*Dream archive: Capella in the NY Times* -- 22 Nov 1999 Two consecutive dreams from the NY Times follow at the end, after these several pages (from Manchester) of what adequately captures the essence of the context for me. William Manchester concludes *One Brief Shining Moment* (1983), his photo enhanced retrospective of the JFK Presidency, with this last chapter (borrowing the scenes about the Democratic Convention and Capella, with only minor revision, from his 1965 *Death of a President*). THERE THOU LYEST . . . . . . Even the 1964 Democratic National Convention, which had been carefully planned as a Johnsonian festival, was stolen from under his very eyes. A month earlier he had scratched Bobby from his list of vice-presidential possibilities. Nevertheless, the most moving moment in Convention Hall was not LBJ’s. It came when Bob stepped to the podium to introduce a film about his brother’s presidential years. For fifteen minutes the delegates gave him a roaring, standing ovation, and then wept as he softly quoted Shakespeare in that inimitable voice: . . . When he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun. Bob had done nothing to encourage the demonstration. You watched through misted eyes as he repeatedly tried to interrupt it, and then, biting his lip, lowered his head as against a storm. You felt utterly shattered, for you were remembering that evening when you walked the Ellipse with Jack, talking of stars. . . . It seemed so utterly monstrous, as you listened to Bob, at a convention his brother should have been dominating, that Jack had gone through all that in the Solomons Slot to die as he had, at peace under a bright noon sun in a boisterous American city. Sartre was right, you thought; life is a theater of the absurd. There was no other word for it. . . . But the phenomenon was too deep for thought, too. It still is, for in the 1980s, despite criticisms of his policies and even of his character, his place in the hearts of his countrymen is secure. . . . David Brinkley concluded that the assassination and its aftermath are unfathomable. “The events of those days don’t fit,” he told you. “You can’t place them anywhere. They don’t fit in the intellectual luggage of our time.” To him the tragedy was “too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much. It had to be separate and apart.” But events that cannot be accommodated in the intellectual luggage of our time may fit perfectly in kit which is not intellectual and whose force is therefore not recognized in our time. Brinkley is highly intelligent, articulate, and above all rational; so are our other social commentators. That has not always been true. In earlier eras their role was played by prophets, seers, and oracles, who found reason was weak when pitted against the tides of emotion. The terrific energy released by the death of the President would not have surprised them. They would have found the emerging Kennedy legend familiar -- for though strange to us, it is as old as the human race -- and they would even have known how it could be used to strengthen and invigorate the country. There were few who sensed this at the time. Senator Ralph Yarborough had been bred in the florid tradition of southern oratory, and when the President was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, Yarborough turned aside, whispering, “Excalibur has sunk beneath the waves.” Jackie had not heard him, but several days later, talking to Theodore H. White, she too evoked Arthurian images, remembering how Jack had loved those lines: “Don’t let it be forgot / That once there was a spot / For one brief shining moment / That was known as Camelot.” Once, she said, she had thought of history as something that “bitter old men” wrote. “Then,” she said, “I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way -- if it made him see the heroes -- maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view.” Other great Presidents would be elected, she said, “but there’ll never be another Camelot again.” Actually, of course, there never was a Camelot. It exists only in legend. But that does not discredit it. Legends cannot be measured by dialectic. Biblical miracles are myths. If you dismissed them as lies, however, you would not only offend those who cherish them; you would also be wrong. When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that it was his mission “to bear witness to the truth” and that “everyone who is of the truth hears my voice,” Pilate replied: “What is truth?