Rabbits from the Hat by David Healy

The power that prompting concern in us about some measure of our apparent health can have in the development of new drug markets is demonstrated dramatically in the cholesterol story.



For fifty years it has been known that very high cholesterol levels and especially familial hypercholesterolemia, an uncommon genetic disorder that leads to high cholesterol levels, can be risk factors for heart attacks. These are the people whose cholesterol levels really do count but these could often be picked up without a blood test by the old style clinical glaze alone – in people with this illness there are cholesterol deposits around the eyes.



In the early 1950s, the Framingham study, which followed 5,209 men and women from Framingham, Massachusetts, in an attempt to pinpoint the risk factors for heart attacks and strokes, identified the risks as obesity, a history of heart attacks or other cardiovascular events, smoking, and a sedentary lifestyle. Raised cholesterol was also a risk factor, but of much less importance; moreover, it was only a risk factor when one or more of these serious risks were also present. The most important things, then, for people who have not already had a heart attack, are to reduce weight, get fit, and stop smoking rather than to measure cholesterol levels.



In fact most Western countries saw a 30 percent drop in cardiovascular mortality between 1970, when increased attention to smoking, diet and fitness began, and the 1990s when the statin group of drugs became widely used to lower cholesterol levels. And aside from the selected use of statins after cardiovascular events, raw study data ( as distinguished from ‘study reports’ given out by the pharmaceutical companies) suggest that, if anything, there is an increase risk in mortality in people using statins who are not otherwise at risk of a cardiovascular event.



While, therefore, there are some people, primarily in hospital care, who have already had a heart attack or stroke, who may be helped by cholesterol screening, widespread and indiscriminate cholesterol testing in society in general with consequent treatment with statins that slightly elevated cholesterol readings almost inevitably lead to, may in fact lead to as much harm as good.



While cholesterol-lower statins grew to become a $30 billion a year market in the late 1990as, it was also becoming clear that simply lowering cholesterol did not provide a person much benefit. Indeed, the drugs could be risky in their own right, and cholesterol itself, scientists were finding, was not without benefits. This however did not put a brake on statin sales – the numbers were ‘refined’. Popular articles and medical reports began to distinguish between high and low density cholesterol and their ratio to each other, as well as triglycerides and fatty acids (which are further lipids found in the blood) Where we all might have had and average overall cholesterol level before, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that any of us would be absolutely “normal” on all these measures and could walk out of a doctor’s office without being proffered a drug to match our numbers, even though the attention that cholesterol and other lipids now receive in medical encounters is out of all proportion to their clinical usefulness.



Extrapolation from studies that demonstrated a benefit in men already ill to the rest of us has led to claims that ‘balancing” out lipids will reduce our future risk. This is a completely mythical balancing, rather like remedying a supposed imbalance of neurotransmitters with antidepressants. Several studies have suggested there may be as much if not more benefit to be gained from adopting a Mediterranean diet, which is more likely to increase than reduce cholesterol levels. For women in particular, the data suggests that attempting to reduce cholesterol levels may increase mortality. Alarmingly, women without coronary artery disease now constitute almost a quarter of those taking statins with almost 10 percent of women over the age of seventy being on statins [which may cause muscle pain and weakness!). More generally 40 percent of people taking statins have no history of coronary artery disease.



These developments have been driven by a series of studies designed to map out norms for cholesterol and lipid levels, the achievement of which would supposedly lead to minimal or no risk of cardiovascular events. There is a set of cholesterol levels that is linked to almost no cardiovascular events – levels found in teenagers or people in their twenties. But these levels are linked to no cardiovascular events because cardiovascular events almost never happen at this age. There is thus no particular reason to believe that cholesterol levels at this range protect against strokes. Nevertheless, it is just these values that have been set as the normal range for adults of every age. According to norms like these, 94 percent of New Zealand’s population has elevations of their lipid levels that carry some risk.



It is a clear contradiction to set up as a normative standard a level to which 94 percent of a population are abnormal. These may be optimal cholesterol levels but they are not normal levels. This is akin to what happened with the advent of drugs like Viagra, when impotence was reconfigured as erectile dysfunction. Impotence had been a disorder of men who were completely or close to completely unable to function. But marketers have progressively redefined the target so that now even twenty-year-olds, who from time to time have an erection that falls any way short of full rigidity, are invited to think of themselves as having a condition that could benefit from treatment and are encouraged to see a pill as a way out of anxiety.



In the case of cholesterol, the context in which any discussion of cholesterol levels made sense – where patients had a history of heart attacks in their family, smoked, were obese, and were also hypertensive – was progressively stripped away, so that the clinical gaze now focuses on the numbers themselves and their deviations from the norms, partly because here is an area where a drug can be prescribed and a doctor can document that something has been done.



Just being constantly reminded of our own numbers on a scale of cholesterol norms can seduce. Even someone like me who knows better, who knows that cholesterol levels are for the most part meaningless in terms of overall health, when faced with his own lipid numbers, if these are thought to be even marginally too high, is likely to be unnerved or perhaps challenged. “I know there’s no real need to get this marginally elevated level down, but hey, let’s see what I can do.” Faced with an apparent deviation of our numbers from the norm, some of us can ‘feel’ our arteries clog up on the spot and would find it almost impossible to do nothing.



Just as Sanjeebit Jachuk found his patients began suffering after a diagnosis of hypertension where they had been fine before, so also many readers of this book would likely start start to suffer from effects they imagine excessive cholesterol brings if faced with their lipid levels [ e.g. chest pains, nausea, incidents of short breath, tiredness which simply arise in the normal courses of life]. Once we only visited a doctor when we were suffering and we hoped to leave in a happier frame of mind about relief in the offering, often later grateful for an encouragement that we did not know at the time defied the numbers. Now we are much more likely to start suffering [in terms of anxiety and fear as well] when some nonessential blood test, health program, or ad prompts us to visit a doctor, who is unlikely to counsel us to leave well enough alone.



At the epicenter of this are companies who have cholesterol- lowering drugs to market. This market is worth $35 billion per year, with the best seller, Pfizer’s Lipitor, making over $12 billion worth of sales in 2008. At the heart of the marketing of Lipitor has been a series of ads that have pulled no punches. One shows the soles of the feet of a corpse in the morgue, with a name tag on its left big toe, and a strap line on the side – Which would you rather have, a cholesterol test or a final exam? Another shows an open heart with its traceries of blood levels and a strap line – Lipitor reduces risks of heart attacks by 36 percent. Behind claims like this, there is typically a study in which 3 percent of older men with a history of heart problems and other risk factors have a heart attack on placebo compared to 2% taking Lipitor or whichever drug – this is a 50 percent reduction in what is called relative risk in contrast to absolute risk. But even for consumers alert to this piece of trickery, there is nothing in the ad to let women or men with no history of heart problems know that these figures of risk reduction do not apply to them.



Pressure like this makes the idea of taking something or going on some diet that might lower lipids very seductive. So much so that even though using pills to lower cholesterol appears to increase mortality, the pill becomes a solution to the problem that attention to cholesterol levels has created. This follows the standard recipe for pulling a rabbit out of a hat –first put rabbit in hat. . .



The new focus on blood lipids, blood sugars, bone density, peak flow and the like has transformed encounters between doctors and patients. But the change has not come simply from blood tests and other obvious measurements. It has also come from the use made of scales developed to measure aspects of behavior. These rating scales were needed in trials of antidepressants, tranquilizers, analgesics, hypnotics, drugs for sexual dysfunction, and other drugs used to modify behavior , for the same reasons as cholesterol levels are needed in statin trials and DXA scans in bisphosphonate trials. In lieu of evidence that patients get up from their beds and walk, feel better again, and return to work, these rating scales produce numbers that go in the right direction on treatment and can be held up as evidence that the treatments are working. The rating scale scores thus developed all too often translate into treatment, without further thought. As a result, for example, anti-depressants have moved in less then ten years from rarely being used prenatally to being among the commonest drugs given in pregnancy –despite convincing evidence that they double the rate of birth defects and miscarriages.



