MJCwriting.htm

 

CONVERSATIONS ON A DYING AGE

The American Book of the Dead

 

 

I began Conversations On A Dying Age in the summer of 1977 and completed it in 1984.  The story begins with Jacob Heimkreiter, the narrator, "strolling" through the world at a very placid pace.  The reader is his companion.  Jacob Heimkreiter is philosophical, pessimistic, obsessed with the coming death of his own culture.  He is the father of three children; his youngest son, Daniel, it later is revealed, has committed suicide--and his father is haunted by this and by his sense of having failed as a father.  In fact, Jacob, it is revealed, bit by bit, is dying of cancer.  This stroll is in fact Jacob's walk through his life and into his death.  He talks to the audience directly, telling them about his life, his opinions, his fears.  Slipping into death.  The stroll in time becomes a massive journey into eternity, into the land of souls and historical figures, metaphysical concepts, personal fears, archetypal meanings and foundations, into heaven, into light, into understanding, and then back out again into rebirth.  Jacob Heimkreiter becomes an archetype: he is alternately the biblical Jacob, Ahab, Prometheus, Icarus, Jacob Fugger, the Archangel Michael, his own son Daniel..).  Indeed, Jacob "becomes" or confronts, at some point in the novel, many of the mythological figures from many different cultures, essentially being, himself, the sun-hero, Odysseus, Horus, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Moses.  He is Plato, Aristotle, Mercury, the Angel Metatron.  The book, as a unity of thought, conceived during Jacob's ascension into heaven, attempts to reveal a nature which is a synthesis of science and theology, of reason and poetry, causal necessity and mythology.  Before the creation of the universe, the one womb, abstract space, contains the finished piece, the unified plan: a sort of  jigsaw puzzle before its fractionation.  The glimpse, the unity; the Big Bang (differentiation), the rebirth into life: the individual emerges out of darkness.   Jacob eventually becomes his son Daniel, who is reborn in his father's image.  The influences on this book are almost too numerous  to mention: James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, The Old Testament, Albert Camus' The Fall, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Dante's Divine Comedy.  I present two excerpts from this novel here: the first part is the first few pages of the book, where Jacob meets his "companion" (the reader) and they begin their stroll through Jacob's life; there are four parts or chapters or seasons of Jacob's life, at the end of which Jacob is pulled out into the world of the  dead; he visits his own funeral; he falls into Hades.  The second excerpt presented here is the beginning of Jacob's fall into Hades.

 

 

 

 

PART ONE.

 

 

We stand at the threshold, a man told me several days ago.  The threshold of what? I asked, an inquiry which seemed to me as natural as it was inevitable.

      We stand at the threshold of a new age, he said.  And science and the powers of technology have brought us to this threshold.

      There was pride in his voice.

 

Why do I tell you this story?  I donÕt know really.  The man is an ass, of course: personally, professionally, and philosophically.  He is my supervisor at work.  I work at a bank.  I have my sights on the position of vice-president, although all that is really more for the sake of my wife than for myself.  I donÕt mind being a senior advisor; but her sisterÕs husband is a partner in a large law firm on the west coast, and makes more money than I even dream of making....

      So what! you say with scorn.  I too, with scorn, agree: So what!  Unfortunately, my wife doesnÕt see things with quite the same perspective.  So, and too often now, I find myself in the unenviable position of having to endure as best I can the tripe and delusions of the aforementioned Mr. Henning.  Bob Henning.  Robert S. Henning.  He wears a green felt hat, and he carries a cane.  His wife is the daughter of a snow-tire magnate, or something to an equal degree of preposterousness.  He went to school in the west somewhere, and then returned home to attend Harvard Business School.  His family made its money in the construction trade.  Tearing down to make room for something else to tear down.  The Circular Theory I believe itÕs called.  He speaks, every now and then, with misty eyes, about his great and dear departed father, who built from nothing an empire of gilt and steel... Yes, weÕve all heard that story before.  There is a picture in his office, on the wall behind his desk, of Father Richard Henning, dressed in suit and tie, hard-hatted, swinging an axe or a pick or something at a ground-breaking ceremony.  Many people are standing by: smiling.  Everyone is posing for the picture.  Aiming their smiles toward the man who holds the camera.  All pretending to have a good time.

      But why do I tell you this?  I confess: there is no justifiable reason.  So I desist.

      My name is Heimkreiter.  Jacob Heimkreiter to be exact.  Jacob Oliver Newton Heimkreiter to be complete.  I work in a bank—but IÕve told you that already.  What more about me might you find interesting?  IÕve never killed a man.  In this day and age that fact alone should attract some degree of notoriety.  IÕve never saved a man from death either.  IÕve always wanted to save a man from death. Possibly to die while saving a man from death.  Ahh, that all is some romantic notion I entertain—a fruitless exercise in the nobility of sentiment.  IÕm sure, should the opportunity ever arise for me to save a manÕs life some day, I would probably watch him die, not out of any sense of vengeance, surely, nor even cowardice, but simply out of the dictates of a frozen curiosity.  IÕve never seen a man die before.  But letÕs move away from that.  I am not a courageous man, nor even a man with much enthusiasm for principle.  I lost that years ago.  Principle is the food and the badge of the young.  But it is only a laugh of scorn—an echoing laugh of derision—to the man who has lost his youth.  I lost my youth years ago.  It was no great loss really.  It was rather a burden, to be totally frank.  So many things to be and do in youth—it actually makes the head spin.  And it tends to light oneÕs mind afire with confusion.  No: away with it!  Age!  Give me age: wisdom!  Gray to fleck my dignified temples!  Security!  A respectable profession!  A fine wife and three healthy children!  What more could a normal man desire?  And I do consider myself a normal man.  A normal American male, with desires to achieve and attain and all the rest.  And a desire to be normal.  That is the most American of all American traits.  A longing to be...well, average: to fit in at all cost.  A desire to be accepted.  And I am accepted, at least I think I am, by nearly every society with which I wish to associate.  Does it make me happy to be accepted? you ask.  It is no great honor.  It only proves the blandness of oneÕs character.  And the paucity and harmlessness of everything one says.

      You laugh.  Do you think it foolishness for me to admit to you that I am bland?  On the contrary.  It would be foolish for me to deny such a thing, being, as it were, in a manner of speaking that is, written upon my face.  DonÕt I appear to be rather bland to you?  Rather...average?  Tell me truthfully now.  Oh, youÕre trying to be kind.  And I do appreciate it.  You are very kind.  And youÕre very kind as well to listen to my rantings.  I hope that IÕm not boring you.  Am I boring you?  Well, I hope that you will continue to find me less than dry and monotonous.

      But letÕs see.  More about myself.  It is always very difficult to talk about oneself.  I make a fairly good salary, although that probably interests you even less than it interests me.

      Am I happy? you ask.  Well, that is a straightforward question.  I congratulate you on your seriousness and honesty.  We should all be serious in our relationships with people—and straightforward.  At least, in theory.  I try to always be serious and straightforward in theory, in all of my relationships with people.  So—I see I raised a chuckle with that.  You appreciate an occasional witticism, do you?  An occasional play on words.  IÕm glad.  You know, most people donÕt seem to appreciate humor today.  Most people donÕt seem to have time for it.  ItÕs only something which gets in their way occasionally.  Some object over which they must step to find the high ground.  Of course, IÕm speaking of important people now.  People on the move.  People going places.  They wear their humor across their faces like a nervousness.  Their laughter is too loud, poorly honed, notched with disinterest.  They laugh at the wrong moment.  And everything they say is lined with a sting and irony.  They look at their watch, inevitably, as they speak—thinking in the distance.  Thinking about laughter perhaps.  Thinking about Time.  Thinking about lost time, and thinking about the future as though it were something to charmed, something to be captured.  Something to wear either a collar or a proper name.  Something to form a legacy: a memento to their smilelessness: the glimmerings of an eternity....

      But IÕm getting away from your questions, arenÕt I?   Which was: am I happy?  Of course happiness is a difficult thing to assess.  A difficult thing to determine.  Do you know what my father used to tell me about happiness?  He used to say: If you ever have to stop and ask yourself Am I happy? -- then more than likely youÕre happy enough.

      My father did have a sense of humor, though it was brutal at times, and usually bitter.  He wanted me to be a banker.  He named me Jacob after Jacob Fugger, the great German banker of the great banking family.  We used to play a game around the table in our dining-room, with cards and dice and play-money and property.  Yes, it was Monopoly.  My father was always the banker: he controlled the money.  And, by controlling the money, he controlled the game. 

      He was actually, in his other life, in his life away from the dining-room table, a carpenter and, later, an electrician at the mill.  But in his home, around the dining-room table, he was a banker.  It was something he always wanted to be.  And we were his little Fuggers, seated all around him.  Did you like that?  Yes, the big Fugger and the little Fuggers.  And each of us was given a name to roughly correspond to our value and age.  But enough of that—itÕs going no where.

      Happiness—yes, happiness.  Do you think IÕm skirting the issue?  An interesting choice of words, I admit.  But let me put it this way: I remember being happy once, long ago, when I was madly in love with a beautiful young woman. 

      My wife?  No, certainly not!  Does one ever marry the mate one truly loves and wishes to marry?  But I donÕt wish to get ahead of myself.  Do you have much time?  Oh, very good.  If it begins to rain perhaps we can duck in for coffee somewhere.  Yes, arenÕt the trees lovely when they turn like this?  ItÕs my favorite time of year.  My wife says itÕs because it makes me think of death.  She thinks IÕm morbid.  And that I think too much.  What can I say to that?  That I think she deludes herself?  And that she thinks too little?  But that would be cruel.  And it would not be fair really.  Everyone must do what they can to get along.  ThatÕs a basic law of survival.  And sheÕs no happier than I really, even though she pretends to be.  ItÕs not easy to grapple with the tragedy of a passing life.  It takes a very great actress to find the fortitude to carry on today.  Today, when the scripts are all so bleak and savage.  Or, not savage enough.  But I mustn't go on with this.

      Would you like a cigarette?  No?  Well done, sir.  A very good response.  I must admit to you my powerful enjoyment of great sin Tobacco.  Though I guess it is a dangerous thing to do—my smoking.  It probably is the most dangerous thing I do in life.  ItÕs my little touch with the primal urges, I suppose.  You laugh.  DonÕt you take me seriously?  Let me ask you this: Do you believe that some danger is healthy for a man or a nation?  Healthy for sanity, I mean?  You find me amusing.  That pleases me.  But the question I ask is both serious in tone and curious in respect to seeking a response.

      Do you find my verbiage prolix?   I know.  It is a bad habit.  It comes from the company I keep, I fear.  ItÕs really the worst sort of company.  Long names and long faces.  Good breeding, they call it.  The pomposity of stately blood.  But I shall try to overcome this handicap, this weakness of form.  You must bear with me, my friend, until I find a way to curb this frightful excess.

      But back to my question.  And what exactly do I mean by the question IÕve just posed?  Let me put it another way.  If manÕs physical security were less certain somehow, if his physical survival were somehow less than guaranteed, and required more time and more effort to ensure, wouldnÕt that leave man with less time on his hands to ponder the inexplicables: the wherefores of life?  And wouldnÕt that, in itself, be beneficial to his sanity?

      Perhaps, you say.  And perhaps you are right.  Whatever—it seems to come down to the question of Time again, doesnÕt it?  That banded curse of civilization!  For isnÕt it the nature of Time which drives man to despair?  The seepage of Time?  The desperate need to block that seepage?  To conquer the maddening passage of amorphous, constantly eroding hours and minutes, days and even years?  Time is to the mind what blood is to the body—that is my belief.

      I can tell by the way you shake your head: you donÕt totally agree with me.  Perhaps I am wrong.  And it really doesnÕt matter so much.  Or, as my wife says, when disgusted by my philosophical gloom: It all comes out in the wash, dear Jacob.  And sheÕs right, of course: Truth, buried beneath the plebeian metaphor.  It all does come out in the wash, no matter what you would think or try to believe.

      You smile again.  DonÕt you believe me?  You know, the better you come to know me, the more time you spend with me, the more easily you will recognize a rather annoying trait I possess: I have theories on everything.  My whole life has been spent constructing theories and ideas.  I am to theories what Father Richard Henning is to the material world.  I stand above Life, and bludgeon it with the weight of my pick-axe.  Then, as the pieces fly, I construct, from those pieces, however abstrusely, a part relating to that broken whole.  ItÕs all very exciting really, in its own quiet way.  Though most people could never appreciate it.  ItÕs too passive an activity for most people to enjoy.  Most people want meat in their activity.  Blood.  Violence.  Something to awaken racial memories of childhood: impressions of primal strife and significance.  To feed off the action and off someone elseÕs pain.  To gain a spiritual sort of strength from the withering, broken corpse.  A kill.

      Oh, you think me too cynical as well.  Perhaps I am.  Do you read Hemingway, by the way?  I thought you might.  Well, Hemingway is an interesting example.  An example of what? you might well ask.  Of many things, I admit: though I shall try to remain focused on my theorem at the moment.  Tell me this: Why is it, do you believe, that Hemingway is so admired by the American reading public?  Is there really such a beast as the American Reading Public? you ask.  Yes, that is another matter.  Let me re-phrase the question then.  Of all the supposedly great American writers—Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Whitman, even Twain—which writer is most admired, even, I guess I should say especially, by those readers who have not even bothered to read him?  You would agree then: it must be Hemingway.  And why?  Because Hemingway sought to be the American Hero.  He drank, he loved, he fought; he failed, but, in failing, died a public, gruesome, violent death—his very life being that death—and, in dying that death, he became immortal.  Hemingway is admired certainly not for his writing, although there is much in his writing which is admirable.  He was not loved, alone, because he was a writer—although his being a successful writer did carry with it, as a badge or an aura, some measure of mystique—he was loved because he was a Hunter!  Yes.  Hemingway was Jupiter, with his magic thunderbolt and shield!  He was a god, in fact, for not only could he destroy, in the guise of Hunter, but he could also create, this time in the guise of the ever-laboring novelist.  But it is the Hunter in him which we admire—the Destroyer!  And it is the Destroyer in him which made him an American Hero.  The Hero in him which made him an American god.

      The role of the Hero-God, who seeks to destroy and create and destroy anew, in an endless series of successions.  It is much the same of Father Henning, I suppose.  Much the same as myself, in an obscure sense, to a lesser degree.  Man in a struggle of heroic proportions.  And itÕs the circular theory again, of course: destroy, create, destroy anew.  Serving the course of progress and perennial development.

      No, I wonÕt continue.  It is becoming rather repetitive, isnÕt it?  Rather redundant.  Let me just add one thing more.  One can learn much about a society simply by studying the heroes which it chooses to serve, the heroes by which it seeks to define its own self.

      Enough said.  ItÕs probably more than enough said.  IÕm not even certain how we came to speak of Hemingway.  Oh, yes: we were speaking of violence.  But letÕs move away from that—to something a bit more civilized.  You laugh at that, at the irony.  And that impresses me.  IÕm always impressed by a good listener: a creative listener.  For the art of conversation consists, when well applied, of two blended components.  The creative listener (and the same is true of the reader of literature) is every bit as important as the creative speaker.  He recognizes nuance, irony, inference, structure of thought.  And he encourages the speaker, with his attentiveness, to continue.  You are encouraging me to continue, I trust—with your attentiveness?  I hope you donÕt find me tedious or disturbing.  I certainly mean to be neither.

      But let us move to something altogether different.  What would you like to hear about me?  About my wife?  LetÕs wait a while for that.  Would you like to hear about my grandfather?  Would that be an acceptable topic to approach?  Very well.  My grandfather then.  My grandfather was named Otto Heimkreiter, after, if I remember the story correctly, Otto Spengler, a neighbor and friend of my great-grandfather in Leipzig, and god-father to little Otto.

      But all this background data seems rather pointless.  My grandfather came to America as a small boy, an immigrant with his family, after the great revolution of 1848 failed.  There was even talk that they sailed with the great Carl Schurz—although thereÕs no reason to believe that really was the case.  I donÕt wish to re-examine my entire family history, so I will cut this short.  You must find it rather trite, and uninteresting in the main.  No?  Well, let me congratulate you on your stamina.  And on your seemingly boundless curiosity.  What I did wish to tell you about my grandfather is that he was, and remained until his death, in every sense of the word, a true American Patriot.  He fought with the Union in the War Between the States.  He supported, with his vocal chords, if not actually with his blood, the war against the Spanish in 1898. 

      He was a believer in the American promise of Justice and Freedom—and he remained so until his death in 1901.

 

But where, exactly, was I taking that?  I am not sure.  I seem to have lost the context and the direction of my ranting somehow.  Oh, never mind.  It shall return.  All things return, afterall -- don't they?  At least, I have been assured they do.

      Should we sit for a moment or two?  Would that be agreeable to you?  I feel a weakness creeping into my limbs.  I suppose there is something else I should tell you.  Something which I haven't even mentioned yet.  I seem to have a weakness in my lungs: something congenital, I believe.  My doctor has warned me, in the most strenuous of terms, that I should cease immediately this nasty habit of smoking tobacco.  He is very serious about it.  But it is something I just cannot do.  It's a sacrifice too grand to even contemplate with seriousness.

      Can you understand that?

      Of course my wife says I smoke because I secretly long to die.

      Can you imagine that!

      Of course, I reply to my wife that she secretly longs to die also -- that she, like the rest of us, longs for sweet annihilation; she aches with a kind of religious ache for that shroud of complete oblivion.  But instead of tobacco, she uses sex to accomplish this. 

      She denies it, sometimes heatedly, saying I only ascribe to others this morbidity which I feel myself, which I express with such conviction, this dark nature which has come to possess me...

      Yet I do not consider myself morbid.  Do I seem morbid to you? 

      It is true: death does intrigue me.  But it is not the rotting of the physical frame in which I find so much of interest.  The material world now compels me very little.  It is like the shell of the egg: once it is broken, the shell has little consequence.

      Has my shell begun to break?  Oh, that is a magic question.  Let us just say that there are one or two fissures that have made their appearance.

      But it is not the broken shell in which I take delight -- but it is the treasure within.  The mind, with all its subtle complexities.  The soul, with all its deadly occasions.  The spirit, with all its knowing persuasions.  Both before and after death.  That is the great mystery.

      Life is but a gathering of speed and knowledge: a frantic preparation for that singular goal of life.  Which goal is Death, itself, of course.  And should we not, as we grow closer to the grand occurrence, begin to concern ourselves with this next adventure...?

 

You seek to slow me down a bit.  Let me ask you this: Do you believe that man longs for death?  Do you believe that, buried somewhere within us, a kind of pirate's treasure if you will, is an impulse toward death?  A longing to escape this empty mess that we've mistitled Life?

      You're not sure.  Who can be sure?

      You do agree -- although with reservations.  I see.  I suppose it is wise to hedge our bets -- to always try to keep our trump-card turned face down.

      No, of course I don't mock you.  I understand your reserve.  And I compliment it.  Afterall, some of the evidence does remain out.

      However, let us speculate a bit.  I know it is a daring bit of behavior, speculation, and sometimes quite dangerous; and not always very productive; but sometimes it is rather intriguing, even pleasurable, if pursued with a modicum of care.  And it is only speculation.  There is no one here today who shall confront you tomorrow with the views you held today -- I am not some McCarthy afterall.  No, there is no one here today -- it is only I, afterall.  And I am what?  A kind of specter?  A kind of cipher -- a man changing from one to zero. 

      No, your opinions are all very safe with me.  We speak to each other as brother to brother.  As father to son.  And all shall be held within the strictest of confidential terms.  All shall be held, as my wife was once fond of saying, within our hearts, the keys to our secrets being our trust....

 

So now you know that I am mocking you.  But all in a mood of good humor, I assure you.  All in the mood of friendly jester to ingenuous squire...

      But we mustn't stray for long (in our jocularity) from the serious question which I have posed.  You do agree to this speculation, I trust?  Very well.  We must proceed at once then.  But, first, I suppose we should organize this question in the form of a proper proposition.  And we also must decide upon the scope of this investigation.  Should we confine this speculation to Americans alone, being, as we are, so much more familiar with our countrymen?  Or, since the application of our findings affects all of mortal lineage (through no fault of their own), should we seek to arrive at a general statement -- and include the rest of the human race as well?

      You wish to confine this discussion to Americans alone?  Very well.  And not without some reason, I agree -- for there are many factors to consider.  As for the proposition, shall we put it this way: If Americans were allowed to vote, say, every four years, as they are to elect the men who at least nominally represent them in government...were they allowed whether or not they wished to be alive....

      You are laughing!  It is rather absurd, isn't it?  But let me finish the proposition anyway: do you think a majority, or even a plurality, would assent to this existence...?

      Of course, you say (between bits of mystified laughter).  Americans are optimistic by nature.  And the desire for life is strong...!

      And that is true -- in an healthy organism.  In an healthy organism, the desire for life is strong.  Which brings me, I suppose, to that next inevitable question: Is America an healthy organism...?

      The question seems to leave you somewhat puzzled, somewhat quizzical.  You wonder if perhaps I am projecting my own dilemma on my nation.  Well, that is an interesting point.  But we needn't answer either question at this point.  At this point it is enough that we have dared to ask these questions.