“ Men have been struggling to answer him for two thousand years. . . . Truth, in short, may be simple faith -- faith in today’s creeds; faith also in those creeds of the past which we call myths or legends. They are many. The legendary hero is found in all cultures -- . . . , Arthur in Britain, and Roland in France. Doubtless all of these champions existed in one form or another. The difficulty lies in sorting out the facts about them. Those who shape legends have never been content to leave substance alone. Roland, for example, deserves to be remembered for his stand at Concesvalles. His lily needs no gilding. Nevertheless, the *Chanson de Roland* tells us that he fought with a magic sword and a wonderful horn that could be heard twenty miles away, both of which he had won from a giant. This sort of fictive embroidery is even more intricate in tales of the most remarkable of all legendary heroes, Arthur of England, though here, as in so many other particulars, exceptions must be made. The embellishments -- the sword in the stone, the sacred sword Excalibur, the Round Table, the Holy Grail -- are so consistent with one another, and so magnificent in their entirety, that they guarantee immortality in themselves. Arthur is unique. His fame is not confined to England; indeed, for several centuries he was better known on the Continent than in his own country. He is the only historic figure from England’s Dark Ages to have emerged, radiant, into the Renaissance and then to have grown through the centuries that followed, until today he is as celebrated as the twentieth century’s world leaders. He died 1,444 years ago. . . . . . . . . . The last Easter Table citing Arthur is dated A.D. 539. It reads: “The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Mordred perished.” Camlann was not a fight between Britons and Saxons. The need to drive away the Germans had united England’s small kingdoms. The Saxon withdrawal had loosened the alliance. The allies quarreled with one another and then resorted to the sword. In their lethal struggle Arthur and Mordred may have been resolving a personal quarrel or championing different kingdoms. In any event only horsemen were involved; the peasants were undisturbed and unthreatened. The tremendous thing is that Arthur, by his skill and bravery, had brought Englishmen a lifetime of peace, and that was so unusual in the Dark Ages that he won what proved to be everlasting gratitude. . . . . . . . . . Excalibur went its watery way, and Arthur departed to sleep beneath the inscription “*Hic jacet Arturus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus*” -- “Here lies Arthur, the Once and Future King.” Thus, he joined that small circle of mythical heroes who can never die, who, in Steinbeck’s words, have found “a seat of worth beyond the reach of envy, whose occupant ceases to be a man and becomes the receptacle of the wishful longings of the world.” Arthur lived, fought, and died when all his countrymen . . . believed in heroes. Kennedy’s age was the age of the antihero, the victim. Alienation had become a cultural vogue. Great leaders belonged to the past . . . It therefore followed that this young President who seemed to have been cast from it must be an imposter. Those who held this view were a minority, but they were immensely influential. Because of Kennedy’s class, taste, and interest in the world of ideas, he had moved among them for years. Their modes were familiar to him but unacceptable. He continued to write of the gallantry they disparaged and spoke eloquently of the need for a new idealism. In Houston, the night before he was slain, he quoted the Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” He saw his country threatened by a gray tide of mediocrity and an implacable enmity toward the concept of excellence which he exalted. . . . The tension between him and the intellectuals who should have identified with his presidency but didn’t, became irrelevant in Dallas. Most Americans didn’t know that heroism was obsolete. Their grief in November 1963 was like that of any people, at any time in history, whose champion has been slain. . . . Some institutions are universal, and burial of the dead is one, but it can be done in various ways. The ritualistic splendor of these mourning ceremonies for Kennedy struck deep, atavistic chords, recalling ancestral memories older than the nation. For example, the riderless, caparisoned steed that followed the gun carriage, with boots reversed in their stirrups, a sign that the beloved rider would ride no more . . . Somehow Jack’s young widow had reached back across the centuries and found the noblest of funeral rites, celebrating the sacrifice of fallen leaders; then, gathering that solemn aura into the prism of her own anguish, she refracted it into a radiant, penetrating beam of light that blinded a nation with its own tears. One conclusion was predictable. The country’s concept of President Kennedy had changed forever. Once a leader becomes a martyr, transformation naturally follows. Endowed with a nimbus, he must also be clothed in raiment which he would have found strange, but which satisfies the public eye. As Edmund Wilson pointed out, the Lincoln to whom Americans are introduced as children, and whom Carl Sandburg did so much to perpetuate, has little in common with the cool, aloof genius who ruled this nation unflinchingly as the sixteenth President of the United States. That man who became his nineteenth successor shared his fate. The real Kennedy vanished on November 22, 1963. The fact that Lincoln and Kennedy shared an abiding faith in a government of laws therefore becomes inconsequential; legends, because they are essentially tribal, override such details. What the hero was and what he believed are submerged by the demands of those