that parents, teachers, and judges might be charmed by the sputtering history staged for their benefit, but they’d never be edified, implicated, or truly moved.
Nonetheless, I did what I could to counteract the actors’ unerasable nature. I helped to edit some of the scripts, removing telltale anachronistic diction from their dialogues. “It’s unlikely that Anne Boleyn would have uttered the phrase ‘Yeah, right!’ under any circumstances,” I argued. “And I’d bet anything that General Patton never referred to his junior officers as ‘you guys.’” I also rooted out instances of unnatural exposition. History would have to survive the absence of such admittedly functional but wholly incredible lines as “Well, there’s never a dull moment when you’re Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. It’s almost 1803 already, and I still haven’t purchased the Louisiana Territory!”
Mostly, though, I urged the actors to manifest the physical differences their adopted selves required. Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t throw herself into her seat the way a child does, I said; rather, she reaches for it gingerly, befitting a woman of consequence, pomp, and excess poundage. Then, when she rises, she doesn’t launch herself out of the chair like one of the White House pups but works her way up in stages, pressing up with both hands. The pre-teens in particular were used to rocking back and forth as they spoke as if needing the bathroom. My would-be soldiers, scientists, and labor leaders were sprawlers who swung their bodies about as recklessly as they used slang. I tried to explain that older workers are not called “working stiffs” for nothing. I reminded them of the arthritis and equity that increase over time and encouraged them to show both in their carriage. Thus I grounded Lindbergh and Earhart. I bent springy senior statesmen into ampersands. I laid gravity upon Joplin Junior High School’s brace of notables and bade them stay.
In short, I tried to teach the kids to cultivate a semblance of the heft of decades in only a month. (The alternative, I told them, was to whittle history down and compete solely as distinguished children: say, a bunch of boy King Tuts and a squad of Shirley Temples.) Hamlet took pains to tutor the players he commissioned in plausibility, admonishing them not to bellow, strut, or saw the air in such ways as to strain patience and crack the mirror he’d have them hold up to Nature. But at least the prince was dealing with grown men, and professionals at that. My troupe’s problem was not tempering their passions but mimicking passions they’d never had.
Unfortunately, even when I convinced them that they must not only speak the speech but act their assumed ages as well, the result was pretty comical. Grown-up moods take years to cook into the countenance. For example, kids get sad, certainly, but their sadnesses are comparatively shallow; richer recriminations and profounder sorrows take time to bed down in the core of the people we become—a great deal more time than we could devote to the process. Asked to do languor, our Queen Elizabeth I merely looked bored, as if she’d been closeted away from court society to finish her algebra homework. Asked to do hauteur, our Napoleon stalked about the stage with what seemed to be a bad nosebleed. Instead of ennui, I got petulance; instead of dignity, daze; instead of studied contempt, the look of someone who’d swallowed sour milk with his cereal. Contemplation came off as constipation, existential crisis as ADHD.
Yet dutifully I drilled them late into the evenings they’d have preferred to fill with television and soccer. A veritable encyclopedia of despots, generals, rebel leaders, artists, martyrs, and other luminaries kept hours after class in rarefied detention that spanned centuries. Those who did not know their history, who did not have every jerry-built gesture and syllable of it down pat, were doomed to repeat it and, every afternoon for nearly a month, repeat it again. Such was the history they inherited: a show that must go on.
And on they went, serving up bite-sized highlights of Western civilization like turns on a bill. Twenty-three elite personalities dredged out of the archives. (Dredged, indeed, going by the baggy, overblown figures they presented.) Twenty-three sundry tragedies strung together to constitute a pageant, our very own ruin with a view, which we offered up gamely to enchant an audience ready and willing to be enchanted.
And going by the applause and the judging sheets, we got away with it. We apparently pulled off Pericles without tarnishing the Golden Age of Greece. We led out Lenin and the putsch went unpunished. We paraded our Columbus, Kennedy, and Sacagawea, and their reputations somehow survived. And afterward, all clutching certificates of merit, our miniature diplomats and makeshift sovereigns were embraced by grateful teachers and parents, who felt, for once, that the dustbin of history had been redeemed, that the past, theirs and ours, was not lost time. Because it clearly featured students from their own school district, because their own children headed the cast, history was assured a level of significance that no textbook, file tape, or document under glass could match. Nothing was as preposterous as the version of posterity we put on that day. As it turned out, though, intimacy, not integrity, was the point of it.
I used to wonder what it would be like to watch the network news as if I knew everyone involved. If the nightclub fire had exclusively claimed my classmates, the eight-car pile-up had restricted itself to the relatives with whom I’d just shared Thanksgiving turkey, and the evening’s inventory of burglary, rape, and murder victims had all had my last name, how would I bear up? How would I persevere under all that personal implication? Then I’d realize that, of course, every assault and battery, every killing blizzard and embezzlement, every accident and spectacle had sought out someone’s husband, wife, parent, or child. Everyone who was interviewed on screen or made the papers was someone’s significant other, just like everyone who did not.
“What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” asks Shakespeare’s Prospero. The answer is always the same: the faces of our children, which remind us of our own, long since ravaged and irretrievable. The children, flushed with their performances, will discover that, too. For parents are fated to let their sons and daughters in on their mutual doom. That was one definite lesson that came out of the day’s proceedings. All of us, sooner or later, will be history.
5 Watch This Space
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
—Henry James, “The Middle Years”
Unpack any molecule and you’ll find it’s mostly empty space—like space itself, chiefly composed of soots. A monotony of black, an ecstasy of it, with barely a break in the mute and unremitting night. “From Blank to Blank—/ A Threadless Way,” went Emily Dickinson, whose groping disclosed nothing more definite than the determination that “’Twas lighter—to be Blind.” True, one might find a brief gash of star or an arguable flicker of intention somewhere, but in the main it’s a formal evening every evening, and nature’s wardrobe is basic black.
The overall lack of habitation goes against the psychic grain. We prefer to interpret our Solar System, with its massive planets running unopposed, conducting their ancient oval offices around an eternally tenured sun, as the result of the primary election, when actually it represents only the returns from the nearest precincts, which are not very reliable in the long run. In the main, science finds only a modest ration of atoms allotted to every astronomical acre—the monopoly of darkness is that undeniable, a comprehensive locking out and locking down. The chances of anything occupying a random shovelful of universe, much less of any being being there, are so scant that they barely bear mention.
John Updike wrote about the need to edit our ambition: in the absence of supernatural certainty, he suggested the consolation of “the small answer of a texture.” But on a macrocosmic scale, even that may be too much to ask. Our constant barrage of radio waves, television signals, and other electronic sorties notwithstanding, no technological “Marco” is likely to get anything resembling a “Polo” in response. No, from all reports, it’s an agony of emptiness all around, a crush of nothing, and just looking up is enough to threaten
