If you hold your hand, close your face. You will obviously see it.
But you will see what is just beyond in greater focus.
You need to pull your hand back from your eyes until it comes into focus, which is for me about right there.
There is where I can see my hand, but there is also where the background becomes blurred.
Thus, each one of us can see and not see all at the same time.
And that is why it is said that vision is the most alienating of the senses because we cannot see everything at once.
There is always something we cannot see. In my first lecture,
I proposed that the notion of an American body is one that is difficult to
envision and that this has been the case for almost two hundred and fifty years.
When the United States separated from Britain in 1776, there were no ready metaphors for how to embody the new nation.
And this is large in part because the colonies comprehended themselves as parts of the British body.
The king's body, a regal body whose limbs were being painfully severed.
Painful, too, for the colonists.
I might add not because they had to start over, but instead because they had to make an image out of something they had themselves destroyed.
And so the intercessors rushed in the great history painter Benjamin West, the lone American who served as a court painter to King George.
The third suggested the body of a Native American person to represent the continent.
But this was problematic because it was two obviously different,
and the frontiers between white settlement and indigenous sovereignty were still tentative and contentious.
Others suggested animals to symbolise the country marvelling at the range and difference of species in North America.
Benjamin Franklin offered the body of a snake a humble image, to be sure,
but a remarkable animal that regrows where it is severed always whole, even when it is fractured.
Flying squirrels were also popular,
and so were the bald eagle and the turkey that the American people would be represented in the body of their president was not a foregone conclusion.
George Washington, of course, was widely admired for what the public knew of his military success,
and he was named even during his presidency as the Potter Patrie a. the father of the nation.
But as a separate matter, there was little consensus about what a president was to the letter of the law,
much less what it could symbolise in the larger sense.
Was a president like a king by another title or a benevolent dictator like the Roman Cincinnatus?
Was he supposed to keep his profession and rule the country on the side?
Was he fit to rule? If he did not have property or slaves?
The sovereignty of the states was another issue would each state have its own president or something else?
And would the states bowed to the authority of the president of the United States?
These issues were many vast and complex, and the American people for a brief time were fairly ambivalent.
The first representation of George Washington as a symbol of the entire nation is not.
I am certain when you are thinking of it, is this.
The city of Washington, designed by Pier Lawful Lawful, was an interesting man for the job.
He was French, a Parisian court painter to King Louis,
the beloved who left France to enlist in the Continental Army and fight against the
British during the American Revolution in 1790 and at the suggestion of the president,
George Washington. U.S. Congress designated a compact 100 square miles of riverside land to serve as the new nation's permanent capital.
The land was donated by the state of Maryland, encapsulating the existing city of Georgetown.
A different George. Your George. Not ours. Across the Potomac, from the thriving slave port of Alexandria in the Commonwealth of Virginia,
Washington's estate, Mt. Vernon included a working plantation and enslaved labourers and its 15 miles south.
The plan for the capital city unfolded according to debates, in a newly formed and contentious Congress.
Thomas Jefferson was against any new city because he was principally concerned for the will of the people,
and thus he argued any new development should naturally follow the contours of the existing city of Georgetown.
In the end, though, Full appeased Jefferson's demand for a democratic arrangement of space.
By laying out the city according to a grid. Since equally spaced rectangles.
Seemed rational and fair. But the federal faction in Congress saw a capital city that would rival European court life.
This was LaFalce bailiwick, to be sure. So he designed an axial web of grand allays to be superimposed over the grid wide avenues
with sight lines that could accommodate views of uninterrupted military parades.
He conceived of the National Mall, a wide strip of land connecting the U.S. Congress,
building with the president's palace later to be called the White House,
to be a raised lawn on which the president would process imperially back and forth.
The awkward meeting points between the rectilinear grid and the diagonal axes were to law fall,
intended as empty spaces that would eventually hold monuments for the assurance successes of a country whose history was still unfolding.
Now, as someone who's lived in Washington for 10 years,
I will be the first to attest to the fact that the long phone plan is a miserable failure, impossible to navigate.
Low fall. Poor guy was fired. Who in their right mind would join together an 18th century city to an arkless grid, to the grandest aspirations of S.I.
And yet this bizarre hybrid was the first real symbolic representation of Washington whose name it bears.
Work on the construction of the new Washington was slow to start and be set by political consternation.