David Healy is a professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University and former Secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology

Biography of the I Ching by Richard J. Smith

The I Ching seems so different from other “classics” that instantly come to mind, whether literary works such as the Odyssey, the Republic, the Divine Comedy, and the Pilgrim’s Progress or sacred scriptures like the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Qur’an, the Hindu Vedas and the Buddhist sutras. Structurally it lacks any sort of systematic or sustained narrative, and from the standpoint of spirituality, it offers no vision of religious salvation, much less the promise of an afterlife or even the idea of rebirth.



According to Chinese tradition, the Yijing was based on the natural observations of the ancient sages; the cosmic order or Dao that it expressed had no Creator or Supreme Ordainer, much less a host of good and malevolent deities to exert influence in various ways. There is no jealous and angry God in it; no evil presence like Satan; no prophet, sinner, or savior; no story of floods or plagues; no tale of people swallowed up by whales or turned into pillars of salt. The Changes posits neither a purposeful beginning nor an apocalyptic end; and whereas classics such as the Bible and Qur’an insist that humans are answerable not to their own culture but to a being that transcends all culture, the Yijing takes essentially the opposite position. One might add that in the Western tradition, God reveals only what God chooses to reveal, while in traditional China, the “mind of Heaven” was considered ultimately knowable and accessible through the Changes. The “absolute gulf between God and his creatures” in the West had no counterpart in the Chinese tradition.



Yet despite its brevity, cryptic text, paucity of colorful stories, virtual absence of deities, and lack of sustain narrative, the Yijing exerted enormous influence in all realms of Chinese culture for well over two thousand years – an influence comparable to the Bible in Judeo-Christian culture, the Qur’an in Islamic culture, the Vedas in Hindu culture, and the sutras in Buddhist culture. What was so appealing about the document, and why was it so influential?

Journey Into The Cat Jungle by Gay Talese

The year was 1957. It was a bad time for New York’s 400,000 stray cats. They were victims of their own overpopulation and the dearth of garbage cans in the city’s newly constructed apartment buildings; and I was researching my first full-length article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the cats’ struggle for survival. Other people were worried about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, or the lingering presence of the “Mad Bomber,” or the fact that the Soviets had just launched a dog into space. But I was concentrating on cats, and when my 4,000-word article was published on May 12, 1957 – under the headline “Journey into the Cat Jungle”- I confiscated about thirty copies from the Times’s printing plant and mailed them to my relatives and friends around the nation. It was my first fling with what Andy Warhol would later identify as a fifteen-minute fame buzz, and yet, like the initiation to love in early youth, its sweet memory can be sustained privately forever. That is how I recall the publication of that article about hungry cats by a hungry young writer. . .



When street traffic dwindles and most people are sleeping, some New York neighborhoods begin to crawl with cats. They move quickly through the shadows of buildings; night watchmen, policemen, garbage collectors, and other nocturnal wanderers see them – but never for very long. A majority of them hang around the fish markets, in Greenwich Village, and in the East and West Side neighborhoods where garbage cans abound. No part of the city is without its strays, however, and all-night garage attendants in such busy neighborhoods as Fifty-fourth Street have counted as many as twenty of them around the Ziegfeld Theatre early in the morning. Troops of cats patrol the waterfront piers at night searching for rats. Subway trackwalkers have discovered cats living in the darkness. They seem never to get hit by trains, though some are occasionally liquidated by the third rail. About twenty-five cats live seventy-five feet below the west end of Grand Central Terminal, are fed by the underground workers, and never wander up into the daylight.



The roving, independent, self-laundering cats of the streets live a life strangely different from New York’s kept, apartment-house cats. Most are flea-bitten. Many die of food poisoning, exposure, and malnutrition; their average life span is two years, whereas the stay-at-home cats can live ten to twelve years or more. Each year the ASPCA kills about 100,000 New York street cats for whom no homes can be found.



Social climbing among the stray cats of Gotham is not common. They rarely acquire a better mailing address out of choice. They usually die within blocks of their birth, although one flea-bitten specimen picked up by the ASPCA was adopted by a wealthy woman; it now lives in a luxurious East Side apartment and spends the summer at the lady’s estate on Long Island. The American Feline Society once moved two strays into the headquarters of the United Nations after having heard that some rodents had infested UN filing cabinets. “The cats took care of ‘em,” says Robert Lothar Kendell, society president. “And they seem happy at the UN. One of the cats used to sleep on a Chinese dictionary.”



In every New York neighborhood the strays are dominated by a “boss” – the largest, strongest tomcat. But, except for the boss, there is not much organization in the street cat’s society. Within the society, however, there are three ‘types of cats – wild cats, Bohemian, and part-time grocery store (or restaurant) cats.



The wild cats rely on an occasional loose garbage lid or on rats for food and will have little or nothing to do with people – even those who would feed them. These most unkempt of strays have a recognizable haunted look, a wide-eyed, wild expression, and they are usually found around the waterfront.



The Bohemian, however, is more tractable. It does not run from people. Often, it is fed in the streets daily by sensitive cat lovers (mostly women) who call the strays “little people”, “angels””, or “darlings” and are indignant when the objects of their charity are referred to as “alley cats.” So punctual are most Bohemians at feeding time that one cat lover has advanced the theory that cats can tell time. He cited a gray tabby that appears five days a week, precisely at 5:30 P.M., in an office building at Broadway and Seventeenth Street, where the elevator men feed it. But the cat never shows up on Saturdays or Sundays; it seems to know people don’t work on those days.



The part-time grocery store (or restaurant) cat, often a reformed Bohemian, eats well and keeps rodents away, but usually uses the store as as a hotel and prefers to spend the nights prowling the streets. Despite its liberal working schedule, it still assumes most of the privileges of a related breed – the full-time, or wholly nonstray, grocery store cat – including the right to sleep in the window. A reformed Bohemian at a Bleecker Street delicatessen hides behind the door and chases away all other Bohemians looking for handouts.



The number of full-time cats, incidentally, has diminished greatly since the decline of the small food store and the rise of supermarkets in New York. With better rat-proofing methods, improved packaging of foods, and more sanitary conditions, such chain stores as the A&P rarely keep a cat full-time.



On the waterfront, however, the great need for cats remains unchanged. Once a longshoreman who was allergic to cats poisoned them. Within days rats were all over the place. Every time the men turned around they would find rats on crates. And on Pier 95 the rats began stealing the longshoremen’s lunch and even attacking the men. So the street cats were recruited from nearby neighbors, and now most of the rats are controlled.



“But cats don’t get much sleep around here,” said one of the longshoreman. “They can’t. Rats would overrun them. We’ve had cases here where the rat has torn up the cat. But it doesn’t happen often. Most waterfront cats are mean bastards.”. . .



There were Times editors, to be sure, who did not like what I was writing; they called them “ragpicker” stories and we would have polite but stubborn confrontations. To dissuade me they assigned me to the political beat in Albany to cover the New York State legislature, there to listen to the lies and pointless pronouncements of the politicians and to report this as “news”. I could not do it.



I wanted to avoid writing about political figures, for so much about them is of temporary interest; they are dated people, victims of the recycling process of politics, doomed if they openly say what they truly think. My curiosity lures me towards private figures, unknown individuals to whom I usually represent their first experience in being interviewed. I could write about them today, or tomorrow, or next year, and it will make no difference in the sense of their topicality. These people are dateless. They can live as long as the language used to describe them lives, if the language is blessed with lasting qualities.



There was a rule on the Times in those days that reporters’ bylines usually accompanied articles that were at least eight paragraphs in lengthy. During my time in Albany, I never wrote a political story longer than seven paragraphs. I did not want my byline on an article that was limited to the rulings and railings of the Albany legislators, and as a consequence, the Times editors discharged me and thought they were punishing me by bringing me back to the home office and assigning me to write obituaries. I was never happier. Obituary writing was in the realm of personal history, biography, a summation of an individual’s worth and consequence, and anyone who commanded an obituary in the Times was doubtless an individual of distinction and singular achievement – which was considerably more than I had seen during my brief career as a twenty-five-year-old political correspondent.


