I may walk to the library, since there's none of my clutter there, and much to distract me, I could read manuals and encyclopedias, or listen to music and dance, but other residents may be there with their chatter and clutter, and I must clear my mind of its current static. The study of history once offered me a blanket of security, and I miss its reticence about what it can claim, what proofs it needs, its methodical labors, so, rather than my destiny, should I have one, which I don't accept, yet in some way can't entirely reject and which may anyway await me, I roust Manifest Destiny, whose self-serving assumptions have, since I was a teenager, fascinated me, though I was never able, when I taught teenagers, to transmit my wonder. "We shall be as a City upon a Hill," John Winthrop wrote, and on they trekked and settled their new Israel, which the Louisiana Purchase doubled in 1803, and "Westward Ho," without qualm, where settlers annihilated natives who obstructed their mission, since it was sanctified by God, these revolutionists who'd swapped beliefs, from God's having blessed monarchs with a divine right of succession, to having blessed them with a bountiful land, theirs at any cost. The Puritans were hardworking, unforgiving, and practical people, though Winthrop's letters to his wife were tender, immoderately affectionate, and even lustful. I felt so sad about America, suddenly, I had left it, or it had left me.
Homer believed that the gods spin ruin to men in order that there might be song and remembrance, and, in The Iliad, Helen thought Zeus brought evil to her and Paris "so that in days to come we shall he a song for men yet to be." Some write songs about ruinous beliefs and philosophies of the past, which at the time appeared undeniably true, but more revel in a placid pool of amnesia and swim with forgetfulness, since remembering can be an encumbrance, delaying rapid movement. I don't want to cherish or memorialize memory, create and keep it in its own image, call its loss a sacrilege, confuse it with nostalgia, since I forget more than I remember, though I can recall facts, dates, what I've read, and conversations easily, but I'm not sure what obligation I have to memory's cause, uncertain what remembering signifies, or why it necessarily makes human beings better than animals, since memories are two-faced, they avoid trouble or lead to it, as revenge is a motive for drama and war that might die out if not for the resilience of memory, though some think revenge lies waiting in DNA, which is a problem. Everything is a problem, I can't think of anything significant that isn't a problem from the past for the future, and though I erect temporary altars to what I remember, some of which feels permanent, as I remember scenes exactly the same way for years until I don't, I'm wary of its drastic claims on the present, especially for sensitive people.
If the Puritans hadn't been persecuted and left England, if scientists hadn't wondered if the world were round, if adventurers hadn't despised ordinary limits and sought vistas beyond their eyes, since people have wants and can't stop themselves, if there hadn't been a slave trade, then if Manifest Destiny hadn't been theorized, there wouldn't have been an expansion of the territories or the extermination of Indian nations, if righteousness didn't prevail, there wouldn't have been a Bloody Kansas, there wouldn't have been a Civil War, except states' rights were from the start a singularly important, pernicious issue for our new nation, and without slavery there wouldn't have been a war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Abraham Lincoln wouldn't have been shot by John Wilkes Booth. Mary Todd Lincoln attended seances after her sons died, but if her husband hadn't been assassinated, she might not have attended more of them, certainly not for him, or have gone mad, but she was rumored to have been mad also when Lincoln was alive, and I might he Austrian, never born or already dead. None of this supports a cessation of sensation, or a sensible quiet in the present. I can't undo it, thinking doesn't, I can better take apart a chair in another corner of my room, one that is wrapped in white muslin cloth around its back and seat, damaged and in need of repair, but I may keep it as is, imperfect, a material journal of wounds. I want a perfect chair, like the Minola armchair, by Carlo Mollino, designed during World War II, in Turin, when quality materials were scarce but skilled craftspeople were still available, with an ebonized wood frame, covered in velvet. I have sat in it twice and considered buying it, but I might one day want to take it apart, and no chair held me or my back better or felt more right for my frame, nothing held me better except the arms of a certain man. Wrapped in a Minola armchair, I could dream and speculate, also about my history shadowed by a bigger one, I might have done other than what I did, about some things I had some choice, though about most I didn't, and, in the middle of my life, I can look back and be content or restive. I may pursue my interests, I have time, it's what I have, proverbially I could walk other paths, or invent new versions of the past to believe, there are songs of ruin worth mentioning, and some of us live with the threat of mortification.
Across from my bed, the dark wooden bureau is off center and a framed print above it, not of my choosing, of a bearded doctor, the founder of this institution, is also askew. His impervious, dark eyes, even aslant, peer at me. The housekeeper must have, when making the bed, moved the bureau and picture to clean both more thoroughly and then she must have forgotten to return them to their original places. I feel an intense heat in the room, often the furnace goes berserk or one of the residents adjusts the thermostat to suit him or her better, which inconveniences others, who often return it to a lower or higher temperature, and this can go on all night or morning, surreptitiously, except that everyone may experience the change of heat. My skin actively dries, shrinks, and is fiendishly itchy, augmented by my condition, dermatographia, and I get off the bed and walk to the dresser, first, employing my weight to align it against the wall, to center it as well as the generic portrait of the founder, and then I discard my clothes, which scratch me like a hairshirt, choose a thick cream that promises Immediate Relief and slap it on my arms, and hands, rub it gingerly on my chest, breasts, stomach, and shoulders, and select another for my face, Revitalizing Richness, which I carefully apply, patting the skin and moving my fingers in circles, while making sure to keep off the soft tissue under my eyes. For a moment, I forget my legs, at the bottom of one is a scab or a circle of scaly skin, pinkish, the size of a dime, and it could be psoriasis, I will telephone my dermatologist, he might diagnose it over the phone, even though he doesn't like to, though in my case he makes exceptions, because I have been his patient a long time, he believes I can report my condition in detail, and we have a good relationship, whatever that means. Now I wrap a queen-size all-cotton white towel around me. Outside, the wind gusts, shaking the trees, it blows frantically and whines, I'm protected in this room, relatively safe or merely sheltered, which is a privilege, too, so I think about Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in which, with the Civil War just ended, Lincoln said that each side claimed the same Bible for different ends, "each invoked His aid against the other." He called for "malice toward none." My father and I watched JFK's inaugural on TV, in our spacious den, with the blond Eames chairs and table in the back of its two open, connected rooms, with its walls of sliding glass windows. JFK proclaimed "we dare not forget today that we are heirs of that first revolution," a heritage I claimed, and, later, with his hat, the new president shielded Robert Frost's old eyes from a noon sun that glared and obliterated the words on a bright, white sheet of paper, from which he attempted to read an occasional poem, "Kitty Hawk," and failed; then from memory Frost recited "The Gift Outright," whose lines also suited the occasion, as if penned by a recidivist Puritan: "The land was ours before we were the land's…." My father leaned in toward the television, and the venerated poet, aged and stooped, his brilliant white hair like a halo, leaned against the handsome, young president, who was not healthy, but very few knew that then, who would soon be assassinated, but no one could know that then except a seer, and everything was helter skelter.