Civil War
by Joseph Keckler
“There’s going to be another civil war,” people say these days, these days being the past four years and especially lately. After a group of cops publicly murdered George Floyd for reportedly buying cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty in Minneapolis, protests broke out across the nation and beyond it, calling for an end to racist police violence—and if racist violence is its raison d’etre, an end to the police force itself. After that, we woke up in America to hear about young Black people hanging from trees, and about a wealthy and barefoot couple bursting out of their mansion to point firearms at passing protestors. We woke up to hear about racially charged altercations in parks and parking lots that sometimes culminated in a particularly 21st century standoff of which Susan Sontag might have dreamed: One party aims a phone camera while the other aims a gun, the sublimated weapon vs. the real.
In June, our cities sounded like war zones. Fireworks were going off hour after hour, night after night, and depending on who you asked they were being set off by trust fund kids, actual kids, anarchists, police, the CIA or some passing collaboration among two or more groups. But it’s not only the origin of fireworks on which we could not agree. We could not agree why we were exploding. Why do we lack a common understanding of what our reality is and what forces shape it? One reason so many Americans are caught in feedback loops of perception is that most of us still receive information from one wing or the other of corporate media, which are both as truthful as funhouse mirrors; they simply sit side by side at the same carnival, bending in different directions. Some of us scroll through our Facebook feeds, which are self-curated and invisibly influenced by algorithms that aim to show us what we want to see, so although these streams of information feel broad, they tend to be ideologically narrow, reinforcing an individual’s worldview. Some lurk on Twitter, where hundreds of users with compressed resumes in their bios spend the day lashing out at one another-- like a brawl at a trade fair. Others listen to independent podcasts, or absorb YouTube videos that modestly propose all elected officials are interplanetary shapeshifting lizards. Can you prove they’re not? Meanwhile, our president, who often speaks with a comedian’s delivery to such disorienting effect that most of his utterances are lodged securely between the literal and the figurative, the ridiculous and the dead serious, has been encouraging his supporters to join “his” “army,” to “fight” the “out-of-control mobs” formed by their fellow members of society. Of course ‘army’ would be a metaphor if the citizenry were not so heavily armed.
I never knew that much about the first Civil War. I entered adulthood feeling so ignorant of history, in fact, that I once bought a book just called History. My deficiency was my own fault, but it hadn’t helped that the public school I went to had no classes in the subject, offering instead the vague “Social Studies,” which tilted more social than study. I think most days we watched the movie Platoon. I remember the teacher as a merry prankster who once dropped a snowball down one of her favorite students’ pants and poked at me with a wooden sword whenever I was asleep, which was always.
A couple years ago, I gathered a little more about the Civil War when I stayed in Gettysburg as a guest of the national park, which was a luxurious way to learn. I was invited to stay for a few days as a visiting artist, under the auspices of an ongoing residency program facilitated by the National Parks Arts Foundation. During that time, I was given tours of the grounds, and of museum buildings, so I might cook up ideas for a project about Gettysburg. Though as an artist I strive for range-- I’ve delivered my own absurd opera arias about some evenings of personal misadventure, penned a number of intimate character studies of one-offs I’ve loved and known, and composed my share of metaphysical torch songs-- I had never imagined dealing with American history in the realm of art. Someone else had imagined it, though, and I was intrigued. So there I found myself, walking through a storeroom filled with bins of cannonballs that looked exactly like gigantic blueberries. And then I saw the reconstructed farmhouse of Abraham Bryan, a free Black man who left during the war, fearing enslavement, and returned after to find his house ransacked and his farmland turned into a cemetery. A couple miles away I went into Mamie Eisenhower’s 1950’s house, which contains a lot of her favorite shade of pink. The walls of the house hold a few exuberant portraits and landscapes by former president Dwight, who painted in retirement when he wasn’t out walking the battlefield alone, contemplating military maneuvers. I toured the same battlefield, visiting its grassy expanses, mounds, dips, and clusters of boulders. Many of these natural features are named: Big Round Top, Little Round Top, Devil’s Den, Plum Run, and the Valley of Death. Also on the grounds are three dinosaur footprints, imprinted on stones that now form a bridge. Dating from 200 million years ago, The Age of Reptiles, these fossils both anchor the landscape in a dramatic timescale and make the Civil War feel current by comparison. Certain trees that were alive during the war still stand today, and some have bullets in them. They are known as witness trees.
Why such focus not on the stakes of the war and its outcome, but on the positioning of soldiers during the bloody encounter?
At one point I rode shotgun in an SUV, looking out the windows and listening to the genial park director who sat behind the wheel, leading me on a guided tour. He explained each feature of the landscape as it related to the movements, locations and actions of soldiers in the war. I learned that the Southern troops paradoxically entered the battlefield from the north, as the North marched in from the south. I also learned that the Union gathered upon Cemetery Ridge, while the confederates congregated a mile opposite them, at the rhyming location of Seminary Ridge. As my outdoor tour approached its end, the director mentioned that another visiting artist had produced a large-scale work in which archival images of soldiers’ faces were projected onto the landscape at night, and said he hoped the site had sparked some ideas for me. But it hadn’t. In that moment I was silently wrestling with doubts about art, which seemed all frills and illusion next to the incomprehensible ravages of war. I might have been reminded, however, that it was a work of art, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which, in rendering the brutality of slavery, altered the collective consciousness and partly incited the Civil War.
