The Arduous Path Up Spengler’s Decline:

An Idealist Responds to Destiny

by

John R. Harris

For in the dialogues he understood justice to be a rule of the god also, as a powerful force in resolving men upon the just course of action lest, having done evil, they come to a reckoning after death, as well. Whence he has been considered by a few as too fond of myths; for he mingled in his writings such stories that men might refrain from committing injustices in recognition that what follows after death is unclear.

Diogenes Laertius (3.79-80) on Plato

 

If the function and purpose of the eyes cannot be fulfilled without eyes, it is nonetheless true that the eyes can sometimes not fulfill their purpose. But once a person employs his eyes so that he may see the truth, he then possesses a sense of sight which truly sees.

attributed to Cratippus in Cicero’s

De Divinatione 1.32.71

 

When PBS recently aired its latest version of the pageantry that (apparently) was Rome, The Roman Empire in the First Century, the contributing classicists ran true to form. I have written in these pages on another occasion of how the academy’s betrayal of Western tradition has undermined even Classical Studies, that most crusty (or venerable, depending upon your perspective) enclave of atavism in the Humanities. Despite appearances by such Old Guard scholars (mostly European) as Karl Galinsky, the series as a whole allowed such textual sources as satire, invective, and graffiti to upstage epic, law, and philosophy. The tyrant wasn’t neglected in favor of the shopkeeper: the distinction does not cut along the simplistic axis of class struggle (graffiti notwithstanding). On the contrary, tyrants have fascinating personal lives, while shopkeepers are almost as boring as serious philosophers. What we got, rather, was the licentious instead of the abstemious, the bawdy instead of the grave, the lurid instead of the sublime, the scatological instead of the quotidian. The Empire and her standard-bearers were racy, ruthless, shocking, and—from a safe distance of two millennia—highly entertaining. In short, they played rather like the rest of Primetime TV.

Yet I repeat that this is a phenomenon of the academy: heavy applications of the outlandish and the outrageous were not laid on by Hollywood. (After all, this was PBS!) On the other hand, perhaps my opening remarks were unfair in implying a particular novelty about the academic cult of the exotic. Ever since studies in dead languages and the far past have been the province of a distinct professional class rather than of wealthy amateurs, that class has drawn social odd balls and misfits. I think of the great classicist Paul Shorey, who belonged to the generation which preceded the intellectual debacle of the sixties. As a boy, Shorey was a runt, prone to being harassed by playground bullies. He learned Greek so that he could abuse his assailants in an incomprehensible tongue while safely poised among a tree’s high branches. Or take the insolubly enigmatic T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). Though World War I altered permanently a course which would have swept him into the academic life, the young Lawrence was no stranger to archaeological digs, and the reluctant hero of later years would translate Homer’s Odyssey in its entirety. General students of literature may care to wander back even farther to Gustave Flaubert—who, again, was no academic in the strict sense. Flaubert’s Salammbô, however, shows a stunningly thorough knowledge of antiquity in some respects. One chapter even lifts from Vergil’s Aeneid the lone soldier’s daring penetration of an incredible escape from the enemy fortress.

Salammbô! No more exotic work was ever written—nor, perhaps, one more contemptuous of bourgeois decorum. For this unique novel’s creator was also Emma Bovary’s: his loathing of civilized decency is all the two works share, yet it is quite enough to make my case. To wit: disgust with bourgeois existence is the common denominator of the literary professional class. Victims of playground bullies, of uncaring parents, of complex dispositions and neuroses, or of mere intelligence (than which few deformities isolate one more), these people carry a heavy baggage through life which includes numerous axes to grind. They haven’t the pleasure and support of lovers, friends, and families which the dully prosperous merchant or insipidly popular under-prefect seems to enjoy. In revenge, they savage the whole system—or, more conveniently (and pusillanimously) , celebrate every trace of otherness they can mine from those systems long dead and buried whose autopsy only they are qualified to conduct.

You know what I’m talking about, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable—mon frère. If you are or have ever been a member of this "privileged underclass" which we call the professoriate, you have surely attended conferences where papers are endlessly read, doughnuts endlessly consumed, and the jargonal sparring of one-upmanship endlessly renewed. They are the oddest gatherings in the world. I often wondered, in the days when I was a steady participant, if a single one of my hundred or so fellow conferees had passed a remotely normal childhood and adolescence. (I know I didn’t.) Former wimps and nerds now hiding in tweed jackets and closely clipped Van Dykes, former plain-Jane stay-at-homes now exuding aggression from shoulder-length earrings and cropped hair more spiky than a grad student’s stubble… they were an agonizing bunch among which to attempt circulation, and I myself hadn’t the confidence to burst through the densely fortified, lovingly maintained barriers of formality squeezing me from all sides. A man with a patently sincere and uninhibited laugh or a woman with genuinely regular and unmutilated features drew a strangely mixed gaze of envy and admiration (I suspect) from us all, and was sure to enjoy the advantage in any bid for organizational office.

Among such as we, in short, the anomalous was the nomos. Even the most conservative of us (and a conservative professor of literature is as rare as a shark with table manners) had still failed to find lucrative employment, failed to dazzle elegant young women, failed to build muscle with an honest day’s work… and hence failed to break into life’s mainstream, either at a higher or a lower level, and to snap up any of life’s big fish, whether the rare or plebeian variety. We were suspect, probably more to ourselves than to anyone else. We just didn’t belong—we couldn’t belong: and so many of us decided not to try. The mainstream? How crass!

The bourgeois mainstream, you know, is crass more often than not, at least in matters of taste. I have more faith in its moral lights than most of my academic confrères ever did. I believe in the common sense which motivates our basic human regard for fair play, perhaps because I saw the "superior" spirits of the academy so besmirched with egotistical pettiness. But when it comes to providing such common sense with its proper pedigree—to navigating rationalist philosophy and natural theology back to a mind created to worship eternal goodness… no, this was not a path that ordinary intelligences could easily follow. We intellectual types would have been quite élite enough—far more legitimately so than we are now—if we had remained Aristotelian contemplatives. Great heavens above! Can you imagine anything more extraordinary than that in this day and age? A contemplative philosopher!

As a group, however, the professoriate chose raw shock effect over a disdain of the mainstream. The scholars among whom I matured in the seventies and eighties, especially, chose to play to the mainstream. They needed it desperately—they craved its grimaces of bewilderment or horror at their antics: they were as much its prisoner as if they had been condemned, after all, to work at Dad’s bank or to marry money. And so they taught me Ovid instead of Vergil, Cicero’s speeches or letters instead of his treatises on morality or divinity, doggerel and graffiti instead of Stoicism. No doubt, they knew the latter regimen well enough; no doubt, the curriculum bequeathed to their mentors by the Victorians had reiterated its nobility and transcendence ad nauseam. But those were not my lessons: my generation had no link whatever to antiquity’s tiresome, stodgy fascination with absolute virtue. We were raised as if that aspect of the ancients—that quest of the unconditional for which we call their works "classic"—never existed, or not sufficiently to be taken seriously even in their own time. Serious was their ripping off extravagant cutlery from rich hosts or staking out some lovely young matron’s doorstep while her husband was in the provinces. They were serious at their play, apparently.

I will not entirely surrender my assertion, therefore, that the late sixties and seventies brought on a qualitative deterioration of the academy. A traditional, even congenital grudge against bourgeois decorum became a debauch of exhibitionism wherein the weaknesses of decorum were never considered. One needed only to be indecorous. The contemplative life, though far removed from respectability’s servitude to sedative stupor and obsession with what the neighbors might think, was not outrageous, not incendiary. It was, indeed, almost invisible. It would never do—not after 1967!

I wish to pursue this accelerated decay of loud counter-conformity into the realm of literary taste, where it has wreaked havoc upon our understanding of reality. (Nowadays, in a literary context, the word "realist" is almost synonymous with "shocking".) First, however, let me clarify the alternative view I seek to recommend. I am not in love with some anemic, high-brow Never Never Land where garlanded figures drink tea to strains of the harpsichord, yet my defense thus far of idealism may seem almost so silly. That acid critic of naïve, self-blinding convention, Oswald Spengler, would surely have categorized my remarks above as—in his word—ideological, just as he judged those of universalist thinkers from Goethe to Nietzsche:

Much that was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward image of the Classical—which was in reality the background of a life-ideal that they themselves had created and nourished with their heart’s blood, a vessel filled with their own world-feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities—the southern dirt and riff-raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys and Phrynes, phallus-worship and imperial orgies—excite the enthusiasm of the student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the world-cities of to-day too lamentable and repulsive to face.1

Not that Spengler champions what he calls the materialistic approach which heeds only articles in the rubble and traces of squalor: he proposes his method as a compromise between the two in the interest of truth. I confess, however, that I cannot find any higher truth—anything more nearly true—in Spengler’s professedly mathematical objectivity than I see in the writers he scorns. In a postscript to the passage just cited, he declares that "there is not the slightest inward correlation between things meant by ‘Republic’, ‘freedom’, ‘property’ and the like then and there and the things meant by such words here and now."2  Not the slightest? Then why study the past at all? Were we to discover something delightfully or poignantly or otherwise meaningfully comprehensible about it, we would have to reject our discovery as false, since Spengler maintains that the spirit of any culture or age cannot be recovered by or transmitted to another. That many of us have derived much comfort from reading the great works of centuries past is, apparently, self-deception. We have been fashioning shapes out of the clouds, rather, like Rosencranz and Guildenstern as Hamlet twits them—but how dare I wring a simile out of the inscrutable Shakespeare! "There are no eternal truths," sayeth the scholar, preparing us to embrace the truth-of-the-day.3  So be it, then; yet why stop at arbitrarily imposed temporal and cultural borders? Why not drive Spengler’s wedge through all of our personal relationships? My own experience of life has taught me that I often have more to say to a Canadian or a Frenchman than to the people among whom I was born. If my assumption that the European and I more readily ascend to universal ideas than do my fellow Americans is mere poppycock—if I am being "ideological" again like the benign but benighted Goethe—then surely I am not equally mistaken about my indifference to cell phones and SUV’s!

Spengler, of course, is exaggerating. He is, if possible, more given to hyperbolic flourish than Nietzsche. In an age (the early twentieth century) when antiquarian studies had become all but professionalized—i.e., bureaucratized—Spengler was a relic, one of those aristocratic amateurs whose loathing of bourgeois nullity could only distort, not suppress, a breathtaking stock of erudition. I myself have known one or two of his stamp, though they have now long lain in their graves. Their overarching generalities sprawled so vastly and wobbled so precariously that I was left agape, yet their particular learning was so profound that they could usually persuade onlookers to walk along the structure hand in hand with them. That Spengler, for instance, should have considered "culture" (e.g., Greece) inward-turning while "civilization" (e.g., Rome) was outward-turning makes no sense except politically. Why not simply say, then, that true imperialism (as opposed to vandalism) requires technology—what we call "infrastructure" today? Certainly the Greek city-states would have grabbed empires if they could have sustained them: many tried. The contrasts Spengler attempts to draw seem to me much more clearly developed by what we now know about oral cultures and literate ones; and from the perspective of that emerging science, Homer is the extrovert and Vergil the introvert, Greece the land of doing what your neighbors expect of you and Rome the land of thinking it all over with some abstract sense of purpose. But that’s Socrates, you protest! Yes, and Socrates is just where Eric Havelock located the rift between oral and literate habits of thought.

Needless to say, that axis wouldn’t have carried Spengler where he wanted to go: that is, into an exposé of civilization as decline in full spate. But wasn’t he, then, cooking the books to suit his own ends in precisely the manner that he accused others of doing? Wasn’t he, indeed, anticipating Deconstruction by arguing the utter relativity of truth in order to advance his favorite set of arbitrary beliefs? Tom Bertonneau maintains convincingly in this issue that Spengler was well ahead of the intellectual game, resembling far more the radical relativism of our time than the stormtrooping totalitarianism which courted his genius. All the same, I can’t find it in me to blame the Nazis for picking up mixed signals.

To my lamentably incomplete and undigested reading of Spengler, I will pay this much tribute: I owe to the man, at the very least, the clarification of my own perspective, which I shall now seek to explain in detail. Spengler’s distinction between ideological and materialistic thinking (or idealist and materialist, I would prefer to say) is thoroughly genuine—more so than he knows. For the schism is unbridgeable: all you can do is work one side of the street a while, then the other, which is routine defection rather than compromise or synthesis. I denied with all the spirit I could muster the notion that my idealism ranks me among those naifs who refuse to rake through cultural garbage heaps, and I renew my denial. It isn’t that I wish to ignore the presence among the ancients of panders, sycophants, and poltroons; rather, I choose not to concede that this is the most important thing about them. No doubt, they were statistically inclined to the garbage heap. So are we—so are all cultures, and all individuals. Pascal was far better than Spengler at humbling us with the time we spend in the bedroom and the bathroom versus the time we spend writing treatises and symphonies. Nonetheless, I would insist that the meaning of life, both for individuals and for cultures, resides in treatises rather than bathrooms. The gap between materialism and idealism is unbridgeable because it is not lateral, but vertical. It is one of those great pits on a Dantesque ascent, and you either cross it or you don’t. That the choice to cross obligates you to a seemingly endless series of re-crossings falsely implies, perhaps, that a highway runs between the two embankments. No such luck. The upward struggle must be steady and determined. A composer may hear the first notes of a new symphony while brushing his teeth, and Pascal’s humbling insights, after all, figure prominently in his noble philosophy.

So, yes, Spengler is right that the ancients were not demigods, and yes, he is right that we can never appreciate just what they were from so many centuries away. But he is also wrong. When Vergil writes superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est—"all misfortune must be overcome through endurance"—I flatter myself that I have quite a bit more than the slightest notion of his meaning. So does anyone who has ever suffered in a worthy endeavor. Morally speaking, human beings across the spectrum are in fact astonishingly similar. The common ground goes well beyond loving one’s family and fearing death (you can’t build morality out of biological conditioning): it includes acknowledging that rule by carnal impulse is depravity, that sacrifice of self for the innocent is admirable, and that such qualities as honesty are desirable despite being materially unprofitable. No eternal truths? Who before the twentieth century would ever have uttered such a patent absurdity? Perhaps someone who hoped to exploit the gullible or ease a troubled conscience—for the presence of those motives, too, is eternal in human affairs. Yet the past century seems to have achieved a particularly dense concentration of them.