But one crucial thing happened to refresh American energies in favour of the capital city.
On December 14th, 1799, George Washington died.
What ensued was a massive outpouring of public support for the first president.
A rush of unifying enthusiasm heretofore unheard of in the nation's short history.
U.S. Congress held a recess on the day of his funeral, led by the example of the then first lady Abigail Adams,
a woman so popular and outgoing that both critics and supporters called her Mrs. President.
High society. Women around the nation went into a year of formal mourning for Washington.
Tributes came even from around the world in a significant gesture to the young United States.
The Royal Navy's battleships lowered their colours and thus, in the absence of Washington's real body, came the urgency to visualise it once more.
The favourite, George Washington, was to appear as not too strong like a king.
Americans were decidedly over that idea, but not too weak.
He needed to personify the strength of the federal republic that was already confidently marching westward in its grasp of the entire continent.
Instead, the favoured representation of Washington in the early 19th century imaginary was this.
The Gilbert Stuart Athenian portrait painted in 1796,
one painted during the president's lifetime and famously memorialised by the U.S. Treasury on its currency starting in 1869.
This painting has the body that Americans wished to see for themselves first.
It was understood to have an honest facial expression.
A slight blush in the cheeks conveyed sincerity as though the president were unable to erect a false facade of his true emotion.
His widened jaw conveyed patience, determination and control.
The downcast stare. Read to the viewer as though Washington were in the presence of a moral exemplar, conveying modesty and deference in one glance.
And most importantly, the unfinished quality of the portrait invites the viewer to complete it himself within his own
imagination of what the ideal George and therefore the ideal American should be in the eighteen thirties.
One journalist said it is the mirror for the image itself, reproducing the very virtues in themselves.
Unlike the urban Washington, D.C., Stewart's portrait is intended as a literal illustration.
However, I would like to suggest that it is also, in its own way, abstract,
owing to its close association with increasingly popularised images of Washington's profile on hard currency even before its appearance.
On the one dollar bill, Stewart's portrait was also subject to an astonishing circulation in print.
Stewart had left his portrait unfinished because it was a template not only for later paintings of his own,
but also for countless renderings as print engravings serving a popular market eager to purchase commercialised images of the first president.
One of the roles of fiat money is to stabilise the abstraction of monetary value.
To give it a unitary form and reduce the volatility inherent in a transaction.
The Athenian portrait, while not actually money, is likewise numismatic.
It represents American socio political cohesion across time and space.
Its appearance as cash later in history only reinforces this role.
After Stuart's portrait, Emanuel voices George Washington crossing the Delaware.
Is the image of the first president enshrined in the American imagination, a gleaming symbol of American unity and rebellion against tyranny?
Lloyd's cuts an interesting figure in American art history.
He was born in Germany, emigrated to America in 1840, but moved back to Germany in 1841 to study painting in Dusseldorf.
There, he espoused a concept of romanticised history painting current in the German school aligned with notions of a progressive,
universal history rooted in the philosophies of Conte and Heikal.
In this, Duesseldorf differed from the cyclical model of history, which I addressed in my first lecture on the American landscape painter Thomas Cole.
For coal, the fall of civilisation was a warning against decadence and wealth.
But Loyiso took a different tack, one that was reactive to the 1848 political revolutions sweeping Europe.
The rises and downfalls of nations corresponded to embedded national character.
To him,
America was the most inspiring modern nation because its success as such was borne out of a revolution against oppressors and therefore also to him.
George Washington symbolised nothing, if not the whole esprit de corps.
The spirit of the entire people. We must momentarily leave to this side.
Then neither Htay of Lloyd says Romanticism.
If only to see Washington crossing the Delaware simply for what it is at an impressively large 12 and a half by 21 feet,
it is virtually the size of an entire wall with a highly artistic and exciting composition.
The subject is General Washington's leadership of the Continental Army.
Across the treacherously icy Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776,
en route to a surprise attack on the Heshan garrison at the Battle of Trenton, New Jersey.
The event in history is cemented as the turning point in the war.
Evidence of Washington's expert supervision of military forces and his ability to exhort the rangy and exhausted troops to victory.
In its emotionality, Loyd's spared no expense.
The statuesque Washington stands erect in an improbably tiny vessel enveloped in what we can only guess is divine light,
illuminating the national mission during a night-time crossing.
