And it is very scary to be in such a position, so you have to keep securing it. You severely rank the country. You put half the people in death camps or gulags or poverty or maybe you actually kill them—but for such a direct method, you may be called mad by other nations, as is Idi Amin. Then you put safe women in great houses where they can be inseminated only by those with the proper credentials, so you can raise a race of legitimates. The rest deserve what they get. Eventually, you tell your confidants, the world will be a great stall for a few black-jacketed or brown-shirted men to romp in, and everyone else will be dead or at-your-service.
But it is still scary, yes, because to secure your legitimacy, everyone else must be disinherited. And in time, the legitimate must hear the cries of the starving hordes just beyond the iron gates, and so must build higher and higher iron gates, pile more concrete around the bunker, must drink only bottled and tested water, breathe only canned and tested air.
Power held and loved and cherished in the hands for no other end than itself, yes. Oh, eventually, it dies, of course. It goes round and round, eating everything in sight, and never excreting, jealous of conferring, by accident, one magical bit of itself that might be seized upon and used by the unlawful to work a spell. So, bloated and glutted, it topples over, unable to control its own swollen body.
Except that now they were working on better and better ways to control—buttons and wires and wirelesses and computers that could reach not only the four corners of the earth, but even to space. And anyway, it is no consolation that the legitimates die, because there are always new ones to spring up and take their places, claiming transcendence, claiming invulnerability. And besides that, they always take us with them. Certainly. Look, there, that pink-cheeked boy with the tam and the rifle, standing scared on the street corner, he never finished school, and the army at least paid a decent wage, so there he is, but just behind him (he can’t see them, but look and you will) are some children, not much older than eleven, sneaking up behind him, three of them, boys, with a bomb, just a little one. There! now you see the explosion, and the pink cheeks and the tam are in slivers, the boys didn’t do much better, one ran faster and got away with one leg intact, the others lie there, their blood mingling with the soldier’s now, in death, when it is too late.
Yes, and there is a slender golden-skinned boy with fair hair, who used to play with his sister on the veldt, and who always had to be reminded to brush his teeth, but who learned to obey because his father had a broad belt, and right this minute he is lifting his rifle, aiming it at a brown-skinned boy in a tree whom he takes for a guerilla, and who knows? maybe he is. C
RACK
! goes the rifle. D
OWN
falls the brown-skinned boy, the branches break as he hits them, his head clobbers the ground like a coconut and the brains spill out and the golden-skinned boy turns away a little ill, and pulls his illness together and molds it into righteousness and marches home and announces his feat. Never again will he cry: he will only shout. That’s how the transcendents do away with pain.
Yes, and there, that one, he isn’t very old, younger than Tony, he looks a little like Tony, same dark hair and sensual mouth and eyes. He too learned early to obey Father, and Father stands behind him now, Father-Commandant, Father-Superior, Father-in-Heaven, ordering him to do it, to do it, to place the electrodes on the woman’s vulva, and he does, and the switch is pulled, and the woman shrieks and writhes and passes out, there is a terrible smell of burning flesh and the Father says
good
and the boy creeps back to his quarters and lies on his bunk with his legs drawn up into his stomach and tries not to think, tries to remember his village, but all he can remember there is hunger.
And if he grows up, he too will have to be a Father, for his guilt will permit him no other alternative.
Yes, yes, but maybe it’s no worse now than it ever was. Maybe she shouldn’t dread it as if it were the end of a livable world, maybe things had always been this bad only you didn’t know about it.
Picture: a hovel in bare country, scrub trees and sandy soil, people bent and wrinkled and nearly toothless by thirty (even though they didn’t eat white bread), bodies permanently stiffened into odd postures by work and cold, calloused feet wrapped in rags, minds nearly crazy with hunger and ignorance. Cold indoors and out; never enough fuel to do much more than bake the bread that is usually their only meal, and to keep a spark of the fire going. They milk the cow with stiff fingers, and bring it and their chickens indoors with them at night. The woman nurses her children as long as she can, or until they die. If they die quickly, she nurses herself into a cup and feeds the two who have somehow, miraculously, lived.