Once we proceed beyond basic moral imperatives, common humanity continues to sweep out a wide vista. I was surprised, and a little chagrined, to read recently in Cicero that "Carneades used to tell a story about the face of Pan bursting out one time from a stone split in the Chian rock quarries" (De Divinatione 1.13.23). Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote almost an identical tale into his never-finished Citadelle—hence my chagrin, for I should like to have known of the connection when I was completing a book on Saint-Ex. But just what was the connection, after all? Had the Frenchman (who was no T.E. Lawrence, at least academically) read or heard of the ancient Greek legend somewhere, or had the same idea—over two millennia later—simply popped into his head? Either way, it is a deeply human connection: one of sincere fascination, perhaps, or else one of parallel creativity. I assure you that the beds and bathrooms frequented by a French flier and a Greek philosopher would yield nothing to prepare us for such a meeting of minds.

Or take a conception as ostensibly prone to cultural conditioning as that of causality—of whether things happen by necessity or by chance. Spengler is resoundingly, even deafeningly determinist. Having dismissed with scorn as a universalist fantasy the immaterial, ahistorical realm of human free will, what else could he be? "That which is a possibility is a necessity," he announces.4  These are very nearly the terms, it turns out, which the ancient Stoics employed to express their view on the subject. If I may invoke Cicero again (an unrivaled treasury of philosophical discussion, though Spengler insists that there was no such thing in Rome), his De Fato meticulously lays out the Stoic position that, since all events have causes, and all causes have anterior causes, every event was predestined to happen once the causal chain’s first link was forged.

For it strikes Diodorus that only that may take place which is either true or will be true. His position leads into the argument that nothing may happen which is not necessary, and that whatever is possible either exists right now or will exist: events to come can no more transmute themselves from truth to falsehood than events which have already been. But the immutable nature of past occurrences is apparent, while that of certain future occurrences, being less apparent, may not even seem to be real…5

De Fato 9.17

Cicero himself, of course, was an eclectic with a distinct preference for Aristotle. He consumes much of this fragmentary treatise trying to referee between various Stoics who perceived that their deterministic doctrine potentially annihilated moral choice; and he also amusingly waves aside Epicurus’s attempt to build arbitrary spontaneity into atoms (as theoretical physics, it happens, is doing today). Epicurus, of all people—the grandsire of materialist ethics, concerned about moral freedom! It would seem that, at least within Greek culture (if you can call a four-century span involving the turbulent Eastern Mediterranean the snapshot of one culture), people contradicted themselves egregiously in stumbling and struggling among certain truths which they regarded as inviolable.

Devout Spenglerites will be clamoring by now, "But this is precisely the rigid Newtonian causality which Spengler rejected outright! Just because the ‘everything fully possible is fully necessary’ formula happens to resonate with a line dredged from a Stoical text doesn’t mean a significant connection exists. To argue otherwise would be to establish one of those absurdly shaky parallels with the past which Spengler so deplored." Not at all: the connection here is significant. It reveals that any attempt to account for the causality of human actions (as opposed to strictly natural phenomena) which jettisons free will must ultimately deny the very possibility of morality. No wonder the Stoics so squirmed over the doctrine and sought to refine it for generations—no wonder even the professed materialist Epicurus found it, in the depths of his humanity, hard to swallow. Spengler obfuscates the "great denial" by branding classical causality a heartless mathematical metaphor and dressing his own version in a quasi-spiritualism where the future attracts Alexanders and Napoleons like a magnet. He claims to reject the determinism of material cause-and-effect in favor of this outlandishly inside-out determinism of destiny. He dedicates himself to the notion that, while we enjoy no free will, a life-force is continually drawing us forward into becoming.⁶ Yet through it all, he believes that what we do is not notably a result of personal choice—and whether you locate the motive force in the past or in the future, all that really counts morally in this debate is whether you locate it inside or outside of the human will.

I am not remotely competent to say how much of Hegel and Nietzsche is implicated in Spengler’s theory (he disparages both, as he does all philosophers) or to what degree it anticipates Heidegger (of whose work it reminds me, if only in its forward-straining slipperiness). I would go no farther than hazarding the opinion that Spengler, having rejected both materialism and idealism, finds himself in the pitchy trough beneath the ascending bridge. There is a mere instant of indeterminacy, apparently—not freedom, but chaos—at the dawn of culture, when a given ethnos first seizes upon a given set of symbols. Thereafter, the culture exercises a collective imagination as the chosen symbolism irresistibly percolates through and through its members. The original choice’s arbitrary character yields a full-blown relativism if one can only get beyond that choice’s "chaos"—if one can accept it as truly chaotic.⁷ Some cultures count by abstracting form from context, others by privileging context over isolated form: why question what caused the former to turn left, the latter right? Put it down to chance, and then put the rest down to destiny. From the former you get an astrolabe, from the latter a boomerang—it couldn’t have happened otherwise.

If I had Professor Spengler’s breadth of learning or depth of acumen, I might concur with his thesis—and defy it—by chasing concepts like atomic particles and chaos back into the classical past and demonstrating thereby how thoroughly symbolic our supposedly objective science is. I find Spengler both perceptive and persuasive at this level… except that, once again, he fails to discern a universal human center of intellectual gravity constantly reanimating the old tropology. To be sure, there is plenty of room for contingency in how chaos is portrayed: a symbol, by definition, can be carried in any one of several directions. And since the human mind depends heavily, if not exclusively, upon symbols to think, the way we do mathematics may very well be a tip-off to how we butter our bread or whistle our tunes. The universality lies beyond particular symbols in the dependency upon symbolism—and, yes, in the power and durability of a few particular symbols. We all concede the reality of such a thing as a year, we all count its days in some way or other, and we all like some kind of tune. I see no reason to come away from such reflections with a "no eternal truth, no replicated conditions" thesis unless one entered them with the intent of doing so. On the contrary: the very difference beyond apparent similarity is only comprehensible thanks to more abstract similarities yet further beyond the differences—a path which leads back to Kant, the a priori, the universal.

Take Calvinist predestination: very different from both classical/Newtonian necessity and from Spenglerian destiny… up to a point. Yet in reading the De Fato, I was struck that there should be any ground of comparison at all between an ancient culture without an inkling of monotheism (as Spengler asserts—of course, he is wrong) and the culture of Reformation Protestantism wherein this question occupied center-stage. The Greek Stoics and their Roman heirs indeed seem to me to have a keen feel for the subject. In Cicero’s summation, many of them defend what would become the Calvinist position, though on the logic of cause-and-effect rather than on the assumption that God is omniscient. (The difference here is deceptive: it’s mostly a matter of when the word "god" is actually used instead of "nature".) Cicero himself, in my opinion, finds his way to the heart of the problem as few hardline Calvinists do when he distinguishes between inner and outer causes—that is, between a material event or physical reflex and a deliberate choice. If one were genetically predisposed to heart disease, one’s choice to smoke and imbibe alcohol would nonetheless put the "fated" misfortune on a different timetable from unassisted Mother Nature’s. (The ancients, by the way, did have some suspicion of genetics as well as environmental conditioning: see De Fato 4.) And while we might argue that such unhealthy choices are themselves ultimately caused by external forces (e.g., drinking because of stress or bad company), this is only to say that adequate material cause may always be found for any choice after the fact. It does not say that choice is an illusion. Had our hapless subject chosen to abstain from high-risk behaviors, there would be adequate cause for that, too, in the environment. He was afraid that he would die—what material cause could be less resistible?

Naturally, Cicero doesn’t express himself in just these terms. The crucial point, however, is that he recognizes the gap between mind and matter in a way that Spengler and other determinists do not. We see again that Dantesque trench gaping between lower and higher perspectives. Material force and human will are different orders of cause, though they are constantly and intricately intertwined. Human will acts through matter, and matter influences human will; but in any case where will holds sway at all, its control approaches 100%. No one knew this better than the Stoics. If a man can will his own physical torment and destruction in a worthy undertaking, then it’s perfectly silly to insist upon how hot the flames are or how dreadful death is. All physical explanations always rely 100% upon physical causes: all moral explanations weigh the material only insofar as it distracts, intimidates, or perverts the will—which places ultimate cause upon an unperfected will. Does God know how we will all respond to a wailing baby or a pleading widow in the same way that water must rush downhill until it encounters an obstacle? Perhaps, if you adopt the right perspective. Goodness, I suppose, either achieves in a given heart on a given occasion the critical mass needed to act properly, or it does not. Goodness knows and has always known itself, and its seeds grow and converge upon their source. Goodness is fated to be good.

Such a formula is not at all what Calvin had in mind, of course. Yet I offer this view of predestination because I consider it fully valid in some sense, and because ancient philosophy indicates its parameters far better than Renaissance casuistry. The same idea has lingered throughout the history of Western civilization, and I, though a modern, find certain discussions of it which are two millennia old to be more profound than others which date from mere centuries or decades ago. Both conditions openly violate the law-according-to-Spengler. Have I put words in a Roman pagan’s mouth? I have already admitted as much. Did I distort Cicero’s deeper meaning, his most fundamental intentions? How could I have done, when my "misreading" involved no consistent effort of suppressing troublesome words and phrases? The fact is that, once we human beings all agree to step around—or simply to ignore—the clutter and stench left over from our culturally determined orgies, we have quite a lot to talk about.

Now consider art, the subject for which this essay was destined (though fate seems to threaten digression). There indeed may be no better illustration of freedom and determinism dancing around each other and walking straight through each other. We study artists generally by historical period, and specifically through biography. We establish connections between their work and their circle of friends, the prevailing trends of taste, their day’s accepted prejudices, the wars and jubilees and scandals of the time, and so forth. We create the impression (which we teachers ourselves may or may not believe: how often do we think it through?) that a certain work must inevitably have been written under a certain set of historical conditions. Or if a degree of indeterminacy remains (you can always inject a little indeterminacy: two motives are better than one), we run to plug it up with what the author had for breakfast, how his father punished him, how his schoolmates treated him, and whom he slept with on what occasion. We are dynamos of objective scientific analysis during these little exercises. We pin the artist to his card, label him, secrete a drop of formaldehyde, and arrange him in just the right niche of the collection. He is a perfect specimen. He painted or wrote or composed as he did because he had no other choice, just as pupae must weave cocoons and turn to butterflies.

And what of the artist who goes against the grain (as so many of this human subspecies do)? Why did Wallace Stevens write poetry despite having achieved the material comforts of a successful businessman? Why did Saint-Exupéry write novels despite having compiled a respectable résumé as a commercial pilot? Why did sailing not suffice to Joseph Conrad—or medicine to Chekhov, or the priesthood to Prévost and Rabelais, or statecraft to Marguerite de Navarre, or the military to Archilochus? Why does anyone ever do anything so unremunerative, time-consuming, and frivolous as making up verses and stories? At least a tune is pleasant to listen to and a painting to look at; but literature is the most demanding of the arts to enjoy, and frequently leaves even its creators perplexed and exhausted. Could any act advertise more boldly the presence of an independent will—or perhaps, even, a perverse streak in human nature?

Why, not at all, responds the determinist. The successful create because they’re bored, the active because they’re tense, the powerful because they need propaganda, the devout because they need confirmation. Each of them gets a pay-back: there’s always a pay-back. In the same way, a philanthropist who donates millions of dollars to charities may be said to pay off his guilty conscience, and a hero who dies freeing a lifeboat to transport survivors may be said to buy back the self-respect which an accusation of cowardice once took from him. No mystery here. The spirit leaves its tracks everywhere in the world of matter; but they are material tracks, of course, so matter in one of its restless shifts always suffices to account for them. What you look for is what you see. Where your treasure is, there lies your heart.

I am not proposing that one may as properly be a materialist as an idealist, according to one’s taste. I observe merely that the evidence for either position is compelling, once you have already accepted that position (something which Pascal noticed long ago about miracles). The ultimate verification of idealism is constantly postponed in the world of matter. Spengler’s loquacious and ill-read cousins, the deconstructionists (who deny any relation: cf. Tom Bertonneau’s essay in this issue), have underscored this fact to insinuate that idealism is naïve, at best, or maybe even manipulative. Invariably, they—and I might as well say we, for they are our "destiny"—opt for materialism. Matter is perhaps touched by spirit, but need not be. You can stroke it and kick it, bite it and smooch on it; it’s there, and if by acknowledging its limits you grow claustrophobic, you can at least boast that you are not easily hoodwinked.

Now, these are not two positions of equal merit. They are equal only in the ambiguity of their witnesses. The fruit which grows from their trees could not have a more different savor. Let us return to art, this time from the perspective of its audience rather than its creator (for the quality of an audience certainly influences art, while the artist’s essential inspiration is better left veiled in mists). An idealist expects to find spiritual footprints throughout the material world, as we have noted, and believes, indeed, that all human actions are so many shadows cast by spiritual reality. As a reader, in particular (for narrative is an art made of action), he would expect of any good story an array of strong characters and a richness of psychological motivation. On the other hand, the materialist believes that character is a function of environmental conditioning, and that psychology itself is a mere projection of basic biology into human culture. Hence his preferred story would be far more extroverted in motive (though not necessarily what we would call "action-packed"). Characters would behave like lab rats in a Skinner box. At its most "idealist", such a story might portray the human rats as lacking food or water or protection in order to provoke a sympathy which could be politically exploited. That is, they would resemble propaganda.

Notice that we are talking about causality again. I was being somewhat coy before when I introduced the subject merely in illustration of how little the times and customs have altered certain notions. In fact, our view of ultimate cause courses through the ditch of that great divide whose opposing banks radically affect their occupants’ vistas. The idealist does not accept any cause in human affairs as existing independently of the will. Even a volcanic eruption or a flood or a plague merely forces the basic nature of individuals out into the open: the moral fiber of latent heroes and villains rises or plunges to the occasion. In contrast, the materialist can only count and study victims as the lava flows or the ship sinks. The large, prosperous family which drowns one by one in Zola’s novella, Le Déluge, is differentiated only by stereotypical qualities of age and sex, and the cry, "I don’t want to die!" is heard all around.

Such "realist" or "naturalist" fiction offers what seems to me a depressingly narrow range of possibilities in human nature. How could it do otherwise? Human nature is animal nature: social, environmental, and genetic conditioning. The real is what we can see, touch, count, and dissect. The only comfort in this view is that, while heroes do not scale very high, neither do villains slither very low. Since conditioning is the ultimate cause of all conduct, good and bad, every character is predestined by material circumstance to lie or come clean or fight back or make peace. "Ce n’est pas ma faute," as protagonists declare from LaClos’s liaisons Dangereuses to Maupassant’s Bel Ami (though LaClos, at least, leaves room to doubt the protest): "It’s not my fault."