As his men scramble to fall in line, of course, historical accuracy was not.
Lloyd's is calling. Owing to the artist's idealistic views of the progressive nature of civilisation,
the painting was a resounding tribute to both American freedom and American character.
I'm sure, as you can imagine, when it was displayed in New York, it was a spectacular success.
Within a year, the picture was prepared as a line engraving by the well-known French company computer VIDAZA.
And that print version is the one that found its way into virtually every 19th century American parlour.
For the next 70 years at least. Lloyd's is painting gave all Americans the right George at the right time.
And I say all Americans, because by 1850, the American body was shifting, changing.
It was breaking. By then, most knew that the relationship between the north and south was polarised beyond repair.
Patriotism in the north sensed its inheritance of American values to be rooted in New England,
including personal liberty and suffrage, which were sharply at odds with the institution of slavery.
Patriotism in the South aligned itself with the American revolutionary confidence to overthrow a despotic government,
which they increasingly compared to the North's demands for abolition.
Strangely enough, both north and south then could see themselves reflected in voices inspiring painting without a second guess.
The ability of both sides to appeal to a shared national iconography of the revolution lubricated the re-entry of the defeated South into the union.
At the conclusion of the civil war. But then something changed.
The Washington that was so bright in the eyes of grandparents seemed altogether less interesting to their grandchildren.
Washington began to disappear, or at least the Washington Americans knew.
Humble, honest but unconquerable began to fade.
New biographies of the first president, such as WB Woodward's book, published in 1923,
disproved cherished stories about Washington's honesty and virtue, origin myths now taken to be totally old fashioned.
Americans in the Jazz Age were delighted to read in the papers about scandals, and Washington was outed as the most scandalous of all.
A drunk, a womaniser, a gambler and a dancer. He couldn't stand to read a book and he couldn't even spell.
Inasmuch as these descriptions make Washington into an object of mockery,
they also make him into a flamboyant every man, The Great Gatsby of the revolution,
even the more temperate biographers throughout the 1920s and 30s,
acknowledged that Washington's life had been romanticised throughout the 19th century.
It's not that there wasn't any interest left in the founding father, but that what made him an interesting story had changed.
Here is one entertaining example. The painter, Grant Wood, best known for his 1930 painting American Gothic, typifies the shift.
And here I also show his 1932 Daughters of the Revolution taking its title from
a conservative American women's organisation popularly known as the D.A. R.,
whose eligibility for membership is determined by establishing an authentic genealogical connexion to Revolutionary War soldier.
Wood said it was a rotten painting carried only by satire.
In that sense, it is rotten, very rotten indeed, in the sense of being quite naughty.
Three elderly DSR ladies,
one preciously holding a delicate cup of tea in front of what else amounted coloured print of loiters Washington crossing the Delaware.
The v shaped clearing of space in the centre between the second and third woman is an inversion not only of the triangular composition of Loyd's says,
painting in the background, but also the similar shape formed by Washington's legs splayed out in the boat.
The satirical point is all too clear, the image of Washington as the saintly hero only continued to be relevant to decidedly unmodern Ortiz,
who would recoil from the certain aspects of Washington's real body, so to speak.
If there is a defining feature of Washington in the 20th century,
then it might be identified as the tension that had characterised his images from the start between
the search for a coherent American identity and the incoherence of a body in which to locate it.
The great iconoclasm of abstraction born out of the mass destruction of two world wars refuted the 19th
centuries doctrines of progress which could no longer account for the world's fundamental absurdity.
Thus, rejected artists came into new conventions, processes and views about history itself.
What is clear is that paintings like Loiters Washington crossing and in fact, the entire practise of painting could never again be so naive.
In 1953, the artist Larry Rivers reinterpreted Lloyd says, grand manner painting in the language of a gestural abstraction.
In his own painting titled Washington Crossing, the Delaware Rivers constructed a brick collage of the main elements in Lloyd,
says Mammoth original general Washington appears alone in the boat.
At the centre of Rivers, work turned to face the viewer.
Human and equine figures scatter across ice floes denoted by rough swaths of thick white paint.
Rivers seemed to leave the work and an overall state of incompletion figures in lines blur in
an abstract expressionist style recognisably derived from Rivers mentor Willem de Kooning,
thematically, just like we saw with Grant Wood. Rivers divorced his painting from the ideological bravura claimed of its source image.
