The sixth 2017 A.W. Mellon Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Alexander Nemerov’s talk entitled “The Forest of Thought: On the roof with Robert Montgomery Bird”, seemed to have gone missing from You-Tube. I was disappointed because I had watched the previous five lectures and enjoyed them. The Internet is subject to odd fluxes, random appearances and disappearances – it’s like the world, things are radiantly present until they vanish.
Then, one evening, the lecture manifested, stored in some remote nook and cranny in the Web. I was pleased to watch Nemerov’s talk. I’m a fan and believe that his renovation of the Emersonian ecstatic lecture is an important development in American arts and letters. In these lectures, constructed according to an associative system that fuses together disparate subjects, Nemerov ostensibly considers American culture in the decade of the 1830's, particularly in light of the clearing of the great forests. My rather wan characterization doesn’t do justice to Nemerov’s abundant ambition. In fact, the lectures attempt to represent a form of historiography that aims to restore the sense of the past to us, the glint of light on brick walls or crazed glass long since vanished, the momentary sense of a living presence where formerly there was nothing at all. In the prophetic manner of Emerson, or Whitman, Nemerov simply declares that the past can be revived through his methods, although only transiently, the whiff of some faint, strange perfume in the air that gusts of modernity quickly dispel. No logical proof for these propositions can be advanced; the question that the lectures (and Nemerov’s written work) pose is whether the sheer force of the speaker’s personality can achieve this outcome.
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The building was a hulking mass of old masonry, fissured and cleft like a wall of boulders in the desert. Probably, the place was a Scottish Rite lodge, a huge structure filled with gloomy ballrooms and theaters where strange, secret rituals were once enacted.
I understood that an artist, or, maybe, it was a collective of artists had made an installation in the structure, now abandoned, and scheduled for demolition. The installation involved a mystery that entrants were charged with solving – it was a little like Sleep no More, the big art installation spread across several floors of a Chelsea warehouse a decade ago, an experience midway between theater (it’s based on Macbeth) and gallery-going.
The interior of the building was ruinous with puddles on the floors and places where the ceiling had collapsed into sullen humid heaps of plywood and drywall. The path of discovery led through three ballrooms. The first was small and empty, a couple of moldering flags on a stage under a grim, shadowy chandelier festooned with cobwebs. In this place, we learned that the structure and its former occupants had something to do with the Grand Army of the Republic. There were insignia and emblems indicating that the G.A.R. had once used this place for a meeting hall. A stairwell led to a deserted mezzanine where a few visitors were milling around. The light was low so that I couldn’t see the faces of the other people touring the ruin; they were mere shadows. On this floor, a vaulted entrance led into a much larger auditorium, seats upholstered in red velvet and a big stage where debris sprawled like corpses fallen on a battlefield – there were more banners and pennants. Clearly, something very bad had happened here. The contents of a couple file cabinets were strewn around the aisle. I picked up some of the papers to read them, searching for clues as to what this meant. But the light was dim and I couldn’t make out the words printed on the page.
There were more people in the attic of the building, high above the proscenium of the theater below. I don’t recall how I reached the upper level of the temple, but I found myself there, under a skylight of glass supported by spidery girders. The burning had been more intense here and the walls and floor were leaden with soot. There were many more clues as to the calamity that had beset this place but they were all badly charred and impossible to read. Here the Grand Army of the Republic had met its final defeat, not on the battlefield where it had been invincible, but here in the ruins of this building. Through the skylight, I glimpsed the towers of the city, lit like candelabra.
Reality has a sound, a humming mechanical noise like an engine rumbling far away. That sound impinged on my consciousness as I rummaged around in the ashes.
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Nemerov’s subject in his final lecture is recapturing thought as it existed 180 years ago. His ambition is to perceive, if only for a moment, what is was like to be a thinking subject around 1840.
