by Roman McClay
He had told her stories of Gilgamesh , and how he had been half god and half man. This had made him too haughty for earth but too incompetent for entrance beyond the cherubim guarding the Elohim behind flaming swords. He felt that this was his fate, to be neither man nor god. To straddle two worlds and be both too good and not enough was a hell that offered mere moments of relief; moments when the hellfire warmed his frozen core to zero, moments when the icy winds cooled him from 100 down again; moments that had to be wrought and demanded and built with the hands from nothing, ab initio and then lit up to witness with the illicit fire stolen from the vengeful gods. He was clearly going mad. And everyone watched with eyes looking above and below the plane he lost it all upon. He bent the light and thus, modern men could not see him at the horizon.
These sojourns into meaningless danger and outrage and recklessness were his only respite. He proved himself to indifferent gods and made mere mortals confused and frightened and chagrined. He blinked reflexively as the rain now hit his face; his eyes even behind goggles could not remain open with these stabs to the cheek and jaw. He was angry at the innate limitations of the body, and how it could not be overruled. The face did this to protect the eyes, but it was not needed and was an overreaction begun down in the cerebellum, but one’s neo-cortex had no standing, the decision from down low was not subject to appeal.
He continued to blink with each hit from the 90-mph rain even as his eyes saw just fine behind the goggled glass.
They blew past Fort Collins at unaltered speed, and the wind began to curl from the west, down off the foothills and he -and thus she- had to lean into it to stay on the road. On a motorcycle that means you ride at an oblique angle to the road surface. Viewed from behind the bike appears not upright -not straight up and down- but rather, it is half falling over, and yet going forward on the edge of the tread of two tires, as you push the left handle and the gyroscope of the machine leans left. And yet it drives straight ahead.
One does not steer a motorcycle, one leans it; one pushes the bars left or right. To steer it would actually make it go in the opposite direction, the physics confuses the uninitiated; but it is as true as all the things man must abide whether he understands it or not.
The rake of the chopper was not extreme, but the forks and lead wheel were out in front to a degree than matched his height, it fit him ergonomically and aesthetically in a way even a man of average height would not be able to even ride. Jeremy -a false friend- had sat on it once and couldn’t even reach the controls.
That moment appeared -in retrospect- to be a crucial moment in why Jeremy Costilow betrayed Blax so ruthlessly. Jeremy had vowed revenge on the man who both made and commanded that machine. Who but its commander is a thing’s owner , Ahab had asked and answered in Blax’s head at times marked by the ringing of bells in Beauly Priory and from old clocks in homes of German landlords. He remembered the wisdom of the gods. He twisted back on the throttle more with each insult from the past. The bike galloped in real time and in memory too; both worlds existed at once, a wave collapse.
Society is a machine too, and those who it lays low and humiliates, they plot against her, whether we -or she- like it or not. All men have some core need for dignity, even the small, the weak, the effete . No man is devoid of all pride, and so anyone can be pushed too far, he thought.
Some men are so prideful that all creation rebukes them. Some men find to be merely, briefly, benignly, gazed upon to abrade them; and the softest breeze to flay the skin. Some men find gravity too oppressive to tolerate, and a kind word to lack the army of all noble words possible, and thus an insult to send -as it were- just one man, just one word. An emissary, the offended man thinks, when the master ought have arrived himself and expressed his manifold respect. Some men are unhappy no matter what.
Blax was such a man; he found all objectionable. And he rode that flat black chopper of doom and brushed aluminum and thick gauged steel with a small black-haired gypsy-girl on his aft, and visions of vengeance in his fore, fast enough to invite pain of daggered-rain but too slow to outrun the storm that created it. Always caught between two extremes, in a superposition waiting merely for the gods to observe; that was his only audience, he was auditioning to be allowed re-entry to Heaven.
The wave collapse might be death for him, he mused, but at least it would prove he was alive and not dreaming, as he often suspected was true; and then they -the gods- would have to decide on his fate once and for all. The road never seemed to end, the north never begin. He rode into the black and crossed into Wyoming at 92 miles per hour and became what he was fated to be. “Amor fati ,” he barely said as he breathed upon this undead steed.
The morning moved slowly to light, he ignored the time -banished this dream, and reverie, the vague reminder that he had let his enemies escape- and let the mind unfurl as he lay in the murphy-bed now -in an instant- wide-awake.
III. 2037 e.v.
The mule deer, of which there were eight or nine that he could see, were no more than seven meters from the house at the beginning of the circle and 11 meters at the rear. They were gathered around the driveway he had built by plowing under scrub oak and some Pinon and laid gravel down around a large tree, building a vulva if seen from above, or an in-and-out drive with two routes from home to exit.
The hail had just begun; it was coming down as they stared at him; he was now visible to them. He had come into view as he advanced to the sliding patio door facing them and facing east.
They were in prey paralysis. They were totally still as the hail bounded off their tough brown hides; staring at him with those all black eyes and huge mule deer ears, rotating like sat-dishes orienting by auditory feedback.