      And we mustn't let this avenue of thought stall our progress in any way.  For we are progressing admirably -- don't you agree?  But, yes -- we should move to something else.  We should move to something less absurd, to something much more vital with respect to human life here on earth.

      Why don't you choose the subject now?  Afterall, I am in that tiresome habit of tending to dominate the conversations I begin.  You know how trying that can be for listeners.  So, what would you like to talk about?  Oh, yes -- anything is acceptable.  Anything which interests you.  So, what will it be?  You're not sure?  How about the modern world, then...?

      My, haven't you chosen the broadest of possible topics for us.  Oh, yes, I do agree.  The Modern World is an interesting topic of concern.  It is an age of machinery.  It is an age of machinery conquering weak and tempting human flesh.  Do you agree at all with that?

      It is an age of speed and steel -- and the frantic conquering of fragments of Time.  We do try so hard to conquer Time, to hold it in its place, to remain somehow beyond it.  If life were once a  long-distance run, it has now become the quickest of sprints, run solely against the stop-watch.  Other human beings doing not even concern us now.  We run against Time.  Other human beings do share the track with us.  But they are only colored jerseys, flashing in the periphery....

      You find it odd that I should draw an analogy between life and sport.  You are a fan of sports, aren't you?  Yes, I was sure you were.  It's your competitive edge, I seek it quite clearly when I look at you.  Seeking to find an outlet.  It's your primal urge, rising again to the surface, never really gone, never really far away, seeking out strife and aggressiveness, as a way of reminding the buried warrior that a struggle for life is never really far away, not matter how civilized we believe we have come.  Goths and Visigoths all come calling, down beyond the border, above and beyond, circling our own great Rome like some disease of nature, always calling, like a cancer in the lungs or in the esophagus.

      We watch it now, the sport, the fight for life, the conquest of Death -- once we a part of it.  We thirst.  We drink our alcohol to sate our thirst.  Our hunger is mere instruction to our craving.  We sit and grow fat and content ourselves with the way things were -- though deep within us the craving remains.

      Yes, we are a nation of aging spectators, screaming our vengeance, screaming our terror, from an overflowing grandstand.  Our heroes line the playing field.  They dare to maim for us in the spirit of....of competition, in the spirit of wholesome activity and fun.  They are our gladiators on Sunday.  I speak, of course, of football.  It is the true American sport.  If baseball is the nation's pastime, then football is its holy passion.

      Yes, I did say holy.  I usually try to choose my words with care.  And why did I say holy?  Well, let me put it this way: it is no mere coincidence, no mere happenstance, that football games, traditionally, are played on Sundays.  Professional football, I mean.  The highest level of the sport.  And you are smiling.  I believe you are anticipating me.

      Ahh, yes: sport as religion.  You see it as well as I then.  And the players then as what: as a pantheon of Greek-like Roman-like muscle-bound gods for us to watch, for us to admire, for us to eulogize?  For us, today, who have no gods...?  

      No God, the singular.  No God, the absolute.  No God, the irreconcilable.

      Does that make any sense to you...?

      What's the matter?  Don't I believe in God? you ask.  And you ask it with such a starkness.  Of course I believe in God.  In a fashion, that is.

      Oh, I go to church with my family every Sunday -- at least I once did, when I still had a family. And I'm not an atheist.  And I try to avoid religious discussions, especially with my closest of friends.  My closest of associates I should say -- for I am not sure that I really have any friends at this point in my life.  I have created a lot of debts in my many years on this planet.  Those who once were my friends have mostly either grown weary of me or have died and left me here alone.

      You see, I speak very bluntly with you, very truthfully -- and that is because I hardly know you.  You are a stranger to me really.  Oh, you seem familiar, in a way, like a friend I once knew when I was younger, more innocent, more true perhaps.  You reminded me of myself, when I was younger -- that is the thought I had when I first saw you, coming up the street, your wide smile, your energetic walk.  But, as you came closer, I then understood that I was mistaken.  I really didn't remember you, phantoms being what they are.

      I am honest with you because I really don't have to worry about offending you, or alienating you, with the hairy breath of my opinions.  If I do alienate you, that is fine.  If we were never to see one another again, that too would be fine.

      I can see you shaking your head in total agreement.  We understand one another totally.  We are strangers.  And that is why we can be so totally open, so totally honest, with one another.

      Yes, it is refreshing, isn't it.  It's nice to really speak one's mind on occasion.  To purge oneself of all the ire and the withheld malice.  Without the fear of puncturing the pride or the tenderness of a loved one....

      But, back to your question -- an important question, I agree.  Do I believe in God...?

      Which God? I might retort -- and leave you searching my serious countenance for a trace of contempt or jolly irony.  But you shall find none, at least not concerning a topic such as this.

      You see, there are more than one God today.  More than one, and none, at the same time.  You wish me to explain.  Very well.  Of course, God, the first-person, the Supreme Being, the Patriarch and the Savior and the Angry  Judge of the human carnival -- no, He no longer exists.  He was extinguished years ago.  Extinguished when forbidden-knowledge became a seductive god of its own; and circumscribed His throne by charting it in squared cubits.  Science dethroned that one and only God.  And turned life from painful statement into the tentative, valueless passing of time.  Right became histrionics only.  The will of the strongest club.  Which is exactly what it is, of course.  And wrong?  Wrong became the weak club seeing strength, I suppose.  The law-breaker seeking his chance to make the law.  The Rebel.  The Revolutionary.  There have been many of these in our day.  The anti-hero. 

      We should perhaps than Einstein for all of this.  This relativity theory of his, which says that each action is relative to another action, each value is relative to another value.  Although Einstein did believe in God.  And there was an absolute in all of his relativity.  The speed of light was an absolute afterall...

      We all wanted one answer to it all -- Einstein even wanted this -- believing, for some reason, that there truly was but one answer.  It was the foolishness of youth perhaps.  Expecting so simple a solution.  Afterall, one must become like a child to pass into the kingdom of heaven.  First childhood and last childhood, into which I am coursing at a pretty terrific speed if I do say so myself.

      What meaning has Life?  GOD!

      Oh, it was all so simple a solution.

      Apparently that was much too easy.  It was certainly not enough.  It was enough for the fire-eating, sun-breathing nomad who wished only for simplicity in his picture.  Who hadn't the Time, and therefore the need, of any explanation more complex, more attenuated.  What he sought was reassurance.  And, as long as the priest or chief or magician could provide him assurance, then he would provide the holy-man with mutton from his flock.  The priest could rule, if rule he would, with the pretense of piousness and with a kind of faith in the future.

      The promise of life-beyond-life, life without these black seasonal borders, life without end, ever-was and ever-shall be.  World without end.  Amen.

      It made his life much simpler then.  There was a rule to be followed.  There was a justification for the pain of life.  And there was the promise of reward for those who bore their suffering with grace and with dignity....

      But then the philosopher appeared.

 

Cities grew around wheat.  Rivers floated wheat to wheat, stone to stone.  And civilization began to rear its precious head.  Civilization began to rear its constructive-destructive head....

      Youth, in a constant flurry, with all its inherent benevolent beliefs. Growing.  Maturing.  Until luxury and wealth became the Rosetta Stone of denial.  And golden civilization began to rears its doubting head.  Golden civilization began to fear the cracks within its fiber, within its wheat, within its stone.  Ever-was and ever-shall-be....

      Sons of lords and kings and shahs sat splendidly in the Eternal Palace; and pondered life in all its confusing amusing miseries.  If youth had been but slicing wheat or carving stone or gathering hay, then its hands would not have had the time to form and fit the tightening noose.  But Youth had grown old then.  Youth had lost its touch with life; it had become doubting, angry, denying existence.

      The wealth which conceives and nourishes a civilization, in the end, attacks the very health of its glorious creation.  Until a moral and physical lethargy are all that dare remain.

      Of course, wealth is a god too, one of the smaller gods, that is, one of the largest gods still with a small "G".  We all know about this, coming from America as we do.

 

And, as I suggested when we first met, Science has become the newest god.  Science has become the god of our friend, Mr. Robert Henning.  He trusts, with all his soul, the authority and goodness of this latest divinity.  But is this new god any more potent than the last?  Any more true, more final?  And will it answer finally the recent questions we have posed?  Will the meaning and value of life on earth be posited by some technocrat in white -- possibly in the form of a computer print-out...?

      I seriously doubt the probability of this.  Dare we deceive ourselves to such a ridiculous degree!  Science seeks to render man fleshless.  To turn the human fool into man the machine-incarnate!  Oh, how we strive for efficiency here!  What will conserve the most amount of Time?  What will entail the least amount of effort?  What will allow for the least degree of mishap or failure?  Why, the machine, of course!

      God is a machine today.  We worship Him as a machine -- as we worship all of our machines.  We collect God today.  We place Him in our living rooms and kitchens, even in our garage.  He makes our life easier.  Though He doesn't demand very much of us today.  The Old God made life easier too -- though He demanded quite a bit more.  And He returned, at least that was the theory, a spiritual significance, a moral border inside of which life took on order and meaning....

      But what does God the Machine return to us today?  Time.  Only time.  More time to contemplate the depth and the expanse of all that we lack, of all that we are missing today.  Labor-saving, yes.  Time-saving, yes.  But soul-saving?  This I am not willing to admit just yet.

      Spiritually, we are a race of paupers.  Of course, I include myself in this judgment.  There is nothing of beauty in America today -- only things of value.  The accumulation of things, petty machines, is our form of prayer today.  We are fearful, we are discouraged, we feel betrayed: we go shopping.  Devotion to these petty machines is our avenue to spiritual sanctity today.  Is it any wonder we founder as a nation...?

      Please don't misunderstand me.  I am not a reactionary, calling for the swift return to a corrupt religious hegemony of many years gone by.  No, I am thankful we have escaped that form of tyranny.  We have not escaped all tyranny however.  It only rule today in a less dramatic fashion....

      Perhaps I should say no more about this.  I fear I may sound like some disjointed cleric, preaching the endless blessings of a dark-age morality.  And that is not the case.  I am, every inch and corpuscle of me, whether I wish it or not, a Modern Man.  A man of this gray and burgeoning world called Now.  A man who feels his age -- and see that others are feeling their age as well....

      Burgeoning?  Yes, perhaps that is an incorrect term.  But all that sprouts must soon begin to pout and wither with the sun into trampled seeds and shrunken vines....

      Do you believe that this is true?  That the death is in the seed?  That Oswald Spengler was right -- that families and nations and globes are bordered by nature's laws of birth, life, death and discovery...?

      Oh, I read it somewhere.  Or perhaps I made it up.  I'm not sure really.  And I'm not sure it matters much.  It is not important.

      Let me ask you this: Do you feel yourself an integral part in this burgeoning, pouting withering world called Now?  You laugh again.  You're not sure, you say.  Who is sure?  How could anyone be sure?  Dear, how could anyone feel himself an integral part of the madness and the motion of this constant heat and continual commotion...?

      It is becoming clear to you that I don't feel myself an integral part of this.  Yes, well, I will have to admit that your are reading me clearly now.

      We are an age out of time with time.

      We are a longing age.  An age revolted by the social technicalities -- and the cheapness that seems to clutter the human environment.  Yes, they were the worst of times, they were the best of times.  Like all times perhaps.

      Do you agree that there is a longing in us to escape it all -- to escape this thing called Now?  But where do we go to escape all this congestion?  We can't go to the beach house.  We no longer own the house in the Hamptons.  We wish to escape into a simpler time, a more humane age: the Past.  The glorious past, so perfect in contour, so pristine in emoluments.  It cannot be done, however.  We cannot escape into a memory.  For what is the past but a silk-clothed memory of soft-warmth and abandonment.  The death of responsibility....

      What word should we use to describe this age?  Oh, I don't know.  Do you think the word alienation has not been defused of all value owing to its frequency and popularity of use?  Alienation is a good word.  It has been over-used perhaps, but not for lack of justification.

      Man, who flees loneliness with nearly the same dedication and desperate frenzy with which he flees all attachment.  Solipsism as a sort of national endowment.  I as a sort of moon-god beaming down on curious woe.  Seeking not to touch or to be touched.  But to observe touching carefully.  To write a treatise on its manners.  And to wonder at the apparent nature of its softness and its soothing.

      We are an age out of touch with touch.  Out of taste with taste.

 

But you wish to stop me.  Yes, we did begin by speaking about God.  Did I move away from the topic?  And I hadn't even noticed.  I suppose it must be my age.  What is my age?  Oh, I never give away my age.  Clues?  I never give clues either.  But I will tell you this: I served my country in the Second World War; and I took part in the landings at Northern Africa, Anzio and southern France.

      What?  Did I say I'd never seen a man die?  But that was in the war -- that was different.  Well, of course I saw men die -- in the war.  I saw friends of mine die.  They died as men often die, soldiers of fortune, men out making war.  Of course, there was nothing I could do for them....

      So, this gives you a much-altered view of me, does it?  It shouldn't really.  I did nothing gallant or heroic in the war.  I was drafter and I served, with neither much notice nor enthusiasm. 

      Why did I tell you that I had not seen a man die?  I don't know.  I suppose I didn't think of it.  You make too much of it.  It was war.  There was nothing that could be done for them.  It was the wheel of destiny.  And it rolled over everything in its path.

      Did I ever try to save a man's life?

      Not that I recall.  Oh, in theory I did.  I was a medic in the army, though assigned to headquarters, far removed from the actual fighting.

      But this isn't really very interesting, is it?

      Was I ever frightened during the war?   Yes, many times.  Was I always frightened?   No -- not always.  War is really rather a boring, lonely affair to be truthful.... Perhaps I should have said business rather than affair -- for there is more of this in it than there is of that.  Although, there is a fragment, perhaps a fragrance, of the latter involved in the spirit of wholesale destruction.

      Was I afraid of death?  I was for a time certainly.  That final waltz into oblivion was not the experience I most desired at that time of flowering manhood and strength.  But fear soon gave way to a sort of grim resignation.  And there is a kind of death in that too -- in grim resignation.  In the hardening of the spirit.  The loss of faith in the higher things.  One either learned to accept his fate, as dismal and grimy as it might be, or he sacrificed his sanity to the pointless abuse and madness that was war.  Many men did sacrifice their sanity.  Became walking scarecrows dedicated to lunacy.  And many of us learned to accept death, soon wearing it like a stink that seemed to cling to the linings of our shadows.  It made us old.  Youth seeped from the limbs and heart like life itself.  This left us fearless for a time, Death itself, stronger than Death because we had become Death, without even realizing it.

      The world came to rest within the jaws of our own gray landscape.  The moon was laced with a slivery slavery: all-conquering.  beaming down on curious woe.  Earth and God and the Moon and the mind all wore a kindred garment of shame.  But life continued to trudge along, as it always does, two feet at a time, calculated for song, for a dirge, a ballad, later perhaps for a laugh and a dance.  Life continued to trudge alone, although a bit more slowly with mud and blood caked to its boot-soles....

      There was nothing anyone could do.

      It was part of a plan.

      History was calmly laying the course of its own involvement.

      Everything seemed to move through a momentum of its own.  Ineluctably.  Like the movement of Time itself.  God's handlebar.  Being turned by midgets in glass slippers.  Cocky and weeping by turns.  Hard and astonished by the calories of hardness.  God and devil, saint and sinner, all standing inside the same skin, killing the good and the bad at once, harvesting souls for heaven as surely as a farmer slice wheat to wheat, stone to stone, calculating profit, as Nature herself calculates the winter burden.

     

I see by your enthusiasm that you want to continue this discussion.  Was I very brave, very patriotic? you ask.  Not really.  Oh, I see: you remember about my grandfather Otto.  No -- Otto was the patriot of the family.  No, I knew the war was being fought for heavy industry, for world markets, and for the price of tea.

      I felt no great duty to serve, or satisfaction in serving, or pride or even much gratitude in eventually living to speak of it.

      I can see you are somewhat disappointed by my response.  You would rather I speak of wild heroics, of valiant grace.  You would rather I claim to be a Sergeant York amid the flames.  I was no Sergeant York.  One Sergeant York was enough I suppose....

      But I will tell you something, a bit of a story, if you will.  I can see that you would like to have one; so I will try my best to comply.

      It was after one of the landings in the Mediterranean.  I can't even remember which one.  Perhaps it was Sicily.  Perhaps it was southern France.  It was all so long ago.  Anyway, after the beach-head was secured, after we had penetrated several miles into the mainland....I know I am not telling this very well.  I am not a storyteller, afterall.  I am a man of ideas.  I never was very good at the raconteur's art.  Anyway, a group of German soldiers who had apparently been waiting for the landing marched up to us to surrender, coming out of the woods, waving a white flag.   There were only a few men, about a dozen or so, of all complexions and sizes; but one man, a short man, with very short blond hair, almost shaved, and with a web-like scar on the back of his right hand....I remember that man even today, vividly; I remember the small white scar as well.  He was crying, uncontrollably, overwhelmed by nerves and fatigue.  He was holding up his right hand to shield his eyes from view.  He was ashamed that he was crying.  Still, he could not control his emotions.  Finally, as he sat amid the smoking rubble, a friend put his arm about the shaken man.  It was a picture of gentle brotherhood and kindness -- amid the flames of hell.  It made me realize, at that moment, for the first time, that even devils must have souls; and it was a reassuring thought, believe me, for I thought of myself many times that year, as we drove up toward the Rhine, I thought of myself also as a devil, a devil with a soul most likely.

      Even Satan, in all his hideous aspects, must warm with actual compassion when all vanity and sham lies naked in the smoke, brutally exposed, Death lingering much too long, turning all souls into tattered children, no food to eat, no blanket, no shoes, a madman's nightmare, a bad blemish of color blown up in one of Van Gogh's dusky balloons....

      And the stricken man kept mumbling: It is all madness!  It is all madness...!

      And the corporal, his compatriot, replied: It is all madness for them now, Karl.  For you and I the madness is over...!

     

I was genuinely touched by the declaration, by the drama of such a romantic declaration.  Of course, it was a delusion to believe that the madness was over simply because Karl and Klaus chose to walk in chains, rather than be burned alive, sacrificed to the god of lebensraum.  Madness was just, shall we say, removed a pace or two.  Hidden from view.  For the time being.

      Klaus and Karl felt themselves no longer a part of it, not longer responsible for the mayhem.  They were in chains; they were now the victims of the madness, not longer the perpetrators of it.  And this made them feel free somehow.

      The world continued to march at its own pace, however -- with or without Karl and Klaus.  Madness also marched at its own pace.  Madness did not simply disappear because Klaus and Karl now refused to recognize it.

      Now I am speaking from the historical perspective, of course -- the general as opposed to the individual.  Yes, that phrase does have more than one meaning, especially given the military context.  And many philosophical implications as well.  The general opposed to the individual.  Eternal Time as opposed to individual time.  Nature as opposed to man.  East as opposed to west....

      Yes, I could go on -- but you get the picture.

      Clearly, even as individuals choosing to act in accordance with their wills, perhaps even in accordance with their mores, Klaus and Karl could not escape the madness of the times.  Progress marched at its own enlivened pace.  And it carried them along, like bits of driftwood in a muddy stream, in a deepening pool, driftwood bobbing and bobbing in its own concentric wake....

      What Karl should have said in response was: But, Klaus!  If it is madness for them, then it is surely madness for you and I as well...!

      He did not of course.

      He smoked a cigarette; then he continued to sob.  And he sobbed and shook until they came to take him away, a captive, a broken spirit....

 

Which brings us, I suppose, to the essential theme of this...would it be acceptable to call this little rendering a vignette?  No?  And not a fable either.  This...simple narrative, then.  No, of course madness is not the essential them.  What is the essential theme then? you ask.   Why, captivity, of course.  And not just captivity, but voluntary captivity, desired captivity.  The flight from freedom....and the subsequent death of the Golden Age....

      Wo!  Yes, that is quite a leap.  From captivity, slavery to the death of the Golden Age.  Are these two things connected?  Is there an implicit causal connection here...?

      I don't know.  Ideas move at their own pace, like progress does, like Time itself, like light moves, like photons move through dense matter.  Ideas are actually living things, living beings -- I think Plato said that, or at least implied that.  Certainly Pythagoras once thought it too.  Packets of light imbued with intelligence.  Which actually inhabit bodies -- that was the ancient notion of transmigration of souls, I believe.  Ideas being linked, not in ones mind, but in actuality, linked in some pattern and imbuing one with...insight.

      Yes, we are etheric now, becoming a bit thin, like a butterfly's wing.  I am sorry.  Occasionally, more so now than ever before, I occasionally drift away on the wing of a thought, anti-grave, girding for dreams.  Anti-something.  Everything is anti-something.  Positive is anti-negative.  American is anti-German -- or , I guess, anti-Russian now.  One is anti-zero, I suppose.  We should consult Pythagoras on that one.  Making me wonder if there is a place where their is no anti-, where the one and the zero exist together, pre-genetic if you will, a place and a time without polarity, a kind of spatial womb where opposites intertwine, legs wound together like lovers spent, the polarity over, sleep coming on.  Yes, sleep coming on.  In sleep then?  That is where polarity vanishes...?

