History as Told in a Series of Definitions — Pete Segall

Mystics and Cowgirls

Hildegard of Bingen — Visions began at the age of three. Refused to have them recorded until she was forty-two, when she received permission from God. The gestating years: illness, paralysis, musical compositions. She said the universe was shaped like an egg.

Katherine Haroney — How much hail can one sky hurl Doc Holliday says I am in the mood for venison chucks coins in her sour direction Big Nose Kate mistress of the expanse says I will feed your ass to the hail.

Mary Fields — The first Black woman to work for the United States Postal Service, driving a stagecoach through Montana. Gary Cooper wrote about her in Ebony magazine. He said she was a baseball fan.

Julian of Norwich — Anchoress; saw all of creation in an object the size of a hazelnut. Plagiarized by TS Eliot.

Laura Bullon — Member of Butch Cassidy’s gang. Took part in the robbery of a Great Northern Express in Montana. Later settled into unremarkable life in Memphis. Forever enraptured by the humiliated form of the train.

The Maiden of Lublin — A woman performed a miracle. “Isn’t that something,” said the miracle. “Isn’t that something,” said the woman.

Rose Dunn — Canadian runaway. Her brothers killed her lover to collect a $500 bounty. She didn’t hold it against them.

Edith Stein — The only saint to have died by inhaling Zyklon-B.

Annie Besant — After abandoning Fabianism and socialism she coauthored a book called Occult Chemistry, which attempts to determine the chemical composition of the ether. Eventually she and her collaborator give up in favor of analogies for incalculable sums.

Biddy Mason — Slave to a family of Mormon converts. Walked from Mississippi to Utah following a wagon train. The first Black woman to own property in Los Angeles.

Lottie Deno — Skilled poker player and lover of a murderer. Protected by a seven foot tall slave named Mary. Reportedly spoke to the cards she was dealt. Known as Mystic Maud.

Sun Bu’er — A demon she exorcised was so moved by her appearance that it turned itself into pure awe, so it would never have to be apart from her. Even after she disfigured herself by throwing boiling water on her face, it never stopped following her.

Mary Ann Bugg — Accomplice and lover of Captain Thunderbolt of New South Wales. Once beat a policeman while very pregnant.

Lady Katherine Ferrers — Slit the throat of a cow that reminded her of Oliver Cromwell.

Alexandra David-Neel — In this incarnation, an opera singer, anarchist, witness to the Paris Commune and Sino-Japanese War, casino hostess, interloper in the forbidden city of Lhasa, scholar and friend of Tibetan Buddhists, receiver of unseen voices. A tram stop in Paris is named for this incarnation.

Marguerite Porete — If you ask God to dance, and God asks you to dance back, whoever says yes first has to buy breakfast in the morning.

Coin Toss

Heads — Jedem das seine 

Tails — Arbeit macht freie

Figures from Classical Mythologies

The Phoenix — A leather-winged bird that could not be killed. The repeated, futile attempts to vanquish it are often invoked to represent the resilience of malignancy, a poor economy, for instance, or a lingering sickness. Once, Athenian farmers captured it, bound it in chains, covered it in pitch, tied boulders to its wings, and threw it into a well that had been filled with oil before dropping a lit torch. The instinct to call ruin on oneself is an engine of uncommon ingenuity.

Invoking the bird in times of suffering suggests a pride of accomplishment. Ovid has it that Zeus tricked it into chasing a comet and it continues to fly through space forever, while Thucydides claims it is sleeping beneath the Adriatic and will awaken once the final judgment is well underway.

The Furies — Scourges of evildoers. Known as The Kindly Ones for their willingness to accept all requests promptly and professionally.

Achilles — His uncovered heel demonstrates our desire for own our destruction in unexpected places, according to Freud. We search for death in things as unremarkable as a sliver of tendon on the back of our leg. The phrase Achilles’ heel refers to the ecstasy of uncovering death someplace so ordinary that the dying one believes himself to be the beneficiary of heavenly grace. See also la petite mort.

Medusa — A gorgon with snakes for hair. She was so horrible that anyone who looked at her turned to stone. She taught Jason and the Argonauts a lesson on the importance of being yourself.