Idealist fiction is infinitely richer: Dostoevsky rather than Zola, Kafka rather than Hemingway. Yes, Kafka—for the higher realities hidden within events may also be darker realities. Dante visits Hell as well as Paradise. A novelist like Tolstoy or Conrad may appear to some to defy classification along these lines. Personally, however, I find it impossible to conceive of either without his idealism, his sense of human will as the prime mover of human affairs. (Tolstoy’s Napoleon, by the way, is indeed drawn on by something like a Spenglerian destiny: French society was so eagerly awaiting a charismatic figure to lead them into empire that even a Corsican upstart would do—yet what contempt Tolstoy showers upon such mass gullibility!) That this will may itself ultimately be moved by divine will is certainly suggested more often by the Russian than the Polish expatriate; but even Tolstoy steers well wide of that metaphysical determinism which degrades so much popular "Christian" fiction today, and which is built upon a false analogy with materialism. When a Pierre Bezoukhov or a Levin or an Ivan Ilyich has a thunderclap of revelation, its meteorology can only be understood within an atmosphere of free choice. The sparks which goodness ignites (if I may rephrase an earlier sentiment) are predestined to ascend to heaven.

Conrad’s idealism is perhaps more interesting precisely because of its agnosticism. "Hang it all, for all my belief in Chance I am not exactly a pagan," remarks his Marlow (at the end of the novel bearing that name). Indeed, the mystery of the human will so dominates Conrad’s otherwise naturalist landscapes that it brings them to the verge of what we now call magic realism. The frightful shadows cast by Kurtz’s confessions (in Heart of Darkness) over our most philanthropic motives create a chaos which leaves the sweltering, fever-ridden Congo looking relatively benign. Nothing is certain in the human world. In comparison, nature at its reddest and rawest offers a strange comfort in its predictability; and the novel’s African natives, to the extent that they live close to nature, are paradoxically harmless—even reassuring —behind their alien veils. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe entirely missed the boat when he branded as racist Conrad’s exotic portrayal of the locals. Europe is far closer to the heart of darkness than Africa, the euphemisms of the board room and drawing room far closer than shrieks in the underbrush. I think Achebe’s countryman, Ben Okri, is fully aware of this: i.e., of the human heart’s ability to swallow all mysteries of time and place in its own. Okri is among the greatest living masters of magic realism, in my opinion. He is as much Joseph Conrad’s heir as Achebe is Émile Zola’s.

And we Western academics allow Okri to practice his craft (although we do not read him much) because he hails, after all, from the Third World. Authors born into traditional societies have a special dispensation to write in the style of myth and folklore: it was in their mother’s milk, so they are being true to ethnos—to conditioning—when they employ it. Among our own authors, however, we take a very dim view of it. (Louise Erdrich, being half-Sioux, falls within the dispensation.) Even among non-Westerners we merely bestow upon it a patronizing nod. We preserve our laurels for the Achebes and the Ngugis, whose work shocks with gritty detail and hammers away at post-colonial political outrages. (The protagonist of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born escapes murder at the hands of the local racket’s thugs by actually fleeing through a toilet into the sewer!) We understand, and approve: that’s the kind of stuff we write.

I have sought to encourage actively the submission of magic-realist pieces to Praesidium because, quite simply, I find in them a refuge for the spirit. From the high side of the bridge, ultimate reality is spiritual: matter implies spirit, distorts it, and otherwise imperfectly expresses it, but is never indifferent to its presence. Morally, this vista reveals to us innumerable possibilities for action, yet also warns us that the indefinite consequences of action stretch fearfully beyond what we can calculate. Such a perspective is both energizing and paralyzing, both sublime and horrible: it pulses with the blood of life—the ichor of life within life and beyond death.

The lower vista seen from the uncrossed bridge, by comparison, is suffocating. You study in magnification the decomposed matter in your unshod, besmirched toenails until you feel the onset of Sartre’s high-intensity, frozen-frame nausea. Should you turn away in disgust, your hungry pleasure is served at the same blunt, immediate level (for a stiff drink and a copulation are a good way to fight down the enzymes). This perspective cannot effectively provide any basis for distinguishing between art and pornography. Art is "real": what could be more real than an itch that needs scratching? A more honest formula would be simply to admit that all reality without spirit is obscene… but many advocates of the low bank fidget before outright, massive demoral- ization. They beat a retreat into wholesomely de-spiritualized "celebrations" suitable for younger readers and viewers (perhaps even the staple requirements in some indoctrination program) which end up, in their insipid bourgeois tedium, making the Moral Majority look like a bunch of bohemians. These politically correct momas and papas collect heart-warming tales by third-graders or the physically challenged or successful single parents or Forrest Gump look-alikes and offer up anthologies on the altar of reconditioning. All of it is as "real" as buttered toast, and so tiresome that one sentence sends you into a coma. Real, too, is graffiti and subway art, grandma’s old letters and a chatroom print-out, the photograph of a mud puddle and the scan of a Coke can, the "dance" of the panhandler and the hooker on the streetcorner. I love haiku, Vermeer, and the penny whistle as much as anyone else—probably more than most of my contemporaries; but simplicity without spirit is mind-numbing mediocrity.

As a culture, we are no longer crossing the bridge. We no longer accept that our environment is caused by our wants rather than our wants by our environment. Even in our religious dimension, we have become people of the word rather than the spirit. Where it occurs, good behavior (we generally believe) is caused by obedience to certain commandments, which in turn were caused by a divine intrusion into human affairs, which in turn was caused by… we know not what, nor dare ask. We are uninterested in the many resonances between those commandments and others from distinct traditions—uninterested, or even belligerently dismissive, since common ground would prove embarrassing. We prefer to agree with Spengler that all truth is arbitrary and relative until we reach our own truth, which is arbitrary but absolute. In our materialist determinism, we find discussions with the past wholly frivolous, if not corruptive; for, assuming that we do share something with our distant progenitors, a closer examination of it would only divert us from strict concentration upon The Law. Indeed, our liberal academic community and our conservative religious community differ far less in their dedication to the materialist view of reality than in their view of art—and not much there, even, when the "social-conscience realism" of story-telling sets its puppets in motion to sell the good cause. But religion today would as soon avoid literature altogether.

So would Spengler, by his own admission. His disparagement lets no facet of our cultural heritage pass by undiminished—or, to be fair, he so diminishes us as to rule our heritage inaccessible in our present "stage". (But this begs the question: for whether the past is denigrated or elevated with respect to the present, the judgment is still being delivered from an atemporal point of privileged insight.) Perhaps, then, one should not be surprised to see this art historian sans pareil finally waving aside art of all varieties as he contemplates the West’s "destiny":

I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day "arts and crafts", architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, for they display for me to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construction the real Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a matter of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the Caesars—their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded architraves—is preserved or not…. A century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic and metaphysical production—let us say frankly an irreligious time which coincides exactly with the idea of the world-city—is a time of decline. True. But we have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.⁸

I confess that I can readily imagine a National Socialist cheering this passage. What I find most disturbing about it is not the denigration of art. (After all, I too would rather behold a well-wrought airplane than an exhibit of feces-smeared Madonnas: "realist" art can move one to appreciate myopia.) It is the utter absence, rather, of any moral duty from Spengler’s remarks which most impoverishes them—the blunt acceptance that fighting against the current of one’s time is more childish than heroic, and more mad than childish. What a puny-spirited surrender! Where now is the magnificence of the great scholar’s scowl at those historical paradigms whose current he himself resisted? An intellectual Roland, but a moral Ganelon: I would trade it all for one line of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, just as Bonhoeffer would have traded all his papers for one blow against an immoral destiny.

This absence of moral acuity seems ubiquitous in Spengler (he reproaches Kant for having no theory of history—but Kant believed in a radical freedom which precludes such theories).⁹ Indeed, it explains his resistance to the "higher" art of idealism: the myths, parables, allegories, and fantasies whose essential claim is upon a universal human nature, not a keen eye for shocking detail. In the passage above, such high art is no less denied to us than the contemned art of decadence: Phidias and Mozart are as futile to grope after as our contemporary masters in carcasses, urine, blood, and dung are polluting to the touch. Yet by what aesthetic or moral imperative does Spengler refuse "lower" art the "right" which his destiny guarantees it to probe the bottom? In his zeal to break with a stifling tradition, he has become an unwitting apologist for the suffocation of "realism": of the idly unique, the inconsequentially common, the closing rather than the opening spiral whose "destiny" is to accomplish utter isolation from the past and from others. He is part of the great decline, and his scorn for rationality survives in our time as full-blown intellectual decadence.

The decline of the West has been stimulated primarily by the elimination of spiritual reality from its philosophy, from its art—even, in some respects, from its religion. Such, at least, is my firm belief, and more than one thinker discussed in Praesidium before now has endorsed it. (I might cite Thomas Molnar or Eric Voegelin in passing.) The world of empirical reality, unfortunately but inevitably, had been the most traveled province of the divine since the dawn of human culture: primitive religious systems sought to provide a foreknowledge of, if not a control over, disquieting natural events, and thus performed a service very similar to science’s in our time. Cicero puts the following defense of divination in his Stoical brother Quintus’s mouth (which he rebuts on his own behalf later) just after a passage already mentioned:

The responses of haruspices and every sort of divination requiring judgment are similar [to the arts of medicine, navigation, and military strategy]: they rest upon conjecture, for in no other wise could they proceed. Perhaps they are mistaken sometimes—yet most often they lead to the truth. For they have been practiced over and over for time out of mind, during which span, since an almost innumerable mass of events fell out in the same way when preceded by the same signs, an art has been created from frequent observation and recording of the same things.

De Divinatione 1.14.24-25

This is about as good a description of scientific method as one is likely to find before Bacon and Descartes!¹⁰ The Latin ars might indeed be translated "science", for it refers to a finely polished skill rather than to our romantic notion of inspired creativity. The Greek word for ars would be techne.

When did things change—when did Western civilization decide that mystical signs were laws of nature? The shift was well under way even before Copernicus… but we would be following a red herring to equate it with the egress of spirituality from our world. False spirituality, perhaps. The empirical realm, after all, is more Caesar’s coin than God’s; or, at any rate, God’s metaphysical stamp does not show up unequivocally to our eyes in natural phenomena, as I have already said. The greatest triumph of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to recognize as much—and its greatest failure was not to do so, for this was the epoch when our cultural road twained definitively. Descartes, and still more emphatically Kant, insisted that the objective, systematic study of nature did not and could not affect the spiritual realities which encircled it majestically. Kant stood without equal in his degree of elaborating these realities as moral. A starving child is a starving child: not genetic inheritance nor cultural conditioning nor political threat can excuse one’s refusal to share a crust of bread. The prick of duty trumps science every time.

Yet Kant remains a favorite whipping boy for those who grieve the spirit’s decline. They would prefer, apparently, to see this war fought on the materialist’s turf, as Western Christianity is presently fighting it. God bringing rain, God holding SUV’s to the road, God keeping our boys’ necks and knees intact at Friday night football games… there seems to be nothing so morally neutral or morally oblivious that this crowd will not pray for it. They cannot forgive Kant for establishing with relentless persistence that spirituality demands a thirst for goodness, not for profit and pleasure. He is in league with the evil scientists who have anesthetized us, slit us open, and stuck pins in our viscera.

Now I am back to Spengler, who harries Kant with such charges from start to finish. ("A man like Kant must always feel himself superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child," writes Spengler with pugnacious acerbity.¹¹ The truth is that Kant all but idolized Rousseau, no doubt sensing painfully the aridity of his own style, and perhaps the leanness of his own emotional life.) Vilifying people in this fashion who think systematically is no way to reverse our cultural degeneracy. The reason we are in full decline, rather, is precisely because we no longer have any higher referents—any principles—by which we may judge our experience. Spengler wants us to abandon, not only universality, but broad generalities: this is not our culture’s specific destiny, to hear him tell it, but an irrefragable condition of finding the truth. (Dare I say a universal law?) He would have us believe that history is resuscitated from the pedagogue’s ether and brought to life only when we leave off classifying and synthesizing. In fact, just the opposite is true. History is always necessarily an artificial construct. Those like Spengler who would bring it to life are themselves profoundly confused about how to live. To argue as he does that the record of where we have come from is a trek toward fulfilling certain symbols of thought is to imprison the human will within the figures of speech it stammers out rather than to acknowledge the longing which makes it stammer. This longing—this quintessentially human desire to transcend the material by immersing oneself in the material—is a motive which Spengler should have learned from his beloved Goethe, if he couldn’t find it in his own heart. But surely he could have, for it is quintessentially human. When combined with the mysterious grace of seeing through and working through (as opposed to getting mired in) the material, it is the generative force of universal moral principles. It feeds the destiny of whatever real life sparks in us to converge upon goodness’s light.

We call such destiny freedom, since its destination lies through and beyond the material. Seen from the materialist lower bank, that is, the most distinguishing characteristic of our vital longing is (as in Faust’s case) its resistance to capture and containment—its refusal to alight upon any object and remain there. Spengler and his theoretical fellow-travelers, the deconstructionists, insist that this longing is, rather, at work not through but within its metaphors, tricked into striving for their fulfillment instead of restless with their limitation. Spiritual struggle is servitude, not freedom, in such a view: at best, it is unwitting servitude—the illusion of chasing the horizon when you are only following your own echoes through the labyrinth. The very metaphors of my preceding sentences are so far from ensnaring me, however, that I will accuse their inadequacy on one point: their representation of moving outward and moving inward. For the idealist, even as he quests for ultimate meaning beyond the stars, beyond death itself, is paradoxically turning inward to discover and marvel at his hunger for perfection. The materialist, meanwhile—whose kidnapping of rationalism excites the scorn of Spengler and Deconstruction, but whose entrapment in the visible anticipates theirs—learns nothing of his soul as he lunges outward to steady his yearning upon the strictly carnal. Along with civilization in its late imperial stage, Spenglerian destiny gropes and clutches to the full extent of its excursive reach. It can offer only becoming, not something worth becoming.

I recently read a review of a novel (it won a Pulitzer) whose protagonist, an escape artist fresh from fleeing the Nazis, teams up with another denizen of the fringe to create a new comic book character. The same source carried reviews of a novel about a fatherless teenaged girl and her mother who make a kind of odyssey through oddballs of the American backwoods, and of a short story collection about tight-lipped, amoral rednecks in lower Alabama. Bohemians, vagabonds, eccentrics, grotesques, psychopaths… the irrelevant, the irreverent, the facetious, the lurid, the sadistic. All quite shocking. Mission accomplished: bourgeoisie confused, fringe occupied, destiny fulfilled.

Faites votre destin, âmes désordonnées,

Et fuyez l’infini que vous portez en vous.