It was during my obituary-writing period that I also began to concentrate on writing for the Times Sunday Magazine, for I was in the ‘doghouse’ with the daily edition. After my cat story I did about thirty more Times magaziners in the months that followed. I wrote about silent-screen actresses in an age of sound, about old men who rang bells during boxing matches at Madison Square Garden, about the river captains of the Staten Island ferries, about the window designers of Fifth Avenue boutiques and the sculptures of the plastic but nonetheless alluringly realistic female mannequins. . .



Advice to young writers? The one essential quality is my curiosity, in my opinion, and the energy to get out and learn about the world and about people who lead unique lives, who dwell in obscure places. I’ve subsequently expanded this thinking into writing books about Mafia wives (Honor Thy Father), love advocates (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), immigrant tailors (Unto the Sons), and high-altitude steelworkers (The Bridge).


There are stories everywhere within view, within range; and the other advice I might offer (following my father’s advice to me): "Never write anything for money.” It is perhaps strange advice in this age of bottom-line rationalizing, greed, and gluttony; but it is the advice that has guided me through these forty years since back in 1957 (in the company of cats) I turned twenty-five.

Loons by Edward Howe Forbush

There are five species of Loons (Gaviidae Family) in North America, two being common in New England: the Big or Great Northern Diver and the Pacific Loon which has a black-throat but is distinct from the Black-Throated Loon found off the coasts of Europe.


Loons have stout, strong, straight, narrow, tapering sharp-pointed and sharp-edged bills with which they strike and hold their prey which consists primarily of fish but may also include frogs, crayfish, crabs, mollusks, leeches and aquatic insects. They can also subsist on aquatic vegetation; both Audubon and Dr. B.H. Warren noted that they found such food in Loon’s stomachs.



Loons are especially noted for their diving powers, the long distances they travel underwater and their great speed beneath the water where they use both their feet and wings for propulsion. They can alter their specific gravity quickly and swim with the body wholly or partly under the water, with only the head and neck exposed.



Loons are only summer residents of the inland lakes of Northern New England. They spent the winter along the New England Coasts, primarily off-shore. The Loon is a wonderful, powerful living mechanism fashioned for riding the stormy seas. See him as he mounts high above the waves, neck and legs fully extended “fore and aft”, and a bill trifle raised which gives to his whole form a slight upwards bend, his wings beating powerfully and moving as steadily as the walking-beam of a side-wheel steamship. He is driving straight ahead into the teeth of the gale and making greater headway than the laboring steamer that steers a parallel course. Now he slants downward, and striking just beyond the top of a towering wave shoots down its inclined surface and rises again on the coming crest. Here, midway of the wide bay where the seas are running high and wildly tossing their white tops, with a wintry gale whipping the spray from them in smoky gusts, the Loon rests at ease, head to the wind and sea like a ship at anchor. The tossing and the tumult disturb him not, as he rides, light as a birch canoe, turning up his white breast now and then on one side as he reaches unconcernedly backwards to preen his feathers. His neck narrows at the water-line into a beautifully modeled cutwater. His broad paddles push his breast to the tops of the great waves, where it parts the foam as he surmounts the crests and glides easily down the gulfs beyond. The freezing spray that loads the fishing fleet with tons of ice seems never to cling to his tough, glossy plumage; or if it does, he washes it off among the fleeing fishes away down in the warmer currents near the bottom of the bay, as deep as 90 feet.


Often Loons swallow little fish under water but they will bring larger and stronger fish to the surface and mauls them there. If such a fish escapes, the bird dives in pursuit and soon overtakes its prey. It is difficult to see how a Loon manages to swallow a flounder ‘as wide as a man’s hand’, but they do catch and eat such fish. On March 11, 1922, in Nantucket Harbor, I saw a Loon swallow two within half an hour. Both fish seemed dead when brought to the surface as they did not struggle. It would be interesting to know how the bird killed them underwater. The loon worked a long time with the flounder in its bill, apparently crushing it, and finally swallowed it with apparent ease. Crabs are bitten and broken in preparation for eating and their legs are often discarded. There is no very convincing argument that Loons kill and eat other birds though one writer has observed that Loons seem to be very hostile to ducks.


When the ice begins to break up in April and May the migration of Loons from the coasts begins. In breeding season Loons love the solitude of northern lakes where shores are shaded by fir and spruce and pure water seldom mirrors a human face. Islands in quiet lakes are their favorite nesting sites and there in June or July the young are hatched.


Nevertheless, Dr. Coues had an excellent opportunity to watch some Pacific Loons at the Bay of San Pedro on the coast of southern California in 1865 where, as they had been little hunted, he had no difficulty in securing all the specimens that he desired. He says they were tamer than any other waterfowl he had ever seen. They came up to the wharves and played about as unconcernedly as domestic ducks. They swam constantly all about the vessels in the harbor and were evidently not frightened or hurried in the least by any human agency. In New England, however, they were “shot out” at great expenditure of powder and lead and other forms of persecution. They almost died out but there numbers and amiability to human presence have increased in recent years due to protective measures.



{Loon populations are affected by air and water pollution, and face many threats related to the impacts of human activities, including recreational use of their aquatic habitat, fishing with toxic lead sinkers, and shoreline development.


Mercury, a byproduct of coal-burning power plants and trash incineration, is one of the airborne pollutants threatening loons. It is transported to the Adirondacks and other loon habitats through prevailing winds, and falls to the ground in the form of rain or snow. Along with acid rain, the mercury can then enter lakes, where it is converted into a more toxic form called methylmercury, which accumulates in the aquatic food chain. People, loons, and other top predators are most impacted by this concentration of toxins in the food supply. The neurotoxins concentrated in loon prey can affect the birds’ behavior, reproduction, and eventually, their population numbers.

Invasive plants such as Eurasian watermilfoil and curly-leaf pondweed can negatively impact the fish population, lake ecology, recreational use, and ultimately the loon use on a lake.


Removal of woody debris from the water has been documented to cause population crashes in perch populations on a lake. Perch are the primary food for loons so a crash in the perch population may result in less food for chicks and loons abandoning their use of a lake. Fish populations rely on good aquatic plant and woody debris structure for protection and nursery areas. Leaving a buffer zone of native plants along the lakeshore will provide nesting cover for loons and other birds.


Four-stroke motors contribute less pollution to the water and air. They are more efficient and use less oil-based products compared to older two-stroke motors. Hundreds of loons (for some states this is equal to their entire population) can die in one oil spill. Oceanic oil spills can have major ecological impacts as well as catastrophic effects on wintering loons.} *



Although the Loon is graceful and swift on or in the water, it is at a disadvantage on land. For one, it can hardly rise into the air from land nor from the water unless aided by a head wind, and it must have more room than can be furnished by a small pool, and even then it is obliged to flutter and run spatteringly along the surface for some distance to get impetus enough to rise in the air. When the young are well grown, the family, often joined by neighboring adults, frolic for a brief time on the water and then fall into line side by side, and, lifting their wings simultaneously, run an apparent foot race over the surface with ‘incredible speed’ for a quarter of a mile, and turning race back to the starting point. Thy repeat this over and over again. During these races the wings are held out and about half opened. At the end of the performance the male, female and neighbors leave for other fishing grounds and the young scatter to find food. This pay evidently tends to train the muscles of the young birds and to fit them for flight.



Once airborne the ordinary, steady, level flight is familiar to all who know the bird but under favorable conditions it can also soar or circle with set wings.



On our coasts Loons are rarely seen on land unless wounded, but Audubon satisfied himself that on their breeding grounds they spend the night on shore. I once saw at nightfall a pair resting on the beach of an isolated island in British Columbia. Mr. Bent says that “when it is safe to do so they often come ashore to sleep” and that he has several times surprised a single bird well up on a beach. The attempts of such a bird to regain the water were more rapid than graceful, as it often fell on its breast as it scrambled down the beach, humping its back, darting its head and neck about and straining every muscle to make speed, with rather surprising success.