 

But back to what matters, the real world, I mean.  The world of Robert Henning -- and all his partners in crime.

      We were speaking of freedom and slavery and gold, yes?

      If we were to put it in the form of a question or two, this thought might read: Will man, when madness seems to cloak his age in the clasp of a hellish encompassment -- will man, to escape the debilitating trauma, and the countless dangers of utter chaos -- will he accept, even demand, the relative security and the discipline of chains...?  Will mankind opt for slavery over the relative instability of freedom when it turns to license...?

      And it the concept of freedom even viable any longer...?

      Yes, these are big pieces of meat -- and very important questions, for the future, I mean.

      And I only seem to be looking back in time.  Have you never heard the saying: It is a kind of counter-march, by which we get into the rear of time, and mark the movements and the meaning of things as we make our slow return...?

      No, that is not a double entendre.  I am not raising the issue of inversion now....although, clearly, when I begin to speak about freedom becoming license, the phrase getting into the rear of time does take on a whole different meaning, one that we may explore somewhat, on the plane of ideas, if our companionship is allowed to grow and if our discussion turns to the effects and the causes of a declining personal civilization....

      Do I have children?  What?  Oh, yes.  I do have children -- at least I did have children.  But it is too early to begin discussing them.  Everything in good time, my friend. 

      There are certain circumstances, which, at the time of their happening, are a kind of riddle; and, as every riddle is to be followed by its answer, so those kinds of circumstances will be followed by their events; and those events are always the true solution.

      Have you never heard that expression?

      Well, I'm surprised.  No, it is just an old saying.   Did I make it up?  No, certainly not.  It is probably Greek, you know.  You know how the Greeks are.  And it is not so very important who constructs an odd phrase or two.  Neither are the phrases themselves so vital.  Words cloak something, afterall.  The pod cloaks the pea.  The Idea matters. 

      Real Nothingness is inside the Truth.  The Truth is inside the Idea.  The Idea is inside the Word.  The Word is inside the Mouth.  And the Mouth is inside the hollowed Body, the hallowed Body.  The Body lives inside the Earth.  The Earth lives inside the Planetary System.  The Planetary System Lives inside the Galaxy.  The Galaxy lives inside the Quadrant.  The Quadrant lives inside the One.  The One lives inside the Zero, the womb, which, itself, contains every Idea. 

      Until the time that all things are born, all individual truths, cast out on the sea as a fisherman casts his net.  Packets of light, pieces of matter all broken off from the mother, Hydrogen.  Each piece of light containing all lights, all ideas.  Hologrammatically structured.  The thing and the anti-thing.  Shadow itself creating the anti-thing.  Matter being density; density creating the shadow.  The Idea being born; and, at the same time, the Death of the Idea also being born....

      My -- I  have just revealed the secret of existence.  Without really knowing it.  Strike a stone and watch the water run out.  And me, this stone -- I am only a simple banker, a banker with only simple questions to pose. 

     

We construct such pallid symbols to our melancholy.  Constructive-destructive symbols.  Words.  The elements of thought.  Gods who feed upon themselves, ultimately littering the terrain with negation.  Negation being their prime nature.  And then proclaiming: All sustenance is lacking!  All sustenance is lacking...!

      Almost with a smile.

 

Yes, food is vital.  And there are some who would claim that the rose is vital.  That the rose is as vital as the loaf of bread is vital.  Do I agree with that?  Well, when I was young and idealistic...

      There are some who would claim that rain is vital to drought, that youth is vital to age, that health is vital to sickness and fatigue.  That woman is vital to man -- and man to woman.  That black is vital to white.  That death and re-birth are vital to life and to decay....

      Even that vitality is vital to the luxury of despair.

      No, I am returning to your question.  Let me illustrate my answer with a small story (I won't call it a vignette):

 

There once was a young man who sailed to America in the mid-1800's.  During the voyage, his father gave him a small coin with which to buy a loaf of bread from the ship's kitchen.  Near the door of the ship's kitchen sat an older man, another voyager, his clothes tattered, his face drawn and pale, who stopped the young man and spoke to him in a weak though pleasant voice.

    I have eaten nothing for many days, the old man said.  I have grown weak; I have need of physical sustenance.  While I brought very little money for food with me on this voyage, I did bring something very special nonetheless.  I brought this bed of roses, for I knew that on this desolate journey there would be need of something of beauty.

    The young man looked at the several dozen roses, rich in texture and hue, packed in fertile soil within a hand-made oak bed.

    It is not enough to have bread, to have physical sustenance, the old man said.  One must also have spiritual sustenance, an appreciation of beauty, a contact with the finer things of the world.  For it is this which makes man a thing above the other beasts of prey.  A man's soul is barren if he thirsts for bread only, if he hungers not to see the rose.

    It is true, the old man continued, that a man's body weakens and withers if deprived of physical nourishment.  So, man must seek to supply himself with both, in appropriate degrees, to make room in his life for both kinds of wealth, both kinds of pleasure.  Since I am hungry, but have these roses -- and since you have money for bread -- I will share with you my roses, if you will share with me your bread.  For then we will both have a necessary portion of each....

    The young man thought for a while.  He could see that the old man was very weak, that he was in desperate need of something to eat.

    At length, the young man replied: I will do this.  For all of your roses, I will give you an entire loaf of bread.

    The old man's eyes lit up.  An entire loaf!  True, he would be losing his roses.  But a man must eat...!

    I accept, the old man said.  If you will let me keep one rose for myself.

    Very well, the young man agreed; and he hastened to the kitchen where he bought the loaf of bread.  He returned, gave the loaf to the old man, uprooted the one rose, as promised, and handed it to the old man, who sat eagerly chewing the length of the baked wheat....

    The young man then took the bed of roses, hoisted upon his shoulder, toward the rear of the boat, to where the more wealthy voyagers were situated.  They were pleased with the sight of the young man and his roses; and they offered to buy them, to brighten up their lives with the delicate beauty of the flowers.  The young man sold them one at a time, uprooting each, taking coins from the excited patrons.  Finally, when all the roses were sold, the young man returned to the kitchen, where, with his profits, he purchased three loaves of bread to take to his family.  His father was very proud of him, of his shrewd business sense.  His family happily ate the three loaves of bread.

    Of course, in a matter of days, all the roses were dead, having been deprived of their nourishing soil.  The old man, too, was dead, having eaten the whole loaf of bread at one sitting, his shrunken stomach heaving in the ache of ultimate contrast.

    The ship swayed as always on the ultimate gray sea.

    In time, the people on the ship forgot all about the roses.  They forgot that so much beauty had once graced their lives at sea. 

    They landed in America on an overcast, colorless day.

 

Yes, I suppose I do paint a rather bleak landscape with my tale, which was probably not well-chosen.  No, of course it was not a true story.  It was only a bit of a homily.  A strange sort of Parable on the Waters, if you will.  I don't know where it came from.  Where does any story come from?  But did I answer your question?  About what is vital, I mean...?

      You believe that I am a cynic.  I am afraid that is true.

      Do you know what the captain of the Titanic said, as his ship steeped and rolled before disappearing in the salty deep? 

      He said: It is vital, in this hour of great danger, that we not lose our sense of humor...!

 

You smile a black sort of amused smile.  You must have liked that one.  And I suppose humor is vital, to man who wears a tireless frown....

      By the way, do you have the time?  My watch is in the repair shop.  Yes, a minor problem I believe.  You never know.  You never know what those doctors really know and what they tell you -- clock doctors, I mean.

      Oh, it's still not so late.  Would you like to walk some more then?  Yes, I feel much stronger now.  The rest has done me a wealth of good.  Would you like to walk down by the park?  Oh, yes, it is lovely this time of year.  The alders are so rich.  And the pond with the swans so timeless and peaceful.  One can't help but feel the hand of winter in the air though.

      I have an arthritic condition in my back.  It makes the winter weather much less pleasant that the fall -- I can always feel things coming even before they arrive because of this condition.  Weather things I mean: snow, rain, the barometer falling, that sort of thing.

      And the summer?  How do I like summer?  To tell you the truth, I'm too old now to enjoy the summers as  I once did.  My children enjoy the summers.  But even they -- and I believe it's a sign they are growing older, on the inside I mean -- even they don't seem to appreciate the warmth the way they once did.

      You would like to hear about my children?  Later, perhaps.  That should come later in our conversations.  We will get to them eventually....

 

Oh, yes.  Did you read about the murder here on Thursday.  Did you realize that the names of our days of the week have mythological and planetary originals?  You did not?  Thursday is Thor's Day.  Friday is Frei's Day.  Saturday is Saturn's Day.  Sunday is the Sun's Day.  Monday is the Moon's Day.  Tuesday is Zeus's Day.  And Wednesday is Wotan's Day.

      Oh, I am sure it has some meaning.  I am not prepared to address such meaning at the moment, however -- as it is really quite arcane, not the appropriate subject for a walk in the park.

      Speaking of which....the murder!

      It happened over near that bench, beneath the overhanging branches.  It was very close to where that older woman is sitting now.  I don't imagine she'd be sitting there if she knew the grisly facts of the crime.  If she realized her proximity to the spirit of such a killing....

      But you didn't read about it -- in the newspaper?  No.  Well that surprises me.  I was certain everyone read in detail (and perhaps with relish) the reports of crime and punishment the same way I always do.  I was certain that was what sold the papers.  That and the sports section, of course.  And the section with the horoscopes.  And of course the obituaries...

      I suppose I will have to tell you about it then -- about this murder.

      Well, it happened at approximately five o'clock Thursday evening.  It was the same day that I took my pocket watch into the repair shop.  I remember that quite clearly.  For it was at exactly 3:37 pm that day that my clock had unexpectedly stopped.  I didn't realize that it had stopped until much later however.  I was walking toward this very park, for it was my custom to meet a friend here to play chess.  I stopped at the repair shop on my way to the park.  I found out, to my horror, that it was much later than I thought.

      But that has nothing to do with this story-- or, at least, it has very little to do with this story.

      Do you find this of interest?  I had the feeling that you might -- murder being what it is, so close to our primal natures, I mean.

      Anyway, it happened at approximately five o'clock Thursday evening.  A woman was sitting on the bench closest the one in question.  She was the only witness to the shooting.  It was dusk, that second time of day when the forces of darkness and light are of equal strength; when the forces of darkness begin to win in fact.  The evening was settling in.  And an older man, in his early sixties, respectably dressed, bespeaking at least a moderate degree of affluence, was sitting on the bench beneath the overhanging branches.  He was reading, the woman said.  She wasn't sure exactly what he was reading.   But she said he was quite absorbed in the book; then a young man walked slowly up to the bench.

      The young man was dressed shabbily: tattered denims, brown leather jacket, sneakers.  He had sand-colored hair, which fell over his ears, over his collar; his face was rather drawn and quite pale; his hands shook as he drew a revolver from his coat-pocket.

      He asked the man for his wallet.  The older man set his book upon the bench, reached into his pocket, withdrew the wallet, and handed it to the young man.  The young man looked at the woman.  Then he turned back to the older man, and he asked for his watch.  The older man, too, carried a pocket watch.  He gave it to the young man.  The young man then demanded that the older man rise from the bench and follow him into the shade beneath the overhanging trees, on the far side of the tree, away from the bench.  The older man did as he was instructed.  The woman watched it all.  She could hear the voices in the trees only indistinctly; but she could see everything.  She watched, mesmerized.

      The older man emptied his pockets.  The young man, in his turn, stuffed everything into his own pockets.  He turned to leave.  Then he turned back.  He said something, then raised his gun calmly; and he shot the older man in the chest.

      The older man was thrown back violently against the tree trunk.  The young man laughed as he walked away; he laughed hysterically, a madman's laugh.

      The older man called from the tree for help.

      The woman sat upon the bench, watching, frozen in terror.  She believed the young man would kill her too.  But the young man slowly walked away, saying nothing to the woman.  She said the man walked ever so casually.  And with a proud strut of self-importance.  It was as if he had just hit a homerun to win the World Series in game seven.  Or as though he had just helped an old man across a busy street.  There was that kind of pride in the rhythm of his walk, as though he had just won something for his teammates, as if he had just done a very good deed.

      The woman waited until the young man had disappeared; then she hurried to the wounded man.  He was dying.  His blood was strewn about the fallen leaves like a crimson dew.  She ran to call the police and an ambulance.  But the older man was dead when the ambulance arrived.

 

Yes, it is a sad story.  It is a pathetic story actually.  It is obscene.  I probably shouldn't have brought it up.  It makes me quite depressed to speak of it, to think of it.  And I am quite obsessed by this story.  I can't see to get it out of my mind.

      And I said there wasn't enough danger in America today...!

 

Let's not talk about this any longer.  Not, it is not a very bright story.  It clouds the many aspects of this beautiful golden day.  Let us talk about something more...more bracing.  To fit the glorious atmosphere.

      Do you wish to hear something more about my grandfather?  Very well.  Although I really know very little about my grandfather.  I was an eleven-month baby, by the way.  I was expected in October; and I refused to break the light of day until the middle days of cold December.  Terrified as life was thrust upon me with such brutal speed.  I longed never to pierce that silken web.  Coiled, like a snake, within the Eden of the luxurious bed.  Totally propelled.  And everything there, in that dream, so succulent....

      What do I think it signifies?  The eleven months?  Oh, stage fright, I suppose.  I must have known what waited for me.  The crowd of horrors. The whelping in the balconies.  Birth and death.  That constant flow.

      The sun has an eleven year cycle, by the way.  An eleven year cycle from Alpha to Omega.

      I must have had an inkling from somewhere.  But I head on for dear life. 

      Although, finally: the ultimate rejection.

      The first ultimate rejection.  Before the second, the last, utter rejection.

      Birth, the archetypal ambulation, serving all succeeding forms and traumas of rejection...

      Carried to an endless point of value.

      Like a sum which is volleyed on the stock exchange, a tennis ball being batted between two forces, the buyer and the seller, the bull and the bear, the good and the bad, the generalist and the individual, the internationalist and the nationalist, the force of life and the force of death....

 

By the way, have you read much about reincarnation?  Oh, it is a fascinating concept.  And at least as plausible as our western concept of life eternal in a heaven or in a hell.  And it is much more poetic a concept than our is.  Our is so....judicial.  So....property-oriented.  Don't you agree...?

      (I must admit I chose that word -- oriented -- as a bit of a pun.  However, since you didn't seem to catch it, I felt I must point it out myself.  Oh, but you did catch it?  Well, wonderful.  I felt slightly like an ass to point it out.  But I was so proud of it, in my own way, my older way...you need to forgive me certain things like this.  I have very few triumphs now, now that my family has disintegrated and all the bits of stars have been scattered to the wind.  I am quite alone now, living mostly for my puns and some memories.  But mostly for my puns.

      I apologize for not giving you the credit you deserve, as a listener I mean.  I will not make that mistake a second time.  If I do, you must point it out to me.  And I will present myself to you for a good flogging.)

      But, yes, back to my grandfather.  As I was saying, before I so rudely interrupted myself, I never did know my grandfather.  I became acquainted with him only through legends erected by my family.  And you know how people tend to deify the dead, especially their dead ancestors.  To make them larger than life somehow, with all their compliments and small embellishments.  So who can really say what was really the truth.

      One curious thing though: it seems he never did speak English very well.  Though he came to America as a youth, he remained, for most of his life, in an environment which continued to employ German as its major language.  The English he did manage to speak was less than fluent to the ear -- and I've heard this from several independent sources.  This leads me to accept that it was probably so. 

      He did read English very well, however; and he steeped himself in the lore of American history and American literature, caring very much for Walt Whitman among others.

      His favorite period of study seemed to be the American Revolution and its subsequent developments: Federalism, the formation of the government, the National Banking controversy....

      Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton.  He loved the innocence of the quest for democratic rule.  Our renaissance era.

      You see, my grandfather had just come from a country where the glorious revolution did not succeed.  Social progress had been blunted; and he had been left without a home.  Here, in his new home, he discovered, with much excitement, a land where the revolution actually had been won.  And it seemed to him that this was proof that good actually could prevail.  Right would have its day.  He saw in America the future of humanity.   Resurrected from the ashes and the blood of Old World Europe.

      He read all the great speeches of the colonialists.  And, if the stories of my family are to be believed, he even memorized the famous speech of Patrick Henry of Virginia, the Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech.  And he would recite it in the saloons, in full Germanic voice, in his very broken English, whenever he had taken a bit too much to drink.  Which was quite often, by the way.  For Grandfather Otto also drank a great deal.  That's another thing you should know in piecing together this tattered fabric of a history, this personal re-creation of a life, of a nation, of a race and races, of a star system and of the genesis of hydrogenetic thought....

      Is that what this is? you ask.  This journey we are taking?  Well, I suppose it is.  Are you surprised?  I mean, that I should be damned by such an intent?  Volcanic in its nature.  Subterranean in its makeup.  Stringing voices on a long lace, pearls from the sea and also purloined motives from gods and demons.  Ambition is the problem.  The walk is long.  And we still have time....

 

I even memorized the speech myself, as a lad, hoping to gain some burst of enlightenment by following in the footsteps of my legendary precursor -- yes, the one who cursed before I did....

      You are now moving a couple of steps ahead of me, I'm afraid.

      And did I gain a burst of enlightenment?  From memorizing the speech?  Well, not in so many words, not in the dramatic fashion which my fancy had actually designed.

      Do I remember any of the speech?  Well, let's see.  Some of it, I'm sure.

      Dear Mr. President, he said.  It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against that painful truth.  And to listen to the song of that siren, till she transform us into beasts....

 

Truly, that is what the man said.  A memorable introduction, don't you agree?  A timeless message, to be pondered, it seems.  In the circulatory gesture of things.  The blood stream, the wind, the rivers, the air.  Oxygenation.  Everything.  Re-circulating.  The recycling of ideas.

      Yes, I suppose I do have a good memory.  For some things anyway.

      Did I do well in school?  Yes -- rather well.  I was nearly always at the top of my class: bright, well-liked, although tending toward shyness.  And with a natural tendency toward indolence also, something I have perfected in my later years....

      Why toward shyness?  Oh, I suppose it was due to my insecurity.  The feeling of not fitting in too well.  The fear that I would not fit in too well.  There is a longing to belong to something larger and greater than oneself.  To gather some support for one's identity from the regularity of changeless fact and friendship.  To convince oneself that there is a certain quality of stability.  To find in oneself the laws of permanence....

      But all permanence is but a smile we see, a smile on a beautiful girl, moving down the busy street, then gone.  All permanence must crumble at the touch of a frown.  At the touch of a scrutinizing glance or two...

      It crumbles and leaves what in its place?  The illusion of impermanence perhaps?  The illusion of change?

      Yes, paradoxes.  There are paradoxes everywhere.

 

Let me tell you about the young man who confronted me last week -- as I was buying a Sunday paper.  Yes, I too was confronted by a damaged young man.  He had an empty gaze in his eyes, the gaze of an unearthly bliss.  The transcendent peace of an eternal contentment.  He lived in a different world than I, that much was obvious.  He handed me a pamphlet which read: How To Be Born Again.

      I thought for a moment that it must be about reincarnation.  But I was sadly disappointed.  He spoke to me about the miracle of re-birth.  He was part of a Christian sect, no doubt.  One of those new Christian fundamentalist sects.  Yet he was very distant.  And his logic seemed somewhat confused.

      He said God was working through him -- and I had to smile to myself over the thought that God had sunk to such lows, judging from the quality of His new....army of the word....

      He said God was working through him, and those like him -- the prophets -- to bring the message of annihilation and salvation to those standing at the threshold of destruction.  The end was at hand!  Only those who became selfless and who accepted Christ would be saved.  The world would finally crumble into chaos and despair.

      It was all in the Bible, he said.  All the predictions about today.  Satan was ruling the earth.  Man was gorging himself on ruin.  Sin had swept the earth like star-dust.  And a vengeful God was waiting, without mercy, in the wings, for those who failed to repent.

      The scenario was so simple.  The Great Battle would begin soon.  The End would rise before us like a black swan in the eastern sky.  And all reality would be wiped away.

      A black swan or a black dawn? I asked.  I had always heard the expression black dawn. 

      No, black swan, he had said.

      All reality -- save that terrible reality of an injured, angry God, who seeks to gain His just return by dangling man above the eternal flame, like a broken moth, poised to suffer a timeless pain and demolishment -- all other reality would be merely wiped away, like it never had existed....

      So it shall be, in the End, he said.

 

Why was he bringing this message to me? I wondered.

 

The young man said that knowledge was the culprit.  He said Mankind would finally have to bear the fruits of that forbidden tree.  For knowledge had made us much too proud.  Much too arrogant about the rights of Man.  And arrogance had filled us with disdain toward all life but our own -- all life but the life of Humanity.  We had tried to separate ourselves from the chain of events.  The chain, linking all creations back to God, had, at least in the mind of Mankind, been broken.  Mankind stood apart from this understanding now; that was why the world was in such disarray.

      Each man was his own God now, making his own rules, living by his own creed.

      For all could be reduced to matter now.  The observable laws of motion, space and content.  Weight.  Height.  Speed.  Impact.

