Black Uniform and a Sam Browne Belt
Mussolini, orating at an elevated rostrum, in the reading room at the New York Public Library is a peculiar thought to have. The vision of it struck me while I was staring off into the middle distance, my hands lying fallow in front of my computer, while the growing legion of those at work sat at the broad oak tables, dispersed at irregular intervals, toiling at their various tasks in the cavernous, booklined chamber.
My routine of coming to the library twice a week to write was a result of my having reduced my five-day schedule, working as a whole animal butcher in East Williamsburg, down to two days a week. The job was satisfying but hard and the shop was a surprisingly pleasant place to spend the day. But after a year, the physicality of the labor began to take its toll on me; I was worn down and struggling to recover day after day. I also began thinking about coming to terms with the longstanding preoccupation that I had with writing. Up until this time, the closest I had come to fulfilling the impulse to putting my thoughts down, was to spend my time thinking about what I might do if I ever got around to doing something about it, without actually doing anything about it.
Eventually, without knowing exactly how, I came around to breaking the logjam and began to do some work.
Those days that I wasn’t working in the butcher shop, I would leave my apartment before ten, walk up to fortieth street, slide my backpack off of my shoulder for the guard at the library entrance to give it a perfunctory glance, before nodding me inside.
The reading room, despite the frequency of my visits, would leave me taken aback each time I entered and I would need to take a moment to absorb the grandeur and beauty of the beaux artes space. After which I would suss out the vibe, calculating where best to place myself for a day's work. Pulling the seat away from the table, I’d carefully lift the legs up so as not to have them scrape audibly against the floor, echoing distractingly throughout the entire room; breaking the silence and setting one's teeth on edge.
Usually, within a half hour, a thought would burble up and for the next few hours my focus would train on that idea. I afforded myself the luxury of not having to worry that what I was writing, related in any way to what I wrote in a previous sitting, and in doing so I afforded myself the lattitude to follow my mind. There was an additional thought that presented itself more abstractly, but which was motivating: The idea that I may be writing a book.
Having spent a time hearing nothing more than the white noise in my head, I looked upwards at the ornately finished iron rail encircling the mezzanine and Il Duce is standing at one of the rosewood lecterns mounted atop the railing. He’s wearing a black military uniform, and a Sam Browne belt running diagonally across his tunic, his bullet shaped head is closely shorn, and his chin is lifted up haughtily. I have no explanation for why my subconscious has manifested Benito Mussolini from a moment in time at the height of his powers. Why of anyone, he is who I conjured, standing there waiting for his moment to address those of us below. I can’t exactly say.
At the time, I found the idea ridiculous. Stuck for something to write, I was presented with the absurd. Pleased with myself, so much so, that three years later, and finding myself out of pocket without a piece to make my deadline, I dug into the archives and brought out Benito for this week’s article.
I still think it’s funny, but there’s an edge to it that troubles me.
Without quite knowing why, I swung over to Youtube to watch some clips of The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin’s final film and his only talkie.
Having made the movie specifically to reduce Hitler to a buffoon, Chaplin puts in, arguably, his best work. It is beautiful, melancholic, and uproariously funny. The attempt is heroic and Chaplin is at the height of his powers, both artistic and influential, yet the caricature may be too gentle, too Chaplinesque, to adequately satirize Hitler. Those traits that he sought to deflate: the over the top oration, the pageantry, the promise of a greater purer nation, were the qualities that successfully and terrifyingly drove Germany disastrously forward.
Having spent some time watching on my computer, the imaginary, uniformed, fascist, ineffectually shouting into the crowd, reinforced the struggle that I was having, which was finding the inherently loathsome funny. The contradiction has left me to puzzle why one afternoon, three years ago, the ridulous image of a despot orating in a library presented itself for my amusement.
Writing now, with much having happened since then, I want to draw something bigger from the hallucination. At a time, where democracy came perilously close to slipping away a little over a year ago; and now, in Ukraine, the largest military incursion is occurring since World War II, the propaganda is in full bloom, as is the absurdity of it all, neither of which will alleviate the unimaginable suffering that has no end in sight. I suppose I’m reaching for the deflation of what is most terrifying. Below is the story that I wrote three years ago.
Il Duce Addresses the Reading Room at the New York Public Library
There is a narrow, ornately railed, mezzanine that encircles the entirety of the grand reading room at the New York Public Library, the place where I regularly come to work. I have yet to see a single person strolling along the elevated, book-lined promenade, rising some ten feet above the minutely ordered volumes populating the shelves at floor level. Up there, at an interval of what appears to be forty or so feet, are small, rectangular, platforms anchored upon the railing and cantilevered outward, overhanging the floor below. Rostrums, if you like, they are, no doubt, there to facilitate the researchers who, having located the volume of their liking, are afforded the convenience of neither having to stand, balancing, simultaneously with both book and notepad; nor having to lug one of which, from my worm’s eye perspective, appears to be an unyielding cadre of substantial volumes, back down to the main floor, so that they may instead record the necessary information entombed within the sizable tome of their choosing comfortably and proximately to one of the conveniently placed podiums.
When I have occasion to raise my head from the labors occupying my mind at the moment, I sometimes look up towards those regularly spaced platforms mounted along the railing and as I take in the ornate and cavernous space, occupied by the studious and the bored, I’ll occasionally imagine something entirely different occurring in that space directly overhead. What I contemplate is: Standing erect at one of the rostrums, grandly uniformed, in olive-drab militaristic garb, shouting pronouncements of victory and conquest, over the un-raised heads of those of us below, is Benito Mussolini, Il Duce. He’s up there yelling and mugging and pounding his fist on one of the beautifully constructed rosewood lecterns as he, unsubsidingly holds forth.
Those times when this occurs to me, there is usually just one of them up there, directly above me, going at-it full tilt, while being fully disregarded by those, other than me, who are trying to slog through the rough of their own silent labors.
Other times, depending, I suppose, upon my frame of mind, there’s a Mussolini situated at each and every lectern; a pounding, posturing, shouting and mugging little library dictator situated, one every forty feet, encircling the grand chamber, each vying for the attention of those of us in attendance. They, the populace of elevated orators, to a one, brandish that cadre of inspirational rhetorical gifts of the original, which at that time, brought the entirety of a nation to rise and enthusiastically follow the undeniable charisma of the despotic Il Duce and the grand vision of his passions.
Of course, a bit further into the story and much later on, the catastrophe that his vision evinced, got him shot and summarily strung up in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan; a dead, stubby, upside down piñata left to endure, for a time, endless petty depredations delivered at the hands of a city of fully pissed-off Italians.
You really do have to wonder if I’m ever going to get anywhere with this fucking book.
Not to be a pest, Jeff, but Chaplin went on to act in 4 more films after the War: the controversial Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, A King in New York, and A Countess from Hong Kong. Nevertheless, another excellent piece in your Journal of Failure.