It is quite generally asserted that Loons cannot walk well on land. In fact the name Loon is understood to be derived from the old English word “lumme”, a lummox, an awkward person. Though ungraceful on land by reason of its hidebound legs and the peculiar position of its feet, the Loon can make remarkable speed for short distances when racing towards the water. It uses its wings in place of forelegs, like a pair of crutches, Sometimes the bill is also used ‘like a pick’ to keep the balance. and so flaps and scrambles along.



Loons have amazing voices; very loud and resonant calls. At nightfall or before a storm a A-ooo’-oo or as often written O’-O- ooh; a laughing call hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo uttered in a peculiar vibrating tremolo or something like o-ha-ha-ha-ho!. W.L. Underwood identifies four calls 1) a short cooing note, 2) a long drawn-out known to guides as the night call, 3) the laughing call, 4) the storm call, a peculiar and weird performance. Robert J. Sim described what he called ‘the silly song’, Oh-a-le cleo-pee-a, cleo- per-wer-wer!, a soft mellow pleasing O lair in a rather disconsolate tone.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWgwPb_uNaI-rit]


Often along the coast towards nightfall I have heard the wild storm-call of the Loon far out to windward against the black pall of an approaching tempest like the howl of a lone wolf coming down the wind; and I have seen his white breast rise on a wave against a black sky to vanish again like the arm of a swimmer lost in the stormy sea. Sailors, hearing the call, say that the Loons are trying to blow up an “easterly.” At times his cries seem wailing and sad as if he were bemoaning his exile from his forest lake. Such is the Loon in his winter home off our coast; for there he lives and braves the inclemency of the season. Of all the wild creatures that persist in New England, the Loon seems best to typify the stark wildness of primeval nature.



Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States by Edward Howe Forbush; The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Norwood Press, 1925

*http://www.mercerwi.com/loons.htm

Avant-Garde of the Revolution by Bruce Chatwin

George Costakis is the leading private art collector in the Soviet Union (c.1973). And his is no ordinary collection, but one of compelling interest to all who would understand the art of this century. [2] For twenty-six years he has conducted his private archeological excavation – and this is what it has required – to unearth the Leftist art movement which burst on Russia in the years around the Revolution. Russia’s revolution is the outstanding intellectual event of the century, and her painters, sculptors and architects rose to the occasion. During the First War the center of artistic gravity shifted from Paris to Moscow and Leningrad where it remained for a few turbulent years.



‘I will make myself black trousers of the velvet of my voice,’ sang its most conspicuous spokesman, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. [3] Young women shivered with pleasure at the voice of the man who called himself ‘the cloud in pants.’ Characteristically it took a Russian émigré, Serge Diaghilev[24], to galvanize the fading talents of Western Europe into a show of activity. But by his exile he divorced himself from the source of his inspiration. The Russian soil is a powerful mother and few of her artists survive the trauma of parting.




Those with strong will power stayed. The uniqueness of the Russian situation encouraged in them an almost Messianic belief in the power of art to transform the world. And because the most extreme apostles of modernism had opened their arms to the Bolsheviks, they were able to press their claims. Admittedly they fought each other (with fists) and divided into schismatic groups, each broadcasting its manifestos which read like the anathemas of the medieval church. They called themselves misleading names – Constructivists, Productivists, Objectivists, Suprematists – which often reflect personal vendettas rather than any real ideological split. As a whole, however, the work of the Leftists has a freshness and confidence, which towers over the smartness, the hysteria and the aridity of much European art in the Twenties.



When the full history of the Russian movement comes to be written – and to some extent we must thank Costakis that it can be written – it will probably emerge as he most significant of all. Whatever we think, later generations will look on the twentieth century as the century of abstract painting. Two Russians, Kasimir Malevich [16] and Vassily Kandinsky[3a], are its pioneers, and to understand the movement properly we must place it first in its original Slavic context.



For a few euphoric years the avant-garde flourished, but its anarchic philosophy appeared to contradict the crucial tenets of Soviet Marxism. It attracted official disapproval; was formally sat non; and then paintings disappeared under beds or into the vaults of museums. When Costakis began, Leftist art was quite forgotten. Outside the Soviet Union it attracted a few disparaging comments. Inside it did not arouse a flicker of interest. In 1947 an art critic could denounce Cezanne’s dishonest ‘indifference to subject matter’ and complain that his fruit and flowers ‘lack aroma and texture’. In those days the non-figurative artist was a pariah.



Costakis was the ‘mad Greek who buys hideous pictures’. He spent fifteen years in the cold and if, over the past ten, his apartment has become an object of pilgrimage, it gives him very obvious satisfaction. ‘…Kalf…Berchem…this kind of thing. Then little by little they all looked to me like one color. I had twenty paintings on the wall and it was like one painting.” He cannnot single out any one event of childhood that inclined him towards works of art, but imagines the ceremonial of the Orthodox Church may have affected him. ‘But this is not the real reason. All my life I wanted to write a book . . . or make an aeroplane . . . . or invent some industrial miracle. I had to do something. And I told myself, “If I continue to collect old paintings, I will do nothing. Even if one day I will find a Rembrandt, people will say ‘He was lucky’ and that is all.” Then, in he dark days after the war, someone offered him three brightly colored paintings of the lost avant-garde. ‘They were signals to me. I did not care what it was . . . but nobody knew what anything was in those days.’



Three paintings signaled to Costakis the existence of a world he had never suspected Whenever free from his duties at he Canadian Embassy he hunted for ‘lost’ pictures ‘thrown around all the corners of Moscow and Leningrad. The hunt led to old people who imagined that time had passed them by. Some were broken by events and delighted to have even a token of recognition. He rescued canvases that were rolled up and covered with dust. He met Tatlin before he died, ‘the great fool’ who designed the Monument to the Third International[4], and lived alone with some hens and a balalaika. He befriended Stepanova, the widow of the comprehensive genius Alexander Rodchenko. He tracked down the friends of the great Malevich. He bought works by the emigres Kandinsky and Chagall; by Lissitzky, the master typographer, and Gustav Klutsis, the Constructivist designer; by Liubov Popova, ‘the strongest painter of her generation’ )’When she was fighting for art, she was a man; but in bed she was a woman.’); and by Ivan Klium, whose cosmic abstractions anticipate Rothko. With persistence he traced obscure artists who had signed the early manifestos, finding in them qualities their contemporaries had overlooked. And as he accumulated, he pierced together the story of their ideologies, alliances, fantastic projects, squabbles and love affairs; for revolutionary freedom was synonymous with free love. . .



The existence of the Costakis’s collection introduces an unfamiliar aspect of life in the Soviet Union. In the Western imagination the Marxist State is the declared enemy of private property; and some might suppose that a valuable private art collection merely reveals the inconsistency of Marxism. This is not so. Nothing in the Soviet legal code prevents a man owning pictures any more than it prevents him owning a pair of boots. Nor can one suggest, by way of explanation, that Costakis uses his Greek citizenship to enjoy special rights and immunities. He does not.



There are plenty of private collections in the Soviet Union today and prices are rising. An entry in Costakis’s visitors’ book which reads, ‘An example to all of us Russian collectors of avant-garde art’, tells us he has competition. But two awkward facts remain; that abstract art was banned by 1932; that it has failed to resurface on he walls of museums. The Ministry of Culture, however, is showing signs of a more indulgent attitude. Rumors are in the air of a Soviet Museum of Modern Art. . .


The reasons for the ban are far from clear. Western opinions on the subject have long entertained a consoling fiction, that Party bureaucrats failed to understand Leftist art, therefore had it and branded it as subversive. Its disappearance is used as an excuse for pious assertions on the need for artistic freedom and for exposing ‘official’ Soviet art to ridicule. These have not been helpful. I do not mean to suggest that Leftist artists were not horribly wronged in the late Thirties. But the idea that their art was banned through ignorance is a trite explanation which belittles its significance.



