Storm Clouds and Historical (Re)interpretation
As the wind blows, the storm clouds gather, and a deluge of rain is promised by the weatherman down here in southern Arizona, I am reminded of a writing project in progress. It is loosely titled “Doomsday: Understanding the American Civil War as Apocalypse.” In it I try to argue that, with as many rehashings of the Civil War as we have, none do the transformative nature of the conflict real justice. That the war is best seen, and should be seen, as it was experienced by those who survived it — that it was a cataclysm, an outright apocalypse.
I’ve included a snippet below from the introduction where I lay bare my opening gambit.
Cut/Paste
An Extract From: “Doomsday: Understanding the American Civil War as Apocalypse.”
All things end.
The study of things dying is called thanatology; the studying of everything dying is called eschatology. When we talk of the end of the world, we’re talking about the latter.
In the Deep South, there is a societally-sanctioned form of eschatology — one that is not so much studied as lived. This idea, that the world has (in some way) ended, permeates many Americans' understanding of history.
This understanding is as ubiquitous as it is nebulous; its source lay in the apocalypse known as the American Civil War. A war that, in a period of less than five-years, saw the destruction of a nascent southern nationhood, the forging of a (seemingly) stronger national union, a violent bloodbath that saw more soldiers die than every other American war combined, and finally — and most importantly — the banishment forever of chattel slavery.
This apocalypse, from sea-to-shining-sea, saw its own version of the Four Horsemen: Death, War, Famine, Conquest. These riders, figuratively speaking, saw to it that the end came.
For everyone in 1860 who, somehow, managed to survive to 1865 and the war’s end saw the world as they knew it completely destroyed. The apocalypse may have, at the beginning, moved slowly and with fits-and-starts, but as it moved it gathered speed and shook the continent with a bloody, violent urgency. For many Americans the world as they lived, imagined, and remembered it ended in the ultimate cataclysm of the Civil War.
This world that was simultaneously lived, imagined, and remembered — particularly in regards to the Old South — is the one that slips languidly, mint julep in hand, into popular culture under the guise of literature and film: Gone with the Wind, Song of the South, and Gods and Generals. When refined Southern belles and grand, sun-dappled plantations are evoked (and invoked) it is of a verdant land without war, an Eden before the Fall.
The North in these near-mythic tellings is barely there. This remembered South is a half-remembered America, a world where everything and everyone has its proper place and, most importantly, knows and embraces their roles in home and society: whether free or enslaved. It is a land that does not know war. Antebellum, the very word used to describe this idyllic world comes from the Latin words ante and bellum - quite literally “before war.”
The words anteonfinem or antecataclysmus are the more fitting and just sobriquets that could be applied to the era before 1860, at least in so far as the Old South has long been imagined. For the generation that survived the conflict, the great cataclysm of war was a Lapsarian sundering with the past. It was the fall of man, redux. It was the Book of Revelations directed at one continent and one people — the final apocalyptic war which ended the world as they knew it.
I wrote the following poem in October 2018 on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. The southern portion of the island, where I wrote this, is a tourist Mecca — it’s a strip of land that, like Waikiki on Honolulu, has been completely turned over to tourism. Yet, the presence of a vast, undulating swell of pasty tourists did not stop the locals from their daily trek out into the seas.
The Locals in Their Fishing Boats
In the earliest hours
Before the world wakes
The locals putter out
In their small fishing boats.
Old and new
Wage a kind of silent war;
The locals make haste in the dawn
Before the tourists rule the day.
They must take in their bream, wreckfish, and tuna
Before the return of the pleasure crafts
And tourists catamarans
And jet skis
And ocean liners
Return to swallow up the Costa Adeje.
The locals must make their catch
Before the visiting parasailers can catch wind.
Old and new
Wage a kind of silent war
And the new is winning.
But it hasn't won.
Not yet.