Taking it on the road (a commercial interruption)
These days, when asked to make a public presentation, I sometimes offer an illustrated tour of Agincourt, Iowa. Just as often, though, you’ll be relieved to learn that I’ve spoken on other topics: 1) the Gothic Revival as source for the Modern Movement, 2) the evolution of architectural drawings during the 19th and 20th centuries, 3) the Social Gospel, 4) emergence of the architectural profession in the last 150 years, or 5) Victorian culture on the Great Plains. Granted, most of these are historically based, but that’s just who I happen to be.
Last year I was invited to speak at UNLV (thanks to our friends at Klai+Juba) and gave one of the best presentations of my career: a guided tour of imaginary Iowa to a capacity audience (so I’m told) of students and community. A half hour of post-presentation Q&A reinforced my belief that this project has been worth my investment. Some of the crowd even got the obtuse inside jokes. But the most illuminating experience so far has been another shorter presentation to a handful of sixth graders at Faribault, Minnesota.
Molly Yergens (Milton and Barbie Yergens’ daughter) teaches art at Shattuck-St Mary’s, an Episcopal day and boarding school with students quite literally from around the world. Molly had challenged each of her charges to imagine a community and hoped the Agincourt story might stir their creative juices. So I gave them twenty minutes of sketchbook images, pix from the 2007 exhibit and other material that hasn’t been shown yet. Things went well, but then I noticed a downcast face and a furrowed brow and wondered about his concern. “Well,” he paused, “it seems to me that people might actually believe Agincourt really exists.”
“You catch right on!” I enthused, because that’s exactly what excites me about this project. I recall the BBC production of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and supplementary discussion with cast members, including an off-hand observation about the difference between fantasy and imagination. Despite the puns and inside humor, I have hoped that this exercise of the imagination will be solidly based in real historical processes; I want precisely what my new young friend had feared: the nagging suspicion that you’ve been there before; got a tire repaired at Cliff’s Garage; had pie and coffee at Adams’ Restaurant; received a postcard from Aunt Harriet’s high school reunion trip.
In a few weeks we’ll be offering a set of Agincourt postcards–images of buildings and people–for gift-giving this year. Proceeds will support a scholarship in our NDSU department. But my real hope is that some of these cards will find their way to Ebay; that ultimately “…people might actually believe Agincourt really exists.” Everything I do is motivated by that wish. And what I can learn along the way.
Saints and other sinners
Twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, someone gave me a religious medal. About an inch and a quarter tall, it is made of aluminum and bears a relief image of Saint Dymphna. Her story is typical for obscure saints, especially females: widowed father (Irish king) sees the light of his late wife in the blush of his daughter’s cheeks; she flees to Belgium with the court jester, is pursued by her father and beheaded when she continues to resist his amorous advances. You know, boilerplate stuff from reality TV. But the manner of someone’s death doesn’t always predict the circumstances of their canonization. In Dymphna’s case her relics preserved in a church at Gheel, Belgium have become associated with miraculous cures. This medal invokes her protection with the words “St. Dymphna pray for us.”
Incidentally, Dymphna is the patron saint of the criminally insane.
The original Catholic parish at Agincourt, founded in the early 1860s, would typically have borne the name of a dedicatory saint. Many such saints names have ethnic or national connections. Saint David, for example, is the patron saint of the Welsh; Saint Patrick of the Irish; Saint George of the English. Churches dedicated to Saint Augustine frequently serve African congregations, since he had been Bishop of Hippo on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Tunisia. Nineteenth-century Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi is likely to be sainted within the next few years. But there are a large number of canonized lives much less familiar; one might say obtuse. This is especially true in rural Europe where local saints continue to be venerated by their neighborhood populace–and there alone. When was the last time you invoked the name of Blaise, Mungo or Procopius? As a once and former adherent of the Church of Rome, I continue to be fascinated by the sanctity claimed for a relative few of our species.
The canonization process can begin soon after the candidate’s death or centuries later. It depends. Miracles are the usual raison d’etre, but I suspect that politics have much more to do with it. Mother Theresa of Calcutta has already been beatified on the fast track to full sainthood. Controversial historic figures like Pius XII (called “Hitler’s Pope” in a 1999 book by John Cornwell), however, are likely to steal their way through the lengthy process on the coat tails of universally popular figures like his successor John XXIII. But who would be the spiritual benchmark for Agincourt?
