life. As a minister he had a gift for sermonizing. He had a photo album from his 5th Army Air Force Squadron that connected me to story in a way that I was not always before he shared it with my cousin Hugh and me. Because of his elder position within our family, when he took the time to show us his photo album I became enthralled with World War II history to the point of watching black and white “Hitler (History) channel” reels with very little understanding of the stakes. Had Willie been killed in New Guinea in a bombing accident my family would not be; there would be no memories of the 1992 National Championship game in New Orleans; or the occasion to see my grandfather enjoying turtle soup in commander’s palace. No memory of quarrels with Miami Hurricane fans seated all around us, because in order to get our tickets Willie had to join the University of Miami booster club.
My love of memories is new, and is derived from the history teachers that taught me in formal settings like boarding school, and the University of Alabama. One world history teacher gave me a book that was exclusively primary sources. The first document I ever studied was Pliny the Younger’s description of the eruption at Vesuvius. If not for the document, and archaeological excavations, would anyone know about these Roman citizens who were frozen in time?
My latin teacher gave me a completely useless text of Tacitus’s Agricola when I was too dumb to translate it. It was like giving someone the rhetorical gift of education. I wanted to believe that the Roman General Julius Agricola was somehow related to my family, or that the German Agricola’s of the Holy Roman Empire were somehow this Roman’s descendants. His story was obscured by the latin but to my knowledge he was a leader in Britain along Emperor Hadrian’s wall in Northern Britain. The wall was Emperor Hadrian’s philosophical impulse to contain and restrict the reaches of the Empire, as opposed to American Presidents who were asserting in showy, and incendiary ways, American power over Vietnam— some might argue as a preliminary last gasp of that same power.
Then Julius went to fight the Germanic tribes and disappeared into the wilderness. My kind of guy; he probably just went native, fly-fishing for German butter brown trout, and later his progeny grew up to sack the same Roman Empire he once built with his demarcations of walled off space in Brittany. For Tacitus, Pliny’s Uncle and teacher, he titled the book about Germany, Agricola, to appease his father-in-law.
Then 1400 years after the incident at Vesuvius and the devastation of Pompeii a German man named Johannes Agricola challenged Martin Luther on the validity of antinomianism. This is the belief that Christians are relieved of their obligation to follow the codes of moral law because of their grace bestowed by God. Willie loved the idea of grace. He said it at every meal:
Give us grateful hearts thy father, and make us mindful to the needs of others. For these and all His many mercies in God’s holy name we praise. Amen
Was Willie a believer in antinomianism? What did he think on this subject? I honestly can only project, but an excavation of his past may be illuminating. Clearly he was not ill disposed to some deceitful chicanery as was evidenced by his acquisition of Hurricane tickets at the USF&G Sugar Bowl in 1992. This would be the end of Miami’s dynasty of championships, and their fall from grace is often forgotten by sports historians, probably because the Crimson Tide David in this scenario became actually a Goliath over the longue durée. Willie was the same age as my father is now, and the family understood the importance of him seeing this last championship contest in person, and it was the first championship since Paul “Bear” Bryant’s run of six, and my first in memory.
For Willie, his unexpected Pompeii moment was a severe stroke, and the dust would settle on the family for decades after his fall at the cabin that he built atop Hensley Mountain in Gadsden. The cabin was his end-of-life project, and it is an artifact of his humanity that affords viewers a magisterial gaze of the Coosa River. When this patriarch fell, so did those left in his wake. Their falls were unique forms of imbalance, and for some these initial instabilities may have been experienced like toddlers taking their first steps without parental guidance. Yet, in time they all found graceful human strides that can only be attributed to God’s grace.
I talk about Johannes and Julius with the same sense of reverence that I speak of my actual blood, but why? Because I imagined these two were related to the carp line for so long it became reified in my ego? It is a delusion for sure, a historical and psychological dust in my eyes. It is ash on the doors of genealogical perception. Is it possible that the post-modern dilemma creates a difficulty for the subject to discern truth for him or herself, so myths are constructed to satiate the thirst for egoist celebrity, and this process incidentally consumes the individual to the point that he fails to see himself as a mere atom in the universe, or another fallen Adam in creation?
The hook for me was when my grandfather, Willie, showed me the last page in his album, and it was two New Guinea native tribesman holding the decapitated head of a Japanese soldier whose Bushido will to live and fight for Emperor Hirohito became his tragic undoing, or not so tragic if you are two American baby boomers’ son reflecting from the safe historical distance of Covid 19 Substack writing.
The volcano is our techno-verse digital landscape, and the bio-connection to that source of power makes it very dangerous to our emotional health meters. Unlike in the video game universe, there is not some magical briefcase full of heart health to re-up. In fact it is often the struggle to be noticed that makes our hearts unhealthy. Dopamine hits that come from the ether make the mind sizzle like a “liquid hot magma” to reference Dr. Evil from the 90s classic, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Maybe it is his secret lair underneath the volcano that is at the core of our problems as a society. It is evil and self-interest that makes all of us yell into the night, or raise our pinkies to our lips uttering “for one million dollars.” We all sin against each other by not considering how our posts have the power to hurt one another. Do no harm, Dr Evil. That will be my now forever mantra for this substack.
Is there a solution? Long live agrarian republicanism of the Jeffersonian variety? My last delusion is that Agricola means “farmer” in latin. It’s true. Saw it on Dead Poet’s Society. If nothing else, I excavated gratitude for Pink Floyd within myself again, and this jaunt down a proud memory lane is dusted off for all who read to see.