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A Few Words from the Editor
First of all, it is my pleasure to announce that our
non-profit educational organization is now legally and officially The
Center for Literate Values. I continue to believe as firmly as ever that
the rather vapid phrase "literate values" must include a
tendency to seek privacy for meditation, an ability to employ meditative
moments in intense self-scrutiny, a certain healthy suspicion of others’
motives and one’s own, and—in two words—a cultivation of that
dutiful, confessional state of mind which might well be called moral
reason. I shall probably remain a little bewildered to my dying day by
the icy response which the "m" word and the "r" word
draw from ostensibly educated people, and especially educators at the
higher level. Nevertheless, some battles are better lost if winning them
would require a tenacity sufficient to prevail, under other circumstances,
in the whole war. I had reached the point where I was simply exhausted
with having to explain so innocuous a pair of words to so malicious and
retrograde a phalanx of intellects. Hence… farewell, moral reason:
welcome aboard, literate values.
The Web site where many of you are no doubt reading
these words has been overhauled from top to bottom (or whatever the
operative image is for a mass of hyperlinks). I sincerely urge everyone
who has access to the Net and is comfortable sitting glued to a screen for
hours to meander through The Center’s new site at a leisurely pace.
Please remember the magical "org" at the end of www.literatevalues.org.
Secondly, I must apologize for the appearance of
self-promotion in this issue. I had anticipated that my own essay would be
long. Its subject, frankly, deserves a book-length treatment: the
surprising yet intimate collaboration of communism and fascism in
rendering the twentieth-century West’s intellectual life suicidally
simplistic. I recall being rather relieved, in fact, at the prospect of
having little space left over to fill. I had forgotten that summer is an
especially slow season for submissions. Naturally, I was delighted to have
another piece from Professor Chaves, and journalist Mark Wegierski did me
the great favor of contributing a review of the twenty-first century’s
possible points of fatal collision with our "miracles" of
technology. Neither of these excellent essays, however, required much
space. I was therefore able to devote about half the issue to creative
work; and I found myself compelled, in addition, to inflict upon the
reader a few more of my prose poems (a stock of which I keep around for
just such emergencies).
This even balance of the analytic and the aesthetic may
have turned out to be a good thing. My essay, after all, scarcely plots a
vector toward optimism (and the final essay of this series, which I plan
to insert into the Fall 2003 issue, is indeed not looking rosy on the
drawing board). Mr. Wegierski’s overview of our lunges into various
technological abysses, furthermore, is downright frightening if one
ponders the frivolity of the electorate in recent years. Under the
circumstances, a heavy dose of artistic creativity is surely indicated.
Yet this quarter’s artists are themselves hardly
ravished by the realities of modern life. My own rambles are probably the
most airy, and in a sense the most irresponsible. Mr. Moseby’s short
story, while it has much of the nostalgic and a little of the fantastic,
remains on the whole pretty gloomy about human nature. Ralph Carlson’s
verse chronicle of a young woman’s being hustled by an impersonal
medical establishment from the first highly invasive treatments of her
cancer to an anguishing death safely beyond the sterilized corridors moves
us with the very absence of humanity it conveys. Michael Lythgoe’s work
pulses with a sense of far greater reality—of comic relief, in the
highest possible register—looming gloriously over our somber daily
realities; yet even here, hope lies in following rivers and clouds and
fragrances anagogically into metaphor and a love which passeth
understanding. The best hope this world has to offer, one might say, is
that which fractures the strict conditions of this world by finding in
worldly matter the stuff of otherworldly images. Of course, such hope is
not really in this world at all.
But when was it otherwise, I ask? If we lived in one of
those golden eras when people believed implicitly that heaven was coming
to earth, or if we who still think about things collectively decided to
burn our books and join the fête servile of those who can content
their heart with a day at the mall, how would we be better off? Both of
those states—the cultural golden age and the consumerist artificial
paradise—are merely alternative forms of delusion. Our hope can really
not rest on anything we see, not even if we should invent an antidote to
mortality. (For when has our joy with this life ever been so great that
its sole vitiation was the ticking of our body’s clock?) I would go so
far as to say that taking mortal existence’s full, sad measure— which
is getting easier to do all the time as our technological wonders
successively show their seams—makes us more capable of the one true
happiness we may know as we are. We expect less, we demand less, we
survive with less, and… and we begin to rediscover, for instance, the
pleasures of a Carolina wren’s warble because we are strolling along a
grass-besieged sidewalk rather than bulleting along a superhighway. We may
yet slow down: we may yet choose to slow down (as opposed to being
chased into the hills like Boccaccio’s crew by some terrorist-hatched
plague). Thinking makes you want to slow down, and reading makes you want
to think.
So read, and live!
~J.H.
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Judges of the Past
by
Jonathan Chaves
Jonathan Chaves is Professor of Chinese
Literature and Chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and
Literatures at The George Washington University. He is co-author with J.
Thomas Rimer of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing: The Wakan Rôei
Shû (Columbia University Press, 1997).
Recently, the MLA has sent a survey form to
chairmen of language and literature departments. When I received my copy,
I simply threw it away. Sometime later, I received a second copy, with a
cover letter in which the writer stated that he was "distressed"
that I had not participated, and asking again that I do so. I responded to
him that "distressed" would be an understatement to describe my
feelings every time I open the program of an MLA meeting, and read once
again the Modern Litany of Asininity. Should the MLA ever return to
sanity, I said, I would be glad to cooperate with any survey they chose to
conduct. But for now the study of literature—and therefore the MLA—along
with all the humanities, has become the playground of those who profess a
destructive approach to civilization known for the moment (a new term
could be coined at any time) by the oxymoronic name of
"Postmodernism."
At its base, this chameleon, this congeries of
seemingly disparate "theories" of literature, is really a deadly
combination of Utopianism and Nihilism, which, as Lee Congdon has pointed
out, "both derive… from the same source—undying hatred of the
world as it is." And not only the world as it is, but the
world as it was. C.S. Lewis has written that "we are not so
much the judges of the past, as we are judged by it." But a judgement
upon the past, upon all traditional religion and philosophy—let alone
the literature and art in which they are embodied—is precisely what our
"postmodern" colleagues consider themselves competent to
proclaim. They have done so by applying first "Deconstructionism",
which seems to ignore all historical context, and then "New
Historicism", which seems to reinstate historical context. But these
are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, the subjective ego of the
"scholar" is supreme.
In a recent piece in the Newsletter of the Association
of Literary Scholars and Critics, E. Christian Kopff has called upon us
"to teach our students to think like Dante and Homer," which is
the correct approach, already called for by C.S. Lewis in his great book
of 1961, An Experiment in Criticism.
But the "postmodernists", whether overtly and
proudly subjectivist, as in their deconstructive mode, or seemingly
historical, as in their "New Historicist" mode, are reading
Dante and Homer while thinking like Marx, Nietzsche, and Lévi-Strauss.
"Increasingly we meet only ourselves," writes Lewis, and indeed,
for a modern to read these critics is like looking into a mirror, rather
than through a window. Given the prominence of "New
Historicism", calling for a "return to the sources" (as
Kopff correctly does) will not be enough, so long as those sources are
returned to by scholars with an agenda of superimposing trendy ideologies
upon them.
This sad truth recently drove itself home as I plowed
my way through a book which is in many respects emblematic (pun intended)
of the problem. It is a study of the emblem books which played such an
important role in sixteenth and seventeenth century Holland and England
(and elsewhere in Europe), and which combined engraved pictures with poems
or prose texts conveying moral messages of various kinds.* The
author is described as being the Chairman of the Society for Emblem
Studies, and is clearly extremely learned on the subject. The problem with
this book is not an absence of scholarship—the bibliography of all
emblem books published in England is thorough and dependable, and whenever
the author limits himself to describing the books in a straightforward
manner, he demonstrates his comprehensive knowledge of their imagery and
rhetoric.
The problem lies, rather—as it so often does today—in
the author’s ultimate concern, which is really not to study these books
on their own terms, but rather to use them as fodder for the all-devouring
"theory" to which he subscribes, which is New Historicism
grounded in (Post-) Structuralism. This is the author’s (pseudo-)
religion. And it blinds him precisely to the real religion, Christianity,
which underpins the emblem books, such as Partheneia Sacra (1633)
by Henry Hawkins, S.J. This presentation of various images, most notably
the "Enclosed Garden" (hortus conclusus), as metaphors
for the Virgin Mary, is clearly inspired by something the author just
cannot sympathize with, namely real devotion. "We are required,"
he writes, as if it were a dreary obligation, "to visualise the
Blessed Virgin as, variously, a garden, a rose, a lily, a violet, a
sunflower, the dew, a bee, the heavens," etc. Our author knows that
all of these "are sanctioned by established traditions of Christian
iconography"—ignorance is not his problem. But this "does not
diminish the sense one has… of a tension… which affects almost every
level of its organization." In other words, for him, a Structuralist
tension between equal but opposite polarities or among unassimilated
fragments—a kind of absolutized relativism—subverts the (merely
conventional) religious devotionalism of the book. Structuralism trumps
Christianity. And in case we miss the message, the author repeats several
times—indeed, rams down our throats—the caution that the benighted
writers of the emblem books thought that the metaphors and images
they used were "natural"—or possessed "facticity"
(i.e., were true), while we today, in our greater wisdom, realize that
they were all culturally conditioned, and therefore lack substance as
truth claims. The writers of the seventeenth century believed what they
believed, and our author believes what he believes (the ultimate in
tautology!), and feels a kind of urgency to undermine the fallacies of the
very writers he is studying. He has placed himself in the position not of
scholar, but judge, of those writers, probably because he somehow
feels that the errors of the past are obstacles on the path to Utopia, and
must therefore be exploded.
Precisely because this is an ambitious book by a
well-established "authority," written in dense prose heavy with
jargon, and published by an important publisher, it is likely to establish
itself as the "cutting edge" of emblem book studies. It is full
of accurate detail pressed into the service of a subversive agenda. The
book is all wrong, in tone and attitude.
Is this a unique problem of this particular book? Of
course not; this is now the norm in the "leading" studies of
virtually any topic in the humanities. Only Lewis’s call—and Kopff’s—for
a return to "thinking like Dante and Homer" will save literary
studies from this descent into decadence.
REFERENCES
Lee Congdon. "The Aesthetics of Hate." Chronicles
of Culture, Vol. 9, No. 4 (April 1985), pp. 14-15.
C.S. Lewis. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge
University Press, 1961.
Michael Bath. Speaking Pictures: English Emblem
Books and Renaissance Culture. Longman, 1994.
NOTES
* As
the reader will soon understand, Professor Chaves is pursuing a generic
point about contemporary scholarly writing, not tendering a book review.
He has therefore suppressed this particular book’s title and author lest
he appear to single out a certain scholar merely for uttering the
gibberish exacted of the whole cult.~Ed.
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Look Homeward, Angela
The following circular was marked, "Please
distribute and post," when it arrived in our e-mail this past
spring. Since our objective is not to deride any single individual or
group, we have suppressed most of the names which appear in the
announcement. We may confide without being accused of mean-spiritedness,
perhaps, that the proposal originates in a certain Canadian institution’s
Centre for Feminist Research.
Call for Papers, deadline extended
Diaspora, Memory and Silence:
Who Calls Canada Home?
We anchor the debate of changing diasporic
(transnational) identities to Canada, but, meanwhile, we question space,
place, and location as geopolitical manifestations, historical events
and metaphorical imagined communities. The boundaries of homes are often
remembered as sites of historicized struggles; in addition nuanced
identities present new possibilities for articulating anti-racist,
post-colonial identities or for critiquing the limits of modernity.
In this interdisciplinary conference we seek to focus
on interpretations of "home" and "homeland" within
the Diaspora, in the widest possible sense. When individuals leave
"home" they may experience a poignant loss of culture,
history, language-indeed a way of life. Our focus is on "loss"
and its remembrance.
While some may find solace in memories, others may
feel that memories are constant reminders of sorrow and suffering
endured in the "home" and "homeland." While silence
is a possible response to "loss" of "home" or
"homeland" (as well as one’s known and familiar identity),
it also generates possibilities of "new identities" and a
state of "double consciousness."
In this conference we seek to explore the hybridity
encoded in "memory" and remembering, and its expression and
representation in literature, film, music, personal narratives and life
writing. We invite papers that seek to move the concept of Diasporas
further, with particular reference to gender and class. Some of the
questions we want to ask are: is the Diasporic transnational individual
necessarily an intellectual or does the term apply equally to all? Do
women experience life in the Diaspora differently from men? Is the
essential self-expressed in a hybrid identity rooted in ethnicity? Is
hybridity a binary opposite of "indigenousness?" Is there a
relationship between hybridity and anti-racism, and hybridity, and
nationality? What is it? For the transnational migrant on the borders of
a nation or an experience, where and what is considered
"home"? How is the "homeland" configured in
narrations of the past?
Targets for the indignant grammarian sail past like
clay pigeons from some skeet-shooting machine run amuck. One would have
expected a Canadian, at least, to be able to quote a single word without
enclosing a comma or period within the marks: this Canadian cannot
even keep the question mark out of quotes consistently. Then there’s the
merciless transformation of rare words like "diaspora" into
plurals and adjectives. (Can "diasporize" be far away? "Narratize"
reared its ugly head long ago, though it is not as reverend as this writer’s
rather blasé "historicize".) And, by all means, let us not
write anything so quaint and proper as "indigeny" when we might
peel off some indigestible hunk of a word like "indigenousness".
The quotation marks will get it past muster. What the heck, just quote
everything: "home", "homeland"… and how about "centre"?
Isn’t there gross presumption in suggesting that a particular place is
somehow "home" to feminist studies? Better make that
"studies".
What are the odds that the question, "Do women
experience life in the Diaspora differently from men?" will be found
to have an affirmative answer?
All gibes and quibbles aside, however, the document
strikes us as a pathetic piece of self-indictment—pathetic on two
counts. First, there is pathos in the assumption that the loss of home—of
childhood, of innocence, of high hopes, of protective love—which we all
experience as we grow up is somehow a geopolitical (and almost certainly
patriarchal) plot. One must always wince when one sees adults in such
denial. It’s like watching a forty-something woman weep because the
teddy bear her grandma made her has been lost. Naturally, the display
makes one feel sad. One thinks of one’s own past, of how much is now
gone forever. Ní feicfaimid a leithéid arís, as many an old
Irishman has said (some probably in Canada): "We won’t see their
like again." But a grand gathering, not to commemorate the
snows of yesteryear, but to indict the culprit responsible for melting
them… aw, come on!
Secondly, there’s the self-contradiction so common in
contemporary literary studies as to be typical (perhaps requisite?) of
them. Follow along. IF national boundaries are a manipulative
construct of dominant cultures—propaganda, in effect—THEN we
should indeed make little of them. This is often precisely what an
educated person is called to do: it is why Socrates labeled himself a cosmopolites.
But our conferees are not-so-subtly invited to conclude that alienation
from home makes recent immigrants especially sensitive to the common
humanity of others not privileged to be part of the "Mayflower"
set. (Heaven forbid, of course, that the phrase "common
humanity" should appear even within quotation marks.) Now, such
sensitivity is surely a good thing. THEREFORE, an enlightened
project of liberating people far and wide from their silly regional
allegiances would seem to undermine the creation of sensitive souls. EITHER
the concept of home is a fraud whose victims are needlessly suffering, OR
it has a certain moral usefulness in rendering the exiled more aware of
what really counts. But the female protagonist of this script is at once a
victim for having been gulled into loving one mountain more than another
and a hero for lending her sympathetic ear to weeping slaves and refugees
out on the steppe where she has been shanghaied. Wasn’t Meryl Streep in
that one?
The honest, direct approach to this conference’s
topic would be to observe that the colorful dialect in which our
grandparents corrected us, the intricate way in which we grew up
celebrating the new year’s arrival, and the songs and games laced
through our childhood memories are all part of what makes us unique. To
deplore such uniqueness and seek to give us all the same past—or seek to
erase everyone’s past—is probably almost as idiotic in conception as
it would be despotically overweening in execution. At the same time, the
kaleidoscopic variety of our past years cannot conceal a common baggage of
naive expectations and resurgent hopes—of faces and places lost forever
in this world combined with intimations of immortality fed by the pain of
such losses. We are human beings, one and all. The academy continues to
turn the basic truths of our nature inside-out. As we approach the
half-century mark since the first ravages of "relevance" upon
the humanities curriculum, the professorial élite shows few signs of
awakening to the most essential limits of life: childhood, adulthood,
senility, death… male and female, this skin and not that one, this
tongue and not that one, this height, that weight, those eyes and hair.
What can never be made over must be made over, or at least incessantly
lamented, while what is eternal and transcending must be denied to the
last barricade.
Meanwhile, the human condition grows a little more
opaque to self-anointed literary scholars, sympathy in this world of
bulldozed homes and broken families becomes rarer than ever, and the
Western academy draws closer to fatal overdose as it pops one
anti-depressant after another.
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Daggerpoints and Loggerheads, Part Two:
The Twentieth Century’s Fatal Division
into Ideological Camps
by
John R. Harris
Argumentum pessimi turba est~
"The crowd’s will embodies the worst
conclusion."
Seneca, De Vita Beata 2.2
In the previous issue of Praesidium, I alleged
that much of the twentieth century’s misery stemmed from its persistent
submission of complex issues to yes-or-no litmus tests and, with
complementary perversity, its obfuscation of very basic moral choices as
insoluble conundrums. I further alleged that such topsy-turviness
reflected the largely successful attempts of egotistical, unprincipled
intellectuals to manipulate newly "empowered" throngs of
constituents whose rudimentary education, quite frankly, left them pawns
in any real power struggle. In the present essay, I wish to proceed from
abstract argument to a limited review of certain historical facts of the
past century--facts I have come to know best through novelists and
essayists. Where all such primary sources have been cited, by the way, the
translations are my own.~J.H.
My son has reached the stage where all that pertains to
soldiers and soldiering fascinates him. He had crossed this threshold,
probably, even before Operation Iraqi Freedom resuscitated patriotism and
plastered images of troops and tanks all about us. My generation, of
course, has a tendency to reticence in such matters—and I like to think
that my own aversion to gung-ho enthusiasm isn’t so much the long shadow
of the Vietnam War as it is a reasoned, perfectly manly distaste for
modern warfare. A bullet in the brain from nowhere…shrapnel through the
rib cage before you can get your face in the dirt… this doesn’t sound
to me like the stuff of valor and moral will. As well to display your
valor by flying a kite in a thunderstorm. What does survival prove,
besides your good luck? What does victory in a firefight prove, besides
the steadiness of your fingers and the dryness of your powder? What speed
does the righteous wrath of a good cause add to your missile, or what
punch the toughened sinew of Spartan training to your land mines? These
are not scenes from a Homeric confrontation: they are turns in a game of
craps. No wonder small-bodied women, having lived through boot camp, can
do as good a job as a veritable Ajax. It’s all in the eyes and fingers:
align the cross-hairs and then press the button.
Yet I allow my son his bloody combat missions through
den and bedroom, and I even participate. I am happy to see that he desires
to be brave. He will learn soon enough that bravery in the contemporary
world must be measured less by resigning oneself to an invisible, lethal
hail than by actively reasserting control over a culture of push-button
annihilation. I keep thinking of all those African and Arabic adolescents
one sees on TV wheeling their jeeps through harrowed villages and firing
rounds into mid-air. How often is there someone sensible enough, and man
enough, to say to them, "Stop wasting your ammo before one of you
takes it in the back"?
War is complex, and modern war is immensely complex. It
has become a commonplace to begin any explanation of the West in Rubble
(also known as postmodernism) by gesturing toward two devastating world
wars. I might as well go through the polite motions myself. The West’s
preeminent powers—the nations which gave us the Enlightenment and
scientific method and the glories of cathedrals and symphonies—could not
have more willfully slaughtered their youth in the Great War, and with
less regard for anything like fair play or humanity (let alone chivalry),
if they had lined all their young men up along the Tarpeian Rock and dealt
a push to every other one. The means of slaughter were ignoble, even
cowardly, and spared the brave no more than the faint-hearted, the
generous no more than the vile, the wise no more than the foolish. A
millennium of classical heritage leavened with Celtic/Germanic fantasy and
Arabic techniques of calculation had at last risen to produce… what? A
fearsomely vainglorious and repugnant adventure in nation-building which
exacted vast sacrifices of able men to meat-grinding machines.
The Second World War, of course, is somewhat more
tolerable in retrospect. If its machines were more deadly, they were set
into motion precisely to save innumerable droves of non-combatants from
the slaughterhouse; and the fighting, besides, was highly mobile, so that
no Maginot Line evolved wherein butchery could be concentrated with
inconceivably hellish intensity. (The Pacific Theater, be it noted, was
not so "clean" in this regard.) The cost of such mobility upon
Europe’s artistic and architectural treasures, however, was
proportionately greater. Cities far from the front were bombed into powder—great
cities with structures which had stood, in some cases, for two thousand
years. Civilians, naturally, were also implicated in "collateral
damage" much more than they had been before. In fact, there was
nothing collateral about Hitler’s bomb- and rocket-attacks on London.
For the first time, women and children were tactical targets. An ancient
or medieval city under siege would sometimes send its non-combatants under
escort into the mountains. The city itself was the target, whether for its
strategic position or its symbolic representation of authority. Now, the
objective was to dishearten the other side by shredding sweethearts and
infants. If the British had bundled off their families to one narrow,
aerially identifiable site in the Cotswolds, Hitler would have pointed his
V2’s there.
Is our nightmare, then, just a matter of technology?
Could we still rest easy as long as combatants were hacking away each
other’s limbs with blades or rather ineffectually depeditating horses
with careering cannonballs? Was the Thirty Years War, with all its
carnage, looting, and rapine, insufficient to "postdate" the
seventeenth century’s modernism just because it produced no mushroom
clouds? I can hardly imagine those who style themselves the conscience of
our time being comfortable in a distant past when temples and cathedrals
were not ransacked; for such salutary taboos were undergirded by rigorous
belief systems (often implicated in the causes of war), by a social order
which involved steep class hierarchy, and by a political order which held
authority to be divinely predestined and sanctioned. Turn the clock back
beyond the cataclysmic abilities of Western technology, and you inevitably
land in a Shangri-La where poor farmers are turned out to starve in a
ditch while His Lordship carries off their pubescent daughters.
Certainly the scope of our technology should alarm us.
I have already expressed my own opinion (which was around long before
Orlando tossed Cimosco’s blunderbuss into the Zuyder Zee) that gunpowder
is more akin chemically to cowardice than bravery. Is it such a bad thing,
though, that our technological culture is forcing us all toward a
spiritual definition of courage? How few of us would have discovered that
definition, otherwise! By all means, indict Western modernity for turning
us into cowards, into uniform drones, into servants of the machines that
were to serve us—but do not be so obtuse as to suggest that we were
forced where our own perverse inclinations did not already lean. Our
technology has merely clarified the cloudy image in the mirror. Now that
we see it to be a rather ugly image, some of us want to blame the filter.
The most brilliant, most appalling achievement of the West’s twentieth
century is that it photographed our human soul with x-ray precision: not
our culture, not itself—the West—in the camera’s springs and
shutters, but the diseased soul of the human being supplied with all the
toys and wings and thunderbolts he ever dreamed of.
To cringe from this portrait rather than facing it
"like a man" is the posture which contemporary Europe has
adopted. It is the "postmodern" posture: blame the springs and
shutters for working as they were made to work, not the face for having
warts. If my accusation is true, then the two world wars are really less
causative of Europe’s befuddlement than symptomatic of it. Europe, that
is, was already falling under an evil spell before Franz Ferdinand was
assassinated. The dark florition (if I may attempt a very fine
distinction) of this evil seed was not a Flanders stream awash in human
blood or a Pacific skyline pushing up mushrooms: it was not the
destruction per se. In fact, much of the destruction, at least in
World War Two, was incurred to resist the evil’s relatively orderly,
undisruptive proliferation—the tidy discretion of mass graves and death
camps. The evil was not what the technologically sophisticated trigger
unleashed. The evil was in the finger which itself itched with a wrath and
an ex nihilo creativity purloined from that old god of Western
Christendom, that god pronounced dead. It was ideology. It was classical
hybris liberated from classical condemnation—and armed, this time, with
the Analytical Age’s bottled earthquakes, yet as divested of that age’s
early moral philosophers now as mad Orlando of his clothes.
To assist me in diagnosing this dreadful disease, I
shall turn throughout the rest of my essay, not to historians (for I’m
afraid I haven’t much trust in recent history-writing, which itself too
often drudges for ideology), but to an array of personal accounts by
Europeans who lived through—or sometimes perished in—the last century’s
miseries. 1
I hasten to emphasize that I offer this brief review only
tentatively. I don’t pretend to have uncovered definitive,
incontrovertible answers, but only to have discovered that the true
answers must be far more intricate than those I was taught as a youth or
continue to hear as an adult. No doubt, my self-deprecation and my
gathering clouds of witness bestow upon me a passing resemblance to those
very postmodern analysts (or anti-analysts) I so disdain. The difference
is that I produce my dissenting witnesses, not to fray the edges of
orthodox explanations and uphold a kind of agnosticism, but to puncture
holes in ideological explanations (which, yes, are sometimes also
orthodox) as a way of letting the truth’s light sift through. I believe
these questions have true answers. The truth does not dissolve beneath
contrary points of view, it seems to me, but cries out, rather, for a
remove which explains the close-up appearance of contrariness in all the
testimony. I have often had occasion to recite to myself Saint-Exupéry’s
most elegant, almost mystical formula: "From surmounted contradiction
to surmounted contradiction, I make my way toward the silence of questions
and hence to beatitude."2
What I came to appreciate only recently was
how much this very man, who finally gave his life to free Europe from
fascist terror, was reviled as he lived and vilified after he died by both
communists and Gaullists for "fence-sitting"—i.e., for singing
neither stale refrain. Postmodernism, too, for inflexible and programmatic
ends, does not want us to achieve an enlightening remove from petty
obstacles. Beneath its insinuation that ideologues cannot be rejected
through right reason lurks a much-coveted license to hatch yet more
ideology.
