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Encyclopedia of the Eye

Disclaimer: Eye of the Day is not a family history, it is not a history.  Yet it is full of well known players, and for better or worse, I have been truthful to their spirit – what I know of it or imagine.  But, as Hollywood says repeatedly, any resemblance to people living and dead is purely coincidental.  That said, not all coincidence is created equal.

What follows is my private encyclopedia:

 

Albert Einstein

In Eye of the Day, Einstein is said to live across the street from Old Mrs. Shaw.  My own great grandmother was not Albert Einstein’s neighbor, but rather his potential landlady.  Einstein, having recently arrived at Princeton University, wished to rent the old lady’s house while she took the year to travel abroad.  The family relays, accurately or not, that he found the tree in her garden “very sympathetic.”  (He also liked the blue curtains.)  Thus arrangements were made for the rental to proceed, but before move-in-move-out day, his tenancy ended abruptly.  Observing a note nailed to the sympathetic tree, and unaware that this note was actually a clue to a neighborhood treasure hunt, Einstein alerted the FBI.  As in Eye of the Day, the quote was from Kublai Khan:  “all who cried beware beware” etc.  Einstein considered the verse a Nazi threat.

In Eye of the Day, Aunt Ethyl says, “there are too many great men in Princeton.”  In real life, even the local cop on the beat was erudite: it was he, not the FBI, that recognized the line from the poem.  Though the incident was only a misunderstanding unintentionally orchestrated by literate children, forever spooked, Einstein declined the rental, and my great grandmother did not go abroad.

Other family connections to Einstein are equally, curiously violent.  My aunt served him tea at a faculty gathering, and in awe of the great man, poured the tea down his trousers.  Reportedly, Einstein just went on talking.  My uncle, learning to drive in in a winged Buick, almost ran the great man down.

After the dropping of the atomic bomb, Einstein became a peace activist.

Aubrey Wilson

Actually his name was John Lacey.  He was a commander under George Washington, and a Quaker, one of the few “fighting Quakers” in the Revolutionary War.  When the Quakers refused to give horses to the American cause, George said to John, “Hang a few Quakers,” and obediently, John did.  In fact, he hung his own uncle.

 

 

 

Residents of the Northeast Kingdom

In a village called Greensboro in the Northeast Kingdom, remote corner of the state of Vermont, you’ll find a glacial lake in which Greta Garbo swam naked.  My father was fishing when he met her.

The Northeast Kingdom is known for its weather and its Yankee belligerence, with a strange modest way of cussing, and winters broken only by the festivities of sugar on snow.

Vermont is everything Delia says it is in the novel. But she neglects to mention that the state was its own republic before it joined the nation, and is presently considered the most likely state to secede. An anonymous poet, from the golden years of the Republic, put it this way:

Come York or come Hampshire, come traitors or knaves,
If ye rule o’er our land ye shall rule o’er our graves;
Our vow is recorded–our banner unfurled,
In the name of Vermont we defy all the world!


The 10th Mountain Ski Division: 

In 1939, Finnish skiers defended their country against Soviet Invasion.  In America, the president of the National Ski Patrol was impressed, and he lobbied the United States War Department to create a division of skiers to protect the northern border from German invasion.  The ranks of the 10th Mountain Ski Division were soon made up of Olympic contenders and world-class sportsmen plucked from the slopes by the Ski Patrol.  Though the 10th spent the majority of the war dressed all in white and rigorously training in the American mountains, when they were finally deployed in 1944,  no winter equipment accompanied them to Italy.   Thankfully, they were supplied with synthetic ropes – created by DuPont Chemical. Expert climbers, they took Mt. Belvidere…

It was February 1945, and ice glazed the vertical bluff of Mancinello-Campiano which protected the German stronghold of Mt. Belvidere, the highland strip of the Gothic Line, also called the Winter Line. German gun pits, bunkers, minefields and armed ancient abbeys reached from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, cutting east to west through the Apennine peaks that split renaissance Florence from the railway town, Bologna.  From the limestone mountains, the Germans could peer down on that north-south thoroughfare and machine-gun everything moving.  The road between the two cities was littered with tanks in which sat the scorched remains of the all-Negro American division. The Allies had failed three times to take the mountain without which there was no pushing north.  To successfully take Mt Belvidere, the Mancinello-Campiano ridge had to first be secured.  But this was considered impossible: the ridge was steep and unstable.  So small patrols of expert climbers prepared five trails up the ridge and then waited for the thaw…

After Mt. Belvidere, the 10th Mountain Division joined the Spring Push, moving north across the Italian front.  When war in Europe ended, the division was to be sent to mainland Japan, but because Japan surrendered after Nagasaki, the division returned home.

The 10th Mountain Division engaged in 114 days of combat in which 4154 were wounded and 992 killed, the largest number of U.S. casualties per combat day in Europe.

Further reading:

 

Tree Spikers

A nail is hammered into a tree in order to save the tree from logging.  The nail, though it will not harm the tree, breaks the saw, making logging economically unviable.

“In the woods we return to reason and faith,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.  One of my students made me a calligraphic rendition of those words, which I pinned above our herb cabinet in the kitchen.  For at least two of the five years that it took me to write Eye of the Day, “In the Woods We Return to Reason and Faith” was its working title.

Even in Emerson’s time, the deforestation of America was well underway.  Today, tree spiking is an attempt to prevent the destruction of the last North American heritage woods.  It is a tactic of eco-defense that some call eco-terrorism.  It isn’t altogether nonviolent resistance: twenty years ago, one millworker was seriously hurt when a nail shattered his blade.

Nowadays no one uses six-penny nails like Amos does in the novel.  In the low-tech arms race between logging corporations and radical environmentalists, corporations trumped nails with metal detectors, and environmentalists trumped metal detectors with ceramic nails.

