What The Re-Writings of Gettysburg Address Say About Us Especially “Now”
Presidents Day has got me pondering, of all things, presidential verbiage. And although we’ve missed Abraham Lincoln’s actual birthday 
(Feb. 12) by nine days, “Four score and seven years ago” is a pretty cool turn of phrase (although it was probably borrowed from the King James Bible).
At any rate, during one of these February dates in the year, 1864, the President who once spoke these syllables re-wrote them for the fourth time by hand. It is worth noting that Lincoln made this effort for friends and for purposes of history, and on this fourth occasion he scribed the Gettysburg Address for colleague and former Secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft. Bancroft had, in turn, wanted to publish the cursive writing in some manner of historical journal, but because Lincoln had scribbled this copy back to back, it couldn’t be duplicated clearly. Following Bancroft’s fourth copy of the “few appropriate remarks,” the Secretary’s stepson, Colonel Alexander Bless, made and received the fifth and supposed final transcript of the president’s oratory. And here’s where the now famous speech of November 19, 1863, becomes somewhat hairy (historically speaking). That is, like so many other documents that have been recorded for posterity, the assorted versions of the prose vary in line length, vocabulary and, in one case, intertextual revisions.
None of this, of course, should surprise anyone, least of all an historian. The historian, surrounded by boxes and boxes of supposed eye-witness accounts, and those, stacked upon even larger crates containing annals, heirlooms and artifacts, and those often ransacked by tomb raiders and archeological looters as well as the stray bedouin, looking to stay warm by tossing one or two scrolls into the fire… yes … the historian comprehends the mess. And then, takes great pains to clean things up. What we, the readers of history, get is this: the redacted version of ever-devolving details. Exactitude is lost over time, even a nanosecond. Things may be recapitulated, but merely as a simulacrum of the real deal. Historians, therefore, might as well admit it; before them is the most audacious poetic task, which is the re-writing of history, or of histories.
Many may recall the comments of President George W. Bush when he had been asked by Bob Woodward about how history might judge him. He said, “History we don’t know; we’ll all be dead.”
My argument, however, is that we do know it. We know it all too well. History is coughed up like phlegm in our throats. History wells up like blood-textured tears in our eyes. History cramps our fingers and toes. History makes our ears buzz at night as if we’re listening to Emily Dickinson’s fly “when I died.” What’s different about this history, rather than the Bush doctrine-fatalism, is the heap of contingencies that gall us in the present. It could have been otherwise.
In Charles Taylor’s Templeton Prize-winning book, A Secular Age, the professor of philosophy has lots to say about historic speeches such as the Gettysburg Address. “Poetry,” he writes, “can be seen as an event with performative force, words which open up contact, make something manifest for the first time. But what is this event?”
The answer to this question is the counterpoint to those who envision a monolithic sort of meta-narrative out there.
One there is not. Yes… “the fear is of a loss of the performance power.”
But more and more a dialogical understanding of language… makes its way, and it becomes clear that the resonances which matter are those which link speaker and hearer, writer and readers, and eventually (perhaps) whole communities. Poets may fail to be heard, but the end of the writing is to reach others and to effect a coming together in the Being revealed, or set free.
You see, it’s possible that old Abe Lincoln penned his copies of the Gettysburg event for the same reason that he barked out his message near the battlefield where opposing soldiers had bled and died. He did it because of that transcendent thing that might break through at any moment. And it’s that thing that laps upon the shores of silence between each phrase that’s well-crafted and judged by critics and fellow MFAers as “brilliant.”
Hell… I guess where I’m going, in my fragmented way, is that distinctive revelation that’s so far above and beyond the competition and pressure we may feel to be good, better than or great. Forget that… That push is the bane of my feeble existence, and I dare say, yours. And maybe we’d be less than honest if we’d even try to forget the crazed ambition that drives us as individuals to write and to re-write. Maybe we’d be less than authentic, a commercialized version of idiosyncratic ourselves. So forget that I said ‘Forget that’ a few sentences ago. I’ll remember that inciting voice in my head, but also stand on my toes like a ballerina to see what’s over my head. Or to see what’s over and beyond the boxes and crates of history!
The fact is — Abraham Lincoln and I have many versions of what we’d like to express, not simply to a nation weary of war, but to the non-human and human worlds in which oral exams are now.
And now!
And now!
Babel
–by Rae Armantrout
“Let us go down and confuse
their languageso we may distinguish
the people
from our thoughts.”*
Can it be true
that the baby is afraidhis wish
to gobble us uphas been realized
already?*
Hard to say
since we’ve thrown our voiceinto the future
and the past
Peace–
So many interesting revelations here. I love history “coughed up like phlegm in our throats,” and welling up “like blood-textured tears in our eyes.” And it’s cool and impossible to consider what really motivated Lincoln to write and rewrite the GA, and to reduce/elevate him to writer.
Thank you, Sam. It’s hard to avoid “phlegm” in February.
Thank you, Sam.