Inside the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum, we viewed one of the main attractions, an 1883 cyclorama by French artist Paul Phllippoteaux, which is promoted as being “longer than a football field” and illustrates rolling hills, wild and tilled fields, with soldiers and horses everywhere, lunging and falling among collapsed gun carriages and bursts of smoke, all beneath a placid sky. The event depicted is “Pickett’s Charge,” a failed maneuver of the confederacy which led to their downfall, an event regarded both as the climax of The Battle of Gettysburg and as the turning point in the war that was to nevertheless blaze on for another two years. I typed “Pickett’s Charge” into my phone, looking at the painting of the maneuver as I scanned internet articles about it. I I found that it is varyingly described as “heroic” and “desperate,” and is often treated with a mixture of awe and analysis, as though it were a legendary sports play in a late-season game. Departing from the cyclorama, I walked through other parts of the museum, encountering cases of guns, uniforms, and stories and images that mapped combat.
Towards the end of the afternoon I strayed from the park and walked through the surrounding town. There I noticed signs and storefronts advertising ghost tours -- like Salem, Gettysburg is a site of historic death that has become a capital of paranormal attraction. In town, I learned that a beloved local who spent forty years impersonating Abraham Lincoln had recently died.His name was Jim Getty and it turns out he was a decorated career performer who could call forth Lincoln speeches precisely and spontaneously; the way some people spoke of him, I’d gotten the idea he was somehow a professional apparition, a dead president at large, roaming around muttering the Gettysburg address. He is survived by at least one town eccentric who has the American psyche on his mind: a young dandy in fur who was holding court in the thrift store. “A bawdy poem of Pushkin! Can you imagine such a thing being taught in American schools?” He asked the two shopkeepers behind the counter, who returned blank expressions and no answer. “I might post it and cause a social media storm!” he announced, letting his imagination run away. “That will be my trolling. They’ll learn all too well what a Russian troll truly is,” he continued with increasing verve, as I slipped out and headed back towards the park.
Back in the cabin where I stayed, I tried to imagine what sort of project I could possibly accomplish at this site, what I could say, and if I had anything to say, how I would cut through all the layers in the way– an aura of national grief, the dead air of governmental institutions, and the sedating fog that had risen out of my social studies textbook and seeped out of certain wall texts in museums I'd just visited. The thrift store’s fur-clad schemer might be more up to the task. I wasn’t. I struggled to understand what it meant to dedicate a museum to a civil war as opposed to a civilization, an artistic medium or style, or a cultural period and its artifacts. Does a war museum confine the conflict to the past, or carry it to the present? In the cemetery, near a honey locust that still grows there, Lincoln himself proclaimed, “We cannot hallow this ground” and called upon the living to take on “an increased commitment to the cause” so that the dead should not have died in vain. But what of all the diagrams I had seen, the elaborate play-by-plays of how the North and South collided in this war over slavery? Why such focus not on the stakes of the war and its outcome, but on the positioning of soldiers during the bloody encounter? I thought of the subculture of people who perform reenactments, donning old military uniforms, impersonating the generals. These reenactments were practically the first things that had sprung to mind whenever I’d thought of the Civil War.I wondered if the perennial interest in the details of the violent scene could be driven by the vigilance Lincoln envisioned, an ever-renewing commitment to human rights. That’s one idea, yet a Civil War reenactment is not the sort of annual pageant that repeats the founding myth of a religion or nation. Instead, it is one that calls up a question at the heart of a nation: What if the war had gone differently?
It occurred to me then that the walls of the museum, the staging on the battlefield, these endless mappings of the conflict, the persistent obsession with the geometry of the field and choreography of the battle, were also studies in possibility. Consciously or unconsciously, possibility itself has been kept as a fossil, as hard and defined as the prints of the dinosaur-- as though in a subterranean reality the war were always happening, as though the other side still had a chance to win, as though secretly it had.
Joseph Keckler is a singer and writer. His original performances have been presented widely by venues including Lincoln Center, Adult Swim, Centre Pompidou, Third Man Records, and Opera Philadelphia. Last year he toured the country as the national support act for the band Sleater-Kinney, after premiering two evening-length works: Let Me Die, an amalgamation of operatic deaths, and the critically acclaimed Train With No Midnight, commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects. He has received a number of awards, including a Creative Capital grant, fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Village Voice Award for "Best Downtown Performance Artist." His music has been featured on BBC America and WNYC and his writing has been published in Literary Hub and Vice, among others. A collection of his writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published by Turtle Point Press in 2018. He's currently working on new videos and an E.P.
October 30th 2020