I’ve not worked since the bombing of Guernica five weeks ago, haven’t even been contributing my share to the WPA project. Which I like: a park sculpture meant as a clambering device for little kids. But there was a park in Guernica too, kids playing. The German Condor Legion hit the town on market day, nowhere to hide, thousands of people killed and torn apart, cremated in the fires that followed. It was a completely inhuman thing, and it made me a little crazy. Of course, the world is full of sadness — all the massacres in Spain, in Ethiopia, in China, here in this country for that matter: men tortured with blowtorches, then hung from trees and set alight — but this was something new. Others could put a good face on it, talk about its arousing world opinion finally against the Fascist terror — how could Roosevelt ignore this? — but I felt like those people out on the Caspian steppes must have felt all those centuries ago, ancestors of mine maybe, when they first saw those strange monsters thundering down on them from the morning sun, awesome, dismaying (the rumble of it, the precision, the terror) — no, not the Mongols, hordes like any hordes, but the horses. Now I look up in the sky, where life comes from, and see it dark, yet garish, ablaze with metallic death.
I destroyed half a year’s labors that afternoon in a fit of — what? despair? guilt? outrage? revelation? childish nihilism? I don’t know. All I remember is I picked up the oxyacetylene torch as the news came through on the radio, in between soap commercials, thinking to fight back with art, to forge some affirmation in the face of so much annihilation, something like that, and instead I went berserk, fusing everything within the blowpipe’s reach, including a stack of metal folding chairs, the pipe on my old stove, and the bars at the foot of my iron bed. In fact, it was the alarming stench of burning blankets and mattress straw that finally brought me back to my senses — I twisted the valves shut, threw a pot of cold coffee at the smoldering bedding, wrenched the sagging bars at the foot upright and held them till they cooled, and then fell down on the bed, still in my gloves and goggles, to lie in all that stink and wreckage, thinking: This is probably more or less what the survivors of Guernica are doing, because: what else can they do? I stared at the melted cityscapes, the mowed Jarama flowers, the broken-backed jugglers. A cat made of little pennyworth nails I’d been working on for nearly a year had collapsed on its own fused belly like an old drunk. Nearly a year! What have I been doing all this time? I must be mad!
The Black Baron wandered in then, looking faintly offended, circled the bed once, then jumped up beside me. “Baron,” I said, “Leo’s right. Art’s just another form of hysteria. If you’re not on the front lines, you’re dead.” The Baron purred. “We’ve got to grow up, Baron. We’ve got to learn how to kill.” Instead, though, I dropped off into a deep thick begoggled sleep… from which — only today, it might be said — I’m at last stirring.…
At the river, where it rolls under Ogden, I pause, watching the rain freckle the dirty brown water, sweeping back and forth with the wind like indefatigable and ever renewable armies. An illusion, of course. Armies can perish entirely, causes can be lost, nothing is inevitable. Just because people can control their thoughts, they suppose they can control the world of things. They project their convictions out on the world and are surprised when the world takes no notice. A kind of magical thinking: Freud called it “omnipotence of thoughts.” I’ve often been guilty of it myself in that space of time between thinking up a new idea for a sculpture and actually picking up the torch to begin. All the worse when it happens out in the world. Orthodox Marxists like my friend Simon tend to forget the old rabbi’s warning—”History is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims”—and to look upon history not as the minute-by-minute invention it really is, but as a kind of discovery, something that unfolds inexorably before your eyes, in spite of all of man’s willful and unwillful resistance. Which is, as Leo puts it, a lot of mystical borax. Nothing so infuriates Leo as Simon saying something like “You can’t hurry history, comrade.” Usually, this is Simon’s excuse for avoiding demonstrations and the like, and so that makes Leo all the madder. “Listen, Simon,” he’ll yell, his mustaches bristling, “I don’t believe in historical forces and I don’t believe in moral positions. Nobody’s got a right to anything, and nothing—nothing, goddamn it! — is inexorable. The struggle against oppression seems endless, but it can end, and the oppression is real but it is not immoral. I can understand these shits like Girdler. If I’d inherited a railroad or a steel plant, or had fought my way up the goddamn ladder like he did to get one, I’d be on the other side fighting to keep what I had, just as hard as I’m fighting now to take it away. Partly just because it’s fun. And don’t think any crazy historical spirit or supposedly superior morality would stop me! All that’s just fiction, brother, and fiction is the worst enemy we got!”
Leo’s right when he argues that actions are the only hard things in the world — I also believe in the essential softness of objects, the hardness of gesture, it’s why I like to work in welded metal. But these actions have less certain meaning and more lives in the world than Leo likes to allow, and he’s too much gripped by the image of life as a gutter fight. Of course, the Party’s doing everything it can to make it seem like one since the Stalin-Trotsky split, turning old family friends like Simon and Harry into mortal enemies, and the kangaroo trials in Russia right now are making Leo’s claim that “the only real joy in life is power, and there’s just not enough of it to go around,” sound like a truism, but this is to ignore the effect a changed context can have and to underestimate the appetite for hope and brotherhood. Leo also finds my jugglers and athletes frivolous, but that’s because he talks without listening to himself; he’d be much closer to the mark to say they were self-contradictory. Leo puts a lot of people off with his hardnosed bluster, but I’ve always felt close to him. He and Jesse befriended me during rough times on the road, and I followed them around in their efforts to organize coal miners, tenant farmers, ironworkers, housewreckers, Leo becoming a kind of father figure to me. Not having had one of my own. And from those times, I know that Leo’s not the cynic he pretends to be. If anything, he’s too ruled by his emotions. Injustice offends him at some level that seems almost organic, and he stakes out these skeptical positions to give himself more room to move and breathe.