 

Accomplish your destiny, you souls unknown to order:

Keep fleeing that infinity you carry deep within you.

 

These lines of Baudelaire’s (from the condemned "Delphine et Hippolyte") rattle through my mind almost daily: I didn’t require Spengler’s harping on destiny to dredge them up. What other occupation do we have in this moribund culture than fleeing the infinite embedded deep within us? And where does it all end, except at the bottom of some cliff? Is there life after shock, once chaos becomes so general that the fringe no longer exists?

Of course there is—in the routine drudgery of the new middle, the new old middle that must always re-surface: the routine of leading life around a great infinite in your heart. Most of us poor sods will struggle to our feet and try to make something of ourselves again. Back to work on a steep slope where to stand still is to slide back… how tedious. How systematic. And how life-like, to find wonders concealed in the drudgery—wonders far superior to the parodic carnivals haunted by those who have taken the day off.                         back to top

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Two Notes on Boys and Men

Since the publication of Peter Singleton’s "Breaking Line at Payback Time," we have received several comments about the state of masculinity in our culture and, especially, about what Christian Hoff Sommers has called "the war against boys" (in a new book of that name). Below are a couple of items which our steady contributors have volunteered.

Why All the Fuss About Alcibiades?

One of the most torpid truisms about ancient Greece is that its male denizens engaged liberally in homosexual, and even pederastic, encounters in the course of a broadly heterosexual existence. Probably more people today are aware that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers and that Athenian philosophers often shacked up with their favorite students than that Leonidas and his Spartans died repelling the Persians from the pass at Thermopylae. (Of course, we wouldn’t suggest that the numbers of the "aware" are very high, in either case.) While absolutely positive that those curly guys in sandals were mostly "switch-hitters", though, the politically correct contemporary campus is less sure about just what to make of so precious a factoid. The gay lobby has long made political hay out of antiquity’s apparent "tolerance" and proudly pointed at the statuesque magnificence of Alexander, Plato, the said Achilles, and others who were at least occasionally of their persuasion. At the same time, so high a proportion of sexual virtuosos in one cultural setting rather botches the argument (or, we should say, the dogma) that homosexuality is genetically transmitted. The chances of a single culture having the rebellious gene in such astronomical proportions do not merit serious consideration.

And then you have the resident feminists, a formidable contingent in any expanse of ivory rubble. Feminism is in a bind here. It desires to display its solidarity with gays at all times, yet it is also adamant that an essential part of any woman’s freedom is the right to dance with as many partners as she can squeeze on her card. The apparent Athenian preference for young boys constitutes a severe threat to this freedom. There’s always Sappho, naturally… but Lesbos is a long swim, and evidence that today’s most popular modes of academic experimentation were among its chief exports is entirely lacking. What you have, instead, is a bunch of nasty boys, dirty old men, and—in a word—the patriarchy. Not that any feminist worth her salt couldn’t work around great gaps of evidence: such skill is, indeed, a prerequisite for success in the field. But a mainland situation where respectable white guys are acting up en masse is simply too useful as filler for that other evidentiary void, Western patriarchal oppression, to squander upon the merry boys in a comradely beau geste. Histories of unsavory males are in high demand among the Gender Studies crowd, and Jupiter with Ganymede in tow is a real find.

If one could possibly imagine an academic atmosphere inimical to propaganda, one might well wonder just what the literary and historical evidence is for widespread Greek homosexuality. That practices which, even now, we consider somewhat depraved were regarded with less censure seems beyond doubt. Yet the very fact that so many instances of "misbehavior" are noted suggests that they were notable—that is, at least somewhat out of the ordinary. Within just a few pages of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Beliefs of Famous Philosophers, for instance, we may gather enough pieces of the puzzle to appreciate the whole’s complexity. Take the final chapters of Book 4. We read that Arcesilaus was called by several Stoics "a corrupter of young people, foul-mouthed and shameless" (40-41) due to his taste for boys. That brash atheist of most humble origins, Bion, is also accused of leading his young disciples into shamelessness. "I sleep with Bion every night," declares one understudy in public, "and I haven’t gone through any wild, weird change" (54: isn’t it remarkable, by the way, how kids discovered in sexual escapades keep coming up with the same retort?). Perhaps most interesting, if only because it involves the most prominent figure of ancient philosophy, is Bion’s snide jibe at Socrates: "If he felt a need for Alcibiades and abstained, then he was a fool; if he did not abstain, then he was just like the rest of us" (49). At a minimum, there was obviously a popular suspicion that Socrates did not engage in erotic relationships with his followers, as well as a tacit confession on Bion’s part (shared by how many others?) that they longed to reduce the great man to their level. In another setting, this would be called a guilty conscience.

But who are "the rest of us" (literally, the routinely instructed implied in the word paradoxon) of whom Bion speaks? They certainly don’t include the Stoics or the masses of unenlightened who are vexed—some of them even incensed—at the pederastic practices of such "teachers" as he. It seems fairly plain, in fact, that if playful homosexuality were a favorite pastime of the Athenian rank and file, none of the passages just cited would ever have been written. We have a record of this widespread aberrancy first because it was considered aberrant, and second because the group within which it was widespread had a certain glister about it. Blue-collar workers who booze and brawl are of little interest to any reader—but let a Hollywood superstar have one too many and push a waiter through a window, and his face is posted prominently at every newsstand. Or consider what bad press the Vikings got for depredating wealthy monasteries in northwestern Europe: their target was the one segment of that society which could write fluently, so the unflattering portrait of them which that segment painted is the only written historical evidence we have. Even so were the ancient Greek schools of philosophers and rhetoricians—men whose position in the community was often already marginal—the source both of much attention in their day and of not a few of its written records. To gauge the frequency and popularity of homosexual practices from their example and account would be like compounding the Scandals of the Stars with the hyperbole of medieval chroniclers to arrive at a typical picture of a typical person’s life.

There will be no elucidation of this shadowy side to antiquity as long as history is held hostage by contemporary politics. Among other theories to consider, however, is that perhaps homosexuality is related to academic pretension and rhetorical éclat: in other words, perhaps people who like to hold themselves aloof from the majority and to taunt it are not above achieving these ends through their sexual habits as well as their treatises and tirades. That would be yet another point in common between the classical world and ours.

How Calamity Jane Rewrote

the [Her]story of the West

If you have a little boy who is old enough to enjoy stories but not quite old enough to read long ones to himself, you know how difficult it is to find new children’s books which acknowledge his existence. Legion are the whimsical tales about dreaming of benign sprites or discovering a secret friend in the stars; but as soon as your boy starts to complain that he wants something real—something about trucks or firefighters or trains or cowboys—you quickly come to a couple of unsettling realizations. One is that most of the few books which satisfy your lad’s craving for rough-and-tumble action are at least twenty years old, have become soiled and worried beneath countless juvenile fingers, and contain facts about fire engines and airplanes which are no longer very accurate. If you’re lucky, your local library will have enough of these treasures to get the two of you through the next three years: just keep looking for small, smudged books with little or no artwork on the cover. Even the "dream" tales of this variety, by the way, are far superior to their contemporary counterparts. We used to dream more purely when we didn’t spend so much time brooding about whether our dreams were politically pure.

But the latest releases are a great disappointment, in everything except their dazzling artwork. Try doing a search for books about race cars. Let’s see… race (black, Hispanic, Native American, Polynesian), racism (causes of, how to handle, how to eliminate), racehorses (one entry)… no, you didn’t miss it: the race car is not represented among subjects considered acceptable to write about. Cowboys? Surely there are books about cowboys… well, yes, but not a lot of new ones. Let’s go visit them in the stacks. This one is clearly for a junior high school student. That one looks good, several eye-popping photographs… but every other page seems to discuss cow-girls: the slender volume, indeed, appears dedicated to convincing girls that their grandmothers rode the range and that they, too, can add hitting the saddle to their infinite list of career options. Here’s a book about Calamity Jane. Okay, fair enough… but why is the only book about males of her time restricted to a few outlaws? You don’t want to turn your kid into John Wesley Hardin. Couldn’t the politically correct crowd even do you the minimal favor of seeing that someone wrote a flashy little biography of Pat Garrett or Bill Tilghman?

Well, there are always sports figures, right? America worships sports… bound to be some clean-cut types with a strong work ethic in that section. And there are, of course… except that, once again, all the new volumes with the best photos are dedicated to Mia Hamm and Venus and Serena Williams. Even among the twenty-year-old books about male athletes (and what boy now wants to read about Mantle and Mays and Wilt Chamberlain), the emphasis falls heavily upon race and ethnicity. You remember reading all about Hank Aaron when you were a little white kid and not feeling in the least out of place while doing so. Now your skin color makes you a trespasser as you pry into the Aaron family. Maybe your young auditor won’t pick up on the hints.

The cop books, perhaps, tell the story about stories most plainly. Classics like A Day in the Life of a Homicide Detective and Calling Car 24 Frank feature police armed with .38 revolvers and newly introduced to the ritual of reading Maranda rights. Today’s equivalent sanitizes the text of any reference to such terrors as guns, taking the little tots on a tour of a friendly precinct HQ as if they were on a field trip to the museum; or else the opposite direction is favored, and young readers are scared stiff with warnings about firearms, dirty old men, date rape, and hate crimes. It goes without saying, of course, that the blue shirt of the good guy is filled half the time by a female torso. (Police canines, too, receive generous exposure.)

The phenomenon before us is not one of mere female-for-male substitution. On the surface and in general, that isn’t a bad description: the girls are being so vigorously encouraged to try their hand at anything—anything at all—that boys are left to digest the implied message, "Oh, and you fellows can do… something, something or other." Beyond the overt nudging of boys into the margin, however, contemporary children’s fare has at once sapped life of all competition, all aggressive zest, and also sketched a Gothic landscape where pockets of irrepressible energy are so many lurking predators. Wouldn’t you rather your son read about a good guy bringing a bad guy to justice than having his natural taste for excitement transferred to flesh-rending dinosaurs and the nightmarish details of the Titanic’s demise?

Now that firefighters are being universally idolized in the wake of the World Trade Center catastrophe, perhaps we may see a renewed interest in dangerous and physically demanding jobs undertaken in the service of others. Perhaps children’s books, especially boys’ books, will reflect that interest. No doubt, women will continue to wield the axe and climb the ladder prominently. That’s okay, as long as the message remains the service of others rather than, "You can do it just as well as they can, babe!" In fact, a little celebrating of self-sacrifice would do both our sons and our daughters a great deal of good.

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"Alpha" is for "Acephalic"

The editor of Praesidium, who is also the owner of a small publishing house, reports that a certain novel continues to elicit indignant reactions from the self-styled Religious Right. (We withhold names of both the press and the novel lest we be accused of plugging either one.) Complaints are now at or near double digits, he estimates. Said book sports cover art wherein a classically designed campus building is collapsing as students picket before it; and within the building’s dark recesses, one glimpses a retreating female figure in the nude—whose frontal parts, be it noted, are invisible and whose dorsal is less provocative (as far as any normal person can tell) than the Venus de Milo. Whether the novel’s critics actually proceeded beyond this point is impossible to say: none has been forthcoming with details of the verdict, though a few have felt such moral outrage that their conscience will not allow them to pay for the order (or, apparently, to return it). This sublime hauteur is the less comprehensible to those involved in the novel’s production insofar as its tale is a bitter, unrelenting indictment of the hedonistic ethic which reigns on many campuses. The assumption that the front cover was never turned, of course, would dispel the non-sequitur.

If we mention here what has become a rather amusing experience for those of us who know of it, we do so to qualify a recurrent hostility to feminism in these pages. It happens that all cases where the controversial novel has been condemned originated when it was ordered by a young woman and quickly burgeoned when it was intercepted by the household’s tutelary male. There is indeed, we may conclude, a certain kind of man who judges books by their covers, who doesn’t really like books to begin with, who dictates to his womenfolk what they may and may not read, and who considers himself a devout servant of God. The largest collection of such males in the news today is the Taliban; but Islam has no monopoly on this type, and it represents a force to be dreaded wherever it exists in dense concentrations. At its most general, perhaps, it is Manichaeism—the blunt, uninquisitive division of moral reality into good guys and bad guys (See Peter Singleton’s essay above, p. 6). It is easily observable in the utopian crusades of the Left, but it is more infamous among the book-burners of the Right. It is a species of hybris, since it banishes sin from the "believer’s" breast and deposits it in the Gadarene swine of the surrounding culture. Despite the faint odor of humility enjoyed by its faithful (thanks to their fanatical devotion), its outrageous promises of something very like deity actually confer a ghastly arrogance. It is the scourge of an ignorant world, and it is spreading far more widely than any anthrax epidemic ever did as humankind spends less and less time cultivating rationality and true piety.

What has this to do with feminism? Only that it offers an occasion for us to acknowledge editorially the noxious influence of dictatorial males upon our culture—upon all cultures. The abundant existence of such persons is a reality: to that extent, we can agree with feminism. What we refuse to endorse is that the Manichaean is essentially a male rather than a diseased soul. That he is more often a "he" is probably true, and the reasons may well have more to do with nature than culture. Yet the majority of males at any given time are not Manichaeans, just as the majority of blacks do not suffer from Sickle-Cell Anemia or the majority of Jews from Tay-Sachs Syndrome. Wrong is wrong. A bullying spouse is no more a villain just because of his masculinity than a bullying boss is a hero just because of her femininity. Let us concentrate one and all upon good behavior and not upon the irrelevancies of how our underwear is cut.                         back to top

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Nihilist’s Progress:

From Marx to Feminism to Misogyny

by

Gianna DiRoberti

One of the frustrations of academic writing is the necessity of what referees of journals (from whose severe hands I have received many a rejection) call "proof". Nothing could be more alien to the realm of hard, objective facts than the creative imagination; yet when we write about that imagination or some of its most celebrated products, we must revert to the style of an anatomist bending over a cadaver. Lately, of course, the academy has been far more receptive of "life experience", "personal narrative", and other such tendentious mush. I still get those letters of rejection, and they still talk about lack of evidence—but what they mean now is that I’m on the wrong side of the trend. It was just my luck that as I became a more objective critic, the validity of objectivity became something you had to prove!

I continue to find much more satisfaction in noticing correspondences between things without necessarily having the galactic arch of some theory or ideology at my back. I don’t entirely know why, when one reads broadly (as most academics no longer do), one often picks up echoes in the strangest places. To be sure, the impression is subjective—but art is all about the curious objective fact that certain works can stir very similar subjective impressions throughout humanity. It seems to me that there should be some provision made for taking note of these echoes; because they are often much more objective than the theories which are supposed to hold them dutifully in orbit, and I suspect that they have a great deal to say about us as human beings whenever we grow out of this passion for advocacy which we call theorizing.