Orpheus — He is invoked for protection by submarine crews, subway engineers, miners, and salesmen. Carry me downward, past the gates of the surface, and hold me below, read a prayer inscribed on most U-boats.

Oedipus — Interestingly, there is a very similar myth from matriarchal societies in what is now Southern France. The primary difference is that it is presented as farce rather than tragedy.

The Minotaur — Two old friends who had not seen each other in years ran into one another in a crowded market. One had become successful while the other was plagued with poor health and disrespectful children. The wealthy man was deeply troubled by his friend’s misfortune, and he felt the fear of it over his shoulder for the rest of his life. A Marxist interpretation turns the creature into a symbol of the parasitism of the landed classes. To Lovecraft it represented the terror of other people.

Prometheus — In Shenzhen, a young woman reorganized the characters on a sign of a luxury hotel to make a pornographic riddle. As punishment she was sent to an American university, to study civil engineering.

Pandora — I have wondered, have I wanted to be lonely? Have I wanted not just to be a hermit but my own hermit, with a hermitage in the half-tended grounds of my own life? Nights walk. There is slack yearning in the dark air. All around you you’ve got forms and rituals. People who love people who are bad news. I don’t dare watch what they do at crosswalks anymore. Maybe I wanted to retreat. I have to consider that possibility. That I wanted to run from all this and see myself at a small chair, in small light, in a small room.

Last Words (Note 1)

And where do you come from? — The afterlife will be a story about a girl who worked in a factory.

Take a step forward, lads, it’ll be easier that way. — The afterlife will not be reprimanded for cheating.

It is time for a new direction. — The afterlife will have ideas that seem cockeyed at first.

My God, Ned, help me, I’m on fire! — Instructions for the afterlife can be found in your seatback pocket.

It’s hovering and it’s not an aircraft. — Go looking for trouble in the afterlife and see what happens.

Well now I’ve got to go meet God and try to explain all those men I killed at Alamein. — The afterlife will have four hands: one will hold a dying star, one will hold a bouquet of roots from a Lebanese cedar, one will hold the hand of a child that is its bride, one will hold a freshly lit cigarette.

Roses plural or Rose’s roses with an apostrophe? — The afterlife will be born on a Tuesday.

I forgot something. — The afterlife will be swarming with informants.

Fuck you. — Busking will be permitted in the afterlife.

I am starting to believe you are not intending to count me amongst your friends. — There is a man wandering in the afterlife who insists he had an appointment to meet a friend this afternoon and he stops anyone who will listen and even some who will not to ask if they have seen his friend and the description he gives of his friend is quite good, so good in fact that some people who have not seen the friend think that they have, and this friend who has been carved into existence by sheer force of word has been spotted going into a department store, arguing by the docks, waiting for a bus holding a small bottle of wine that he drinks from without caring what anyone might think of him; though the truth is that this friend, the corporeal one (such as it is in the afterlife) is at home, cursing (he has just stubbed a toe), thinking nothing of his friend because their appointment is tomorrow, and that his much too far off in the future to concern himself with now.

хорошая собака. — The afterlife will appear like frost fading from glass.

May God have mercy on the assassins. — The afterlife will undergo a number of regime changes.

This is your friend. Don’t forget to tell me how your mother is. — The afterlife, standing by itself on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow for a bit.

It is nothing, it is nothing. — The afterlife will sing to you, if you ask it nicely.

I don’t think they even heard me. — Certain facts about the afterlife remain contested.

Uh-oh. — At night in the afterlife there are people holding torches who say they know the way.

I want the world to be filled with fluffy white duckies. — Every drug in the afterlife produces the same high.

Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good! — The afterlife won’t make complete sense without reading the translator’s note first.

I must go in, for the fog is rising — The afterlife will wake up screaming.

Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go. — There are echoes in the afterlife the way there is weather in this world. Some days they fill the sky and fall without relief. Other days they are gentle, delicate, brittle even, as if just noticing them might cause them to break apart and scatter as embers of sand.

Mother, I’m going to get my things and get out of this house. Father hates me and I’m never coming back. — The afterlife is working as hard as it can.

