Crank: In Favor of the Outnumbered

By Daniel Whitman

Crank was written over a 30-year period, and covers the experiences
of 40. Its fiction and non-fiction mix retains no more purity than does Mann or Conrad or the U.S. News. The settings Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Conakry, Brookline, Port-au-Prince and others gave the props, not the essence of the experiences. Like strophic patterns of the French chanson, they stood the logic upright and sustained the tale, never diving for the observers heart but gaining ground on it by inadvertence. The foreign postings brought fresh news, conspiracy, javelins into the unsuspecting heart, then succeeded one another
like lovers decamping before dawn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 23, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465329950

Daniel Whitman

Whitman has worked as a State Department official in Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Haiti, and Cameroon. In Washington he has served with the African and European Bureaus, and the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Topics of his forty articles range from current affairs, African Studies, travel profiles of Europe, and of cultural leaders on three continents. His books are Kaidara, a presentation and study of a 1000-year-old African folk epic; Madrid Inside Out, a guide to residence for foreigners in Spain; One Step Up, a manual for buyers of stringed instruments; and A Haiti Chronicle, the Undoing of a Latent Democracy 1999-2001.

Book preview

THE HEMINGWAY STYLE

They said, Make it work short. Use verbs. Keep irony out unless you know what irony is. Say what must be said, only.

Hence air hostesses who announce, Fasten mask over face, as if in the current regime of prolonged lives there were no time to say, Fasten the mask over your face. What if they were right, and there weren’t time enough?

There is voluntary and involuntary reading. The involuntary—the reports and news dispatches—must indeed be verbal (of verbs.)

As for the rest, if it were not made of dependencies and did not reside in ambiguity; and if it did not secrete negation to gather and align evasive phases of thought without name; and if it did not enter mind states which only in complicity with the sweat of language could be pinned like butterflies on a felt field; then why would it be called voluntary?

PART ONE

(Beginnings)

BEGINNINGS

It’s hard not to love you for saying so, she said.

He said, I would say, then, give up the effort!.

Her fingers inched towards his, rounding the plate of blinis, advancing like a coiled snake casting prisms of light through the penumbra of the old-world café, to the willing receptors of his own fingers’ touch.

-     -     -     -

The narrative is kaleidoscopic, said the one, revealed each day as more rueful, the vineyard come at last to the infertile terminus of a near-century of fruition.

The other said, It is not kaleidoscopic: it is a kaleidoscope. Can’t see but through the damn glass gizmos stuck at the end of this thing.

-     -     -     -

"Tag dig i hånden, said the Dane through the gloom of false spring settling over the cemetery across the broad avenue, Take yourself in hand."

This he meant to offer in dialogue, though there was no one just then to receive the thought, only him to think it.

-     -     -     -

Markham, political officer at the light-but-not-heat-producing embassy in Buenos Aires, was himself so yet unrevealed, and so averse to the intricate lingo of his profession, that they didn’t know what else to do with him. They sent him off to Kosovo, where merely existing was taken by the promotion boards as a kind of triumph.

-     -     -     -

Her heart raced uncontrolled, inversely to the now lengthening distance from the dreaded border behind, staffed by uniformed fools and foes, predators. The days of panic and penury, the bad days should now be done.

She pulled the car off to the shoulder of the road, woods to the rear, woods ahead. The heart, though, had gone to arrhythmia at the moment of rescue, the children bewildered and instructionless in the forest. She pulled out the cell phone to call someone, anyone. If this is a film of a film of a film… she said, as if it were the last thought of all.

-     -     -     -

The White Hunter, pearls of sweat dripping from the pith helmet to his corpulent face below, swept the palm frond aside and viewed the clearing beyond, unsure whether or not to venture as if with a child’s first steps, onto the golf green ahead.

-     -     -     -

A fireplace crackled to meet the autumnal chill, driving nostalgia into each one present, in the various ways nostalgia reckons as a force for good and ill. The pianist’s foot lifted from the pedal, leaving a creaking sound at the sonata’s final chord, releasing the ancient instrument’s gears and cantilevers, and musculature, like a yawn.

