Of Virtue and Valor (SSKC excerpt 1)

In ’76, we were all high on the New Idea, something with endless possibilities. In each year that came after the Founders had gone to seed, their vision became distorted more and more with each generation hence. I think Poetry was the first thing to go.

Columbia was out, but the vision she embodied still clung to the nation’s subconscious, not in the head, or even the heart, but in the gut, and in many cases, United States of America; it looked good on paper, and we wore it on our uniform lapels hearts, but Columbia warmed us at night, and kept us fed when our bellies laid bare. United States of America steeled our resolve before the gun-smoke mêlées from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, but it was Columbia that lit the fire that charged us forth. She was passionate and scandalous and fueled us with such purpose, that in no time, she had earned bones and on those bones, supple flesh. Breasts, hips, belly and thighs, her arms thrust open, and feet gripping the Earth, standing firm and forward, her chest swelled with courage.

Our Lady Columbia.

She was the girl that all the Revolutionaries kissed once on the lips before bed each night on the march, The one they sang ballads to late at night in the inns, drunk on old Franklin’s Proof of God’s Love. A hundred years later, the crates upon crates upon crates of iron and pressed copper made their way from France across the Atlantic. Our friends from the Revolution bestowed us with a new colossus of feminine dignity. Cloaked and modest, welcoming, yet chaste, we ignored the awkwardness of the situation. Someone forgot to tell them we were already taken.

They didn’t make the easiest of adopted sisters. Liberty was no bully, but she was a big girl and she outshone her big sister pretty quickly. Fine by Columbia, Libby could play nursemaid all she wanted to boatloads of refugees, lifting her lamp day in and day out, coddling and caring for all those confused plebeians with no clue which way to turn. Yes dear, you’ve made it to the New World. No dear, the streets aren’t really paved with gold. No, I don’t know where you can find your cousin, talk to the man at Ellis I’m sure he could help you.

My god, Columbia thought. How exhausting. No wonder she called it quits and shut down shop in 1954. It was a mundane, tedious exercise for which Columbia the wild girl had no time, she would rather be sneaking out the back door to party with the boys. What did Libby know anyway, she didn’t see The War.

Because The War. The real one, the one that had been sewn like a pack of larva under the countries skin, burrowing deep, just to have the wound burst open with blood, pus and Blue and Gray maggots 85 years later. The Real War. That was Columbia’s last moment in the fires of grandeur.

And in the years after the guns were laid down, two men, wise men of the earth stood on a hill’s crest in the City of Brooklyn and said: “Here. This is the spot we have chosen.” The men were architects. Landscape architects, a new term that combined botanical arts with structural design into creating vast natural landscapes in the middle of bustling cities.

Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead had triumphed over the Herculean task of returning Nature and Peace to the center of New York. And after Central Park opened as the greatest Urban Miracle the world had ever seen,
Vaux and Olmstead had the standing to build a park exactly as they saw fit. A vanity piece. A new park that would embody the Prospect of a new dawn.

Brooklyn would be their canvas.

Olmstead had been a journalist, reporting as a Northerner in the South. And now in the days of Reconstruction, they wanted a grand sweeping entrance to a pristine urban retreat here in New York’s prominent sister city, a stately yet fervent commemoration to Columbia’s boys that went down.

And Vaux and Olmstead loved their girl, what red-blooded American man didn’t in 1876? They wanted her in all her glory at the doorway to their latest park. Our Lady Columbia atop a Grand Army Plaza that lead into their immaculate Prospect Park. The Arch would be inspired by the French aesthetic, Brooklyn’s own Arc De Triomphe that would welcome trolley-cars through, and horse carriages all around, a wheel with it’s spokes stretching out to the far reaches of the city, this Plaza would be it’s nexus, and our Goodbye Girl would preside from it’s top.

Her Quadriga, a four-horse chariot leads her into battle, two Spirits of Victory, bearing trumpets on either side declare her awesome presence. She too, holds a torch, but this is no blaze of enlightenment. The flame sits atop a long lance, crowned with a ring of fire that she no doubt stole from Helios himself and sweet-talked that sap Icarus into taking the fall for it. Columbia’s fire is a weapon, a herald of the carnage that stood in her path, and would lay in her wake.

Flanked under her, on either side are her boys. Columbia always had the highest standards for her men, and after the first shots were fired, she would only run with fellas who served. The Sailors and Soldiers. The men who threw themselves into battle for her. Would you fight for me, boys? Stand up for you girl if a bully was treatin’ me mean? Would you bleed for me, boys? Would you die for me?

You can bet the farm, the horse, the cow and the hen that that they would, and they did. The boys threw themselves to the slaughter for her favor, The Civil War was Troy and Columbia was our Helen.

Spirit of the Army and Spirit of the Navy; Fred MacMonnies called the two collections of figured that rested in the center of each of the legs of the arch. On her left stand her sailors. Lead by some wide-winged, eagle-crowned daughter of Poseidon, a trident thrust high, her tits: perfection, poised like torpedoes. A captains wheel and quiver of arrows stand behind her. At the forefront stand shirtless chaps and bearded vets, willing and eager. white men and Negros alike. A young black-skinned boy is crouched in front with a cannon by his left knee. And in their right corner, one young boy felled by the villain’s volley, he lays limp in his comrade’s arms.

Under her left Angel of Victory stand the Soldiers, guided by a trumpeting messenger of Athena, their muskets blazing, their bayonettes glinting in the autumn sun. One zealous troop rushes forth with his squadron. Both squads are guided by a buxom angel to an certain doom they accepted long ago.

And they did it all for her.

I’m standing at the mouth to the park, staring up at that sculpture, I can see why they sacrificed their lives in her honor; her lithe frame fully upright behind her blazing lance. Her scandalously voluptuous form is freed from all restrain; the same cloak that Liberty wore with modesty and decorum, is flung wide behind her, swirling through the air and she stands poised in a delicately sculpted and, even in bronze, almost translucent blouse.

MacMonnies must have wet his sheets dreaming of the Hourglass Harbinger.