My son has been reading a book about D-Day called We
Were There at the Normandy Invasion. 3
Published in 1956, the story
represents what I immediately recognized as the "party line" in
my own education, and what continues to be far and away the most widely
circulated assessment of France at that historical moment. Almost to a man
(goes this view), the French detested the Nazi occupation forces. Pampered
aristocrat and penurious farmer, worldly Parisian and naïve provincial,
Catholic priest and communist factory worker—all applauded the arrival
of Allied troops, all deplored the Vichy government and its collaborators,
all passed a note or hid a fugitive occasionally for the French
Underground (or maquis). Such is the image I imbibed as a child
from TV shows like Combat and movies like The Longest Day
and Is Paris Burning?; and such is the image, I remarked in
watching a recent PBS documentary, that American journalists still purvey.
The French hated their Nazi invaders, and they loved their Yankee
liberators. For that fleeting moment, at least, in the middle of the
century, the sons of Lafayette and the sons of Washington could toast
their common love of mankind in a bottle of rich amber Sauterne.
Now, there’s no question that the French have never
forgiven the Germans for the Franco-Prussian War—or certainly hadn’t,
anyway, in 1938. Frenchmen would have detested a billeted force which
spoke German even if it arrived with an olive branch and a promise to
defer to local government (circumstances which roughly obtained in the
euphemistic zone libre). That the French almost universally
rejected Nazism’s social objectives, on the other hand, is simply not
true. The Parti Populaire Français (or PPF) was little more than a
Nazi Party without German baggage: the same national socialist agenda, the
same loathing of American capitalism, the same suspicion of Jews and
Freemasons. The PPF amassed quite a following throughout France. It taxed
the Vichy government not only with sycophancy toward the Germans but also
with an inadequately aggressive intervention into social and economic
issues. Due to such sentiments among many of the rank and file, French
authorities zealously rounded up tens of thousands of Jews for Nazi
boxcars and gas chambers (as detailed in another kind of film, Mr.
Klein). France was by most accounts more forthright in handing over
her Jewish citizens than the Reich’s comrades in arms, Italy and
Denmark. Our own troops were scarcely greeted in Paris with open arms: GI’s
were not safe in the city immediately after the Liberation. My
father-in-law once told me that he and his buddies were ordered never to
stroll about the streets of Paris alone—that they could expect to be
treated by certain inhabitants as enemies. After half a century, he
retained a reticence about France which bordered on mistrust. Clearly,
something besides wine was being spilled on those Parisian furloughs.
Among other shady types, members of the Milice (Vichy’s secret police—a
kind of French Gestapo) continued to lurk about.
If I appear now to be stoking the anti-Gallic sentiment
so widespread among Americans these days, then my readers have falsely
anticipated my purpose. I say only that France was far from universally
rejecting the politics of Hitler and Mussolini—that the tribal
antagonism between Gaul and Teuton did not readily overflow into the realm
of ideas. But if France nourished substantial sympathy for fascism, is
that not the most valid of reasons to denounce her? Well, then… denounce
the Vatican, too, and Roman Catholicism. Denounce families with a de
before their name whose land (often shrunken to just enough acreage for a
dilapidated château) had been passed along for generations. Denounce
"sons of the earth" who had risen from their humble state to
become owners of tiny but prosperous local concerns—bottlers of mineral
water or packagers of fertilizer. Denounce Protestants who led decent
little lives around their small, proper families. Denounce bureaucrats and
petty functionaries—gendarmes and railways conductors—who kept the
status quo running smoothly. Denounce everyone who was not a card-carrying
communist: for this array of "everyone else" constitutes the
list of those whom Stalin’s emissaries had slated for execution when the
time was right. The proscribed well knew that they were marked men. 4
They
had felt the tremors from Russia, they had read brochures, and they had
listened to bearded firebrands spouting flames on street corners. However
repellent they found the upstart Austrian Corporal, he had not publicly
vowed to pillage their homes and stand their sons and daughters up against
the wall.5
The exporting of Soviet communism, in short, gave
fascism an appeal which it would otherwise never have enjoyed. Communism
had trenchantly, obtusely, and—in a word—ideologically simplified a
host of complex issues in what I have called elsewhere a "nullifying
opposition". 6
Either the passer-by was to embrace every tenet of the
faith without equivocation, or he was to receive a bullet between the
eyes. No modification was permissible: no compromises, no prisoners. The
example of pilot-author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry splendidly illustrates
the trials of a responsible Frenchman wanting no part of either extreme.
During his self-imposed exile in the United States (a period which saw him
dash off The Little Prince therapeutically), Saint-Exupéry voiced
precisely the sentiments common to most Americans and largely responsible
for their embracing of the war effort. France, wrote Saint-Ex in Pilote
de Guerre, was part of Western culture, and the West was all about
making sense of individual sacrifice in a metaphysical context. The
collectivism of both Hitler and Stalin, by contrast, outraged Western
tradition.
This moral system [of serving the collective] will
clearly explain why the individual should sacrifice himself for the
Community. It will no longer explain, without linguistic artifice, why
the Community should sacrifice itself for a single man—why it is
equitable that a thousand should die to deliver just one man from unjust
imprisonment. We still remember why, but we are forgetting little by
little. And yet it is in this principle, above all, which clearly
distinguishes us from an anthill, that our greatness resides. 7
For his pains in reconciling America to the war’s
costs, Saint-Exupéry was ostracized by de Gaulle’s circle (for which
the annihilation of all collaborators was as important as the repelling of
Nazism). The General himself, who constantly chafed at Eisenhauer’s
prudent direction, would never hear of honoring his nation’s beloved
aviator-poet during his long post-war term as France’s president. The
Nazis, at whose barbarity Pilote was specifically aimed, were
mild-mannered by comparison, at least to begin with. Since Saint-Ex’s
pages never actually mentioned Hitler’s name, the work circulated widely
in occupied France for months before fascist censors were able to read
between the lines!
Under such circumstances, one can hardly marvel that
well-meaning people (if less thoughtful than Saint-Exupéry) felt
virtually coerced at gunpoint into loathsome alliances. There were some,
inevitably, who played both ends against the middle with consummate
cynicism. Jean Dutourd’s satirical novel, Au Bon Beurre,
describes how a family of bourgeois shopkeepers manages to profiteer from
the Occupation so successfully that it pulls off marriage into the
aristocracy while also acquiring Gaullist sympathies at just the right
time. Yet even quite principled people could find themselves on the wrong
side of a jagged moral divide. Titled landowners who sincerely worried
over the sharecropper’s plight but were not prepared to see their homes
burned down… village priests who had devoted their lives to the poor but
were not prepared to see their faith exterminated… such were many of
fascism’s uneasy, deeply regretful allies. 8
Unfortunately, the fascist
agenda was often advanced as inflexibly as the communist. The troubled
consciences of fascist "acquiescents" must have led more than
one to pass secrets to the maquis—an organization run mostly by
the Communist International’s FTP (Franc-Tireurs et Partisans) in
central and southern France.
Nevertheless, the votaries of Bolshevism rather
consistently managed to surpass those of fascism in hideous and wholesale
brutality. Hitler gassed his millions—and Stalin machine-gunned and
starved his dozen millions. In places like Spain, the lessons of the
nightmarish comparison were clear to moderate minds like the fictitious
speaker’s through whom Emilio Romero wrote his testimony (in terms, be
it stressed, which often echo Saint-Exupéry’s):
The tactic of violence imposed upon the modern
political world by communism and fascism, with its terrorist razzias,
its civil militia formations, its dogmatic fanaticism, its radical
dialectic, its doctrine of attaining power through revolution, mass
uprising, and assault—and, above all, its corruption of the state into
an "apparatus" for integrating the community, as systematic
and inexorable as celestial mechanics—all of this had produced an
incredible devaluation of the individual and an icy superiority toward
personal sentiments.
Communist doctrine particularly shines in this
regard. The community is adored, that inanimate abstraction, to the
point of forging ferocious and grotesque gods like those of antiquity;
and among the sacrifices that are exacted figure the following: removing
the sexual member of male victims; thrusting crucifixes through that of
assassinated females; hanging the breasts of women on the walls of
barns, storehouses, or silos; throwing men into deep pits with heavy
stones tied about their necks; burying them alive while allowing an arm,
mangled and blood-streaked from agonzing torture, to show above ground;
violating women in front of their bound-up husbands; tying bodies to the
tails of horses and galloping on these barbarically until the animals
are exhausted and the victims have disintegrated like rag dolls; or
maybe leaving the victims nude or blind or one-armed in a kind of
partial sacrifice, so that in them is published a torture greater than
death. 9
To be sure, Spain and Russia of the early twentieth
century seem to have been crucibles wherefrom the greatest horrors of war
crawled forth readily. This was no doubt because such horrors are both
multiplied and minimized (to those immediately involved, that is) in
countries where life in normal times is cheap and death commonplace. Yet
if one examines one of the countries where fascism quickly took the upper
hand, one seeks in vain for mass graves of Stalinesque proportions. The
slaughter of the Jews did not begin at once with Hitler’s rise to power,
was scarcely prosecuted at all on German soil, and was either disbelieved
or entirely unsuspected by the rank and file of the German nation as it
happened (and long after it happened, in some especially thick-headed
cases). As for citizens of a respectably Arrian stamp, many would allege
later that they were afraid to protest or resist orders, and executions of
"conscientious objectors" certainly took place. There was no
wholesale annihilation of dissidents, however—a fact which would
invalidate the said defense of fearing reprisal when it was advanced by
several Nazi officers and collaborators.
Or consider Italy. All of the novels I have ever read
about Italy under fascism were written by its enemies, yet even these do
not paint a ghastly picture. Ugo Pirro’s L’Isola in Terraferma
follows the travail of a destitute Sicilian family ostracized for the
father’s refusal to renounce communism and embrace Mussolini. The son
(who narrates the story) is expelled from school for not wearing fascist
colors, and the father’s iron-working business almost founders. It
survives a particularly lean stretch only because the village priest
places a timely order—a priest who well knows, as does everyone in town,
that Papà Santini is "a militant, mature, conscientious, renowned
atheist". 10
There are incidents of hazing and moments of lying low; but
of brutal assault or executions over a ditch or patrol cars rolling
through the streets with mounted machine guns, we find no trace. The clear
implication throughout the book, rather, is that several of the Santini’s
neighbors are far from infatuated with fascism and march to its drum only
to avoid the same social and economic persecution which makes this family
stand out. The father, for that matter (despite the author’s attempt to
present him as otherwise), is more than a little ludicrous in his
coffee-house harangues of fellow communists (there are a few), more than a
little pathetic in his window-sill dreams of the revolution, and more than
a little despicable in his forcibly detaining a wife and daughter from
attending Mass. With enemies of authoritarian dictatorship like this, who
needs Mussolini?
Carlo Bernari’s Le Radiose Gironate offers a
much more detailed picture of mainland, urban Italy under Il Duce,
and the novel’s tenor, if not exactly resonant with communism, is no
less dissonant with fascism. The narrator has actually completed his
required military service as the story opens (as did a great many young
men who had no special enthusiasm for anything that the military was up
to). Yet when his childhood friend Andrea comes skulking about in search
of a place to hide, he quickly lends a helping hand. Eventually his bad
company lands him in hot water with the notorious chief of police,
Quattropani, who calls him in (not at gunpoint, by the way) for
interrogation. When the young man replies that he has never heard of any
Andrea Sacco, he realizes that he has stepped in a snare.
"Too much certainty!" he told me. "You’ve
made a slip."
He moved from behind the desk, gulped the last
sugared drops of Carmelina’s coffee (I recognized the green cup), and
said, "It’s never prudent to answer with such conviction."
He turned toward me, lighting a cigarette, and drew the first puffs from
it with such relish that the desire for one seized me; but hardly had he
placed the pack in my hands when he bolted up shaking his big hand.
"Oh, no—you’re not getting out of here with
just a friendly little chat!"
He caused the cigarettes to slip out of my fingers.
They went rolling all across the carpet. In trying to gather the most
wayward, I found myself kneeling, as it were, at his feet. He loomed
enormous over me. Only then did I feel that he could crush me. He
profited from my confusion by keeping me humiliated on the ground at his
feet.
"So that name doesn’t mean anything to you?
And you’ve never seen the man? Well, then… let’s take it from the
top." 11
A hint of a physical assault clings to this scene—but
the thumbscrews never materialize. In fact, Quattopani allows his young
quarry a restroom break shortly hereafter, and upon his return declares
coolly, "Freshened up? Well, we’ll stop here for this evening and
resume our conversation tomorrow." 12
For worse malefactors, the third
degree under hot lights, hours without food or water, a slap or two,
detention in a cold cell for a couple of days… this kind of harassment
was by no means unknown in police stations around the United States at
about the same time. The "torturing" of the young man with a
fresh cigarette would indeed send anyone into fits of laughter who had
read of what Solzhenitsyn endured.13
Significantly, I think, the book’s
single instance of deliberate, deadly percussion occurs when the shadowy
Andrea appears to have torched a gasoline depot, almost certainly maiming
or killing a few guards. Yet Andrea is a man of ideas, and hence heroic.
He is allowed a few murdered flunkies here and there, apparently, along
the way to making over the world—or a few thousand.
I do not suggest that fascism is or ever was inherently
more humane than communism. What I would emphasize, rather, is the
accommodation of certain moderating influences under the dark fascist
cloak. The Santinis escape starvation because a priest, who is wholly
unsympathetic with the father’s politics and who himself would have been
gunned down summarily in Red Square, manufactures enough employment to
keep them alive. The villainous Master Inquisitor of Bernari’s book
turns out to be restrained by something like decorum, if not manners,
because he must know, surely, that several highly respected figures of the
civilized world are propping up his cause. The likes of Sartre were able
to write away molested in occupied Paris (especially when they praised the
likes of Heidegger), a situation whose mirror-image in Moscow would have
been inconceivable. In much of Western Europe beyond Germany, decent
people sought to cut a deal with fascism because the alternative overtly
demanded their complete extermination; and the result was that, outside of
Germany, religious leaders and prosperous bourgeois and gentlemen of taste
and breeding (like the marchese in Bernari’s story, or like the
Graf von Metternich in Goering-looted Paris) made the finger on the
trigger a little less heavy. No doubt, we view these people with loathing
today—and, no doubt, we should. They temporized with rogues and thugs:
they struck a bargain with the devil. But the other devil loose in Europe
gave them little opportunity to reconsider and would have granted them
little clemency if they had considered otherwise.
To be sure, the grass-roots support of communism and
its cut-them-at-the-roots polemics are hard to understand in the
continental European context. The rural poverty in places like Sicily and
Spain was brutalizing. I recall a scene in Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione
in Sicilia (another anti-fascist classic) which—quite unconsciously,
I’m sure—echoes one of Spanish journalist Antonio Azorín’s most
poignant essays. In both cases, the authors are accompanying a caregiver
(the mother of Vittorini’s narrator is represented as a nurse, and
Azorín is curiously following his doctor friend Don Luís) on long rounds
among the poor. 14
Words of comfort, even of good cheer, are offered in
abundance—but the observer soon realizes that he is witnessing a
procession through a kind of Death Row. Confides Don Luís finally,
"I don’t know… what solution will bring this problem to general
attention. What’s certain, what’s undeniable, is that to live in this
way is impossible. We’re not living: we’re dying." The doctor
thereupon offers some dumbfounding statistics about the mortality rate in
his rustic practice due to tuberculosis and other diseases attendant upon
malnutrition.
Ruthless war, as I have said, is far more probable and
sustainable in places where the peace is just as ruthless—where slow
starvation is a way of life, and where the ailing waste away to the sound
of powerful chariots bearing the rich from manor to city to neighboring
manor. We can all comprehend how vengefulness would seep into the blood of
someone who had watched his parents or children perish in this way. What
most of us grasp less securely is that the omnipresence of death can
simply create calluses of habit upon the human heart, and that the
intolerance of needless suffering must sometimes be taught in such
circumstances. The duty of teaching falls to bourgeois convention: it is
part of that civilized routine which once separated the city from the
country, the township from the wilderness, the human world from animal
ferocity. It is a plain fact that the footsoldiers of Marxism drew a great
many recruits in the twentieth century from the latter member of this
contrast. Western Europe’s most destitute rural populations, living
always on the edge, without a past or a future, were attracted to the
Manichaean "us/them" oppositions of communism, and they were
prepared to enforce those oppositions in the most Procrustean of manners.
Urban Marxism, by contrast, was often capable of
compromise—at least as practiced by the urban poor. (The intellectuals I
shall leave for the climax of this essay, and the lowest circle of hell.)
Urban poverty was no less unsightly than rural, but it could not be
indefinitely overlooked by a bourgeoisie concerned about safe streets and
open businesses. Cutting deals was a necessity for everyone at such close
quarters: the essential concepts of multicameral elective government were,
indeed, concocted in ancient Rome’s seething urban cauldron. England,
which had no dearth of Marxist hotspurs in its own pot, was never pushed
to the brink of a Bolshevik-style revolution. Its urban politics were too
successful at defusing tension for pressures to mount toward cataclysmic
levels. (Of course, many of England’s most outspoken socialist crusaders
arose from rural constituencies in Scotland and Ireland.) Only in those
parts of Europe where rural destitution was utterly cut off from the life
of the city—as Russia’s heartland was from St. Petersburg or Calabria
was from Rome or Andulasia was from Madrid—did ferocious,
take-no-prisoners communist insurgencies occur. The well-networked city—and,
more generally, civilization—was Lenin’s worst enemy in exporting
revolution. Far from growing naturally and inevitably from the
self-annihilating progress of bourgeois capitalism, as Marx had predicted,
communism never really had a chance to catch fire and burn all before it
except on those sterile plains which the sun had just as mercilessly
seared.
We have seen this same lesson repeated in southeast
Asia, with a vengeance, throughout the second half of the twentieth
century—but my essay aspires only to autopsy the West’s collapse in
the century’s first half. I venture to propose at this point that the
ruinous "us/them" split between fascism and communism which
forced so many people of good will to select such unsavory allies was made
possible, in the first place, by masses of destitute, uneducated poor.
These masses fell easy prey to lettered and tutored demagogues in search
of raw political power to reach their own vainglorious, often megalomaniac
ends. A variant of this explanation is indeed the standard prologue to
World War One: I mean, that unscrupulous, egotistical leadership lured
France and Germany both into a slaughterhouse. I shall revisit the
circumstances of that war shortly—for, of course, it holds the key to
the second war. If I may keep backing up, however, like a detective trying
to reconstruct a crime, I would observe here that the abusive rousing of
impoverished masses is not just central to Russian, Italian, and Spanish
communism, but to German fascism, as well. The fascism of France, Italy,
and Spain was largely a reaction to the communist threat; and in Germany
of the Weimar, without doubt, fears ran the higher in that the bulging
Bolshevik dam sat just up the valley. Yet the German bourgeoisie of this
moment was strangely like the northern Mediterranean’s abject peasantry
in its extreme impoverishment. There was no German haute
bourgeoisie, compared to the European nations which had successfully
weathered the Great War. Here was an odd situation, perhaps unique in
Europe at the time: a nation without a vast rural peasantry, jeweled with
villages and cities of a substantial history, where shopkeepers and
artisans were as destitute as day laborers.
To the civilized immersion in classic letters, besides,
Germany had a dubious claim even before World War One. Certainly she
produced some of the greatest scholars in the West: yet they were
generally scholars of other traditions (Wilamowitz in Greek, Heinze in
Latin, Kuno Meyer in Irish). There was no German equivalent of the
Académie Française, there was no Colosseum or San Pietro on German soil,
and Germans had nothing closer to Shakespeare than Goethe or to Chaucer
than Wolfram von Eschenbach. Germany’s classics were the most
"folk" of any Western European nation’s (which is why she
gleamed among the romantics), and hence the least tied to anything like
the abstract, eternal rights of man. I defy anyone to show that the level
of moral sophistication in the Nibelungenlied approaches that in
Vergil’s Aeneid. The latter echoes infinitely with conflicting
duties, forcing the reader constantly to weigh the hero’s public
responsibilities against his private ones; the former so stubbornly
reveres prowess in battle that it glorifies a pair of jealous, lying,
conniving murderers for their valiant exit while killing infidels. Wrote
one votary of the old school to a German newspaper in 1929 (a blueblood—the
Graf von Schlieffen, no less), "Beautiful and uplifting experiences
are entirely absent [from All Quiet on the Western Front]. Could
there really be so many soldiers who served on the front in whose minds
only the horrid and the fearful remain, and not at least as many memories
of heroic deeds and beautiful rapture?" 15
In my own half-century of
life, I can’t recall having seen this particular justification of war in
any text since the days of the broadsword: i.e., not that it is a
necessary evil, but that it is an aesthetic, even mystical experience of
which no young man should be cheated.16
Such was the "buffer" provided by a liberal
education to many Germans even before the twentieth century’s first
great war. One can only wonder just which books Paul Bäumer is casting
aside in one of All Quiet’s most symbolic scenes. The young man
has briefly returned home on furlough. In his room, he idly begins to
thumb through the works he read as a schoolboy. Imperceptibly, the search
begins to take on something of the frantic. One book after another after
another falls into the pile at his side: at a glance, he knows that each
holds absolutely nothing whatever which bears upon his living nightmare.
How senseless is everything that was ever written,
done, or thought, if such a present as this could happen! It all must be
lies, all trivia, if the culture of thousands of years could not even
hinder these streams of blood from running, these dungeons filled with
hundreds of thousands of groans from existing. The field hospital shows
best what war is.
I’m young, I’m twenty years old, but I know
nothing of life but doubt, death, agony, and the conjuncture of
senseless surfaces with a background of misery. I see that masses of
people are driven one after another, silent, uncomprehending, dull,
obedient, and guiltless, to die. I see that the wisest brains in the
world are seeking after weapons and words to make all this yet more
refined and long-lasting. And along with me, all the men of my age here
and elsewhere, throughout the whole world, see the same thing: with me—my
whole generation is living through this. What would our fathers do if,
all of a sudden, we stood up and stepped before them and demanded an
explanation? 17
Of course, these words could be emblazoned on the
banner of postmodernism if they were not penned altogether too early.
(Along with such worthies as John Ellis, Jonathan Chaves has recently
unmasked—in the pages of Praesidium—the absurdity of
postmodernism’s claim to historical validity.) As anguishing as Bäumer’s
naïve plaint is, however, it also undermines itself. At a mere twenty
years, and having spent the last two of those years in the army, Paul
Bäumer can hardly assert much familiarity with his literary heritage,
even if his exposure to it as an adolescent had been well supervised. The
Maginot Line a failure of thousands of years of cultural evolution? Say,
rather, a betrayal of a painfully evolved culture, mostly by the military
élites of France and Germany after they had achieved a power far beyond
their range of expertise through the skillful demagoguery of their
political handlers. More about this momentarily.
Let me reemphasize that in the economic collapse
following the Treaty of Versailles, the next generation of Germans had not
even the advantage of Paul Bäumer’s heap of literary and philosophical
"trivia". 18
The grandfathers of these younger Germans continued to
live in a world of Prussian glories bearing no resemblance to the present,
their fathers lay in unmarked graves all along the Western front (or were
keeping as silent as the living dead), and they themselves absorbed only
bits and pieces of civilization haphazardly. Some of them, not
surprisingly, absorbed no civilization at all. They constituted an
uneducated mass. They were as well primed for the gross rhetorical
excesses and rigid "us/them" oppositions of a rabble-rouser as
was any swarm of poor farmers in the plaza on market day.
Even a Spanish peasant, for that matter, had some sense
of the past and of culture, perhaps a sense far superior to the
impoverished German bourgeoisie’s. Next to the universal humanity
adumbrated in thriving townships, Marxism’s greatest enemy has always
been the folk culture which it so shamelessly purloins and distorts to
host its own doctrine; for in the traditionalist, pre-literate ritual are
the seeds of universal duty and common goodness, too. Romero’s narrator
has this to say about one such rural communist recruit:
This young type of the Spanish rural communist made
me sad. He would never have been a communist by inclination. There were
deep moral reserves in the people, in their age-old games, their
innocent marriages, their "blue heaven", their domestic
intimacy, their natural way of living. Yet all of this was [tenuous]
vital and spiritual nourishment amid incredible hardships involving
economic and social structure. This situation, evolving through a life
of adaptations and discoveries, grew more painful each day. There were
communities of people and communities of animals: forced inaction,
demeaning servitude, forced labor. Teodoro was a natural product of
inadaptability to all of this, and he placed his faith in a world of
social equality and fraternal camaraderie. He was like an ancient
Christian, except without Christ. 19
One has to wonder how much more sophisticated than
Teodoro and his cousins were the young Germans who believed implicitly in
the glorious myths spun for them by Hitler’s propaganda machine. To
hearken back to an ideal golden-haired hero looks rather like atavism,
especially if one has been spoon-fed from the cradle on stories about
Siegfried and Parzival. Frankly, such debased acculturation reminds me
very much of our children’s flirtations today with time-traveling
Highlanders and laser-armed paladins: hoary legends for orphans without a
yesterday. Teodoro had yesterdays out of mind, but they were patently
severed from today. The likes of Mao and Kim Il Sung are ever ready to
secure the flapping legendary signifiers. The generation of young Germans
after the war (like our children, for different reasons) had few stories,
the most dubious of legends, and no past. Joseph Goebbels possessed all
the sophistication and charm needed to step in and sing the forgotten
lullaby.
In the inflammation both of southern and eastern Europe’s
rural peasantry and of Germany’s disenfranchised bourgeoisie, the
villain of the piece is not mainstream Western tradition, but severance
from that tradition. To be sure, in both cases, Western technology was a
material cause of misery: directly so for the Germans, who were eventually
outgunned in the Great War, and indirectly so for the peasant throngs whom
the industrial revolution had left behind. 20
Yet the coin has another side.
Western ethics and religion gravitated heavily against the
atrocities which war had sprung upon horrified onlookers; the Geneva
Convention was an early manifestation of the collective outrage. As for
places like rural Spain and Sicily, technology merely needed more time to
address the problem, and was indeed inhibited from doing so sometimes by
local superstition. In another of his classic essays, Azorín writes of
how the Spanish peasant refuses to irrigate lest the water dissolve his
soil’s nutrients and refuses to plant anti-erosive trees lest
seed-eating birds come to nest in them!21
The real villain of the piece, of course, is not one
who poisons water, but who poisons minds. In both impoverished rural
Europe and Germany, a starving mass of people was not turned into a
murderous horde by machinery, but by an induced blindness to common
humanity. And in both cases, those who induced the blindness were
themselves capable of seeing quite clearly. They created myth and lore and
music and philosophy almost ex nihilo with consummate cynicism in
order to fashion a human wedge behind which they might thrust their own
images deep into the world’s heart.