-     -     -     -

Cruelly confined, the ape reached its hand out from the bars of the cell of its 40-year ordeal, to the rare passer-by. Its eloquent eyes, their fire long gone, beseeched the stranger: Why am I here?

-     -     -     -

Some moments after union was achieved, he could no longer tell the difference between him and her, and said so.

It goes with an ancient belief that this actually happens, she said, arching to meet him yet closer.

-     -     -     -

Crossing the Panhandle was hot, endless, an intergalactic gap between Oklahoma to the north and the real Texas to the south.

Imagine the grain silos as medieval castles, said the one to the others, who sat back in the car too worn from tedium to try to do so.

-     -     -     -

He couldn’t sleep for the shooting in the neighborhood. He got up and went to the kitchen, where the phone was.

You’ve been in war zones before, he said to her over the phone. What is this happening? He held the phone to the window facing the gulley, and the woods beyond.

Thirty-eight Magnums, some Uzis mixed in, she said. Nothing to worry about until there’s return fire. Go back to sleep.

Three years later they drank gin-and-tonics at a bar on the avenue, after work.

In the dream, the dead returned and came at the living, enraged, and fought them to the floor.

She squinted from the smoke of her own cigarette. There may then be unfinished business still to do.

The pastel Washington twilight settled over the city, announcing the summer heat ahead, and the reassignments that kept six thousand of them in limbo for the travel orders to strange places, the wide-avenued cities over the Earth and its civilizations and those civilizations’ stepchildren.

-     -     -     -

Would it be too late for us to start again? she asked.

He took the phone from his ear for a moment. He didn’t want to say it all at that particular time, but it was said: It’s not your fault, really not. But it may be now enough.

Spring spread through the neighborhood like night parachutists taking a town by stealth. The phone went silent.

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, WAR

Some viscerally rejected the U.S. role in the Vietnam conflict, others in the widest sense dodged its enigmas: was the Southeast Asian jungle as irrelevant as it was distant? . . . But if so, did we propose delivering the apparently well-disposed southerners up to the crazed forces of orthodoxy to their own North? Might we have just listened to Pierre Mendès-France after Dien Bien Phu, telling us delphically we would never impose relative good over relative evil? Were the many mistaken murders a lesser arrogance than overlooking the mess left by the then friendly French?

We sat in college waiting to be taken by war, knowing that not many generations of men had spent their twentieth year in any other way. We studied history. On Fridays, the professor quizzed us on assigned subjects with his implacable and old-fashioned scrutiny in the cavernous amphitheater. We read of Europe’s youth, sacrificed once and again like a sound loop, to the egos of its elders. It seemed amazing that any were left at all. Done in by honor, or territory, or nationhood, or justice, but by miscalculations mainly, and in accordance with the protocol of a generation’s sacrifice as part of the expected process, the hand dealt to those agreeing to be born.

The Austrian writer Jakov Lind visited our campus in about 1965, met fifty of us in the Student Union and explained the simpler meaning of his opaque fictions: the one generation envious of the youth and powers of the next, succumbing to the appeal of exterminating them.

We read German history for a year, took 1648 as the pattern that brought what followed as Germany, herself, lay fucked by a cynicism such that she could never right herself really again.

We played, read, came to revere and despise, bicycled along country roads by fallow corn fields. There were no malls yet, nor money to spend if there had been. The talk had to do with history and language and what had been said by those over the centuries who had woven thoughts into texts.

Freshman week the wrecking ball took down a wall of a venerated building to make way for its expedient replacement. As the dust settled in the morning from the old wreck, to 200 observing citizens a griffito too huge to be mistaken came slowly into view from the surviving inner wall, where ingenious vandals had crept the previous night: Fuck you. The scatological rage of the mid 1960s, and its premonition of ominous events yet to come, was off and running. The unformulated and not yet articulated sense of needless doom drew initial salvos from around the country and world, but the griffito we saw that autumn day took the whole dialogue to a single paraphrase. We pealed in the decade’s catastrophes with belly laughter, not the intellectual laughter, yet, of the throat. That would come later, when matters turned more serious.