      The spiritual world could not be measure by Man.  So it did not exist.

      Man existed.  The world existed.  The world existed for Man's existence.  The world could be tamed and managed by Knowledge....

      Everything had become so orderly.

 

He told me about the new advance in science.  He said: They've nearly perfected the Time-Machine.  They realize that there's no life on the other planets.  And that this planet is dying.  Greed is killing it.  So the answer is to escape the Present, traveling backward, fleeing in time, back into primordial memory....

      I said: That's utterly ridiculous.  How in the world could something like that work?

      And he said: It's a machine!  You set the controls on the machine; and it carries you back into another age...!

      How can that be? I asked again.  Is Time but a ribbon upon a spool?  Does the past hang in space like some oversized photograph?  Is it a movie we re-wind at will...?

      He wasn't certain, he admitted.  But of one thing he was certain.  There was nothing, nothing, totally beyond the realm of science...!

      Of that much he was certain.

 

Yes, all great religions are founded upon superstition.  And all crumble, eventually, at the touch of a scrutinizing glance or two.

     

But the key word in this exercise, this broken bit of conversation, even more than the word Time, is the word -- the concept of -- Escape.  Yes, escape.  That is why I told you of this young man.  Because of this longing which he has within -- the longing which we all have within -- to escape it all...

      But how does he wish to escape it all...?

      He seeks his escape through death, through the annihilation of the earth, through the salvation of the other-worldliness.  Through the destruction of the self.  He does not believe in science.  Even if the magic Time Machine were created, were perfected, this would change nothing.  It would only alleviate our boredom for an instant; then we would cry out for a new, better toy, a new, better annihilation of the present.  No, he is smarter than that.

 

To him, Science was but a devilish creed made from chromium, speed, steel and computer bits.  The trumpeting of formulae.  The worshipping of fragments of life, now mistaken for life itself.  He looked toward the future, but with a sadness, even a terror....

      Yes, I did have two sons.  Two sons.  One son was, well, he was very positive, he was the opposite nature of this battered boy who tried to educate me on the nature of spiritual re-birth.  But my second son, Daniel, he was, in fact, yes, he was a boy very much like this young man.  I thought of Daniel as this young man talked with me.  If he hadn't reminded me of my youngest son I probably would have walked away from him very quickly.  He was dingy and dark -- a projected negativity -- a kind of demon, a bearer of shadows.  But....still I stood and talked with him, thinking of my Daniel.

      Where is Daniel now?  Oh he is far away from here.  He is....in another world really, at the moment.  He is time-traveling, I suppose.  That was his nature, never fitting the real world very well.  Always built better for dreams and for perfect places.

      And Benjamin?  Well, Benjamin was killed in Vietnam, in the Battle of the Chu Pong Massif in 1965 near Pleiku.

 

You are sorry?  There is no reason to be sorry really.  I am old and getting older.  The older one gets the more people he has to bury.  That is a law of nature, an indisputable fact of arithmetic.

 

But, back to the young man...  No, not Daniel; the other young man.  The man I met near my apartment last Sunday. 

      There was nothing for him to believe in now.  Not the mystery of life.  Not the history of life nor the magic of creation.  The magic of creation had all been explained to him.  Everything was finished.  Everything was explained.  And the mystery of life?  What exactly was the mystery of life?  The power of man, perhaps?  The power of man to transform, to destroy...?

      What a sacred illusion it all is.  Man as the savior.  Man as the ultimate creation and the Life....

 

But the young man saw the fragile facade.  He saw the decay, the rotting or morals, the breakdown of the common good.  And so, he came to worship Death.  He came to worship the ultimate Escape.  The annihilation of Time.  The salvation, only, of a wedding with Blackness....

      And the young man was a visionary of sorts.  He understood the folly of looking backward in time for hope.  That was such a senilic sort of occupation.  Destined to end in failure and decrepitude.

      No, Man must continue to look ahead.  Toward the threshold of the next adventure.  Toward the light or the darkness enshrouding the future.  Toward tomorrow -- and beyond.  Beyond the decay and the flimsy corruption.  Beyond the illusion of impermanence.  Beyond Life itself.  Toward that ultimate escape and ultimate darkness, which might be light itself, light without shadow, without differentiation, absolute light....

      The Religion of Death will replace the Religion of Science (which is the Religion of the Death of God).

      And why must this come to be?  Oh, it's the circularity of things, I suppose.  The cyclical nature of things of this world.

 

A belief in God was born from out the fear of death.  The organism was young and vital then.  It believed in life.  It desired life.  Death was a black-hooded viper, slinking across the multi-colored earth-surface.  Death was a thief.  A sinister shadow robbing Man of his consequence -- and his power.  But Man must continue to live.  If Man does not life for ever, then what is the value of all of this living?  What is the reason for life?

      Are we but a candle-flame which trails away in thinning stems of smoke, carried to nothing by capricious winds or rains...?

      But there is a God!  There is a God -- and there is not death.  There is death -- but there is life eternal.  Life-without-end.  Ever-was and ever-shall-be.

      We are given life-for-ever, beyond this ephemeral earthly sheen.  For God has given us such life...!

      God was born to help us conquer the future...!

 

But then, in the midst of this, in another's age (passing out of the mad German Nietzsche's mouth): God died!

      And where did that leave Earthly Man?

      The religion of Science was born from Man's desire to control his life.  To understand and ensure the basic necessities of existence.  To dominate nature and nature's cold imprecisions and furies.  Science became a God with its promise of immortality.  The endlessness of the machine....

      We will capture disease, age and Time -- and put them in a bottle.  Send them out into the seas of space, banishing them for ever from the Earth, our wondrous globe.  We will put them in Pandora's Box, and fly them to the moon.  (This sounds more and more like a Top 40 hit.)  Then, we will last for ever!   We will conquer death!  Man shall become immortal on the Earth!  Science, in fact, holds the cure to this thing...Death!

 

So, both the first God and the next each offered a belief in the endlessness of Man, as the meaning of existence.  I am, therefore I shall be.  I am, therefore I am.  I am that I am.  I am that I am.

 

Yet, there was a difference between the two.  God-the-first offered salvation through a strict adherence to a code of rules, rules designed (in their best light at least) to create on the Earth a kind of heavenly palace, where honesty and decency underwrite each act.  Morality was the touchstone, and the creator, of immortality.

      Whereas, Science offered salvation without reference to morality.  Science offered immortality as a birth-right of progressive man....

      So, what became of the concept of right?

      Well, it passed away.  Einstein had a hand in this.  Right passed, in theory at least, from necessity to a mere misperception.  Afterall, nothing any longer was absolute.  Everything was relative.  Pragmatic morality came into being.  What makes sense, in terms of the world; no;t in terms of some distant spiritual sense of justice.  Amorality became the law of ethics.  That which was practical.  That which made sense....

      Science killed the concept of Right when it killed the concept of God.

      You ask: Which was killed first; and which was born first?

      Like the chicken and the egg, you mean?  Yes, an interesting question.

 

But getting back to the young man, our prophet.... No, not my Daniel -- the young man I met last week.

      I said to him: If science can produce this Time-Machine, then why don't you simply removed yourself from today?  You could live out your life in the relative peace of yesterday.  And escape for ever the chaos of today...?

      And he said: Because life is, by definition, a tragedy.  It was little better then than it is today.  I seek something beyond this -- truly beyond this....

      But what if there is nothing beyond this? I asked.  What if there is no God, no eternal life?  What if there is only death...?

      And he said: That won't matter.  Death, itself, is better than this....

      And this man was in his early twenties.

 

Youth has become old today.  Life has become such a burden now that Youth looks beyond youth, looking beyond Life itself, searching for the Greatest Escape.  The Greatest Death of Responsibility.  That ultimate, eternal sacrifice of the self....

      This is the world without a soul looking back to examine itself; and finding itself lacking.

      Oh, but you find this kind of bleakness and despair self-defeating.

      Yes, I quite agree with you.  I suppose that is exactly the point I am intending to bring across.  I guess I must have succeeded.  I admire your perceptiveness.  You are a good listener.  I enjoy talking with you very much.

      I do apologize, however, for evoking such a gloomy aspect in the midst of this sparkling day.  Passing that scene again -- the scene of the murder -- it seemed to throw me, for some reason, into a sort of momentary depression.  I apologize for that.  I'm not really sure what came over me.  I'm not sure where all that sadness came from.

      But I'm feeling better now.  At least I think I am....

      Did I happen to mention to you that I was in the neighborhood that Thursday...?  Yes, I was only a few blocks away at the time.  Actually, I was walking in this direction, walking at a high rate of speed.  My proximity to it all is probably what piqued my interest in the crime....

      But we don't wish to dwell on that, do we?

      So, would you like to hear about the time I knew real happiness?  Oh, yes, it lives in my memory, indestructible.  The pain of the involvement has been transformed into a vagueness.  But the pleasure remains, sublimated by the passing years into a sort of idealize picture of life.  That is what pleasure does, when intermixed in memory....

      Oh, yes, the pleasure does remain.

      I don't know where to begin this really.  I was in my early twenties, a young man of principle and ambition....

      You seem to smile at that, as though these two qualities argue the fact.  Ambition and principle, in theory at least, aren't necessarily opposites.  No, listen: isn't it very ambitious to be truly concerned with the question of principle...?

      I was Youth, wearing a velvet robe, I admit.  But it was very real then.  The question of principle and integrity was of the utmost concern to me then.

      Granted: in practice, ambition and principle, when they meet, often lock horns in a gruesome battle of strength.  And, usually, the results are painfully permanent.  A grim sort of fatality hangs in the balance.  Ambition is almost always fatal to principle, in practice -- unless the ambition is merely to retain one's principles.  But this value seems so blasŽ today -- such a seemingly juvenile ambition.  Sadly, principle, to survive, must almost always turn a superior back-side to ambition.  The two become hostile twin brothers, each one seeking a distance from the other....

      Success in the world?  Or success within one's self?  That is often the choice one must make.  Often, the result is neither.  Very rarely is it both.

      Rarely is it both -- but both is a possibility...?

      As I said: The greatest ambition is to retain one's respect for principle, the foundation of one's integrity.  Don't you agree? 

      I admit, the hues of the various terms become clouds.  Perhaps we should move to something more...concrete.  That would be a word to win the hart of our friend Robert Henning.  He would think immediately of his father, of course.  He would lean back in his swivel chair, raise his arm casually, directing our attention to the photographic tribute to his father on his wall: breaking concrete with strong heart and arms....

      Now, there was an ambitious man!  From the bottom he pulled himself up, constructing westward as he went.  A builder of men.  A man of buildings and bridges.  Setting bridges to span the alien land -- buildings to puncture the azure hue.  Cities of glass and steel, wherever the eyes could see.  Cars of steel carrying beams of steel to steel gray cities carefully sunk into the desert....

      What was it Whitman wrote about the railroads?  You can build the railroads, and send the trains west.  But you better build with the cities you build lunatic asylums, for that is the price of the civilization that you build....

      But Whitman shows the real impotence of my memory.  That was not really what he wrote.  It bears not even a distant resemblance to the set of words he actually used.  But the idea is the same.

      You must forgive me -- my memory seems to lapse, at times, in my old age.

      I'm not that old, you say.

      Yes.  That is true.  I am not that old.  Though I do feel old these days.  It is probably the constant dampness in my lungs.  The web of phlegm that is strangling me slowly.

      Oh, yes, it is quite a serious illness.  The doctor is quite concerned.  My wife frets a great deal, of course.  She calls her sister on the West Coast and tells her that I haven't long to live.  I suppose it is the way she dramatizes her life to make it more palatable for her.  I suppose my dying a ghastly, wheezing death would, in some ways, compensate, in her mind, for my having failed to become a vice-president at the bank.  A horrible death sometimes makes up for the fact that one has lived an equally horrible life....

      Oh, no, the bitterness is not real.  It's just a way we have with one another, my wife and I.  We actually even seem to like one another now, in our own way.  No, that was not always the case.  There was a time when we hated one another with a similar kind of fascination that we now reserve for tolerating one another.  But I won't trouble you further with the added weight of this admission....

      Oh, yes: love!  I do believe in love.  With all my heart.

      If there really were a God....

      I was going to say that if there really were a God, love would have been the finest of his creations....

      For love-in-bloom is a location, an actual location in space, perhaps the same as the Garden of Eden, or at least very near it, which is continuous with joy, peace and happiness....

      Yes, I do admit to being a romantic, beneath this barnacled, cynical shell.

      Do I love my wife? you ask again.

      Love and Marriage -- why should we confuse the two?  Are they not somewhat like the opposite elements we discussed earlier: ambition and principle?  Clearly Love and Marriage embodies the dynamic interchange of those values, ambition and principle.  Love and Marriage is, at least in my experience, such a similar paradox: compatible in theory; but contradictory in practice....

      One could say the same, I suppose, about the two participants of that act of paradox: woman and man.

      Oh, you find that unfair....

      Yes, perhaps.  And it is much too broad a topic, with too many furrows and potential furies, to discuss on such a lively and abbreviated walk in the park.

 

My grandfather Otto married a beautiful Swedish woman named Lilli Stevenson.  She was a tall, buxom beauty, with strawberry-colored hair, and a sweet, dreamy distance set into her eyes.  He met her one day while stealing milk from Lilli's father's barn.  She convinced him not to take the milk -- at least that is how the story has been handed down.  The story doesn't say exactly how she convinced him; but not long after than morning they were married.  And soon thereafter she bore him the first of their seven children.

      They had seven children in nine years of marriage.  And then Lilli died, her body sapped and broken from all the years of constant bearing....

      It was not a happy marriage.  Lilli was devoutly religious.  She was also an ardent supporter of the movement to stamp out drink.  She believed liquor was a gall to the Lord, a corrupter of the body and soul.  Of course, my Grandfather Otto drank a great deal.  This lead to continuous fighting.

      Lilli would hold her own against him; though the battling did become quite vicious at times.  She came to hate Otto.  She would go to his sister, Ursula, and tell her of all the cruelty and spite.  Ursula would try to talk with Otto.  She seemed to have a steadying hand with her brother.  But when Otto and Lilli came together again, it was the same as before: brutal reproach and indignity.  And then a silent, stifling hatred which infected everyone they touched....

      She threatened to leave him quite often -- this was back during a time when wives didn't leave their husbands.  My wife, in contradistinction, left me many times, sometimes without even threatening to do so first.  But Otto and Lilli lived in a different age, one which viewed such marital disloyalty as a disgrace.

      Lilli would threaten to leave Otto -- and then he would disappear for several days, drinking, playing, until he was totally worn out.  Then he would drag himself home and apologize, telling Lilli that he left because the thought of her leaving him drove him to distraction. 

      She would take him back again, out of pity, hope somehow that he would change, that their marriage would improve.  But their marriage never did improve.

      Who can really know if there ever was love between them?  Love starts in lust, generally; and once that hot level of love passes, when the couple must sink down from the hot surface to see if they really share anything other than flesh-obsession, it becomes clear rather quickly if they can touch one another in the deepest levels of the soul.  That is love-at-first sight I am describing, of course.  The love of immediate hot convulsions.  There is another, less dramatic love, one in which the man and woman begin as friends, slowly sinking into a deeper intimacy. 

      But the love of Otto and Lilli was of the former order, passion first, incompatibility next.

      Perhaps there was love when she spied him with that can of stolen milk.  Perhaps, then, something was lit between them.  She had deep blue intoxicating eyes.  Perhaps they opened up wide for him, at one time.  Perhaps there was love that day they made their bed in that scattered stack of hay -- if they actually did, that is.  That was the suspicion.  They were human, afterall.  The relatives continued to snicker about it, many years later.  Attributing it to Otto's charm, and to the power of his German virility....

      Yes, perhaps they did love one another at that time.

      What happened to that love...?

      Sometimes love is but a flame of light.  It recedes when it is spent.  It flickers out -- and becomes gray ash.

      And then, of course, there is marriage to consider.  Marriage sometimes pours cold water on the flame.  And jeers at the uselessness of its new-found wet impotence....

      So, you think me too critical of marriage.  You think I project my ideas about marriage through the prism of my own experience....

      Marriage makes a business of sensuality and sentiment.  It cannot nurture love, really.  For business and love don't co-exist.  Marriage seeks to put love in a harness.  It dictates rules of love.  It imposes rites and restrictions, property value upon love...

      Property value?

      Yes.  Marriage is founded upon the notion of property -- that is, of course, the business aspect in all its nakedness.  It was founded in property; and it was, in fact, a form of slavery.  The woman belonged to the man, as did her children.  They became his chattel, his belongings, with his house, his land, his furniture, his gold.  And they sought to keep his farm productive, and his house clean and in fine repair....

      Then, upon the death of the master of the house, ownership would pass to the eldest male child.  And the process would begin again, circling back on itself...

      Yes, glorious inheritance.  And the pooling of resources.  That is what marriage is really all about.  We don't think of it in quite those terms, not today, of course.  But that is what marriage is, beneath all the lace, all the propriety.  Even today, where the slavery of marriage has a highly altered focus (and has become, often, a reverse of its original, with the enslavement of the man now), still it remains a business arrangement.  It is not to be confused with the wedding of emotions....

      At least that is how it was with my wife and myself.  We both knew it was that way.  That was how we chose it to be, thinking ourselves clear-sighted, not prone to being victimized by illusions...

      Yes, of course, the institution also seeks to cement social stability.  And I have no claims against that.  It does cement social stability.  And what is the alternative?  Social instability.  Really, no one wants that, no one but revolutionaries and criminals, artists and anarchistic children.  No, I have no criticism of that function of the ritual.

      But we are becoming mired down in this thickening digression.  We were talking about Grandfather Otto.

 

Lilli died when she was but twenty-six.  Some people say it was her lungs, consumption of a sort.  But Ursula always claimed it was an illness of the heart.  That her heart had been broken by Otto.  And that her spirit had been damaged; that was why it flew away....

      Lilli had been such a romantic girl, a girl who had danced in the yellow fields of spring, her hair all aglow, a reddening fire, full and glistening.  She had been wedded to the sun as a young girl, life alive in her mind and heart, and pulsing through her veins like gold.  She was a dreamer.  She believed in Man.  In the goodness of God and nature.

      She wrote poetry.  She dream that a young man would come to her, carrying magic in his arms, the magic of total love.

      She was an artist, too.  She drew, and painted, as a young girl.  She was quite talented -- at least that is what the family said.  Her specialty was landscapes and animals.  She was especially good at drawing small birds...

      Then, one day, she saw that rawboned young man, his arms laden with stolen goods, pushing back his cap as he was caught, saying something rather innocuous in his broken English, like:

      Well, it looks like I have been caught in the act...!

 

She believed in love more than Otto ever did.  That much is certain.  He was constantly on the make, constantly looking for conquests.  He sold flowers for a time, in his debonair fashion, door-to-door.  He had a silken salesman's pitch, flattering the ladies with compliments and sparkle.  He was very audacious.  Selling flowers when flowers grew freely in their very gardens.  Still, they could not resist his charm....

      He worked for a time as a cobbler's assistant in town.  But there was never enough excitement in that.  And there was certainly no future.  He longed to be away from it all, to find his fortune in the west.  But then he stumbled into Lilli Stevenson....

      It was the death of them both, really.  A death to both of their spirits.

 

After their marriage, Otto built a cabin on his father's land.  He became a farmer, like his father.  He tried to become just like his father: gentle, serene, established.  And content with the workings of this thing called life.  But he was not satisfied.

      Otto dreamed of adventure.  He dreamed of fortunes to be made, for those with the willingness, and with the requisite testicular fortitude, to seek them. He read about the west.  About gold; and about money to be made in land speculation.  His wife wandered listlessly throughout the house, swollen with child, dreaming of a finer, easier sort of perfection.

      He began to hate her.  She was the reason he tramped the hot fields by day; and drank by night to appease his accusing conscience.  He watched his life slip slowly away, day-by-day.  He had talent, real talent, he told himself.  Just no opportunity.  He deserved better things than this in his life.  Why, he could sell anything!  Hadn't he sold flowers to women only with a smile, flowers to women who didn't need flowers?  Hadn't he sold shoes to men who had come into the mercantile store looking for saddle-wear?  Hadn't he sold himself, his body, to other girls, others before Lilli, even a few after Lilli, who had let him retain his sprightly gait, the limitless humor of his youth?  Why had Lilli taken the promise of his youth, stolen it, contained it, with her dire necessity?

      He hated her; he hated himself.  He drank more than ever before.  He left her alone at home during the nights, almost every night.  She loved her children anyway.  She no longer loved him.  The children became to Lilli what her husband could never be.  They needed her.  She made them feel better, made their life richer.  They snuggled closer to her for warmth and comfort, not like her husband who desired only brutal satisfaction, needing nothing but blatant physical expression.

      She hated him too, hated him with a fury.  She could have killed him on several occasions, her spite red hot and pointed, eviscerant.  But also could have loved him, even after all the rage and ruin, if only he would have let her....

 

Otto schemed constantly.  If only he had the money to take his family west.  Everything would be better there.  Everything was green and golden in the west.  Life would be much better there....