Was this, then, the inevitable outcome of Western
culture, as postmodernism maintains? In a sense, the answer must be,
"Yes." Without the Christian valorization of every individual
soul as equally precious to God, and without the Hellenic tradition (with
which Christianity fused early on) of prizing every citizen as a
repository of talent and reason, there would have been no arduous ascent
toward alleviating the misery of ordinary people and recognizing their
right to self-governance. Western tradition cared for the underprivileged
as no other culture has done in history. Yet transitions were not always
smooth. Populations which had been relatively comfortable before changes
settled in were sometimes nudged to the bottom of the pyramid. A
preeminent example is the hearty yeoman farmer’s conversion into an
uprooted vagabond, courtesy of the industrial revolution. By pressing for
universal political enfranchisement even as it was creating restless
droves of urban poor and sad provinces of starving sharecroppers, Western
civilization produced one of the most dangerous weapons in human affairs:
a huge block of political power whose members were without the resources
necessary to practice political responsibility—without the sense of
history necessary to distinguish truth from fiction, without the
rhetorical ability necessary to challenge popular opinion openly, without
the logical acuity necessary to reject a foolish opinion even privately.
Such masses of people were not at all a finished product, of course, from
the Western perspective. They were to be universally educated so that they
might be universally responsible—not educated with indoctrination, but
taught to read and write, primarily, so that their access to ideas might
encounter no limits and that they ability to appropriate and modify ideas
might be refined.
But the last chapter of this vision has never been
written in the public forum and at the polls. Instead, ambitious men
seized the opportunity to mobilize the mass’s strength long before its
"mass" character wore off in a series of individual awakenings.
I suggest that ideology, as a term possessed of meaningful rigor, was born
in this historical moment of cynical, ruthless hijacking. An ideology is
an experimental (i.e., unnatural) social design of such profound
incoherence yet of such militant rigidity that it must resist honest,
intelligent scrutiny with evasion, defamation, intimidation, and—in
extreme cases—physical suppression. 22
Now, how in the world could such a
thing as this ever come to be: an untested, volatile mixture of ideas
which proposes to validate itself by exterminating everything not it?
At the very least, the conditions required for so monstrously arrogant an
undertaking to gain a serious audience include the following: 1) an
uncommonly gullible and manipulable mass of followers, 2) an uncommonly
charismatic and unprincipled leader or clique of leaders, and 3) a
widespread discontent with the status quo. Contrary to the wag’s wisdom,
gullible masses have not stood ready throughout Western history. The
peasantry of a medieval baron would have been little inclined to hear out
some barb-tongued Thersites. Common folk, then and long thereafter, were
convinced that God had intended them to be peasants, and almost as
convinced that they needed looking out for and that their lord was doing a
tolerable job of it. Indeed, discontent with the status quo is always
largely a matter of perception in human affairs. Until the Enlightenment’s
respect for the individual had percolated thoroughly through Europe, one
would have to say that discontent among the lower classes was
astonishingly rare. The poor had no reason to expect anything but poverty,
nor the weak anything but weakness. An enormous amount of religion around
the world—varieties of quietism hatched by Confucius, the Buddha, Zeno,
Epicurus, and even certain Christian mystics—was truly that opiate which
Marx deplored in it… and, for better or worse, the drug worked.
The twentieth century brought all three elements
together. Large masses of rural poor and (after World War One) urban petite
bourgeoisie were available for exploitation. Furthermore, these masses
had become convinced by the nineteenth century’s brilliantly successful
progressivism that their lot was genuinely miserable. Perhaps most
importantly, a new kind of rogue was on the loose who excelled at
exploiting just such wounded souls. But how could roguery have ever been
in short supply among human beings, any more than poverty? Why now, at the
turn of the century, were exponents of airy battlefield glories like Paul
Bäumer’s elders—and, for that matter, like the French propagandist
Maurice Barrès—acquiring such vast influence over the general populace,
and this even before the Great War and a global depression had reduced
elements of the European middle class to a vulnerable penury?
The example of Barrès is instructive. A littérateur
of mediocre talents, he came into his own thanks to the newspaper,
that mass-produced and consumed genre of the written word which was the
only reading a great many people ever did. In the darkest days of the war,
his saccharine, jingoistic exhortations diverted the French public from
the obvious fact that their sons were being slaughtered without visible
progress on the map. "Even before she has shed her rain of blood upon
our nation, war had made us feel her regenerative powers—only by her
approach!" Barrès effused upon the outbreak of hostilities. "It’s
a resurrection!" 23
His columns leaned heavily upon communications which
he claimed to receive from young men at the front—among whom his own son
was serving—and also upon letters which he surely received from parents
solaced by his exhortations. No doubt, Barrès was not the least deceived
of his readers: most fathers naturally wanted to believe that the living
hell into which they had cast their children had redemptive qualities. All
in all, the apologist for such endeavor, if he is also a parent, must be
considered a figure more pitiful than execrable.
Two crucial components in Barrès’s case, however,
account for why the crowd-harrying dog was now having his day. One is
journalism. No writer of Barrès’s meager talent would have achieved
celebrity a century earlier, when writing was still the province of a
highly educated élite and reading the scarcely larger domain of a small
social minority. Enormous audiences were occasionally reached in the early
nineteenth century through the direct address of such fiery orators as
Ireland’s Dan O’Connell; yet these stentorian vocalists were almost
invariably undergirded by pamphleteering. (A source who claimed to have
attended Dan’s grand event at Tara Hill, where a million people were
said to have gathered, confessed that not one in fifty men heard a word of
the speech.) 24
The journalist, thanks to inexpensive printing techniques and
mushrooming literacy rates, could reach millions upon millions. Even the
incorrigibly illiterate could find a friend with a newspaper who was
willing to read aloud to bystanders. The deficiencies of style in this
cheap copy when compared, say, to Addison and Steele’s essays only
enhanced the potency of the former, for the new reading public lacked the
literary background necessary to support a fine between-the-line analysis.
The better the editorialist used the idiom of the masses, the closer he
was attended. The blunter his distinctions, the more effective their
hammering. It was as a journalist that Mussolini began his self-promoting
career in earnest.25
I do not mean to equate journalism with roguery. It is
a sad fact, though, that good journalism, today as ever, must be
championed by conscientious publishers and curmudgeonly editors against
the raw economics of pleasing the masses. Most people do not have time for
a lengthy investigation into the issues, and perhaps many do not have the
learning or the keenness to understand the details of such an
investigation. The journalist, therefore, is forever being tugged by the
gravity of quick consumption and easy comprehension into short-cuts and
shallowness. If he himself is seldom the rogue who would ride the mass’s
swell to elective office or a lieutenancy of the revolution, he is
nevertheless indispensable to such characters. Whether they have him in
their pay or have enlisted his fervent allegiance to their movement, he is
the pawn who has made kings throughout the past century.
To the journalist’s presence must be added the
philosopher’s absence. Western culture before the nineteenth century
abounded in artists, statesmen, clergymen, landowners, and even soldiers
who could have spoken with tolerably current expertise about any subject
under the sun: ancient epic poetry, the cause of earthquakes, the latest
reports from India. With the growth of empirical science, however, came
the Age of the Specialist. Diderot’s Encyclopaedia was a last
valiant effort to encompass all human knowledge within a set of readable
volumes. Soon the learned simply had to concede that they were learned in
special areas only. One could not explore the intricacies of Greek lyric
poetry and also those of the human digestive system or of the peculiar
properties of mercury fulminate. The effect of such specialization upon
social and political leadership, I think, has been grossly undervalued: I
am not aware that it has even been widely acknowledged. For this effect
was often negative, in the sense of "indemonstrable". It could
only be calculated by considering imaginatively what was not on the
scene. To the West’s mortal loss, common-sense pronouncements upon taste
and propriety, delivered by astute, well-versed people, faded from the
twentieth century. No major figure in the sciences would have cared to
pass formal judgment on a Fauve or Cubist exhibit: he would merely say
that he was a scientist and didn’t waste his time on such things. A
priest or minister might very much want to express a formal judgment on
some new scientific theory—but he could only do so as a priest or
minister undisciplined by scientific rigor, and so his
"judgment" would slip into the category of idle opinion. By the
dawn of the twentieth century, human experience had so fragmented that
philosophy itself—the study of "what it all means"—was
disintegrating into psychology, neurology, biology, political theory, and
a slew of other fiefdoms over which no one ruler held sway.
This unfortunate condition placed more power than ever
into the lowly journalist’s hands, since to him fell the chore of
representing—briefly and simply—all the modern world’s mind-boggling
technological changes and political upheavals to the common man. The real
experts tended to draw farther and farther away from public life into
their safe cocoons. The novels of Georges Duhamel portray the consequences
of this centrifugal motion with a clarity and justice beyond any other
works that I know. Duhamel’s protagonists are typically men of science
whose goal in life is to capture some strand of an objective, eternal
truth in their antiseptic laboratories. Yet their selfless devotion
(which, of course, is often tinged with egotism) is inevitably foiled by
witless bureaucrats, sensation-seeking journalists, and ruthless
politicos. If the truth is touched at all, its feel cannot be communicated
to the masses by their cliché-heavy scribblers—and it can only be
touched at all if the researcher’s probes receive the blessing of some
suave Machiavellian who intends to twist the results to his advantage.
So the experts kept as low a profile as they could in
this new era. Responds Duhamel’s most winsome scientific daydreamer,
Laurent Pasquier, when warned of war’s imminence with the Kaiser,
"War? What war? Oh, yes, I believe… it seems to me that people are
talking about war. Why war?" 26
At least Pasquier is no Niels Bohr
plugging away in the crypts of a megalomaniac intent upon world dominion.
Yet it was the objections and reservations of such as he which might have
averted the first war.27
Instead, their élite circle retreated to truths
visible only under the microscope. Politics, geography, morality… all of
that was somebody else’s specialty. The certain outcome of the
specialist’s unheard voice was the rising chorus of the throng, stirred
by a motley crew which one traumatized survivor of the era describes thus:
"a small minority of big-shots, politicians, financiers, economists,
writers, and high priests of a nationalism which conferred all their lofty
authority on them and whose paces they thought themselves capable of
governing."28
Self-serving politicians and irrepressible exhibitionists
like Charles Péguy led the chant for revenge on the Prussians, for
glorious displays of French manhood on the battlefield.29
In the moment’s
frenzy, pacifist Jean Jaurès was assassinated (on July 31—the very day
when, thirty-one years later, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would be shot out
of the sky, bookending France’s wartime glories in lost literary
genius). A man of learning with profound rural attachments, Jaurès
projected a socialist aura when doing so was not yet de rigueur
among intellectuals. The "taint" of cross-cultural solidarity in
his message contributed to the nationalists’ loathing of him even though
no Bolshevik menace was yet discernable. Jaurès’s fate, as one may well
imagine, bent the heads of other specialists closer to their microscopes
than ever.
Even as the war grew bogged down in a mire of bodies
and would clearly not be muscled to any conclusion within months, those
who raised a protest were few and much reviled. Guéhenno writes with dark
humor about trying to obtain a copy of Romain Rolland’s Au-dessus de
la Mêlée in the winter of 1915. Alarmed by his lieutenant’s
uniform, the bookstore’s employees seemed determined to spare him
exposure to such a demoralizing influence. "Someone had finally dared
to say ‘no’," reflects the lieutenant fifty years later—and
adds in judicious afterthought, "publicly." 30
For Rolland’s
literary protest was, it turned out, widely read, at least beyond France
and Germany (into which latter country’s tongue it was not allowed to be
translated for decades). Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1916.
Nevertheless, he passed the war years a virtual exile in Switzerland,
enduring bitter isolation from his countrymen. He had spoken too bluntly—or
without, perhaps, the simplistic bluntness of ideology, but with mere
simplicity. Though a man of the Left in his own airy fashion, Rolland was
less inclined to indict class villainy and invoke an epochal class
struggle than to beg, prod, and cajole his audience (in the most ingenuous
manner possible) to think again. He would probably have been spared
Jaurès’s bullet had he returned home; for if thousands were smuggling
about copies of his book, no one would have found therein the makings of a
manifesto.
These, then, I believe, are the essential causes of the
twentieth century’s disastrous reduction to thinking in facile
oppositions, the one wholly and immovably dedicated to the other’s
annihilation. Huge numbers of people were enfranchised to vote or
otherwise participate in the political process without having been
supplied with the literate skills needed to reach clear, independent
judgments. Media of communication evolved which were adapted to addressing
such vast audiences—and inevitably, these media were characterized by
the speed and trenchancy of their presentation rather than by detailed
accuracy. Shrewd, unscrupulous men seeking political advancement under
these circumstances exploited the power of the popular press to cast
issues in black and white and to insist that anything less than total
capitulation to "the people’s will" was a defeat. Finally, the
longer heads who might have cried foul publicly and commanded general
respect in so doing chose, instead, to flee into their narrow areas of
expertise. Even Erich Remarque (I might add by illustration) constantly
reiterated in interviews that All Quiet on the Western Front was a
modest chronicle devoid of moral or political message. While this was a
fair enough response to pacifists, communists, and others who tried to
annex the book to their propaganda, a more honest answer would have been
to address the day’s major issues rather than to evade all tags.
Remarque was so badgered by the fascists, in any case, that he at last
left the country… so wouldn’t it have been just as well to speak out
when a forum was offered?
Today, we are all very familiar with the intellectual’s
retreat into specialty. The physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project
apparently pursued their labor with an almost adolescent excitement, so
divorced were they from the looming consequences of The Bomb. 31
To his
credit, Robert Oppenheimer would later be very candid about his group’s
troubling insulation from moral reality. A sensitive and erudite man
rather than a stereotypical "mad scientist", Oppenheimer serves
as a cautionary tale to all of us who assume that no amount of
experimental crescendo would nudge our conscience into the position of a
casual onlooker. Of course, President Truman himself always maintained
that he was appalled at the atom bomb’s destructive power and had been
given no very clear idea of it in briefings. Among the victims of the
reticent specialist, besides the general populace left to sort through the
hyperbole of marketers and the reductive headlines of journalists, are
certainly the policy-makers who genuinely seek after the right choice and
are baffled by the puzzle’s many pieces.
When I mention marketing, I do not refer merely to the
"public relations" antics of office-seekers—not even primarily
to that, nowadays. The marketer is a rather disheartening blend of the
journalist ("keep it simple, stupid") and the specialist (Ronald
Reagan’s engineer of the better can-opener). He works so closely at
present with the whiz kids of "research and development" that,
in many respects, he defines their experiments. Another way of saying this
is that the specialist increasingly specializes in marketing—in problems
of satisfying very specific demands. As the unholy marriage between pure
science and industry has matured, we see more and more well-paid, very
bright technicians giving less and less thought to the broad moral
consequences of their innovations. Now automobiles are designed on the
computer with aerodynamic precision: it isn’t the designer’s job to
lift his attention from alternative curves and seams to ponder the
Greenhouse Effect or the safety of toddlers. The architect’s assignment
is to build comfortable, attractive structures—and also, perhaps,
fuel-efficient ones. Urban aesthetics or neighborhood traffic patterns,
however, lie beyond his scope. General Mills and Kelloggs want to box
cereals that provide most essential vitamins and "taste great",
too. At the same time, all the heart-friendly bran and anti-carcinogenic
fiber are neutralized by whopping doses of sugar… but staff
nutritionists have apparently not yet been presented with that variable,
and enough brown sugar glaze can sell shredded cardboard.
During my lifetime, the masses have been so titillated
with sex by the media which serve (and rule) them that almost every
toothpaste advertisement borders on pornography (that most spectacular
beneficiary of the Internet); they have been so inebriated with speed that
they accept casualty rates on their highways equivalent to those of a
major war; and they have been so bereft of will power by sugary sweetness
that obesity has reached epidemic levels. No skepticism, no moderation, no
suspicion of bright images and oratory… the same kind of
"handling" which brought the West to make a bloody trough of
Flanders has bestialized its citizens, within a century, until they do
indeed resemble animals bound for slaughter. Where are the voices of
higher inspiration and better information which ought to have restrained
us? Why is the only alternative to having our children witness strip-tease
beer commercials between innings of the All-Star Game an iron-fisted
boycott or crackdown? Why are we now warring over Sport Utility Vehicles
when, forty years ago, we could have been zoning cities and planning
railways so as to use internal combustion modestly? Why are our official
handlers now contemplating a heavy tax on burgers and fries?
This essay’s final emphasis falls not on frivolity, I
would plead, but on ignominy. From the Great War to the Fat War: in a
significant sense, I believe the West’s decline to be very justly
capsulated in the contrast. As our media of mass communication have grown,
our societies—on both sides of the Atlantic—have become more and more
wedded to trends, fads, and other lunges to the extreme. Critical reason
has not kept pace with political freedom: the more rights we have
acquired, the less sobriety and restraint we have learned. Now the actual
literacy rates of societies throughout the Western world are plunging—willfully
plunging, as people choose to be served up the pre-cooked, highly
seasoned fare of the mass media rather than to feed their own intellectual
hunger. The mob has long ago descended from whatever dubious nobility
might be found in the clash of sabers. Today it is finessed, instead, by
promises to liberate its "sex life" of all inhibition and
pathological side-effect, to liberate its "road life" of all
fuel shortage and physical risk, and to liberate its "food life"
of all blandness and ill health. These promises are patently
contradictory; but the unreflective mass which we have become cannot even
perceive the contradictions—or cannot, perhaps, muster the will power,
the intellectual honesty, to register the perception.
Yet experts and specialists (some will object) are
hardly in short supply on soap box and bull horn as we swing from extreme
to extreme like a loose boom. Ban all motor vehicles, say the
"green" crusaders, many of whom have their doctorate. Ban all
genetically altered crops, say the nutrition fanatics with an equal
appearance of authority. In fact, the specialist brimming with advice has
never been completely absent from the past century’s scene of decline.
Particularly since World War Two, the Sartrean model of engagé
intellectual has attracted heavy investment, with its stock spiking in the
late sixties. Such "guidance", however, is by no means what I
would designate as informed, mitigating judgment. On the contrary, it has
inevitably been characterized by its provoking of the general public
toward extreme conclusions—its instigation, sometimes, of riots and
revolutions. Far from wise, responsible leadership, it represents the
quintessence of incendiarism. If its mouthpieces are not the populist
kings who ride to power on the mass’s assembled shoulders, neither are
they such pawns as mud-slinging or spear-shaking journalists. I place them
in a separate category, and I must discuss them in a separate essay.
For now, I say only that they are uniquely responsible
for what is most virulent and irrational—most ideological—about our
loggerhead culture in the "western West", the West of the Allies
and of NATO. After all, I have admitted above that nations like the United
States, Great Britain, and France were at far less risk of a cataclysmic
Bolshevik-style uprising than European nations with a destitute peasantry.
Yet our technology for manipulating mass opinion must surely have been the
envy of the Soviet Union, the austere voice of the philosopher warning
"Not so fast!" has been almost as inaudible here as in any
totalitarian regime, and the intellectual palliation of ideology (as
opposed to the brutal implementation of it) has never been attempted
anywhere so persistently as in the United States, Great Britain, and
France over the past fifty years. The academic romance with communism,
especially, is a highly peculiar phenomenon of the "Free World"
which really has nothing to do with the nineteenth century’s classical
liberalism and, furthermore, shows no convincing signs of abatement.
In my next essay, I intend to suggest that the ideology
of the West’s "academic specialists", or intellectuals, is a
thoroughly ad hominem affair. That is, it has little patience with
abstract ideas and little interest in objective reason (hence its open
contempt for both) when one places in the balance’s other scale the
sheer egotism of its exponents. It is an easy means for bright, learned
people whose craving for admiration surpasses their devotion to principle
to stoke their heart’s dark fire. I shall further suggest why the ascent
of such an unwholesome influence is, once again, a distinctive feature of
the twentieth century; and, finally, I shall try to identify what few
doubtful antidotes to the West’s malaise have occurred to me.
NOTES
1 If I might drop but a
single name to defend my suspicion of history books, Claude Chambard’s Le
Maquis (1970) was translated into English by Elaine Halperin and
published as The Maquis (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). Here we
find the classic representation of the French Underground as a fraternal
order of leftists and rightists all working to overthrow Nazism. Though
the war had ended twenty-five years earlier, this naively uplifting book
appeared in the year of General de Gaulle’s death and amid rising
impatience with the Cold War. A coincidence?
2 From Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
Citadelle in Oeuvres, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard,
1959), 680.
3 Written and illustrated by
Clayton Knight (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1956). Major General Ralph
Royce, USAF (Rtd.), was Knight’s historical consultant—an impressive
credential which reflects the book’s aspirations to veracity.
4 Timing is indeed everything—and
ideology indeed bends principles at will. As long as Stalin believed
Hitler malleable, "Muscovite elements among the Communists [in
France] were the first and most wholehearted collaborators" (David
Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich [New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1981], 64). Of course, this honeymoon proved to be a one-night
stand.
5 One may well counter with
justified wryness, "Yes, Hitler had vowed to murder only the Jews—a
fine case, this, of watching out for your own hide!" Yet the average
French bourgeois often identified Judaism (like Freemasonry) with
insurrection, if not with Marxism. The most eloquent and intellectual
exponents of revolution were often Jewish, even though these had little or
nothing to do with the masses of people whom the Nazis herded to
slaughter. I do not defend the identification: I say only that it found
traction among uninquisitive minds, whose surrender of the Jews could be
explained thereby as crudely defensive rather than purely pusillanimous.
Decades earlier, the Dreyfus Affair had involved the same identification:
a military insider had sold state secrets, Captain Dreyfus was a Jew,
therefore he was the traitor. Such thinking had much to do with the murder
of Georges Mandel and Jean Zay as Allied forces approached Paris. By
contrast, the anti-Semitism which seethed in Nazi Germany fed heavily off
the high visibility of Jewish bankers at a time when the Gentile
bourgeoisie was foundering.
6 "Daggerpoints and
Loggerheads: A Sad Time’s Taste for Perverse Oppositions," Praesidium
3.2 (Spring 2003), 23-32.
7 Op. cit., 378. Pilote
was in fact written deliberately to enlist American support for the war,
and, to that end, was translated so quickly that the English version—Flight
Over Arras—appeared before the French original!
8 France also possessed a
substantial body of ex-military and "anti-decadent" types who
foresaw a disgraceful drôle de guerre and would later embrace the
Occupation with self-flagellating glee: cf. Lucien Rebatet’s Les
Décombres. Here, indeed, was French fascism’s rank and file.
9 La Paz Empieza Nunca (Barcelona:
Planeta, 1957), 139.
10 L’Isola in Terraferma
(Venice and Padua: Marsilio, 1974), 32. Pirro wrote the original ms. in
1960 and revised it in 1973, when—or soon thereafter—my copy must have
been published. Since the author was born in 1920, his little novel has
every appearance of being autobiographical.
11 Le Radiose Giornate (Milan:
Mondadori 1969), 216-17.
12 Ibid., 217.
13 I cannot resist noting that
such uneven recording of "atrocities" by Marxist zealots seems
typical in all situations, and may be taken, indeed, as a benchmark of
ideology (i.e., the corruption of one’s own stated principles in the
interest of defaming the other side). I have seen lists of General
Pinochet’s crimes against humanity posted on the Web which include
frightening children by sending in police to suppress a riot. Pinochet’s
police, beyond question, executed some dozens or hundreds of people
without due process, and one finds the names of these unfortunates posted,
too. The throngs of Castro’s victims, however, could scarcely be read in
a day… and for that reason among others, perhaps, they are considered
unworthy of citation on the subject of atrocity.
14 See especially 233-48 of
Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993);
first published in 1953. Azorín’s essay, "Los Sostenes de la
Patria", is fourth in a series titled "La Andulacía Trágica".
See, for instance, Los Pueblos (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1987),
254-58.
15 See Im Westen Nicht
Neues (Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), letter from Graf von
Schlieffen to the Deutches Adelsblatt, p. 220 of the book’s
generous post-novel Materialen.
16 I concede that this remark
indicts my own lack of erudition on the subject more than the Graf’s
Wagnerian Wut. For instance, Maurice Barrès (about whom more
shortly) wrote ecstatically in the last days of World War One, "What
letters our children are sending us from the front! It’s one long burst
of laughter!" (See Chroniques de la Grande Guerre, v. 1
[Paris: Plon, 1924 ], 255.)
17 Erich Maria Remarque, ibid.,
177-78. The original title of the novel, by the way, carries an irony
which the English translation could not reproduce. The watch cry,
"All quiet!" is equivalent to, "Nothing new!" in
German: hence Im Westen Nicht Neues. Yet this absence of novelty on
the German front line betokens anything but quiet—just the opposite! The
slaughter continues: the troops continue to be decimated. "Everyone’s
still dying… nothing new!" It is this indifference of the German
commanders to their soldiers’ massacre and, indeed, of German fathers to
their sons’ murder which composes one of the work’s most acid
undercurrents.
18 Remarque’s own book, for
instance, despite selling a quarter of a million copies in the first year,
was banned from one German school after another (lest it undermine the
courage of Germany’s budding manhood) until, to all intents, no German
adolescent would have had access to a copy. The American film based on the
book was also banned from Germany by Goebbels in 1931.
19 Emilio Romero, op. cit., 296-97.
20 The fascist Parti
Populaire Français attracted much rural support precisely because
French agriculture, too, was economically crippled by its failure to
modernize.
21 "Los Árboles y el Agua," op.
cit., 210-215.
22 Some will balk at my
insistence that ideology is a social design. We hear respectable
scholars saying that art, history, and even mathematics and science are
ideologically tinged. The crux of this assertion, however, is precisely
that all forms of human knowledge and endeavor reduce to power plays—not
the power of a divine tug on the heartstrings, but that of a
mass-manipulation for the benefit of the privileged (or, in pseudo-benign,
"after the revolution" manner, for the benefit of the Party
Chair’s Five Year Plan). Make no mistake: the word "ideology"
has no meaning beyond the presumption that people are being and must be
herded about.
23 Chroniques, v. 1 (op. cit.),
98.
24 See Ríonach Uí Ógáin, An
Rí gan Choróin (Baile Átha Cliath [Dublin]: An Clóchomhar 1984),
36.