The students staged street theater in the chapel, to the background of mighty organ preludes as they filed in for the Tuesday assemblies. Two toughs in military garb from the Army/Navy store dragged a naked Asian undergrad to the front, pulled out guns and announced to the thousand spectators, This man has been found guilty of crimes against the American people! We will now kill him, will anyone act to stop us?

Then they drew their 45’s shot him dead, of course with blanks. We knew what they meant, we were all accomplices.

We staged Brecht, imagined having the time to read Shakespeare’s histories (but never doing so), received letters of advancement and despair from high school classmates at other campuses, and sensed both the teaming cities to the East (New York, Beirut, Delhi, always further east) and the fecund Ohio soil underfoot. Bicycles, snow, candles during freezing autumn evenings, ineffective flirtations, and silent readers in an archaic reading room filled the proscenium. The past was our reference point, in those days not yet discredited by the innovations and technology which were still then only the domain of lone eccentrics. Then when the eccentrics grew to become the majority 25 years later, and as the past lost stature, our pity grew for the whole resulting outcome and especially for ourselves.

Following Medieval European history was like coursing through a dream of veiled significance, the points of reference (God-not-democracy, honor-not-justice) all askew. The dream was not beautiful, not nightmarish, just alluring with explanations not given, importance not manifest, stories compelling but lacking the third, defining tone of a triad.

As we entered the nineteenth century in our readings we awakened, groggy, to see not as much the senselessness of the dream as the banality of the signposts which were at last legible: Frenchman enslaving Mitteleuropa with unwanted liberty, Russia coy and retrograde in the corner, Metternich and Bismarck moving to the empty spaces with a crafty intellect we recognized from the occasional newspaper filtered into the campus like samizdat to bring the yet cruder consciousness of a presently mounting war, and the spiders weaving it, and the cretins who accepted that it might benefit any human, anywhere, ever.

Namibian Herreros falling in the 1890’s to the Gatling gun for the sake of experimentation; Boers capturing Europe’s sympathies as they defied England and provided rite de passage for Winston Churchill; Boxers in China smashed by a still muscular and undaunted West which in retrospect seemed unnecessarily bent on the competition which would later kill it, but which still provided such poems! Such paintings! And Proust.

We did not require the yet unknown skills of the later writers and documentalists in order to imagine the agonies of the battlefield; the yet unglutted mercantile meeting place of horrors (Picasso’s Guernica, still on view for us in New York, gave us all our non video-formed imaginations required fully to sense the waste of it all, and the idiocy) left us knowing dread. But the charms of the Museum and of the eloquence of the written past got our attentions.

We saw few films, but one we liked was a discarded sci-fi from the 40’s or 50’s, which depicted a space platter landing at night on a Midwestern field. When the alarmed yokels approach the sophisticated space vessel, the one farmer says to the other, Must be a bomb, until a circular hatch on the contraption begins to undo itself with persistent grinding sounds, implying passengers inside about to disembark.

Wait a minute, says the other one in overalls in alarmed response. Bombs don’t unscrew!

After the rictus undid the movie audience, the ones present in the hall that night coded the line for the next four years as reference for lame-brained foolishness: Wait a minute, bombs don’t unscrew!

We drifted late into the night over bad donuts in the lounge, deplored the ambiguous endgame of our efforts in a predicament of war which was voluntary for the nation, involuntary for the benighted conscripts. Like scouts lacking field maps we stumbled through events and escalations and options for avoidance, to a backdrop of masterful slide lectures on Art History. Our sense of the power of events and stories came at the cusp of an age when the Power of the Image would soon make each such feeling a mere poke in the eye.

We spoke when we had to. When we didn’t, we were content to think, more than a few of us heretical in bypassing conventions, repelling received ideas, making our own direct links to the large and the vast. We read accounts of religions which killed people for doing the same.

We lived history’s last decade of manageable road traffic and improvisatory television, preceding the noise which, once established, could never be reversed since once there is noise, silence can no longer be reestablished.