All of which, perhaps, amounts to a weak excuse for the incoherence of what follows… but I honestly have little more to offer below than a few fascinating passages from three entirely distinct sources and a series of thoughts about each. Personally, I believe they overlap at the very heart of our culture’s ongoing debate about gender and power. I offer them on the strength of that belief.

The first two passages belong to the late Juan Carlos Onetti’s Tierra de Nadie, or Land of No One, a novel written more than half a century ago about the author’s native Argentina during the troubled rise of fascism in the thirties. This is a difficult novel to break into: few in my experience have been more so.  Intimate brief scenes involving unidentified characters succeed each other like a film whose mad editor has snipped out all the transitional matter. I do not cite it here as a fluid, pleasant read, however. My interest really concerns only one section, which I have broken into two parts. The leftist intellectual Llarvi is making entries in his diary, and he naturally focuses upon Party matters:

… Ideologically, Russia ought to desire the annihilation of Nazism. But afterward, what? From an orthodox point of view, it would be nonsensical for the USSR to risk itself to keep Germany from gaining control of Europe rather than the Allies. We often discuss this with Casal: he maintains an idealistic position and, if hard pressed, he will respond with his brand of revolutionary spirit, "Let everything be sacrificed before honor!"

What a distortion of the issue it is to believe that in this order of things, honor should be a spiritual principle, independent of reality, invariable. Honor derives from responsibility, in every case. I won’t bother with examples: every one that occurs to me at this instant reeks of the kitchen and of Kropotkin.¹ In a case involving war, honor consists of winning the war. The honor of international communism rests upon reaching global revolution—or, at least, not losing the possibility of creating it. (If you look closely, all affairs of honor are like this, with their credit opened toward the future. While there’s hope, there’s honor.)

I’ve thought much, in a vague manner and without method, about Stalin. Always the antithesis of Trotsky, always earthy, astute, a hard bargainer, "essentially bourgeois" in his psychology. Yet, apart from that, I’ve been struck when meditating upon his "orientalism". Beside Trotsky—a Jew and hence without a country, international—this man whose face and whose soul stand between Europe and Asia seems like Russia personified. There may well be something of this in the secret of his victory over the intellectual Bronstein. I remember having seen him a little while back in a newsreel. His look contained everything that they say about him: energy, mystery, shrewdness, etc. But what struck me most forcefully was the complete calmness with which this man entertained the most enormous contempt for the rest of the people who inhabit the world. A contempt the like of which no one has ever felt, comparable in intensity to the love of Christ. A contempt which, like the love of Christ, proceeded neither from intelligence nor from analysis: a colossal and instinctive contempt, incapable of growing or shrinking and which did not require nourishment nor could be nourished by anything.²

Onetti has presented us here with a magnificent character sketch done by the hand of the character himself—an unwitting self-portrait of a Marxist intellectual. Llarvi’s comments about honor are especially revealing, and really quite logical. If you subscribe to dialectical materialism, then, naturally, your honor depends upon the ideology you happen to have embraced rather than your ideology’s depending upon absolute moral referents for its validity. In fact, as I understand it, the word "ideology" precludes any such hearkening back to universal principles: it is a system declared in a vacuum, a moral chaos, and "truth" is determined by degree of adhesion to the arbitrarily announced dogma (what the existentialists would call bonne foi). It pains me to have to remark anything so evident as that this is not really honor at all. Honor comes of committing oneself to a higher purpose, a higher reality. The highest reality of Marxism is advertised to be a neo-utilitarian greatest good for the greatest number, with the forward surge of the class struggle thrown in to combat the well-known inertia of the masses. Yet since there is no higher reality left to explain why one should sacrifice oneself for others (let alone why one should sacrifice oneself for progress), the commitment here is ultimately an egotistical whim—an emotional craving to be different and avant garde arrogantly proclaimed as a universal imperative.

I recall that Eric Voegelin, who was recently mentioned in this journal, refers to the whole Marxist proposition as an "intellectual swindle". He has the mot juste. Llarvi’s version of honor is simply being true to one’s vanity. If civilians must be bombed or entire townships exterminated, then so be it: the cause must be advanced. To withdraw from the cause of whose truths one is the self-declared prophet in favor of a more authoritative faith would be to betray the glories of being the greatest truth’s prophet. What a shame… what an outrage!

Is it any surprise, in the sickly-pale light of Llarvi’s self-worshipping credo, that he admires Stalin’s contempt for humanity above all his other attributes? Stalin is represented here as the Superman. His contempt of all that he surveys has no objective origin: it cannot grow or diminish, and was neither learned nor can be affected by future lessons. All terrestrial details are as irrelevant to it as they are to God’s love and forgiveness (or to Christ’s, as Llarvi says—for he cites Jesus, of course, as a mere literary creation). I do not fully understand some of the allusions in the passage, such as the examples which reek "of the kitchen and of Kropotkin"; but whatever Llarvi means here, he is clearly displaying an intellectual weariness at having to build an argument from examples. When he advances to his contrast of Stalin with Trotsky, this note of anti-intellectualism becomes strident. No doubt, Llarvi has a very high opinion of his own intellect: why else would he be recording his thought in a journal? Its most important source of authority, however, is that it is his intellect. Perhaps he would even say that a sure mark of his intelligence is his having abandoned intellectual parlor games for the perfect self-absorption of the ideologue… or perhaps he would cast his transcendence of paltry human struggles for justification in more spiritual terms. We never find out, because, of course, he never allows the question to be put to him by others and certainly doesn’t put it to himself. By writing to himself in the diary’s dedicated serial manner, in fact, he is engaging the only person really worthy of his conversation. He is refining himself as a Stalin of the intellect—a self-sufficient mind for which genuine interaction is as pointless and tedious as rational argumentation. He thinks… therefore the rest of the universe is. The Marxist’s "progressive" project of obliterating remote and isolated cells of resistance to his thinking is merely an exercise in helping reality "become".

As I tendered my observations above about this egotistical dynamo disguised as a human being, I was acutely aware of describing many of our intellectuals today. The Marxist contempt for bourgeois normalcy, the Marxist fantasy of a high crusade that never ends, and the Marxist empowerment of an élite which knows vastly more than the benighted masses it claims to liberate are all elements of enduring appeal to intellectual snobs. Hence the academy of today, despite a dismal track record of twentieth-century Marxist dictatorships unblemished by any deep concern for human rights, continues to preach the same old gospel, and even to stage revivals. Feminists, in particular, have found in Marxism a vehicle to express the upward struggle of oppressed women through the ages. How do you suppose the devout Marxist revolutionaries of the thirties and forties actually viewed women? Victims in desperate need of having the shackles struck from their ankles? Once again, I allow Onetti’s Llarvi to speak for himself as he speaks to himself:

August 3—The memory of Labuk and the presence of Labuk. In reality, there’s nothing more. "Presence of Labuk" was a dark-skinned little woman, rounded, thick-haired, decked in flashy stuff. Strip her… more hairy than ever, with fat thighs, bowed knees, marks of pigmentation everywhere, excessive and rounded breasts overhanging a little chest. She was tight-lipped and dirty, simple. She lived alone—actually, she lived in bed, in her sweaty and slippery world. (An image pursues me persistently of the tropics, crocodiles, malaria, canoes, mosquitoes, heat, and humidity. Entirely fanciful, since she came of a race of peasants whose land was poor and frozen!) When unearthed from her world, she would languish in silence. She had given up on her scant Spanish (which consisted almost purely of infinitives) and there she would sit, as if turned into shadow. (Not besieged by shadow, but turned into it, visibly and sensibly.) In reality, you could believe in her presence only because she smoked. An invariable tendency was in her to find forgotten areas in houses or cafés where no one ever spoke. This "Labukpresence" has something of the truly surprising. A beast, an utter beast. As for me, this beast is the only woman on whom I can bestow, in its full sense, the name of woman. With any other, I think, once one loses her, one shies away from remembering her—she becomes vague, colorless, indecisive, and all that. But in this case, we find that the "Labukmemory" bears no relation to the "Labukpresence". For some reason, the image of the hidden Labuk refuses itself to me. At any rate, it never comes spontaneously. Only this other Labuk, the sad little woman. Her ridiculous "Me want" and "Me am"—a good source of jests for an idiot like M.—seem sweet in recollection, pronounced straight-faced by a celestial mouth. Even that thin and ordinary face had I don’t know what similarity to some animal which rendered it innocent. It’s as if Labuk, the "soul" of Labuk which I never managed to locate, were immanent in her memory. An interesting hypothesis: my contact with her traced slowly, insensibly in me the figure of the other Labuk who was far from me, nowhere in the bed…³

In our degenerate time, I am sure that some would find Llarvi’s recollections almost tender, especially toward the entry’s end. The girl continues to haunt his memory… how romantic! For those of us whose brains have not entirely atrophied, however (when did it become provocative to claim that fine feeling is intelligent?), Llarvi’s attitude is alarming. It further illustrates his sense of superiority to all the rest of humanity—that inherent, unassailable contempt for others which he so admires in Stalin. Notice how quickly his assessment of the Indian girl moves from a ho-hum mug-shot to a complete strip (not even a strip-tease, but the humiliation exercise which secret police often use on their victims) to a mass of smelly bedsheets. Labuk is less a succulent morsel in this man’s reminiscences than a kind of domesticated vermin. He coupled with her, one imagines, in the way that a king in exile might toss an inedible table scrap to a mouse whom he has named Mouse.

How tender. Ah, but what about the memory, as opposed to the presence—the Labuk recuerdo? Llarvi’s enhancement of the clinical style as he enters this part of the reflection should itself warn us sufficiently that nothing very poignant is going on here. The king, bored, has discovered that mouse tails are actually very handy for balancing on window sills. He makes an entry in the margin of his rambling memoir… fascinating. And what is Labuk’s natural endowment that stirs the Superman’s wonder? Why, her stupidity, of course. Llarvi admires her utter vacuity of mind almost as much as he admires Stalin’s vacuity of spirit. Think of it—to be as blunt as a stone! Such is the ideal of Buddhist contemplation, as Pierre Lasserre pointed out brilliantly in the context of Rousseau’s encounters with nature. Lasserre saw Rousseau as a supreme egotist—as an incurable narcissist, in fact—and was able to trace all of his pseudo-spiritual effusions convincingly back to that source. "The fatigue of living is a malady as old as civilization," he writes, "perhaps the first rustling of conscience in the human animal. Millions of people would have suffered from it, no doubt, if it had not given birth to religious and philosophical disciplines whose object was to detach oneself deliberately from human will and all terrestrial ends—to make one’s way, under the guise of a rare spiritualization, toward the torpor of nothingness."⁴

I think Llarvi’s fascination with the memory of Labuk is precisely the equivalent of Rousseau’s with nature, as described astutely by Lasserre. Of course, Rousseau’s view of nature as liberated from the tedium of social and moral duty dictates his view of the ideal state for a human being—which turns out to be the "Labuk state" of stupidity, also observable in our present infatuation with Forrest Gump. "If man had ever been such as Rousseau paints him in his original condition," says Lasserre, "he would have remained eternally stupid." And he continues:

The spectacle of this animal [Rousseau’s savage trapped in civilization] receiving his blows peacefully and weeping when he sees them coming stirs a sadness which has much of the ignoble. Among so many ways of imagining the story of primitive humanity, what was it that made Rousseau tell this one? His deeply nourished complaint against energy. In placing in natural man’s breast nothing but innocent witlessness and laziness, he suggests that the formation of organized societies is not approved by nature. Civilization becomes a despot crying, "March! March!" over a weary humanity, ever since the mad adventure which wrenched it from its peaceful sprawl in the ditch. This is the afterthought of an anarchist.⁵

Who knows if Stalin also entertained such whimsical longings after bovine placidity in his daydreams, or if he, too, had perfected the kind of nullity which Llarvi ascribes to him? One thing is clear: this state is so far from being natural that it is inaccessible to any human being (even to Forrest Gump—for it is the churl’s moments of clairvoyance that redeem his humanity, not his imperviousness to thought). When Llarvi projects such a state upon Labuk, then, it is not to reduce her to a level which justifies contempt: he already has an unfathomable scorn for people, especially women, yet he considers Labuk unique. Rather, he makes of her the refuge from his own egomania, the brain-dead peace which his intellectual annihilation of all around him cannot seem to create. One can trumpet one’s own will to the universe for only so long before even that becomes dreadfully wearisome. What could be more so, really? To be completely and permanently trapped within oneself, a seamless solipsism: "Myself am Hell!" as Milton’s Satan screams out in anguish.

All of which does little to elevate women. At worst, they are disposable toiletries in the revolutionary’s shaving kit: use and then flush. At best, they may become a Labuk—an Other in which the all-annihilating Self finds its own annihilation, or dreams of finding it. Is that state really superior to the bourgeois doll’s house where the wife provides safe harbor from the shark-infested waters of the business world? Down from the pedestal and into the pit: the Otherness of renewed childhood exchanged for the Otherness of interrupted brain activity. No wonder the Marxist liberator needs a female comrade at his side! The liberation may just succeed, and then he will have to live in the palpable, ever-buzzing futility of his world without inequity, standards, or striving—a world which contains only himself and so allows of no competition. His will be the agony of the skilled parodist suddenly deprived of all his material when he realizes that he has ripped everything in sight to shreds. Woman, that black hole, is all that remains. Like Peer Gynt sniveling in Solveig’s skirts to escape the Button-Maker, the revolutionary can retreat to the womb in his flight from fiery chaos.

The fate of women in a Marxist utopia (assuming one might ever exist) is to let spoiled-brat boy children cry in their lap between bouts of ill temper.

What, then, of the fascist alternative which is typically represented as polarized to communism? Llarvi actually got that part right. The real opposite to the communist’s forcible imposition of self upon the collective is the bourgeois suppression of self in the hum-drum march of business-as-usual, not the forcible fascist enlistment of the collective into an ethnic fantasy. Both Stalinist and Nazi view the collective—contradictorily—as their ultimate end and as temporary (indefinitely temporary) slave to that end. The former dreams of a future which never comes, the latter of a past which never existed. Their methods are so similar that they can always cut a deal until they have more liberty to exterminate the other (for recall that "honor" is entirely bound up in the project of exterminating and cleansing). Perhaps the feminine is the source of the single major difference between the two. If the anarchist revolutionary runs home to his CD-player and a slow joint after planting a pipe bomb at school, waiting for Mom to announce supper, the fascist slips out of home in his special Jolly Roger jacket to a torch-lit rally of adolescents all vowing to turn in their parents. The anarchist is frozen in the wet dreams of puberty: the fascist is frozen in its gory rights of passage. Marxists and other enemies of hierarchy would put the world back into the womb at gunpoint. Fascists plan to crowd everyone who looks "soft" onto a cattle car.