25 It might be added that
all of the fascist governments displayed an interest in filmmaking which
bordered on sincere affection. Mussolini was the founder of
Cinecittà, the Italian Hollywood (completed under his eager guidance in
1937). Goebbels drew playwrights and filmmakers like a magnet: he
had the money and patronage to keep them in business, and such products as
flowed from Jean Giraudoux, for instance, often evinced more artistic
ambiguity than propagandistic heavy-handedness (though an outright
challenge like the American film of All Quiet on the Western Front
was met with outright suppression: Goebbels banned the movie in
1931). Indeed, the cinematic circle which collected around Jean
Cocteau in occupied Paris enjoyed a golden age of activity. Much as
the Hollywood of our own time likes to style itself ruggedly independent,
then, the historical evidence that filmmaking and journalism both grease
the wheels of demagoguery--whether to move left or right, whether to
instill simplistic notions or merely to placate the masses--is
overwhelming.
26 Georges Duhamel, Le
Combat contre les Ombres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1939), 279-80.
27 Duhamel’s own weak
protests against censorship have impressed few as redeeming his activity
in occupied Paris.
28 Jean Guéhenno, La Mort
des Autres (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1968), 37.
29 Writes Guéhenno very aptly
of Péguy, "One was seized by a certain instinct for grandeur which
he had in him, but disillusioned by degrees as one saw this very instinct
turn sometimes into a sort of ambitious surliness which oriented
everything around the man himself and his own destiny" (ibid.,
51).
30 Op. cit., 109.
31 I am not necessarily implying that the
bombs should not have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: I fully
grasp the argument against invading Japan. What I never hear discussed,
however, is the third option of accepting Japan’s conditional
surrender. The ensuing half-century, which gave us Mao’s apocalyptic
carnage in China, the Vietnam War, Pol Pot, and now a lunatic despotism in
North Korea whose finger is poised on a nuclear trigger, would surely have
enjoyed a far more peaceful denouement if the Japanese had been allowed to
swagger about southeast Asia in some greatly reduced and de-fanged manner.
Where were the specialists of international politics at that crucial
moment—was the assumption that the vast American electorate would
tolerate nothing less than the severest reprisals for Pearl Harbor and the
Bataan?
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Transgressive Technologies:
Does a
Posthuman Dystopia Await Us?
by
Mark Wegierski
Mark
Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher.
The following essay paints a bleak picture, many of
whose shades are not unfamiliar to steady readers of Praesidium yet
whose overall gloominess is perhaps unique in our pages. I urge the
reader, therefore, to remember that Mr. Wegierski is merely presenting an
array of possible scenarios, not prophesying. It would be unwise to
dismiss his call to high alert simply because just a handful of these
catastrophes is likely befall us. His point, as I take it, is that one
handful would quite suffice to destroy civilization—if not life itself—and
that some such small dosage of calamity is in fact very likely. ~Ed.
There are a number of highly transgressive technologies
on the horizon of development today which may prove to be the most
fundamental challenges ever to the notion of a more stable human nature,
and thereby, to what can seen to be "natural" to humankind. Such
technologies can be a vehicle for the almost indefinite perpetuation of
"the unnatural", never allowing today’s societies to
"catch their breath" and possibly return to earlier, sounder
bearings. For example, in the book, Posthuman Bodies (edited by
Judith Halberstam, Indiana University Press, 1995), a group of
ultra-radical, postmodern writers and scholars looks forward to the
deconstruction of actual physical gender which could
occur as a result of advancing technology. They talk of such things as men
literally being able to bear children, as well as a "transgendered"
existence across a "spectrum" of variants. A "posthuman"
artistic movement depicts gross interpenetrations of machine and man. In
his recent book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002) the uber-pundit
Francis Fukuyama has profoundly warned of some of the social dangers of
genetic engineering.
The Internet is a primary focus for technological
advance today. It is difficult to see what the longer-term intellectual
impact of the Internet might be. While on the one hand, it could encourage
the flourishing of varied philosophical debate, it could just as easily
encourage varied kinds of depravity. One wonders if it simply won’t
serve to perpetuate the current consumerist, materialist society.
Further in the future is the prospect of Virtual
Reality (VR). The ultimate goal of today’s massive, frenzied attempts to develop VR is often semi-jokingly
said to be the prospect of virtual sex with pop-icon Marilyn Monroe. VR
(perhaps similar to the so-called "holodeck" which appeared in Star
Trek: The Next Generation) can be understood as highly addictive
electronic stimulation. The incredible popularity of Nintendo and similar
videogames, with what could be considered "primitive" technology—relative
to what awaits in the future—is an obvious warning as to the spiritual
disfigurement that could result. The recent hit-movie, The Matrix,
darkly portrayed the combination of the ultimate extension of VR and
Artificial Intelligence (AI), both now in embryonic form.
Another danger which awaits today is the pharmacopia—the
continuing development of pharmacological narcotics and hallucinogens
which create a state of addictive stimulation. This is often coupled with
surreal rock music and sound and light effects at so-called
"raves", semi-clandestine multi-hour dance-parties, where the
taking of the drug called Ecstasy (MDMA) is virtually de rigueur.
The "rave" experience, fairly common among some young people, is
already quite close to VR. Large numbers of highly addictive, highly
enrapturing, chemical and plant substances, are supposedly illegal, yet
are pretty well available to young people who wish to find them. But a
greater danger may become a generally available "feel-good" drug
(such as the "soma" of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World),
which may kill the possibility of "the true spiritual" in human
beings because of the constant feeling of satiated comfort it gives.
The third danger is the extension of the body piercing
and body-transforming concept to ever-more transgressive levels. Some
aspects of this visible today are the overindulgence in cosmetic
operations; the grotesqueries of hyper-muscle-building (almost always
enhanced by drugs, such as steroids); the phenomenon of
"sex-change" surgery; and increasingly transgressive
body-piercing. This may culminate, for example, in various types of
extreme body-piercing, tattooing, and branding, by comparison to which a
small nose-stud will seem tame.
The fourth main danger is genetic subversion,
which some call by the trendy name "algeny" (from alchemy). What
this might mean is increasing inter- as well as intraspecies genetic
engineering, including the attempt to create new lifeforms. The advances
in genetics will be initially powered by the promise of eliminating
hereditary defects in the womb, which few people will probably object to
(i.e., to produce a physically healthy rather than disabled child). They
will also be powered by the desire to create replacement body parts for an
increasingly aging population. Some of these trends can already be seen in
the mice produced for scientific research, which have genetically human
blood flowing through their little bodies, as well as
"transgenic" pigs, whose organs are to be used as substitutes in
humans. A possible extension of these concepts would be the production of
brainless fetuses, who grow in a woman’s womb for the sake of the organs
they would later supply. A similar concept is to clone a brainless twin
from every normal baby born, where the former would be maintained only as
supplier of fresh organs for the latter. We are already seeing the
widespread use of various parts from the many aborted babies for the
manufacture of so-called lifesaving medicines.
There has been an incredibly intense debate over
stem-cell research, as human embryos are usually considered to be the main
source of stem cells. Some researchers, however, have tried to identify
and work with stem cells from adults, which neither harms the adult
person, nor requires the destruction of embryos. In November 2001, there
was the announcement of the cloning of a human embryo. It was said about
the procedure that it would be used only for "therapeutic"
purposes, i.e., to harvest stem-cells that could be later be grown into
substitute organs—rather than to try to replicate a whole new person.
Geneticists have also experimented with splicing the genes of mice and
carrots, and creating "monstrous" flies, with eyes in places
where they never naturally occur.
Genetic engineering could be seen to hold the peril of
human extinction within itself. Suppose genetic engineers develop an
oil-eating bacterium, to deal with oil slicks, which somehow mutates into
having a preference for human blood! There is a fundamental genetic threat
to humanity from ostensibly positive motives, and not only from such
obvious things as biological warfare exercised by some rogue country’s
or terrorist faction’s fanatical leaders. It has been noted that because
of the increasing prevalence of estrogens and other chemicals in the
environment, there are possibly occurring drastic declines in men’s
virility, especially in the advanced, Western countries, as well as the
far quicker onset of characteristics of puberty in young girls. At the
same time, there is an explosion of obesity-related diseases, as the
percentage of obese persons continues to grow. Cancer rates are also
burgeoning, most likely because of the increasing poisons in the food,
water, air, and earth. The increasing prevalence of prostate cancer in
men, and breast cancer in women, is probably environmentally related.
There has also been some correlation shown between breast cancer and
abortion.
Food produced by modern industrial methods and
involving genetic modification often appears to be carcigenous; yet a
return to organic methods of farming (and avoidance of genetic
modification techniques) is now difficult, since the food supply would
likely drop so rapidly that hundreds of millions of people would probably
be pushed to the edge of starvation. However, the extreme
industrialization of food production, for example, by feeding cattle the
ground-up remains of their own species—has resulted in mad-cow disease.
These industrial methods are accompanied by massive use of artificial
growth hormones and antibiotics, because the cattle no longer eat grass in
the fields, but are continually penned up.
The story of modern medicine and technology is one of
initial fantastic success which has somehow stalled in the last few
decades of the Twentieth Century. Indeed, one can see a hypertrophy
of advance, a law of diminishing returns, in the current-day fight for
health. The health-consciousness of a few is magnified through the media’s
highlighting of "beautiful people" and sport-stars, whereas the
spectator public grows ever less healthy and overweight. As modern
medicine carries out evermore advanced and seemingly miraculous
procedures, the possibilities of dangerous manipulations also increase.
What is not often noted is that many birth defects arise from the polluted
environment, as well as sometimes from the manifestly unhealthy lifestyles
of one or both parents; i.e., these extraordinary technological
interventions are now required as a result of other forms of
"progress". It can also be noted that because of over-use of
antibiotics, fearsome new strains of disease are making a comeback.
The fifth main crisis is that of environmental
degradation. Overpopulation, industrial pollution, drastic changes in
weather patterns, and the reduction of biodiversity (sometimes through the
introduction of certain non-native animal and plant species) are often
interrelated phenomena. Various parts of the world are now increasingly
threatened with extreme weather (such as floods and fires) as well as
insect and plant plagues and pestilence. The arrival of the West Nile
virus in North America has been well-documented. The planet’s biosphere
is a complicated system, and late modern human actions may be putting
inordinate stresses on it. By the time humanity realizes it has seriously
damaged Earth’s climatological system, it may have passed the point of
being fully reparable. The weather may well continue to become ever more
extreme and unbalanced. Extreme weather, crop failure, and pestilence may
cause vast increases in the number of people facing starvation. However,
as conditions worsened, humanity could presumably still take the steps
that would avoid truly disastrous outcomes—such as the so-called
"planet Venus scenario"—where global warming would become
open-ended and irreversible.
Another possible danger is nanotechnology,
which, although today in its infancy, is now taken as standard in many
science fiction futures. Nanotech is the notion of micro-machines taking
on the role of keeping human beings, and possibly animals, plants, and the
entire environment, in good health and shape. One way this might work is
that when a baby is born,
he "gets introduced" to his own batch of
"nanotech warders"—i.e., the micro-machines that will help him
avoid disease and grow up stronger, healthier, and perhaps more
intelligent than he would otherwise be. The possibilities of misuse of
nanotech are obvious: nanotech programmed to torture or kill, or to
massively alter one’s mental perceptions, or the possibility of a
widespread nanotech "virus" or "plague" that could
possibly extinguish humankind and even all natural life—the so-called
"gray goo" scenario. This was one of the main concerns—along
with the emergence of AI that would replace mankind, and the perils of
genetic manipulation—raised in Bill Joy’s important article in the
April 2000
issue of Wired. As Chief Software Architect of
Sun Microsystems and co-inventor of both UNIX and JAVA Script, he cannot
be so easily dismissed as a neo-Luddite. In November 2001, it was
announced by an Israeli laboratory that it had created a "DNA-based
computer"—a convergence of biotechnology and nanotechnology.
Moving beyond nanotech, one comes to the possible
ultimate extension of the Internet—the ability for persons to upload
their "consciousness" into an electronic virtual reality realm.
This is perhaps similar to what the radical theologian Teilhard de Chardin
called the noosphere. There have been a number of science fiction books
written which suggested that only religious-minded people would resist the
prospect of such an unprovidential quasi-immortality. However, it does
appear that the very complexity of the human brain (with its hundreds of
billions of synapses or "links") will prevent the possibility of
the meaningful, physical "uploading" of consciousness into a
mechanical construct.
What is often missing from many scenarios of
transgressive technology in the future is the question of politics. If
things go on as they are today, there can be expected a general
strengthening of left-liberalism and "political correctness" in
society, and a further marginalization of traditionalist opposition. Thus,
such commonly-voiced ideas as the creation from cloning of a race of
super-scientists, super-soldiers, or dimwitted servile workers (as, for
example, the Epsilon Semi-Morons in Huxley’s Brave New World) are
not especially likely scenarios. On the other hand, left-liberalism may be
tempted to extend what Donald Atwell Zoll has called its "sub rosa
social totalitarianism" into the pharmacological and genetic sphere.
Already there has been some mention that "it would be nice" if
genetic engineering could be "used to eliminate racism and
sexism." Certainly, given the ferocity of left-liberal attitudes
towards supposedly ever-present racism and sexism today, it would be
rather likely that the so-called managerial-therapeutic regime would not
renounce the deployment of electronic, pharmacological and genetic means
on its behalf.
Electronically, this would probably consist of VR
scenarios of mostly violence, graphic sex, and horror serving the same
role as the Violent Passion Surrogate (VPS) in Brave New World. In
Huxley’s novel, this is a chemical process, but in the otherwise
uninspired television movie based on the novel, it was shown as a kind of
Virtual Reality "theatre". Of course, Huxley’s "feelies"—the
more common form of entertainment in Brave New World—are an
obvious parallel to VR and our own society’s drive to create media
impressions that are "realer than Real". Pharmacologically, the
main control mechanism would be the "feel-good" drug.
Genetically, there would probably be an attempt by "politically
correct" psychologists and neuropsychologists serving the regime to
identify the sources of "authoritarianism",
"hierarchical-mindedness", and so-called "super-stition"
(i.e., religion) in the human brain, in the desire to somehow eradicate it
from birth. The current mapping or so-called sequencing of the human
genome, the attempt to discover precisely which genes control what kind of
physical and intellectual traits, could possibly put a very dangerous
instrument in the hands of these kinds of would-be genetic controllers.
Certainly the psychological regime, the monitoring of the upbringing of
children in the family, would be very tightly attended to, far beyond what
would be thought
acceptable today. And it may indeed be noted that the
drive towards the provision of "universal daycare" outside the
family home is one of the hallmarks of the most "advanced"
societies today.
One dystopic idea that has been raised in science
fiction is that everyone (apart from a small group of controllers) would
be saddled with "disabling devices" (affecting both the physical
body and the mind)—to create the effect "that everyone is equal to
everyone else." A somewhat similar concept, which would almost
certainly be supported by some radical
feminists, would be to flood female fetuses or infants
with testosterone, as well as to supply them with steroids, so that the
innate differences between male and female physical strength would be made
to disappear. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the flooding of
female fetuses with controlled dosages of testosterone results
"only" in the sterility of the females, without outward physical
changes, thus making them "ideal" as sexual playthings, the
so-called "freemartins". However, the controllers are careful to
subject only a third of female fetuses to this treatment. It does appear,
however, that it will be a very long time before an artificial womb can be
created that could carry a child to term from the moment of conception.
The human prospect may indeed look dire in the face of
these deep-level technological manipulations, and their attendant
ideologies. Given these transgressive technologies, the return of a more
balanced society would appear to be realistically possible for only a few
more decades. Beyond that period, we really cannot know what may await
humanity.
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Diagnosis
by
R.S. Carlson
Ralph Carlson (Azusa Pacific University) has given Praesidium
something slightly different from his many past contributions this time.
The following free verse quartet, he writes, "devolves from the
journey of a young acquaintance of the family, who got her first
diagnosis of breast cancer at age 16 and, through a series of remissions
and ‘medical pick-apart games’, didn’t quite make it to her 21st
birthday." The first poem of the series (as noted) has already been
published, and we reprint it here with thanks to Poets On. Of
course, it is the intent of no one on our staff nor of the poet to
suggest that humane, devoted doctors do not exist… but somehow, in a
culture dominated contradictorily by miracle cures and impenetrable
bureaucracy, humanity is often filtered from every quarter of such
situations, leaving one to stifle screams in a hellish maze of
calendars, waiting rooms, and "preferred providers".
Diagnosis*
* First published in Poets
On: Loss 15 (Winter 1991).
1) Have a seat, please. And please
try to relax. Having some nodules
or lumps in the breast tissue is
normal and, at certain times in
your cycle they will commonly be
more prominent than other times. We
will watch them, of course, and do keep
on with your self-examination as usual.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
2) Hello again. Now you really shouldn’t
worry too much. Yes, a couple of these lumps
do seem more distinct on the film this time, so
let’s have you come back for another couple
views. They do seem a bit larger to the
touch as well. Do you have a history of
cysts or fibroids—as far as you
know—among the women in your family?
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
3) Well, I’m afraid the mammograms show
enough of something that we should go in
and take a look. What we probably will
find in there are a few cranky little
cysts to get rid of. It won’t take
very long, really, and you don't have
to plan for much time away from work or
school. The procedures go quickly these days.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
4) Please have a seat. I’m sorry to have
to tell you the biopsy reports came back
positive for malignancy. Unfortunately, the
cells in the lumps are of a type that usually
starts somewhere other than the breast, so
we really need to do further tests to see
what may be going on somewhere else that
brought the problem to where we found it.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
5) Please have a seat. The bone scan and
CAT scan came back to us clean, as far as
we can tell, and the blood work should
be back to us soon. Unfortunately, the lab
has had a couple people out sick, and the
reports are coming slowly this week. We
expect to have those results for you very
soon, however. Please try not to worry.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
6) Have a seat, please. You can relax.
The last of the tests are in and they
show no signs of malignancy anywhere
else in your system, even though that
cell type we found very rarely arises
in the breast tissue first. But now,
we already know it's out,--it’s
gone, and it was only breast cancer.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
Diagnosis II
2.1) Have a seat, please. Let’s
take a look at the lump you say has
appeared on the arm. Since the
breast lumps were not good, we
certainly do need to watch any new
developments closely. Don’t
worry yourself unduly. Every day we make
new advances in taking care of these things.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
2.2) Please have a seat. The biopsy
on this latest growth also shows a
malignancy. We’ve scheduled you
for admission to the hospital for
chemotherapy. You should sign in
at Admissions this afternoon if at
all possible. The agents we now use work
better, and give fewer unpleasant side effects.
You may call your family from the front desk.
2.3) How are you feeling now? How is the
room service in this hotel? Is the food
any good? Since this problem cropped up,
we have gone back over the CAT scan pictures,
and we do think there are some abnormal
densities on the uterus and ovaries. We
want to see how they respond to this chemo, but
we may have to consider taking them out. When
the nausea passes, sign yourself out at the desk.
2.4) Please have a seat. The last set of
pictures still show several questionable
areas on the uterus and ovaries. The chemo
does seem to have reduced them somewhat, but
frankly, we should have seen dramatically better
response. We now see surgical removal as the
one safe option, and we feel getting those
affected organs out as soon as possible is best.
You may call your family from the front desk.
2.5) Waking up? You are doing well. We
think we got all that bad tissue out, now, and
the surrounding structures all seemed healthy
when we finished the job. We’ll schedule
another regimen of chemo to go after anything
that might be too small to see. Let the nurses
know if you need something for pain. When you
are a little more awake, Recovery Room people will
see you get back to your own room and your
visitors.
2.6) Please have a seat. I trust you are
feeling well. The incision looks very
good and, if the tenderness is decreasing as
you say, then everything should be back to
normal for you soon. Here’s a prescription for
hormones. We’ll adjust dosage as needed. Let’s
start the chemo regimen next week. Call
if you notice anything at all unusual.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
Diagnosis III
3.1 Please have a seat. Let’s put
these films up on the light so we
can see what’s going on with you.
This last checkup shows us two
new spots on the lung and several
more in the liver and right kidney.
We’ll go after these with another
good regimen of the chemotherapy.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
3.2 Have a seat, please. That’s a
cute kerchief you have there. The latest
films show we are gaining on those
spots in the lungs, but the ones in
the liver and kidney seem to be just
about the same, so we’ll try a little
different recipe in the chemo for the
next few sessions. Keep that smile, now.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
3.3 Please have a seat. Let’s get
the films up again where you can see
them. Here is the old view of the
right lung, and here is this week’s
view. Looks like those bad guys are
gone, now, see? That’s one for us, and
two to go, right? We’ll change the
mix on the chemo again for the next series.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
3.4 Have a seat please. We seem to have
some stubborn spots, still, in the liver
and kidney. This set of films shows them
all slightly reduced, but still hanging
on. We’ll keep the chemo at the same
mix this time, but we’ll also add some
radiation treatments to your regimen. I
trust they won’t disrupt your schedule.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
3.5 Please have a seat. The current
films just arrived this morning. As you
can see here, the bad spots on the
kidney seem to have given up, so we
just have those in the liver left to
chase with another round of chemo and
radiation. Got a new kerchief, didn’t you?
Yes, these sessions are a real drag, I know.
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
3.6 Have a seat please. Let’s get all
these films on the light for you. Here. The
befores and the afters. See?
Clear. Clear. Clear here, too. Start
planning your next hair style. Make sure you
get enough rest. Be sure you stick to a
balanced diet, now, and let's have a checkup
again in six months. Happy Nineteenth
Birthday!
Arrange your next visit at the front desk.
Diagnosis IV
4.1) Please have a seat. Yes, the follow-up films
look clear, still. No, Dr. Jones won’t be seeing you.
He’s been reassigned. Yes, we realize he suggested
a bone marrow transplant, but the board disagrees.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.2) Have a seat, please. Yes, your attorney has
contacted
the review board on the transplant issue. However, your
tests are clear now. Furthermore, the rare type of
malignancy you presented has never responded to
transplant.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.3) Please take a seat. Let’s look at these latest scans.
We’ve noted these ambiguous features in the brain
before.
Head injury when you were six years old, wasn’t it, and
a little residual scarring still showing? We’ll watch it,
too.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.3) Have a seat please. Everything on these films looks
the
same. The blood tests are fine. You should be feeling good.
The little shadows on the brain haven’t changed a bit.
Still
nothing but that residual scarring we saw. No bad spots.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.4) Please have a seat. Again the scans show nothing
new.
And you have no new symptoms to report, right?
Since the Cedars
of Hope consult your attorney arranged concurs your
type has never
responded to auto-transplant, it would be purely
experimental.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.6) Have a seat, please. Again, the reports look good.
As long as you feel so well, why put more stress on the
system?
Yes, your attorney is dealing with the board. If
arbitration
goes your way, we’ll refer you to University Hospital.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.7) Please have a seat. It’s been a couple months,
hasn’t it?
How was it at University? The post-transplant isolation
can be
tough, I’m sure. Flu-like symptoms? No way to spend
your holidays.
Seen psych, yet? Relax! We can do another set of scans
and tests.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.8) Have a seat, please. From these scans, it looks like
we’d better go back to chemo again. That cranial tissue
has more
shadowing this time. Spots show again in the lungs, the
right
kidney, the liver, the pancreas. First chemo, then cobalt.
Please arrange for your next visit at the front desk.
4.9) Please have a seat. When you take her home, see
that the
IV’s are changed every four hours. Give the morphine
every two
to four hours as needed. I’d say get a hospital bed into
the
apartment if you can. Your contract allows two weeks
hospice care.
Ask for Discharge Planning at the front desk.
4.10) Back again? Is Demerol any better than the
morphine?
We need to keep these IV’s going if you can’t hold your
lunch.
This is a busy place. If they won’t answer the call bell,
then just do it in the bed. They’ll change the sheets
eventually.
See you again on the next rounds.
4.11) Sorry, but we really need the bed space. You’ll
just have
to take your questions up with Discharge Planning and
your attorney.
I’m sorry, but these latter stages are unpredictable. It
could be
three weeks or three months. The chance of remission is
nil.
Now please, take your other questions to the front desk.
4.12) Look. I didn’t negotiate the contract—your
employer’s
broker did. Hospice care is available for the final two
weeks of
the terminal illness. I can’t involve myself in home care
issues.
My duties are here in the wards and the clinics. I can’t
say when.
Go back and ask for Discharge Planning at the front desk.
4.13) ... age twenty ...beloved daughter of... sister of...
graduate of Mountain High School, attended Crest
College, active in
Girl Scouts, Amnesty International, Save The Whales...
requested
no religious observance... cremation, ashes scattered at
sea...
memorial gifts to Family Cancer Fund, Box 7344, Crest
City....
Editor’s Postscript
In connection with Professor Carlson’s series, a
discussion has arisen concerning whether or not the pages of Praesidium
would be an appropriate venue for sorting through the complex,
emotionally and politically charged issue of health care. Clearly, our
charter does not allow us to espouse any certain political cause. In a
broader context, however, the impersonal, pseudo- or hyper-empirical
approach to such basic human problems as illness and aging lies fully
within our proper ken. The journal has carried essays challenging the
fitness of computer technology to express the human spirit: why not an
essay on the inadequacy of medical protocol for addressing bodies
animated by spiritual longings? Other essays have deplored the heartless
machine-dominated structure of our neighborhoods, thanks to cars and
car-obsessed zoning laws: why not an essay on health treatment centered
around the hottest new technology rather than around the timeless facts
of the human condition? Literature itself is replete with classic works
about sickness and dying. Tolstoy, Conrad, Hemingway… what great
author has not written on the body’s frail treachery to the
soul? Georges Duhamel and Maxence van der Meersch were both medical
doctors (not to mention Chekhov). A literately keen analysis might well
be illustrated, in short, with literary examples.
So the answer is, yes, we would be happy to receive
any paper about current medical care which is not narrowly focused on a
volatile political controversy nor obscurely indexed to medical jargon.
Whoever pays for the drugs, there remains a pale horse and a blind
boatman in everyone’s future.
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Four Poems by Michael H. Lythgoe
Lt. Col. Lythgoe (USAF, Retd.) evinces in these poems
as in his many others known to Praesidium’s readers a keen sense
of place and of history. A very fine observer will also notice here,
however, the heightened note of mortality (or, perhaps we should say, the
raised volume of eternity). As with Professor Carlson (see directly
above), the nemesis which cancer has become to our culture recently cast
its cold shadow across Mr. Lythgoe’s path—without lastingly malignant
consequences, fortunately.
A History of Tea
Arabians ate figs, Indians first drank tea
Two thousand years ago, records ancient history.