who mourn him. In myth he becomes what they want him to have been, and anyone who belittles this transformation has an imperfect understanding of how the emotions of an entire nation may be moved A romantic concept of what may have been can be far more compelling than what was. . . . The legendary Arthur, like the Jack Kennedy we knew, was in his element on seas and streams. He was said to have been conceived at Tintagel, where towering seas crash against cliffs and burst into billowing clouds of foam. Five of the great battles in which he rescued England from the swarming Saxon invaders were fought on the banks of rivers; he fell with his last wound on the shore of another stream; he returned his sacred sword to the Lady of the Lake, whose hand rose from the depths to receive it; and he was carried away by three queens on a royal barge. But those who yearn for his strength and courage do not look seaward. Since the beginning of time men have sought the answer to profound mysteries in the sky. In various eras stars have been worshiped. Along the Euphrates, observations of them were recorded before 3800 B.C.; the Chinese had discovered the 365¼-day solar year by 2300 B.C.; the Egyptians laid out their pyramids and established the rules of surveying by charting celestial movements. Thus, those who seek Arthur search the stellar vault of the heavens, seeing him in Arcturus, the star said to have been named for him, or in the sparkling constellation Ursa Major, “Arthur’s Wain.” If you were sitting beside Jim Swindal in the Air Force One cockpit during that flight home from Texas on November 22, hurtling eastward at a velocity approaching the speed of sound, goaded by a mighty tailwind, you became aware that night was approaching rapidly. Less than forty-five minutes after you left Dallas, shadows began to thicken over eastern Arkansas. In the southern sky you could see a waif of a moon, a day and a half off the quarter, hanging ghostlike near the meridian. Like you, Jim, near tears, was fighting to control himself. Conversation was out of the question; voices couldn’t be trusted. Outside, twilight turned to olive gloaming and became dust. You looked out upon the overarching sky and realized that in the last days of autumn the northern firmament is brilliant. Jupiter lay over the Carolinas, the Big Dipper beyond Chicago. Cassiopeia and the great square of Pegasus twinkled overhead. Arcturus was setting redly over Kansas. But the brightest light in the bruise-blue canopy was Capella, just beginning its annual five-month wintry cruise over the hemisphere. Always a star of the first magnitude, it seemed dazzling tonight, and as Air Force One rocketed toward West Virginia it rose majestically a thousand miles to the northeast, over Boston. Ever since then you have thought of Capella as Kennedy’s star. It is brilliant, it is swift, it soars. Of course, to see it, you must lift your eyes. But he showed us how to do that. (Turning the page, the book finishes with just photos: on the left, the full page of the funeral cortege; and on the right -- Jackie and Caroline kneeling down beside the casket, the little girl with her hand under the flag, touching the casket.) The New York Times, 17 April 1923, p. 6 -- MURDER CHARGE IN DREAM Trial is Result of Pittsburgh Mother’s Vision of her Dead Son. *Special to The New York Times.* PITTSBURGH, April 16. -- Peter Capella is on trial for his life, accused of murder by Mrs. Magdalene Capella (no relation) because a sixteen-year-old son of the woman who was found shot dead in bed appeared in a dream eighteen months later and told his mother that Capella killed him. Capella was a boarder in the woman’s home at the time of the young man’s death. In court today Mrs. Capella, in response to Assistant District Attorney Philips’s question and under cross-examination, insisted that she had charged Capella with the murder of her son because of the vision she had in November, 1921[*]. The son, Rudolf, made his home with his parents at the time of his death. The mother testified that in May, 1921, she heard a shot coming from a bedroom and, running upstairs, she found her boy with a bullet wound in his temple and dying. The defendant, Peter Capella, was in the room at the time, she testified. The Coroner’s inquisition failed to reveal any testimony upon which any one could be held for the killing, and a verdict of accidental death was returned. Then, the very next dream reported in the NY Times . . . The New York Times, 7 February 1924, p. 5 -- (The topic of this edition is the reporting in words and photos all the sights and sounds of President Wilson’s funeral the day before in Washington, DC.) Mother’s Dream Leads to Dead Son. WATERBURY, Conn., Feb. 6. -- Dreaming that her son, who had been missing from home since yesterday, was dead in his automobile in his garage here, Mrs. Maria Connolly roused herself from sleep this afternoon, hastened to the garage and found her dream had come true. James Connolly, 23, her son, was lying dead in the rear of the closed car. Death is believed to have been caused by asphyxiation. * * * * * * Reply to: angel_marvelzombie@yahoo.com