I cannot do better here than to cite a passage from Leon Podles’ splendid new book, The Church Impotent. No account which has passed under my eye better explains the peculiarly masculine attraction of the fascist mentality (or the thicky feminine tinge of modern Christianity—but that is another story):

Nazism shows most fully the dangers inherent in masculinity. The male, to become masculine, must first move away from the normal, feminine, domestic world, face danger and darkness, and then return to the normal world transfigured by his experience. The motion away from the normal is dangerous. It should be a parabola, leaving the base line of the normal only to return to it, but it can become a hyperbola, plunging off forever into the nothingness of infinity. Initially, it can be very hard to see the difference between the two trajectories. Nor are they predetermined. The male has a free will and can choose one or the other. Nor can a society avoid the dangers of nihilistic masculinity by renouncing masculinity.⁶

Nihilism, the belief in absolutely nothing—the belief that absolutely nothing is what there is: no, suppressing the masculine will not suppress that. We have already observed in the character of Llarvi that the great void of the solipsist is a rather feminine nightmare. I shall try not to become mired in all the facile contrasts between male and female which have been floated over the centuries. Most of them can be taken only so far. For instance, while men have surely been more extroverted throughout history in the sense of leaving the home and changing the world, women are more extroverted in the sense of being better adapted to a harmonious communal existence (as Peter Singleton observed in his fine essay of Praesidium 1.3). It is enough to say that, for a number of reasons, women handle being alone better (or consider aloneness less of a problem, which may not be "better" for inspiring either meditation or action). More elderly people living alone are women than men by quite a large margin. Women are often said to be more in touch with themselves, a phenomenon perhaps related to their being more expressive at a very early age: hence they may be more adept at sustaining that inner conversation which keeps the isolated person going.

In this sense, then, Marxist solipsism—the daydream of that Rousseauesque world where no one has to work, no competition exists, and everyone has all he wants (i.e., the dreamer has all he wants)—is a very feminine concoction. Though the revolutionary male like Onetti’s Llarvi (Camus’s men are identical in many respects) has an overt contempt for women, his system of nothingness is highly feminine in its self-containment, its ability to imagine itself outside of uncooperative realities. In those dark moments when his masculinity overtakes him and he catches a whiff of his own devastating vanity, Llarvi (unlike Camus’s Meursault) plunges into feminine images rather than do anything so manly as look into the void. He pretends that a person as null as a stone would still be a person rather than a stone.

No wonder Marxism is the choice of so many intellectuals! Introverted, cloistered, distanced from the average Joe on the streets, and reflective (though in ways whose quality cannot be guaranteed), the intellectual is hardly fit to enlist in a band of stormtroopers. He is much more suited to giving humanity the benefit of his daydreams, and to remain stunningly unaware that the tin soldiers he dreamily sweeps off the board at a command are somebody’s sons and daughters. In contrast, the fascist tends to be blue-collar. He has grown up in the crush of shoes and elbows and is not afraid of a brawl. The whole point of Podles’ discussion is in fact that he needs a brawl, especially in the ever more effeminate world of the patronizing leftist intellectual. I repeat, however, that both roads lead to nothingness. If the Marxist sacrifices the world to his favorite daydream, the fascist sacrifices himself—dreams and all—to the mere spirit of sacrifice, the heady joys of male camaraderie. One must eventually ask oneself why one is cradling one’s best friend, mauled and dying, in a foxhole; and if the answer is, "For the joy of dying in foxholes," one must either go mad or desert from the ranks of the faithful. In the words of the Bard, "’Tis mad idolatry/To make the service greater than the god."

I am amazed, frankly, by how many formerly militant Muslims have declared themselves distressed by the slaughter of unsuspecting non-combatants in the World Trade Center assault. Even if their declarations are calculated, the descent into such "perfidy" would not be excused by mere calculation, according to the creed of the zealots. I have to believe that some of them are indeed growing up. On the other hand, the number of leftist academics who have clung to the party line about the Western patriarchy’s having "asked for" such assaults and its needing to understand how "non-European cultures" feel is more depressing than surprising. As Podles stresses, the initiate can always return from the wilderness: he is, indeed, supposed to. But the spoiled brat who yells at Mom to stay out as he lounges in bed planning the next Columbine may hide from life in that room for a very long time.

Somewhere in all this is an important role for women to play. To those of the Taliban’s persuasion who say that women have already played too large a role, I reply, "No, they have only been playing the wrong role—a half-male role." A single-parent career woman who nourishes an adolescent terrorist in the upstairs bedroom is fulfilling neither role very well. Women, traditionally, hold the secret of why men die in foxholes—why their husbands and sons leave them widowed and childless; for the woman herself is not the secret, and she, too, must sacrifice to it. Where you find homes, neighborhoods, and communities—civility, decorum, and investment in the future—there you find the secret.

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Three by R.S. Carlson

R.S. Carlson is familiar to readers of Praesidium. A professor of writing at Azusa Pacific University, he has published his poetry widely. He is particularly (but not exclusively) interested in poets whose work was influenced by the soul-wrenching conflict in Vietnam. He and his wife now return frequently to Southeast Asia—not only in peace, but on missions of charity. They made one such journey to China this past summer.

Miss Judge,

my high school Latin teacher,

   quick to tell the preachers’ kids

   she was an atheist, so don’t bother,

didn’t expect to lead me

into the paths of liturgy, for God’s sake,

 

but, as the Tallis miserere and gloria

drill past my clavicles,

her grey-white hair

perpetually rolled in the stereotypical

back-of-the-head bun,

 

and the missa brevis

lofting from the quadraphonic speakers

conspire yet to parse

     "Deus" nominative case,

     "Filius" nominative case,

     "et" coordinating conjunction,

     "Spiritus Sanctus" nominative case noun

     with adjective in agreement…

 

and all thread declensions past Caesar

to conjugations metaphysical

Miss Judge would judge misguided.

 

But she could not control what she gave us

in knowledge of the vocative, the dative,

the accusative, the genitive….

 

My church choir director would tell me

the tissues spreading like air roots

across my bronchae

and clinging to the abdominal walls

even while tracing the branches

of my aorta and superior vena cava

 

are simply the fourths, the fifths,

and the sevenths the old writers used

for so long, avoiding, some say,

the third as the devil’s chord.

 

Moderns and post-moderns would tell me

to toss such old forms aside,

rush to other notespans

"hollow"

or "haunting".

 

But my plasma, not knowing better,

flows into the openings

as though the hollows

were vaults built for echoes

of requiem and alleluia.

 

The musicologist reading historical notes

to the serious listening audience

will tell me how much the composer risked

in text and sonic textures,

sounding Anglo-Catholic as politics

shifted to mortally Protestant winds.

 

Tallis winds from chantry’s monovoice

to fugue and melisma,

chord, movement, chord,

infusing me

to the very cells between capillaries.

 

In stark circumstance, people

would shake their heads,

sigh,

and call this metastasis:

but no medical imaging

will show cells gone wild here.

 

The slender, ceaseless air roots

seek my larynx.

 

Qui tollis peccata mundi… Miserere nobis…

 

Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini…

 

Gloria in excelsis

In excelsis

In excelsis.

 

 

Abuela, in her good black lace rebozo

this Easter morning, steps her four-foot-eight

sixty-nine years over the threshold

of Iglesia de San Francisco.

She wears all black.

She is a modest woman of the faith

in this world filled with pains and devils.

         This is the feast of the Resurrection

        of the Virgin’s Son. The sanctuary

        is crowded beyond anything her cataracts

        blurred from her before.

        The padres she can hear chanting mass

        at the altar, forward.

        She must venerate the Blessed Virgin.

        One side pew past the entrance        

        waits the Holy Mother of God,

        larger-than-life-size plaster, jeweled,

        robed blue and white under garlands of roses.

        Abuela genuflects, reciting her "aves"

        across the seven teeth remaining

        to bless her daily tortillas.

        "Amen," and Abuela lifts herself

        to find the next open seat

        or the next station for meditation and prayer.

        But suddenly she sees the padres

        have done it again. Not only the faithful

        fill the pews, but norteamericanos, too,

        have come—dozens of them—to sing.

        Abuela twists her scarf tight to her cheek.

        She turns up the side aisle.

        The seats are jammed on the main floor, and

        even the side pews have Gringos in them.

        Just before the next saint’s niche,

        Abuela turns to the side pew again.

        Where is there rest for a faithful woman?

        Here, where there should be respect

        for Abuela’s grey hair, for Abuela’s old bones

        weary with diligence, the chanrty pulls all eyes

        to Monsignor at the altar. Where she longs to sit,

        the space is filled—father, mother, and young son—

        by paste-skinned devils on this, the feast of the

        Resurrection of the Son of the Virgin.

        For all this, Abuela must pray.

        The decades, the stations demand it.

        Let the young world go on with its mass.

        There are saints yet efficacious

        niched even nearer the high altar.

        And for this bleached-wheat-flour family, too,

        a word whistles through her seven teeth: "Coyotes!"

Tradition Says

Tradition says a river always flows

between its banks: a storm may disagree.

Now—must we swim, or may we dip our toes?

 

Mountain rains entice whatever grows

to green, then smuggle solutes to the sea.

Tradition says a river always flows.

 

The casual clouds forget the price of snows

and scatter rains across the city’s knees.

Now—must we swim, or may we dip our toes?

 

The twists of wind may mean a desert shows

where orange groves at one time fed the bees.

Tradition says a river always flows.

 

When storms conjoin, the lowland creature knows

to find a burrow or shelter under trees.

Now—must we swim, or may we dip our toes?

 

Summer scorches earth. Autumn blows

fires through the hills with smoke-strained breeze.

Tradition says a river always flows:

Now—must we swim, or may we dip our toes?

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**************************************

Running on Empty

by

J.S. Moseby

"There was something wrong from the start. Sometimes you just get that feeling, right from the moment when you view the crime scene. But just because that feeling puts you on the alert doesn’t mean you end up finding the missing piece, the mistaken sum. You can carry that feeling with you for the whole case and never find a peg to hang it on. I’ve delivered cases to the D.A.’s office, even—got convictions on them, even—and had that feeling the whole time that we were all missing the big picture. I might even be a prosecution witness on those occasions. There I’d be sitting there nailing some poor sod’s hide to the wall—‘We found the defendant’s fingerprints on the glass… the gun was registered to the defendant’… but what could I do? ‘You Honor, I’d just like to state for the record that something doesn’t add up. I don’t know what or why not. I just know we’re missing something.’ Well, they don’t let you say that. You’d lose your job, and you’d deserve to.

"But this was one of those times when I found the missing piece. It was the gas tank: for some reason I’d noticed that it was almost full. It shouldn’t have been. But the detail was so small that I couldn’t pick it out of the haystack for days.

"No, at first we just had the usual stuff. A body, a murder weapon, a crime scene. For my first few years on the squad, I was amazed at how often we’d find a weapon. If I were going to kill someone, I’d be darned sure to dispose of the weapon afterward. Then it finally dawned on me that most murderers don’t plan their crime and aren’t thinking clearly after they commit it. I guess you call that experience. You learn all about interpreting and preserving physical evidence long before you learn about people. How people think is not something they can teach you.

"I knew enough about people by now that I was actually the guy to find the weapon, because I was looking for it—an alabaster horse of a kind that they make a lot of down in Mexico. It must have stood almost a foot tall, rearing on its hind legs, when it was in one piece. Forrest had assumed that the old woman must have toppled it down with her when she fell, but I could see problems with that right off. For one thing, the floor was carpeted, at least there in the bedroom. A fall from a night table onto a carpet, amounting to scarcely over two feet, could not have shattered that horse at its thickest point and at half a dozen other points. Besides, it was simply too big an object for that small table. It would have looked garish (as my wife would say), and this was a woman who by all appearances decorated her house very carefully. Of course, when the medical examiner found traces of Mrs. Sellars’ scalp caked on the base, that was that; but even before than, I had done my own little investigation of the room’s furniture and found a clean oval in the dust film on the dresser exactly matching the dimensions of the base. No slur on Mrs. Sellars’ housekeeping, God rest her soul: by all accounts, she kept the little place as tidy as she could. But it had been a dry, dusty summer. I have often noticed, besides, that old folks can’t always see where to dust or mop due to weakening eyesight. My own mother has that problem.

"So what we had after our initial investigation of the scene was this. No forced entry—the victim had either left the kitchen door unlocked or knew the assailant and let him in. (Or her.) The victim had suffered a single severe blow to the back of the head, administered with such force that it shivered the alabaster horse and sent her sprawling on the floor with arms stretched over her head. (That is, she instantly lost consciousness and could make no effort to catch herself; she could never have regained consciousness—not from a smack like that.) These circumstances meant that she had not been in bed when attacked, but also that she had had her back turned to the assailant. Nothing suggested that she had heard an intruder, sprung out of bed, and put up a fight. Just the opposite: she had either been struck from behind without any knowledge of the intruder’s presence (unlikely: I noticed that the floor boards creaked loudly, and the entrance from the hallway was on the far side of the bed), or she had simply turned away from someone she knew very well without any suspicion that she was about to receive a blow. Yet she would have had to know that person very well, considering that the intruder had been allowed into her bedroom. She had put a robe over her nightgown, but she had otherwise made no effort to ready herself for company.

"There was no evidence of theft or ransacking. No drawers or closet doors were open, and no contents of such were in the least pushed around. Mrs. Sellars’ purse lay in full view on a coffee table in the living room, unopened and stocked with over $50. Her jewelry was in its various cases, and her wedding ring (which she had continued to wear, obviously, after her husband’s death) was on her finger. An assailant who had fled without thinking to rearrange the scene—for instance, so that it looked like an accidental fall in the bath tub—would hardly have had the composure to turn the place upside-down for some certain object, then tidy it back up again. This was not a robbery, unless a robbery gone wrong where some novice took off when he realized he had committed a deadly assault.

"But what robber, even a novice, belts a seventy-five-year-old woman over the head when her back is turned unawares? He might strangle her or suffocate her under a pillow, but even then he would only act when he was sure he had been seen. Was she running away from him when he struck? But again, why not just throw a choke-hold on her?

"Premeditated murder was just as far out of bounds. A murderer with a plan would have brought his own weapon. This killer fled in a panic. He was terrified at what he had done. Or she.

