Mosaic Winter 2016 | Page 12

Reflection on La Carmagnole by Joel Glickman

But I didn ’ t know this song or even that it existed so my first encounter with the dance done round the guillotine was as witness to a scene slashed out in charcoal , two different drafts on facing pages of an open book that lay before me , Kaethe Kollwitz drawings . I thought till yesterday O ’ Keefe was the only woman that had to brook so many years upon the earth to show us what she saw . Now here was this raw Parisian throng strutting along a cobbled street , limned out by a Berliner . They look to be singing some loud and angry song . The tower is just behind the crowd . And I had to know what the tune was , because it was clearly known in 1900 by this German wife and mother who knew how to make life ’ s grimness lyrical . What I found on line however was delicate and spherical , folk garbed dancers circling round a maypole-like affair , with precise and child-like steps done to a lilting air .

And I looked back down again at the charcoal Carmagnole and could not reconcile so much blood lust with this little chanson that sounded like a Christmas carol . What kind of crucible forges that much rage ? The short answer is perhaps : same species , different age . But still , I think the enemy you loathe should at least be executed with solemnity . It should have been enough that Marie Antoinette could no longer eat cake or advise the rabble to do the same from the moment her head tumbled into the basket . A dirge along the lines of a tisket a tasket seems out of place . Leadbelly once said it isn ’ t dancing unless your feet cross . Those of the mob do not , though what I saw on line well fits the definition . But Kollwitz got it right , understood death long before the decade and a half before her son Peter perished in the Great War and well before her grandson Peter fell on Russian snow in the next to come along . Vive le son . Oh , my poor son . Vive le son du canon .