      He hated his life farming the land.  He longed for the excitement of the city.  The life of lights, shapely, pretty women in bright clothing, ripe and casually friendly, ready to be plucked.  Lilli was no longer enough for him, if, indeed, she had ever been.  When she was pregnant with their third child, he began meeting other women.  Lilli knew about them.  She didn't care.  Otto meant very little to her then.  She had the sweet solitude of her dreams. And she also had her children.

 

Otto would come home drunk, cursing, throwing things about the house.  Lilli would take the children into the woods behind the cabin, telling them about a land where only magic things would happen.  A land where horses had wings and could fly; and where children would never age. Then, after he would pass out, she would return to the house with the children.  She and the eldest daughter, Anna, would undress Otto, and put him to bed.  Then she would put the children to bed.

      Then, after everything was wonderfully silent, when her husband had receded to the farthest corner of her darkened mind, Lilli would stroll about the woods, beside the creek, dreaming again: about youth, and beauty; and about the man who really held her heart.  He was out there somewhere.  Yes, somewhere there was beauty.  Somewhere she would find it.  If not in this world, then certainly in another....

 

Lilli had more children.  Their love-making was rarely gentle.  It was more a duty she performed. 

      Otto took a great deal of pride in keeping his wife swollen with life.  It was a sign of his virility, a sign of his physical prowess -- this at a time when Otto was showing little else of his production or excellence.

      But he was usually rough with her, indifferent and urgent.  She despised him for it.  It made her heart ache to feel his cold hands upon her gentle flesh.  She pressed her eyes shut, acceding to his coarseness.  The insensible demands of conquering flesh.  Burying the flame in the earth, a comet falling into a sea.  And he would finish.  Then she would be free of him again, free to recede into her own world where touching need not be a scaly sort of conquest.

 

Lilli became more involved with her religion after their fourth child -- an American offshoot of Lutheranism.  She would attend church several times a week, seeking to escape her husband, trying to find something holy and sacred on the earth, something she could hold on to.  It was about that same time that Lilli also formed an interest in the local temperance movement.  It was comprised mostly of women from the church, with a sprinkling of men.  Lilli blamed liquor for being the destroyer of her marriage, the destroyer of her husband.  Liquor was the cause of the trouble.  Otto was just a victim.  This way she could at least feel pity for him.  She did so want to feel something for him, this stranger with whom she was passing her life...

      Otto would have none of it.  He drank in public to embarrass her.  He chased other women to chafe her ire.  There was something within him, some obsession, which forced him to see the destruction of his life, of his wife, for they were the same thing now.  He would never forgive her for stealing his youth, tying him to the soil, this spot which was empty.  He would never forgive her.  As he had conquered her body, she had conquered his hope....

      And she -- despite the forgiveness stressed by her religion -- she could never forgive him either.  They began to do battle at about this point.  She would no longer withdraw when he began to assault her sensibilities.  She would no longer be bullied by him into silence, distance.  She lashed back.  And the scene became an illuminated cross-fire, with the children caught in between all the rage.

      He would hit her.  She would hit him back.  She would strike back with a madness, with a ferocity, which would paralyze him with surprise, her intensity so final.  He thought, more than once, that Lilli some day would kill him.

      All the hostility, all the lost hope, all the betrayed dreams -- all the dammed emotions flooded from her outraged soul, taking its form in a ritual of violence.  The scene would explode into a living hell.

      He offered to leave her.  She told him to leave.

      He could not leave her.  She was pregnant again!

      Well, that wasn't her fault! she retorted.  It was not her wish to have any more children!  No one should be brought up in this heathen environment! 

      She would not have any more of his children!  He should find someone else, another vessel, to carry his seed!

 

Then, finally, he seemed to soften toward her.  He would try to be kind, at times.  This all surprised her greatly.  She wanted to feel something for him.  She could never really love him again -- but she did want to feel something....

      He would come home at night, drunk, his eyes some times filling with tears.  He would tell her about his lost hopes; and she would pity him and comfort him.  And she would even let him take her; because some times there was even tenderness in his grappling now.  Perhaps he even needed here now.

      But soon everything would return to normal.  Hatred flamed from all the touching, all the vulnerability.  He felt somehow less a man for admitting weakness, admitting sorrow, for having a need for her softness and warmth.  And he held her to blame for it, for she was a witness to it.  She was even the cause of it.

      He hated her with a vengeance then.  He thought of killing her, in moments of outrage.  He would like to break her neck.  She was responsible for all of his failure.  He should be a gambler now, in some city.  He was a good gambler.  And he was a good salesman.  He had always been good at everything he had ever tried.  Why was he digging weeds, and planting corn, and withering beneath the stultifying sun? 

      He wanted more from life.  He wanted more than this!  This was not enough! 

      He would leave her after this last child was born, when she was back on her feet again....

 

The seventh child was a frail boy, tiny and pale, sickly from birth -- with a weakness in his lungs.  He didn't live long.  Only a matter of days.  The loss confused his father.  All the other children, against the odds of nature, had survived their birth and early childhood.  All seemed to be strong specimens when they grew.  But this last child was only a shadow of life.  It could not even move its head or open its eyes.  It just wheezed and lay still, almost lifeless, but for the delicate coughing in its chest.  Its innocence brought him to the point of breakdown.  Perhaps he saw in it the fact of his own aging, his own withering of strength.  And perhaps he saw here, for the first time really, that life was not mandatory.  That there was no real permanence on earth.  That everything was fleeting.  And perhaps he saw intimations of his own wife's growing weakness.

      Death stalked his household now.  Time was collecting the days it had lent.  Death humbled Otto.  And it made him even see the logic of his failure.

      He cried to have been such a brute -- such a fool.  He went to his wife and touched her hand, as she lay pallid upon her own death-bed.  He wanted to make it up to her.  He promised to make it up to her.  He stroked her hand.  He kissed her hand.

      Please get well! he said to her.  Everything will be better when you get well!  I promise!

      He pleaded with her: I am nothing without you!  I will make everything up to you, somehow!

      But Lilli, by then, was ready to die.

      There was nothing really wrong with her physically, the doctor said.  She was just tired.  And she was resting.  She needed her rest.  Her nerves and her body had been pushed to the limit.  It would take time for her to recover.  Time and rest and will of the Lord would help her arrive through this ordeal.

      She whispered to Ursula, her sister, that she would never recover.  Because she no longer wished to live.  Everything had been broken; and her world had become ugly and hauntingly barren.  She could not bear it any longer.  She would lay there until she finally went to sleep.  And then she would find a better world someplace else.  She made Ursula promise to take care of the children.

 

The fever was with her almost two days.  Her beautiful face lit up; she smiled; she sang, as the heat rose from her skin, and delirium eased out of the heat.

      Otto begged her not to leave him.  He cried.  He pleaded.  He fell to his knees, calling toward the bedroom ceiling: Please, God!  Please don't take my wife!  She is my life!  Please don't take my darling Lilli...!

      Lilli died late at night in the dimly-lit cabin bedroom.  Otto sat beside her through it all, tears streaming down his child-like cheeks.  He gripped her hand tightly; and he pleaded with the Lord.

      If only she could gain the will to live, then she would live!  The doctor had said it was so!

      But she never regained the will to live.  She mumbled something about seeing a light, and hearing a voice, the voice of a song.  She said she could reach the voice, touch it; she said it was all-good and all-warm.  And that she was becoming a girl again, dancing in the poppies and in the yellow fields of spring.  She heard his voice.  It was light, like a wisp, just as she had imagined.  She felt his love embrace her.  It was wonderful!

      Life dropped from her hand.  A stillness seemed to rattle on the floor, rattling too long, making of silence a painful din for Otto.

      Lilli was smiling again.

 

Of course, Otto, too, felt life drop from his hand.  Stark loneliness began to press upon him like a billion-pound weight.  His world had been turned inside-out.  Everything was without color now.  Everything without depth or characteristic.  He almost laughed at this discover, his helplessness was so extreme.  He wanted to scream.  But who would hear him?  He had always screamed at Lilli because Lilli was there to receive the scream.  It was their perverse form of communication.  Now there was no one to hear his cry for help.  He was without existence now.  He was only a massless shape.  A superficial human form....

      He walked, dazed, into the children's room, blubbering in a pathetic agony and shame.  He woke the eldest child, his daughter, Anna, and pressed her against his heaving, demanding bosom.  Anna comforted her father.  She let him cry; and she told him not to worry.  She told him that mother was happy now.  That she wouldn't have to suffer anymore.  Still her father cried; and Anna tried to comfort them.  It was what mother had wanted, Anna told him.  Because now she could return to an endless sort of innocence....

      All the children were now crying.  And they rose from their beds to drape their plump young bodies against the heaving warmth of their father.  He drew them all in, loving them really for the first time, needing them for the first time.

      There was a sort of completeness in all of this.  True, there was death.  And one of them was missing.  But something new seemed to form in her place, perhaps from the mass of all the suffering.  Otto felt a real compassion well within his heart again.  Again, I say.  For it must have been there at least once before, somewhere, slumbering perhaps, a dim memory from the life of the boy, before being driven out by all the bitterness and abuse.

      He would love his children now.  No longer were they but glaring evidence of all his striving and all his failure.  They were dependent upon him now.  He could love them now.  He felt drawn to them ineluctably.  Something had been born in him through this death.  And he would never be the same again.

 

Well, so much for that.  Yes, so much for love and marriage.

      Have I admitted to you yet that I once had dreams of being a writer?  No?  Well, it is something I admit to very few people any longer.  It is something of a treasure from my past actually.  And I may write again some day, after I retire, when I have the time.  (Of course, I know that this is not so, that this is merely a delusion to make me less self-judgmental.)  I have many plans for things to do after I retire.  And I have so many ideas for stories to write.  These ideas come to me everywhere.  If only I had the energy and the time to pursue them now.  Perhaps after I retire....

      Oh, I think everyone would like to write their memoirs, as age begins to draw them to a close.  It is a way of justifying one's existence I suppose.  A way of saying: Look at all the things I did when I was young!  When I was striving and fleeing from failure!  Look at all the things I had plans to do...!

      Please, you must forgive me.  Sometimes I become a bit sentimental, as I look back at such potential and innocence....

      I used to be embarrassed when my mother would sit at the dinner table, late at night, and cry, telling me about when she was a young girl, all the dreams she had, all the disappointments she had experienced in growing older....

      Lord, she clung to those memories like they were a life-raft.

      She played the piano and sang, when she was a young girl.  She had ambitions, in her own way.  Oh, not to set the world on fire.  She was never very aggressive.  But she did want to see the world.  That was her one great ambition.  And she wanted to continue to play the piano and sing.  She wasn't seeking fortune or fame.  No -- it just made her feel good to play the piano and sing....

      She used to tell me this -- and other things -- as we sat at the dinner table, she and I, after everyone else had moved to another room.  I was the baby of the family.  I was perhaps her favorite.  She never told me that directly.  But I think I saw it in her movements.  And she would tell me her secrets, about her dreams and her hopes. And then her eyes would moisten.  She would wipe the tears on the hem of her apron; and make me promise not to tell father she had been crying....

      It used to embarrass me.  And some times it would make me angry.  I would say: You should have done it!  You should have fulfilled your dreams -- instead of sitting here crying because you didn't...!

      Those are things I wish I could take back now, those words, that innocent stupidity.

      And she would just smile sadly at me, as though she were saying: You shall see, my son.  You shall see some day, that no matter what you do, no matter where you go, emptiness is what you find....

 

But I am getting ahead of myself, aren't I.  That will all come in due time.  Of this I am sure.

      What happened to Grandfather Otto? you ask.

      What happens to all of us?  He continued to live his life, until he died in 1901.  He never took another drink, after his wife, Lilli, passed away....

      But we are coming to that place where our paths must diverge.  Shall I see you again tomorrow?  Oh, splendid!  The same time and place, then?  Wonderful!  Oh, yes, I have enjoyed our walk a great deal!  Did I make up the story about Grandfather Otto and Lilli?  No, not really.  The story was there.  I may have brought it to life a bit.  But the story was already there....

      I will tell you tomorrow of my dreams of being a writer.  Yes, I once was committed to being a writer, a great writer, like Hemingway, or Melville, or James Joyce or Tolstoy.  But I'll tell you about that tomorrow.

      Have a pleasant walk home!  And be careful with this traffic!  It's dreadfully dangerous at this time of evening...!

      And the wind is coming up a bit.  It is becoming a bit cold....

      You must button up your overcoat....

 

 

PART TWO.

 

My father was a short man, though powerfully built, with shoulders that rippled with a bulky sort of tenseness.  His hands were compact, though massive in strength and tenacity.  His strength was almost Herculean.  His forearms bulged with authority.  He was not a happy man....

 

My grandfather, Otto, taught him to memorize as a young man.  Otto told him that memorization disciplines the mind.  And that the mind disciplines the body and the spirit.

      So Benjamin would recite: Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses...!

      And his father would look on proudly; and reward him with a fatherly smile.

      Otto became more stable as he grew older.  He had come to accept his situation in life as father of his motherless children.  He gave up chasing women.  And he even read the Bible now and then: on special occasions.  Still he drank, but not as before, not in the spirit of self-destruction.  Now he drank to be jolly.  To be rotund in his humor. And to philosophize the blessings of life as an American citizen....

      Anna became the mistress of the house.  And Benjamin, the third-born, and the eldest son, became the young man who would carry-on the ambitions of his father....

      It was a weighty burden, indeed, for a young man so melancholy as my father did tend to be.  And for a young man whose mental abilities seldom brightened the darkness of his temperament.

      For Benjamin was a brooder -- how else can it be put?  A brooder.  An enigma.  A man with plans, surely.  But, well...he was a pretender.

      He was his father's son, that much cannot be denied.  Yet he was without his father's suaveness or brash aptitude or eager energy.  And neither did he possess that sensitive, creative flame of his mother, Lilli Stevenson.  It was as though he were born from the remnants only of their finer natures.  Of the chaff.  A product only of the husk of their plants, rather than of the sweetness of their meat, glistening and golden as their best natures were....

      Indeed, Benjamin was poorly prepared to make an assault upon the promising world beyond his home.  He should have been a farmer.  Or perhaps a logger.  Or perhaps even a blacksmith.  He should never had become an adventurer, a hunter standing upon the limitless plain, without skill in the province or the logic of his craft....

      Indeed, an adventurer whose nature stood in clear opposition to adventure.

      Yet Benjamin had too many plans to ever be content with anything less than adventure.  Anything less than completion.  Fame.  Even perfection, in a manner of speaking.  His head was teeming with ambition and demands.  And, of course, Otto encouraged him in this.  Otto encouraged him to look beyond his home, toward the western crest.  Toward that vast unknown from which heroes, the guardians of the race, pulled from the depths the golden crown of achievement.  Toward the daring and the colorful life, with all of its savage irregularities....

      For there was a kind of salvation implicit in looking beyond.

      And it was in the spirit of conquest, afterall, that one justified his life.

 

So my father spent his youth plotting gain and dreaming conquest.  He rarely took the time to even smile, a habit that gained strength as he grew older, became, in fact, a characteristic of the man.  And when he did smile, it was almost always an ironic smile.  His wit was usually caustic -- bitter and sardonic, even as a youth -- at least that is the story in the family.  He had few friends.  He liked to be alone.  He would walk the fields the hills behind the farm which belonged to his father; and he would dream of a glorious manhood awaiting him somewhere off in the future...

      The present was a kind of blank space to my father then.

      Youth was a sort of suspension of life.

      The other young people would swim at the dam.  They would attend the Sunday picnics, making eyes at one another...

      But Benjamin didn't have time to swim.  He made eyes at no one.  He didn't have time for all that...nonsense.  For there were more important things to be considered, things that mattered much more than love or pleasure. 

      There was a distance in his soul -- everyone saw it.  There was a tenuousness in his eyes that seemed to say: I shall be here for only a short time.  And then I shall be gone...!

 

Why is it that all sons are so burdened by the failures of their fathers?  Why must they carry the crushing weight of disappointment and death, burdens flung down from earlier lives and times, in an endless procession of sorrow?  In an endless form and in a circularity of context...?

      The answer must lie in our conception of life.  Doesn't that seem to make sense to you...?

      But I must tell you of a friend of mine -- a man by the name of David Blumenthal.  He was a very intelligent man.  He studied the rise and fall of all the ancient cultures and civilizations.  It was a passion with him.  And we would meet, several times a week, in the park or over coffee, in some bistro perhaps, or over a chessboard; and we would talk about these ancient worlds; the course of their growth and their final decay.  Of course, we talk about their conception of life; for, as my friend said, the conception of life is the structure by which an organism seeks to live, as both an individual life and as part of the collective....

      And he would speak about the division of worlds; and about the Eastern and Western modes of thought: a division which, he claimed, was based principally upon differing conceptions of life, which he contributed, at least partially, to the directions themselves -- he spoke of the directions as being guardian angels of a kind -- for my friend was somewhat mystical in nature...

      And he would say, my friend David Blumenthal, often with much animation, for he generally was quite excited by the latent power of ideas and thoughts -- the power, he often said, which could re-make a world....

      And he would say: It is ambition and desire which drive us to distraction!  A longing for something we simply cannot have!  And why, exactly, can't we have it?  For the very simple reason, my friend, that it does not exist, save within our minds, as blueprints to our fantasies....

      Here in the West, we attack life! he would say.  Life is not something merely to be lived, enjoyed, savored.  It is something to be conquered!  It is certainly not something merely to be accepted, darkness and light as double fragments in a simplified whole.  It is something to be tamed, and possessed!  Something on which we must put our special mark, our name -- which is the immediate aspect of our supposed victory...!

      And he was right, of course.  We are constantly trying to prove ourselves here.  To prove something lasting about ourselves, perhaps to gain some figment of immortality  through our name, through our seed, oblivious of the eternal destiny of the obscuration of names, the obscuration of each living seed, in the end when life is extinguished...

      To prove ourselves Abel perhaps.  Yes, that is a pun, of course -- although not without its seriousness.  To prove ourselves successful.  And to die in the midst of the waste from all our failure.

      For wasn't Abel the more successful of the two?  Afterall, his offerings were accepted by God.  Whereas, the offerings of Cain could never be accepted...

      So Cain killed Abel.  It was inevitable of course.  It is an allegory for the death of the old, the death of the sweet, the death of the agrarian nature, the gentle nature killed off by the aggressive nature....and the ushering in of energetic youth.

      Abel, the established, the keeper of the flock, humble and obsequious, fat with wealth and lack of imagination, the Old World worshipping its overbearing God....

      And Cain, the Modern tiller of the soil, collector of the golden wheat, purveyor of the radical change, the New World seeking to raise its head, and crumbling the Old God with the weight of its new brand...

      Cain killed Able because Abel had grown weak, unable in his stiffness and in his surfeit to defend himself....

      Once America was Cain.

      But every Cain must soon become but another bleeding Abel in the dusk and silvery twilight, lying bloodied in the leaves....

      But let us not concern ourselves with Cain at this moment.

      Cain was once an orphan, wandering amid the vast and shadowed wasteland.  The wilderness was his sanctuary.  He fled from the grace of order, and from the laws of the Old World God.  He brought the message of the New World laws: Freedom.  Freedom of movement; freedom of religious choice.  Freedom.  Freedom from the Old World hierarchy of clerical abomination.  Freedom from the flock.  Freedom from God.  The wheat-seed spewed, like a prophecy, from his compact youthful hands.  Golden grain sprang up all around him like sweetly-moving icons. Walls went up to protect the grain and the riches stored within.  The city was born.  Abel was buried.  God disappeared into the clouds like something vaporous.  And war a slaughter became wholesale...

      Golden grain soon became a golden mineral to burn.  Cain became Abel.  Again Cain, the downtrodden, the hated son, slew his prosperous brother.  Cain escaped west.  The world was vast and promising and endless in the West.  Ships sailed.  Land was conquered.  Warfare and violence again became wholesale.  Cities began to push their dusty spires into the harmony.

      Golden minerals became, in turn, a golden coin to purchase value.  Cain again became Abel.  Again Cain, the less advantaged, the less satisfied, the hungrier of the two, Cain dispatched his fattening, wealthy, increasingly despondent brother, first, taking this money, and then pocketing his glistening pocket-watch.  Then Cain fled west, into the hills and trees of Elysia....

      Progress traveled at its own pace.

      But the foot became the hoof became the wheel became the slithering bow....

      Bicep became sinew became a slip of steam became a deafening roar....

      Progress traveled at its own pace.  But Progress did not choose its own pace.

      Walking became trotting became sprinting became mercurial speed....

      And the Golden West became but a box for hungry faces.  All the countenance seemed dizzied, confused by the commotion.  Their bodies were long and lean, laced with muscularity.  And in their eyes was a gluttonous greed.  Every man against the next; and God against all.  Every man for himself.  A terrifying thirst for sound....

      And Cain was in the box of all the hungry, lonely faces.  His lips were parched.  His hair was tangled.  And in his eyes could be seen a sort of desperate pleas of madness.  He looked at his pocket-watch; and then he began to smile.  Then he began to laugh again, which filled the world with hysteria.

      Hysterically it filled the world with a chant of rage and terror.