In the pinion of its makers, the Bolshevik Revolution had set man free. The proletariat had won –was, in theory, dictator, and had the right to decide what was, or was not, proletarian art. Marx had hoped that once the worker had free time he would ‘among other things, paint. But for all his genius, he was not visually inclined and did not suggest what the worker should paint. Nor did his theory allow for the visual awareness of the Russians, nor for the Russian painter’s status as prophet and teacher. No government can afford to ignore him, and this is a fact not appreciated in the West, where a revolutionary art is defused by the patronage of the rich. One of Lenin’s secretaries records how people were led before Repin’s painting The Barge-haulers on the Volga[5] in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and converted to the revolution by its message against injustice. Now all good Bolsheviks believed that art belonged to the people. But by October 1917 there are two contradictory opinions on the form the new art should take.



In one camp were the Futurists. (I use the word Futurist in the widest sense.) As the old order tottered, they conducted a war of nerves against middle-class morality and taste. They saw themselves as a wrecking party which would unhinge the future from the past. Their painters saw in French Cubism a preliminary shattering of images beloved by the bourgeois. The philosopher Berdyaev[6] said Picasso was the last of the Stone Age men. Their poets had an ‘insurmountable hatred for the language existing before them’. They drained poetry of its meaning and insisted on the primacy of [pure sound. ‘Words are but ghosts hiding the alphabet’s strings.’ They published their manifestos – ‘Go to the Devil’ –‘The Thunder Boiling Cup’ –‘A Slap to Public Taste’ – on the cheapest paper, ‘the color of a fainted louse.’ Mayakovsky and David Burliuk[7], the self-appointed storm-troopers of Futurism, paraded around St. Petersburg in alogical fancy dress; crowds wondered if they were clowns or savages or fakirs or Americans. Mayakovsky once advised his audience to ‘carry their fat carcasses home.’



But the Futurists usually came from ‘good’ families, and their posturing was of the essence of middle-class revolt. The Bolsheviks were tougher, more serious and their view of art different. The populist composer Mussorgsky[8] had once said that artists must ‘not get to know then people, but be admitted to their brotherhood.’ If serious, the artist must merge in with the masses and do nothing to affront the taste of the common man. That taste was bound to be traditional. And the pragmatic Lenin saw the need for an art which would broadcast the revolution in simple, traditional images.



Lenin was the son of a provincial director of schools, and historians have often noticed the firm, pedagogic manner with which he handled his colleagues. Edmund Wilson even called him “The Great Headmaster.’ Certainly his concept of partiinost, or sacrificial party spirit, reminds one of loyalty demanded for the schoolteam. His tastes were old-fashioned and austere. He knew that Marx’s moral and historical interpretation of history was right. He knew his own interpretation of Marx was right. And he also knew that if he waited for capitalism to collapse he would wait indefinitely.



On this crucial [point there are two distinct trends in Marx’s thought. One encourages the worker to rise and batter his oppressors. The other says capitalism will evaporate in the quickness of time and in accordance with the laws of history. Marx’s open legacy crystallized into a quarrel between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Lenin, as Bolshevik leader, appointed himself the active agent of history, who was to accelerate its inevitable process by force. The Mensheviks dreaded force, preferring a gradual change to Socialism, through educating the workers.


Among the Bolsheviks themselves there was a similar split. A challenge to Lenin’s authority came from an ambitious Marxists called Alexander Malinovsky, who later changed his name to Bogdanov, which means ‘Son of God’ (God in this case being the ‘People’). He founded a rather nebulous institution called Proletcult which, he aid, was ‘a laboratory for proletarian culture’, and had set up a colony in exile on Capri which Lenin visited and loathed. Bogdanov countered Lenin’s demand for unity by calling for ‘Three Ways to Socialism – Political, Economic and Cultural’; in particular he insisted on the independence of cultural matters from the government. The Futurists preferred the independence of Bogdanov’s Proletcult to Lenin’s centralization. From the start they were in the wrong camp.



Years of committee meetings in exile had convinced Lenin that liberal intellectuals were weak-kneed and ineffectual. Unity, unity at all costs obsessed him, and he saw ‘no special basis for different directions in art’. Anything that reminded him of idealist philosophy he distrusted, and he would chide his colleagues for ‘coquetting with religion’. Maxim Gorky might exclaim, ‘Almighty, Immortal People, Thou art my God!’ but Lenin never. If he was a dreamer, he was, in H.G. Wells’s verdict, ‘a dreamer in technology’. His saying ‘Communism is Electrification plus Soviets’ expresses his faith in the machine as savior and agent of Socialism.[9]



Marx had warned against the delusions of abstract thought and Lenin probably thought the same of abstract art. At first he thought it harmless, but tolerance gave way to irritation. He disliked the street monuments which left spectators gasping for sense. And when some artists ‘cancelled out’ the trees of the capitalist period in the Alexandrovsky Gardens [12] outside the Kremlin by painting them in bright colors that wouldn’t come off, Lenin and Krupskaya[10] were very cross. In a dry memorandum of October 1920 Lenin wrote: ‘No creation of a new proletarian culture, but the development of the best models of existing culture . . .’ Marxism does not despise the achievements of the past.



Certainly the new masters of Russia preserved its treasures. Once the Winter Palace was stormed, the inventory of its contents began and looters were shot. Anatoly Lunacharsky [11], Lenin’s first Commissioner for Education, had once made his listeners cry as he evoked the wonders of old in the Naples Museum. In November 1917 he made himself cry at news of the destruction of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s [13&14], and resigned from the Revolutionary Committee. ‘I cannot stand it. I cannot stand the monstrous destruction of beauty and tradition.’ He reinstated himself two days later when he heard the news was false.



In contrast, a mood of iconoclastic fervor swept the Left-wingists. They couldn’t have cared less what happened to the Kremlin. Marinetti [15] had once called it ‘an absurd thing’; for all they were concerned it could burn. Malevich hoped all towns and villages would be destroyed every fifty years and said he’d feel more sorry about a screw breaking off than the destruction of St. Basil’s. The avant-garde hadn’t counted on the Bolshevik uprising, but they were the only group of artists in Russia to welcome it. Calling themselves Leftists, they clamored for complete monopoly in the arts.



They behaved with customary lack of caution but superhuman energy. Mayakovsky’s slogan ‘the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes’ flushed artists out into the open. They decorated the Agit-Prop trains which toured the country, staged mass spectacles, placarded old palaces with monumental posters, bundled Tsarist monuments into parcels of throbbing red cloth, played a symphony on factory sirens, evolved a new typography to broadcast the new message and said they were breaking down the divisions between art and engineering, or between painting and music: the latter is not difficult in a country where colors have equivalents in sound; reindeer bells tinkle red and for one poet the noise of the 1905 Revolution was mauve.



The ideas of the artists conflicted. At one extreme was Kandinsky, who for some years had been painting the private landscapes of his mind. He believed in painting as a healing ritual to cure mental anguish and wean men from materialism. ‘Painting’, he wrote, ‘shall free me from my fears’ But men like Tatlin and Rodchenko insisted that materialism was the only value that counted. All the artists, however, agreed to hate the image. The art of the new man must suppress all representation of man. Malevich, an eloquent if erratic propagandist, thundered against the Venus de Milo (‘not a woman but a parody’) and against the rubbish-filled pool of Academic art’ with its female hams, depraved cupids and congealed legacy from Greece. His tone is that of Isaiah on the subject of idols and I think the comparison apt. For beneath the Russians’ obvious devotion to human images lurks an impulse to smash them to bits. The ugly riches of late Tsardom, it is true, were an open invitation to wreckers, but iconoclasm in Russia has a longer history.



As ‘Third Rome’ and guardian of an orthodoxy denied by the renegade West, Russia inherited from Byzantium her peculiar attitude towards the image. The statue of an emperor or icon of a saint proved the legitimacy of a political or religious idea. The saying ‘He who delights in the Emperor’s statue delights in the Emperor’ apples as well to Justinian as to Tsar Nicholas II. Authoritarian societies love images because they reinforce the chain of command at all levels of the hierarchy. But an abstract art of pure form and color, if it is serious and not merely decorative, mocks the pretensions of secular power because it transcends the limits of this world and attempts to penetrate a hidden world of universal law.



Anarchic peoples, like desert nomads, hate and destroy images, and a similar image-breaking streak runs through Russian history. The apparent endlessness of the country encourages the search for inner freedom – with mystics of all kinds, the Brodiagi or perpetual pilgrims, flagellants, Adventists, people in search of the Seventh Dimension and the famous Molokany, or Milk Drinkers, who influenced Tolstoy.