Once again, I’m at a loss to explain the source for Saint Ahab. The name came from nowhere and a quick google search found his saintly life unclaimed by any denomination. The circumstances of his canonization are sketchy. At present I can tell you this:
- He was an obscure Croatian saint
- His relics were rescued by Crusaders retreating from their failed religious wars
- They were taken to Agincourt in northern France and installed in a modest Romanesque church
- He has very likely become the patron of those suffering from OCD
Ahab’s hagiagraphy is yet to be written (perhaps by a local authority on iconography). And his portrait icon will be crafted by Mr Jonathan Rutter, Moorhead artist already deeply imbedded in the Agincourt Project sandbox. Howard Tabor has written a lengthy history of Catholics in Fennimore county, describing that first church already replaced by two successors, but I have yet to interpret Tabor’s word picture.
Synecdoche 2.1
The only significant difference between me and the students I engage each day is this: there are more cards on my rolodex. Pardon the antique metaphor. (I thought the last of that desktop detritus had found its way to the Smithsonian, but the other day I saw a computer version where virtual cards rotate on the screen; how tenaciously we cling to the familiar!) The forty years of experience that separate me from twenty-somethings may have added information and experience to who I am, but they have also burdened me with preconception and prejudice. I take care to distinguish among them and draw from my better self.
Photograph courtesy of Mr Peter Atwood
This Arts & Crafts window wants a home, and that home can only grow from the cards on my rolodex. Its gentle horizontality; the circular vignette of landscape; its asymmetry fit with my experience of smaller residential work in the U.S. during the gaggle of years surrounding the First World War. They probably account for my attraction to it. But first things first: I need a client. Perhaps it was the link I had made between “synecdoche” and my grade-school education that offered someone: this will be a teacher’s home, and the teacher will be a woman.
Folks of my generation were taught by what I call secular nuns. Teaching was a profession of women, and they were largely unmarried; I was in the seventh grade before I saw a man at the head of the classroom. So my education came from misses: Hletko, Rapp, Piancimino, Piper, Spellman, among others; we had not yet imagined “Ms.” Early in life they had chosen career over marriage, and that career could only have been teaching, nursing or God (though, technically, that last choice does involve a wedding). So my client is a composite of those wonderful women who had helped me learn to think. Let’s call her Rose.
The moment I saw this window, it suggested the work of a Chicago-area architect whose work has fascinated me for many years: Lawrence Buck. Because this teacherage would be small, I recalled two of Buck’s smallest houses–one for himself in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago (demolished) and the other extant in suburban Oak Park; both date from around 1910. These would be my models. Coincidentally, the Oak Park home had been built for a teacher–Miss Rose Kavana (interesting variation of the more usual Kavanaugh)–so now I had my client’s full name: Rose Kavanaugh. Her home would be no more than a block from Darwin School in Agincourt’s northwest quadrant.
There are certain defaults in Lawrence Buck’s houses: asymmetry, compactness, stucco-on-frame construction, clustered windows with small pent eaves, passive solar orientation. I can recognize his work at five hundred feet from a moving car in a snowstorm. In fact, I did just that in Rockford, Illinois, several years ago (minus the snowstorm) driving through with my friend Richard Kenyon. So Miss Kavanaugh’s home came to me quickly. And her window will soon have an outlook: beside the front entry, so she can glimpse her guests and anticipate their welcome. I imagine myself standing there, age twelve, with gratitude for the gift of her teaching.
First design of the Kavanaugh cottage.
Synecdoche 2.0
There are far more figures of speech than the metaphor and the simile, two we learned in eighth-grade English class from Miss Rose Spellman. Until Philip Seymour Hoffman’s recent film “Synecdoche, New York,” I didn’t know the word synecdoche. But it’s definition–the whole for the part, the part for the whole; the general for the specific, and vice versa–reminded me that I’ve heard these figures of speech most of my adult life; that I’ve even used them now and then, possibly in error.
In architecture, synecdoche seems closely related to the idea of deductive thought, moving from the general to the specific. Design begins with general information and observation, then moves through preliminary and intermediate schemes, toward a specific solution; from large questions to increasingly small, detailed and specific answers. I am intrigued by the prospect of a studio design exercise reversing that process. Perhaps Spring semester….
