by Roman McClay
Ah, but the personal, the intimate, was it corrupting? Was this true axiomatically or just due to the failure of man and woman to make amor as grand as one could make life and justice too? She may have run as much away from amor , as to God. Is this blaspheme? By her? By me?
I think she was not wrong, but she had no personal love with her god like I have, which is with You, with you and with not you; the absence of you, papa; as if my love can now stretch out.
She thought the Biblical Isaiah was worth saving, and that Jesus spoke in Greek , not Hebrew at all; she was mad, mad, mad, and thus was searched out by God not the other way around! Chosen by God -the unbeliever first and best convinced- and then to invert the hubris, and submit, submit, submit. I dare any modern woman to ignore the wisdom of submission, when to rebel against God is to rebel against what liberates the soul- free from sin, the most painful and tyrannical condition of all men! Only a fool, a woman , but I repeat myself, would reject submission to God, and His angels, as if woman knows more than God Himself.
You think man is too haughty to submit to woman? No, he does it each day! Each morn! I felt and still feel your worshipping eyes, penitent gaze, reverent awe on me.
God made room for us in Tzimtzum; I am learning the Jewish words for all this. The absence, papa, the absence of love is love itself, the absence of God is God itself, the absence of freedom is freedom itself, how can man not know this when he opens his eyes into a pure black night!
I shall quote from her analysis of the Iliad at length:
Here we see force in its grossest and more summary form- the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment… this turns man into a stone.
From its first property -the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him- flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet -he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this- a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done .
A man stands disarmed and naked with a weapon pointing at him; this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.
Oh Papa! How sublime and true and false; and all in between. I feel she has located error and accuracy both in that, and the space in between is where we -you and I- do live. We live as man and woman, as man and wife, as man and daughter, as man and charge, as killers and those killed, we live inside the space left by a retreating God, with only the ex-nihilo numina, the wake, the echolia of Him for us to orient inside. But we do it without becoming things , despite the death that hangs over us, the sword of Damocles , the arbitrary nature of this purposive life. We need not now understand it, we now only need accept it, and do our duty, our duty to justify the space left for us to fill with our own breath, our own waking, our own spoken and -maybe- heard words.
Simone then quotes Homer:
Those terrible man-killing hands that had slaughtered so many of his sons…
Valance! XoxoxoX
p.s. I am on the trail of Hypatia of Alexandria next…
Blax had already begun to hold the page away from the drops that fell and the great sorrow escaped, and her wisdom received, and their exchanging breath. His love, oh his love, she had forgiven him their absence -without saying it aloud- this thing implied was more effective as she well knew; the genius of love, she was. She is , he said again to himself.
She saw through the pain to beyond pain, not avoiding it, but through it, to alloy the body, the soul, with aggrandizing pain. She was wiser at 16 than he would be in 16 more generations; what depth, what horror -he thought- for her to be this great and think others higher than you are! He was maddened with the desire that he should kneel in front of her, somehow get under her prostrating penitent bow like the way Jack One pushed his off suit cards under the thrown three cards that all beat him. Blax watched the men throw and throw again as the game went round and round; each man being himself, playing a little differently, little things here and there that made it more than mere machine. More than Rotam et Sacoma .
Blax then thought, this is the wisdom of the female form, to know what it knows -that which man can never know- and yet to know its opposite too, and to truly know its opposite is true! She had seen the true crime that is embodied in use of force, not the black blood on the whetted ground, but the making of man into a thing , and then to admit -almost in passing- that man is already made a thing when he begins to first exist in this world; this innately -Godly- violent world.
The space! This is the space in which the thing becomes a man, death is not a thing, it makes not man a thing, man makes himself a thing when he refuses to be good, refuses to be a god, when he refuses to meet force with force, to bend the sword back to the man who holds it, the god who lords it above. When man eschews -he obviates- the space made for him to fill , Blax said to himself.
Did God want us to kill Him? Only so in his absence we could move, and that space imbued, with wise men, wise men, men who refused to sin. Only then would God cede the ground to man. Only then would man become as God. And God would have done his job raising His sons and daughters both to be strong in a world that cannot be both in existence and also safe; force is the price to pay for a moment of life, and a chance to be not a thing .
Blax looked up again, and saw his Jacks playing in truncated speech, careful not to speak in anything approaching code or hint and challenge the sanction on table-talk; going the long way ‘round so one was never perceived to cheat, and thus to ruin the game by winning at all cost. He had taught them the rules and given them the cards; but they had made the game anew, by focusing on the code by which the man won and lost the lower game, by which he won the higher game instead. They could and did play for hours, over and over and each Jack rose and fell in play like a wave, in the ocean they all made.