 

Why do we seek to conquer Time?  To fill our lives with vanity and waste?  And with the clicking of small treasures....?

      My Grandfather Otto used to say: The wealth of America stretches from here in a straight path running to the gates of Heaven....

      One nation, under God, indivisible...!

      Indivisible.  That which cannot be divided.  Wealth which cannot be divided: stretching to the gates of Hell.

      The wealth which builds also debilitates.  Poverty grows a sharp incisor.  Thin becomes fat; fat becomes thin again, thin to the bone.  And the gates of Hell sparkle with an electric sort of fascination.  For worships is conducted here.  Worship of frailty and spitefulness and rage.  Worship of the death of innocence.  Worship of the passing of principle....

      My Grandfather Otto was a jolly man in old age.  Jolly because Youth had finally accepted the family banner.  And learned to clasp it with a steady hand....

      Oh, there were things to be done, of course.  Many things which had to be done.  Only the foundation had been laid.  But the foundation was a sturdy one.  And Benjamin wore a lean and hungry look, a compact look of ....grim determination.  A serious look of greedy expectation.  Conquest was in the breast of that one and only Benjamin....

      But I must slow down a bit at this point.  I've hardly even paused to take a breath today, for all my talking.  And I must say: you are looking very well today.  And very spry -- if my eyes don't deceive me.  Oh, yes, I am feeling quite robust.  Quite intoxicated by the glint of autumn falling.  And by the scent of the brisk freshness and the curling of the leaves.  Yes, I do feel quite alert today.  I am primed for our conversation. 

      I must admit that I slept very little last night.  Oh, no, nothing was wrong.  I was just excited by our conversation yesterday.  And I was looking forward to today.  You know, it really does me a wealth of good to express myself to you in this way.  It's a kind of therapy for me.  My words can lose their weight.  They become airy bits of persiflage, lilting in the frozen air.  Like the sounds of this city: slicing through the silent day.  Oh, the bitter accusation of words unspoken!  Better to get them out into that cold air!  Let them be swept away by the northern breeze.  They settle on the sleeping land, like nuclear dust.  Infecting all mysteriously that they somehow come to touch....

      My, but I do seem poetic today!  There is something in the air -- there is no doubting that.  The coming of something meaningful.  What in the world do you think it might be...?

      My wife is very practical, of course.  She says there is rain in the forecast.  She told me that as she watched tv -- as I read the newspaper.  I should take an umbrella with me.

      It's true: we don't have much to say to one another.  Not that we ever did, not really.  She watches television.  I read the newspaper.  She tells me about the perfect crime.  I tell her about the stock market.  But we seem to get along alright.  Despite all our many differences....

      But let's not talk of her today -- no reason to spoil a good day.  That time will come soon enough.  Today we should talk of something different, something teeming with life, if you will.

      Oh, you'd like to hear of my dreams of becoming a writer.  Yes.  Very well.  But let's see -- how should I begin this tale....?

      Once, a long, long time ago, when the weather was wet with laughing, and the city was bright with looking, when I was a young lad with both hope and a budding sense of justice, I wished to become a writer.  Oh, not just any kind of writer!  As radiant as a Shakespeare!  As enlightened as a Milton! As imaginative as a Tolstoy!  As self-sufficient as a Joyce...!

      Life was for learning and expression then, wasn't it?  Life was the product, in fact, of your search for life....

      And idealism was not a sin then!  Not something to be shunted!  However much it may have been  a sign of weakness then -- still it was not a sin then.  For I was young and filled with a belief in life's inherent goodness....

      But let me tell you of the old man who lived in a shack behind our apartment house, on the block where I spent my childhood.  His name was Isaac Amatof.  He was a small man, with a heavily-wrinkled brow, and deep bushy-black eyebrows set above his curious, almost timid fine black eyes.  His hair was also black; and shaggy and poorly-kept.  At times he wore a full black beard.  He was Jewish, I believe, although I didn't know it at the time.  I didn't care about it at the time.  Some of the children on my block called him Crazy-Man.  Often they would throw rocks at him as he walked, undisturbed, down the sidewalks past the tenements.  He was not concerned with these children and their violence.  His head, too, was flowering with plans, teeming with ideas.  He was a writer.  He wrote novels and poetry and stories and plays.  His closet was filled with manuscripts he had written....

      I became his friend somehow.  I was reading in the park one day.  I was reading Moby Dick, if I remember correctly.  He came by, recognized me as a neighbor, and stopped to talk about the book I was reading.  He said he had read it seven times.  And that he had gained a great deal more from it with each successive reading.  I told him that I wished to be a writer some day.  He took an interest in me.  He invited me to his shack, to share a cup of tea.  I went with him.

      His shack was nothing more than a storage room for one of the buildings.  But it had a bed, a table with a small lamp and an old Royal typewriter; and an indentation in the wall, which looked like it had been created by falling object, which he called his 'closet'.  Inside this closet, stacked haphazardly, was a magnificent collection of manuscripts he had written.  He handed me one of his creations -- as he put a pan of water on a radiator pipe.  I read it, quickly, quietly.  He watched me, nervously awaiting some evidence of judgment.  His eyes were on me like thin, glowing darts.

      I remember that I wasn't very comfortable.  I hurried to finish the story -- which was about a young boy growing up in a small town in Russia; and the anti-semitism that swept the town.  When I had finished the story, I placed the manuscript on the bed.

      Well, what do you think of it, he asked.

      I think it is very good, I responded.  Have you tried to publish it?

      This one? he asked.  No, not this one.  I have tried to publish others.  But I have had no luck.  I have had no Jack Luck....

      You should try to publish this one, I said.

      Umm.  Perhaps, he said.  It is not an easy thing to publish a story, you know.  You don't just publish a story because it happens to be good.  There are other things involved in the publishing business.  They are there to make a profit afterall.  That is their first intention.  And not everyone who has talent can make it.  Not everyone who can write becomes famous....

      No, I agreed.  I suppose that is true.

      He said: When I was your age, I had plans to garner fame and fortune.  I believed that the just reward would follow talent, in much the same way as a lightning rod attracts the lightning-bolt.  I believed it was only a matter of doing the work -- and then waiting to be recognized.  But that isn't the way it worked, my friend.  I know no one significant.  I don't have friends in the proper places.  That always makes it more difficult.  Do you know anyone in the publishing business...?

      I had to admit I did not.

      He paused for a moment; and then he asked me: Who is your favorite writer?

      I don't know, I replied.  I suppose it's Ernest Hemmingway.

      Umm, he smiled.  For every Ernest Hemmingway there is at least one thousand Isaac Amatofs.  Do you believe that?

      I don't know, I replied.

      "Let me give you some advice, he said, after pausing a moment: contemplative.  If you wish to write, write because you love to write.  Don't write because you seek fortune or fame.  Fame and fortune don't really exist.  They are only stories told by fathers and mothers.  Like stories of Santa Clause; and gold a the end of the rainbows.  Fame and fortune have never been real.  Oh, you may say that some writers become wealthy and famous.  And that is true -- some do.  but it really doesn't complete their lives.  Still they must deal with the problems of life: love, hate; life and death.  And oftentimes, then, they must deal with life without their dreams to guide them, since their dreams have been realized.  And this realization has proven to be sadly lacking.  If you set for yourself the goal of wealth and notoriety,  you will be sorely disappointed should you ever reach that goal.  Because it means nothing.  Because it is empty.  It is a false dream, a false god.  It will only make you wonder where your life has really gone....

      So, love life for itself, he continued.  And love writing as a high art.  Or even as a craft, if high art is beyond your reach -- as it is for myself.  Love writing as a cobbler loves to build a shoe.  Or a tanner a piece of lasting hand-work.  There is a purity in the things of life which tastes corruption in the marketplace.  I have written for over thirty years.  I once tried to publish my work.  I became distraught when my work was rejected, since they were rejecting a piece of myself also.  Now I am not concerned with being rejected.  Now I only write because I love what I am doing.  And God has made it clear to me that I am supposed to write, that this is my calling.  It is not important if I sell it to some buyer.  I live my life the way I wish.  I am comfortable with my life and with my creations.  I no longer even try to publish my work.  That is not so important as is the writing itself....

      He was a queer old man, who wore second-hand clothes he got from the church: worn shoes, pants too short in the leg.  But there was a secret shining in his pin-like eyes.  He seemed to have found some satisfaction in his life.  He seemed to bob atop the waves of discord and confusion.  He was the man I most admired for the longest of time....

      Of course, my father dislike Isaac Amatof.  He told me to stay away from the old man.  He told me Amatof was a bad influence on me....

      But Isaac and I shared our writing my one another.  I took his stories home to read them.  Then we would talk, at length, in his shack about the stories -- or in the park, if the weather was good.  He read the first short-stories I wrote.  He encouraged me to write.  He applauded my efforts; and he told me I had talent.

      My father told me I was wasting my time.

      And now I am a banker.  An affluent man with money invested: stocks, bonds, an IRA, even some gold bullion, in case the economy were to implode.  I have a home in the suburbs.  I am a member of several fashionable clubs.  I am the husband of a wealthy wife.  A father to my poor, poor children who look upon the world now as a kind of burnt offering -- an offering their father has burnt....

      The world seems to hold no interest or promise for my children.

      And my father had said: I want you to go to business school, Jacob.  You've got a good head on you for numbers.  And Uncle Mort knows some people.  He can help get you in.  You've got to think about your future now, Jacob....

      My father was a short man, though powerfully built....

      He was named by Grandfather Otto after Benjamin Franklin, whom Otto believed to have been the greatest of men.  In his old age, he would quote Benjamin Franklin:

      Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation.

      Lose no time; be always employed in something useful.

      Rarely use venery but for the sake of health or offspring; never to dullness or weakness or to the injury of your peace of mind or to the reputation of another....

      He asked: Why does the blind man's wife paint herself?

      That was one that stayed with me.  It is an interesting question, don't you agree?

      Yes, my wife does try to look younger than she is.  She has had her skin tucked.  She had her breasts fixed too -- before the tragedy.  She wears slinky dresses, and too much make-up.  And she dyes her hair to try to keep out the gray.  I put up with it though.  There is much about herself which she doesn't like as well.  She puts up with it too.  It's much easier now, since we're all the other has....

      But, yes, getting old has been a trauma for her.  The loss of youth and beauty has made her miserable, for the most part.  She used to cry about it.  She used to accuse me of not loving her -- of being in love with someone else....

      Oh, yes, she was quite beautiful at one time.  Beautiful in a classic sort of way. Her features were too rigid though, for me.  Too sharp.  Too naked in their bleak appeal.  She was too harrowingly beautiful to ever be considered very real or very feminine.

      No, she was not very feminine.  She was much too aggressive, much too expectant.  There was an urgency in her every movement: at the center of her being.  She demanded satisfaction.  In all its various forms and hues.  In all its anxious camouflage.  But satisfaction -- satisfaction was just a desperate lunge at living for her.  A desperate plea for autonomy.  She could never be satisfied.  She was a spoiled girl, a rich kid.  She was given everything when she was young; so she came to value nothing.  Nothing but each new experience.  She needed novelty like most children need bread.

      Feminine?  No.  She derided the feminine.  She said she would never be trapped, like most women were, by their femininity.  She was like a man, she said.  She would conquer the world, like a man did, like her father had, her father who had never loved her.

      She would search the world, not simply to gain, but to conquer, to render useless for others.  She would long to place her name upon the world.  TO press it deep within her livening, cherished womb.  And to wear it there for ever, as though it were some priceless possession, belonging, singularly, to her....

      Of course, she could never be content with anything she could ever capture.  That was the nature of her nature, I presume.  The disposition of her disposition.  She could never be content, my wife -- there was too much tension in her soul for that.  Too much active longing in her heart.  Too much greed.

      As I said, she was a spoiled child.  What more could have been expected...?

      My mother, on the other hand, was a soft, gentle soul, with a genuine capacity for warmth and affection.

      Oh, you smile at the parallel.  Well, comparisons are inevitable, afterall.  Comparisons are of the first order.

      And you thought that all men sought to marry their mother!

      Not so, in this case, I assure you.  I sought to marry my father I'm afraid.  I fell in love with my mother; but she broke my heart.  So I married my father instead, my eternal father, and placed him in my soul as a reminder of my own imperfection....

      You laugh.  You appreciate a bit of whimsy now and then.  I do feel a tad whimsical today, in fact.  I believe it comes with my failing to sleep much last night.  Oh, yes -- there probably is something more to it than mere lack of sleep.  There is probably something in the air.  I can feel it in my back, in my joints, in fact.  There is a coolness in the air -- a kind of foreboding.  Perhaps something cataclysmic is approaching....

      You smile.

      Would you like to hear some more about my father, Benjamin the Brooder?

      Well he left home one day, with a knapsack on his back, heading west, into the ethereal sunset....

      Of course, this, too, could be said about my youngest son, Benjamin the Brooder.  He headed into the west with a knapsack on his back also.  There seems to be some kind of connection between grandfather and grandson; some kind of mythical connection, I mean.

      This all reminds me, in a way, of a shortstory I once read.  I shortstory written by Isaac Amatof.  It was called The Pretender.  It was about a young boy named Thomas Stakof, the son of a village merchant.  The boy was a dreamer, a pretender; a boy who sought to never age, who sought to never leave his childhood....

      He was a very sensitive child; and he would play in the hills and rocks which surrounded the sleepy village.  The boy had only imaginary friends.  Real friends would not do for him. He only played at imaginary games; and he sang with an imaginary childish, timeless splendor....

      And he was the only happy person who lived in the dreary village.

      One day his father said to him: Thomas, what do you wish to do when you grow up to be a man?

      How do you mean? the young man asked his father.

      I mean, his father said, what shall you become?  The children you've grown up with -- they have all chosen careers, trades.  Adam Linsky shall work in his father's store.  Derek Thomas wants to work in the mines.  And Michael Felix will attend the University... What shall you become, Thomas?

      And Thomas asked his father: Why must I become anything...?

      Because you must! his father replied.  You must become something.  How else will you spend your life...?

      I will spend it in dreaming dreams, father, Thomas replied.

      Oh, if only you could, Thomas, his father said.  If only you could!  But the world will not allow it!  The world will not allow it...!

      But the world allows it now! Thomas said.

      The world allows it now because you are still you! his father replied. But soon you shall be young no longer; and then things will be expected of you....

      What sort of things, father? Thomas asked.

      Oh, many things, Thomas, his father replied.  You shall have to find a job.  Make your way.  Become a man.  Contribute to the world...

      I shall contribute dreams to the world, Thomas said.  For dreams are more important than gingham or coal or books full of numbers.  Aren't dreams more important than those things, father?  What kind of world is a world without dreams...?

      But dreams are not real, son, Thomas's father told him.  Dreams are only....shall we say, buildingblocks of childhood.  Phantoms of an innocence.  Soon you shall have to sacrifice your dreams...by building new dreams, more concrete dreams.  You will have to wear an apron, Thomas, and work as your father works, daily, in the candle shop....

      But I don't wish to work in the candle shop! Thomas replied.

      But you shall have to just the same! his father says.  I did not wish to work in the candle shop either.  But I did.  One does not always get to do what he wishes.  You will understand this some day, when you are older.  That is just the way things are....

 

When Thomas returned to the hills beyond the village, the boulders had lost their magic quality; the trees no longer spoke to him; the animals fled at his careworn approach.  He sat amid the pines, and wept; and he longer for his imaginary playmates to come, for someone to take him by the hand, to twirl him in the air as thought he were someone else's dream, to take him on an endless ride among the castles and the carnivals of an eternal rhyme....

      But things were different now.

      Things had changed.

      He heard the factory whistle blow.

      Soon he wore an apron; and he spent his life, daily, in his father's candle shop.

      People came.

      People went.

      Thomas grew older.

      Now, no one in the village was happy.  No one sang in the hills and trees which cluttered the vista beyond the angry village.

      Everything was as it must be.

      The factory whistle laced the air like a profound psalm.  Then everyone went home again.

      They closed their back doors silently.

 

Yes, perhaps the story is too sad, and not really very instructive. I apologize, if that is the case.  All stories should be instructive, I agree.  Perhaps I shouldn't have even mentioned it. And I wouldn't have -- had it not leapt into my mind with such a force of dramatic flair and grace.  It seemed to demand my attention somehow....

      So what does it mean? you ask.

      In relation to what?

      Oh, in relation to Benjamin?  Well, I'm not quite certain.

      Benjamin certainly was not Thomas -- well, yes, that is true....

      Yet perhaps he was Thomas. Perhaps he was the inverse of Thomas somehow.  Thomas, as seen through a darkening prism....

      Whatever the case, Benjamin disappeared into the luminous horizon.  And Thomas disappeared into his father's somber candle shop. 

      And, before long, they were both forgotten -- forgotten, but for the intense carelessness and the idle glory of their youths....

      Time moved forward.  Circular movement became the law.  The four-armed sickle.  And everything was as it must be...

      That is, until Benjamin Heimkreiter returned home from the west.

      But that must come a little bit later in the story.  At the proper moment; for mood and timing is everything....

      Would you mind very much if we paused to take a seat again?  Yes, I do feel a bit weak.  My legs feel a bit unsteady now.  I hope you don't mind.  Yes, I am taking medication.  I don't know what it is called.  It fights something caused by the other medication I'm taking.  I can't keep up with it all.

      You know, I never used to have to rest so much.  Oh, I once kept myself in the finest of shape.  I was quite athletic, a long time ago.  I'm sure you don't believe it, looking at me now.  But it's true.  I played all the sports in high school.  I was captain of my football team.  I played short-stop on the baseball team.  And I was an all-conference basketball player.  Basketball was my best sport.  Baseball was the toughest sport, the most solitary, individual sport.  Oh, facing a strong-armed pitcher was a lonely experience.  It was you and he, alone in the universe.  It was a kind of joust.  Hitting a baseball is really a very difficult feat....

      Oh, I know intellectuals aren't supposed to like sports.  I realize that.  But I cheat a bit.  I like sports but I don't talk about it to my friends.  Oh, I would never talk sports with David Blumenthal.  He would look at me with the shake of his head, reminding me of his European pretensions.  Soccer was acceptable, because it was a European sport.  But that was it.  Anything European was good.  Anything Asian was acceptable, because of their long history.  Come to think of it, anything was acceptable unless it were American or Australian.  David never forgave the Australians for bastardizing the Queen's English; he never forgave America for bastardizing the queen....

      Oh, yes, I was well-liked in high-school.  One of the cheerleaders even had a crush on me once. I went out with her a few times, but nothing really developed.  She really didn't hold my interest.  Perhaps I didn't hold her interest.  It seems so long ago.  I was probably a bit frightened of her.  Her name was Ava LaDick.  Yes, what a name.  No wonder I was frightened of her.  I was always a bit frightened of the female animal anyway.  Even of those with names not so nakedly foresakingly primal....

      I, too, spent much time alone as a boy.  I read a great deal.  I read the classics -- and I loved them.  I read Homer.  His travels through the human mind,  the psychic landscape, were stunning.  So enriching.  And such a wonderful escape from things, from all the everyday life of things I mean.

      He was blind, you know -- Homer.  Yes, he was a blind man. At least, that was the legend.  A blind beggar, no less.  A minstrel who traveled from town to town, begging for his sustenance, paying for a stranger's generosity with a story drawn from his lexicon of the Race of Heroes....

      Yes, I was athletic.  And quite strong.  You know, teenagers are the Race of Heroes today.  That is true.  That is the age where the heroic is still possible, where the heroic is still alive in the heart, still tactile.

      I was nothing like my father however, in terms of strength. He was a Titan.  Powerful, even up to his dying days.  Yet, he was an angry man.  Constantly bitter with disappointment and frustration.

      No, I was never his favorite son.  William was the favorite.  And he liked all the others better than he liked me.  But I was the one he counted on.  I was the one he would talk to, when he became dreamy, sentimental, after drinking a few beers and a shot or two of whiskey.  I was the baby of the family afterall.  I was his last chance, in a way....

      One night, as he was in this very dreamy, sentimental state, he told me about a girl he had loved.  She was a blonde, very well built, with thick,  puckered lips and a shy, inviting smile.  Her name was Annabelle Livingston.  Her father worked with the postal department.  He saw her one night, while taking a stroll through the neighborhood north of his home.  She was sitting on the porch of her house, with her mother and father.  And they were laughing and talking: a gaiety seemed to clothe that peaceful Sunday evening.  And it made Benjamin envious, of course -- in a way.  He would have liked to have been a part of all that joy -- rather than just to be passing it, noiselessly, like a ghost along the pavement.

      He told me it was love-at-first-sight (whatever that is supposed to mean).  He said that he was walking -- and rather lonely -- along the quiet streets; and then he heard a pitch of pure laughter, breaking the night like a joyous hymn.  He looked up -- and he saw Annabelle.  She didn't see him.  It was rather dark on the street; she and her family sat on their front porch, illuminated in a porcelain glow.  Her father was smoking a pipe telling a story about a Saint Bernard dog.  Her mother laughed at the story, genuinely pleased.  She was sewing at something which lay rumpled in her lap.  She was wearing sewing glasses, and a thimble.  But my father's eyes were on Annabelle.  She was young, probably about seventeen.  There was a clean freshness in her spirit, a purity of movement, which made my father almost burst with admiration: the mingling of joy and a desire to possess this beauty.  She sat on the edge of the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her, her blonde hair draped in perfection about her shoulders.  She threw her head back as she laughed.  Her necks was smooth and white; her face conveyed a youthful honesty. 