Though I’m repulsed by this example, recall with me the Kohler TV commercial where an affluent couple is shown the work of a prestigious architect in his exemplary office (the office itself being synecdochic: it is a specific design that presumably stands for the total oeuvre of its designer). Seated in his conference room, the architect asks “Now what can I do for you?” Then, from her purse the woman brings forth a faucet. “Design a house around this.” Her challenge to the architect–design a whole from and for this part–is the heart of the Agincourt Project.
Photograph courtesy of Mr Peter Atwood
Two months ago I found a stained glass window from the Arts & Crafts era. The glass and leading are in surprisingly good condition, though the wood frame betrays a house whose inner-city neighborhood likely brought about its own demise. Yes, I would gladly return my acquisition for the restoration of a modest single-family home in Toledo, Ohio; it belongs there, to delight children’s searching eyes and reassure harried parents that little moments matter. So now I accept the challenge set by the pretentious woman with the faucet fetish: what notion of “home” might grow from this urban artifact?
mnmlsm
This semester I’m teaching a seminar on Minimalism, a movement in architecture exemplified by the work of John Pawson and David Chipperfield. We’re approaching it as the architectural counterpart to other movements in art, literature and elsewhere during the last fifty years–perhaps, in my view at least, farther back to the origins of Modernism itself. Never shy about taking on topics that are new and unfamiliar, we’re exploring minimalism in music (Steven Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams and the like), in art (Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Tony Smith), and even farther afield in theater and film.
Literature is also an area where minimalist inclinations occasionally break out–which I think of today in the context of Agincourt, probably the most “maximal” exercise of my experience. Besides Concrete Poetry of the 1960s, there are many other types of wordplay where less achieves more, or at least tries to. Witness: haiku and the limerick. Extending that idea, can we consider the palindrome to be a minimalist literary form? “Able was I ere I saw Elba” says as much about Napoleon in seven words as other authors have accomplished in volumes. There are three other exemplary types that I want to share.
If you’ve not heard of the Six Word Novel, plug that phrase into your favorite search engine. Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a novel in six words. Not a huge Hemingway fan here, but his solution was both elegant and eloquent: “For sale: baby shoes. Never used.” There is such pathos in those few words, a tale of sadness and loss that even a short story might bungle. With the elimination of one word, a favorite poem by Ogden Nash also becomes the soul of concision: “Candy is dandy, [but] liquor is quicker.”
Not necessarily short, but at least restrictive, I recommend the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, run each year by Prof Scott Rice at San Jose State University. The task here is to mirror the wretched Victorianisms of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, perhaps the worst novelist of the 19th century. Lytton wrote The Last Days of Pompeii, a work whose title may be unfamiliar, but whose opening words are instantly recognizable: “It was a dark and stormy night….” Trust me, it goes way beyond that opening gambit borrowed by Snoopy, in his quest for the Great American Novel. Lytton drones on for almost two pages with one of the longest sentences on record–surpassed only by Marcel Proust and lately by Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666. Your task, should you elect to enter this year’s contest, is “to write the opening line of the worst novel never written.” My all-time favorites, though not prize winners: “He had enough hair on his back to make a coat for a small Albanian” and “The sun rose like a hair ball.”
Then there are the Novels in Three Lines penned by French anarchist-journalist Félix Fénéon. For a period of about three years, Fénéon wrote a column of filler for a Parisian newspaper. After his death these were collected and published by his wife as Nouvelles en trois lignes, expertly translated by Luc Sante in a 2007 reissue.
For me, all these examples only higlight my own excesses as a writer. Whether by me or my avatar Howard Tabor, this writing is clumsy, quirky and burdensome; I took journalism in high school but clearly learned nothing about brevity and the clarity of news reportage. Yesterday’s blog post couldn’t possibly be a local history column in any newspaper, unless its author was somebody’s brother-in-law. Howard’s column averages about 650 words, a length that no reader would tolerate, even on a sleepy Saturday afternoon when “A few figs from thistles…” is printed.
Milton is reading over my should and suggests I apologize for this excessively long article on minimalism.