They did not complain or look pitiful, they looked prioritized on the large apex predator at the window. As some time passed they realized he was no threat -por ahora - and began to respond to the punishing hail that was so heavy and fast coming that the metal shipping container sounded like a barrel -with a microphone jammed inside- thrown down the slope into a churning gravel pit.
Now he watched as they took one step away from the pain, and into pain, which made them stop.
Then they’d move again and again they’d stop. It was a herky-jerky motion he had never seen from these animals. It was obvious what was happening , he surmised, they had an instinct to flee the pain, not knowing its source, being simple deer and not understanding hail or weather at all, but feeling, proto-reasoning, that normally in life, when one moves whilst in the middle of a pain response, the pain lessens . If one is touching something sharp or hot to move is to reduce the pain, each organism reasoned well, for this was mostly true. When in doubt, if in pain, move , was the logic that worked 99 out of 100 times.
But in a hail storm to move is to invite more pain, because it is falling all around, and so instead of thinking logically, oh, I must move through several moments of pain to find a tree to hide under , the deer instead thinks: when in pain, I move, if where I move to still hurts, then I stop and reassess, because moving isn’t fucking working.
So, they move and halt and move and halt in steps of one, and at that rate they can’t reach a tree with sufficient boughs in under 40 moves. To stand still hurts, to move hurts, and the hail just keeps coming down.
It was absurd to watch and yet he knew it well. How often had he been in pain, he thought, psychic pain, from a female or a bad decision of some kind or a betrayal or a stupid act, and moved away, and moved right into more pain and stopped and scratched his head; as stupidly as the deer ? How often had some event as random, inevitable and uncontrollable as hail befell him, and he had been confused, and moved in punctuated halts and starts and not seeing that he must just keep going for 40 moves without cessation, through the pain, the hell, the doom, until he could shelter under the bough of some relieving tree?
He was obviously just like the deer; and he could see his own inability to see some cosmic hail for what it was: random, inevitable, and uncontrollable as h
ell; and that one could neither stay nor move but be in pain.
Pain is necessary and good; in and of itself. This he knew for sure, but one cannot fail to respond to it or it loses its function. One must remain dignified, not whine; the deer did not whine, they acted. One must know what pain is and respond to it.
Second, pain is good for you, without it you become deformed like CIPA patients -afflicted due to a mutation of the SCN9A gene- who sit on the feet and knees until the blood flow is cut off and they lose limbs. Half of all children with congenital insensitivity to pain die from an unfelt and unaddressed anhidrosis -an overheating- by age three.
Pain is good. A life without pain is bad; and even if the body is not deformed by lack of pain, the soul would be. Dostoyevsky’s bubbles of bliss forever would indeed deform man, turn him into an enraged beast, demanding the pain of life to return so he may prove himself, his mettle, his courage somehow. Nothing is more permanently and idiopathically insulting as to be reduced -as the Russian put it- to piano keys , mere piano keys played by the gods.
Man must assert his ontic and ontological value. He -man- is real, he exits, and he will be paid attention to; or else .
Why else do men do such things that we hesitate to name? Blax could think of 1,000 things he had done just to prove he was a man, and damn those who couldn’t understand, those mechanized men with no free wills, those fools , he thought. His neck just then ached and he imagined a squirt of oil on it might help.
He had just read Victor Frankl, and like Primo Levi, the thing that stood out was the need for the survivor of the camps to confess that he was a horrid human wretch. “We know: the best of us did not return ,” Frankl wrote, and he went on to say that they, after the war, “now find life very difficult.”
It was something people pretend to understand, nod and affect the grim visage, but the reality is this: they cannot know . To know is to feel , and to feel is to find life very difficult yourself. Each man has a breaking point, and everyone sees the far end of this: what must be done to get man to break. But, they do not think of sensitive men, men who break under the strain of things most men, callous men, suffer through, callously, without angst. Men with no soul can handle shit like CIPA patients, they feel nothing, even as it kills them. Men with acutely sensitive souls feel it all and if they live long they go mad from the pain.
It seems a truism that modern man is inured to the soulless way he lives, the meaninglessness of it, the grossness, the disgusting nature of what he is asked to do to survive. Since it is not the lager , not the extreme of Nazi prison camps or the gulag of the Soviets, since it is just modern ennui and anomie and capitalist stupidity and bureaucratic absurdity, and commercial banality and lack of real fraternity, lack of love, lack of solidarity, lack of culture, because it seems so light a burden, we feel guilty for our break down, he thought; but we ought feel enraged! The hate, the arrogance, is animating, I’m too weak to survive without this hate; the data is clear. Anger overcomes our fear.
But, we feel, he thought, we’ve broken too soon, too early on the rack. We feel weak, like we ought to go on and take it, for after all, it’s not so bad ; we have enough to eat and are free to come and go.
But, sensitive men feel a hollowness, a meaningless to life that is the same end product of what stronger men felt after years of totalitarian abuse. The sensitive man feels the same after 1/1,000th of the torture of the moral soul; yes, he is more sensitive, and yes, most men can take it, whereas hardly anyone could take the Fascism or Communism of Europe last century. Blax admitted this was a more nuanced case.