Soon tea was sipped instead of wine by the Chinese.
A Buddhist priest brings tea seeds to the Japanese.
The shogun introduces the tea ceremony
With paintings, drama, and ritual suicide. Sympathy
Is cultural; tea increasingly is seen as medicinal,
Good for aches and pains, vertigo, or epilepsy.
Navigators and travelers told tales of Japanese
Rituals and London traders offering a drink Chinese
Favored and recommended by physicians: Chinese
Tcha, sold at the Sultan’s Head. The Portuguese
Taught London’s Court their love of tea
And the flavor of mandarin oranges.
The East India Company sold and smuggled;
Queen Anne engaged in royal ceremonies
Not unlike the Ancient Buddhist in temples Chinese—
Sometimes counsel takes… sometimes tea: see poetry:
"The Rape of the Lock." Little sympathy for duties
on the sales of tea. British consumers cut their tax;
the Colonies suffered heavy English taxes on tea,
so Boston sank the English chests in a Tea Party.
Japanese Teamaster, in seppuku ceremony,
Brushes tea with bamboo, parts kimono—a body
Disemboweled. No hara-kari blades for gypsies,
Who sharpen knives and read futures in tea leaves.
The Afghans sip their tea straight, sugar-free
Of English Raj tastes, but swallow tea
While sucking hard candy. Brits smuggled coolies
To open Ceylon’s tea plantations. Cadbury
Serves chocolates at Victorian teas, singing
Tea for Two. In the Fifties, the movies
Showed Americans in love with the Japanese:
Tea House of the August Moon ceremonies,
As A&P and Lipton bagged their green teas
To steam in porcelain with scones at High Tea.
The history of sugar is not sweet, yet ceremonies
Lump Japanese aesthetics with Chinese leaves.
A Victorian Tea Room is named for Tea and Sympathy.
Heaven Envisioned as the Cirque du Soleil
She is blessed with dreams of happiness.
The Blue Ridge Mountains shiver in the shadows
Of a summer storm. A traveling man pauses for Mass
With his wife, a dreamer, near the border. Parishioners
At Mass honor another couple married six decades.
A sculpture marks the parish of Saint Francis De Sales:
The shape of Christ Crucified passes through black iron
Revealing Cezanne’s blues—sky and trees seen
Through the Iron Cross’s wound.
The travelers eat at Candelarias, in the old Purcellville Inn.
Supper is a taste of Tuscany: whole garlic baked in olive oil
For crusty bread, homemade mozzarella with tomato
Slices seasoned with sweet fresh basil, veal scallopini
Served over pasta, with artichoke hearts, a local pinot grigio,
And more—abundant—crusti.
As husband and wife travel west, the sky clears;
The sun blinds, white clouds surround the sun.
The wife tells her husband one of her dreams:
I saw figures floating freely between several
Levels of clouds, happy trapeze artists,
Painted faces in silk turquoise tunics, lemon
Chiffons, mango orange hues, cherry Lifesaver-
Reds, sun-lit as the Cote d-Azure—aerial acrobats
In the Cirque du Soleil—street mimes, an alchemist
In a wizard’s hat—swinging suspended on a scarf. No one
On the ground seemed aware of the happening above:
Spellbinding costumes, laughter, tumbling performers.
Continuing their drive, the wife says a field—giving up its
mist—
Is like a scene from Brigadoon. A quartet
Of horses plays follow the leader, leading darkening
Shadows back across field to barn. Going night night.
On the radio, jazz:
Oscar Peterson plays down the sun with Gershwin’s
Embraceable You; Winton Marsalis on horn. The wife’s
eyes
Close again. She dreams of a hot air balloon—rising above
Albuquerque; slow motion ascension—a trampoline bounce,
Tumbling—reaching the heavenly swing,
Happily airborne among mysterious aerialists.
Kelly’s Ford
Every river is a passing hour, a crossing, an obstacle;
Dante’s river is darkness too deep to wade.
Frost tells us the way out is the way through a
debacle.
Rivers. After Dante’s cantos. Lead to glades
Inside an Inferno, suffering ghosts.
In dark woods, imagine many shades.
We drive to find Kelly’s Ford, and pay the cost.
Safely cross the Rappahannock River;
Move through winter fog, avoid getting lost.
To be lost in the dark is to live fear.
Hum Hoagey Carmichael’s tune, Winter Moon;
March night is moonless; feel the winter.
Battle grounds: Cedar Mountain, mortal wounds,
Brandy Station, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness.
Ghost riders are cavalry, gray dragoons.
Hoagey Carmichael’s ballads anchor the past,
Transport me to Indiana, where he sings
Still for dead parents whose love songs last.
Charon lifts coins from the dead to bring
Damned souls over the River Acheron,
Haunting, poling, night shrouding.
Finally, the lights, the bridge, the Inn,
Comforting fireplace, musket over mantel,
Birthday drinks, meal before the summons.
Charon leaves the living, hearing no death-knell.
We cross a different way, by-pass ferry
To underworld, and literary hell.
Life is crossing rivers, however wary,
Aging on a moonless night, dangerously
Aware of little more time to love, not unwary
Of what I left upstream: cancer scare, happily,
News from our children, their children, a death—
An aunt. Downstream—rivers, vulnerability:
Tigris and Euphrates, war. On shore, your breath
Inhales dreams of Hades, voices, rivers;
Hear poetry and pain; warriors face death.
Sunrise melts dirty snow to mud, rivers.
Fog burns away. Let the ferryman
Row another day, other passengers.
A grim reaper is the aging boatman.
Some poor souls cross another way, Potomac,
White’s Ferry, miss the creaking oars of
Charon.
Coast to Coast
My love and I traveled from coast to coast.
From Puget Sound to Vancouver and Kelso,
East along the Columbia, stopping at sunset.
A container ship curved its wake through
The channel making for Portland, leaving
Astoria, the mouth, distanced, Monrovia
Registry, carrying cargo on deck. We travelers
Look for a sign: a dream, a vision, an owl—
Like the Indians around Seattle or Spokane:
Wolf, Eagle, Bear, lessons from Raven. Listen
To the stones, the stories the river tells. Maybe
The sea otter should be our totem carved after
A dream, a white man’s dream in a sauna’s steam,
Pretending it is a sweat lodge. Drive the high desert,
Eastern Oregon—shoot the gap in the Cascades,
Bend—
Three Sisters’ peaks marked like a skunk’s tail.
With snow in August, through juniper and shady
Douglas Fir. Queen Anne’s lace lined our parading
Route. Along the Deschutes River, geese honked
Loudly the last morning. Ducks quarreled
Over corn at the Woolen Mill in Salem, my love.
Remember returning from Newport Beach?
Were we sure of love’s pursuits, destiny Tucson,
Santa Fe? Leaving Boulder—you loved Las
Cruces—
We view blue ridges on the horizon,
Aware, as the Navajo rug weavers,
We are in a weaving with an imperfection:
A landscape, a place we are and a place
We look to be, believing love is a journey;
But love is not motion. The Caribbean poet writes:
Love is stasis. Wings return us to flying sounds,
Geese in splash-downs on a pond near Chesapeake.
The ducks of Salem seem to have followed us
home—
Welcomed by Queen Anne’s lace, stasis on our own land.
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Hommage à Baudelaire:
Three Prose Poems
by
John R. Harris
I really don’t know why the prose poem fascinates me,
at least in its Baudelairean form, ample and fluid and somewhat formal in
register. (I’ve seen volumes of contemporary prose poems that don’t
grab me at all: short-paragraph gestures at haiku which end up sounding—to
me—more like bill boards or crime reports.) I confess that there’s a
lot about life in the present which doesn’t please me. The prose poem
offers a chance to stop the roller coaster and examine the weeds growing
between the tracks, some of which turn out to display exquisite patterns
or to exhibit morally admirable endurance. Of course, this very
interruption of drunken diversion is itself anti-modern and, depending on
whom you ask, anti-social or even un-American; and the highfalutin sermo
gravis, whose bid for sublimity leaves today’s readers impressed
only with its pomposity, makes one very nearly eligible for the FBI’s
list of suspicious characters. Baudelaire… now there was a guy you’d
want to keep an eye on. Maladjusted, discontented, élitist, contemptuous,
perverse, perhaps malign (who could tell?)—how he would have autopsied
the cultural corpse from whose fumes sprout Reality TV and fast-food
lawsuits may only be divined by the liveliest of imaginations. I make no
such pretentions. At the risk of trying the reader’s patience, I merely
allow a few very private, very tame ghosts to stretch their immaterial
limbs. And the reader, after all, may pass on after a glance.
Invitation to a Voyage
(Invitation à un voyage)
The electric fan… how did they live without it, those
people of hooks and laces, of starched collars and high-topped boots,
whose prim ghosts, frightened wide-eyed by the cameraman’s hand-held
flash pan, haunt yellow and gray portraits in the basements of old
buildings (the Old Courthouse, the Old Fairfax Mansion, the Old Tolliver
Hotel) turned into small-town museums (open Sunday afternoons during
summer)? Only those wide eyes know, those frightened eyes out of which the
ghost escaped, or perhaps within which the ghost was finally, briefly
(briefly and forever, as it turned out) permitted to declare its presence,
otherwise so well laced up and hooked together, behind the tightly
stitched lips and the fine, thin nostrils—only those eyes betray the
justice of the portrait, that it was no yellow-and-gray accident of
primitive photography, but the truth, the full and accurate record of
yellow-and-gray lives in a yellow-and-gray time. Among other things, those
eyes betray that the electric fan was sorely missed. Its artificial
breeze, to be sure, would have been fiercely coveted: one could hardly
move on the veranda or in the drawing room between morning and evening
baths, if one was of a certain finely scented class. But the truth I mean
is in the sound of whirling blades. How did those hooked and buttoned
gentiles live their death without that sound to point them elsewhere? How
did they manage to strangle in perfect silence?
Even as you move among such wall-eyed ghosts in the
basement of the Old Confederate Inn (souvenirs and literature available at
the counter upstairs), you are floated and carried through and past their
agonies—their mute, silver-pupiled martyrdom—on a distant electric
current. The box fan at the base of the stairs or the window unit beside
the regimental flag is taking you places, rolling like a wheel, whirring
like a propeller. You are passing through, a traveler bound for anywhere
not of here or there, for any time not of now or then, and the ghosts
frozen in an instant of time forever cannot see or even dream of such a
one as you while they stare your way wide-eyed from their nooses of
somebody somewhere. The engine runs, and your soul is transported onward,
always onward, always onward. See all the little lives from your craft’s
window, all the webbed somewheres and the riveted somethings, cities and
states on a clear day under your fuselage, all turning with the planet as
you stand still, all sewn into the present as you tear the future’s
cirrus edge. And you could weep for pity of them, for love of them, so
found and so lost, so shrunk in space and time, so dead in their tiny
lives—but tears freeze instantly to cirrus at your altitude, and the
engine’s steady hum absorbs a sob’s first inkling into the infinitely
intersecting ripples running the length and breadth of your aluminum. You
exchange shadows with your looming destination, and you can only smile.
My first clear memory, perhaps (or perhaps my first
memory of something unclear) concerns an electric fan. Our living room was
much the biggest space of a tiny house, though even its modest amplitude
was pilfered by the dining room, a room in the same room, a relatively
high and dry savanna whose climate alone, in the absence of any wall, drew
the distinction. For the dining room was freely circulating shine-and-shadow, a glacier-smooth plateau of table paradoxically sitting upon
sequoia-sized legs that loomed above my eyes. In fact, I could only take
in that polished ice plateau together with its columnar underpinnings from
the sofa, in the living room’s quite different climate and topography.
The sofa was upholstered in an olive-and-gold pattern of tendrils, and
contributed heavily—but not exclusively—to the region’s atmosphere
of lush rainforest. Between plush armchairs forbidden to my digging heels,
the evening sun always sifted densely through the tropical canopy of
curtains and Venetian blinds and even, I believe, a kind of bamboo mat
which my father would draw impressively over the front porch from a
miraculous roller where it hid most of the day. Not that I could see the
cane or bamboo from inside—not that the mat was even made of any such
stuff, for all I know; but the climate, the living-room latitude of the
planet, called for bamboo and high canopy and tendrils and lush grasses.
My dinosaurs would live there with astonishing realism, their bright
plastic reds and greens and blues and yellows as appropriate and
convincing as parrot feathers or exotic flowers. At those moments, the
dining room’s Tibetan sublimity, pure, sterile, almost asteroidal,
suffered from the contrast. No brontosaur would graze that arid carpet, so
dangerously open and vastly smooth; nor would any allosaur or tyrannosaur
make the patently futile attempt to hide himself behind the bare sequoia
trunks, where, despite their massive girth, his red or yellow tail would
have been visible for miles. At most, a lonely pterodactyl might haunt the
sheer cliffs of the buffet, as close to the border of a different planet
as he was to the dawn of terrestrial time. Far more active were the gray
carpet marshes between the radio cabinet-cum-television and the prize
armchair, where big herbivores could feed luxuriously but with
oh-what-a-perilous illusion of comfort; for toothed and taloned predators
loved to loiter in the loose folds of the armchair’s floor-length
flounce, which had shortened the bland lives of many a saurolophus—and
even the relatively slender trunks of the sofa legs often concealed a
white sprint and a horrendous red howl, for the sofa’s jungle shadow
brooded over its short stumps ruinously. I would shudder on my cushion,
just to think of what lurked beneath me.
And the window unit somehow brought it all to life, or
did so, at least, most memorably on that one occasion. In those years,
only the living room had a window unit; and in those days of summer
evenings, when the year seemed three-fourths summer, its engine was always
working, its propeller always spinning. My parents had taken my brother
and sister and left me alone for some reason—a very extraordinary
reason, it must have been, for I can never again remember their driving
off without me at that age. Their trip must have been brief (a dash to the
pharmacy, perhaps, or a retrieval of my brother from some playmate’s
house), and I’m sure that I was given the choice of going or staying.
The air-conditioner guided my choice. Alone on its wings as I had never
been before, I piloted up the sifting sunlight as I had known I would,
shuddering on my cushion at the immensity of time and space, from frond,
festoon, and mire to cliff and mesa—from inconceivable brutality in full
voice to a dry, voiceless neck and pair of moist black eyes circling and
circling in currents on top of the world. I knew then that something was
very wrong, and very right, with life: that it was not what I was being
told, but infinitely more and other—and that I, too, was not what I
seemed, but a constant traveler who was constantly being detained. I knew
that my name was somehow in the propeller’s whir, always repeated, never
completed, and that its whisper was my pulse. And I shivered where I sat
above the most savage monstrosities ever to stain the shade, delighted,
utterly spellbound, knowing that I would always sit above anything that
had ever been or could ever be, shuddering with my engine’s murmur,
moving on, leaning into time.
Perhaps that moment of knowing how much I did not know,
of feeling how much older I was even than my parents and how much younger
I was even than a newborn planet, still lingered in my grandmother’s
upstairs bedroom. There, as an adolescent, I increasingly idled away
summer mornings of waking up slowly and summer afternoons of siestas
beside open books. The slanting, gyring sunlight still settled
suggestively over my world, a breath of frost through the curtains in the
morning, summer frost clinging to a Himalayan leopard; and in the
afternoon, a full gold curtain of its own, a taste of those mesas in the
West which I couldn’t quite see but knew to be an hour’s drive away,
all angle and granite, the gorge of the sun, Arroyo del Sol. The sequoias
of my childhood dreams survived in the fluted, archaic bedposts (a wild
cousin was famed for having snapped one clean off in some hybristic climb
to the heavens, but it had been glued back seamlessly); and even a certain
pattern of tendrils remained on the wallpaper, though they were thinner
and less sinister now, mere perches of discreet scissor-tails and
dun-colored thrushes. To tell the truth, there was never much of the
moist, dense, or luxurious in this high, quiet clime. My taste was already
declaring itself for desert spaces and silent echoes, those vibrations
that ring in the ear when absolutely nothing moves, whispering things you
had long known and long forgotten. I was perhaps at my most meditative
then, in those brief summers which seemed only one tenth or twentieth of
the year, forming for me a tiny portal, the prisoner’s window at which I
starved, out of which I longed, as the rest of the year fed and fumed and
howled around me, a jungle become all too real, a morass of slashing and
carnality kneaded into the pecking orders, mating dances, and nascent
hypocrisies comfortably called adolescence by enemies of the sun. I was
ruined for life at that time, perhaps. I should at least have learned some
defensive slashing, or should at least have known that no maiden awaited
patiently my escape to the Arroyo del Sol. I of all people should have
known, with my grandmother’s slumbering window unit breathing
rhythmically beside my pillow, that time is a sand that never settles—that
one must catch grain after grain and make of them a hand-sized castle,
humble enough to hold cupped from the wind. Instead, I developed the first
skills for a habit of wasting precious years in waiting. A lean, dry
throat without a voice and pair of moist black eyes, my arms crossed limp
over the shoulders of the updraft, I watched the planet turn and watched
the asteroids veer or fall upon it. An adolescent boy is not well advised
to spend his mornings half-asleep, especially if his sleep is a strange
wakefulness—an insomnia of the soul.
But dream I did, and dream I have, dreaming away a
lifetime. I cannot praise or approve those enemies of the sun who urge the
young to dream. What do such minds know of dreaming? For them, it is
possession of the sun in something dug up from the mire, a diamond in the
coal, a nugget on the river bottom. In the squalor of their dreams, they
dig their graves. My dreams have a certain compensation, but I cannot
lightly recommend them, either. At worst, they are thin air, a stirring in
the curtain, a ringing in the ear; but even at that, they are at least
nothing earthy, no suffocated ghosts of gray and yellow. If they should
indeed turn out to be nothing, I shall at least have waited for something
that never came, for something worth the waiting, the princess of the
Arroyo del Sol—and I shall at least have tasted the nobility of the
wait, not a taste that soothes dry throats but one that moistens eyes, the
spectacle of pity and love as webbed cities and quilted counties roll into
planetary dusk beneath one’s wing. What haunts me is not a gray and
yellow Lily Langtry nor a tiny gable caught by the wheeling sunset like a
needle in a curtain: I know that I would always have taken flight, if only
to stand still as the earth takes flight. But might I not have swooped low
here and there, gathering a grain, saving a victim, piecing together as
much as my hands might hold in flight? Have I flown too straight a path
past death, past life?
It is much too late to ask, perhaps. I am too near what
is nothing, or my destination. The murmuring turns of time and space have
almost carried me past all possibility of descent; and what is the terror
of death to them below, to predator and prey alike, is to me the princess
and her father, the planet in my palm, my flock of parent children, the
toys of my pity, the tears of my smile. If I did not stop to live, I shall
not stop to die. I am the traveler, passing through. I am the sunlight’s
echo and the wind’s recoil.
A Hemisphere in Blonde Hair
(Une Hémisphère dans une chevelure)
Contrary to popular wisdom, a child is the strongest
form of human being. Children can endure to the very brink of life.
Even when they die, they die with a strength many times an adult’s.
Largely lacking self-consciousness, they can drink pain to the lees
without really taking its measure, and so without fearing its relentless
increase or its pitiless duration. Certainly they do not ponder all the
mysteries beyond the last shrill pain of heart and lungs suddenly ceasing
to pump. They live for the moment, and the pain they feel is the moment’s.
If they are starving, then they simply get on with starving.
So for other pains—pains of offended taste or of
uprooted love: the child is largely a stranger to them. What a mineral
world, what a heart-sickening slag heap, was the north Texas city where I
grew up! Alkaline earth upon whose calcium a little gray grass somehow
survived, wiring flat lawns to gray concrete curbs, shaded only by
telephone poles and power lines (no need to bury the lines: winter freezes
were still and dry, splitting wood in a clear dawn); turquoise sky with
white-hot shavings of trans-continental jets always astir, the slingings
of the sun’s lathe, writing their silent screams in chalk; streetlights
at night that ran for twenty miles from the mild rise of our yard, the
stars their image in some sand-blasted hangar’s sheet-steel roof—they
the real stars, the hot rivets from heaven, the molten manna in beatitude’s
foundry…. For, you see, I adored those night streets from my window. All
the stinking petroleum fumes, the drunken-punk drag races, the oily dollar
bills in blue jeans, the sordidly screened skin flicks, the unlighted
railway crossings where shady figures converged on stalled cars like
deepwater sharks on a lumbering raft—all this was nothing to me, no pain
at all to my delicate taste. For what did I know of all those things, of
slick oil and dirty silk bills, of carnality and urban crime? I always
washed my hands before supper; and on Friday night, after supper, it was
my secret delight to trace the streetlights into the night’s horizon.
What did I know of real stars or real manna, or the distance of heaven? I
ached, all right, before that squalid city—but the pain of a saint
arrived at paradise was in me. I knew that it was there before me, the hem
of my God’s robe, dragging at my feet in jewels. I knew that I could
reach and have it all… but I knew not how to reach. I was in agony. It
was delightful, the only agony of delight I would ever live. For I had
found, and had only to reach.
What staggering immunity to tastelessness—what a
stunning leap of poetic imagination, to have cobbled the court of heaven
with those sore, swollen streets! For I was young, and I had not the least
suspicion that I had built an image. As far as I knew, the agony I felt
came of standing at God’s hem in a paralysis of delight.
For the reach, you see—even that was a very simple
matter. It consisted of calling her on the phone. I shall not name her:
what would be the point? She had a real name, of course, which attached to
a real human being; but since I never knew one well enough to draw a
greeting, why garble the issue with the other? She was the brightest jewel
in God’s hem. She had a facility for smiling and blushing crimson, a
readiness to register shame which was instantly my incarnate metaphor for
innocence: only incarnate, and so no metaphor. It was her blush in the
center of a playground crowd, one of whose members had snatched her purse,
which instantly captured me back in seventh grade. Instantly for the next
several years. The culprit was surely male, and he, too, probably just
wanted to see that glorious blush. She was one year my senior and one race
of angels my superior—for I belonged to a dark-eyed, dark-browed tribe
whose skin could never betray a blush, whose eyes could only glow until
they frightened or offended people. To this day, people ask me why I
scowl, the fair-haired fair-eyed race of sky-dwellers whom I can only
watch from my ravine, hating them all, abjectly adoring one from time to
time….
… As I did her. For six years I adored her. The very
thought of transferring my attention to someone closer by, someone truly
accessible, was spewed out with contempt when, every year or so, my
well-meaning intelligence saw the hopelessness of my delight. In all of
that time, she spoke to me once—to ask after one of her many admirers,
if I might have seen him, looking past me and through me all the while and
musing, I suppose, that his sudden appearance would spare her a few words.
I could write endlessly about my junior year of high school, about the
sickening courage I finally found in those twenty miles of streetlights
(thinking now, knowing now, that she was somewhere out there among and
within them, laughing and not alone)—the courage to dial her number. And
I do write endlessly about this very subject, in a way; for it was she who
started me writing, and I have been chasing metaphors across pages ever
since. It was even she who made me learn to drive a car, an exercise in
which I took no masculine satisfaction and which bores and peeves me to
this day… but the secret to those streetlights lay in driving. In a way,
it is the driving about which I wish to write: an intimate passage between
files of wan haloes regularly mapping the infinite night, God’s lost
jewel at last found and sitting next to you, beside but infinitely far,
and you with your hands neared over the wheel in thankful prayer that the
winding avenue excuses your eyes from having to go blind on the jewel’s
luster—from having to blink and weep.
I would return to that drive which never happened.
(For, of course, it never happened: surely I have created no suspense! No
suspense could live in these images—I have firmly turned our backs to
the future). I would study that metaphor now, after all these years, now
that I have seen so many metaphors for what they are. I should like to ask
of that imaginary drive, of that forever-postponed rapture, just why I
wasted time on blue eyes and fair hair and a blush, first with her, then
with so many others. For it occurs to me that the questions are the same:
why streetlights, why a blush… why a metaphor? Or perhaps why not
a metaphor—why, at the time, a reality? Why was the reality of my youth
stolen away in delusions? For a metaphor that fails to delude and make its
own reality can scarcely be a metaphor at all—not a vibrant, successful
metaphor. A metaphor cannot come alive as a metaphor except when it is
mistaken for truth. Am I censuring my youth for its poetry, then? Am I
sneering at it for not being oil, fumes, and feverish zippers?
Though I chased what was never there, would I have been
better off where nothing deserved chasing? Do you see what I mean? Do you
really not see?
I mean that she might really have had a self as caught
in my metaphor as I might catch her name in a word. I mean that the drive
might really have happened, even down those littered avenues where drunken
Visigoths dragged and cruised and parked to claw at buttons and zippers.
It might have happened as I had scripted it a thousand times from my
window’s ledge, hoping she wasn’t at that very moment laughing easily
with someone else. Uneasy laughter I could easily countenance. Indeed, I
had scripted a whole history of incidents with other men into my
great speech, my last words, my soul’s first confession and farewell to
the safety of childhood—for death to my present state this speech would
surely have been, the two of us in a car, streetlights filing past to
solemnify my stammer in a kind of marriage procession or funeral march.
"For six years," I would have said prayerfully over the wheel,
"I have fought to find a way to tell you…." And then the
script allowed for death; and then, miraculously (if but briefly), for
resuscitation. "I know you have admirers. Who would not admire you?
Beside most of them, I am nobody, nothing. I know that." I was
counting, you see, on the uneasy laughter of all those somebodies before
me who had all expected admiration in return. I was not so very ignorant,
at that. I knew that cars and streetlights ran on carcasses in advanced
decay, and I suspected that the games most men played with her were fueled
by ego-energy. My notion of what passed under Friday night’s dark glow
was clear enough, as clear as I wanted it.
I was counting on those tawdry scenes—they were
essential to the metaphor. How on earth should I have found the courage to
die beneath the stares of curbside haloes with my lost-and-found jewel,
but that I believed in some transforming emanation from my stammer, from
my black-hot eyes of tears? I was he with whom one might laugh easily; if
I couldn’t blush, yet I was innocence. I was he who saw haloes in
metaphor, before whom even harlot streetlights turned to jewels. I offered
her worship without knowing her well enough to draw a greeting, after six
years of knowing her as one might know a star or statue: adoring
ignorance, aesthetic distance… but is such an offer so slight? Was my
metaphor not ample in becoming—could she not have grown with me in my
impersonal and misplaced reverence? Why, I wonder, do women so fear
reverence—why do they fear comparison with what they can never be? It is
in the spirit of reverence, precisely, that two people may collaborate,
chiseling their metaphor, connecting stars to make a constellation which
neither would ever have seen alone, discovering a god whom neither could
ever have approached alone. Who in the world would ask you to be a
goddess? My metaphor only asks that you wish to pretend to walk with God,
you better than yourself and not yourself, I transformed and lifted from
myself, both of us leaving old names behind. For in the pretense is the
reality: only deluding metaphors are true. Calculus is only a guess, but
to insist on pinpoint accuracy is to be surrounded with lifelessness.