Their farm is in Cornwall, on the rough ragged coast, or in Crabbe country, perhaps. It is the middle of the fifteenth century. The country is falling apart, between civil wars and the plague. And one day up rides this band of marauders, wild, crazy-eyed kids out of the army because of missing eyes or limbs and no dole, but still able to ride. Come tearing up on hungry horses and rip the bread from their hands, kill the children, rape the woman, murder the man and then the woman, and burn the hovel. So mean it didn’t require burning, it would have retreated back into the earth in no time at all.
Four skinny bodies wrapped in rags, two of them tiny, lie on the dirt floor as the straw flares and catches. The crazy kids yell crazily. They kill the cow and eat it over a couple of days until it begins to stink. Then they kill the chickens and eat them with the feathers still clinging in places. Then they ride off to find another hovel. It will be days before they do, and two of them will be dead by then.
“As our life is very short, so is it very miserable; and therefore it is well it is short.” Jeremy Taylor should be resurrected and taken on a junket to Marin County.
Things are better, aren’t they?
Still: who before the twentieth century could have imagined a long line of railroad tracks with connections to all of Europe, dotted all along the way with little white railroad stationhouses, decorated with pots of bright flowers and quaint signs bearing phony names? All designed to calm down people who couldn’t get away anyhow, who were going to places that had signs over them saying
Arbeit Macht Frei,
where they would be forced to work. Slavery is an old institution, but what kind of insane slavery was that? It was the first wave, how many millions? the first line of the ridding the earth of the untouchables, the forever and irredeemably illegitimate. There were to be many more, but the giant toppled. It doesn’t matter. He lives elsewhere.
And yet we forget. We forget it all, as we forget the Albigensians, the Amalekites, what they did to Joan. Even though the signs are still there, we forget.
What lies beyond the signs is beyond imagining. You have to see it. You have to go to Theresienstadt, climb out the single lookout tower that is left, and gaze out at miles of silence. Not a single red patch stains the dry brown earth, for all the blood that was spilled there. The wind blows through and doesn’t weep as it passes, for all the cries that were heard there. And for all the agony that was felt there, there is no monument, no bleeding heart set into the image of a god, nothing but the barren earth. Not a wall remains. No voice comes on the soft wind late at night and sings lamentations.
At Auschwitz the ovens stand empty, birds sing in the trees surrounding the compound, they peck in the earth. In a display case huge as a truck are shoes and boots taken from the prisoners. The boots crinkle and curl down, sad as bassets’ eyes, but no sigh wrinkles the air. Even the visitors keep their mouths shut.
No depiction of human pain can ever suggest its reality. Even the earth doesn’t remember, it doesn’t want to remember. The world would drown in its own tears if it ever let itself feel its grief.
So maybe their way is better. Forget it! Onward and upward! Hey, young feller, pick yourself up (and wipe them tears offa your cheek), dust yourself off and
GET OUT THERE AND WIN THAT GAME
!
L
ADIES AND GENTLEMEN, HE’S COMING BACK! LISTEN TO THAT APPLAUSE!
N
OTHING CAN STOP HIM
! Not osteomyelitis or his bad heart or his broken knee or his fractured collarbone or his ingrown toenail or his wife in the loony bin or his mother on the dry-out farm or his little baby kidnapped: N
OTHING! HE’S DOING IT FOR THE OLD MAN, LOOK AT HIM, WILL YOU, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE HERO’S FATHER STANDING UP!
S
TANDING UP!
The hero is running off and off, into the future with a bomb in his arms.
Yes, but you had to admit it was a way of surviving. They deny pain. Is your way any better?
To deny pain you must deny all feeling. Denying feeling leads to insanity.
And who’s the most insane person around here, huh?
It’s true. Watching TV one night back in the States, the evening news. Report on a new weight-losing technique: Diet with Jesus. The women (they were, of course, all women) gathered weekly, were weighed, compared statistics, and read the Bible and prayed together. Sufficient faith, they insisted, would sustain them in their ordeal. The interviewer homed in on a woman who was not at all fat, even on TV.