"I write these things now as if I were just transcribing my notes on the scene. Of course, that’s not so. Notes are always confused, hurried, almost haphazard. All the same, you’re usually beginning to get a bigger sense of what they mean as you scribble. I can tell you, the feel that was growing upon me even before I flipped the cover shut over my pad was a sick one. I knew that it hadn’t hit Forrest yet. I could tell by the way he was crawling around on all fours, like he expected to find the murderer’s laundry list under the bed. I don’t mean to be hard on the guy. He was young, and he’d only made detective a year before. But I remember being really put out with him. It wasn’t bad enough that the whole thing was turning more rotten than that fairly recent corpse—I was going to have to explain it all to Forrest! That made me sick upon sick. I told him I was going to look around the outside of the house, and I went out for some fresh air.

"I wandered off into her little flower garden to have a smoke and buy some time. I knew the state troopers were waiting for me down at the curb with the ‘finder’. My God, what a hard little worker she was! A rosebush at every corner, peonies all in a row… everybody’s picture of a granny. And then she gets clobbered by someone she’s known all her life, maybe. But that, of course, wasn’t the worst of it: that happens all the time. It was her back being turned like that. Someone you think you know as well as yourself, and you’re so unaware that you said something wrong that you actually turn away—but it was something so very wrong that the person goes off that instant like a firecracker and nails you with the nearest blunt object. Because this person hadn’t planned anything, hadn’t brought in a weapon—had been so shocked at what he’d done that he took off without faking the scene in any way. A person like that, who’d go off like that at someone he’d known forever, would have to be a walking time bomb. He’d have to be crazy. Or she.

This trooper named Nolan finally came back to me, real slow. His slowness interested me. He seemed to feel that something was up. I crunched my fag on a paver and sparred with him a while, trying to see if I might be right about him. I decided I was: he was a sharp one. It was what he didn’t say, and the dryness in what he did say, that showed the guy had some depth. I brought him around with me to the side of the house, where we could see the ‘finder’ and his family in front of the patrol car. I asked him if that was the son, and he said it was. Then I asked him very deliberately why I got this sense from his tone that he didn’t buy all the guy’s story.

"Nolan continued very dry and very slow. I wouldn’t have trusted him so much if he had been otherwise: I would have thought him just another young buck who wanted to impress the detectives by being ultra-suspicious. But he had thought this all through, or as much as he’d had time for. He said that the middle of the week was an odd time to take off for the lake, which is where this son claimed to be last night. Who would go to the lake at night, even though the summer was hot and the kids were out of school? It was odd that a fellow who sold insurance door to door, had a wife and two kids to support, and was paying down a new Chevy wagon would just come home in the middle of the week and say, ‘Let’s camp out at the lake tonight.’ Nolan figured that it was about forty miles to the lake, and he said the only road over the mountain twisted around and made it a lot longer than the crow flies. He said he figured the drive couldn’t be done, especially in the failing light, in much less than sixty or seventy minutes, and he said the son phoned in the discovery at about 7:30 this morning. Arrive at the lake at sundown, leave at sunrise after a night in a tent—what a happy-go-lucky bunch! Those were Nolan’s words, his dryness. He said that the son and Mrs. Sellars junior just didn’t seem the type. And he said that when he’d asked the kids if they’d had any breakfast, they couldn’t seem to agree on an answer, which daddy quickly rushed in to supply.

"He said that it just didn’t smell right. There was nothing definitely wrong about it, but something wasn’t completely right.

"That’s when I walked down to Mr. Sellers’ station wagon, with Nolan beside me. The family had gone over to the patrol car, as I’ve said, and the other uniform was patiently standing and looking over his notes. Nolan, too, took something out of his shirt pocket, maybe a notebook. The wife was busying herself with the kids, who were clinging to her skirts like a couple of chicks and a hen. That left me and Sellars. While everyone else was busy pretending to be busy, I just stared at him as I walked, and he stared at me. I realized about halfway down that I was doing it for a reason—that his stare was telling me a lot. There should have been a question or some begging in those eyes. There was a question, all right—but it was the wrong one. It should have been, ‘Do you have any clues?’ not, ‘Why are you staring at me?’ He didn’t even fidget: even a little fidgeting would have been a good sign. People who are completely surprised by death, especially murder, have no confidence. Their world had been turned upside-down—you can always stare them into the ground. Not this guy. From fifty feet away, he already had that look. He might as well have shouted, ‘Hey, you want to fight?’ He could see I was being kind of rude, and instead of being cowed or confused by it, he just dug in.

"I tell you, that man Nolan was sharp. I fully believe that he felt me sizing Sellars up over his shoulder. He never said a word. We just started circling the station wagon. Once, then a second time closer up. I peered into the driver’s seat as I passed the left window. That’s when I saw the needle of the gas gauge almost on ‘full’. But I pulled my head back out at once and watched Sellars watching me. It was days before what I’d just seen came back into my mind. Even Trooper Nolan missed it."

***

The manuscript displayed a lacuna at this point, and I respected it by taking a break. I was interrupted by a long-distance call shortly thereafter, and I had promised a friend on short notice some hyperbolic copy for the dust jacket of his new novel; so I ended up virtually forgetting about this particular parcel of papers for several days, and it proceeded to sink beneath the strata of later deposits which cause my desk to resemble the La Brea Tar Pits. Not that the story didn’t grab me—I shouldn’t be trying to copy and annotate it right now in such a very awkward manner if I hadn’t found it intriguing. I suppose I could plead that my brief appearance on a national telecast had simply swamped me in mail and more demands for commentary about the Ellison murder… and that would be true, I suppose. But there was something else: there was primarily something else. Right from the start, I could see that the manuscript had all sorts of "marketability" problems (if you’ll pardon my mercenary crudity—but a person who makes his living by the pen has to be aware of such things). The style was bifurcated, to begin with: much of it read like Dashiel Hammett (or a strained imitation thereof), other parts were as prosaic as a logbook entry, and still others evinced a surprising sophistication. The whole did not create a single, resonant impression. Then there was the date of the original incident: 1948 or 1949, I believe. Readers are not particularly nostalgic at the moment—not in the crime genre. The great capers and awful horrors of yesteryear seem almost childish by comparison with what we now see every day. A public which is all but accustomed to hearing of diced body parts in some psychopath’s lunch box can’t get very excited about an old woman with a crushed skull. And then you have the factor of mystery—or its absence, in this case. The first few pages left no doubt that the son was the prime suspect. If another party turned out to have been the culprit, the audience would be ill prepared for the surprise; if the son bore out our suspicions… why, then, where was the mystery of it all?

At the very least, I knew I should have to undertake a massive overhaul of the manuscript if I were ever to use it, and it wasn’t really mine to twist and torture in that way. Or was it? When I did finally get back to the bundle, reviving all my misgivings with one glance at the first paragraph, I paused to dig out Mrs. Dykes’ cover letter. What precisely was she empowering me to do with it all?

I was astonished to see that she, too, had misgivings about the literary quality of her late husband’s memoir on the Sellars case. Of all the weaknesses which I would have expected a layman to discern in the story, the stylistic one would have been last. I quote:

I know a professional writer like you will want to make many changes in how the story is written. Frank never got it properly together. He wrote and rewrote, year after year. I was his sounding board for each new version, but after a while I felt that I had read it once too often. I began to see earlier versions peeping through the new wrapper. I had to tell him that he should either write it like a memory of the way things were (before all these gangs and drugs, I mean) or a straight-facts kind of thing—a documentary, you know. Frank knew that I would give him an honest opinion, but I’m afraid that that time I wasn’t much help. He anguished over which way to go with it, but could never choose one way over the other. I truly believe that the reason for this was that the case had gone both ways in his mind. He tried to be coldly rational about it, and I think he succeeded. But at the same time, something about it always ate at him.

Frank was a very intelligent man, Mr. Billingsly. Some people think that policemen, even detectives, are a step above ruffians. Well, Frank had a college degree, and he worked in Naval Intelligence during the war. You will see that he could be quite deep.

I gathered from this passage and the rest of the cover letter (which struck me as if I were reading it for the first time, now that I myself had wrestled with the story’s opening section) that I was being given pretty much of a carte blanche. Old Dykes had never been able to bring the person to trial whom he thought deserving of that honor, and his widow, in a touching tribute to him, wanted me to put the culprits before the public eye in any way possible. Of course, I was concerned about defamation of character. I might have changed the names to protect the indemonstrably guilty (i.e., to protect myself from a lawsuit); but then, what kind of tribute would that have been to the civil warrior upon whose grave the Sellars murder lay heavily? One of the reasons, therefore, that I decided to leave the manuscript largely untouched—to do little more than intrude my rambles in this irritating fashion—was that I would thereby simply be publishing the notes of a celebrated detective rather than vouching for their accuracy. Frank Dykes is now beyond the reach of any attorney. Let the pages that survived him speak for themselves, and let any who may be offended step forth and expose the flaw in his reasoning.

***

"It was three days before I could really talk to Sellars. I didn’t like asking him the questions on my mind right there in front of his two kids, and the uniforms had already got his statement, anyway. I had a suspicion that that was why he brought the whole family over, to begin with—as a distraction, I mean. The kids would be shocked, and he could use their shock to keep us looking at our feet and also take to comforting them if he needed time to think up a good dodge. Besides, if he’d left the family back at home, someone might have slipped over to question them before he got back, and they might not remember what to say. This way everyone was singing the same music from the same page.

"I can’t sit here and pretend that I’d really thought all this through by the time I walked out of the house, or even by the time Nolan and I walked over to the family. All I can say is that it was growing and growing in the back of my mind, like storm clouds on the horizon.

"But after a couple of days, I had thought it through, every bit of it. Hard-working insurance salesman in small town who served his country on the beaches of Normandy brains his mother from behind and uses his wife and kids to hide behind… some headline.

"Forrest would hardly speak to me. He was furious when I gave him my take on the evidence. And he had some good points. Why try to fake a trip to the lake, if it were fake? Stories like that could be checked out (not that he wanted to ‘waste his time’ checking this one out). Why not simply murder the old girl, then go home and say you spent the evening trimming the hedges? That wouldn’t rule you out, but neither would driving to the lake—and it would be a heck of a lot easier to cover the half-hour’s absence while you were at Mom’s instead of watering the petunias than it would be to fake a whole night’s absence. I scratched my head over this one, but not for long. I told Forrest that the lake trip would rule Sellars out if he left when he said he did, for the very reason that he couldn’t have nipped back into town from such a distance. Sure, it opened up his story to general target practice, if it was a fake… so why didn’t we go check it out? That’s when Forrest called me un-American. I almost lost it—it was the way he said it.

"But I kept my control. I realized a lot of things. Forrest was young, and he just wasn’t ready for this one. He wasn’t the only one, either. The Old Man sidled up to me shortly after the blow-up. I guess everyone on the second floor must have heard Forrest shouting. Anyway, Wendell got enough of it out of the kid that he knew where I was headed. He told me to be very quiet with this, and very careful—that we couldn’t go around calling one of the hometown heroes a depraved lunatic. He said to tell Forrest that we could canvas the vagrants better if we split up, and that maybe I could check out Sellars’ story on my own that way. He was worried about the newspapers. Forrest wouldn’t have babbled, but he might pop off again, this time in front of the wrong people. We both knew (Wendell said, and he offered me a cigarette) that Forrest was a hothead.

"If I didn’t know before, I sure knew now. But I knew something else, too. This murder was going to have to find a murderer: there were too many old ladies in the county who slept without the screen door latched. So they were going to do their best to hang it on some hobo or vagrant—some poor slob who hadn’t got his feet on the ground since he’d been demobbed (and there were plenty of those). Maybe some G.I. who’d lost a lot more blood on Omaha Beach than Sellars ever did. But that was okay, just as long as nobody knew about his past and he had a kind of crazy look. Un-American! Boy, for a while I wanted to go find Forrest and shove that word down his throat.

"But Forrest was young, and we came to be friends in time. Forrest couldn’t think that far ahead, or he would have been with me. It was the horror of it that he couldn’t face: a man murdering his decrepit mother like that, the way a thunderbolt falls out of the sky. No, it was Wendell who had already seen how the whole thing would play out—Wendell and his handlers—and had nodded their consent, all of them. A no-name would be selected to die for the good of the community, and life would go back the way it had been. And maybe Wendell would believe that the no-name was the killer—but not for the same reason that Forrest would believe it. Forrest was trying to keep something in himself from being destroyed: Wendell was trying to keep the customers happy.

"So I checked out Sellars’ story more or less on my own. But before I did, I wanted to talk to him if I possibly could, both without Forrest and at the station, no wife or kids around. It wasn’t hard to arrange. Forrest had thrown himself into grilling every gas pumper, soda jerk, and cinder dick about strangers passing through town. As for Sellars, I figured he really wouldn’t want the family around now. Surely the wife must know the truth: better not to have her listening to his lies until maybe, at last, she can’t take any more. He was very quiet on the phone, very polite and obliging. Who knows if he believed me when I told him we might have something—that is, if he believed that I believed it? He was the one person who knew that we could have nothing.

"I took him into an empty room, sat him down, and closed the door. Then I showed him some pictures for about half an hour, just to soften him up. They were mug-shots I’d pulled from anywhere I could get them. I’ll have to give the guy this much credit: he didn’t try to frame anyone by saying he’d seen him cleaning Mom’s windows or delivering her groceries last week. Through it all, he was completely calm, much too calm. I said something about that, like, It’s amazing how calm you’re taking all of this—you haven’t even phoned before now to ask how we were coming. He said he knew we were busy and didn’t like to bother us. I said, Your kids must have been very close to their grandma. He said he guessed they were. I said, It’s too bad you didn’t take her to the lake with you. He said she didn’t want to go, that she didn’t like camping.