Кропо́ткин
Citizens make the town. That’s as it should be. But it’s not just the extremities–the rule and the fool–that make the place, though they tend to be the people we remember. Perhaps that’s why Howard chose an extreme character as the subject of his column for November 10th, 2006
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
Kropotkin, the Knife-Man
Agincourt has been slow to correct and even more reticent to punish its social fringe. But no one tested that tolerance more than an itinerant mechanic named Kropotkin.
Our community has been exceptionally tollerant of deviance–that is, it has accepted difference from, even defiance of, societal norms. It neither rewards nor punishes for that difference from a so-called normative state or condition. Perhaps that’s our inheritance from the Dutch who came here in the 1870s, because the Low Countries have traditionally welcomed all, with an attitude that your behavior is acceptable so long as it doesn’t impinge upon mine.
Some time after 1905, a rough man calling himself only Kropotkin (Кропо́ткин in what an old friend calls the Acrylic alphabet–thank you, Cecil!) arrived in town with neither family nor much in the way of possessions. The little English he spoke came wrapped in a thick Eastern European accent redolent of onions. Everyone assumed he was Russian; some even inferred that his appearance was connected with the failed 1905 revolution in Russia which was so prominent in the local and national press.
Revolution was on everyone’s mind–from rumors that Victoria’s death would bring about a British republic, to fears that our own oligarchy might be threatened. It may have excited the natives to imagine that a card-carrying anarchist revolutionary was in their midst. Radical change can be frightening, no matter what its source.
Kropotkin didn’t live in town; in fact, for many years no one was quite certain where he lived. But he and his horse-drawn wagon appeared regularly throughout town to sharpen tools, kitchen knives, lawn mowers, ice skates–anything with a metal blade dulled from use or abuse. He was the master of metal, plying his skills as far as Fort Dodge and Storm Lake in good weather.
Kropotkin’s wagon held a large whetstone mounted on a foot-fed treadle. He would set up business on residential street corners and call attention to his presence by clanging a large cowbell and proffering his sharpening services in a rich basso-profundo that would have secured a contract with the Metropolitan Opera and the lead in “Eugene Onegin”! Eat your heart out, Robert Goulet.
A dozen years or so after his unheralded arrival, Kropotkin disappeared. Evaporated would be more accurate. It was only then that folks realized he had been living in an abandoned farmstead five miles south of town on the flats near Muskrat City. Pinkerton agents showed up a few weeks later seeking his whereabouts, which seemed to confirm local suspicion of anarchist tendencies and a possible return to Mother Russia following the more successful revolution of 1917.
An entire generation of Agincourt children ate their vegetables and took their medicine and respected their elders with a parental admonition that “the Knife-Man will get you!” if they misbehaved. What a sorry example of tolerance. And what a sad legacy for the memory of a stranger who did no harm—strange only because we did not know him.
Not all strangers are strange.
And our cutlery has never been the same.
Things, a seminar
I invested the 1993-1994 academic year in graduate study at the University of Delaware. Others will have to weigh in on the value of that year for the course of Western Civilization. From my perspective, it was intimidating but fruitful.
As many of you will know, graduate programs are often on a two-year cycle, with some required courses appearing in the catalogue once in every four semesters. So there were offerings that I could only dream about. One of the courses I positively lusted for was titled “Things,” a seminar in material culture.
Imagine a once-weekly seminar with probably fewer than 12 or even 10 students. Between 2:00 and 5:00 Thursday afternoon, the instructor enters the room bearing a medium-sized cardboard box. The box is placed at the center of prying eyes–perhaps preying eyes–as an object is revealed. I imagine all this happening deliberately but without ceremony. Our prospect for the next three hours is to examine the object, perhaps silently, for several minutes, and then to begin a discussion. The instructor in such a graduate level seminar is a guide and facilitator (which is very difficult for me to be), an observer whose role is to provide balance while simultaneously expanding the limits of our thinking.
On the surface, the process is simple, straightforward. Answer these basic questions:
- What task did the object perform? What did it do?
- How was this tool an improvement over other, earlier ways of accomplishing that same task?
- Why has this object disappeared from common usage? Is the task no longer necessary or is a better tool available?
It’s possible that the anticipation of such a course could be better than its experience. I doubt it.
