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.