Malevich was touched by mystical yearnings. In his hands the non-objective canvas became an icon of anarchy and inner freedom: this is what made in dangerous to Marxist materialism.. Of his painting Black Square he said he had felt ‘black nights within’ and a ‘timidity bordering on fear’, but as he decided to break with reality and abandon the image: ‘a blissful sensation of being drawn into a “desert” where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life’. Now this is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart -, or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich’s Black Square, his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka’aba at Mecca, the shrine in a valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God. And if this seems far-fetched, I quote the judgment of Andrei Burov [17], an architect who left the Constructivist Movement: ‘There was a strong Muslim influence and orthodox Mohammedanism at that; by way of decoration only clocks and letters were allowed.’



With militant enthusiasm the artists of the Left set about demolishing class barrier and imposing the art of equality on people. They then asked the Government to suppress the Society of Easel Painters and abolish all traditional forms of painting. The very fact of the Revolution demanded a complete break with the Academic tradition, which was alien and Western. The cry went out to jettison the relics of the past to prevent the new man being ‘weighed down like an over-loaded camel’. In Bogdanov’s opinion, the art of the past was not a treasury but an arsenal of weapons against the former age. ‘We will smash the old world wildly,’ announced Mayakovsky, who then suggested everything from Adam to Mayakovsky be consigned to the dustbin.


A White Army Officer
When you catch him
You beat him
And what about Raphael
It’s time to make museum
Walls a target
Let the mouths of big guns
Shoot the old rags of the past!

To many officials, the Leftists were to the ‘left of common sense’.



What had caused the hysteria? One suspects they were overcompensating for not having fought alongside the Bolsheviks But more important, the mystique of the machine seems to have gone to their heads. As John Reed [18], an American Communist, wrote: ‘The devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer. . .’ That kingdom was the kingdom of the machine. The backwardness of Russian industry before the First War is, I am told, often underestimated. The machine age came late to Russia, but when it did, it came with a startling abruptness. The growth rate was phenomenal. Industrial units were few, but were the largest in the world, and Texas oilmen would visit Baku to witness the latest techniques of oil-extraction. With the Revolution, the means o production had devolved on the workers themselves and in their hands the man-made machine would transform humanity. Such was the hope. ‘We are masters of the machine,’ said Mayakovsky, ‘therefore we need not fear it.’ The machine was going to introduce true Socialism. Experts said it would take six months.



Now Lenin’s Mechanical materialism was tempered by his sense of the practical. The Leftists did not know his restraint. Most of them hated nature, or pretended to. Man had a Promethean mission to hack up the earth and fashion it to his taste. The position of mountains and other inconvenient geographic features was ‘far from final’. Malevich, whose mysticism was aroused by machinery, called for man ‘to seize the world of nature, and build a new world belonging to himself’. Other artists described themselves as ‘Saints in the Church of the Machine’. In Vsevolod Meyerhold’s ‘biomechanical’ theatre the actors suppressed any life-like emotion and behaved as though they were stage machinery.[19] Pavlov’s dogs salivated mechanically to stimuli. The concept of the house as a ‘machine for living’ probably originates in Russia and not with Le Corbusier. There was an infatuation with an imaginary America with calls to ‘Chicago-ise the soul’ and ‘do our work like a chronometer!’ to ‘desoul’ art and reduce painting to the scientific application of color.



Once they had ‘desouled’ painting, painters could dispose with it altogether. The monochrome canvas, in effect, declared its extinction as an art form. Malevich exhibited his White On White canvases, which were his ultimate expression of non-objective bliss. Tatlin painted a plain pink board. At an exhibition at the Vkhutemas School in 1921 called “The Last Picture Has Been Painted”, Alexander Rodchenko [20] showed three plain canvases in the primary colors. His sketchbooks which lead up to the ‘suicide of painting’ still belong to his daughter in Moscow and reveal him as a conceptual genius on the level of Marcel Duchamp. In two years he tried out and discarded almost every experiment the New York abstract painters tried in the Fifties and Sixties before reaching the present impasse.



But in 1920 the Russian avant- garde was undismayed by the impasse. A useful art and architecture of iron, glass and concrete would, in one opinion, replace the old culture of wood, ‘itself a bourgeois counter-revolutionary material’. The man-made thing became the object of a minor cult, the factory a shrine to the dignity of labor. Tatlin designed stoves and casseroles [21], though one cynical observer noticed that if all the artists went into the factories they would be reduced to designing labels. Nevertheless, when today we talk of the dehumanizing effects of the machine, it’s strange to hear Malevich’s adulation of the ‘big city’s metallic culture, the culture of the new humanized nature.’



And the kingdom of the machine was not confined to earth. Air travel had also gone to their heads. In 1892 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who taught physics and mathematics at a girls’ school in Ryazan province, had said ‘This planet is the cradle of the human mind, but one cannot spend one’s life in a cradle’.[22] So, being a genius, the Father of the Russian Space Programme invented the first wind-tunnel and outlined the principle of the reactor rocket. A less talented visionary, who had the grace to call himself Kreisky ‘the Extreme’, pioneered the concept of stellar engineering. ‘We shall arrange the stars in rows. . . We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the Palace of World Freedom.’


Tatlin’s projected iron and glass Monument to the Third International, which was to have spanned the Neva, appealed to the yearning for the infinite. Its spiral form which certainly has Islamic ancestry) combines the idea of cyclic renewal with limitless upward progression. Later ‘the great fool’ retreated up the tower of the Novodyeviche Monastery to design an articulated glider called Letatlin, but it never flew.[23] One critic described Malevich’s White on White as a ‘rocket sent by the human spirit into non-existence’. The artist then passed from easel painting to a search for perfect architectural form, and made a series of plaster models. The fact that he called them Planetes suggest he intended his buildings to orbit.



Bad living conditions inflate the life of the fantastic. Berthold Lubetkin, the architect, who was a student at the Vkhutemas School, recalled for me the winter of 1918. He shared a room with sixteen other students behind the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. They ate hyacinths from window boxes; slept between joists wrapped in newspapers because they had burned the floorboards, had no blankets and no source of warmth other than a flat iron which they heated in the porter’s stove. A fellow student called Kalesnikov was unable to find a room and bored a hole in Lissitzky’s street monument The Red Wedge Invades the White Square, where he installed himself for the winter.[23] The same Kalesnikov submitted to the school a project recalling conceptual art of 1794 or a story by Borges) for converting the earth into its own terrestrial globe by attaching a steel arc from pole to pole, on which the artist could hop off for a day and and night.


This brand of proletarian thought might, at a pinch, get through to the industrial worker – albeit with negative results,. But there was no room for the peasants, the wronged peasants chained to the black soil and the seasons of ice and mud and sunflowers and dust. The Leftists preferred not to think about the peasant, and hoped that his condition was transitory. There was, it was true, a strain in Russian Intellectual life which regretted the passing of old Russia and idolized the peasant, from afar, as the incarnation of Russian virtue. Bu this peasant-consciousness had become tainted with middle-class longing for the primitive. Peasant smocks had arrived in the literary salons of St. Petersburg, peasant themes and peasant colors in the Daghilev Ballet.[24] The painter Mikhail Larionov evoked peasant lechery, yet continued to wear wing collars.[25] There was, however, one real poet of the earth, Serge Esenin, the blonde innocent who awoke the tenderest emotions in both sexes. But he failed to master the contradiction of his roots and assumed Bohemianism 9 including a marriage to Isadora Duncan). He destroyed himself with drink, then cut his wrists.[26]



The Leftists may have ignored the peasant. Lenin and the Party did not. Peasants accounted for eighty per cent of the population. Without their help the country would now starve. And in 1921 the government, prostrated by Civil War, granted an unknown freedom of action to the peasant in the New Economic Policy. Lenin believed that peasant solidarity was the course of true Russian Communism.. ‘We are, in a sense, pupils of the peasant.’ He once said. Now the peasant might be illiterate, but his visual acuity was exceptional. For centuries he had ‘read’ the Bible story on the iconostasis of his church; he had ‘read’ folk-takes and news on woodcuts, called lubok, which he pinned up in his cottage; and now he wanted top ‘read’ the message of Revolution and the discomfort of his old tormentors.