I could never argue both sides of any question. To me, history’s protagonists seemed the greater and lesser villains, and I could only choose sides early on in the unraveling of conflict.

Twenty years later I noticed the basis of it all, the Four Boys: Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville. They left the basso continuo for which most that followed in America was development and counterpoint. The depths of the New England snow, anecdotal currents of an eternal pond, the fastidious thinker exhorting others not to follow but to think, too; the rolling seas and Bartleby, the eccentric who we were told resembled Christ. Wind-in-the-face perseverance yielded results like dried out wounds after the liquid has drained and the scar goes about rehabilitating the inner, unknown logic of its own tissue. The mid nineteenth century permitted such solemn ironies in an age preceding another, when trivialization and self-inflicted catastrophe began not only obscenely to coexist, but also to seek and complement each other. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

We didn’t revere Thoreau exactly, as we thought he wouldn’t have wanted such an attitude of us. Yes, his night in jail came cheap to him, was anecdotal, had its touch of pettiness. But it moved us to the refusal and doubt which had set moral patterns in a once loveable America, also favoring skepticism, which, by the way, forms the basis of scientific advancement.

Years later sitting on a panel at the altar of resource distribution, I heard a younger colleague prevail in arguing for the current currents, and for the demolition of Thoreau overseas. Then I knew the Four Boys were set aside for possible future use, dust collectors likely, and the betrayal of their taut morality complete. Like metals tarnishing on first contact with air, they went consumed in inaudible puffs, farts into the ozone. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

I meanwhile dodged and weaved, not yet understanding that honor can take many forms, and that dilemmas call for as varied a set of responses as there are individual fates. I forestalled, ducked and postponed. When the College put me in a French course two years beyond my capacities and began giving me Ds and Fs in it, I majored in the language and learned it, so as not to be expelled and conscripted. I was not ready for prison or exile, nor would I ever be. When held up to the higher standards of those who somehow knew their way as I did not, I took the two sides—the one, of bold strokes and the advocate of the unambiguous; the other, of random acts and the escalating disarray of the fugitive. What I knew led little to what I did, and what I did was only a series of graceless feints to delay, not evade, the outcome. Avoiding The War was only the beginning, a fragment in constructing a life in a way the Four Boys would have approved. I was too good and too bad for the gauntlets thrown to me—too good to buy in even to now established models of defiance of annihilation (I wasn’t interested in communes, social defiance, prison, or even scholarly anonymity)—too bad to find a formula of my own.

I put on the graduation mortar board, smiled at the camera, and made off to teach in Boston, the rabbit warren where I could sit out the next four years and see if there might be anything intact to pull out at the other end once the slaughter might cease.

BOSTON, 1968

It would be difficult to seem light-hearted about what followed. At the same time there was beauty all around.

I found an apartment in Brookline’s only slum, twice beyond my means. I shared it with a fellow my age, Joe, who could pay half the rent. Boston’s rifling cold settled in during the late autumn, and I held to my urban desk in the evenings to make lesson plans and type out spot exams on mimeograph stencils. I worked with my school headmaster on the documents to get me a draft deferment, but heard nothing from the military during the whole winter ahead. The idea had been to teach and not to soldier, but the military’s silence was a poker player’s bluff, and I kept a small suitcase packed by the bed for quick escape to Canada, should the Greetings! letter ever arrive in the mail.

I made dinners out of the sparse provisions my salary could cover, and which filled only the door racks of the redundantly immense, empty refrigerator. Lamps, a writing table and bed, an archaic sitting chair made their way randomly into the flat. The winged high-backed settee designed years before, to match the aesthetic of an extinct age, sat in the opening of my sleeping room’s bay window toward the street, near the creaking antiquated radiator, only a few feet from the footsteps and conversations of neighbors passing by outside in the street. Working urban people, they braved winter winds with bare hands and heads that turned granite grey in a cold they seemed indifferent to. They lingered at the street corner outside my sleeping room, talking money and sports and delinquent children as I, fighting exhaustion, turned out lesson plans inside. They wore hard leather shoes, their steps echoing through the