In retropsect, I’ve approached the Agincourt Project this way, trying to understand the dynamics of architecture; of how buildngs are produced; why, for whom and what purpose? Every building, no matter its great- or humbleness, tells a story. Conversely, each engaging story I’ve read conjures an environment for its narrative, a setting for the living out of our lives. If Agincourt is successful at any level, it will be from the symbiosis of those two ideas.
The Archers
People surprise me all the time. And I mean that in a good way.
During the design studio that produced most of the work in the first Agincourt exhibit, I spoke blithely of the Chicago & Northwestern spur that angled upward toward the city from the C&NW mainline track. Justin Nelson corrected me (gently, thank you very much) and informed us that this part of Iowa was Milwaukee Road country. Until that moment I had no idea Justin’s hobby–correction, his passion–was railroadiana. He’s the guy who’ll drive five hours, position his camera tripod beside a broadly curved railway right-of-way, and wait patiently for the steam locomotive to belch past at 3:00 a.m. Four years of studio culture generate a level of acquaintance, even familiarity, among our students and faculty, and then come moments like that when we are revealed as multi-faceted and whole–not just cardboard cut-outs in the dollhouse of academe. [With apologies to all who know me, if I don’t know you very well, it’s only my reticence to ask.] Justin’s design for the passenger/freight station at the foot of South Broad Street achieved an authenticity that I understood more fully; and it raised the bar for my part of our conversation.
I habitually learn more from students than they do from me.
So, then I went to Hastings College, a Presbyterian-affiliated school at Hastings, Nebraska, to make a presentation about Agincourt. Rob Babcock, chair of the history faculty, invited me to share the rationale for this project with his students and colleagues (not the finest presentation of my career, sad to say), and, again, I learned something about Dr Babcock: Rob’s hobby has been minor league baseball. He has visited nearly every minor league baseball stadium in the U.S., so his query about Agincourt’s team opened the door to an aspect of community history so far outside my own interests and experience that I’m reluctant to admit it. Now that Jonathan Rutter has volunteered to render some Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance triple play in egg tempera, I hope we can convince Dr Babcock to write the team’s equally colorful history.
That’s why I have friends: to keep me honest and add dimension to the cut-out that I risk becoming.
Sousa, Walton, Hagen…
When the Class of ’63 met to discuss our parting gift to the school, I offered this suggestion: that we select a contemporary American composer and commission a march. Not just any march. The “Argo Community High School Graduation March.” Classmates had tolerated my eccentricities for three and one-half years, but this went too far.
I had imagined someone like Walter Piston, Vincent Persichetti, or William Schuman accepting such an odd commission; all of them had written work that our own band had played (or tried to). I also imagined them taking on the project for next to nothing, for its sheer unconventionality. And what would we have got for our investment? Something unique, but also the start of something new. The reaction to my proposition wouldn’t have surprised anyone.
“But ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ is traditional!” they replied, a chorus of conservatives. It mattered not that Sir Edward Elgar’s composition had, in its time, been new and unconventional; that it, too, had made the imperceptible shift from innovation to institution. So we gave the school a scoreboard for the swimming pool–which I suspect shorted out on a regular basis and has long since been consigned to the scrap heap of antique technology.
It has taken me forty-four years to scratch that itch. But let Howard Tabor tell us about it. Here’s his column from The Plantagenet of October 27th, 2007.
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
A World Premier
Anyone not at the Agincourt Sesqui-Centennial celebration Thursday night missed many things: spectacular catering by Green Market and Vandervort’s Bakery; the late but ceremonial arrival of Claire Tennant’s dollhouse; the reverie of an entire community and the curiosity of our wondering guests. But most of all they missed the world premier of a new work of music by New York composer Daron Aric Hagen.
The 150 Committee decided (unanimously) that our celebration required the punctuation of music and they set about finding a composer willing to tackle a sesqui-centennial fanfare. Because he had written an opera based on the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Daron Hagen became our candidate, a fellow Midwesterner who might be sympathetic to our regional sensibilities. He was willing, even downright enthusiastic to take on the commission.
He asked the 150 ccommittee what we had in mind. Our response? “Mucisk for His Majestie’s Sackbutts and Krumhorns,” was the immediate and unanimous reply we emailed him. Unknown to us, he had already written a work based on Medieval themes, so this was a welcome opportunity to revisit familiar musical territory. The result was five minutes of brass and bravado, ably rendered by Neil Mueller and twelve other musicians assembled for the evening. The Plantagenet lacks a music reviewer (or one for theater, books, art or anything else that isn’t sport!), so it befalls me to render the experience of Hagen’s “Agincourt Fanfare” (Opus 99) into words.