Fire! Go on and fire! — The afterlife will be seen through the windows of a passing train.

Oh my God, oh my God! Where’s my head? Where’s my head? — The afterlife will not be free of accidents.

Everything’s already been said. — Do not bother the technicians who operate the afterlife.

Hey—what’s happening here? — The afterlife is departing.

Operations by the CIA

Operation IA Feature — Support for both UNITA and the FNLA against the Marxist MPLA in the Angolan Civil War. Agents reaching Luanda to oversee the transfer of funds were alternately bored and cowed by the assorted Israelis, Afrikaners, and Zaireans they found themselves in bed with. They played wiffle ball to pass the time. They made stupid conjectures about Prester John. They were stolid, wary, curious in a dead end way. The closest they got to interesting was when one of them tried to convince a drunk Afrikaner he was in Mozambique.

Human Ecology Fund — A research front through the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. It is impossible to tell what human ecology means. At the College one can study policy analysis or fashion design management. Human ecology is probably a necessary part of system collapse. It is the practical side of entropy. The Fund sponsored research into brainwashing by psychiatrists and anthropologists.

Operation Washtub — The planting of supposedly Soviet weapons on a beach in Nicaragua, ostensibly bound for the Soviet-linked president of Guatemala. Oddly, a shipment of arms from an actual Warsaw Pact country — Czechoslovakia — arrived in Guatemala itself. The CIA was aware that the Guatemalans had paid the Czechs but had no idea where the guns were until they reached their destination. Most of the weapons were rusted and useless. Some had clearly been captured from Nazis in World War II. The Speaker of the House called them an atomic bomb in America’s backyard.

Phoenix Program — April 1975. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State: “We can save nothing.” William Colby, CIA Director: “Nothing but lives.” (South Vietnamese paramilitaries backed by Phoenix Program killed or tortured more than 80,000 Vietnamese civilians suspected of belonging to the Viet Cong.)

Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis — An examination into the effects of climate change on global security. The person or people who labored to give the project the name as an acronym of a scorned woman who killed her own children were likely proud of their work, but the result is strange and confusing.

Southern Air Transport — The plane banks gently, turning eastward. The morning light is dim and gauzy. Below, a swirl of tiny islands, dozens and dozens clear in a single look. Over the radio come reports of weather but it’s well to the north. There is something reifying about the islands. They are like commuters at a train station at rush hour. They suggest order and purpose, which can be elusive at times. The gray-green occupants of the Pacific, growing sharper as the light deepens, are reminders that, ultimately, order is the order. Solidity, consistency, purpose. All of that, unspooling across the ocean. They grow more reassuring as the plane drops altitude. Over the radio there is talk of baseball scores. The growing islands are waiting, and watching. “I enjoyed killing Communists,” the pilot later says. “I liked to kill them in any way I could get them.”

Operation Mongoose — The CIA finally succeeded in assassinating Castro by the sabotaging of an oil refinery by dissidents and hardline Catholics trained in Florida. Afterward there was a widespread sensation within the agency that time had slowed, or that they continued to carry out their work without being aware of it. Internal cables and transcripts reveal conversations that are disjointed, repetitive, sometimes dissolve into meditations on words themselves as opposed to their meaning. Notable is William Colby’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before Cuba’s first elections in 1967: “Once the spectacular moment is willed… into being, what follows… what unfolds is a new branch of time. Unconsecrated… Unspoken. Annihilated before it can exist. It is adjacent to, but not part of, eternal history. The unspeakable image is the… fork in the road of chronological time.” Nearly every planned assassination thereafter involved hardline Catholics sabotaging oil refineries, even in places were neither was present. Operations that failed were considered successes, simply by having been thought up. By 1973 Richard Nixon was prepared to eliminate the agency, calling it “a house of fucking egghead nutters who believe time is an illusion and things happen because of what they think.” Eventually, linear time made a comeback. Men who believed in the materiality of the visible world were placed in charge. Agents experiencing dissociation or mild delusions are treated for what is called Havana Syndrome. They receive rest time, medication if needed, and extensive psycholinguistic therapy.