Nemerov’s point of access is an obscure mid-19th century writer and artist named Robert Montgomery Bird. Bird became famous for a penny-dreadful novel, Nick of the Woods, involving a series of revenge murders committed by the protagonist on the Indians that murdered his family. Invariably, these murders involve splitting open someone’s skull with a tomahawk or ax. Nemerov focuses on the gory imagery describing these killings suggesting that Bird’s interest lies in opening up and exposing the instrument of thought, the human brain. The brain emits thoughts from the attic or roof of the body; the head is a corporeal upper terrace from which the world can be surveyed and its cranial structure is an emblem for the architectonics of thought. (The skulls of Native Americans were once thought to evince their savage nature and the same man who collected bird specimens for Audubon looted Indian cemeteries for the Smithsonian and its racial theorists.) In the 1850's, shortly before his death, Bird developed a photographic technique utilizing paper negatives. The negatives, rather miraculously, have come down to us and they show spectral scenes of roofs and balconies, gaping abysses protected by fences with gables and mansards and steeples. (The pictures were taken from the roof of Bird’s home at 90 Filbert Street in Philadelphia, a place to which Nemerov makes a pilgrimage – today it’s a parking lot and Nemerov’s equally ghostly picture shows us snow and slanting surfaces and wan, nondescript apartment buildings.) Nemerov’s contention is that Bird was representing thought in these pictures, that he had split open the skull to show the architecture of the brain. Bird wrote a novel about metempsychosis – that is the transmigration of souls. In the book, a man finds his consciousness, although distorted and changed by its creaturely form, transmitted from person to person – he becomes a landed aristocrat, a slave-owner, an abolitionist, a slave, an artist, an outlaw and, at last, transmigrates back into his own body. One of Bird’s other endeavors was photographing paintings and engravings and, then, developing those negative images into ghostly apparitions on paper. Nemerov shows several of those images as slides, makes art-historical comments, and finds himself discussing an earlier topic in the lecture series, the paintings of Thomas Cole. (Cole appears in the lectures emblematically through his felt stove-pipe hat, the insignia of his gentlemanly status as an artist.)
As it happens, one of Cole’s early paintings, a view of Florence, was owned by the parents of Henry James and displayed in the parlor of the family home. James describes himself as much-influenced by the painting that he spent many hours contemplating as a child – it was a “scene” particularly important to him as described in James’ memoir from 1913. Nemerov associates this recollection with another anecdote told by the writer in his autobiography. When James’ sister (or, perhaps, niece) refused one night to go to bed, the future writer’s aunt told her to “not make a scene.” James’ recalls being particularly struck by this locution – “don’t make a scene” – and asserts that these words had a decisive impact on him. (Nemerov observes that James’ vocation as a writer was precisely making “scenes”.) The notion of a histrionic response to the command to go to bed leads Nemerov to the subject of hysteria, a “gendered concept” he tells us. (At this point, Nemerov digresses to proclaim that his historical sensibility is “androgynous”. He remarks that his position in the lecture hall is below everyone else – the camera angle doesn’t show the environs but we are given to believe that Nemerov is standing in the well of a small theater from which he speaks and shows slides. The camera recording the lectures often shows an elegant fold of drapery to Nemerov’s side, a curtain that is draped in such a way so as to seem sacramental, like linen on an altar – this furnishing to the lecture hall has the austere look of cloth in a painting by Ribera.) The idea of “making a scene” or becoming “hysterical” is intrinsic to James’ ghost story, “The Turn of the Screw”. The governess in the tale is convinced that Bly Manor is a place “where something very bad has happened,” something so terrible that it threatens her young charges. But only she can see the ghosts menacing the children, the sinister Quint and Miss Jessel, In other words, the vision and perception of the evil haunting the place is available to her only. Nemerov asserts that the historical imagination is “hysterical” – that is, the sense of the past is visionary, a presence that only the historian can see and, then, only in glimpses and fragments. But, nonetheless, it is worth attempting to capture and recount this hysterical vision. It is the role of this historian to see what others can not see. In this way, we have communion with something that is absent, vanished, ruined, destroyed by time but, nonetheless, still very faintly present. Nemerov shows the picture of the deserted rooftops over Philadelphia rendered in a dream-like negative, all angles and barriers and clefts in the gables. Then, he projects a slide from a text with which he commenced the lecture series – this is an engraving of the leaves of a plant and, when Nemerov tells us that when he turned the page, he found an actual leaf from that same plant pressed between the pages of the book; that is, next to the engraved representation of the leaf there is an actual leaf preserved in the book. This encounter, he argues, is a paradigm for the historian’s imaginative project of reviving the past.
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The sound of the engine comes from a car warming up in my alley under my bedroom window. The hum of the motor is accompanied by a high flute-like warble, the sound of a belt slipping under the car’s hood. But birds are also singing.
The car sits on ice this morning and I can hear its tires spinning for a moment before they catch hold and propel the vehicle forward. Then, it’s quiet outside and reality seems silent for a moment until my ears become accustomed to a very low and persistent drone, the sound of Being.
The weather in early March in Minnesota has been the same for several days. At dawn, the temperature is twenty degrees and the meltwater freezes to ice on the sidewalks and driveways and can be very dangerous underfoot. Then, it warms and the ice melts and, if you are careful to avoid the slick spots, you can walk without fear of falling.