I know this well, for there followed two decades of
unpretending names, of reality as you see and touch and graph it. I tried
to cling to my innocence: I boxed away one tarnished set of metaphors, of
metaphors turned nakedly transparent, and started making new ones. My one
great concession to adulthood, one which I have now learned to regret
(having taken the full, pitiful measure of adulthood), was not to send
that ridiculous billet doux to her—the only written version of my
script—once she told me over the phone (once and for all) how busy her
admirers kept her and how improbable was her ever having time for me.
Having been so faithful to my childhood for so long, I might have been
naïve a little longer, just one more time. I ought to have been: it would
only have cost me a stamp. "I do not expect you to act upon this note
in any way… merely wish to give reality to a feeling I have carried
about for six years by declaring it to you… owe it to myself not to
bottle up the most powerful emotion of my life… have already
accomplished what I set out to do simply by sending this note." What
incredible naiveté—and what immaculate nobility! A mere year later, I
would be devouring Tolstoy’s pages about Natasha and Prince Bolkonsky
(even as I was patiently waiting to be selected for slaughter in a
Southeast Asian rice paddy). What an inscrutable time to have lived
through—adolescence aggravated by the death agony of human culture!
By the splinters of my keel, I escaped the shoals of
Selective Service. Instead, I spent much of those decades trying to study
Tolstoy and Dante and Vergil in a world where they had grown invincibly
strange. The women I met in that endeavor contemptuously pitied Natasha,
knew nothing of Beatrice, and learned nothing from knowing Dido. Of
metaphors, they would have no part. They had rightly figured out that a
living metaphor is a delusion, an acceleration of raw clay into a comet
whose future must be projected by a calculus of idealism. They rightly
understood that motion is not real as clay is real. And they opted for the
clay—the greater realness of clay plucked from all motion and isolated
from hope’s infection. Metaphor lay dead in all their graduate
dissection trays, like one of those pickled frogs I would slice open
between opportunities to see her in the halls. Metaphor was a
trick. It was something oppressors practiced upon oppressed—something
men, especially, practiced on women. Hope, a future: marriage, children,
higher things, transcendence. They could lift it deftly from the viscera
of embalmed propaganda (as they considered Tolstoy, Dante, and Vergil) and
show you just where the fatal enzymes were secreted into the smoothly
running bio-unit. Feed, sleep, breed, breathe… feed, sleep, breed,
breathe… one, two, three, four, just like a new swimming stroke at
summer camp—and then, the infection leaked in. Feed, sleep, breed,
breathe, hope… hope, love, long… pain, doubt, failure… no, no, no!
Better to have it out!
And so they operated. They shriveled the organ of hope
beneath intolerable doses of raw life. They accelerated all the basic
vital rhythms—the real rhythms of standing still, of grinding up
stimulants and lapping up stimuli. They imbibed liberally,
"crashed" for days, copulated on a dime, and—above all—withdrew
themselves most regularly to interlace their legs and breathe in, breathe
out. Feel the blood carry the oxygen. Nothing else matters: nothing else
exists.
Some of these women sacrificed themselves more
mercilessly on that drunk and thirsty altar of reality than a martyr would
have surrendered his flesh to the cross. Some of them murdered more real
tears in a night than a deacon’s wife might artificially salt and
distill in a lifetime. How the metaphor must have lived in them, to need
so much killing! How they must have feared becoming, to commit so
resolutely the suicide of merely being…. More than once, they made me
think (in metaphor, of course) of a girl who devours a whole candy shop,
then feverishly, nauseously counts her sugar-stained fingers and groans,
"I told you so—it’s all a lie. There’s no happiness here. I ate
every bite of all there was, and I feel worse than when I began." And
even then, how often the bludgeoned head of hope stirred in the rubble,
necessitating yet another blow. Almost always, the treatment ended in
amputation.
But what defense can be made, all the same, for fair
hair and fair eyes and a blush? In truth, I boxed away those metaphors
many closets ago along with other childhood toys; or in truth (for the
first truth out of the mouth always lies if taken too seriously), I
quickly added to my stock of metaphors. If a blush was shamefast and
modest, a spirit living on the bloom of the skin, then dark eyes like mine
could run deep, a bound-and-gagged spirit touching fire to free itself or
to raise a conflagration trying. But why dark eyes, at that? Why the
pseudo-science of physiognomy—why the need of metaphor in a face? I may
say in a truth which stays square from any angle that never in my life was
I won by shapely curves of body: it was always a face, and especially
eyes, for me. Perhaps a body like a fallen leaf would have drawn me the
more, in fact, with a pair of sky or hot-coal eyes to suggest where all
the body’s strength had withdrawn its vital sap. Given even so little as
that, I could design a metaphor in which I hung suddenly snared. But why,
I ask, must a metaphor so uplifting demand material so misleading and
off-hand? Why did I require a face and eyes to begin to fall in love?
Three or four of the best women I shall ever know inspired in me what I
can only call a horror with their sparrow’s eyes and sparrow’s mouths,
faces that might have passed for men’s or sufficed for mannequins. What
horror in myself inspired me with horror—how could my soul refuse to
fall in love just because it failed to see the makings of a metaphor? Why
can the mind not be high-minded? Why must the delusion which brings
becoming begin in a permanent, irredeemable delusion?
And so I ask, is metaphor worth it? Is being worth
becoming when founded, not on uplifting delusions, but on slanderous lies?
If a plain-faced girl must become of no account, then what is a man
becoming but a fool? Is there not desecration in considering strumpet
streetlights to be the hems of God—twenty miles of fallen haloes
darkening the darkness, darkly glowing, as only fallen angels can—stars
demoted to demons, staging such scenes of drunkenness and high-speed
dismemberment and parking-lot rape and stalled-engine murder as never any
race of spear-carrying men had known? Was the fair light in her hair and
eyes and the glow upon her cheeks worth even one year’s wasted time—even
one week’s, of that infinite time which adolescence has to waste (and
which we find out, too late, to be life’s most precious moment)? For
there were girls with straight, flat hair and dull gray eyes who would
have spoken and would have listened, who would have exacted no praying or
dying, whose lives had not been complicated by a demanding network of
admirers… why does a man drop a pearl and chase a pebble, just for the
sake of a face? If a comet must not be reduced to dead slag in a display
case—if hope’s vector must not be factored out of the equation—yet
of what hope is an energy born to chase its own tail? What’s the
difference between a lump of raw clay and a twig forever circling in a
backwater?
The wickedness of our deeds is in their metaphor—not
in a metaphor which raises two deluded minds to collaborate in its
becoming, but in a metaphor which wholly neglects the face unable to serve
metaphorically. In that plain face I see my own mind’s ugliness, a
poverty of spirit which needs lights to play with, boxes of toys—which
is infinitely unfit to stand before God. For we can know God only through
metaphor: yet a god known through metaphor is no god at all, but a star
fallen to earth, the mirror image of a plain, dull face. The only true
metaphor is the one mistaken for truth, but the only truth we know of God
through metaphor comes when we discover the metaphor’s fraudulence. For
God begins where the metaphor fails.
Curse of the New World, to follow metaphor into the
wilderness… virgin forests, fertile plains, blue-eyed mountains and
blushing progress: land of the bright and blond, where ugliness is a
mortal sin and original sin the speck in an eye rinsed clean in an ocean…
continent of streetlights and Friday nights, of cars and senior proms, of
raided candy shops… I am still trapped at my window, mesmerized without
rapture now, admiring without delight. Wondering if, two marriages and
four children later, she would declare herself happy, or happier than she
might have been with me… knowing that there is no way to pose the
question, for she would recognize my face now less than ever. How I yet
love, but how I have come to fear…. I have become, perhaps, as few
around me have; but exactly what have I become?
The Salesman of Windows
(Le Mauvais Vitrier)
Nothing is quite as dismal as house-hunting: nothing is
more dismal than a house on the market, the "house market", the
sad brothel of real estate wherein aging and very lived-in faces are given
a fresh coat of paint and smothered in nauseously sweet-scented candles to
convince the customer that here—next in line—stands his dream. His
"dream home". You don’t like this one—too full in the
garage? Too down at the roof line? They have just the lady for you, just
fifteen minutes from here, now that they understand… if they had only
understood the discriminating finesse of your taste before, your rare
appreciation for quiet, hidden charms… this one is very special. (Not
special, but very special.) The vulgar, shallow herd has passed her
by in her virginal (almost virginal—reminiscent of virginal) modesty…
if they had only known before. Had they the pick of the lot, your realtor
pimps and eunuchs, this would be among their hardship harem, the three or
four special few. Very special.
And so you look her over, her teeth and fingers and
under her skirts, lifting and opening upon intensely private places with a
thoroughness that partakes of the obscene—of many varieties of the
obscene, from the voyeur who inspects Mr. and Mrs. Mugwump’s king-sized
bed and daughter Courtney’s cheerleading pompoms and teenager Jason’s
auto-erotic pin-ups to the coroner at the post-mortem who notes the signs
of wear—the bedpost’s permanent gouges in the carpet, the ill-fitting
door frame where Jason once hung a chin-up bar—prior to and perhaps
causative of death. For, after all, it is death which you attend. There
will be no more little Mugwumps—Mr. and Mrs. M. will have separate beds,
if not separate rooms, in their next abode; and Courtney is off to the
University to study men and sell herself to the highest bidder, like some
kind of pink dream home. For the home-buying game is, after all, no mere
renting of a companion for the night, but much more serious—much more
dismal—business, like purchasing a slave or arranging a suitable
marriage. How much to buy out the soul which lingers here? What charge to
make it die or find another body? This body will do nicely (you decide…
well, almost decide) as a receptacle of your soul, an extension and
part-time residence of your nature’s sedentary clutter: your women,
slaves, and baggage will occupy its spaces roundly. (Well… maybe.) How
much to evacuate the rigor mortis in the carpet and the pale ghost
on the wallpaper? You make your offer (being 60/40 decided), and the
dickering begins. The lady waits silently, shivering in her naked flesh.
Or perhaps you desire the real thing—a dream never
yet ravished by another. Jason—excuse me, Mr. Jason Mugwump and his wife
Yupley (he made good at last… and who would have thought it, to see him
sprawled those adolescent afternoons before his posters with earphones
embracing his narrow cranium? community college set him straight, and
Yupley has done wonders)—they wish to make a statement to all the world.
Only a new home in Riverside Manor Estates will serve notice to Jason’s
wincing high school teachers and Yupley’s hyper-critical mother that…
well, perhaps not Riverside Manor Estates. Perhaps not just yet… perhaps
not for a long while. (After all, there’s the pea in the pod—Jason
Manley if a son-and-heir, Slithely Eglington if a princess, pending the
verdict of the ultra-sound; and both of the ecstatic lovebirds have
already made excessively bold statements in the automotive idiom.) No,
perhaps Pleasant Pastures or Cretaceous Caverns: the hyper-critical Mrs.
Bovinski will still be impressed into silence. Homes for the Future,
sayeth the sign. Dreams for Tomorrow. Available at today’s prices… as
if the prices could be anything but today’s or a vision of a dream for a
later date be anything but the first stage of a headache. But who reads
signs? ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.
In fact, your temples begin to throb as you follow all
the signs, caught again behind Mugwump the Younger’s statement-making
van. (It seems to precede you or closely trail you to every open house and
new development, its driver constantly meeting you around some corner or
beside some closet like a slanderous mirror: yet the two of you have never
so much as exchanged grunts.) Why this Sunday afternoon migraine? Why does
it always happen on these jaunts into dreams of the future’s
discount-if-you-buy-yesterday tomorrow? Is it the sun? Naturally, no tree
has been left standing in Whispering Willows Estates. They make a desert
and call it peace (well-priced peace, at that). Should you opt to buy now
(and go into bondage for thirty years), you would no doubt have the
Mugwump clan in your lap for breakfast, peering from their bay window
across five arm spans of manicured willow’s grave.
Of course, you can escape: escape figures prominently
in dreams of tomorrow. You can at least escape from the bay window—and
not just into the large walk-in closet (upon which your wife will have
first dibs, anyway). Just follow the echoes (your echoes, your wife’s,
Mugwump antecedent’s, Mugwump-at-your-back’s) and the fresh-paint
new-wood smell till you come to the house’s heart, the hub of its
holiness, the future altar of your household gods. Here the master
architect has thoughtfully, tastefully provided (between voluted stucco
columns of the Late Empire) a built-in entertainment center, with recesses
for hundred-inch television screen and mega-decibel amplifiers. No Mugwump
living would ever ferret you out in here… probably. Or if you fear gaps
in the drapes, let your instinct be your guide. Flee unto that
architectural heart of hearts, that inner sanctum, that holiest of holies,
that roost for your armful of penates snatched from Troy’s
smoking ruins: the salle de bain. In a kind of pearly-gate shimmer
of white tile (damn him! here he comes again, squeezing out as your
realtor squeezes you in), a voluptuous, decadent-looking tub lounges at
your feet, wide enough for mating manatees, making you feel incongruous
for not wearing sandals, basking in the slivered sheets of late afternoon
admitted by a discreet skylight. Here you might make love, plot your boss’s
demise, hatch a new philosophy, or slit your wrists like Lucan while
reading your magnum opus in a steamy bath. Utter discretion… a
discretion to which a full fifth of the dream’s square footage has been
devoted, it seems, all impervious to Mugwumps everywhere. Should
pimple-faced Jason Junior one day manage to ascend your roof in response
to his race’s queerly congenital voyeurism, ostensibly to retrieve an
errant frisby (but more plausibly to indulge those not-quite-vestigial
branch-bending digits), you could most certainly sue… most certainly,
that is, if you could affirm on oath that you had not merely seen
yesterday’s reflection, a memory of your own ape-house eyes wanting into
somebody else’s dream—wanting into a dream, anybody’s would do.
For the voyeur is forever peeping through your mirror,
sneaking a look in as you sneak a look out; for you find yourself still
outside the dream, even after you move in. It is that feeling which
sometimes assaults you palpably where your lares energetically make
known their cryptic will upon the television screen, the object of your
rapt and reverent attention (though your supine semi-undress scarcely
dignifies their oracle): that feeling which begins, "There he is
again." Some greater ape of furrowed brow and restless disposition—an
investigative reporter or saucy P.I.—thrusts his rude nose between your
splayed legs where the recliner holds them in offering to the picture
tube, and you see… not yourself, most definitely. But the self you
should have been, intend to be, or have rented for the hour via satellite.
Your alter ego. Is he spying on you, or are you spying on him? Just how
many stations do you need (the cable package clearly wasn’t enough)—just
how many bedrooms must you spy on in one evening? And to think you’ve
only just moved in! The dish was just installed last Friday! Haven’t you
just framed Mom and Dad on the dresser? Didn’t you just settle that desk
you’ve had since high school into that dormer over the loft and discover
the letter which broke your heart six years before you met your wife (and
which, in fact, you’ve never shown to your wife… why bother—why
invite painful prying?)…. Not a month, not a week in your new dream yet,
and already your nose is pressed against a window. For the window—the
television, the skylight—is escape from where you are, and life is only
made tolerable by the prospect of escape.
And so another home, another dream, succeeds this one
in a year or two. When you and Mugwump sell (his sign went up at almost
the same time as yours), Withering Willows is still desirable property,
somewhat improved in value even figuring inflation, and the last trees in
the gully have only just been razed to milk the last possibly buildable
plot of land. Good timing, says the realtor. What ghosts do Mugwump’s
cousins and clones find in your bath and bedroom as their noses file
through, sniffing for deals, sniffing for secrets, poking around a sunken
galleon? No need to worry: your secrets are safe. For you have no secrets—you
haven’t been here long enough. The bedposts have scarcely dented the
carpet, and the den still smells of fresh paint more than of your unfurled
socks. You leave behind nothing. Even the letter which broke your heart
seems a little less poignant now, for the incarnation of you whose heart
was broken has now been buried one grave deeper. In your next dream house,
perhaps, you will throw the thing away. All the deeds, contracts, payment
booklets, cancelled checks, and letters of credit are beginning to clamor
for drawer space. Their family, at least, is growing. Yours is slimming
down: a little less bag and baggage at every move, a few more unpacked
boxes, more parcels for the Salvation Army—more old books lost, more
photos gone missing, more of your past severed from your present.
Soon, perhaps, you will have liberated yourself from
any past whatever in this rifling of dreams, this Zen of moving in and
moving out, just as a steady diet of harlots might finally make a man
ascetic. A monk’s cell would be nice—a high pueblo, a hole in a cliff,
a tunnel that winds and winds through rock… or another dream home, if it
must be so: even that will do. For in the final stage, the lowest and the
highest phase, of your identity’s undoing, all dreams are blank and all
homes are caves. You sit in the harlot’s lap and drink your tea as
contemptuously, as emptily, as if you had found a bed of stone. And should
Mugwump’s divorced-and-remarried wife observe you through your bay
window, you drink another cup. For there is nothing left to observe.
back to Contents
***********************************************
White Cover
by
J.S. Moseby
John Moseby has contributed short stories quite
regularly to Praesidium in recent years. His work is often a
curious blend of the whimsical and the quotidian ("magic
realism", as the style has been called). In this story, he reprises
the flavor of the "film noir" forties murder mystery manifested
in his earlier contribution, "Running on Empty". The actual
events in the story, of course—and especially the lurid crime—are
entirely fictional, and indeed exaggerated beyond the routine to the verge
of nightmare. Given the sort of events which have grown routine in the
twenty-first century, however, a critic might well wonder if the choice of
a setting decades in the past was not designed precisely to vivify actions
no longer very implausible in conception.
They want to say that I’m crazy, the ones that want
what’s "best" for me. What if all of this really drives me
crazy? Then I won’t be able to tell my story so that it makes any sense
at all, and nobody will ever believe me. Nobody will ever believe that I
was anything but crazy. I think that’s the thought that bothers me most—everybody
holding out insanity to me, I mean, like a soft bed to a man who hasn’t
slept in a week. I’d have a hard enough time resisting even if my
friends weren’t pushing it off on me—the ones who keep telling me they’re
my friends. That’s the hardest part of all. My attorney believes in me.
Even the cops in this place are rooting for me. But my friends... my
sister’s in-laws want her to get power of attorney over my estate as my
sole living relative. They never cared for me, but we became friends after
I signed for a bonus last spring. Makes you wonder which side of the bars
you’d rather be on.
Let’s say I start with the war. I don’t really want
to talk about the war, so I’ll just stick to what my attorney calls the
relevant facts. He says to write as if I were talking to a jury. Well, who
doesn’t know that I was captured and escaped? They say a jury’s not
supposed to know all that, but how are they going to find twelve men that
didn’t pick up a newspaper that year? Not that there’s really much to
tell. If I hadn’t had three big years at the plate before I joined up,
nobody would have made beans about the whole thing. They make you a hero
because of what you were before it all happened, but the real heroes
hardly get their names in the obituaries.
All I did was jump out of a troop carrier. They had us
bouncing along in that thing over a mountain road. It was pretty slow
going, because the road was bad and the bridges were iced. I don’t think
anybody was altogether awake, German or GI. There was something unreal
about it all, bouncing up and down, up and down, over this beautiful
snow-covered mountain range that looked like something out of a Christmas
catalogue. It was late afternoon, and the sun came out, really low and
bright—you couldn’t even see where it was. But all the snow was
suddenly like satin. And when the troop carrier hit a low branch, the
flakes came down behind our truck like a gold dust. I don’t think
anybody had said a word for hours. Like I said, we were all half-asleep.
But for me, it was hard to believe that there was a war any place on
earth. Not that I was what you’d call comfortable—I was cold and
hungry like everybody else. But I was that kind of hungry that was beyond
being hungry. I just wanted to sit still and daydream. It seemed like that
satin snow and that low, golden sun were just perfect for my daydream.
I’ve always loved the snow. I always loved to play in
it as a kid. It was almost like I just kind of fell into it, right out of
the truck, like falling into a daydream. Honestly, it was so easy, and
there was no big jolt, no pain or sudden shock. I just rolled and slid and
rolled through the snow’s blanket, all the way down the mountainside. I
guess I never will know if the Krauts thought I had made a brilliant,
daring escape as the newspapers said, or had just fallen out in my sleep.
I heard their shouts way above, but they didn’t even fire a shot. I
guess they couldn’t see anything to shoot at. And they must have figured
it wasn’t worthwhile to stop and chase after me. What’s one dogface,
more or less? They must have figured the woods would finish me that night,
and they must have been pretty tired and cold themselves.
The funny thing is, I really enjoyed tramping through
the woods that night. I knew I had to keep going, that if I stopped I’d
probably get frostbitten. But I don’t think that’s what made me go. It
was like being a kid again after two years of the worst hell you can
imagine. Of course, I didn’t tell that to the newspapers, and maybe I
shouldn’t be writing it now. If I were saying this to a jury, they’d
probably nod to each other and mumble, "He really is crazy."
People always seem to think what they want to think. They have this
picture in their minds, and they expect you to fit the picture. Like me
being the next Lou Gehrig—what a laugh!—or me being the great war
hero. And now it’s me the crazed mass-murderer, made over by the same
people who had me as Gehrig and Teddy Roosevelt. And they still call
themselves my friends. They’re sorry for me, but they won’t believe my
story because it doesn’t fit their little picture. What a bunch of
jerks! If I’m speaking to a jury, I’m saying to them right about now,
"What a bunch of jerks you twelve guys are!"
I’m so sick of this all, even if I ever get out of it
I don’t know what I’ll do with the rest of my life. I don’t ever
want anything to do with people again.
So let’s say I’m home again, war hero, flashbulbs,
ticker-tape parades, headlines. Then the war ends, and all the guys come
back—and boy, do we have a season! I think it was because we had so much
fun that year. After all we’d been through, you couldn’t take the game
any way but just plain fun. It was just such a joy to be there again,
playing that dumb game. As for me, I’d lost half a step of running
speed, but I’d gotten a lot smarter. I didn’t take myself so
seriously, and I didn’t bite when pitchers challenged me. I waited for
my pitch, and if I didn’t get it, I did what I could with what I got.
For the first time in my life, I turned into a really good hitter instead
of just a slugger. And it was all just because I’d learned that life is
short and seldom sweet, and that, for all the flashbulbs and headlines, I
was just another guy, a guy who could have been dead—a guy who should
have been, since the best, bravest guys I knew hadn’t made it. Why
should guys like that be gone and not me? I was lucky just to be there. I
had fun, all right. But I never had too much fun.
Okay, that brings us to Natty. This whole thing is
about Natty, if only I could open a few eyes. I can’t talk about the guy
without sounding crazy because he’s really, certifiably nuts, a Section
Eight. Actually, I never knew exactly why Natty got his deferment. It
would be interesting to know what those army doctors made of him, but I
don’t suppose it ever got that far. I think it had a lot more to do with
his Japanese ancestry, although I’m still guessing. You know how
everybody talks. How would a little Japanese blood keep him from going to
Europe? Some of the guys said he must have bribed somebody. Others said
they were turning Japs away from Europe, too, on suspicion of being spies.
So why didn’t they turn away guys named Schultz and Schmidt—and
Eisenhower? What a bunch of crap! All I know is that he was a good
ballplayer. He was the fastest guy on the bases I ever saw, and there
weren’t many balls that got past him on the infield, either. Why he
never got a chance to start, I couldn’t say. He was great off the bench
to pinch-hit or pinch-run, or to come in late for his defense. But, heck,
I would’ve started him, and I told him so more than once. That’s what
I mean. I was the one guy on that team that really treated Natty like a
human being. They joked about making us roommates, but I said it was okay
with me. They wouldn’t really do it, of course, because I was the war
hero and the next Lou Gehrig. They wanted me rooming with Kowalski. Me and
Kowalski, the one-two punch. It sounded good in print, and it looked good
in photos.
So Natty, it turned out, never roomed with anybody. I’d
never heard of a team before where one guy had no roommate. It was
strange, really strange. It was like he was unclean, or something.
"Nasty", they called him sometimes, because his real name was
something like Natsuma. Eliot Brinkman called him The Nasty Gnat on his
radio broadcast. And then there was Ratty. And Nazi. All the rumors about
why he didn’t join up or get drafted—all that talk about his mixed
blood, maybe Chinese, maybe Indian or something. It all just seemed to
follow him around like a cloud, and everything he did only made it worse.
When he stole a base, he was sneaky and slick. When he made a great play,
the sportswriters would talk about his "black magic". One stupid
hack even charged him once with putting curses on the other team. Stuff
like that—complete garbage. I never saw anybody take so much guff.
But that’s just it—Natty didn’t take it. If he
had, maybe things would’ve gotten better. But he just stored it all up
and never said anything. Or if he did say something, it was smooth and
smiling, like a dog you just kicked that comes back and licks your shoe.
That’s not what I call taking it—that’s helping them give it to you.
Looking back, I wonder if he didn’t hate me most because I was nicest to
him? I would certainly rather that he’d shot me dead than do what he’s
done to me. Maybe in his sick mind, this is a way of paying back a debt of
gratitude—letting me live instead of die, live the life of a dangerous,
branded lunatic who can never be let loose on the streets again. Was that
a special vengeance just for me, just for being nice to him? Or does he
consider it being nice in return? What can you say about a guy like that?
To this day, I don’t really hate Natty. How can you hate a guy who’s
that far gone? But I think I could kill him—me who’s never killed
anybody in his life, not even a German, as far as I know. That wasn’t
the same thing. Who ever knew if he hit what he aimed at over there?
Did the guys make him worse by all those things they
did to him, or was he already that way and really deserved every bit of
it? I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe you should treat anyone
that way, no matter what he’s done or how he is. One time, they poured a
bottle of olive oil all over his shoes. When he took them out of the
locker and slipped them on, the stuff just oozed out all over the floor.