Crusades and Popular Crusades

Crusades

First — We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well. (Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”)

Second — The car’s tall mufflers drum mystery, but the errand boy is a ruffle bufferer, rinsed knee is predicted got lonely tie the teal girl, smith the best bubbas, gut lie this manatee a swell.

Third — History wounds us all, the paranoid doubly so, as his plight springs from what truly is, with all humanity, but by the imaginary, also.

Fourth — History has never hurt anyone. Don’t believe me? Ask the oblivious. Not only has history never once laid a finger on him, but he sleeps extra cozily at night, certain it will never darken his doorstep.

Fifth — Ah fuck! I banged my head on human events again! Who put those there?

Sixth — Symptoms of history include constipation, dry mouth, abscesses of the perineum, rotavirus, syphilis, brain zaps, trenchfoot, midwife’s ear, and hookworms. For history with paranoia not otherwise specified, it’s even worse.

Seventh — We are all carried along by history’s light breezes, but the paranoid rolls all the more lazily by, since he rides in the hand of the real world, with the rest of us, but is caressed by his fantasies as well.

Eighth — Suppose a planet. Suppose this planet is ruined. Boiling rains, iron fields, packs of murderous animals. Suppose a sun that’s just close enough to illuminate the ruin, and keep the wretched inhabitants emerging from their crumbling shelters. Suppose a binding desolation, whether it’s wanted or not, a despair unifying all on this planet because there is nowhere else for them. Suppose, too, that this planet has a hell.

Popular Crusades

People’s Crusade — We will be back in some form. (Donald Trump, January 20, 2021)

Children’s Crusade — Ew lilw eb cabk ni omse orm.

Shepherd’s Crusade (1251) — You’ve been sent away.

Do you remain away or do you return to where you were?

If you return, will you miss being away? If you return, what will you look like?

Will you come back in disguise, like that asshole Odysseus?

And kill your dog in the process? Will part of you be a machine now?

If you are a trickster god and don’t know it, will you recognize yourself?

If you don’t recognize yourself, and do not know who you are, could you not then be everyone?

Crusade of the Poor —

what once was

Owner #1: Is it time Operator #2: Is it time

Lumpen chorus: Revanche ourselves

Hag of gold: Let none be silent

None are silent

Shepherd’s Crusade (1320) — What is that over there?

Divided City

Berlin Wall — Some possible answers: the infirm; depressives in hypomania; sex workers in a slump; tired but needy scammers; the adrift; the uncaring; the voiceless and shimmering; kneecapped demons; those lost in their own homes; those lost on the tips of tongues; the dust burdened; grief machines; defrocked savages; the terminally benign and pointlessly gentle; ghosts of encyclopedia salesmen; astronauts in the bus station; the querulous; the literalists; the speaksofts and laughalongs.

Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart — Some possible questions: Who might I abhor? Who could I cope with seeing in a dark alley? Who could I sit across from and be sincere when I declare that I have nothing to say? Who might be walking too slowly in front of me on the stairs to the train? Who might need me?

French Revolutionary Months

Vendemiaire — Fail better 

Brumaire — Bail fetter 

Frimiare — Frail bettor 

Nivoise — Flail better 

Pluviose — Feel bitter 

Ventose — Veil bedder 

Germinal — Fuel biter 

Floreal — Fair betel 

Prairial — Foil butter 

Messidor — Be a flitter 

Thermidor — Rat beef lit 

Fructidor — Better fail

1  Isaiah Berlin; Erskine Childers; Andrei Tarkovski; Fireball Roberts; Frederick Valentich; Bernard Montgomery; Dylan Thomas; George Lincoln Rockwell; Tupac Shakur; Pedro Munoz Seca; Vladimir Lenin; Oscar Romero; Orson Welles; Franz Ferdinand; Yukio Mishima; Michael Smith; Derek Jarman; Florenz Ziegfeld; Emily Dickinson; Sophie Scholl; Marvin Gaye; Joe Hill; Stone Johnson; James French; Bob Loft

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Pete Segall’s work has appeared in The Bennington Review, Conjunctions, The Drift, Joyland, and elsewhere, He lives in Chicago.