      My father fell madly in love with her.  Her stood on the street, a shadow, watching the Livingstons.  Finally, Mrs. Livingston glanced up from her sewing; she saw the young man standing on the street, in the half-light.  Before long, the gaze of Mr. Livingston, too, fell upon my father -- he was about twenty at the time.  Mr. Livingston put the paper on the floor, and rose unhurriedly from his rocking-chair....

      Yes, young man, he called from the porch, his voice filled with genial puzzlement.  Can I help you with anything...?

      My father had been watching Annabelle; so the sound of her father's voice sent through him a wave of embarrassment.  The whole family was now watching him.  He didn't know what to do.  He took off his cap, bowed a bit, and hurried away into the evening light, feeling a bit ridiculous, though swelling with a new found sense of awe, a new-found love of life....

      Perhaps there really was something beautiful in the world, he told himself.  Oh, not just for people with money.  Perhaps even for himself.  Perhaps there was something pure, as the priest had always told him there was...

      He walked by her house every night for several months.  Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of her, talking with her mother; or sitting, beatifically, like an angel at the keyboard.  Her hands poured over the luminous keys, like a poignant dance.  There was music in her hands.  It made him love her even more.

      She wore a white dress on Sundays; and attended church with her parents and two brothers.  My father began to attend the same church.  They were Methodists.  He would watch Annabelle relentlessly during the service.  Then he would leave early; and stand beneath the pine trees on the church grounds, hoping to meet her gaze as she left the building with her family.

      He never spoke a word to Annabelle.  Oh, he wanted to.  But how could he?  She was the daughter of a postal worker, from a respectable family: very beautiful, and much desired as a spouse.  Many men frequented her house, calling on Annabelle, sitting on that peaceful porch.  He envied them a great deal.  And despised them too, for the depth of their fortune.

      But how could he ever call on her?  How could he even speak to her?  He was but a carpenter at the mill.  He had so little to offer her, no education, no culture really -- so little of substance.  He could offer her only his heart.  And she was the kind of girl who needed something more.  She was accustomed to the finer things of the world -- clean things, quiet things.  He was not the kind of man for her.

      Oh, she did take a notice of him.  Of that he was quite certain.  She even smiled at him occasionally.  In a sort of recognition of his presence.  In a sort of shy recognition.  His interest was a flattery to her.  It would make her blush at certain moments.  Then she would lower her head bashfully, and smile to herself.

      Her father would often comment on my father's presence and his obvious interest.  He would say:

      There's that young man again, standing beneath the pine trees....

      Or:

      There he is again, taking his Sunday stroll past the house.  You know, if I didn't know better, I'd swear he had fallen in love with you, Annabelle....

      She would color slightly, reprove her father gently, and look toward Benjamin with a casual sort of neighborliness.  Occasionally she would even nod.  but she wasn't in love with my father.  He was also quite certain of that.  There were so many other young men in her life, pursuing her charms with a tenacity that was quite appalling to Benjamin.  It was from those other young man that she would find a mate.  My father was to her but a vague sensation, a mystical image of something beyond her ken. And something, too, totally beyond her reach.  They were two worlds, separated by something, by some broad category of experience.  My father's hands were dirty and blistered; and the world in which he lived was noisy and jarring; and it was dedicated to noise.

      One of the main reasons he interested Annabelle was because of his age; and because he seemed experienced.  My father was much older than the young men who flocked about her like wild geese.  My father insinuated a larger world beyond her own -- the other young men did not.  Her own world, marked with wild-eyed, horny young men, eager, even brutal in their displays of competition, seeking to take possession of her, seemed too small, too predictable.  She felt a yearning to know the world outside her own.  Yet she would never be quite brave enough to actually inquire upon that yearning, to step over the threshold into that frightening, stimulating new age.  My father was inaccessible to her.  It was as simple as that.  And it made her feel safe to know that he was.  Though, at times, it made her feel sorry as well....

      She began to see one young man regularly, a man who wore spectacles and had close-trimmed brown hair.  He wore a vest and a bow-tie; and he spoke with a considerable degree of animation whenever alone, on the porch, with the young girl.  He was a successful young man, who wore a white shirt, and brought her a present with each of his visits: sometimes flowers; sometimes sweets; occasionally a book of romantic poetry....

      Of course, my father felt nothing but contempt for the reedy young man.  How could she respect such a shadow of a man!  Jealousy rose in his heart, and took possession of his frenzied temperament.  He would storm about the neighborhood, alone, needing someone to talk to, somewhere to go, but trusting no one enough to unburden himself.  He had no one to talk to then.  The men at work would have only laughed at Heimkreiter.  They would have told him to make better use of his time, to be realistic.  And to accept his place in the world.  If he didn't accept his station in the world, his life would come to grief...!

      My father never spoke of his love to the men at work.  It would have been sacrilegious to even mention her to them, with their jokes and their insults and their constant cheapening of life.  They stripped everything bare to the bones at work.  They spoke of everything in such rigid, naked terms. They had lost their sense of innocence.  They had lost their recognition of beauty.  My father wanted nothing to do with them.  Their brutality and starkness often made him cringe. And it sometimes made him want to cry: he was very lonely then.  And he did not want to relinquish his dreams.  He knew there was a kind of death in that.

      But then, one day, almost magically, she was gone.

      Oh, no, id didn't happen quite so dramatically as that. She didn't just disappear one day, never to be seen again.  but she grew away from Benjamin.  Grew away as she grew older.  She no longer had the time to enjoy my father's shy and quaint approach.  She was busy now, planning things, hurrying about, visiting people with her mother, seeing Richard.  That was his named, Richard Anthony. 

      And she was getting older too -- more mature.  She no longer laughed the way she once had -- the way she had that first night, when Benjamin had fallen madly in love with her.  Now her laugh was much more reserved, more self-conscious, more an expression of tension that a declaration of joy or of youthful carelessness.  For she was becoming a woman now.  More complicated; more opaque.  The girl in her was beginning to be lost, beginning to recede....

      She became engaged to Richard.

      My father read about it in the newspaper, became enraged, then tried to accept it as inevitable.  He did his best to stay away from her.  Seeing her only made him feel sad and more alone.  She no longer had that precious vitality -- that girlish charm -- that had made her so attractive.  Now she even cried.  It made his heart almost break in two, to see her cry, to see her suffer.  It made him want to cry.  It made him grieve not to be able to help this girl. To be left, as always, watching everything from a distance, separated from her by some mystical membrane, as hard as steel, as clever as silicon, ever impenetrable....

      Her tears reminded him too distinctly of his own age and loss.

      He read about the marriage in the paper.  Annabelle Livingston and Richard J. Anthony, in holy wedlock.  Richard was a banker.  Yes; Benjamin understood.

      It all seemed like a dream to him now, the earlier joy, and the swelling of emotions.

      Had it been real? he wondered.  Had he meant anything to her, even in this measured distance?  Had she really even noticed him, or was that all an illusion, created in Benjamin's own mind to supply him with pleasure...?

      He began to feel ridiculous about it now.

      Why had he done it?  What had he done?  For nearly two years of his life, engaged in this sinewy fantasy?  What was it for?  Was it because he was lonely only?  Was that the only reason?

      No, not entirely.  For he had seen something within her soul which had truly made him come alive. Which had truly touched him with gentleness....

      Whatever it was, it was gone now, gone for ever.

      There was a lesson to be learned from this: a lesson of life.  Beyond the lesson about self-delusion, self-indulgence and the poisons of fantasy.  The lesson to be learned from this concerned the fleetingness of circumstance.  The transparency of joy, of pain.  The impermanent of life itself.  Life was like a river, my father said.  The human soul was like a piece of driftwood in the river.  Learn to float, he said.  That was the message he had gained from his experience.

      He said to me: You must try to learn from every experience.  You must seek to learn of life through life.  Otherwise you will never learn.  Look at me.  You are talking to one who knows this now....

      He was abstract and grim as he told me this.  He was drinking a glass of beer, sitting stoically alone at the head of that dining-room table: an overburdened king sitting on a flimsy throne.  There was an eternal vagueness in his voice.  A sense of his groping blindly in the distance.  He smiled at me somewhat cynically.

      He said: We seem to think all the troubles of life are so God damned important, Jacob!  So God damned dire and serious!  But when we get our distance, when we take the time to look back: we discover than nothing is really all that important!  You'll find that out too, Jacob!  When you get older!  You'll find that nothing is really all that important...!

      He smiled at me and said: I want you to have something better than this, Jacob.  You're a smart boy, a good student.  You've got a good head on your shoulders.  The other boys, your brothers....they can work in the mill, if they like.  But you...I'd like you to become something better than that, Jacob.  And I'm sure that you can.  If you put your mind to it, that is.  You can become whatever you want to become.  You've got the talent.  You've got the brains too.  And there are plenty of opportunities for you to make it in this country.  There are plenty of opportunities if you are aggressive enough -- if you know what you want, and then really seek it with your whole heart.  fortune favors few, Jacob.  And fortune favors only the brave.  And there are opportunities out there.  In no other country is that really the case any more.  Oh, there are a lot of things wrong with this country -- that is true.  This country isn't perfect.  There are a lot of things that aren't fair.  Life is unfair, Jacob.  It has always been.  That's the way life is.  But in no other country can a poor man become a rich man, almost over night.  But he can in America, Jacob.  It can happen here.  And it has happened here, many times.  It happened to old Carnegie; and Rockefeller.  It happened to Jay Gould.  And that Hearst fellow.  And some of them have never come down from the top.  So, you see, it can be done.  If you have the gumption and the brains to make it happen.  But you have to be aggressive, Jacob.  You have to have the will to succeed.  Why, look at Abraham Lincoln.  A poor boy who walked to school every day without shoes.  Who became president of this great land.  That could not have happened anywhere but America, Jacob...!

      He became reflective for a moment, quiet, stroking his square jaw with his right hand.  He continued:

      I want you to go to business school, Jacob.  You've got a good head on you.  And Uncle Mort knows some people.  I've talked with him about it.  He can help get you in.  You've got to think about your future now, Jacob...!

      And he was right, of course.  I did need to think about my future.  He was thinking about my future: when he said I was wasting my time writing poetry, stories.   I wanted to be a writer then.  He wanted me to work in a bank.  He told me about the Fuggers then.  He had been reading another book about them.  They were a great family, he told me.  A powerful family, respected by many great men.  And they were wealthy to an incredible degree, an unimaginable degree...

      It would certainly do for anyone to set their goals to be like one of them, he said.

     

Yes, my father was a short man, thought powerfully built: powerfully built about the shoulders.  Until the lung problem made him wither a bit.  Then his voice began to crack and break.  His muscles turned a mushy, ashen text and texture.  And we did battle, familial battle, on the treacherous plains of no return....

      And we became like the bitterest of enemies.

      Yes, my father gave me much, I suppose.  He gave me my wisdom.  He apparently also gave me my lungs.

      But that must all come somewhat later in the story.  Afterall, wasn't my father still that angry young man, leafing through the tattered pages on western heroics and lonely flight...?

      As for myself -- wasn't I that promising, youngest of men, with dreams of still becoming the greatest writer of them all...?

      Don't you remember that time?  Yes, it does seem long ago now.  It seems as though it were another age -- the Golden Age perhaps.  I was another person then.  I was another man.  How many men have I become in my life...?

      But we should talk of something else, I suppose.  I didn't wish our conversation to degenerate like this.  Into a sort of family-album on parade for all.  A kind of leafing through the family's leafless branch: all taken in at such a hurried glance.  Seeing something; and taking it for all.  Strolling through that spectacle of autumn: as we trample the golden, curling, dying leaves beneath our feet....

      Afterall, there are so many interesting things we could discuss.  So many important things that really demand our attention....

      What sort of things? you ask.

      Well, let's see.  Do you follow the stock-market very closely?  I had a feeling that you might -- although not as closely as you sometimes would like.  Well, I don't blame you for avoiding it at times.  It's a grand carnival wheel of chance, afterall.  I great comedy of errors played by men who control the wheel, throwing off pieces of bread to the masses, whetting their nature with the dream of Elysia.  It is really rather an appallingly ridiculous game, this game of high-finance.  Investment.  Collateral.  Dividends and debts.  Margin.  Returns.  Zero-coupon bonds.  All on paper.  All played in theory.  It is all in theory really.  All abstraction.  Abstraction stretching to the Gates of Hell.  Golden coins becoming greenish pulp.  And served up with such a religious devotion....

      But I guess it doesn't have to make sense does it.  As long as it takes up our time, serving us illusions of our own capacity for greatness....

      What I was going to say was that the stock-market dropped another thirty-three points today.  I heard it on the news.  Concern over rising interest rates, I presume.  Profit-taking, and the like.  Revolt over a tightening money-supply.  Yes, it is quite small really.  But it's something I must follow.  It's how I make my living now.  It's my business to know.  It's my business to understand the vagaries of abstract transaction.  Economic Man: astride the wings of Progress and Productivity.  Yes.  Modern Man rides with pride upon the gold-spewing endless machine.  The logo of the Modern Age....

      But which bears which along?  And who controls whom, in all this metallic congestion...?

      Oh, you caught the play on words: bear.  Yes, sadly my friends now consider me a bit of a bear.  I have been recommending my clients move their money into something safe.  I think the market is overbought at these levels.  I think we are heading for some catastrophe.  We are, in fact, sick on the inside....

      Our economy is based upon the gorging of one's appetites.  With hedonism as  a sort of almost religious Duty of Man.  Surfeit as a sort of social contract.  Gluttony as the Will to Power, a dictate of the nation's conscience.....

      We make little things of plastic and glass -- and rubber and steel -- and copper--alloy and magnesium.  We place Man within or atop or beside or beneath the wheel.  We tell him he has value.  He watches the endless machine: endlessly.  We applaud him for his sense of duty.  His endurance and his energy.  And then we given him a handful of green coded paper, to fill his life with things of value.  And what does he buy?  Little things made of plastic and glass -- rubber and steel  -- copper-alloy and titanium....

      He sits atop the endless machine.  His hours are spent in endless schemes to find some way to buy more plastic.  He grows rotund with acid humor.  The plastic and the glass melt and break in his hands: and disappear for ever.  The rubber and the steel run on precious fumes which fly into the collective night.  The copper-alloy and the magnesium short-out.  The endless machine begins to sputter.  We frantically pour our wealth into an undulating sieve.  It disappears, the paper for which we have traded our existence.  The endless appears to be no longer endless....

      And where does Man look, at last, for justification?

      His wallet begins to grow thin.  His watch begins to lost time -- without his knowing it.  And then it stops altogether -- defiantly.  With his friend sitting in the park, a chess-set on the bench, reading the new biography on Hitler....

      Where is a man without his watch?

      The copper-alloy and the aluminum smolder.  Aluminum smells like fear.  Adrenalin keeps us near.  The coded paper bristles, like dry leaves, within his fist, without value.  Consumption has become a congenital, defiant, ever-lasting illness.  Man lies breathing the foul air with his foulness.  The blue sky turns black with spent wealth.  Black with the sign of the man's spiritual anguish and torment...

      I have; therefore I am.  I have.  I have a washing-machine and a television set.  I have a new Ford Explorer.  A Mercedes-Benz.  A house in a lovely suburb.  And a family.  And a dog who really is my best friend.  And two sons who passed away one day.  And a daughter lost in the fright of a plain existence....

      I have pills which I take for my nervous disorder.  I share them with my wife.

      Yes, we stand on the threshold of a new, laborious age....

      I am sounding more, each day, like Benjamin, my son.  What about the Earth? Benjamin would ask.  Who takes care of the Earth -- when your only concern is getting a new BMW....?

      Ahh, the wonders of technology!

      And we must cling to this as our hope for the future...?

      Robert Henning says: Science will discover a cure to all of society's ills...!

      But Science is the cause of many of these ills! I say.  Will Science cure itself of itself...?

      You're too much a pessimist, Jacob! Robert Henning says.  And I suppose it makes you feel superior to me, because you are a pessimist.  Pessimists can look down at Man, judge him, act like some god in a three-penny opera!  But it's too easy to be pessimistic these days.  Everyone is pessimistic these days.  It's the style, afterall.  It's in vogue.  No, bravery demands optimism and faith, even in the bleakest season.  There is no reason to assume that we won't pass through all the trials, into a new Golden Age in which all illness and disease are cured, and all poverty eliminated, all bigotry eradicated, all ignorance relieved.  There's no reason to assume that all this will not happen....

      Smoke hides inside grayish clouds, pelting us with drops of poisonous rain.  We drink the poisonous rain.  We become poisoned.  Our cells leap and fire in a rigorous dissonance and fatality.  Our flesh begins to grow ashen, like the smoke hiding inside grayish clouds.  Our muscles become like mush.  We put our cells beneath a ray of flashing light.  The light burns our skin and cells.  The light seeks to bury a flame, a luminary sore, within the soul of our bones.  It does bury that flame.  And that flame burns with a liquid persistence.  With a cursed and cancerous preoccupation.  As more cells leap, in angry confusion: and then explode like bombs under the skin preparatory to....a grainy extermination....

      Robert Henning says: Science will discover a cure for cancer!

      But Science created cancer!

      And, so, it shall destroy it...!

 

The New God, omnipotent, in Its great and circular majesty. 

      Of course, one really has to wonder: will this cure be only a new form of sacred misery and secret blight to bear...?  Will this cure be something less than a more novel ill with which to grapple: for a sort of chemical survival...?  Or will it be something more...?

      A friend of mine was suffering with cancer.  No, not my wife.  Well, yes, my wife also suffered with cancer.  We each have it, it seems -- the whole generation -- paying for our sins, I guess.  We die the way we live: either through a loss of heart, or with our cells consuming each other.  No....I thought I had mentioned him.  His name was David Blumenthal....

      Oh, yes: you recall that name.  I was certain I had mentioned him.  One can't always be sure these days, the powers of recall being what they are at this advanced age.  Anyway, he was about my age, a distinguished-looking gentleman, with grayish hair, and a sallow complexion, with dark eyes that seemed to seek out speculation.  To seek out terms of fate; and the space of necessary circumstance.  He was a very intelligent man.  He read a great deal; mostly history and philosophy.  He was also a banker, not where I work, but across town.  We met, actually, during some business-related project.  Our personalities seemed to mesh somehow.  We became close friends.

      As a matter of fact, he is the only close friend I've ever had who is connected to my place of work -- my professional friends.  That is just a superficiality of friendship, imposed by similar interests and demands.  Imposed by the dictates of congenial necessity.  All the smiles at work are faded smiles.  Smiles of some archaic posturer, who, eight-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week, must pose to bring home his daily bread -- although, it is true, we brought home more than bread only, me and my colleagues.  We were very well-paid to be sure.  Everyone at work wear's what I call "a banker's smile" -- you've heard of bankers, hours.  Well, the "banker's smile" is somewhat aloof, feigning dignity, feigning, in fact, a fragment of indignation that customers would deign to disturb his holy communication with the God of money.  The banker can smell money -- so the banker's smile has many degrees from zero, zero being the non-smile for those poor sods with essentially no account, those who would be on the street in a month without their salary from the local hotel or bookstore.  The smile grows of course, become at its extreme almost a real smile, when afflicted by clients of utter wealth, still plastic, the smile, but more open, showing teeth, and often accompanied by a slight bow at the shoulder.

      Of course, it is never mentioned that we are making a royal living off other people's money, even the poor sod waitress who works two jobs and is saving to send her children to the state university, the kind of woman who would get a one degree smile (one rather than zero because she is a woman).  We never talk about that woman working two jobs is paying part of our salaries.

      I am going on; and you may begin to take me for some communist is I continue in this vein  -- which, I assure you, I am not, although I have been accused of it in the past, on more than one occasion.  I mean really -- what is more absurd: a communist banker!  I think not.

      Anyway, everyone at work wears this banker's smile -- effecting this proud servility, laced with an arsenic rage that someone might disturb our worship....  A silent rage.  Everyone rages silently at work.  Everyone pursing some tedious sort of action, as if it really mattered to someone.  All the while, Time is ticking.  Time is striking.  Time is tearing the muscles from the form, planting cancer-buds under the skin, a grimy gardener with hands of Zeus -- and we buy things to make us believe that Time is not really killing us.  It is a very feminine action, to buy the big house and fill it with electronics and furniture and appliances and, yes, even works of art.  Filling our nests with our wealth, believing the sheer weight of our nests will keep the wind from blowing us down.  A very feminine act indeed.  Believing we can cheat death.  It is if we were believing that the car and the stereo and the computers and the new divan were modern lambs' blood we used to mark our door in Pharaoh's twilight, protecting us from uncertainty....

      The harpy mutters a blue streak.

      There is such an absurdity in all that frenzied motion.  All that serious aplomb, non-emotion, financial instruction....