Everybody roared. Another time when we were on the road—I think it was
Cleveland or Chicago—they phoned ahead and had the bathroom of Natty’s
suite piled up to the ceiling with soap. Big joke. When we were all out
together at a restaurant or some place, they were all the time telling
Natty, "You got to use the back door," and, "You got to eat
back in the kitchen." They made him miss trains, they stuck him with
bills, they had his luggage get lost. Once or twice, a few of them went to
the trouble to change a lock on him, I think. The skipper got mad at that
one, so nobody ever said much about it. On the whole, O’Rourke just went
along with them, as if there really wasn’t much he could have done about
it, anyway. And maybe there wasn’t, but I can’t release him from all
the blame. You don’t manage a ball club to be liked by everybody. You
keep them as straight as you can, and make them do their jobs. Well, maybe
O’Rourke thought it was good for morale to have one guy get picked on
and bullied, or maybe he was just in awe of all our big names. He didn’t
have to do anything but throw us a ball and a bat, and we’d go make him
the manager of the year. So there was no help from that quarter.
I spoke up myself a few times. I remember once in the
locker room they were talking about going out and getting a dog turd
somebody had seen on the sidewalk. Another surprise for Natty’s locker.
They were having a big time trying to decide where they should put it
exactly. I finally couldn’t take it any more. I told them I thought they
were all sick. Then Kowalski sneered something back like, The hero doesn’t
lower himself, boys." "You’re damn right," I said.
"I thought we just fought a war to stop this kind of crap." You
should’ve seen Kowalski light up. He came right at me with his two fists
hanging at his sides like a couple of hammers. "What the hell is that
supposed to mean?" he said. "I fought in the war, too, hero,
remember? So did a lot of us guys here. What the hell is that supposed to
mean?" I said, "It means a man should have a right to live free
without getting pushed around just because his name’s Greenberg or
something funny like Natty’s, or maybe even Kowalski." He was right
in my face by then. "Are you saying my race is no better than
his?" "Now you got it," I said right back. "That’s
just what I fought for, so nobody’s race would be better than anyone
else’s."
He backed down after that. It was too big a hunk for
his brain to swallow at once. But he wouldn’t speak to me for a week
after—and Kowalski, as I’ve said, was my roommate. I guess he finally
figured that I was crazy and he couldn’t stay mad at me. He did his best
to make sure that the other guys thought I was strange, too—me, his
roommate, his teammate, the guy who got on base so much that he became the
RBI leader. What a jerk! I could see why Natty had it in for those guys.
But what I can’t see is why he took it. You could see
him get as mad as a hornet, but then he’d hatch a big toothy grin and
laugh right along with all the others. I said to him more than once,
"Natty, why do you take it? You don’t have to take all this guff.
Tell them you'll break a bat over the head of the next one that opens your
locker." And he’d always give me the funniest look, as if he were
mad at me—and then he’d finally flash that fake grin and say
something like, "Oh, they don’t mean nothing, Johnny." I
suppose maybe he was mad at me, mad because I saw what a coward he
was. Maybe he hated me more than all the others put together. They only
made fun of his skin color, but I could see inside him. I guess that’s
why he’s done this to me. You never hate anyone like the guy who makes
you see yourself for what you are.
You’ve got to understand that I’m really thinking
about most of this for the first time. The way Natty built up his hatred,
the way Kowalski bad-mouthed me behind my back—I usually didn’t give
any of it a second thought. After all, we’d just lived through the worst
war in history, and we were cruising toward the pennant and the
championship. Every day you’d wake up in clean sheets, have room service
bring you up a pot of hot coffee, and read about your heroic deeds
yesterday afternoon in this morning’s paper. How could there be anything
seriously wrong with the world? The sun would be up, you’d take a taxi
to the park, little kids would be all over you for your autograph—there
just wasn’t time to have an ugly thought. When we wrapped it all up and
won the Series in the fifth game, we even hugged Natty. We were all on top
of the world.
Maybe we were a little taken aback when Natty wanted us
all to come up to his resort in Vermont the next month. A resort in
Vermont—Natty Nokoro! I think the guys didn’t know whether to be more
surprised that he had some going concern or that he’d want to invite
them there. And it was smart of him to put it back till early December.
With champagne dripping down your hair and flashbulbs going off all around
you in the locker room, everybody’s your friend. But half the guys would
have backed out if Natty had asked them to a steak dinner tomorrow night,
and the other half would have forgotten by tomorrow afternoon. As it was,
they had a chance to think. Natty Nokoro... a resort in Vermont. It made
them all curious, I know. It sure made me curious. They must have figured,
"Well, why not? Those oriental types are good at waiting on people,
and they sure know how to pinch their pennies." Maybe there was a
whole family of Nattys up there, bowing and scraping to money-bags on
vacation. Maybe it was like a Chinese restaurant, all brothers and sisters
and uncles. And maybe like a Chinese restaurant, there was a back room
where some real money shifted hands. After all, whatever anybody ever said
about Natty, they never called him dumb. Maybe he knew some people who
knew some people. I think he must have let a few words drop to some of the
real solid citizens like Kowalski about what you might call investment
opportunities. They could believe that, all right. It was slick and
sneaky, the kind of thing they’d spit on—and the kind of thing they’d
want in on. I know he told at least one other guy, Jimmy Galley, that he
wasn’t having the married men over if they had to bring their wives.
That was all Jimmy needed to hear, the poor little squirt. He wouldn’t
have known a shady deal if it crawled up his back. He just wanted a good
time. I guess it was a good thing about the married men. Vince Vlietska
and Conn Laraby stayed away because they wanted to be with their families.
Now there were two decent human beings who never did Natty nor anybody
else any harm. Thank God this business made no widows.
Anyway, when a bunch of us showed up at Natty’s
rustic retreat a month later, it was a funny thing—there was a kind of
respect in our faces and our voices. The inn had a really steep roof, like
some I’d seen during the war in eastern France near the Swiss border. We
looked up at it almost like we were in church, and instead of shouting we
were nearly whispering. Natty soon put a stop to that. He had us inside
and in front of the fireplace in no time. A heavy snow had just fallen,
and it somehow seemed like Christmas to be in front of a big roaring fire
with a hot drink in your hand—or like I used to think Christmas was
supposed to be but never was, you know what I mean. Some of the guys
probably hadn’t quit drinking since the night after the fifth game. But
most of us were sober enough to be really impressed by the effect, and
especially by Natty himself. He looked so different in a thick pullover
sweater, more like a stockbroker on vacation than a guy who could steal
second and then steal third.
And then there was Natty’s woman. He just called her
Lena. He didn’t even say if she was sister or wife or something else. It
wasn’t that she was such a knock-out or anything, such a great
acquisition for our dirty, sneaky Natty. She had a nice smile, but she
usually stayed in the wallpaper and never opened her mouth—the
inscrutable Oriental, as Dick Osterman, our college boy, called her. I
suppose maybe he was right about her race. Her hair was dark and straight.
She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, but the main thing was that she was a
woman. Our shifty Natty had himself a girl, and nobody really thought she
was his sister, or even his cousin. There were a few of us who couldn’t
say as much, myself included. I hadn’t gotten back into the habit of
socializing since I’d come back home. I’m told my roommate Kowalski
had a few things to say about that, too, behind my back.
After we got over being awed by the place and by Natty’s
secret touch of class, we started playing the Series all over again—or
at least the others did. There were fifteen of us there in all, including
Natty. All the starting line-up was there except the two married guys I
mentioned, and Laraby only started against right-handers. So I guess it
was natural, especially as the glasses emptied and were refilled, that we
all started talking about the one thing that really held us together.
Myself, I found it kind of a bore. I spent a lot of time looking out a big
picture window at the snow outside. I think I said before that I love the
snow. It was hard for me to imagine playing on a sun-lit field in shirt
sleeves with that beautiful snow all over the place, sitting in the pine
trees and blanketing the grounds.
I must have been kind of drifting off, because I was
taken completely by surprise when the shouting got louder than usual. It
was Kowalski—no surprise—who was fighting over food—no surprise—while
Natty refused to let him at a silver platter full of little white
baseballs. They were about half the size of the real thing and made of
white chocolate. I don’t know how he did it—maybe Lena made them—but
everybody said they were delicious. And they were so true to life that
they had stitching molded into them. A real class act, this secret Natty,
even with his hors-d’oeuvres! But the strangest thing of all, the one
real surprise, was that he was standing up to Kowalski. Natty, who never
stood up to anyone, was beating back into his corner the biggest lout of
them all. He told Kowalski that there were only enough of the things for
everyone to have a couple, and that some hadn’t even had one yet. He
mentioned my name. At that point I called out from the window that I would
pass if it would help keep the peace. Then I had an even bigger shock:
Natty refused my offer. He told us he’d gone to a lot of trouble to
arrange things just right so that everyone would have a good time. He put
Kowalski into his place with a little lecture on manners as if he were a
father talking to his five-year-old. I hadn’t moved from where I stood,
but I tossed in that I would eat one and give Kowalski my other. That was
how it ended. I don’t think Natty wanted it to end there, though. He
gave me the oddest look. It was like, "How dare you? Do you want to
ruin everything?"
Things started to go downhill pretty soon after that.
Jimmy kept asking Lena where all the girls were, and a few guys had
started a game with somebody’s balled-up woolen socks and a fire poker.
I eased myself out a door beside the picture window and stood on the back
porch just looking at the snow. It wasn’t falling—it was just sitting
there, as quiet as if there was nobody alive on earth. You could hear
somebody scream inside once in a while, sure—but that was a different
world, and I preferred this one. I had that silly candy baseball in my
hand which Natty had forced on me. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t
feel like eating. It made me a little colder to be hungry, a little more
curled up inside myself, and I like that feeling. I liked it especially
out there in the snow. It was like, even though nothing else was alive in
the whole universe, there was enough space inside me to fill up the
emptiness. I felt big, huge, kind of above it all. It was like that night
in the Ardennes when I tramped for miles between two armies, given up for
dead by both. The world is always so much bigger than people think.
I don’t know why, but I let the candy baseball slip
out from between my fingers and fall over the railing into the snow. Maybe
I just wanted to see what kind of a splash it would make. If you hadn’t
been watching, you wouldn’t have heard it. It just disappeared without a
whisper. I knew my footsteps would be whispers, too, if I could get away
for a walk. I didn’t want to be rude, but that silence acted on me
almost like the booze and food on the other guys. I could hardly keep my
hands off it. I just wanted to jump into it.
Well, that was about when Natty appeared with the gun.
I heard a flood of racket when the door opened and turned around. There he
stood in his pullover with a Luger in his hand. I must have looked pretty
shocked. "Take it easy, Johnny," he laughed. "Did you think
I was going to shoot you?" He came over right beside me, his back to
the window so that nobody could have seen him with the gun. "I want
you to have this, if you will," he said. "I’m told that it’s
quite a collector’s item, quite valuable. A non-combatant like me has no
right to such a thing. But you—you are a hero."
He placed it in my hands. The first thing I did was to
make sure it wasn’t loaded. Then I gave it back to him, handle first. I
told him that I didn’t want it. I thanked him, but I told him I already
had a lot more memories of the war than I could ever get rid of. He didn’t
insist. In fact, he apologized and said he should have known better.
Frankly, I thought he should have, too. The guys all knew I didn’t like
to talk about the war. There were just a few of them that did, mostly the
ones that didn’t see any action. It seemed like a real strange thing to
do at the time, coming out there to stick a gun in my hands. Of course,
now it all makes sense.
He cradled the pistol in his sweater as if it were a
lost kitten and gave me this searching look. "You don’t seem to be
having a very good time, Johnny. Do you want another drink? Do you want me
to get you some refreshments? Did you eat your fortune cookie?"
I almost looked over my shoulder at the snow, but I
caught myself in time. I told him sure, I’d eaten it. What else could I
say? As for the "fortune cookie" business, I’d obviously
missed that bit of the fun. There must have been a piece of paper in the
middle of the baseball. I realized that if he asked me how my fortune
read, my lie would be bound to come out, because I just didn’t have the
energy to invent any mysterious Charlie Chan-sounding crap from scratch.
And for some reason that thought scared me—I mean, that he should find
out my lie. It wasn’t embarrassment. It was something to do with the way
he kept searching me with his stare. So I decided then and there to beat
him to the punch. I said something like, "I guess that’s what made
me sad—reading my fortune."
"Didn’t you like it?" he said. "What
did it say?"
I just continued making up garbage. "It’s not
that," I said. "It’s real hard to explain to somebody. It’s
just that no matter how hard I try to think of the future, it always seems
so much smaller than the past. Like the snow out here. You could see two
people walking from the edge of that clearing to the porch, and they might
be all wrapped up in what they were saying, but around them is this big
huge mat of snow. And after they’re gone, their tracks will all be
filled in by the next flurry. That’s how the future seems to me. What’s
the point of even talking about it? There’s something we’re all
missing. There’s so much around us we’re just not getting."
"You’re a very strange man, Johnny," he
said to me seriously, still giving me that deer-eyed, unblinking look. I
said I was so strange I thought I’d go for a walk if it wouldn’t hurt
his feelings. Boy, was I glad for that chance to slip away. I had the
funniest feeling that he was about to corner me in something, more than
just telling a couple of little lies. I felt like the longer I stood there
with him staring at me, the closer a noose was getting to my neck. I didn’t
even have my overcoat when I started off, but when he yelled after me to
come back for it, I just yelled back that I needed a brisk walk, that it
wasn’t cold and there was no wind. I just wanted to get away.
The truth is, I had already sensed that something was
very wrong with this situation. As I walked along at double time, I tried
to think what it could be. Maybe the candy was poisoned. I really knocked
that one around a long time before deciding it was too far-fetched. Maybe
Natty wanted us all in on something that was good and illegal, something
he could blackmail us over, and he needed us stone-drunk to do it. That
seemed a little more likely. In fact, the more I thought about it, the
more likely it seemed.
I got to where I saw some square lights low through the
trees. I kept on till I came to a little village, the snow crunching under
my shoes and not making my feet a bit cold. It’s always amazed me how
dry and fur-like a new snow is. It sounds more like a rug under your feet
than like something made of water. I had this urgent desire for somebody
to see me—sober, alone, and decent—at just this hour. Somebody in this
village. I glanced at my watch. It was four o’clock. I went into a
little store that sold souvenirs and knick-knacks and made a point of
talking to the old guy behind the counter. We talked about the weather for
a while, then he got out of me why I was here and who I was. He wanted my
autograph, so I signed a baseball that he fished out from somewhere in my
firmest, soberest hand. In the back of my mind was that stupid piece of
candy again.
By the time I got back to the lodge, it was dark—or
at least you couldn’t see any shimmer in the clouds low against the
trees, for that was all the daylight there had ever been. The flip side
was that it never really got dark with all that snow yawning at your feet
and huddling at your elbows in the trees, and those low, still clouds
sitting over the woods like a polished lid. You felt kind of like Hansel
and Gretel in a fairy tale. It was like a dream with its own special
light, like a Christmas tree full of tinsel and hidden candles.
If I make a point of the story-book feeling, it’s
because maybe that feeling got ahold of me and made me more scared, more
numb, than I would have been at what I was about to see. The snow on the
back steps muffled my long climb up to the door, for the porch was a good
five feet off the ground. But I’m sure there was enough racket and horse
play inside that they wouldn’t have heard me, anyway. Horse play I was
prepared to see. After all, they’d been playing Game Six of the World
Series with a bundle of socks and a fire poker two hours ago when I walked
out. But what I saw through that big picture window, as clear as if I’d
been sitting in the front row of a movie theater, was two or three of the
guys with automatic pistols like that Luger Natty had shown me. And I saw
them shooting the other guys. I swear I even saw splats of blood. Nick
DeStefano had on a white shirt, and there were little red spots all up and
down it as he fell over the back of the sofa and sprawled over the floor.
Al Malachy stood over him, one hand leaning on the sofa, and pumped a few
more shots into his chest just for good measure. Of all people, Al Malachy.
I once saw him turn as white as a girl when he spiked a second baseman and
drew blood.
Well, I can’t really tell you what went through my
mind then. As you can imagine, I was pretty shocked, but that doesn’t
begin to describe it. I’m not sure anything went through my mind. I
think I was just as empty as a snowman. I once saw a tank back over a guy
who hadn’t seen it coming. And I once slid into a foxhole and found
myself beside a body that had been dead for days, or maybe weeks. This was
the same kind of thing in the way that it seemed to be happening in slow
motion, and I seemed to be watching it happen over and over again while it
was still going on. Only this time it was worse, because those other
things were just accidents. You lift up the cover and see something you’re
not supposed to sometimes—life is like that. It has a lot of little
covered-up places that you’re just supposed to walk over. But this was
unnatural. Something like this wouldn’t happen again in a million years.
A bunch of teammates killing each other in cold blood just for fun.
I don’t know how long I stood there, but I do
remember the first real thought I had. It was about Natty, and I remember
the first words I said. "That son of a bitch."
It was about that time that I saw Nick leap up, along
with all the other guys who’d been shot dead before my eyes. They
laughed and laughed until they had to hold their sides. And the guys with
the pistols laughed, too. One of the dead men grabbed a pistol and opened
up on his murderer until the guy—I think it was Big George Pollock—threw
up his hands and screamed, "You’re too close, damn it! That
hurts!" When I heard those words, it occurred to me that I hadn’t
heard the gunshots—not real gunshots, but just little pops like a kid’s
roll of caps. (Probably even less noisy than that, since the window didn’t
seem to filter out much of the ruckus.) At the same time, two other guys
with guns had turned on each other and were having a shoot-out at the OK
Corral. Something pinged on the glass right in front of me like an angry
insect, and I watched a big drop of red run down the window.
So it had all been a game. I guess I should have been
relieved. I guess I was, but I was also mad as hell. I thought it was the
stupidest thing I had ever seen. It made me want to turn right on my heel
and walk out of there for good. But I’d left my overcoat and my
overnight bag inside, and I didn’t really have any other place to go or
any way to get there. I just ground my teeth and clenched my fists for a
while, waiting for things to die down inside. I wasn’t dumb enough to
walk in on this until the air was out of their sails.
When they were all finally lounging over the furniture
and crowding around the booze, I slipped silently through the back door.
The heat almost suffocated me. That was how steamed up I’d gotten
outside after being cold as ice. Jimmy was the first one to see me, his
legs thrown over the arm of a chair and his head about to roll off his
shoulders.
"God, Johnny, where’ve you been? Where’ve you
been?" he said. "You missed all the fun!"
"Yeah," I said. "I saw."
I came down the couple of steps to the sunken area
around the fireplace—I told you the place had class—and went to the
bar to see if there was anything left. I thought a fingerful of Scotch
might do me good. But most of the bottles were rolling around on the
carpet. Where they should have been was a very realistic-looking pellet
gun. I barely nudged it with my finger. "Some fun. Some game. I guess
you guys got tired of replaying the season, so you thought you’d refight
the war."
"Ah, don’t be a sourpuss, Johnny," said
Nick, with more red than white showing on his chest.
"We were commemorating your immortal escape,"
said the college boy. There was a splotch of red right in the middle of
his forehead. "We had three prison guards, and the rest of us had to
make it from the kitchen to the hearth."
"You may have noticed I got back from my escape
with two good eyes," I said. "If that pellet had been an inch
lower and a little to the side, you’d be hawking peanuts in the stands
next spring."
Well, that left them all quiet. Even Kowalski—who, I
could tell, had been concentrating with all his brain on some contribution
he was about to make—just stood there with his mouth open. I looked all
around the room, not at them but around them and behind them, every one of
them. "Where’s Natty?" I said.
Just then, as if he’d been listening in and waiting
for his cue, Natty pushed open the swinging door of the kitchen and came
strutting in grandly with another big silver tray of food. And what do you
think was right in the middle of it? More of those damn white chocolate
baseballs, this time as big as life. I was studying how they all seemed to
have numbers written on them like billiard balls while Natty picked his
way into the middle of things, chirping to everybody that he had more
goodies. He came to a sudden halt right in front of me as if he hadn’t
seen me, and cried something like, "Hey, Johnny, you’re back! Just
in time to join us!"
I don’t know why I was so sure it was all fake—maybe
because he’d been so deliberately looking away from me before then that
he must have known I was there all along. And I don’t know why, at the
time, it should have mattered to me, though I know why it matters now. But
even then, at the time, I remember how much it bothered me.
"Look, guys!" he said. "You liked the
other ones so much that I had some more made up, this time bigger and with
your numbers on them. That way we’ll know that everybody gets one."
They all descended on the tray like vultures. I don’t
know if they were that hungry or they just welcomed the excuse to break up
the little conversation I was having with them. There were crackers and
cheese and sausages and other morsels, as well. It all disappeared in
about five seconds, and I heard some more bottles clinking somewhere.
There were just three numbers left in the middle of the platter, nine,
six, and seventeen—Al Malachy’s, Natty’s, and mine. Natty asked
after Mal. Somebody said he’d gone off to find the little room. I
wondered if all the blood-letting had sickened him, after all—but
probably just too much booze. Then Natty turned to me with those fake
fawn-eyes that never blinked. "Johnny," he said. "Don’t
you want yours?"
I looked at the number seventeen. It was done ever so
neatly in blue icing edged in red, like on our uniforms, and I guess it
had been baked on so it wouldn’t run. "How about some real food,
Natty?" I said. "I’ll admit that I'm hungry, but not for
candy. How about a steak or something?"
"Lena’s gone for a few things to go with the
roast and potatoes in the oven," said Natty smoothly.
"Yeah," piped Jimmy over his shoulder,
"like a few blondes and a redhead or two." And some of the guys
added a few things that I won’t bother to write down.
Natty smiled at me like a father indulging his naughty
children. "I told her to pick up a few of her friends on her way
back."
"Well," I said, "I guess I’ll wait,
then."
Natty kept giving me that same big innocent stare, but
his mouth narrowed and hardened underneath it. I could tell that I was
really getting on his nerves, all because I wouldn’t take that dumb
piece of candy. I was more determined than ever now that I wasn’t going
to stuff the thing down my throat. What did he mean, anyway, about making
up a new batch? In two hours, while Lena was out chasing after her friends
and the guys were running all over the lodge shooting each other? Didn’t
they just tell me that the kitchen had been the prison? And Natty was in
there, I suppose, with all those drunken louts, stirring up this candied
crap? I just looked him right back in the eye. We stood that way for a
long time, staring at each other.
It seemed like a long time, at least. But about then,
Kowalski belched something about my not caring for dames. "No wonder
he’s Number Seventeen," he said. "You guys know what they call
that in arithmetic, don’t you? It’s strange. Just like three times
three is nine, that’s… well, and then—"
"Snap out of it, Sledge!" somebody laughed.
But Kowalski wouldn’t be put off. "But nothing
times nothing is seventeen, except itself. Strange. All alone. Kind of…
you know. Queer. A queer number."
"That’s prime number," the college boy
corrected him as quickly as he could, but this time nobody was going to
take the fuse out of the bomb. I grabbed the piece of candy and walked
straight toward my big dumb jerk of a roommate. "Here," I said,
tossing it up and down in the air in front of his nose. "You wanted
another one of these a while back. You eat it."
He just looked at me and smirked, and before he could
work his brain long enough to think up an answer, Natty was there between
the two of us. "Johnny," he said, "he’s been drinking.
Let it go. This is a party!"
I’ll tell you for sure that what stopped me wasn’t
anything Natty had to say. It was the way he said it. His face was
completely changed from a moment ago. His eyes were blinking sixty miles
an hour. What was he so worried about? A good fight never spoiled any
party like this, and it wouldn’t have lasted very long. He was right
about one thing. Kowalski was so soused I could have knocked him over with
my fingertip. I said so, too. "He’s right," I said. "You’re
too drunk—but drunk or not, I swear to God, you say something like that
again and I’ll kick your butt up your nose, and I’ll crisscross the
sides halfway up your fat gut."
He raised his big hambone of a fist to let fly at me.
But before he could even come forward with it, I gave him a push in the
middle of his chest and sent him sprawling on the floor, right on his
back. The guys just laughed, and he kicked and reached like a fish out of
water. I stepped right over him and wandered back toward the door I’d
just come in five minutes earlier. I don’t know why. I had no intention
of going back out. I guess I would have gone looking for my bedroom in
another minute. Imagine my surprise when Natty shows up at my side holding
my overcoat, still wearing that twitchy look on his face.
"Johnny," he whispered, "can you do me a big favor? The
Scotch and Bourbon are almost gone. I told Lena to get some more, but at
the rate these guys are drinking... well, there’s a little village just
a mile or so through those trees where you went walking this afternoon.
You may have seen it."
"Yeah, I saw it," I said.
"There’s a little store on the far edge of town—the
far side from here. Cuddihy’s. Would you... I’ll slip twenty bucks
into your pocket. Do you mind? You’re the only guy here who can walk a
straight line."
And before I had time to think twice about it, he was
helping me get my overcoat on with one hand, and turning the doorknob with
the other. I couldn’t very well say no, especially since I’d told him
I had already been to the village. As my right hand came through the
sleeve in a big fist, we both saw that candy baseball pop up before us.
Natty’s eyes sparkled for just a second, but he snuffed the fire out in
a hurry. "There," he said with a weak, nervous grin. "Take
it with you. You can eat it along the way if you get hungry."
I stuffed the thing in my coat pocket and let him hold
the door open for me. On my way out, I heard somebody shout, "Hey!
Time for one more round of Johnny-Comes-Marching-Home before the girls get
here. This time I get to be a guard."
The door closed on those words, but through the picture
window I could hear Nick DeStefano squeaking, "No shooting at the
face this time. Johnny’s right." The poor schmuck—he never had
much of an eye at the plate, anyway. But he wouldn’t be striking out any
more after tonight.
And that’s my story, believe it or not. That’s all
I know first-hand about the lodge and what went on there. I never saw the
place again, and all I know about what followed is what the papers said
when the police let me see them and what my attorney told me. In the
whirlwind of the last two weeks, I had almost misplaced that second walk
to the village, that walk through the snow at night. It seems to be
floating adrift from everything else in my memory, like another walk I
took through some mountains in northeast France—like a kid’s memory of
his favorite Christmas. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with
anything in this world. It was too good, too pure, too peaceful. Of
course, I knew it was no mile to the village. It was at least two if it
was an inch. Natty had just been trying to finesse me into going. But once
I got started, I enjoyed this walk even more. The forest that had seemed
so dead and still in the weak daylight began to move around me now, almost
as if I were the one rooted to the ground. It was as silent as ever, but
that was one of the things that made it seem alive in the dark. I mean, it’s
not natural for things to be so quiet in the dark. You expect a cricket to
chirp or a leaf to rustle. it was like all the trees were just holding
their breath, watching me and tip-toeing behind me. But the nicest thing
of all was the sky. It was lower than ever, and lighter than ever. I don’t
know if the moonlight was showing through the thin clouds a bit, or if
they could have been reflecting the snow all over the hills they
practically sat on. I don’t know if either one is possible. All I know
is that there was a streak through the clouds just overhead, like a road
where wheels had rutted the snow and piled it up on the shoulders, and
then more snow had fallen on top and you saw only these jaggedy furrows,
all of it just over your head and leading into the treetops. That was the
road I really wanted to take. it seemed so close. I felt like I could just
about jump up to it.