Blax admitted he was weak, and thought, if I admit this up front, will you still listen to my tale of woe? If I admit that you are stronger, and you can take what I cannot, will you then listen to why I turned to this life of seeming barbarity? He asked the empty land, the sky, if I promise to only say that it is me that could not take a family that hated me, brother who cared not one jot for me, lovers who mocked me, comrades who abandoned me, jobs that injured me, corporations that disposed of me, society that lied to me, country that tried to lock me up and have me killed, and that you dear reader, you could and have and will take these things without folding -crumbling- as I have, will then you try to understand? If I drop this tough-guy act, will you fucking listen?
He thought of the month before this Parthenon job, and all its vagaries, the ease of something hard, the difficulty of easy things, the way the men, his Jacks, were changing each day, becoming more like themselves, more like him in some ways, more away from him in others. Did they slip away? he asked himself .
He had cooked a simple meal of brown rice and venison, with arugula and purple cabbage from the garden, with garlic and black sea salt, and he had opened the 2005 Palmer and told them of the wine, the Château and how they -the French owner-operators of Palmer - had hid some Jews from the predatory Nazis, like doe from wolves, and that the same family, the Duroux still owned it now. He had said that they were not very far away from these things that deform the human spirit, that infect all men, not just those that did not survive it.
But he had wanted to read to them of something else, something from Primo that was not about the war or the lagers or any of that, he wanted to read to them from a man who understood work, and the power of work, and what it means to man, to a eusocial species. And so he read to them after the meal, before the wine would run dry, while they were full and sated and could think of things beyond their own nose. He read from, The Monkey’s Wrench :
Now, don’t go telling this to anybody, but at that moment I felt like crying. Not because of the derrick, but because of my father. I mean, that metal monster anchored there in the midst of the water reminded me of a crazy monument my father made once with some friends of his, a piece at a time, on Sundays after their bowling, all of them old geezers, a bit loony, and a bit drunk. They had all been in the war, some in Russia, some in Africa, some God knows where, and they’d had a bellyful; so, since they were all more or less in the same line of work -one could weld, another could file, another could beat metal plate, et cetera- they decided to make a monument and give it to the town, but it was going to be a monument in reverse: iron instead of bronze, and instead of all the eagles and wreaths of glory and the charging soldier with his bayonet, they wanted to make a statue of the Unknown Baker, yes, the man who invented the loaf.
And they were going to make it of iron, in heavy black plate, in fact, welded and bolted. They actually made it, and it was good and solid, all right, but as for looks, it didn’t come out too well. So the mayor and the priest wouldn’t accept it, and instead of standing in the center of the square, it’s rusting in a cellar, among the bottles of good wine .
They had sat there with the dinner plates cleaned and candles burning the white tallow down, the fireplace just coals now. The wine was drunk but slower now, as they absorbed what they could glean from this story, and what Blax thought it meant. They always had to think of things from at least those two angles with him around, and it took time and cognition; it was a load that insouciant men do not ever carry; their intellect used only for things they must do, as they off-load all moral work to reflex or other men.
But the Jacks had to think about it all; they had to reinvent each wheel again. They had the cognitive capacity, the speed of propagation along the neural lines, the conductivity. But, it was taxing, and it fatigued the mettle as often as it strengthened it; and nobody gives a shit about the extra load men like that take on. It’s silent and hidden work, done between the ears of an opaque skull, behind dark eyes and grim visage.
Silly men take it for granted that the great moral questions are worked out by other men, not them, and they just stride into a culture with this shit all worked out, like children who take no thought for how the food in front of them is brought to their plate, why on their heads it seems not to rain.
Blax thought of the way intellectuals take the working class for granted too; the way buildings stand and oil gets extracted
and roads get built by large proletarian men, the way these men get taken for granted by people like that vapid girl Helen -a Harvard girl no less, a silly-ass female who had never done one day’s hard work and had begged and received charity; had more free money thrown at her than a stripper- who had told him to muse instead on his privilege when he told her how the white working class had been destroyed by modernity. She had the arrogance of the corporeally sound, those who had bodies still intact, souls unabraded by true malice. She had spoken to him as if they were the same species, like a worm upbraiding the bird. She was criminally stupid and had no idea how evil she was, but she would soon learn, he thought as her address was added to their expanding list.
Each and all ignore the other’s burdens, it seems. But Blax was a man of both milieu , a worker, and intellectual, so he knew each side and how each side was ignored, maligned by the other. He stood between the warring factions, a war all on his own along the DMZ, the corpus callosum of each hemisphere. And he’d upbraid them both, them all. He fight against both side’s ignorance of the other’s ontological worth.
And one -maybe more- of the Jacks began to think that this is why men of substance who make moral compromises and do the things that average men, modern men, think are bad, and wrong and blah blah, this -one or more of those Jacks thought- is why these substantial men hold everyone in such contempt. Because like children who critique their fathers for doing immoral work to provide for their families yet gobble up each bite of meat and cake they are given for free, the bourgeoisie and nihilists both lap up the moral milk that great men provide with dastardly deeds. The middle class survive inside the walls that the rough work -by rough men who slit throats in the night and fumigate the filthy corners of the world in ways that torture them long after the work is done- that the rough work lays foundation for, then builds and maintains.