Rivers would do the undercut voices idealised form of history, demonstrating his fingers as plastic and ambiguous.
Unlike Wood, however, Rivers's work is not satire.
There's nothing obviously funny about it, but if it's not a parody,
then it is a polemic deploying the overly emotional and even the hypermasculine stridency
of history painting as a format that only has continued relevancy as a subversion.
In Rivers's words, I couldn't picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas time with anything resembling hand on chest heroics.
The very term heroic in 1963, 1953 had a clear and proximate connexion to the patriotism of allied victory in World War Two.
Within the arts, more specifically,
the later 1940s and 1950s favoured a muscled up and heroic vision of American free expression crystallised by the abstract expressionists,
huge canvases, gestural aesthetics and moody vision of the sublime.
See, for example, one of the moodier ones, Barnhardt Newman's vier heroics, Seb Leanness, about eight feet high and 18 feet across.
And if that's not the size of a history painting, then I don't know what is palpitating.
Redfield interrupted periodically by narrow vertical stripes.
When it was first exhibited, Newman wrote an accompanying text instructing viewers not to back away from it,
as one might from a large painting, but rather to take it in from a close distance in order to allow themselves to be overwhelmed.
This was an artwork meant to ravish and conquer.
But now some would like would again, Rivers's commentary holds up a critique of American hero ism,
specifically by highlighting its overbearingly unbearably masculine tone.
The sexuality implied by abstract expressionism in the 1950s and certainly comprehended of Newman's painting was not lost on the public.
One reviewer mistranslated the Latin title vier heroics silliness to heroic men erect in order to criticise its lack of nuance parenthetically.
Newman had intended it to mean, quite correctly, men heroic and sublime.
As a rebuttal, Newman defended himself by calling the reviewers attack a castration.
Now, I could go on about this interesting back and forth,
but I will not suffice to say that Larry Rivers had an idea of the kind of critique he was after in Washington crossing.
The artist remembers having been laughed at and labelled as a reactionary because he included a pastiche of a romantic painting.
When others had radically done away with figuration in general, the public wasn't upset, Rivers recalled.
But painters were. By painters, of course, rivers did not mean all painters, but rather the macho men accepted into the abstract expressionist fold.
Note here in the now iconic photograph of the so-called irascible.
The presence of only one woman had a stern. While he did enjoy some acceptance within this group.
He also had one foot in a subterranean culture of gay artists, many of whom were his friends, collaborators and indeed his lovers.
Rivers was bisexual.
But perhaps that personal information is not really as useful as it is to know his belief that gay subcultures in the 1950s, to that point,
the most overtly homophobic decade in American history represented an interesting metaphor for political and social nonconformity.
For instance, Rivers called Loiter a lover of Napoleon.
How else can we read this? But in the light of his later painting of 1964, the greatest homosexual, which is a painting of Napoleon.
All of these are deliberate, if absurd provocations, Rivers wisht most of all to unmask even through hyperbole.
The hypocrisy is a power in the buttoned up official American culture of the 1950s.
One of the reasons why Rivers work shines in memory is because shortly after it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art,
it arrested the attention of the MOMA curator, Frank O'Hara, who was also a budding writer and critic.
O'Hara's queerness, as well as his frequent collaboration's and on again, off again,
romantic relationships with Rivers and other artists is well documented.
The poem on seeing Washington crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art is grounded in a description of Rivers's painting,
but soon becomes a personal letter to George Washington himself.
Dear father of our country so alive, you must have lied incessantly to be immediate.
Here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag,
bravely specific and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to assure.
Other than that, the bridge reaches for. O'Hara professes familial love.
He calls Washington his father. The poet's own living heart is a reliquary for Washington's remains.
But there also exists profound disappointment in Harry's words, the reliquary is secretly a deadly arsenal.
The boat is disoriented elsewhere in the poem.
Ohara rages with cynicism. Still speaking to Washington.
See how free we are. O'Hara exposes the mythic hero who once spoke for all Americans.
As a lawyer. He speaks only for sub.
But wait a pirate's high O'Hara's invocation of the Jolly Roger.
Although it would seem in passing, reminds us of a different flag.
Strangely absent from Rivers's composition, Washington's body is still there from the original.
But the all important American flag that provides the top of the pyramid and therefore the pinnacle of Washington's achievement has now disappeared.
