Grant's Tomb Project Interview: Peer Review

No one took issue with the fact that my interview with SL was mostly about the Civil War, and not about S’s life—that was my main fear. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I seem to be moving into the future by looking farther and farther into the past. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who told me about the drawing by Paul Klee of the Angelus Novus, and Walter Benjamin’s description of this figure in his Theses on History:

IX
My wing is ready to fly
I would rather turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

This is not quite the description I’ve been looking for. I might think of the past as a “rubble heap,” but I do not imagine that it’s “one single catastrophe”; instead I think of this rubble heap as I would an attic—it maybe be messy but I believe it contains such treasures! And not only treasure, but collections of treasure that can be ordered either by chronology or by theme or by type.

What I’ve really been trying to wrap my head around is how to describe the way time expands and contracts in the past. It is certainly not like the minutes and hours of the present and future because the past is not experienced as such. But it seems like the more details I have about the past—the more items I pull from the rubble and put into order—the more time there is back there! Time has to expand to make room for what I know and have to think through as I’m ordering it.

As much as I hoped my interview with SL would be about place, I wonder if it’s more about time. Specifically, SL presents his unique way of relating to history, which is through a very ready movement time. We really didn’t get into his experiences with Grant’s Tomb, and I wonder if place is, in some ways, an imposed framework for understanding reality, which is just as tricky to negotiate in an interview as a woman's experience of her subjectivity. Maybe a researcher can’t ask for a person to talk about their relationship with a place and expect that a place will always be explicitly present in the narrative.

Maybe as my interviews go on, it would be more useful to see what people who are somehow related to Grant’s Tomb wish to talk about instead of Grant’s Tomb. If Grant’s Tomb is so much a symbol that it’s barely a real space, maybe that’s the topic that should be researched, rather than trying to uncover that relationship to see what’s under it. Then again, I really hate symbols precisely because they look beyond the thing, rather than at it. Maybe the real work of my follow-up interviews will be to bring people back to the place—maybe to literally make people walk around through the space—to confront its realness, its monstrous shape, its silent residents: Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant.