by Roman McClay
He was fun and he had a beautiful girlfriend -ah, Miss Julee Rae , he mused- and he even charmed his senior-year English teacher so much, had so enchanted Miss Ross, that she told him he need not take the final exam. She had told him that he deserved an A in her class just based upon the writings he had turned in; reports, essays on books he had read on his own time.
Yet, he had taken the world seriously that final year of high school, stopped smoking weed, began lifting weights and voted in the 1992 presidential election; for Ross Perot as a fuck you; a vote that he still got a smile out of. I voted for a crazy billionaire at 18 and again at 42 ; he thought and regretted neither vote. It was fuck you’s the whole time , the whole way down , he thought.
He had voted for Ralph Nader in between these two extremes; those Nader votes were extreme and polarizing votes in themselves. It never occurred to him to be pragmatic about such plebiscites; voting was like most other things to him: a chance to reveal your conscience and an opportunity to make a point. It was the act of a noble and free man performed with dignity of form and content. The idea of voting tactically, or pragmatically, was not merely foreign, but obscene. A man votes his conscience, he thought.
He would insist that those who voted for the lesser of two evils were the one’s wasting their vote, and it was they, they were the ones refusing to take the world seriously; as they lectured him on the damage he was doing by eschewing the duty -they insisted- to line up behind an establishment candidate.
But, he thought, when you think that the nature, the character, of your own behavior is the very opposite of what everyone else thinks of it, when you see yourself as principled and moral, and they do not, well you begin to change. When you see that you think that their behavior is the very definition of the thing that they pretend to condemn; when you see so-called good men, the great mass of men, as cowards and evil, well, then you begin to see that you don’t share the same definitions of words and conceits, not even the same language, and maybe not even the same alphabet as your ostensible comrades and family and friends .
Why was he thinking about such old and irrelevant things? he asked inside his head, upbraiding himself as the cigarillo went out in his hand from neglect. He thought, I think of these things because I have to understand where this came from. I must analyze myself like any other problem or conundrum. And right now, for whatever reason, this switch at 17 and 18 and 19 years-of-age seems salient.
This is when I stopped incessantly ingratiating myself with others because I stopped reflexively fearing their opprobrium. It was analog not digital , he thought, and so it was a slow process, one that still continues, and the dial gets turned forward and back still to this day; but by the time I left high school I had begun the process to no longer give a fuck what people far dumber, far less ethical, far less creative, far less loyal or romantic or alive in their hearts and balls, thought of me .
Of course, he began his caveat, I still try to convince them that I’m right, so I can’t have stopped totally caring what they think. But, my behavior is less cloying, and my defense, the defense I present to them is less ecumenical; I go for the throat even as I curry their favor. He laughed at this incongruity. He was strange even to himself in moments like this.
His father, the old man, he thought, justified himself less . The father acted as he saw fit; unilaterally and often unconventionally, but he didn’t feel the need to explain himself. However, Blax had to admit, the old man was less worried about his own hypocrisy, less aware of his faults, less interested in knowing what he didn’t already know. He -the father- had endogenous intelligence, was a non-believer, had the genes for masculinity and aggression and iconoclasm, but had been reared in 1950’s Arkansas and had needed to survive first; the luxury of expressing one’s self was something available only to his scions, not to him.
That thought had led to a thought of John Adams saying that he concerned himself with war and politics, so his sons may have opportunity to focus on law and agriculture, so that their sons may focus on art and poetry. Blax then thought of July 4th , 1826.
Blax wanted to be as charitable as was righteous; not too harsh and not too generous. The old man had neither the native intelligence nor the milieu in which to flower into a great man. But he had also not availed himself of those opportunities later in life when they had been offered by his youngest son. He had turned his nose up at the books offered on cosmology and evolutionary psychology and the Vingean singularity. Blax’s father had once critiqued his son saying, in a sentence that was still inconceivable to Blax now as he repeated it in his head, “you seem to only want to talk about one thing .”
Blax, the son, had a more variegated palate of interests in which he could speak upon with erudition and direct experience than anyone he knew; he was incessantly reading, he began to think, and speaking to his family about subjects as disparate as politics from GK Chesterton’s old-white-post to the Cold War and the composition of the Supreme Court; economics from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, MiG welding, ballistics, agriculture and indoor horticulture, the control of Co2 levels, the removal of humid air and the compression of life cycles; art from Rodin and the Parthenon Marbles to the composition of his own drawings and paintings and installation pieces; and he offered them the music from Dead Can Dance to the Dead Kennedys; and cinema from Michael Mann to Kurosawa to Terrence Malick; diesel mechanics, equity and precious metal investing, quantum physics -the conceit of wave-collapse and superposition and non-Newtonian reality at the atomic level- and Newtonian physics and cosmology of how something could come - ab initio- from nothing.
Viticulture, he thought, and oenology; how the poorer the soil and nutrient availability the harder the struggle for the vine, the sweeter and more complex the grape and in the hands of a French master like Doughan or Jadot or the Krinkles or Mondavi of the American west, how a cabernet sauvignon would become round and velvet and like an ouroboros asp of tannins swallowing themselves after a decade or two of being ignored at 55 degrees; Russian and French and American and British literature from Shakespeare -why would you wish me milder; and false to my nature? he thought in this discursive and rapid way. The neurons fired off engrams and sentences from his favorite books.
And Blake, he went on in the febrile mind as the Jacks ran their patrols on the table-top of their land, and Blake - why obscurity in all thy words and laws so none dare eat the fruit but from the wily serpent’s jaws? to Dostoyevsky -man struggles for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as for someone to worship; to Camus and The Author -I think I’ll try a pagan friend since Christian kindness proves to be mere hollow courtesy. He repeated each phrase in his head like mantra and proof and plea. The valley remained unimproved, just forest and just trees.
Shit, he even read 3 rd world and feminist writers, and the black books of the Harlem renaissance of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin - is all the world jails and churches?- and the writings on the Haitian rebellion of Toussaint L’Oeverture by CLR James; literature that encompassed the gamut from Flannery O’Connor, the gothic southern Catholic harshness of an unrelenting pessimism of perdition - I come a long way since I believed in anything; and I come half way ‘round the world, he quoted with vex. To the weird ecstatic -probably delusional but erudite- ramblings of Zachariah Sitchin and the 12 th planet hypothesis, he added.
He kept insisting, augmenting his list, the recursive, lateral mind rolled on: he, he thought, had delved deep into 19 th century French poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud - gouvernail et grappin- he recalled as the landscape of all that Colorado wilderness rolled on like black and green waves now before him from up and out here. He saw no evidence of man up here.
And , he recalled, still defending himself against the old man’s unlettered, jealous charge, he had spoken to his father on the history of the Roman republic; the French and American and Cuban revolutions; 82 men aboard the Granma landed upon the Cuban shore in 1956 and only 12 survived the initial fusillade from Batista’s forces;
yet they triumphed by new year’s day, 1959; the history of the Scots and their introduction of logic and dialectic to law as counterpoise to the English way of precedent in law; and the Gauls who had sacked Rome 400 years before Caesar with barbarian warriors 6-inches taller than the average Roman of that time.
He thought then of the dark-Russo strain of man, and the Russians, he said to himself, who had been absorbing the darkest and coldest influences of creation and perdition for centuries as the black cowled and cockled Orthodox church and the bizarre Tzar had unwittingly handed Lenin and Stalin warm clay to shape into the most credulous and black hearted zealots for revenge in a thousand years. He thought of how things turned black and bleak, how it was no accident at all.
He had studied, he said to himself, the western and eastern fronts of WWI and the writing of General Folkenhiem, and his foil Eric Luderdorph who said of the general - I am capable only of love and hate and I hate General Folkenheim - he thought all this as his PGC ran silently in background. And, he thought, he had read letters from the soldiers who lived in these flooded shell holes for months -and then years- as hundreds of thousands of boys had been shoved into the machine of modern war; war that lasted longer than any campaigns in history and how this augmenting of the time line upon which warfare -normally, naturally a short and quick burst of violence that settles disputes- how this changed everything about how man experienced and thought about and comprehended war.
He smoked the remains of the cigarillo and said to himself that he, could talk with felicity and facility on the Mongols of the 5 th century steppe and how they would ride their horses -surviving on mare’s milk and the blood of their chargers taken from a small slit in the neck- 50 miles a day; and how Genghis Kahn ran a meritocracy enthralled as he was with exceptionalism over all other considerations.
He knew he could speak and demonstrate the techniques of Chinese Kun Tao and Indonesian Silat de Thouars ; belted as he was in these systems; a limb-destruction marital art that could never be used in MMA it was so violent. It was light years superior to Brazilian Ju-jitsu -this a mere calisthenics activity - in his opinion. He could speak on the elements of the oil field, from the MWD tools to the formation itself, to the operation of the Mudtank and the Kellyclamp in derrick’s nest, to the weight of the drilling fluid and the Ph of the same, he thought, but he was growing tired now of all this justifying, all this preening to prove to a man who hated him -from birth- that he was worth listening to after all.
But the mind roiled on as the Jacks patrolled the grounds and let him sit in silence as long as he wanted or needed upon his return from overseas.
Sure, he could explain how rock formations, he thought, how they were drilled by hand with 80lb pneumatic hammer drills and how 1-pound dynamite sticks were planted like tulip bulbs in the rock every 12-inches apart for 100 linear feet; how fit-tests were required for respirator use and how as a shallow breather he often came close to failing those tests.
He could expound on farm work from milking goats to bailing alfalfa to shodding a horse 19-hands-high; he could expatiate on the limbic system and how the amygdala of a psychopath was attenuated in size and/or function, that psychopathy was a hardware/wetware phenomenon that could be seen in fMRI and CAT-scans; he could offer a primer in evolutionary psychology and sexual dimorphism in humans and how this compared to both common chimps and bonobos; delineating the differences and similarities and how the psychology of men and women were innate.
He could talk with subject matter expertise on 1,001 matters and the notion that he was -as Winston Churchill had put it: “a fanatic was a man who couldn’t change his mind and wouldn’t change the subject” -the notion that he- was a one trick pony was absurd, he thought. He was not just enraged by the charge but confused. The mind churned over more and more data, with more and more detail and all for naught.
His own father had charged him with this monomania , he finally thought.
It was beyond baffling, but then as the unknown heated up, the confusion phase-changed -like boiling water evaporates into steam- and it turned the steam-engine and it hardened his heart against even his own pater familius , his own history and genome, his own species. He found all his explaining tantamount to more ingratiating behavior; he was supplicant -again- even in his own mind, he saw.
He -when this statement by his father became the summa of all the insults and perceived neglect of his heart and mind over the years- decided that if he could not reach his father, a man in whose image he had been cut -he had always thought- then nobody could be reached and that something else, something radical would have to be done. No amount of moral suasion and prose poetry, nothing done as a great-artist-of-words would have sway over so fatuous and corrupt and depthless a species , he had then thought. It was a dialogue de sourds .
He breathed out through his flaring nose and forced himself to take large pulling breaths in; he looked down at his matte grey -made-to-measure- suit that fit him like it was two coats of paint on the skin. He loved the piping and the simplicity of it; the collar tab and the European cut; the full back to the waistcoat absent any cinching or any evidence that this suit could be worn by anyone else. Well , he then thought, and laughed a little to himself as he turned to look at his own lieutenant and his sergeants on his flank.
He thought of who arrested John Brown at Harper’s Ferry; it was Robert E. Lee, the man they called the King of Spades: one day you manacle the traitor, and within the blink of a one-eyed jack, you are, he thought, the traitor to the same country.
It’s so strange, he thought as he saw each Jack move and stand, mill and pause, and yet it is comforting to look at yourself from 20 years, shit, 40 years prior, only better in some ways, maybe less good in others. But there they were, their bodies nearly exact copies, only the tattooing would be different, any one of them, he thought, could wear these bespoke suits.
And these four men would have four men each under their charge soon enough; and the compound they had built over the last 18 months would house each of them out here beyond the Sangre de Christos and the Spanish Peaks north of them. So much had changed so quickly; he had lived so many lives, he thought. What would ten years hence look like? he wondered; he thought each 10-year block was a life in itself. He was now 62 years old in a body and face that looked as young, maybe younger and stronger, than when he was 42; but hands -the ends of him- still that could never seem to iron out. They were scarred and keloidal and hurt to both clinch and unfurl. And, he then thought, the broken neck never would fuck off.
“But those common corvids are smarter than either Caius Marcius or myself gave them credit for,” he finally said aloud into the quiet air of his men. Jack One heard him in ear, the Jacks heard -via their coders- in mind.
“Yeah, the Jews are smart too; there are other traits than mere intelligence,” Jack One barked quickly as rejoinder.
“Name one,” Blax said in jest, pretending both that nothing and that anything was superior to intelligence. He knew that he prioritized intelligence too much; and that heart was more important; which is what the Bard was on about, and Jack too. But, he found it hard to elevate anything above understanding, cognition. And he did not know just why.
“Honor,” Jack One said; unaware than Blax had already conceded to this in his own head.
“The Jews lack honor?” Blax asked thinking of the Jews he respected; men like Hitchens, and Primo Levi. They had had honor in surfeit , he thought.
“The corvids lack it compared to the eagle; the eagle would never submit to so complicated a scheme for a meal. The eagle takes it meal by sovereignty of nature. It’s direct and noble and has no need for the wily intelligence of the trickster bird,” Jack One said and lifted his chin slightly.
“Yeah, I don’t disagree with you Jack,” he said. “I rarely do. ”
“You always end up acting as we would act, why the dialectic at all? You never choose the way you pretend to give voice to; you never choose the effete; the crafty way,” Jack O
ne said and spit at the ground and looked back up to the same southern view that went on and on from their plateau.
“Yeah, but it cannot be axiomatic; you must give an honest hearing to your doubts, your enemies and your woman,” Blax said with a wry smile; then as he thought of how he had eschewed personal revenge all those years ago, the smile dropped. It never left his mind, it trailed him like shadow. No, it preceded him; the sun always seemed behind him; even the moon was at his six at night. The shadow never out of sight , he thought.
“Shit, when’s the last time any one of us saw a woman?” Jack One asked.
“Don’t jinx us,” Blax rejoined. To even mention a woman was taboo.
“You brought ‘em up,” Jack said and looked about, left and right; each of the other Jacks were markers for him. Landmarks , he thought.
“Yeah, well anyway, you learn things by earnestly challenging your assumptions; even if you go with your instincts 99 out of 100 times. It’s something you’ll get as you get older; there’s a satisfaction that comes from knowing you tried to talk yourself out of what you end up doing.
“You can act, jump, strike with more bravura -not less- once you’ve truly and genuinely attempted to reason your way back from the edge,” Blax got up from the log and began walking back to the black and grey container among the dark trees and concrete pad.
“My heart is ponderous Jack; it feels like all seven seas sloshing around inside my globular corpus; tilting me on my axis. If I become lachrymose it will be my mind using my eyes as buckets to pitch some of that pelagic pain over the gunwales,” he said as he looked at his reflection in the glass of the double paned, double doors of the shipping container he had turned into a home almost 20 years ago. Jack looked at him via that glass too and nodded his head.
Each pane held a separate, slightly justified reflection, it was two identical men, each with two identical reflections, all slightly justified to the right -and behind- of the first.
