Here in Charlottesville, August 12, 2017, was a day that I feel instantly became "an event" to be recorded in history books. But to me it all feels, in retrospect, like a disjointed cubist collection of fractal impressions. I remember marching, soon after dawn, with clergy and others to a downtown park for a service; I remember Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall that morning, stripped clear of everything and shut down, as if preparing for a hurricane; I remember seeing a great number of heavily armed, heavily armored police; I remember seeing small groups of young white men with swastika tattoos and fascist haircuts walking towards the Downtown; I remember seeing “militia," more militarized than the police, appear.
I was off giving a talk at UVA for the crucial several hours of the confrontations on Market Street and in Lee Park; so I was not hit, nor did I get spattered by spit, or urine thrown in glass bottles, or by kerosene. All of that happened to people I know. But I returned Downtown in time to lay low with others in a semi-secret, semi-secure “holding area” (it was the old Escafé, for those who might remember it—a good restaurant; when I walked in, I saw people getting first aid in one corner, and in another, Cornel West and Katie Couric engaged in a very heavy, serious conversation). I remember a guard outside the building, holding a long, black metal shotgun. I remember running the three blocks down from our building to where a crowd of people had just been hit by the car driven by James Fields. I remember the shattered keening of the people there, people wandering around in shock, people propped up against the brick sides of 4thstreet, getting first aid, a cluster of people hovering around several bodies on the ground. I remember the wrecked cars; had the driver been in one of those? No, I was told; he had raced away. I remember stains of blood on the street, spatters on people, the ambulances. How were we there before police or EMT people arrived? There were a lot of media people, and ordinary people just filming everything; was that the right thing to do? Couldn’t we do something? Anything? We mostly milled about, watching people in shock, and bleeding.
I remember the helicopters, droning above, all day, and the next few days as well. Above all, I remember the emptiness, not aloneness quite but the vacancy of the background, that while there were a few clusters of people—the Nazis and racists, the counter-protesters, the police, the media—the general ambient humanity of Charlottesville was nowhere to be seen. Never was parking more easy to come by in downtown Charlottesville than on Saturday, August 12, 2017.
Thinking about it all now there is a feeling of deep irreality to it; remembering it is like reentering a bad dream. But at the time it felt very very real indeed. What that sense of irreality signifies, to me at least, is the sense of disconnection I now feel between that day and my everyday life, before and after. And yet, despite its fragmentariness, it all remains pretty vivid for me.
In a very minor way, the experience has made me think about what the phenomenology of “events” is like for humans who suffer them. It made me think of two interesting remarks from the nineteenth century.
Here is the first, written by the Duke of Wellington, some weeks after the Battle of Waterloo:
“The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.
Then the faults of the misbehavior of some gave occasion for the distinction of others, and perhaps were the cause of material losses; and you cannot write a true history of a battle without including the faults and misbehavior of part at least of those engaged.
Believe me that every man you see in a military uniform is not a hero; and that, although in the account given of a general action, such as that of Waterloo, many instances of individual heroism must be passed over unrelated, it is better for the general interests to leave those parts of the story untold, than to tell the whole truth.”
Wellington, Letter to John Croker (8 August 1815)
And here is the second, Carl von Clausewitz’s description of a battle (from On War, Book I Chapter 4):
“Let us accompany a novice to the battlefield. As we approach the rumble of guns grows louder and alternates with the whir of cannonballs, which begin to attract his attention. Shots begin to strike close around us. We hurry up the slope where the commanding general is stationed with his large staff. Here cannonballs and bursting shells are frequent, and life begins to seem more serious than the young man has imagined. Suddenly someone you know is wounded; then a shell falls among the staff. You notice that some of the officers act a little oddly; you yourself are not as steady and collected as you were: even the bravest can become slightly distracted. Now we enter the battle raging before us, still almost like a spectacle, and join the nearest divisional commander. Shot is falling like hail, and the thunder of our own guns adds to the din. Forward to the Brigadier, a soldier of acknowledged bravery, but he is careful to take cover behind a rise, a house or a clump of trees. A noise is heard that is a certain indication of increasing danger—the rattling of grapeshot on roofs and on the ground. Cannonballs tear past, whizzing in all directions, and musket balls begin to whistle around us. A little further we reach the firing line, where the infantry endures the hammering for hours with incredible steadfastness. The air is filled with hissing bullets that sound like a sharp crack if they pass close to one’s head. For a final shock, the sign of men being killed and mutilated moves our pounding hearts to awe and pity.
The novice cannot pass through these layers of increasing intensity of danger without sensing that here ideas are governed by other factors, that the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation.…”
Both of these make me think of this, from Clausewitz as well: “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” That is from On War, Book I Chapter 7, “Friction in War.” (The idea of “friction” is one of Clausewitz’s biggest conceptual innovations.)
Since August 12, 2017—or maybe it’s since I’ve been a grown-up?—I have come to see Clausewitz’s idea of “friction” as containing a deep insight about the sheer difficulty of the breadth and resistance of ordinary life.
Anyway, there’s your thought for the day.