Same Place, Same Time Yesterday

Messages from history

Fragments of Blue Willow china still litter backyards in England, shattered along with houses and human bodies by the Blitz. Buried with lead toy soldiers, Roman coins, and Skol lager bottle caps, children dig up these shards and wonder at the strange exotic birds and pagodas imprinted on them. When adults go to sleep or run for cover, wild children emerge from the corners to play and scavenge. This is ever the same in a city, whether at war or armed peace. What are the kids really getting up to? During the German bombardment, when bombs hit a fine restaurant in the finest area of the city—for example, when the trendy Cafe de Paris in London’s Piccadilly was struck by thermite ordnance on March 8 1941—children picked through the rubble looking for treasure. When they found a ring on the finger of some worthy woman or a beautiful watch on the wrist of a gentleman, they used the saws given them by the Fagins who sent them out to cut through bone and obtain the prize. These urchins with knotted bellies were the truth of looting, the truth of silver looted from Cerro Rico de Potosí in Bolivia, smelted down and purified, shipped to England and Germany and the United States, then molded into rings to express the devotions of a love stupid enough to go out to dinner during an aerial bombardment. If the Home Office was unable to feed everyone, then the fruit of the German Heinkel He 111 would.

Diary of Joan Veazey: The most sickening thing was to see people like vultures (after a bombing raid), picking up things and taking them away… At that time, South London’s Juvenile Courts were packed with cases prosecuting minors for theft and looting. On April 1941, for example, Lambeth processed some forty-two children in a single day. Some of these were teenage girls busted for peeling clothes from corpses; one case was a seven-year-old lad who stole five shillings from the gas meter of a house leveled by the Wehrmacht. Kids made up an astonishing 48% of all larceny arrests from September 1940 to May 1941 in England. In total, for the period, there were 4,584 cases of general looting, in varying degrees. The Daily Mail, apoplectic in November 1940, demanded that the forces of law and order kill its own little starvelings whose fathers and uncles had been sent off to be butchered in the Empire’s wars in Europe and Asia and were now dying to defeat Germany: Fines and imprisonment have done nothing to stop the ghouls who rob even bodies lying in the ruins of little homes. Looting is in fact on the increase… The country demands that this crime be stamped out... hang a looter and stop this filthy crime.

Bombing is blind, sometimes even to class. Some thirty high-explosive bombs were dropped on the Queen’s Kew Gardens during the Blitz. Seventy years earlier, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops had laid siege to and utterly destroyed the Old Summer Palace in China. So it is certainly possible that a man, watching the Axis projectiles strike the magnificent gardens of Queen Elizabeth, might have recalled his grandfather’s old tales of the apocalyptic assault on the green paradise of the Qianlong Emperor.

Never mind Churchill’s speeches and the ridiculous Nazi parades, World War II properly began in China with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The sense of it being a ‘world war’ for the West does not include the part of the world where this war started, nor the African dead conscripted by the French, nor the Indians in the British Indian Army (an unrecorded number of Nepalese; 11,000 deaths of POWs after the fall of Singapore), nor the 100,000 Malays, not the 15,000 in the Australian colony of Papua-New Guinea. In China, it is estimated that the Second World War claimed some 14-20 million dead. In comparison, Queen Elizabeth lost 454,000 subjects, a figure which includes both combatants as well as civilians killed in operations like the Blitz.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls across the open field.

The end of the war brought the end of the old style colonialism, replaced mostly these days by a more subtle and virtual kind. Certain brutalities can be refined and enriched. After the Europeans got sick of killing each other, their colonies stared back at their bloodstained fratricidal former bosses. Germany lost most of possessions in the War to End all Wars and England, due to American debt, lost most of hers after the next War to End all Wars.

Before these colonial projects of the 19th Century, Europe had no self-consciousness. It had warfare and culture and land mass and people, but to see itself it needed to look back from afar. It needed to picture itself—literally in a snapshot or a postcard. In these images, the European finally saw his own face in the eyes of a true stranger.

This sense of European bourgeois vanity was first analyzed by Sigmund Freud. It obvious why Freud latched onto myths like Narcissus and Oedipus, whose most literal readings are the love of seeing oneself and entering the place from where one first emerged. In 1913, Freud lived in the same Viennese neighborhood as one Alois Schicklgruber, who would later call himself Adolf Hitler. At the time, Vienna was a place of strangers, addicts, and exiles. Hitler and Leon Trotsky frequented Vienna’s Cafe Central, while Freud preferred the Cafe Landtmann. Both businesses are still in operation today (understandably, the Central skips Hitler in its online list of famous past clientele). Trotsky ran into his future assassin at the Central: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later named Stalin (‘Steele-like’). This is how Trotsky described Dzhugashvili/ Stalin in his diaries: He was short... thin... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks... I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness. At the time, Stalin’s passport bore the name of Stavros Papadopoulos. If he had known what Papadopoulos later had in store for him, Trotsky might have picked up a knife from the kitchen and struck first. Imagine a parallel world where he did just that: Trotsky is then interred in a mental institution for what looks like an unprovoked attack. Mexican art history is changed forever, but not the history of Russia. Charles Scribner's Sons do not publish Trotsky’s autobiography in 1930 and his book on Stalin, published in English by Harper in 1946, is pure science fiction.

There are no recorded meetings between Freud and Schicklgruber/ Hitler but they may have stood in line together, perhaps buying a paper or getting a shoe resoled. If one believes that history is the product of powerful and influential men, then history is just a list of these people and who they lined up with. Waiting in line is a linear plane with an end and a beginning whose length is usually dictated by the workaday clock. Forget the professors—the real experts on history work in the service industry. And forget Freud, the real psychologists are bus drivers.

People standing in lines, at bars and bus stops, sitting at diner counters or loitering on the sidewalk... We meet others through them and still others after that. But between meeting and missing there is a third event. I want to remember you, but we have never crossed paths. I remember never meeting you once. In the station, I passed you by on my way to track 11. Déjà vu is simply a memory of the present—a memory of something that did not occur but might have been. Occurring now, it gives us the uncanny sense that we have lived this moment before.

It is not life you meet in this moment, but the phantoms of life. The moment of déjà vu unites the subject and object in the same way a camera unites the operator with an object he will see only once (when he looks at his photograph, the image is thereby altered). We could call this a true sixth sense, but it has nothing to do with seeing the future. It has more to do with sideways perception, with seeing around a corner. Déjà vu is just another kind of anticipation.

As the old World Wars alliances fade into books and legends even less useful, the status quo achieved by killing 85 million people globally is now over. But old guilt must still be paid for, psychologically and financially. Gaza is the price the Europeans pay for their senseless and passionate racism, for butchering the ‘foreigners’ they created from among themselves—for them, repayment is a negligible cost. The family munitions firms in Germany are still in business, like the cafes, like the old prejudices. From São Paulo to Khan Yunis, children still dig through rubble looking for scraps. It is hard to grow up and see friends die, or abandon you even as you abandon them. Waiting for the blackout, the house is black and calmed. Is that a familiar footstep above, the scurrying of a raccoon in the alley, the sound of mail dropping in the box for the long-dead Mr. Pedraza? I have no way and therefore want no eyes. Yet I remember the harbor and the junk boats in old Hong Kong.

Freud wrote: Our unconscious does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal. Wernher von Braun compared himself to Columbus.

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