A how-to history and treespiker’s safety guide was published by EarthFirst! in 1982.   (Ecodefense by Dave Foreman.) But though EarthFirst! popularized the practice, no one knows who spiked the first tree. Some say that tree spiking originated in America’s Pacific Northwest due to logging labor disputes in the late 19th century.  I like to imagine the trajectory of the spike: from a demand for fair pay and safety for laborers, to respect and sanctity for habitat.

The Pacific Northwest still has some half million hectares of unprotected old growth forests in the possession of multinational logging corporations.  In most other parts of the United States and Canada, (and certainly in Western Europe) the battle to preserve large-scale biodiversity and our common arboreal heritage has been lost.  The fight continues on the rainy western coast.

In the woods beyond my home on Cortes Island in British Columbia grow Red Cedars, sixty meters high, replete with nesting bald eagles and great horned owls and an ungodly number of insects living their vital and thankless lives.  The Red Cedar was sacred to all the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest.  They called it the Tree of Life.  As a newcomer to the cedar woods, I consider myself lucky: if I need sustenance, I can still sit under a tree.

But the problem is I could return home from a book tour one year and find the trees are gone, for a sizable chunk of this little island is owned by Island Timberlands (who bought it from Bracan who bought it from Weyerhaeuser who bought it from McMillan Bloedel). In the last twenty years , the Klahoose tribe, the Native Canadians whose reserve is on Cortes Island, have unsuccessfully negotiated with the timber companies to return their island holdings to Community Forest.

What we fear on Cortes Island: more rain, more rain, and clearcutting.

After finishing this entry, I went to the co-op for local broccoli and eggs.  On the bulletin board I saw a notice announcing the spiking of Cortes’ forests.

further reading:

 

The Corporations: Standard Oil, DuPont Chemical, I G Farben, Ethyl Inc, Ford, General Motors Etc.

In Eye of the Day, Aunt Ethyl compares Standard, DuPont and IG Farben to the Holy Trinity. All the corporations mentioned in the novel share a metaphysical bent: what appears to be many is one.

Who is Standard Oil of New Jersey today? Exxon, Sunocco, and Mobil Oil.

Why is Standard Oil in the novel at all? Because Standard, DuPont and Farben created Ethyl Inc., which so blatantly fueled the Nazi war machine that Standard Oil of New Jersey was accused of treason by the US congress.

Here are a few more overlaps between the corporations (or between the one and the many and the Third Reich):

  • Irenee DuPont was controlling shareholder of General Motors, whose subsidiary Opel built warplanes for the Nazis.
  • Henry Ford wrote an anti-Semitic tract that can still be found on neo-Nazi websites, and the Ford company is even today facing charges for collaborating with and profiting from the Reich.
  • Though IG Farben was not American owned, when it was dismantled in the Nuremberg Trials, for having used slaved labor at its Auschwitz-Birkenau factories, its assets, as well as many executives, were transferred over to Bayer.  What was Bayer’s role in the Nazi regime? It sponsored the experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Naming one corporation, a hundred others pile on.  It gets confusing.  Thankfully Bayer produces aspirin.

I had a lousy American history teacher in high school, but I was very good at cramming, memorizing and retaining information for at least twenty four hours, so that my test results never reflected my boredom.  None of the information above appeared in my history books.  If it had, I might have been interested.

Further reading:

Nazi

The words “Nazi” and “evil” display a loose Rorschach mirroring on the page.  But perhaps it is actually a fun house mirror, a mirror that we seek out in order to distort ourselves.

Hannah Arendt wrote of “the banality of evil” in relation to the Eichmann trials: evil, not so much as the presence of hatred, but the absence of imagination.  If her analysis holds, and it is imagination (leading to absence of identification) that the evil-doer lacks, the distant bystander (the newspaper reader, the morning news watcher) could be said to suffer a similar deprivation.  But here lack of imagination leads not to evil, but to false innocence.  What Aubrey has to grapple with in Eye of the Day is the comfort of the grotesque: when evil appears in its unadulterated form, the distant observer does not identify with it and therefore is let off the hook.

What hook?  Our nature, or purchases, or unequal happiness, the plundering system we live in, partake of, and benefit from, etc etc which is certainly far from innocent, at best both good and bad.  All this vanishes in the face of Evil. Pure evil’s rare occasion assures us of an unambiguous world, and – seen at a distance – this is disquietingly comforting.  If I do not find the “Nazis” ambiguous in the least, I can breathe easy, for I know where I stand.  In comparison to them, I imagine myself to be clean.  Their shadow is so much darker than mine that mine appears not to exist.

In Eye of the Day, I wanted Aubrey Brown not to find it all so easy.  He is standing at a distance, but no further away than his camera, and his camera has the double function of being protective and revealing.  Aubrey is burdened by his powerlessness, and even more so by his ability to observe his powerlessness.  He is oppressed by his own innocence, both its verity and its pretense.  He cannot pretend to be clean of the soil that he grows in.  He is keenly (if inarticulately) aware of the observer’s dilemma: separating self from the system is like separating the image from the field; it can be done but not with honesty.

Further reading: Hannah Arendt

 

The Christmas Pickle

During the Civil War, a Yankee soldier in a Confederate prison, on the verge of starvation, managed to procure a pickle from his jailors.  Feeling that this pickle had performed “such wonders for both his health and spirit” and enabled him to survive captivity, in later years of freedom he gave thanks for his life and family by honoring the pickle with a yearly Christmas hunt.  The tradition spread, like the triumph of turkey over goose at dinner, into many a house in the country.  Today, sadly, the Christmas Pickle has all but died out.

 



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