Microphone in hand, hushed voice, reverent attitude, crock of shit: “You have just listened to a passage from the Bible. Tell me, what did it mean to you?”
The woman had a soft Southern voice, a sweet manner, a child’s eyes: “That passage tells me that I don’t need to eat to feel filled. It tells me that Jesus will fill me with His love.”
Dolores had (naturally) burst into tears.
Everyone is a woman to somebody, but everyone doesn’t admit it.
That nice Southern lady, there, she should have an affair. It was guaranteed to work, for a month or six. Of course she won’t. Too pious: a good girl. Slowly, over the years, she will dry up, begin to say
Tssk
at movies with too much flesh in them, begin to feel what so many people felt, that sex was the deepest evil. (Forgetting the dry earth, not knowing about Theresienstadt.) She was a nice woman, she’d try not to turn vicious. She’d screw her face up into a smile and although somebody could see the trembling at the corners of her mouth, nobody would mention it, and she would say that she certainly did try to understand the young people of today even though she, of course, came from a different generation.
She might try tranks or booze or tennis or golf or bridge. She’d sit in a chair in front of the TV and her mouth would crinkle up and she’d read romances in which every titillation and no consummation occurred. Sundays she’d go to church and Thursday nights to the Ladies’ Auxiliary.
Her husband believes he is different from her: she’s a lady and he’s a
man
—a
real
man. Fast and hard in bed, he’s convinced he’s a great lover, but his wife just isn’t, well … she’s a good woman, you see. He’d done his share of being wild, he wasn’t no saint, he had to admit it (but not to her), he had a bit of the devil in him. But sittin there in church with her on Sundays and listenin to that minister givin him what for, the feelin creeps upon him that maybe it wasn’t so good after all, what he was doin, and that that Betty now, boy did she have a pair though, well, she was fun, but if truth be told, she weren’t much better than a whore.
It was sex itself that was evil, like the Bible said.
So he gave it up. For the most part. He took to rifle practice on Tuesday nights, bowling Wednesdays, and poker with the guys on Fridays. Over the weekend (Thank the Lord in His Mercy) there was football. And he stopped, for the most part, just that any woman that wasn’t a good woman like his wife, that dressed a little—well, you know—or walked out on the street at night alone: well, she got what was comin to her. But he was sure he had conquered the vice in his soul. Just had to get these tramps, these whores of Babylon, these temptresses under control.
But he, himself, he was saved! Hallelujah!
(Meanwhile, in Cambodia, government forces were wiping out villages suspected of wrong thinking.)
He would not notice when he beat his son with his belt for stealing money from his mama’s purse to buy candy with that he was hitting too hard, that he didn’t even hear the child’s screams, that his wife was pulling on his arm, calling him, screaming at him. Because the kid wasn’t getting the message, wasn’t understanding him: Do not expect pleasure in this life! Learn to obey!
He was pure and free from sin and he ought to know.
Nor would his wife notice, when her daughter was overjoyed with something that had happened in school that day, was whirling around in the living room in extravagant elation, and she went in with pursed lips, hearing the crash, having expected it, and said: You see there now! You knocked over the table! It’s a wonder you didn’t break the lamp. Now you stop, hear?: that she was saying, Don’t move, don’t expect, you’ll bring everything down around you.
(In Argentina, at that very moment, the secret police whisked a young couple off the street and took them to a prison that had no official existence.)
Oh, what’s the point of trying to sort these things out?
The point is that one has no choice.
But your truths are always so simple.
Yes. Bus ride somewhere, a conference, yes, near Chicago, all of us on the way to the airport. Professor Bickford, elderly and respected, had come to her lecture. He hobbled up the aisle from his seat to hers and asked permission to sit beside her.
He had listened to her talk, he said. Thought she was brilliant, profound.
He can’t be coming on. I don’t believe it
He traveled a great deal, he said.
I don’t believe it, he wouldn’t. He’s an innocent Of course, I’ve been surprised before. Remember that kindly old toothless man in Assisi? Told you he was ninety-two, asked you how you liked his town, and then grabbed you with a wiry hand that felt like a claw.
And in his travels, he said, he met a great many interesting people. Fascinating people.