      Everyone's silent rage seems to shout: I AM IMPORTANT!  MY LIFE MATTERS!  MY LIFE IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE MY JOB IS IMPORTANT...!

      But life goes on, with you or without you. 

      How many people really have jobs that couldn't be done by Joe Blow living down the road?

      Artists? you say.  Interesting.  Writers?  Well, that is true, in fact.  It is not really a job in the traditional sense.  But I agree with your sentiment.  Artists, creators, they do make something that no one else could make -- true artists that is.  Not the woman's watercolor society kind of arts that learn techniques at the retirement workshop showing them to paint lilies and daffodils and seascapes.  One picture -- and I use this word intentionally -- is the same as any other.  Not even the other extreme -- those who throw paint at a canvas, seeking to shock the middle classes, seeking to portray ugliness, the perverse, without a care for the ethic of aesthetic.  That is anti-art.  Art, by definition, must seek to elevate life.  It does not copy life.  Clearly, it does not seek to repeat life's ugliness, its perversity. 

      I have no patience with anti-art -- or with the art of the workshop guild.  An artist can express the perversity of life, the ugliness of life, but he can only do this within the confines of an esthetic.  Art adds; it does not subtract.  But art also does not copy nature.  Art is not photography.  If Art is photography, then Art must photograph the inside of things, not the surface of things.  Nothing is worse than the art of the surface, unless it is the art of the vain chaotic, the art of the intentionally rude, the art of the anti-aesthetic.  Somewhere between those two poles (the superficial and the false sophistication) lies the true Art which cannot be copied -- the job which no one else can do...!

      Oh, you didn't realize I had such strong views on Art?  Yes.  I am a bit of a collector.  Oh, yes, I do like abstract art -- not all of it, of course.  It became a vogue.  Then everyone began to copy it.  You must, when collecting, always look for the originals, always look for the unique voice.  Oh, I own some Kandinsky, some Chagal, some Hundertwasser.  I love non-abstract art also.  I own many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings.  Wyeth, to me, is the American Rembrandt.  With a difference, of course.  He speaks the American soul, much as Melville did through Captain Ahab.  Wyeth's soul is dry and stoic, isolate and visionary, battered by wind and cold and solitary godhood.  Wyeth's beauty goes into the bone.  Wyeth is my favorite.  We began collecting him many years ago.  Yes, my wife and I.  My wife had very good taste in art in those days, before her illness....

      What about writing?   Well, yes.  They say you can put a monkey in a room with a typewriter -- and eventually he will write Hamlet.  That is absurd, of course.  You could put every person who has ever lived or who will ever life in a room for an eternity -- and no one would ever be able to write Hamlet.  You could even put Shakespeare in a room by himself -- and he would never be able, again, to write Hamlet.  A book is unique, like a child.  It only happens once.  The child only happens once.  And it is ever-unique.

      What I admire about Wyeth is that he --therefore his art -- is a universe unto himself.  Like Melville was, and Whitman, and Faulkner.  This depth is founded in the gothic, in the rural, in the local soil: he is American to the bone.  Without thinking about it.  Without trying to be anything.  He just is what he is, without pretense, without intellection....

      American intellectuals are always apologizing to the European for not being talented or cultured enough.  Apologizing to the Asian for not being good or old enough.  Apologizing to everyone for being who they are: American.  They have a major inferiority complex.  Always looking to Europe for the latest trend.  If American intellectuals were as courageous as American businessmen or American scientists, we would also have the world's greatest writers, the world's greatest thinkers.  That will, no doubt, occur -- only the intellectuals, the self-conscious ones, are best at condemning themselves, at dragging their feet, taking upon themselves the sins of the world, seeking as their highest goal, their highest type, that of messiah, world-savior, and martyr.

      All great art comes out of self-love, out of nationalism.

      All bad politics also comes from the same: self-love: nationalism.

      That is the sorry paradox.

     

But, yes: artists and writers are different.  And we are not artists and writers.

      No, one must never consider himself all that necessary really.  One is ever a piece of faded flesh caught in the spectral, mechanical confusion.  A faithless, smileless cog within this bureaucratic static wheel.  Every-changing; ever the same....

      No one is ever really vital to the scheme: to the health of the organization.  Without you, nothing changes.  Oh, your chair is vacant for several days, your desk is empty.  Perhaps even for several weeks, if it is vacation season.  Then it is occupied again: by some diligent-looking neophyte, who shuffles through the process you've devoted your life to composing, recreating it on the spot.  He puts his pen where you put the paper-clips.  He puts a picture of his young family where you kept a vase of daffodils.  The flowers droop over the years; and then sag sorrowfully.  The picture of the family never changes -- but it becomes a declaration all the same.  Something is wilting, beyond the glass -- beyond the picture that never changes.  Beyond the bad times.  Beyond the hate and the desire to kill or die.  The picture collects dust; but it does not change.  Youth captured in one last awkward glance.  Then put upon display, for all to see the changes -- as the hair begins to gray....

      The son overthrows the father -- it is the law.

      Yes, you are quickly forgotten, except by the woman in accounting who has secretly loved you for all these years -- which you will never know.  It is his job now -- the Young Turk.  The steely man in the neophyte glasses who spends his mornings in the gym, flattening his abs, who power-lunches in the bistro with his friends in mergers and acquisitions. 

      The job puts a stamp on his secular soul.  And it uses him -- as he uses it.  It uses him, until it no longer needs him.  Then it spits him out, like a needless seed from a once-ripe grape.  The grape is like the family photograph.  The seed is our silent, muscular man, dreaming of power and glory and wealth.  I will see him sitting in a withered posture, hunched before his paper-littered desk.  That is the way of the world.  He will probably be divorced very soon....

      Who knows where the time goes? he asks himself, singing it, a bar or two, before he forgets the rest of the lyrics.

      He packs his things in a shallow cardboard box -- memories running mad, into bulky desperations.  He turns his family photo face-down, so he doesn't cry.  Thinking is a very bad thing at this age.  He puts his pen in his pocket, taking it from the place where I kept my paperclips.  His home-away-from-home doesn't care for him now.  He is homeless, in a sense.  No one thinks of him really, except for the women in licensing who has loved him silently since the day he appeared -- but she has never let him know...

      And he is gone.

 

The new man arrives: with a crisp, uneasy smile.  He is welcomed by the bankers' smiles: the superficial energy, always positive, always insincere.  He responds: with a neophyte's frightened eagerness: a positive surface he returns.  He sits in t;he faded swivel-chair, still warm from the passing of an earlier life.  He keeps his staples where a pen once was placed.  And on his desk, where once was kept the picture of a family, he keeps a delicate vase, overrun with rich, fragrant roses. 

      He even pauses to smell them occasionally.  They remind him of some distant satisfaction.  It sends a shudder through his linear frame.  What does it all mean? 

      He stops to ponder the meaning of this.  He quails: drawing back into a tremulous darkness.  He recedes into his fractured sensitivity.  A memory emerges.  He fears he has been through this before.  And still -- still, it all goes on.  Strident.  Relentless.  As though without a thought for him....

 

But I was starting to tell you about David Blumenthal, wasn't I?  Should we walk again?  yes, I do feel a bit refreshed.  Ready to proceed into the shimmering distance, if you will.  Where the acorns lie, and the woodbine twineth.  Do you like movies?  Oh, yes, I thought you might.  Do you remember On Borrowed Time?  Oh, it's an old movie.  Sir Cedric Hardwick plays Mister Brink, Death, who comes to take Lionel Barrymore away.  But Sir Lionel and his grandson trick Mister Brink into an apple tree, trapping him there.  For a whole weekend, nothing can die.  But a world where none can die proves a dreadful thing indeed.  Mister Brink tricks Barrymore's grandson into trying to climb the apple tree, challenging his manhood, calling him a sissy.  The boy climbs the tree, but falls, breaking his back.  Lionel lets Mister Brink come down again; and Mister Brink takes Barrymore and his grandson away together....where the acorns lie, and the woodbine twineth....

      It was a lovely picture of death, of a death that has no sting.

      I think about it often now, when the world darkens.  And I begin to experience dread.

      Let me light a cigarette before we go.  You don't smoke, do you?  I've asked you that before, haven't I?  It is a very wise thing, to not smoke.  (Playing ping-pong with infinitives.)  It is such a bad habit to acquire.  But we didn't know -- that is my excuse -- we did not know that cigarettes would cause cancer.  That knowledge is really quite recent, my friend.  By then I was an addict.  I would rather have my fix than my health, I suppose....

      David and I talked about movies all the time.  One of our favorites was Nosferatu, by Werner Herzog, the German.  Have you seen that?  Oh, well, he is hard to watch.  He is a mystic.  What did Joyce call it in Ulysses: that darkness in the brightness which the brightness can't comprehend...?  Yes, that was it.  Well, that was Herzog, a man from the Middle Ages, living in our age.  When the light comes back it makes him vanish.  Or self-destruct, one of the two.

      Nosferatu was an allegory for life and death -- and the coming to power of evil.  At one pole was the town, civilization.  At the other pole was the devil, Dracula, who lived in a castle on a hill.  In-between were the colorful gypsies, those who lived in nature, in small villages, those who had one foot in death and one foot in life.  Jonathan Harker journey into Nature to try and sell the Devil some real estate; but when the city man journeys into Nature, without a pure heart, guided by avarice, by desire to buy his wife Lucy (Light) a bigger house, he becomes afflicted with darkness, with madness, with evil.  And when he returns to the city, he brings back with him Death.  And he destroys civilization.

      It is a metaphor for Hitler.  I mean, the last one, and the next one.

      But I'm off-track again.  Nothing is worse than telling the storyline of a book or a movie with which the other is unfamiliar.  (Playing horseshoes with infinitives.)

      When did I start smoking?  Oh, it was years ago -- when I was in the service.  In Europe, during World War II....

      I hope my coughing and my constant wheezing doesn't annoy you.  I am certain it annoys many people I know -- even my wife.  She says nothing.  But I know she's upset.  She doesn't want to be around me when I am coughing.

      But it simply can't be helped!  What can I do?  My lungs demand a hearing; my lungs cry out for release....in the glistening, globular air.  I cough my poison into the poisonous clouds.  What is good for the dancer must be paid to the piper -- or something equally rich and judicious.  If you cook the goose you must also kill the gander.  A sort of regeneration through the violence of sound.  A sound judgment.  A disgorging of the elements of a spent, phlegmatic temperament...

      Of course, this bespeaks a tragic, magic implication: the final calling to debt of this silent man, who sapped his own strength with a servile kind of willingness, a plastic smile, a lackey's occupation.  Building friends of wax and then dancing around the bonfire.  Building houses out of dust, the main house, in Berkshire Heights, not far from the club; the second house, the beach house, out on the cape.  Wet dust.  Fearing the combination of sun and wind.  No foundation to count on.  Family gone.  Children abused by their idealisms....

      But we should talk about something less miserly, I suppose.  And less esoteric in the main scope of possible fulfillment...        

      For instance?  Well, I have been meaning to ask you something.  Do you happen to play chess?  No?  Oh, that's a pity.  My friend David Blumenthal often played chess, down in the park, in the evening twilight.  It really is a rewarding, stimulating game.  Yes, it is a military game.  Are you opposed to the military, then?  Like my son, Benjamin, then?  He hated the military.  Well, it was the Vietnam thing, you know.  Killing and maiming a peasant culture, in the name of defending freedom and democracy.  But communism is a tyranny, my friend -- the other side of the fascists.

      Oh, I know the intellectuals don't want to hear that.  Communism is a friend of the poor, the downtrodden.  Yes, I know all that.  I had communist leanings at one time -- when I was young.  And, in the Sixties, the leftist energy (the anti-white energy, the energy of Night) spread all over the globe.  It poisoned my son -- and even my daughter.  Oh, I understand it was linked to an idealism.  But all kinds of diseases are linked to idealisms.  The Nazis were idealists.  Stalin was an idealist, even as he was killing millions of his people, executing them daily, because he feared they might gain power.  Anyone who was successful in Russia, under Stalin, was killed, since that person represented a threat to Stalin's rule.  The same was true of Mao.  Castro's no different.  On the surface, there is virtue.  But, in the depths, there is only madness and fear.  And the killing of all the best people.

      No, the military is not the enemy.  Stupidity and fear is the enemy.

      But if one believes, because of some idealism, or some Christ-complex, that to disarm is the answer, to throw the fate of a nation upon the good will of the world, they will find in very quick order that their idealism was only their cross.  The world is as mean as it is good.  The world is as ruthless as it is sweet.  It is not for the Man to forget that the world is ever good and bad, at once.  Idealism is one thing; and survival is quite another.  The first doesn't exist for long without the second....

      I am getting agitated.

      I grow weary with the younger generation's scolding of the military.  That is a very small vision, indeed.  The vision of a spoiled generation, one that has been given everything.  One that has had to work for nothing.  The most affluent generation in the history of the world. 

      Chess has survived for thousands of years; and it will continue to survive.  Why?  Because it reflects something true about the world.  There is strife, there is struggle for control of the world, between dark and light elements, armies.  And it will always be so.  Until the world ends.  Until that day, please, for my sake and your own, and for your nation's sake, seek to perceive Idealism's hoary shadow.  Because it is there.  And unless you see this shadow, you are only seeing part of what is true, believing it is entire.

      Forgive my fatherly tone.  I am getting agitated again -- and it's probably not good for my heart.  Or for anything else that is strapped to my frame.

      But back to chess -- putting aside for the moment its military overtones -- it is really a rewarding, stimulating game.  A challenging, cerebral sort of calming recreation.  It takes one's mind, at least for a few moments, off the pettiness of the world.  And all its accompanying stress and tiresome lack of clarity....

      But I can see you possess little interest in this topic. 

      What would you like to talk about then?  And please don't say my wife!  Afterall, her time is coming.  We shouldn't rush the Fates.  And we shouldn't tempt them either.  We shouldn't tempt the Fates from the careless coil of their deep repose.  So Helen comes alive again, wearing that scarlet, strapless dress, showing the white of her breast -- the sweet-cheat gone asunder.  Regally standing amid the angular pines.  A tiny thread becomes undone: near the heart-throb of her swollen breasts.  Clotho sits poised: armed with a god's murky civility.  The iron tool within her hand is like a brand to the race of man.  She would snip; no Ariadne this one.  Snip at love, snip at faith.  To bare deceit, calumny, defeat....

      Minerva smiles a bashful smile: a smile of quailing pleasure: a smile of brutal self-content.  Paris is sated.  He reclines: enervated.  Menelaus wears horns beneath his steely, glistening pate.  He wears anger in his heart, like the echo of a spoken vow.

      We stand at the threshold of an old and hideous age, he said.

      Warfare must arise.

      A green felt hat; a hideous cane.

      Men must sally glibly, sententiously to their deaths.   In the grip of a hellish heroism.  And an embellished flight from life.   Seeking Mister Brink, like the lamb seeks the lion.....

      A hard-hat swinging an axe or a pick or something.

      The country glows like a brilliant coal.

      The world is aflame.

      The world is untamed.

      And all is well.

      All is according to the consequences of Nature.

 

The Hero takes his place amid-above the mere men.  His head stands out above their heads.  His arms are twice as long as theirs.  His shoulders twice as muscular.  Yet, he is man among the mere men.  Greek, to be sure.  Roman, also -- perhaps.  He stands among them in their hour of need.  A host among them in their hour of dread.  For he is only man: man among the mere men.  His blood must flow, the same as theirs.  In a sort of circular ordinance, a circular repentance.  Tragically spent.  Squeezed from out the pounding veins of a vine once youthful, now tragically spent, now hopelessly broken....

      For the Hunter has been hunted now.  The Conqueror wears the mortal frown, that mortal crown of pale retribution.  Coming home to roost.  He tastes bitterly the ash and blood of holocaust and conquest.

      For the Conqueror has been conquered now.

      The more-than-man upon the white horse is gone.

      Long live the New God, who sits upon the Old God's chest.  Wringing epic tales from the smoke and waste which cling to the air like threats of some Apocalypse....

      Where was that man who sought to save him in his hour of need?

      And why does the blind man's wife paint her face...?

      A timeless set of questions I ask, no doubt.  And possibly having no answer.

      It must seem as though I speak in riddles now: lost in the labyrinth of occasional classical asides.  I apologize.  I do love myth, classical myth of Greece and Rome.  German myth too.  My friend, David Blumenthal was versed in the Hindu and the Chinese classics also.  We talked about this often.  But you may find it a bit stodgy, I fear.  It wasn't fair of wise of me to test your patience to such a gargantuan degree.  We should speak of something more immediate, more mundane.  Something less colossal in its many aspects of self-disappointment....

      Don't you agree?

      I know -- I shall tell you something about my mother then.  Would you find that topic agreeable enough?  You would.  Very well.  Then it shall be: Agnes Minnow, daughter of the foreman at the mill.

      And where should I begin this tale?

      At the beginning, you say.  Well, of course.

      Yes, I do agree -- that is the most logical course of composition.  And I agree: logic is of the utmost importance.  So, we shall save the ending until the very end.  Is that what we have agreed upon?  (Slipping on the banana peel of infinitives.)

      Very well then.  No, I agree with you.  Endings are best placed at the ends of things.  Although it is difficult, at times, to know where a thing actually ends, or begins for that matter.  Or whether it merely continues, unimpeded, changing forms, unencumbered by divisions of Time.

      The Riddle of the Sphinx is but a universal application: without ends or beginnings of ends.  What walks on four and then two and then three?  And then four and then two and then three?  And then four and then two and then three?  Animal, man and spirit.  Ad infinitum....

      Oh, you smile.  You catch all the sinister allusions then.  Of mother-love and father-hate.  Of blindness piled upon tragic quest of misery.  Ascension through the blood.  Descent into the mire.  For violation of that sacred blood: the imperial source of that manly power.  Everlasting and always.  Amen.  Amen....

      Not to mention the shabby chorus of reincarnation.

      But, returning for a moment -- Menelaus, too, was a blind man.  At least in a metaphorical sense.  Shuffling through the inner hell, the sanctum sanctorum, of self-deceit.  Egyptian riches placed about his feet grew amorphous: without color or depth or regularity.  And without content in that vast arcade.  Without appeal in that solitary sheen of forced laughter and shared obsolescence.  Without permanence.  And, therefore, without meaning....

      Menelaus was blinded by the fiery glint of piled goods and saddened faces.  Lord of an utter inconsequence.  King of a hapless, painful quest of folly.  He can touch the depth of all that follow now, as his age has advanced.  His hair has become parched by all the years living near the fire.  A grayness has passed into his heart and his bones....

      He cannot believe what is happening to his life.

      And Helen?  Helen trails behind him, reconciled now in name and hearth.  She wears the blush of passing beauty like the shock and the pain of a lethal remark.  The golden spindle and the basket on wheels are but the trademark of his desperation.  She weaves from the stiff and scarlet wool, only in appearance like some Penelope, an alien declaration of violent needs.  Needs without depth or hunger or resources.  Needs by which to light a candle.  (French-kissing the infinitive.)  Needs created of a vain wealth and a shallow idleness.  Left clinging to the terror in the echo of its emptiness....

      There is the trace of a smile, like the hint of a frown, lilting on her puckered lips.  And it seems to say:

      Yes, perhaps my life is nearly over.    Perhaps all which remains is for me to simply wait.  But, oh, what a wonderful life it has been.  What a wonderful life it has been...!

      There is a trade of a smile, like an upturned frown -- and what it really means to say is:

      My God, how old I have become!  How old I have become!  I would give everything back for another chance at youth!  Another chance to make everything right...!

      Helen weeps hysterically, amid the evidence of loss.  She weeps amid the flawless, faultless evidence of cost.

      She cannot understand the justice of it all.

 

Anyway, as I was saying....in the beginning, my mother was a beautiful child, delicate in movement, full and graceful in color and disposition....

      She played the piano and sang.

      My father saw her one day, practicing with the neighborhood choir.  She was not quite blonde -- but the was youthful and pretty.  And she had a vibrant quality, which touched him in his hour of need.  He was drawn to her, ineluctably -- as though to a salvation.  My mother, for her part, fell deeply in love with the figure of my father.  He was much older than she was.  He was handsome and strong, with a spray of gray dancing solemnly throughout the hair at his temples.  She thought he looked quite dignified, with that sampling of antiquity.  And he was rather well-set, she believed.  He had a steady job at the mill, as carpenter on the second shift.  And he was rather well-liked, although he did tend to keep to himself.  Her father knew him well.  He seemed like a decent sort, her father told her.  And she fell madly in love with him.

      My father was never really in love with my mother.  But he liked her.  And he could see that she loved him very much.  And he did need her love, in his own way.

      My father was growing old in his isolation -- isolated by the weight, the heavy burden, of his failure.  He looked to my mother as a sort of competition.  A supplement to his dark wholeness and the excess of his brooding.  He looked to her for faith.  And for salvation.  He longed to share that fragile youth that teemed within her blood and bones.  The temple of her sacred flesh.

      He longed for re-birth.  A regeneration through the oneness of flesh.  LIfe-- through the oneness of passionate oblivion.

      There was a passion in his heart for her -- a longing to be exorcised....