Monday last was Columbus Day. For me the sole practical implication of
that fact was that there was no mail delivery, but I was aware of a cloud of
metaphysical implications forming on the horizon. We had just enjoyed a rare visit from a dear
friend from Austin TX, who reported that his city council had just voted to
replace the holiday with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I have also been reading the papers. I know that Mayor Di Blasio, whose father’s German
name (Wilhelm) was of less political utility than his mother’s Italian one, had
been musing aloud about the problem of Columbus Circle and its conspicuous
statue of the Mediterranean mariner. He
wants to cleanse the City of its fascist heritage, but perhaps for the moment
he will be satisfied with such low-hanging fruit as the sidewalk plaque
commemorating the ticker-tape parade that honored Marshall Petain in 1931. Then, more gradually perhaps, he could
abolish Columbia University. The disposition
of the District of Columbia, Columbus, Ohio, the Columbia River, the Knights of
Columbus, “Way Down in Columbus Georgia”, etc. might be posptponable to the
next administration.
threatened in Manhattan
I have been
here once before, in 1992, when I was one of the curators of a major exhibition
at the Library of Congress marking the Quincentenary
of Columbus’s first voyage. In 1892 the
Columbian Exposition had celebrated a number of the unlikely virtues of a
medieval Genoese mystic: his Yankee fortitude, his Protestant work ethic, his indomitable
will to succeed in business. Now we were
supposed to find in him nought but blind luck, unquenchable greed, and an
appetite for genocide. The verb discover and its kinfolk were to be
banished. Columbus could not have
“discovered” America, as America was never lost. People already lived there. Of course my whole life has been a series of great
discoveries—such as girls, Shakespeare, and spaghetti
alle vongole—that somebody else probably already knew about.
Neither the atrocities committed by
some Europeans nor the valid indignation of some contemporary seekers after
justice are to be dismissed or belittled, but historical truth is ill-served by
ideological erasures and air-brushings. Karl Marx famously said that changing the world should take
priority over merely understanding it.
The first stanza of the “Internationale” contains the following
aspiration: Du passé faisons table rase—“Let
us make a blank slate of the past”—or more literally a tabula rasa, an erased wax tablet, the student’s notebook of
ancient times. In the last century, in
Poland, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, and elsewhere, political regimes ostensibly committed to
making the world a better place through principled erasure amassed hecatombs
reckoned at about a hundred million human lives.
At the end of the eighteenth
century the Indians of the northeast were not without grievances, but neither
were the European refugees. Among the
crimes imputed to King George in our Declaration of Independence is his
attempt “to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all
ages, sexes and conditions.” The
etymological meaning of the word “savage” in English was “forest-dweller”; the
evolved meaning grew out of observed experience. Even so, early (Anglo) American
writers, following the lead of such French Romantics as Bernard de Saint-Pierre
and Réné de Chateaubriand give us admiring and idealized pictures of Indians
and Indian lore. I think of the novels
of Fenimore Cooper or Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” a masterpiece condemned by the
political correctness of people who have never read it.
a happy islander, according to Pliny
I do not know whether Bill Di Blasio has studied all of Columbus’s writings, but I have. I am especially interested in his “Book of Prophecies”, which holds interest for me in its reflections of medieval Franciscan millenarianism. Columbus was a sailor of amazing skill and daring, and he grasped a navigational principle, in retrospect obvious but at the time audaciously innovative. As an observer of phenomena unknown in Europe he is often disappointingly banal. Things are either “like we have in Castile” or “different from what we have in Castile”—the initial reaction of many tourists even in our jet age. As to the human inhabitants of his “India”, he looked for what he had been taught to look for by ancient geographers like Pliny and Strabo and medieval Munchausens like John of Mandeville. That is, he looked for giants, pygmies, monocular men, retrohumeral men, macropedes, and dog-headed men, also known as cannibals. We usually find what we are looking for, if we look hard enough.
We may
fault Columbus for blinkered vision. Although
he was among the earlier world travelers, he lacked a cosmopolitan view. In other words he is different from what we
have in Castile, or perhaps Berkeley.
But if cultural solipsism is to be deplored in the fifteenth century,
one might pause before indulging it in the twenty-first. The past is very important, but it is
actually hard--very hard--to
grasp. We are prone to treat its events
and personages as inkblots in our self-designed Rorschach tests, and then to
believe that our inkblot is essential
truth.
probably safe (for the moment) in Barcelona