I once played the French horn in the high school band but, alas, never learned to read music. So I asked Neil to describe what he saw in the printed score. “A little chorus; a little chaos” was his thoughtful reply and on hearing the work I must agree. It’s an American work, to be sure, in the company of others that have so capably portrayed us in sound. But I’m disinclined to invoke a list of familiar musical names, for this is Hagen and none other. Think of it, rather, as a brief musical meal of several short courses. Moments of minty piquancy, followed by more languid sections of sweet and savory sound, like caramelized onion. It lingered long on the palate as the last notes ricocheted about the room. Foolishly, we had failed to arrange for the performance to be recorded, a mistake that cries out for remedy a.s.a.p.
It was impossible to appreciate Hagen’s work outside the context of other previous Agincourt commissions. Organizers of our fiftieth anniversary in 1907 enlisted the talents of John Philip Sousa (whose “March to Agincourt” has been sadly neglected in recent years, as Sousa himself has been). And the 100th anniversary went much farther afield, presuading the elder statesman of British music Sir William Walton to step briefly out of retirement for his “St. Crispin Suite,” adapted from the film score for Sir Lawrence Olivier’s “Henry V.” And now Daron Hagen has set the tone for our next fifty years, offering simultaneous reflection and perspective.
Since I won’t live to see our bicentennial, what music do you suppose will punctuate that night? The works of Sousa, Walton and Hagen set a high musical standard.
Thanks, Howard. I couldn’t have said it better. And thank you also Daron Hagen for adding such meaning to the moment.
St Crispin’s Day
October 25th is an important date at Agincourt. It’s the anniversary of the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, pivotal event in the 100 Years’ War between the English and the French. Agincourt, Iowa’s sesqui-centennial was celebrated on that day in 2007 (unusual for the Rourke Art Museum, since it occurred on a Thursday). The 2011 exhibit will probably open on another day, but I hope something special might punctuate the 25th.
Those who attended the 2007 opening were privileged to hear the world premier of “Agincourt Fanfare,” written for us by New York composer Daron Hagen. Scored for four trumpets, four french horns, three trombones, baritone and tympani, director Neil Mueller and members of the F-M Symphony cranked the volume up just a bit and achieved remarkable effect in the Rourke’s main gallery. I mention this because Daron Hagen has written something new for us: Will Shakespeare’s words put into the mouth of Henry V on the eve of battle, the text for “We happy few” is set for baritone voice and piano, a longer and gentler work for the 2011 event. I want you to look forward to it as much as I do.
In the meantime, consider Shakespeare’s original text (which Hagen has updated only slightly for the modern ear):
WESTMORELAND: O that we now had here/ But one ten thousand of those men in England/ That do no work today!
HENRY: What’s he that wishes so?/ My cousin Westmoreland? No my fair cousin;/ If we are mark’d to die, we are enow/ To do our country loss; and if to live,/ The fewer men, the greater share of honour./ God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more./ By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,/ Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;/ It yearns me not if men my garments wear;/ Such outward things dwell not in my desires./ But if it be a sin to covet honour,/ I am the most offending soul alive./ No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England./ God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour/ As one man more methinks would share from me/ For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!/ Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,/ That he which hath no stomach to this fight,/ Let him depart; his passport shall be made,/ And crowns for convoy put into his purse;/ We would not die in that man’s company/ That fears his fellowship to die with us./ This day is call’d the feast of Crispian./ He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,/ Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,/ And rouse him at the name of Crispian./ He that shall live this day, and see old age,/ Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,/ And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’/ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,/ And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’/ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,/ Familiar in his mouth as household words–/ Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,/ Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester–/ Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red./ This story shall the good man teach his son;/ And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,/ From this day to the ending of the world,/ But we in it shall be remembered–/ We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/ For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,/ This day shall gentle his condition;/ And gentlemen in England now-a-bed/ Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,/ And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks/ That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
In the civil religion of this Iowa town, October 25th is Founders Day. But like most holidays of this sort, its intent has been lost in the commerce of food and fireworks. I’m hopeful Daron Hagen’s setting will remind us of a nobler time. And of our higher selves.