Assassination blues

 

1.The Headline in the New York Sun, April 15, 1865 was: HORRIBLE! THE PRESIDENT ASSASSINATED! MR. SEWARD’S THROAT CUT AND HIS SON ASSAULTED.

“The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious, until a man rushed to the front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, and exclaiming “sic semper tyrannis” and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, making his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience, from the roar of the theatre, and mounting a horse, fled.”

The Sun’s reporter was in such a stupor that his report is a mess of confusions of both grammar and sense – where was the horse, anyway?

2. Some addresses:

Dealy Plaza, Dallas Texas

The Lorraine Hotel, Memphis Tennessee

146, rue Montmartre, Paris

11, rue de la Ferronerie, Paris

4, Rue Rollin, Paris

20, Rue de la Cordellerie, Paris.

3. I have been to Dealy Plaza and paid homage to Smiling Jack. Hell, when I was a 5 year old I saw it on tv, the black and white tv downstairs, in York, Pennsylvania. I’ve not been to the Ford’s theatre. I had a crush on Abe Lincoln when I was a schoolboy, and still wish he had not gone to see My American Cousin,  much as I respect the fact that he needed a break from stress.

My list of addresses is a list of assassinations. Do the places where the shot was fired, the knife was thrust, remember? The spirits of the place – Lares – kept a memory, it was once thought. Some trace, some mnemonic vibration. We have now moved those vibrations to other crossroads in the brain, crossroads of neurons. There, somehow, they exist. But we still retain, in popular culture, a certain dread of certain places. The haunted house. The slasher is killed and maniacally, in sequel after sequel, reassembles and reattacks. The spirit remains – or the box office and the laws of gender make their fated demands.

4. I did not go to the book depository in Dealy Plaza. All respect, though: JFK’s assassination continues its underground existence in the nether side of this country. A world within a world, Lee thinks in Don Delillo’s Libra.

I’ve never been to the Lorraine Hotel, never gone out of my way to go to Memphis, though I have been to the MLK memorial in Atlanta. Nor to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Bobbie Kennedy was, astonishingly, shot and killed. It is a rare thing that two rich and powerful men are gunned down in America. That is usually reserved for the mean and the lowly.

In French, assassination is often used to mean murder, but in the English speaking world, that term is usually reserved for high fliers. Myself, if I was so unfortunate as to meet a bullet, a knife, a hatchet, and so on, would be reported as murdered. Killed. But the president, or king, or leader of the revolution, or other highly placed individuals get assassinated when the projectile ends their dreamtime on this earth.

5. The French assassinations on my list: Jaures, on July 31, 1914; Henri IV, May 14, 1610; Henri Curiel, 4 Rue Rollin, May 4, 1978; and Jean-Paul Marat, July 13, 1793.

Paris is the capital city of assassinations. I have merely listed a small number from among the hosts of spies, White Russians, Presidents, Ambassadors, and others who have been put down in this beautiful city.

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant !

6. Assassinations are the center of little worlds, and upset the standard intellectual belief in uniformian historiography, one that does away with “great men” and puts social forces or production or the progress of knowledge in its place. Ah, history as, essentially, a movement like the wind or water – all very interesting mathematically, but with no part essentially different than any other part.

And yet, who can believe that the ghost futures that die with the assassinated are not notable! One thinks of JFK serving two terms (which would have probably meant that his brother would never have been in the Ambassador Hotel that night); one thinks of Martin Luther King’s middle age – he died at 39 – and the danger he would have posed to the racist order; one thinks of Henry IV surviving, once again, and perhaps preventing Frondes to come, changing the entire culture of the l’age Classique.

Oddly, the burden of assassination is borne, especially, by the left. From Rosa Luxemberg to Fred Hampton, the list of the assassinated is heavy with promises arrested. The river is deep and the river is wide, and there are times when you need to nurse your drink, your wine or your gin and tonic, and weep a little bit. My idea is that to be a lefty is an enormously tiring thing anyway – there’s no clubs, no rich man’s money behind it all. And you are always facing a wall of cops. To go against the grain in societies where the grain is very very hard costs and costs. And thus, the cast of prophets unarmed or, like Che, badly armed, follows us all. It has followed me, at least in my thoughts, for a long long time. Lost time, indeed.