epitaph, epigraph

on the tomb, on the book

epitaph

All the rest can seem so trivial as people are slaughtered and bombed to death.

Hyper-nationalism, human filtering, violent exploitation are all encapsulated along the militarized edge of Gaza. Both the homicidal berserkers of Hamas and the callous war criminals of Israel have exploited the border between Gaza and Israel to wage mass murder.

Witnessing it from the other side of the world can feel debilitating. I’m heartened, ever so slightly, by recognizing the importance of paying attention, studying history. History which starts now. Some reading I’ve been dipping into. This from Joshua Leifer, recommended by a friend, I found spot on and particularly relevant to those who are neither Jewish nor Palestinian and who may feel politically homeless:

The right to grieve is no less a human right than the right to live. And if the left cannot recognize this—if the left fails at this very basic task—then it has learned nothing from the catastrophes of the last century.

The lesson is to not genocide. The lesson is to grieve for those being killed now, those killed and abducted on October 7, and those suffering deadly oppression and attrition for the last 17 years. And keep going back and back. It’s not an empty rending of shirts. Grief is related to gravity, centripetal force, a bringing together. Grief is political.

Antigone, the eponymous character of 5th century BCE play by Sophocles, dares to “defy the city.” To do what? To grieve her brother. She is accused of “being in love with impossibility.” And she is condemned to being buried alive in a cave. Her punisher-uncle, Creon, resorts to this slow death sentence so as not to offend the sentiments of the international community, the gods.

All histories are connected. And they all demand presentation. Which brings me, with heavy heart, to what seems so trivial, but is not: the toiling towards art, the understanding of politics.

epigraph

A lot of different directions you can take with epigraphs, those few-line literary baubles strung up on the frontispieces of books. I went with an Emily Dickinson poem for my first book, but also added the little epigrammatic lanterns at the front of each section. For one, I used an unattributed quote from Jay Z: “Can I live?” (It’s a pointed and pertinent question.) For another, I pulled from Deuteronomy.

With epigraphs you can go colloquial, obscure, untranslated, or classic. You can go dark, sarcastic, hifalutin, or abstruse.

Epigraphs, in my taste, are supposed to be a little cryptic, even bordering on the inscrutable or outré. They function as a key or hermeneutic, but they don’t really need to open very far into the text. They should feel right, set the tone, and — wonderfully, refreshingly — don’t need to explain. All epigraphs need to do is angle your gaze before you turn to the first page.

Epigraphs aren’t old. According to Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs, by Jared A. Griffin, they only came into common use about 300 years ago as poets borrowed, in homage, from other poets as they began their texts.

Despite the point of them being not precisely explicable, my life is organized around trying to say the unsaid, and so I’ll do a little roundabout explaining of my choices for the epigraphs for my forthcoming book, The Case for Open Borders.

For one of my two, I swiped from Les Mis, that expansive, seemingly infinite novel I’m currently rereading.

The classic historical thriller is about humanity confronting the law, the motivations of revolution, and the limits and pitfalls of nationalism. Timely stuff. Here’s my selection:

We are unlearning certain things, and that is good, provided that while unlearning one thing we are learning another. No vacuum in the human heart! Certain forms are torn down, and so they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

Abolition, despite the alpha-privative, is a positive vision. Liberation is not about tearing down the wall — that’s only the first step — but about building something better and anew. My book, for all of its attempted takedowns of the global border regime, is really about what we can and must build. No vacuum in the human heart and no vacuum in politics.

Hugo had a lot to say about the ancien régime (Napoleon himself, the wily Bonapartists, plenty of the roman-numeraled Louis) but for all his scathing criticism, he held and built on hope.

Some other favorites

W.G. Sebald used unattributed epigraphs for each of his four sections in The Emigrants. The first is

And the last remnants

memory destroys

No quote marks, no period. Sebald seeks to throw the reader, keeping us on unsteady ground. No anchor, not even punctuation or — as with his photos — captions. He grabs you by the bleak.

Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, uses only one word, but attributes it cheekily:

“What?” –Richard Nixon

Cormac McCarthy pinned three epigraphs on the head of Blood Meridian. He also included a subtitle (“Or the Evening Redness in the West”) which is pretty rare for a novel. His first two epigraphs are too heady and abstruse for my taste, but his third nails it, coming from a 1982 article from the Yuma Daily Sun:

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

Or consider this gem from Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac:

I saw a queen, wearing a gold dress, and her dress was full of eyes, and all the eyes were transparent, like fiery flames and yet like crystals. The crown she wore on her head has as many crowns, one above the other, as there were eyes in her dress. She approached me dreadfully fast and put her foot on my neck, and cried out in a terrible voice: “Do you know who I am?” And I said: “Yes! Long have you caused me pain and woe. You are my soul’s faculty of reason.”

And Hugo’s pick for his nearly 1,500-page doorstopper? A long and beautiful self-justifying one—that he wrote himself from exile.

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century—the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labor, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.

Before the law

My second epigraph is from Emily Dickinson, sort of by way of Kafka, and first recommended by my friend and mentor John Granger. Kafka’s parable “Before the Law” I’ve been contemplating for years. I have a page-long exegesis of it in the upcoming book. Much of Kafka’s writing explores and lingers in the annals of legal penetralia (ickily onomatopoetic, that word) which made me want to reread him as I was trying to go deep on borders. And I found plenty of inspiring paradoxes in there. Dickinson, too, explores linguistic innards, those guts and recesses of thought and language. Her poems read like a taxidermied mind.

Obviously there's the wall metaphor in the poem I pick. And that wall slots right into border talk. But her work, her words, always also go also beyond metaphor: they’re like little pebbles lodged between those dashes. The poem is about love beyond limits, and it is about a wall. Like Kafka, it logically lays bare the dilemma of the wall as much as it lays bare logic itself.

The bolded below is the epigraph, but here’s the whole poem.

I had not minded — Walls —
Were Universe — one Rock —
And far I heard his silver Call
The other side the Block —

I'd tunnel — till my Groove
Pushed sudden thro' to his —
Then my face take her Recompense —
The looking in his Eyes —

But 'tis a single Hair —
A filament — a law —
A Cobweb — wove in Adamant —
A Battlement — of Straw —

A limit like the Veil
Unto the Lady's face —
But every Mesh — a Citadel —
And Dragons — in the Crease —

AZ Lu updates

I’ve been recently writing a bit about Pinal County Sheriff and U.S. Senate Candidate Mark Lamb. When I saw him in person for the first time a few weeks ago, I walked up to him, held out my hand, and said, “Sheriff Lamb, I’m John Washington, reporter with Arizona Luminaria.” He stood up, all six-feet-many-inches of him, cowboy hat on his head and a gun and a sheriff’s star on his belt, and said, “Now I don’t know if that hand is worth shaking.”

He said I’d written “a hit piece” on him and flashed me a grimacing smile. All I did was look into his finances.

He eventually shook my hand.

Unrelated (but also related) I wrote about the jaguar.