Surely it is the American flag that O'Hara insinuates in the mention of the pirates.
Neither visible in rivers is pastiche, but notwithstanding an image squared with the sense of impending calamity elsewhere in the verse.
But even more striking than the missing flag is how.
Elsewhere in the tightly knit gay artistic subculture in which rivers and our herel worked, the American flag is an object of unrelenting focus.
For example, take Jasper Johns as flag paintings in wax and Kostic,
one of pasted newsprint ground which take the general form and design of an iconic object,
but with a deadpan attitude, just another artefact in the visual world ready to be rendered.
John's conflated the idea of flag and painting,
making instead a depersonalised waxy double one that looks like a flag as an antiquated specimen shrink wrapped in plastic.
He therefore replaced the cultural meaning of the flag by relieving a well-known symbol from its symbolic function.
Just as Lloyd is painting from the 19th century had been relieved of its symbolic functioning in the 20th to salute.
Jones is painting of a flag would be an irrational gesture.
And yet, for all of its somewhat cynical silence, Johns seems to be able in some way to protect the personality behind his many flag shaped works.
One direct example is in memory of my feelings.
Frank O'Hara, 1961, a monochromatic painting in oil and canvas,
adopting the general format of the American flag with the addition of a stacked fork and spoon and hinged mysteriously in the centre.
Colour peeking out from the lower right hand edge of the canvas suggests that it was painted over the preliminary groundwork of a flag painting,
which was not uncommon for Johns to do at the time. Despite the dedicated title spelled out in stencils on the lower left, the.
A parent of use occasion had also to do with the homophobia of the era.
Johns, who was gay, would have known that a more emotional overture to one of his male friends would have been the ultimate tell.
And yet the painting is still a tribute, one that the pre-eminent critic, Leo Steinberg, might have called loving.
Notice the cuddling fork and spoon. Jones is painting again, resists the generally expressive purpose of the American flag,
whose shape it adopts only to recuperate the personal and equally expressive purpose of those small little indications of a private life.
Within the first line of O'Hara's poem reads, My quietness as a man in.
One wonders what we would see if we could open the painting up at the hinges.
That pretends, of course, that there is an inside to see.
What do I mean? Washington's ghost is summoned once more to return to Frank Stellas Delaware Crossing.
1962, a painting. So external and it's obvious geometric arrangement that it might almost render its title pointless.
The painting measuring a six and a half feet squared is an extension of the monochromatic work.
Stella undertook in 1958 the austere black paintings which made the then 22 year old artist instantly
notorious in the New York art world and a leading painter in the emerging minimalist movement.
Delaware crossing is one of six. Benjamin, more paintings, so-called, because they take as their colours.
Benjamin More house paints directly from the can into the canvas.
One painting for each type of spectral colour. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
The other paintings in this series have titles referencing the Civil War,
but only Delaware Crossing maintains a reference to Revolutionary War history and at that to history painting.
When asked in 1964 about the meaning of his striped paintings, Stella famously said,
What you see is what you see, a dictum that has come to stand in for minimalist art as a whole.
And yet I think there is still a history lurking behind this one, located out of focus behind the centre of our gaze.
Much has been made of the black paintings in contemporary art, especially their sheer and radical literalism,
working from the pre-determined format of the size of the canvas.
Much has also been made of their downbeat titles, sometimes in general,
like the marriage of reason and squalor in the vaguely apocalyptic cadence of William Blake.
And sometimes too specific to be legible to us anymore.
Such as Thomas and Cort Park, the name of a public housing project in New York City.
But others are specific and legible. And I think one stands out as unsettlingly so defined a HA.
Nineteen fifty nine. The title in English. The Flag on High, which is the first line of the national anthem of Nazi Germany.
Stella deploys the same basic design scheme in his rendering of Delaware crossing.
Such a comparison cannot be merely anodyne.
If we see Stella as having internalised the approach of Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns,
then we might conclude that Delaware crossing is yet another mid century variation on the theme of Washington's I chronicity.
By now, standard repudiation of seductive presidential power read through the new lens of the
disastrous totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the massive fact of the Holocaust.
But that doesn't seem to fit exactly the store, the historical stakes seem to demand something else.
Another option is to go back one step. We might conclude then that Delaware crossing is a response to the previous generations abstract expressionism.