By what strategy did each man play each game, at each level? Blax wondered as he watched the cards, the Aces and 10s and Kings of followed suit all throw in. The trump cards, often just one of four, each time, each round, the 7.5% to 25% that mutated the flow, diverted the wave, collapsed the grip and yet gave away. He watched each round and the cards travel from hand to slab, and each one spent, ballistic, as these jack-of-all-gods, escaped the game itself. He adored them more than he could say. They knew the real game long before he ever had.
“Both bauers,” Jack Four said and laid them down, both Jacks of black, spade and club as the other Jacks shook their heads -in reverie as did Jack Two his partner, and in wry defeat as Jack One and Three threw in their last two cards- and their lain aces and kings fell to Jack Four’s mighty Jack of clubs and Jack of spades as he took all 5 tricks and two points to take them to 10; to a victory they all shared.
II. 1999 e.v.
The 1989 Ford Econoline was stuck in the schism between the old dried ruts in the property's egress and the new layer of mud that sat on top which had its own grooves. It was dark now and the whole farm was out there pulling on ropes and cables as Zoe manned the steering wheel.
Only half of Zendik Farm's total population of 64 humans was in North Carolina; the rest remained back in Fort Pierce and Vero Beach, Florida as they prepared for the final sale of those two properties. The normally evenly split gender demographics were slightly skewed as more men were needed in Ashville in order to effect the building of the new instantiation of this anarchi
st co-op. Heavy work was needed; and large male frames and muscles and their egos were needed to get it done.
Arol had lifted the ban on Black Tea, so everyone was hooked to the gills on caffeine as they all worked 18-hour days.
The men were underweight but not malnourished. They ate well, but it was a lean diet of proteins and whole grains and live foods. It was the work that chiseled them; there was so much to do, and it was all physical. They moved like an intelligent body of 32 parts; a mind of one.
This van was a perfect metaphor for what they were to do over the next months and years: a piece of modern technology that was not in top condition, inundated with pet hair and the castings of working-class anarchists and outlaws with grease and soil and the effluvium of domesticated animals at every articulation of finger and arm and leg. The van, too, was a hybrid of underpowered and too low to the ground to traverse the long ignored and feral proto-driveway that was being cut up to the property's main house.
The van was a cast-off, just like each of these Zendiks; it had been ignored and abused by its owner for years, then given away as more burden than useful in its later years by someone looking to do a good deed; or someone merely capitulating to the strong-arm salesmanship of some senior Zendik apparatchik tasked with accumulating more free items to be employed for the Revolution.
The ropes were manned by black clad brigands in cargo-shorts that hung below the knee and combat boots that rose above the calf; in t-shirts cut away at the arms so their flanks were exposed. Every 2-feet a new set of calloused and yet artistic hands both pulled and hung onto the rope. The feeling of purpose and comradery was rarely articulated; there was no time for such nostalgia. But each man and each woman, castaways, mutineers and outlaws of the larger American -even South American- society, did feel it swell in their breast and groin and brain in tandem with their catabolizing muscles and tumescent hands.
Their hands were swollen up from the incessant grip on the rope and the low position of it relative to their forward leaning bodies and still captive hearts. They lived like 17th century serfs; like 18th century Oxen; like 19th century slaves: everything was hard, everything was done in the old-fashioned way, and everything was up to them: their survival and their death, because nobody else was coming to pull the plow.
Zoe was as smart as they came for this part of the world, this the greater forest and rock; he was covered in the faded, india-ink jail tattoos from his ear to his chest to first row of knuckles. They climbed up his neck and face like morning glories but he covered as much as he could; eschewing the Zendik’s de rigueur t-shirts that had had their necklines and sleeves removed. His laugh was given up like change if you offered him overpayment on something he didn't want to really sell.
It was as if he felt like he should get to keep it all and you should have been happy to tell him to do so; but he'd give you that change if ever you even hesitated to say, keep it , because he both doubted your gratitude and his own ability to remain honest if he waited any longer. The laugh came quickly to close that gap, but it came as if he couldn't believe you actually wanted or thought you deserved it. It did not go on long and it had no echo.
He steered up onto any ridges he could locate underneath the new mud by laying his hands lightly on the steering wheel and waiting for the indicative vibration and spectral turn of the wheel. Like everything rational at Zendik, it had the patina of mysticism underneath that nobody spoke of except Wulf or Arol in moments of overt edification. But everyone there was an animist and bourgeoning spiritualist who thought they could control matter with their thoughts and that the universe controlled them through the movements of the orbiting comets and the plasma of new age gurus and phlogiston of Priestly himself.
There were doubters of course, but even they had to take these claims seriously, so ubiquitous were they. The Truth-Way and the importance of saying Yes to Life so oft-repeated as concrete rubrics and so obvious was the difference in the life-outcomes between those who harnessed these axioms and those who ignored or were ignorant of them, that even agnostics and rationalists found themselves frowning through their nigh-approval to some bromide even if just to avoid a fight .
