REORIENTATION STUDIES (THREE)
A particularly large colony of Mexican free-tailed bats has made its home for all of contemporary memory at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. Although numbers fluctuate, by all accounts, there are easily a million Mexican free-tailed bats living in the caverns. It was there that Dr. Lytle Adams was vacationing in December 1941 when Pearl Harbor was subjected to a Japanese air raid campaign. Although no record exists of his exact thoughts while at Carlsbad, one has to wonder if, while hiking at dusk and watching the aerial acrobatics of the bats starting off to hunt in the skies above the Guadalupe Mountains, Dr. Adams did not think of the planes that had just bombed the Hawaiian base, or the U.S. planes that were soon airborne in retaliation. There goes a different kind of thing, but somehow the same as well. Ten million years old and yet little has changed of the mechanics. One has to wonder if, in that moment, he did not, despite himself, superimpose explosions, smoke, fire over the entire scene, as the tiny creatures made their spiral climbs and free falls in the lavender gloaming. He let the focus go out from his eyes and saw spectacular maneuvers, brave and glorious pilots not bred but born for victory. Narrowly, the bats avoided head on collisions with each other; narrowly, but unfailingly.
We love to dream of other’s minds, their processes. We love to project and impose our own fantasies on the internal machinations of those we have never known. But Dr. Adams certainly did dream about these bats and he did match some of their maneuvers with those of the machines of war. He moved past the prosaic comparison between the free-tailed bats and bomber planes, and dreamt up and proposed plans to transform these swarms into squadrons of intuitive, if unwitting, incendiary machines.
As history tells it, Adams -- a dentist from Pennsylvania -- was acquainted with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, remarkably, and managed to compel her with this vision. Within three months of his trip to Carlsbad Caverns and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US Air Force had taken on the project and had begun testing and development. The dentist’s proposed plan was to construct carriers in which vast numbers of sleeping bats would roost. Each bat was strapped with a tiny incendiary device. The carriers would then be dropped from bomber planes, as though bombs, on impact releasing the bats to fly off and roost in various locations around whatever city was the target -- in this case, Osaka, and the surrounding cities. Soon after, the incendiary devices would detonate and burn the city from a million different points virtually all at once. If fully realized, the project would have unleashed over a million armed bats on Osaka Bay. Over the course of three or four years, the project’s custody was shifted from one US military department to another until, after investments totaling $2 million across four different military organizations, fine tuning the logistics, the project was dropped in favor of the simpler solution that was eventually brought to bear on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945.
On Friday, May 27th, 2016, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima.
A few years ago, I visited Shiprock in northern New Mexico. I felt compelled for this place for many months ahead of time, drawn to it despite myself and once there, clambering over the severe terrain surrounding that massive monadnock, I was struck continually with a kind of spiraling disorientation. I experienced all at once a greater sense than normal of standing on ground that relates directly to the rest of the universe and a lessened ability to use that sense for my own comfort and certainty.
Resonances of this disorientation visited me a few years later when, in August 2015, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz described the creepy place, as she said, that is the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa. In attempting to explain how she felt about approaching this structure, witnessing it, she talked around a feeling that I thought, even in her lack of distinctly articulating it, I could very clearly understand and relate to. Roxanne is an articulate person. It would be a great understatement to say that her memory is capable. To have a conversation with her is to observe one navigating one’s memories not as though they were catalogued and archived, which is to say accessible but dusty. Instead it seems that most of the experiences that comprise her rich life are as present as the moment in which she is living and as active as the tones of her mellifluous voice.
She was telling me that day about visiting the Voortrekker Monument and how, following the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, the African National Congress left intact many of the monuments and museums which glorified apartheid, but inverted their narratives in one way or another, displaying in certain cases more accurate accounts of the historical record. Inside the Voortrekker Monument, she explained, one finds representations of the colonizing of South Africa which look uncannily like those representations of the colonizing of the United States. It may as well have been the same artists, she told me, as had painted many of the famous images of the settling of the American West, complete with calistoga wagons; only, of course, in this case there were no Lakota or Apache clashing with the voortrekkers, rather there were the Zulu. But in talking about the sense that she had, not only from that uncanny analogue, but also from the structure itself, the feeling with which she was struck and indeed which had left her struck, Roxanne seemed less able to find the right words than when describing almost anything else that day. I remember, particularly, that she used the word “place” repeatedly, saying “that place” many times in one breath. She impressed on me that photographs do no justice to the immensity of the monument. I felt I could entirely imagine the unsettled awe that the place had inspired in her, and I wondered if we had not actually had analogous experiences in approaching such massive, unlikely structures, whether intentional or incidental.
Roxanne was in South Africa during that time researching the process of rewriting the historical record and was hosted by a man named John who was in charge, particularly, of overseeing the revision of historical textbooks for schoolchildren. She explained that with regard to study at the university level, there were plenty of texts to choose from which accurately reflected the history of apartheid in South Africa, but when it came to elementary school textbooks, the ANC opted to simply burn them. John was, Roxanne told me, an American who had come to South Africa by way of Australia and Zimbabwe and who taught in the political science department at the University of the Western Cape. Not long before Roxanne’s arrival, John had been brought on by the ANC government.
A month after returning to her home in San Francisco, Roxanne told me: I opened the San Francisco Chronicle -- well, I didn’t even open it, it was the front page, this huge picture of John! And these big letters, JAMES KILGORE CAPTURED IN CAPE TOWN. He was from the Symbionese Liberation Army. That was the person they had in charge. He was a fugitive since 1976. He had been in exile for 27 years. He came back. They wouldn’t extradite him. But he came back voluntarily, you know, their little boys were growing up and they were living under a false name. His wife kept her maiden name but the children had their father’s false name. All the people in the ANC knew, they knew who he was. They didn’t tell me. No one told me.
Later that day, after spending the afternoon with Roxanne, I met a friend for dinner who asked me, unprompted, if I had heard that Mt. McKinley’s name had been officially restored to Denali, the original name given it by the region’s indigenous people.