A criticism against the will of this type of art to fully subjugate the mind.
And I of course, that was not the explicit goal, as Newman himself protested, but it was nonetheless latent or option three.
The most extreme, externalised and diagrammed, completely emptied of subject and emotion.
Even the high minded subjects and emotions brought forth by the title Delaware Crossing casts doubt on whether a contemporary artist
should anymore retain the utopian right to represent the private self within a world so thoroughly corrupted by unilateral power,
tragedy and mass murder. Where we encounter this same concept, albeit in a slightly more accessible way, is in pop art.
It should tell us something that Andy Warhol liked.
Delaware crossing so much that he purchased from Stella a miniaturised series of the Benjamin Moore paintings.
Warhol always the cypher, was at the same time in the early 1960s,
making his way through similar issues of how to represent the American public back to itself.
Whether that is in the deadpan language of commercial culture, as in his Campbell's soup cans or in media images of collective tragedy,
as in his treatments of Post assassination magazine photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy.
On the one hand, Warhol holds a dark mirror up to the homogenising crush of consumerism that matured in America in the 1960s.
But on the other, Warhol ruptures the glossiness of these objects, both objects for sale and objects of desire, sometimes to their limit.
To suggest, I think, that there is still a story left to tell.
His remarkable race, riot paintings of 1963 64 are an appropriate choice here.
These silkscreen canvases are based on photographs of atrocities committed against
young black protesters in the Birmingham campaign of the civil rights movement.
As published in Life magazine in 1963, to quote Warhol in art news, in the same year, when you see a gruesome picture over and over again,
it doesn't have any effect which may have equated with the apathy of our contemporary culture,
defined as it is by images on pages and nowadays screens.
What I think Warhol really meant, though, was that it doesn't have any effect.
But should people did actually go down south to help with the civil rights movement
because they saw moving photographs of the injustices in magazines and on TV?
There is and always has been an interest in popular images and what they make us feel or don't.
But there is equally always a bit of space left for us to resist, to bounce back.
And at his very best, this is what Warhol wants us to see.
To that end, the race riots rejuvenate our understanding of the American mission.
After all. Warhol silkscreen them in red, white and blue.
With George Washington's body disappeared. Other bodies emerge.
Let me finish with a final picture. The African-American painter Robert Cole, Scotts, George Washington Carver,
crossing the Delaware page from an American history textbook and iconoclastic painting of 1974,
first exhibited in 1975, a year that brings us very close to the patriotic American bicentennial celebrations of 1976.
In it, we see yet another pastiche of the now well recognised scene only now.
It is another Washington at the helm. George Washington Carver,
a prominent black scientist who was born into slavery but who became a highly regarded botanist and agricultural adviser to three U.S. presidents.
Cole Scott's rendition, however, complicates any sense of heroism nor even pride.
By painting the attending figures with the crudest exaggeration of blackface minstrelsy,
a body theatrical performance style from the late 19th and early 20th centuries intended to mock people of African descent to black Americans,
not only the name, but also the idea of Washington has a different resonance entirely.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, formerly enslaved people had only one name, their Christian name.
There was no surname because enslavers deprive them of a personal history and a
sense of legacy as a part of the broader demoralisation of forced servitude.
Many Africans then chose the surname Washington, and because many enslaved persons also did not know their birthday as property.
This idea was only abstract. Many chose the date July 4th, Independence Day.
These 19th century African-Americans, of course, were not naive to the fact that the first president was a slave owner himself.
Rather, their decisions reflected a core belief in the revolutionary American experiment in life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness to which all United States citizens are supposedly entitled.
Cole's Scott painting in the 1970s new that these promised endowments were slow.
If at all, to come to the many descendants of these Washington's racism haunted and still haunts America,
a racism lodged at America's core, like the naive patriotism in George Washington crossing the Delaware.
It is a well-worn habit, subliminal and so completely devastating.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
Wrote the great American bard Walt Whitman in 1855.
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defiled the dead.
And if the body does not do fully as much as the sole.
And if the body were not the sole. What is this all?
Along the course of this series, I have attempted to demonstrate the many bodies of a nation, the suicidal and the weak,
the oppressed bodies filled with radiant hope, bodies that have or do not have a right to representation.
Other bodies remain. But Wittman's question fills me now regarding the body of a nation.