Zoe was a natural mechanic, and this was because he understood systems and the machines that rode on those systematic tracks like integers rode on the math. And he saw the whole world as a machine, like many of the men at Zendik, and no matter how atavistic or advanced, no matter how far in decline or retro-fitted with incongruous adaptations, no matter how remote or embedded in the grip of the earth, he felt that machine, and this world, was his to own and operate if he could first pass the test of repairing what was broken or inert or half dead.
Lyndon bit off a new grip on the farthest left cable; he was closest to the van and kept feeling its bumper touch his straining calf muscles as it lunged with each metronomic pull of the ropes. He reached out with his right arm and hand and pushed on the back of Kee; and the man slid up without turning around. Lyndon advanced on the rope in this space. The van too, moved.
These men had no inclinations to take petty offense in these conditions , Lyndon thought. It was the grandest virtue of working for survival as a eusocial species: with each man’s life in your hands, and your life in his, you began to love him as you loved yourself just as the Christians had wanted. The comradery of trench-mates during great wars was well known and eulogized but the trenches of this kind of combat was a theme that needed grafted on to the poetry of war and the friendships made in battle. America, so close and so far from here, had lost the feeling for work, and what became of men who worked in tandem like genes inside a great organism. Panegyrics to work would need be voiced again soon, he thought, and it would have to come from the working-class, as soon as they had a chance to catch the breath they’d be expected to use for oration to crowds.
The guerre-à-outrance of our first great war: the Hobbesian State of Nature as State of War was itself a machine designed to suck the raw material of men inside its crankcase and fasten each man to his brother as far back as our first Adamantine proto-type in the Garden -Genesis laid out work as the first punishment due he would soon learn as he desperately wanted to link work to God- and this machine would continue well into the future of all laboring. It’s a specific machine, it’s brutal and black with evil, and it’s unlike anything else for communion with the thing that ties us all together; the god of assembling labor in the face of so much demonic and dissembling leisure.
One need ruminate on the compression phase, the explosion, the exhaust, then intake of the 4-stroke motor to understand why life is this way. The built and walled city flanked by the chaos of the forest; the country beset on all sides by the jackals of nihilism and decay, the honed globe of Earth abandoned in the vacuum of deep zero space; and the recursion that starts it all again.
The van rose on ridges Zoe found with his divining and the rope slacked on the starboard side; that contingent of men, Lyndon included, rushed to keep those ropes taut and drive the van out of the muck. Their feet splayed and turned perpendicular to their gaits to bite into the mud that covered their fetlocks. The men bent forward further, closing the angle of the longest arm of the obtuse scalene triangle their bodies had made in relation to the soft and difficult roadway.
Lyndon felt himself breathing in the mud’s ejecta as his face hovered above the footprints Kee and Talon before him left in their wakes. The headlights of the Van halo-ed the men and reflected off their body only where the sweat had washed them clean; the rest of these muddy forms absorbed the dim halogens and they looked like satellite photos of cities: lit up in punctuated grids along some endoskeleton as the flesh of the city's corpus remained dark to the invigilating eye in the sky.
Kee's boots kicked up mud into his face and neck but it felt as mere souvenirs of their victory to him, he avoided merely being kicked as it would slow the tread of the man ahead and the need to wave off any apology would be further annoyance to each man in the line. To pull and keep pulling was all.
>
He noticed the light refracted onto the road, casting shadows where darkness already took up enough space, giving the black an almost see-through quality, as if black could now slip over the edge into some circular clear. He felt his hands seize up again, his grip become reflexively tighter and now he felt that it was his arms that held onto his hands, welded as they were to the rope on their own. His back employed each muscle from latisimus dorsi like a cobra up and flared in the elevated air before its strike, to the choking hands of the trapezius around his neck like his father's own paws that encircled him there as a boy and pushed him ahead as the two of them walked into some kind of future where men returned to beasts, piece by piece.
His glutes and hamstrings buttressed his trunk and quivered under his camouflage BDUs, cut-off at the knee; and his calves, caked with now-dried mud flexed; which cracked the skim coat of adobe and tore at the leg-hairs subsumed in the flood of the mud.
“Move,” Chen barked at the apex of the pulling ropes in the center of the many threads. A half-feral coterie of dogs had run up to the amalgam of men and, as domesticated animals like dogs and children do, just got in the way. He bit into the air as his hands were not at liberty to swat them away and his kicking legs were behind him and employed. The dogs jumped and turned in half circles in the air thinking he might be playing, unsure as to his mood until he barked it again, “Move!”
They ran in a pack up the road beginning now their own barking as they sprinted out of sight.
Lyndon hated those dogs; every one of them. The dogs were useless ornamentations and each of their owners allowed them all manner of liberties that chaffed at his ribs and his ideas on life. Not one of these mutts were working dogs, he thought, and they all had the demeanor of children or men without jobs or women with weak husbands in their pockets .
“Fucking dogs,” he growled not loudly, but not as to be careful either; and several of the men heard him just fine.
