It appears that major donors to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the United States Senate were rewarded with invitations to stay in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House or to spend weekends at Camp David. We have heard this kind of news before. Certainly there are compelling arguments against such close associations between elected politicians and private benefactors. But they don’t interest me because I assume that there exists no moral propriety in Washington business transactions and no limit to the permutations of its sleeping arrangements.
But the attraction of spending any time at all in the White House, particularly in the Lincoln bedroom, is perplexing. The comic aperçu that follows a night in this room usually is about having had sex in its regal atmosphere. This might be amusing if we could assert that Lincoln was exactly as he is perceived by most Americans and not a pernicious tyrant who cast, into a vortex of destruction, the dream of liberty. Still, imagine yourself writing Hillary a check for some immense figure. She thanks you for the graft, startles you with that strangely obsequious sneer, then sends you straight to bed.
Thus begins your reverie in the lair of the beast itself, Theseus vanishing between columnar plinths of the Labyrinth gate. Down he goes once again, as often before, imagining the secret inside his name: The(y)Se(e)(U)s, that bower of deep history impelling him ever way from dreams of rest in arboreal spaces and ever toward cataclysms in catacombs. His lantern illumines the anteroom’s careful detailing of arcing arabesques and florid mosaics, dense with denizens of an allegorical world, shadow harlequins and transcendental ghouls of the night watch, fissures in cold stone, burbling with liquescent ghosts of the Civil War dead. He traces with slender fingers glyphs in the marble balustrade while, behind him, the light of memory, splinters, scatters and is gone.
Darkness erupts in a rhizomatic bloom of ventricles plunging through Southern soil, doomed faces fed through oubliettes in the plasms of mud. Screams entangle the logic of Ariadne’s thread. The Minotaur’s grim retribution for Athenian ardor writhes beneath the map of Appomattox and speaks in riddling cant to Minos, Father of ignominy, stately solipsist of a warring cosmology. Their mouths open in unison, in union. And you wake.
Professor Harrison Horne of the Sleep Research Laboratory at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, England, reports in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 2000; 53 (1)271-9, that sleep deprivation impairs temporal memory. But this alone cannot explain your vexed encounter with Hillary’s nightmare world. For in the sleep of Lincoln, the world of truth is reconstructed on the Knossosian model, and the multicursal maze becomes the multi-cultural ruin of a once great society. The Minotaur was born of the unholy conjunction between a magic bull and the vengeful Pasiphæ, a fiercely ambitious woman who let herself be raped by an animal in order to keep the palace in the family. The Minotaur’s birth scandalized the Cretan gentry, polarized the clergy, but was a harbinger of power. And though she was horribly disfigured by the delivery, Pasiphæ displaced forever all her husband’s mistresses and excesses with a singular act of political acuity. Thus are horror and Hillary fused in the dark conjugation of the Lincoln bed.
September 15, 2000
Scott Wilkerson is curator of the Ward Library at the Mises Institute.