Today we recognize the artists and architects of the Left as great original thinkers. We marvel at early Soviet photo-montage posters by Rodchenko or Lissitzky, which pack on to a sheet of paper all the enthusiasm of the Red Revolution. But their original message did not get home to its intended audience, the whole people of Russia. They did not pass this tricky barrier of communication. By their own admission they decided what the people should want, not what it did want. And, it must be said, the people wanted to possess the monumental architecture, opulent decoration, and gilt-framed pictures with which the old rulers of Russia had encrusted their lives. Lunacharsky was correct when he said: ‘The People too have a right to colonnades.’



The Society of Easel Painters revived itself and vigorously denied that the last picture had been painted. Architects began again to load buildings with ornaments. And the dispute between the ‘formalists’ and the ‘realists’ degenerated from an acceptable dialogue to mud-slinging and worse. Tatlin, speaking for the constructivist, used to say: ‘The material is the carrier of a work’s content’; that is, an object of arresting form in steel and glass could express the vitality of the machine age. The realists’ would say, this is nonsense; it will convey messages only to people who are first primed to receive them. So why bother? The one way an artist can encourage workers in a steel factory or in the harvest field is to paint their heroic struggle realistically; and the only way to beat the camera at this game is to make the figures more heroic-looking than they really are. Such was the rationale of the Socialist Realist Style which replaced the abstraction of the Left.


In any case, ‘urban life enriched by the sense of speed’ rapidly disenchanted the Leftists. They began to see the machine as an enemy. Mayakovsky – the gentle giant with fountain-pens in his top pocket to prove his modernity – visited America, said it was fine for machines but not for men, and granted amnesty to Rembrandt before putting a bullet through his brain. With his death in 1930 it was obvious that the Leftist Movement had failed. The Party did squash it. But it also died of fatigue.



What Am I doing Here by Bruce Chatwin; Viking Press, 1989; "George Costakis: The Story of An Art Collection In The Soviet Union"

The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

I

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing."

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty space.

He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.

He does not wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.

He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.

He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one's throat, before
The hangman with his gardener's gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.

He does not bend his head to hear
The Burial Office read,
Nor, while the terror of his soul
Tells him he is not dead,
Cross his own coffin, as he moves
Into the hideous shed.

He does not stare upon the air
Through a little roof of glass:
He does not pray with lips of clay
For his agony to pass;
Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek
The kiss of Caiaphas.

II

Six weeks our guardsman walked the yard,
In the suit of shabby grey:
His cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay,
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its ravelled fleeces by.

He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair:
He only looked upon the sun,
And drank the morning air.

He did not wring his hands nor weep,
Nor did he peek or pine,
But he drank the air as though it held
Some healthful anodyne;
With open mouth he drank the sun
As though it had been wine!

And I and all the souls in pain,
Who tramped the other ring,
Forgot if we ourselves had done
A great or little thing,
And watched with gaze of dull amaze
The man who had to swing.

And strange it was to see him pass
With a step so light and gay,
And strange it was to see him look
So wistfully at the day,
And strange it was to think that he
Had such a debt to pay.

For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
That in the springtime shoot:
But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
With its adder-bitten root,
And, green or dry, a man must die
Before it bears its fruit!

The loftiest place is that seat of grace
For which all worldlings try:
But who would stand in hempen band
Upon a scaffold high,
And through a murderer's collar take
His last look at the sky?

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

At last the dead man walked no more
Amongst the Trial Men,
And I knew that he was standing up
In the black dock's dreadful pen,
And that never would I see his face
In God's sweet world again.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.

A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.


III

In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard,
And the dripping wall is high,
So it was there he took the air
Beneath the leaden sky,
And by each side a Warder walked,
For fear the man might die.

Or else he sat with those who watched
His anguish night and day;
Who watched him when he rose to weep,
And when he crouched to pray;
Who watched him lest himself should rob
Their scaffold of its prey.

The Governor was strong upon
The Regulations Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract.

And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman's hands were near.

But why he said so strange a thing
No Warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher's doom
Is given as his task,
Must set a lock upon his lips,
And make his face a mask.

Or else he might be moved, and try
To comfort or console:
And what should Human Pity do
Pent up in Murderers' Hole?
What word of grace in such a place
Could help a brother's soul?

With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devil's Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.

We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.

So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.

With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalte ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.

Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And each man trembled as he crept
Into his numbered tomb.

That night the empty corridors
Were full of forms of Fear,
And up and down the iron town
Stole feet we could not hear,
And through the bars that hide the stars
White faces seemed to peer.

He lay as one who lies and dreams
In a pleasant meadow-land,
The watchers watched him as he slept,
And could not understand
How one could sleep so sweet a sleep
With a hangman close at hand.

But there is no sleep when men must weep
Who never yet have wept:
So we - the fool, the fraud, the knave -
That endless vigil kept,
And through each brain on hands of pain
Another's terror crept.

Alas! it is a fearful thing
To feel another's guilt!
For, right within, the sword of Sin
Pierced to its poisoned hilt,
And as molten lead were the tears we shed
For the blood we had not spilt.

The Warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Grey figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.

All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.

The grey cock crew, the red cock crew,
But never came the day:
And crooked shapes of Terror crouched,
In the corners where we lay:
And each evil sprite that walks by night
Before us seemed to play.

They glided past, they glided fast,
Like travellers through a mist:
They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of delicate turn and twist,
And with formal pace and loathsome grace
The phantoms kept their tryst.

With mop and mow, we saw them go,
Slim shadows hand in hand:
About, about, in ghostly rout
They trod a saraband:
And the damned grotesques made arabesques,
Like the wind upon the sand!

With the pirouettes of marionettes,
They tripped on pointed tread:
But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,
As their grisly masque they led,
And loud they sang, and long they sang,
For they sang to wake the dead.

'Oho!' they cried, 'The world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the secret House of Shame.'

No things of air these antics were,
That frolicked with such glee:
To men whose lives were held in gyves,
And whose feet might not go free,
Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things,
Most terrible to see.

Around, around, they waltzed and wound;
Some wheeled in smirking pairs;
With the mincing step of a demirep
Some sidled up the stairs:
And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,
Each helped us at our prayers.

The morning wind began to moan,
But still the night went on:
Through its giant loom the web of gloom
Crept till each thread was spun:
And, as we prayed, we grew afraid
Of the Justice of the Sun.

The moaning wind went wandering round
The weeping prison-wall:
Till like a wheel of turning steel
We felt the minutes crawl:
O moaning wind! what had we done
To have such a seneschal?

At last I saw the shadowed bars,
Like a lattice wrought in lead,
Move right across the whitewashed wall
That faced my three-plank bed,
And I knew that somewhere in the world
God's dreadful dawn was red.

At six o'clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.

He did not pass in purple pomp,
Nor ride a moon-white steed.
Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows' need:
So with rope of shame the Herald came
To do the secret deed.

We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.

For Man's grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide!

We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst.

We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man's heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!

With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.

And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.

And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.


IV

There is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The Chaplain's heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far too wan,
Or there is that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.

So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,
And the Warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,
And down the iron stair we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.

Out into God's sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this man's face was white with fear,
And that man's face was grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every careless cloud that passed
In happy freedom by.

But there were those amongst us all
Who walked with downcast head,
And knew that, had each got his due,
They should have died instead:
He had but killed a thing that lived,
Whilst they had killed the dead.

For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain,
And draws it from its spotted shroud,
And makes it bleed again,
And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,
And makes it bleed in vain!

Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb
With crooked arrows starred,
Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;
Silently we went round and round,
And no man spoke a word.

Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The Memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And Horror stalked before each man,
And Terror crept behind.

The Warders strutted up and down,
And kept their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they wore their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at,
By the quicklime on their boots.