I swear I almost missed the village. I didn’t want to
go on this errand, and I didn’t want to think about all the things that
were pressing in on my mind. Sure, I knew something was wrong—but I didn’t
really know what. I thought maybe it was just me. Like they’re saying
now, I thought maybe I was just a bit crazy. But no, not like they’re
saying now. The truth is, I thought maybe I was the only sane guy left in
the world. And I just wanted out. I wanted so much to follow that road
just over my head.
Well, you can guess the rest. There was a Cuddihy’s,
but not where Natty said it would be. I wasted a lot of time until I found
it right in the middle of the village. And it wasn’t a store at all, but
a bar where half that town must have gathered, so that when I walked in a
bought two bottles of Scotch and two bottles of Bourbon, and then walked
out again without even taking a sip in good sociable company, I must have
looked pretty strange. I must have looked like somebody that intended to
drink himself into his grave. I gather that’s the way the cops put it
together, anyway. They picked me up when I’d gone only a couple of
blocks on the way back. I don’t know if Natty had meant to paint that
part of the picture for them, or if that was a little touch they added for
themselves. Obviously, the main thing he’d wanted to do was get me out
of there for at least the next thirty minutes. Good thing for him that I’m
so strange, as Kowalski says—that I like to go for walks at night. But
of course he knew that. He’d planned on it. That’s why he was able to
paint the picture and put it in a nice frame.
So here I sit in a nice private cell, being treated
with kid gloves because everyone remembers I’m a hero, trying to think
of something to prove myself innocent of a crime I can’t even imagine.
When I try to imagine it, it scares me. It sickens me. I think of what I
saw through that picture window, only this time it’s real bullets and
not pellets with dye. I see Natty playing Nazi prison guard, pointing his
Luger at some poor soused giggling bastard, and squeezing off a couple of
rounds through the guy’s heart. And most of all I see the look on the
guy’s face, the surprise when he realizes that this is real—that his
heart has just been splattered in his chest and he’s already dead—that
this is his last thought and it’s going out like the afterglow of a
flashbulb. And I think of Natty seeing that look, seeing it over and over
again—setting the whole thing up just so he could see it over and over
again. I think of what a sick swine he must have been all along. And then
I think, "Wait a minute! It’s me that’s being charged with
murder!" How do I defend myself when I can’t even stand to think
about it? I wonder if Natty had counted on that, too?
He obviously didn’t count on one thing. He was in
critical condition for three days with a gunshot wound through the back
that barely missed his own rotten heart. Lena must not have meant to pop
him quite so close to home. Maybe she just got nervous. Maybe her hand
shook. Or maybe he got nervous. It’s hard to picture a sniveling coward
like Natty gunning down thirteen men to their faces, even when they all
thought the bullets were wax. And it’s even harder to imagine him
turning his back so that Lena could plug him somewhere soft and give him
the perfect alibi. Jesus, man, you must have hated us all an awful lot for
your hatred to be that much greater than your fear.
My attorney told me Al Malachy was found next to the
bathroom window, shot six times all over the chest, front and back. All
the others were cleaner. Just a shot or two at point-blank range. First
the prisoners, I suppose. And then a little Hopalong Cassidy action with
the two or three guys that had the pellet guns. But Mal was different. In
his hurry to mow them all down while I was out of the way, Natty had
forgotten to count. He’d forgotten that Mal was in the bathroom.
Somehow, Mal had seen what was happening. Maybe he’d come out a few
minutes later and seen all the blood—not dye, but blood, made extra thin
by pints and pints of alcohol, knee-deep all over the floor. Maybe he
screamed and ran back into the bathroom. Anywhere else and he might have
just thrown himself through a window. But the bathroom window was too
small. Natty follows him in. This time he has to kill someone who knows he’s
going to die. His hand shakes, and he doesn’t shoot so straight. He has
to shoot over and over again. How did it feel, Natty? Did all the fun go
out of it this time?
My attorney’s right about one thing. As I put all
this stuff down on paper, certain things are becoming very clear.
Obviously, Natty had a silencer when he finished. Otherwise, everyone
would have scrambled at the first shot. But with a silencer, that Luger
would have sounded about like a pellet gun, at least with all the
screaming and all the booze in their brains. He had to take the silencer
off, though, because the story was that I went bonkers when I saw them all
playing with the pellet guns. It’s no secret that I don’t like to talk
about the war. More than one reporter who tried to squeeze me for a story
about Germany got a short answer. I even grabbed one hack by his yellow
collar. Nice little puzzle just waiting for the other pieces—I see the
play-shooting, go crazy, snatch the Luger, and think I’m in the middle
of the Bulge. I shoot everyone in sight, including Natty—who, good
little host and choir boy that he is, hadn’t wanted to play the game and
almost managed to make it out the front door. Then I wander off into the
dark night like a zombie, dropping the Luger in the snow just outside the
lodge. Of course my fingerprints were all over it. Natty had seen to that.
But I wouldn’t have put a silencer on it—not in my crazy, berserk
state.
So where’s the silencer? That’s one thing the cops
can look for. They haven’t found it yet because they haven’t been
looking for it, but it’s there. If they go back and look for it, they’ll
find it somewhere.
Another thing. If I flip my lid, would I have the
presence of mind to reload the pistol? Would there be another clip handy?
What was it doing loaded in the first place? By my count there were enough
rounds fired that I would have needed to reload at least once. A small
thing, and some police psychiatrist will probably get up and swear that
crazies can do all the things I’m supposed to have done. But I don’t
know. That’s something somebody should think about.
And there’s this, too. Either Natty tossed that Luger
out into the snow, or Lena did. I think Natty did it. For one thing, he
had arranged it all so carefully, he’d want to see to as many details as
he could. Why trust Lena when he could see to it himself? And if he tossed
it there’d only be two sets of prints on it—his, as the owner’s, and
mine, as the murderer’s. If Lena touched it, my prints might get
smeared, plus the fact that someone might begin to wonder why this gun got
handled so much.
So that brings me to the clencher. Natty couldn’t
toss the gun if he’d just been shot, okay? Then I ask myself, why should
he let himself get shot with the Luger in the first place when a little
peashooter would do the trick? As long as he got shot, nobody would look
too close at the wound or try to recover the bullet, and it would sure be
a lot less painful for him. So Natty tosses the Luger, and Lena shoots him
with some little snub-nose job in her purse. Maybe it’s still there.
Probably not. But the bullet’s still there, in the wall right before the
front door. Lena would have stood so close that it would’ve passed right
through. He’d make her, so she wouldn’t miss the sweet spot—which
she might just have done on purpose, the sweetie—and maybe he’d even
kneel down right before, so he wouldn’t break his mug falling. The
bullet’s there, all right, in the floor if not the wall. If they dig it
out, they’ll find out it’s not the same caliber as the others. They
haven’t found it yet because they weren’t looking for it. If they go
back, they’ll find it.
And where was supper? Natty told me Lena had a roast in
the oven. There was no roast in the oven. Would you waste a good roast,
knowing it would never be touched? Maybe he’ll call me a liar from his
hospital bed, but then he’ll have to explain what he intended to feed so
many big men. I’ll bet there’s not even anything in the pantry. They
didn’t notice because they didn’t look. But they’ll go back and
look, and they’ll see that I’m right.
Lena wasn’t cooking anything any more than she went
out after friends. She was hiding in the lodge and waiting, just waiting.
Or maybe she drove the car around the bend and stopped. But she came back
immediately at Natty’s signal. She had to, because she phoned the police
from there—they were on my tail minutes after it happened. They knew
just where to find me. How did they know—how did she know? If she was
collecting friends, how could she have known where I went? Or if she’s
saying she saw the whole thing, then why did I leave her alive? Proof that
I’m crazy, I guess.
They fixed the time of death to an ace, and they picked
me up not half an hour later after Lena called, from what I understand. So
why did she wait to call? A half hour to walk to the village, and I’m
sure somebody must have seen me knocking around looking for Cuddihy’s.
Call it almost an hour. That leaves about half an hour between the
shootings and her call. Hasn’t anyone thought what a long time that is?
They’ll think now, and the whole puzzle will start coming apart. Or say
the time of death isn’t fixed so well. Say that I stagger around the
house for a while like Frankenstein, looking for more victims, and finally
walk out the door after half an hour, then the very next minute Lena
rushes to the phone. So what did I do, sprint the two miles to the village
through the snow? Did I look winded when I walked into Cuddihy’s? A lot
of people will say otherwise. Either way, it all comes apart.
Poor Natty, your girl can’t even cook! And to make
matters worse, maybe she’s a thinker. Maybe she imagined how she could
have you out of the way completely instead of being tied to you for life
as an accomplice, never able to refuse you anything, always wondering when
you’d spring a leak. Or maybe she just flinched before pulling the
trigger, or maybe you did. But I’ll bet you gave her everything you had,
and she still liked the thought of you lying there dead.
Which one of you made the candy, Natty? Lena may have
stirred the pot, but it was your recipe. I’ve figured that out, too,
sitting here writing it all down. The first batch had something in it like
pep pills. Not that you needed some witch’s brew to get that bunch of
guys to act wild—but a little insurance couldn’t hurt, and the drug
along with the booze would make their hearts pump faster, make their blood
spill out like a fountain. That had to be why you didn’t want Kowalski
stuffing four or five of the things down his throat. If he keeled over in
a coma, the whole dance would have to be called off. Plus the fact that
there would be none for Johnny.
But you knew that Johnny hadn’t taken his, anyway.
Even though I lied to you out there on the back porch, you could tell that
my nerves were too calm. It didn’t really matter the first time around,
though, especially since I went for a walk. But the second time—that was
another matter. I had to take my medicine then, because I was the patsy. I
was the one guy that was going to be left alive, and you had to be sure
that I’d just sit there like a dummy and watch you shoot the daylights
out of everyone.
What exactly did you put in Number Seventeen, Natty?
The others probably just had more of the same old joy juice. But mine was
the one that was different. That was why they were all numbered—because
Number Seventeen was different from all the others. And that’s why you
almost passed out when I was going to stuff mine down Kowalski’s big
mouth. I guess it would have put me into a crazed stupor. The police would
have arrived, and I would have been sitting there foaming at the mouth and
quivering all over like a lunatic—a lunatic with a gun in his hand who’d
just shot thirteen people. They wouldn’t have tested my blood because
they wouldn’t have seen any need to. The picture would be right there
before them, and Lena would be standing by to frame it—she saw the whole
thing, or she’d just got back and heard your last words before you
fainted, or whatever. I can’t wait to hear how her part goes!
But now there had to be some last-minute adjustments,
since you couldn’t just blindly hope that I’d pull the candy out and
eat it on my way to the village. I’ll have to hand it to you—the new
touches matched all the other colors. It was really beautiful, really
daring—not what anyone would have expected of The Nasty Gnat. You hated
us all so much that you took some awfully big chances to make everything
fit. When I think of all those guys just stumbling around giggling, too
boozy to make anything of the silencer that was leveled at their ribs—I
wouldn’t slaughter a bunch of hungry rats the way you cut those guys
down. And you engineered it, Natty. Shooting fish in a barrel—or out of
a spilled barrel, flapping around on the floor with their mouths gaping
and their eyes bugging. That was just the way you’d dreamed of it. You
sick son of a bitch.
Of course, they probably won’t find Number Seventeen
now. It was in my overcoat pocket, and some stupid desk sergeant probably
carried it off to his coffee break. Then he had a world-champion headache
and had to be taken home sick. He didn’t tell his superiors what he’d
eaten because he didn’t want to be walking a beat again. Just my luck.
And even if it happened the way I just wrote it, and someone got sick in
such-and-such an office on such-and-such a day and he confesses what he
ate, they won’t be able to prove what was in the candy. It would never
hold up in court. I know that.
But the other piece, the one I dropped into the snow—that’s
a different matter. That one’s still there, Natty, and it’s just
waiting to be found. There’ve been no ants, and there’ve been no
birds. The snow has kept falling, and it’s gotten colder and colder.
Tomorrow’s Christmas Day, Natty. Maybe tonight they’ll find my little
present in the snow. That’s all I need. Just one piece of candy with one
little dose of something nasty. Then my whole story begins to hold up,
Natty. Because otherwise, what would that something nasty be doing in even
one piece of candy? It’s there under a foot of snow, Natty—your ticket
to the electric chair. I’m a free man and you’re a dead one. It’s
just a matter of time now.
Of course, there’ll still be some strong evidence on
your side. It might be close to fifty-fifty. After all, you got shot and I
didn’t. You’re lying in the hospital, not me. Lena did you a favor
when she almost killed you. That’s your best defense.
But they’ll sweat her after they find the candy. And
if they do, you know she won’t go down with you. They’ll cut her a
little slack. My best buddy back in Basic was a cop. A whip and a carrot,
he used to say—that’s how they question suspects. That’s how a
couple of them questioned me yesterday. Some smart cop will offer Lena a
nice fat carrot. She can say that she never knew you had killing in mind,
that she thought you just wanted to get the boys drunk and make them look
like idiots. She walks into the lodge, sees all the bodies, gets scared
crazy as you come at her with the Luger, and shoots you with a gun in her
purse. Then she tosses the Luger and fingers me because if they pin it on
you, she’s afraid she’ll have an equal piece of whatever you get. But
as it turns out—as a new picture takes shape between her and some
detective—she was really just a victim, and all she ever did was defend
herself. It’ll be an easy sell to everyone. The press already calls you
"black magic". It’ll be a real good deal for her, Natty, maybe
just a slap on the hand in return for her testimony. And then you won’t
have a friend in the world. It’ll just be a race to see if they can
strap you in the chair before the whole city drags you out to the nearest
lamp post.
I don’t know why I’ve fallen into writing this to
you of all people. I was supposed to be writing to the jury. I shouldn’t
be writing at all now, but yelling at the guard to get my attorney. I’ve
untied the bag you put me in and made a noose for your neck out of the
string that held it shut. You know as well as anyone that they love me in
this town as much as they hate you. Christmas Eve, and the detectives
offered to work overtime if I came up with anything. Mr. Dotson says if
they turn up something good, he’ll get me out of here tonight and take
me home with him. He has a wife and three kids—that’s how much he
believes I’m a crazed killer! He says the District Attorney has left
orders to be called at any time before midnight at his house. They’re
all ready to rubber-stamp me right out of here with a lot less evidence
than I’m going to have soon, Natty. Why didn’t you think of that? You
thought of everything else. Why didn’t you make Kowalski the villain of
the piece? You hated his guts, he hated yours, and nobody would have that
much trouble buying that he blew his stack and did something crazy. Why
me? What did I ever do to you?
But it had to be me, didn’t it? It’s because I’m
the American Dream come true—Lou Gehrig turned war hero—that it had to
be me. My God, it wasn’t personal, after all. It was just because I was
the perfect portrait of everything you weren’t, the masterpiece of that
great dumb public that threw spitwads at your face. You figured that the
best way to get even with them all was to make their golden boy grow
fangs. I think I get it now. That was really the whole point, even more
than murdering those thirteen other guys. You had to turn the headlines
upside-down—it was vengeance on the whole country. I get it now. And to
do that, you had the guts to match The Nasty Gnat against Clean John. My
God, that took guts, after all.
Not that you don’t deserve to fry ten times over. I’m
going to see that they do it to you. You deserve it, Natty, not because of
me or the other thirteen guys so much as for the hundreds of thousands
that died to stop the kind of thing you went through. When this hits the
papers, the Kowalskis of the world are all going to say, "They ought
to run all that scum right out of the country, or round them all up and
lock them all away forever." It’ll be almost like I never went to
war, like none of us ever went to war—like all the ones who went and
died did it for nothing. You’re going to set everything back twenty
years. There’s not a death in this world that’s ugly enough for what
you deserve.
But you had guts, after all. Maybe if I had that kind
of guts, I’d tear up this stack of papers. Maybe I’d confess and spend
the rest of my life in jail, just so all the guys I fought beside wouldn’t
have given up their youth and their sweet dreams and their lives for
nothing. I want to do it—I’d like to do it. What I wouldn’t give to
see your face, if I did do it! That would be the real way to snuff you out
and turn you into nothing. The world would never catch fire from your
hatred. No one would ever know.
But I can’t. I’m already climbing the walls in
here, and it’s been less than two weeks. The rest of my life? Maybe if
they were going to execute me, maybe then—but they’ll never execute
Clean John. You saw to that, too. You want me festering in their side for
the next fifty years, not buried tomorrow and forgotten next week. And I
just can’t do it. I guess that’s why I bailed out of that German troop
carrier. I figured they’d shoot me down or I’d break my neck, but
neither held a candle to the thought of being cooped up for months and
years. I needed out. I need out.
So I’ll raise my voice in just another minute. I’ll
wake up Christmas Day on Mr. Dotson’s sofa. I’ll watch his three kids
open their presents, and I’ll call Sis long-distance and tell her to
stick this in her in-laws’ faces. I didn’t want to go to Philadelphia
for Christmas, anyway—at least you saved me that trip. But I don’t
want her to take on. If it all goes fast enough, maybe I’ll call
tonight. Just like Santa Claus.
And then I’ll leave the Dotsons alone and take a walk
down to the stadium. It’ll be cold but clear. The streets will be empty
except for a few kids trying out their sleds. And around the stadium,
there won’t be anyone. I’ll jump a fence and get out on the field.
Stadiums, you know, are all haunted. By the Ruths and the Gehrigs, but
also by the Hitlers and Mussolinis. All those cheers, all those boos. And
tomorrow there’ll be nothing but a foot of snow. That would be a picture
worth seeing.
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Dr. Palaver
De omnibus pauca, de nullo omnia.
Dear Doctor,
I, too, am disturbed by the Spanish language’s
apparently ungovernable affection for trend, slang, and popular parlance.
Your editor has now written two pieces on foreign language which lament
that Spanish-speakers, in particular, seem to have no regard for
grammatical proprieties and no awareness of literary tradition. There are
innumerable instances besides those mentioned in Praesidium of
misused words which are now mainstream Spanish. Perjuicio can still
mean "prejudice", but it is more often used by ordinary folks to
mean "harm" or "damage". As far as I know, contestar
has long ceased to mean "contest, take issue with", and now
means only "answer, respond to". After watching a Spanish
newscast in utter perplexity the other night, I finally learned that the
word secuestro means "kidnapping" exclusively. I have no
idea how a Spanish speaker would say "sequestration" these days.
I suppose he just doesn’t say it.
I know that all languages subtly shift the meanings of
their words as they grow; but the common thread in these cases is that a
usefully precise meaning is being shoved aside in favor of a blunt,
general meaning for which other words already exist. I can well imagine
some untutored onlooker picking up words like perjuicio and contestar
from the conversation of the village priest or of an intellectual stumping
for political office and coming away with such misconceptions: "He
said he contested their definition of prejudice. Let’s see, that means
he came back with a different answer about what hurts people." That
such dull interpretation should be allowed to decide the future of a
language is very sad—and I would think that the friends of Spanish would
be the first to see this.
The Knight of the Sorrowful Figure
Dear Wistful Paladin,
It will come as little comfort to you, no doubt, if I
observe that all languages are now pursuing the same sort of
"development" as Spanish. While frittering away some time the
other day with a crossword puzzle, I found that "yield" was
offered as a clue for the word "relent". Now, if surrendering is
not a good 180 degrees from lightening up, it is at least 90. The word
"disintegrate" is believed by most young people to be a synonym
for "annihilate", probably thanks to sci-fi movies. I could go
on. What angers me about the degeneration of English is how willingly the
academy has presided over it. A Chilean peasant has every excuse in the
world not to understand Octavio Paz… but what’s the excuse around
campus for bristling at the word "niggardly"?
Dear Doctor,
I was shocked the other day to hear it suggested that
the word "croak", when used as slang to mean "kill",
is actually very old and not (as I had thought) a coinage of the last
fifty years. Is this true? At the time of being taken to task, I was
criticizing a Western movie which otherwise had very authentic language
for using the word to refer to a lynching. Maybe my learned co-viewer was
just pulling my leg.
Stickler for Proper Slang
Dear Defender of Standards,
Three cheers for the Western—such authenticity is
indeed rare, for "croak" in the sense of "snuff out"
has specific reference (believe it or not) to hanging! The word was
borrowed directly from the Celtic languages (crochadh in Irish and crogi
in Welsh). Heaven only knows how it found its way into mainstream American
slang—probably through the same urban populations of Irish immigrants
which gave us "galore" (from go leor, "to the full,
aplenty") and "shanty" (from sean tighe, "old
house"). We all know that language conceals many lessons in
sociology. The people who were getting themselves hanged in
disproportionate numbers back in the nineteenth century were, not
surprisingly, the ones who had the fewest resources and drew the least
sympathy among the broader populace: people such as Irish day-laborers and
Welsh coal miners.
Dear Doctor,
I have long been puzzled and dismayed at how
prolifically words ending in –al are producing their own nouns
these days. I suppose "prolificality" could be coined at any
minute, for that matter. Words like "practicality" and
"modality" have been around for decades, if not centuries, even
though the Romans had no practicalitas or modalitas; yet
still other words—the kind that particularly offend me—just pop out of
the ground like poisonous toadstools, usually in some scholarly journal
that I read. Theatricality? Literality? When did "rascalry"
become "rascality"? Is a tendency to imitate Pascal destined to
be called, perhaps, "pascality"? It seems to me that some sort
of line has clearly been crossed by such jaw-breakers and
headache-harbingers.
Dictionality Policeman
Dear Blather-Buster,
The Romans, of course, had a very shallow pool of
abstract nouns due to their "hands on" approach to life. Were it
not for Cicero, all of the few philosophical opera of pagan Latin
would have been heavily seasoned with Greek words. The early Christian
church, once it had adopted Latin rather than Greek as its preferred means
of broadcasting to the world, was forced to import or invent a great many
more –tas words (castitas, fidelitas, caritas)
since it was projecting ultimate reality as nothing less than a lofty
abstraction from the deceptive minutiae of day-to-day living. You can
thank Christianity for the most intense influx of these words before the
twentieth century.
Then we have the words which really offend you—and
rightly so. There’s no excuse for the super-abundance of abstract nouns
in much academic writing. Indeed, such nouns are invariably founded upon
false abstraction. An essay by our staff which appears in this issue
("Look Homeward, Angela": see p. 6) partially cites a call for
scholarly papers. The version of this involuntarily amusing document which
reached my desk contained further matter about the "physicality"
of homeland boundaries. The example is classic. National boundaries, you
will admit, cannot be other than physical: a wall, a fence, and river.
Even a line of longitude running along a map serves to designate a
physical line not reinforced by walls or fences or rivers, perhaps, but
entirely determinable by a team of surveyors. The state of being physical
is not an attribute of a nation which may be contemplated apart from the
concept of nationhood: it is essential, rather, to that concept’s
definition. Nothing physical, no nation. To contemplate the ethereality of
air would make just as much sense.
Now, the question naturally arises, why is such
falsely abstract asininity proliferating today? If early Christianity was
injecting a salutary note spirituality into the Roman world, the current
passion for abstraction surely has far more to do with the beloved
obfuscations of pettifoggers and bureaucrats. Lawyers, professors, and
government flunkeys all share a need to say little or nothing behind the
artful appearance of having said a great deal. Of the professorial class
(with which my familiarity is deepest), I must confess also that I observe
an unflattering kind of honesty involved in this muddle-mindedness. Many
young scholars quite frankly do not know how to think, because they have
never been taught how. The conference referred to in my previous paragraph
was probably not the product of a long sigh and the plaint,
"Oh, God… what topic can we do this year?" No, I suspect a lot
of good young minds are sincerely enthusiastic about exploring the
physicality of boundaries. That’s what goes on at institutions of higher
learning now: people sit around discussing the airiness of air.
Having strayed thus far into the subject (and committed
Praesidium, already, to a second page of "hard copy" for
my column), I shall anticipate the objection that surely some of
the abstract nouns christened in academic writing are useful. No doubt;
but the vast majority is indeed the fuzzy coalescence of ratiocinative
lint. Take "theatricality". Does the state of being theatrical
deserve elevation to an imperishable vice or virtue? Isn’t the vice in
question vanity, and doesn’t the theatrical person simply display his
vanity in public, highly visible places? Or return to
"physicality". To assert the physical form of something would
necessarily be to distinguish that same something from its non-physical
form—and of what category of things are we compelled to do this?
Boundaries, perhaps: that is, concepts for which a physical object
condenses or concentrates an effect or import—cases of synecdoche, in a
word. The Berlin Wall was both physical and symbolic. Yes, very well. But
to designate the Wall’s concrete dimension as "physicality" is
to blur rather than to clarify its complex truth. The material barrier did
not "have physicality": it was the physical facet of a symbol.
To divide the Wall up into physicality and spirituality (for instance)
would be to dismantle its symbolic power rather than to achieve deeper
understanding of it. Were one to undertake a purely physical operation
upon the Wall’s purely physical dimension—pouring cement into a crack,
say—one could not declare, "I am presently interested only in the
Wall’s physicality," without being ridiculously bombastic. In such
circumstances, The Wall would merely be a wall. Its symbolic
nature would have vanished for the moment, and the assertion that a
wall was a physical object would be a fatuous tautology of the sort
that seldom passes a bricklayer’s lips.
The profusion of abstract nouns among our
intelligentsia is in fact the flip side of hierarchical thinking’s
obliteration among the same class. Our professional intellectuals no
longer arrange things one beneath another: all is strewn laterally across
the table, waiting to severed from the whole and admired in isolation at
the individual thinker’s whimsy. It has been often and fairly said that
the proto-literate Homer reduced every idea to a hard object. Now our
post-literate, wired-and-woolly day-dreamers refine every solid object
into a free-floating fantasy as they court a perverse, mildly insane
mysticism.
As I type, I have noticed that my word-processing
program has thrown a red line under your "rascalry" and has not
red-lined my "physicality"; so, you see, the infection is
already in our collective bloodstream.
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