For where a grave had opened wide,
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
By the hideous prison-wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That the man should have his pall.

For he has a pall, this wretched man,
Such as few men can claim:
Deep down below a prison-yard,
Naked for greater shame,
He lies, with fetters on each foot,
Wrapt in a sheet of flame!

And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day,
It eats the flesh and bone by turns,
But it eats the heart alway.

For three long years they will not sow
Or root or seedling there:
For three long years the unblessed spot
Will sterile be and bare,
And look upon the wondering sky
With unreproachful stare.

They think a murderer's heart would taint
Each simple seed they sow.
It is not true! God's kindly earth
Is kindlier than men know,
And the red rose would but blow more red,
The white rose whiter blow.

Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way,
Christ brings His will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope's sight?

But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison-air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair.

So never will wine-red rose or white,
Petal by petal, fall
On that stretch of mud and sand that lies
By the hideous prison-wall,
To tell the men who tramp the yard
That God's Son died for all.

Yet though the hideous prison-wall
Still hems him round and round,
And a spirit may not walk by night
That is with fetters bound,
And a spirit may but weep that lies
In such unholy ground,

He is at peace - this wretched man -
At peace, or will be soon:
There is no thing to make him mad,
Nor does Terror walk at noon,
For the lampless Earth in which he lies
Has neither Sun nor Moon.

They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.

They stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:
And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud
In which their convict lies.

The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.

Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life's appointed bourne:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn


I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.

This too I know - and wise it were
If each could know the same -
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!

The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine.

The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.

But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one's heart by night.

With midnight always in one's heart,
And twilight in one's cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.

And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.

And thus we rust Life's iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God's eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper's house
With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

The man in red who reads the Law
Gave him three weeks of life,
Three little weeks in which to heal
His soul of his soul's strife,
And cleanse from every blot of blood
The hand that held the knife.

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal.


VI

In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!




2nd Photo: Oscar Wilde's Tomb in Paris.

Oklahoma City by Andrew Gumbel & Roger Charles

Its always interesting to revisit these cases. For example, for want of $18,000 worth of rebar ( one-eighth of 1% of the total cost of construction of the Murrah Building in 1977) Tim McVeigh’s bomb would have done far less damage and the death toll may have been limited to just fifteen of twenty people. As early as 1988 The National Research Council suggested that the first thing such buildings under threat should do was to close any on-site day-care centers. Furthermore, all of the building’s security cameras except the one serving the GSA’s on-site manager’s office were disconnected as a cost-saving measure despite the warnings and applications of the head of security for the building.



In addition to huge arms stashes by the AFT, U.S. Customs were storing undocumented TOW missiles in the building, in contradiction to both safety and the law. Rescue operations were suspended twice without explanation while agents removed these dangerous items.



Larges bodies of evidence- including 24 eye-witnesses who testified that they saw McVeigh in Oklahoma City before the bombing in the company of one or more other people- 1,034 latent fingerprints taken from McVeigh’s car, the Dreamland Hotel where he stayed and the Ryder rental agency were never checked against the FBI’s computer databases- were systematically ignored during the investigation and prosecutions of McVeigh and Nichols. Greater cooperation between the FBI and AFT, less political interference from Washington, more vigorous pursuit of known extremists could have prevented the attack and broadened the scope of the investigation after. As it turned out the best “evidence’ the prosecutors presented to the jury was the testimony of the sufferings of the victims.



McVeigh ratted on Nichols and Nichols ratted on McVeigh though he did not ‘come clean’ with his whole story until 2007. Michael Fortier ratted on them both. The indictment itself, which came down fairly precipitously in August of 1995, set the start of the conspiracy at September 13, 1994. This day had nothing to do with the evidence. It was the day President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which first introduced the death penalty for using or conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. Prosecutors worried that if they put the start of the conspiracy any sooner, the capital charges might get thrown out.



McVeigh,in a forceful sort of way, had sex with Nichol’s wife on several occasions when her husband was absent. In February 1995, a couple of months before the bombing, McVeigh had sex with Richard Rogers who told the FBI that McVeigh’s tongue and throat action was “incredible”; “He was good at what he did”. A large amount of McVeigh’s activity in the two or so years leading up to the bombing was fueled by crystal meth (which reminded me of the story of Gary Gilmore in “The Executioner’s Song”.)



After sentencing McVeigh was moved to the Supermax prison in Colorado. He did his best to blend in with prison life, forming perhaps the most surprising friendship with Ted Kaczynski. They may have been from different places on the political spectrum, but they were both ideologues who believed in violence. Kaczynski was intrigued to learn about McVeigh’s Gulf War service. McVeigh commented: “Yes, sir. Ironic, isn’t it? In Desert Storm I got medals for killing people.”




Kaczynski thought that the Oklahoma City bombing had been “unnecessarily inhumane.” But he found McVeigh more intelligent than he imagined, and more open to other people and other cultures. “I expect that he is an adventurer by nature,” Kaczynski later wrote, “and America since the closing of the frontier has had little room for adventurers.”



In July 1999 McVeigh was handcuffed, chained and flown with nineteen other prisoners to the new federal death row facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. This was the real-life version of the popcorn Hollywood movie Con Air, with heavily armed federal marshals watching nervously over the likes of Anthony Battle, a mentally disturbed serial offender from Georgia, and David Paul Hammer, a brilliantly devious con man and murderer who inspired both Cyrus the Virus, the John Malkovich character in Con Air, and Thomas Harris’s man-eating evil genius, Hannibal Lecter.



The first time McVeigh spoke to Hammer, who was feared by almost all his fellow inmates, he bragged about the destruction in Oklahoma City, saying: “The official score is 168 to 1. I’m up.” To which an unimpressed Hammer replied: “Well, I guess I can’t kill you more than once.”



Gradually, McVeigh, Hammer, and a third inmate, Jeffery Paul, began holding meetings they nicknamed “Klan rallies,” because they were the only whites on death row. They were not friends, exactly, but they looked to each other for companionship and protection. McVeigh was called “baby killer” by his fellow inmates, and teased for his dearth of sexual experience, but Hammer was his insurance policy against anything worse.



Hammer also helped McVeigh move up the date of his execution by waiving all final appeals on his own death sentence. Hammer did not want to die, although he vacillated about that for years; his principal goal was to set a legal precedent. McVeigh had told his biographer “ I will be glad to leave this fucked-up world.” If his last habeas corpus petition was turned down, as he was almost sure it would be, he wanted to close down the legal process. The problem was, he knew of no one on federal death row who had done this before. So Hammer put in his own request. It was accepted, and McVeigh had his precedent.



McVeigh was not hanged from the gallows in the town square, but his death by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, broadcast via closed-circuit television to the media and relatives of the victims, was the closest thing to a public execution in modern American history. McVeigh called it “Bloodstock.”



Inside the prison, and especially in the death row wing known as Dog Unit, the first federal execution in thirty-eight years was met with a sense of unshakeable gloom. McVeigh had a knack for making himself popular, and found a way of laughing and joking even about his own death. “Still breathin” he signed off his last letters. David Hammer remembered McVeigh forming his hand into a noose and making a yanking gesture whenever anyone asked how he was. “I will grieve for what Tim once was, and for who he is now, because no man ceases to be a human being, no matter his actions or how horrid those actions were,” Hammer wrote in his journal three days before the execution.



Many of the inmates had difficulty eating and sleeping. They were put in lockdown, and the prison authorities replaced the usual menu of cable television programs with comedy films. Hammer, a diabetic, gave himself an insulin overdose the night before McVeigh’s death. “I did so hoping to die,” he later wrote.



In his final appeal at Terry Nichols sentencing trial Michael Tigar did something utterly unexpected: he physically embraced his client and called him his brother, evoking the way Joseph, in the Old Testament, had revealed himself to his brother Benjamin when he stood in judgment over him. The point, Tigar explained, was not to negate the loss of all the brothers, mothers, fathers, and sisters in the bombing, but rather to understand something fundamental about Western Civilization. “ He reached out because even in that moment of judgment he could understand that this is a human process and that what we all share looks to the future and not to the past. My brother is in your hands.”