"So you saw her right before you left? No, I called her. On the phone. What time was that? Right before we left. And what time was that? Oh, I guess about six. Why didn’t you tell us this before, when we asked about the last time you spoke to her? You said ‘saw her’—you asked about the last time I saw her. Did she seem at all upset or nervous when you spoke to her—on the phone, that last time? No, not at all. So you just packed up, left, and drove to Hueco Lake? That’s right. How long did it take you to get there? Maybe an hour… maybe a little more. Isn’t that a pretty long haul after a full day’s work? I enjoy the drive… so do the kids. And your wife—does she enjoy it? Sure, she does. And how about camping out—does she enjoy that more than your mother did? She doesn’t complain, she knows the kids love it. Still, isn’t that putting an awful lot on her, expecting her to get the kids down after a long drive? I told you—it wasn’t so long, and we enjoyed it. So then you get to a campsite and you just jump right in the sack… was that how it happened? No, we went for a dip first. All of you? All of us. But how did you see—I mean, it must have been pitch dark, right? There was a little light left, it was still dusk. And what time was this? I don’t know… it was dusk. Which would mean around 7:30 or 8:00, is that right? Yes, that’s probably right. And then you got in your bags and went to sleep? Yes, that’s right. Without supper? We ate before we left. You didn’t take anything to eat? No… just a bit to snack on, in the morning. So you ate breakfast there in the morning? Yes… and no. We snacked on some things on the way back. So basically, Mr. Sellars, you drove more than an hour to the lake just to enjoy the view, take a dip, and sleep before you drove more than an hour back early the next morning… is that what you’re telling me? That’s what I’m telling you. Does your family do this often, Mr. Sellars? Not often… but the air conditioner was broken, and we can’t sleep in the house very well in this heat. Is your unit still broken, or did you get it fixed? No. No what? No, it hasn’t been worked on yet… but it’s not really broken, exactly, it just reaches a point where it doesn’t seem to cool any more. I’d call that broken. Well, yes… but you have to run it a while to notice, and on cooler days it seems fine. And nobody saw you at all on this trip? You mean our trip to the lake? Yes—nobody saw you, you didn’t make any stops? No, no stops. And nobody saw you? Well, I suppose someone must have seen us on the road—another car, someone in another car. And at the lake itself, at the campsite… nobody saw you? Probably… or maybe not. It was dark, someone might have seen us without really seeing us well. And you made no stops on the way back? No, I had to get in and go to work. But you didn’t—you went by your mother’s house, didn’t you? Yes, we… I thought I’d drop the kids off. They were still hungry, and Mavis didn’t sleep well, and I was going to take her home alone to catch a nap.

"It went like that for almost an hour, me spraying out machine-gun fire, Sellars dodging every bullet and never even breaking a sweat. I tell you, that guy had poise. Not that he was full of himself. Just the opposite—he was very humble about it all. He should have roared at me after the first five minutes if he had been innocent, and maybe even sooner if he had been guilty. He should have told me he was insulted, told me about his family’s grief—that his mother wasn’t cold in the ground, that I should be out looking for suspects, that he would have my badge. None of it: in an hour, not even a frown or a fidget. Even when he made those ridiculous yes-no answers—somebody must have seen them but it was dusk, they ate breakfast but didn’t really, the air conditioner was broken but not quite—all of that he delivered in the simplest way you can imagine. He wasn’t smirking when he said it, and he wasn’t sweating, either. It was almost like he was saying, ‘I know you know I’m lying, and if you can catch me fast in one, you win.’ He was going to play it strictly by the rules all the way. He’d murdered his mother and told a pack of lies to cover it up, but he wasn’t slipping any more cards into his hand. Murder and lying were one thing—but he wasn’t going to play-act to go with it. I’d never seen anything like it. I still haven’t.

"Was it a kind of penitence, maybe? Was he doing penance by leaving himself open that way, not raising a hand to defend himself, just barely dodging every punch I threw with a slight move of the head? He could have called me off. He could just have stood up and announced that he was leaving, that he’d had enough of my insinuations. I’ve never known another who didn’t do just that, the guilty as well as the innocent. The guilty especially. But he just sat there and took everything I had. I came out of it wondering if he was trying to get caught, maybe. I almost felt a little sorry for him: he must have been going through hell over what he’d done, and he wanted me to be his torturer. That’s it, exactly. He felt that letting himself be tortured was the least he could do, since he wasn’t going to confess.

"So I felt sorry for him—that’s really funny, isn’t it? An un-American guy like me with a twisted mind… I’m the sort that ends up feeling sorry for these creeps when the truth comes out, while the Forrests of the world end up screaming for them to be boiled in oil.

"I spent all the next day checking out Sellars’ story. It was then that I suddenly remembered the gas gauge. I was gassing up myself after having a sandwich at the little café out by the lake. Needless to say, I hadn’t found anyone who remembered the Sellars family or the blue Chevy wagon. I’d just finished questioning the girl inside at the register, and I walked out to put the same questions to the grease monkey who was checking under someone’s hood. Then it hit me. I’d stopped at every café up and down the highway—there were only three—and otherwise concentrated on the lake area. Which was hopping, since it was Saturday: a dozen campers, twice as many old guys fishing, a park ranger. It didn’t prove anything that none of them had seen the car, though if even just one of them had, Sellars would be off the hook. And then, as I questioned that kid, I remembered that Sellars’ needle had been almost on ‘full’ that morning.

"I tell you, I could have kicked myself. Here was the one way I really could prove him guilty if none of the gas attendants on duty at the time had seen him. He couldn’t possibly have made it to the lake and back on a gallon or two. Either he never went, or he went and filled up somewhere. And if he filled up, someone had to have seen him.

"The rest of that afternoon I spent combing the highway for service stations. I even took wrong turns and drove down backroads a mile or two, just in case Sellars tried to use that one. In all, I think I only found six stations. Only two of those stayed open after five, and only one of these and another opened before eight. We had a little trouble tracking down one of the guys who’d been on duty that Tuesday evening (it being Saturday, as I said—I shouldn’t have been working myself, but I was that anxious to get to the bottom of it all). Then, just to cover all the bases, I stopped at two stations that were kind of on Sellars’ route through town to his mother’s. These last two places knew his car, all right, but they were sure that he hadn’t gassed up there that morning. Again, one of them wouldn’t even have been open that early.

"So that was that. I had a bunch of solid ‘no’s’ in my pocket, and every one of them was a nail in Sellars’ coffin. All I needed now was a hammer.

"I should have gone home, had a good dinner, listened to the radio or played a little croquet by floodlight with Cal and all our kids—that sort of thing. Just generally savor the moment. The winning cards were in my hand now, and the rest would wait till Monday. It would be good to put the whole mess out of my mind for a day, knowing that it was no longer a mess. Not from a professional standpoint, that is. It would be good to drop the veil back over the other mess, knowing that I didn’t need to soil myself in it any further to do my duty. With circumstantial evidence like what I had, I didn’t need a motive. My duty had been done, and I was still relatively clean—clean and right, a good American if you like! Let the guy’s lawyer explain his twisted mind to the jury. That wasn’t my affair.

"But for some reason, I didn’t go straight home. I phoned Jennie from a drug store to tell her I’d be a little late. Not very, but a little. I wanted to cruise by the Sellars house and see how they were spending Saturday night. The old lady’s funeral was to be the next day (the coroner had had her on ice), so I didn’t expect to see a ball game or a cook-out. I really don’t know what I expected—and as it turned out, there wasn’t anything to see. If I hadn’t parked and hung around long enough to see a light come on in the back of the house, I would have figured it was empty. There were certainly no visitors—no kindly neighbors, grieving relatives, or friends stopping by to express their sympathy. I knew that there was a daughter in San Francisco. It didn’t look like she would make the funeral. I wondered just what kind of friends a man like Sellars did have. I wondered how he could possibly have many clients, even.

"Not only were there no visiting cars at the curb, but the blue station wagon was completely out of sight since the garage had a door. That wouldn’t help me find witnesses to testify that the family had never left town on Tuesday night. The house was on a corner, and the lot next to it was empty. The house on the corner across the street (near where I had parked) was so run-down and overgrown that I wondered how anyone could be living in it. Not good prospects for witnesses from that layout, either. Never mind. I didn’t really need witnesses. I had the ace of trumps.

"Most of this local geography I already knew from Nolan, who I asked on the sly to do a run-by for me earlier. That wasn’t really why I came. I really don’t know why I came. I just sat and looked at that one light behind the curtain as the night grew darker. I thought of those two kids.

"I went to the funeral at noon on Sunday, as did a couple of hundred other people. Some of them were Mrs. Sellars’ friends, none of them (I don’t suppose) were her son’s, her daughter had truly not shown up, and the rest—probably a good half—were there out of shock or fear or whatever it is that draws people to murders.

"I had left Jennie and the kids at our church while I drove across town: a neighbor was going to give them a ride home. After the funeral, I went on back home myself, changed out of my suit, and took a long nap. About 3:30 or so, I went back over to the Sellars residence. I hadn’t planned on bothering my head with the business at all that day; but I had attended the funeral, and now here I was back at the house I’d staked out the night before. I parked smack in front of the walkway up to the front door, but before I could get to the stoup, I heard a rustle around to the side. It was Sellars. He was spraying weed-killer or something in the flower bed. He had on the same white shirt he had worn at the funeral, with the sleeves rolled back.

"He didn’t seem surprised to see me. In fact, he thanked me for coming to the funeral. I remarked that he must have inherited his mother’s green thumb, and we chatted like that a little. Then I heaved a big sigh and said something like I hoped Mrs. Sellars would rest in peace even though we might be a long time getting her killer. Of course, Sellars said nothing to that—I might as well have been talking about the weather. I said further that it was a strange case in some ways: that the killer, for instance, must have worn gloves since the only prints on the alabaster horse were his own, his wife’s, and his mother’s, and yet we figured it for a wholly unplanned homicide that surprised the killer as much as his victim. He answered to that that he and his wife had bought the horse as a gift for the old woman when they were in Santa Fe earlier in the summer on vacation. Just flat out like that, just as if he not only knew I thought his prints were the murderer’s but didn’t care to cover up that he knew. When I got over being amazed, I came at him again. So his mother didn’t go with them to Santa Fe… was that maybe because they camped out along the way, I asked. No, he said, they never did much together as a family. Was there trouble, I asked. No, he said, no trouble—that’s why they all stayed apart, so there would be no trouble.

"And that was the first time I had ever heard a tremble in his voice. Otherwise, he stood perfectly calm the whole time, with his sleeves rolled up and the house’s cool shade falling over both of us. Just two buddies visiting on a Sunday afternoon.

"Then I asked where he had gassed up the morning of the murder.

"Maybe it was the tremble just before—but in all my hours of observing this man, this was the first and last time I would ever see something like confusion in his face. His eyes rolled back half under his lids, and his mouth fell open without words. Even then, he never looked at me to see how closely I was looking at him, never turned angry and retreated to the ‘I’m so insulted’ routine. That very first day I saw him, standing with his family in his mother’s front yard as her body lay cold inside, was the only time he ever showed me defiance. As I had drawn closer and closer to his secret, he had grown more and more easy with me. Now the activity in his face was less that of a man looking for a way out than that of a man who was wearied half to death but saw that he had one more chore to do.

"I repeated the question with an explanation. I told him his station wagon’s tank had been almost full that morning when I saw it in front of his mother’s house, and that a trip to and from the lake would have used at least half a tank. So where had he filled up?

"Finally he just shook his head, staring up at the house’s eave. He said he just couldn’t remember, just couldn’t remember. His mother had just been buried, but if the dead could speak, her voice could not have sounded more weary than his did then. I could tell there was no point in pressing it, that this was how he was going to play it no matter what. He knew he was beat, but he still wasn’t going to try to slip another card into his hand. He was just going to refuse to lay anything down. Now the game would be permanently suspended unless I rose up and declared that I had won.

"I wasn’t quite ready for that—that was for tomorrow. I simply said, ‘I can tell this has been too much for you.’

"And then he said the strangest thing. ‘It’s been too much for a very long time.’ Those were his exact words.

"He was talking about his motive, you see. There I was offering him an escape, and he was so far from taking it that he poured out to me something about his motive—something impossibly vague, sure, something useless in court. But something that would force me to drop my own little act about not suspecting him. I suddenly realized that the friend who didn’t come around on the afternoon of his mother’s funeral—the friend he maybe didn’t have in the world—was me.

"Just then his eyes wandered to the back yard. I followed them and noticed what I would otherwise probably have missed: the little girl and the little boy sitting in the grass. They were all wrapped up in something and didn’t look up at us. It must have been some thriller of a game, because I have never seen two children play more quietly or with less movement. They seemed to be under some kind of spell, or maybe to be afraid of shattering the spell’s peace."

***

There was another gap in the manuscript at this point, but I didn’t allow it to detain me. I forged ahead and read through to the finish, such as it was. If I re-intrude here to force a pause upon my audience which I myself did not observe, it is because I can’t think of a better place to add a footnote about those children who so understandably haunted Dykes. The whole business had happened more than half a century ago. What on earth had become of them after growing up amid such horrible secrets? Even if they themselves had never divined anything of the truth, what must it have been like to be reared by two parents who shared the key to a closet holding such a skeleton?

I entertained the romantic notion for a while of booking a flight, renting a car, and driving out to the scene of the crime. I had nostalgic visions of some ancient mariner overlooking a shriveled hamlet of 200 from a canvas chair in front of the one surviving gas station (now a "Feed & Fuel" convenience store). He would croak to me, after grimacing at the sun, that yes, he did recall the Sellars family… the little boy committed suicide in the high school locker room when he was sixteen, and the girl ran off to California with a rock group and died of an overdose. The parents (I would conclude gloomily but properly) had both lived long enough to bury their children and eat their hearts out over the poison which a foul deed had injected into their household….

The truth was quite otherwise, or what little of it I could find out. Through my correspondence with Mrs. Dykes, I discovered that the town has become a small city. The section where Sellars and his mother once lived is now mostly zoned commercial, though many of the shopping centers on whose behalf the blocks of clapboard houses had been plowed under are today desperately trying to lease empty premises. The really nice residential sections, she wrote me, are to be found out by the lake, and the old junction where the highway branched off in that direction is now a mad hive of activity around the Eagle Mountain Mall. She herself has moved to be nearer to her one child and his family who still live in the state—and in response, she added, to the rash of drive-by shootings in the old neighborhood.

As for the Sellars clan, the son moved his family out of state within two or three tears of the murder. It was known that his wife had suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown, and it was widely assumed that the move was prompted by this tragedy. Certainly, my informant wrote, the community had shown the Sellarses every kindness after the murder. Though the children, especially the little boy, had always been misfits in school (Mrs. Dykes had retired from teaching before the incident but noted that she had retained many friends in the profession), their sudden celebrity had won them a lot of sympathy even among their ruthless young classmates. I recalled that my own happiest days in grade school were those when I broke my arm and had to wear a cast. Children were lavishly kind to me then who never spared me a pleasant word before or after. What an enigma is the human heart, even in its infancy!

So it would be more true to say that the progressive world of the fifties exploded upon the Sellarses and everyone else than that the Sellarses imploded into their baffled community. If their lives did not go on normally, there was so little normality about the times that their neuroses would have had to sit patiently in the analyst’s waiting room. Very soon, everyone would be rehearsing for a nuclear attack. A new war, this time in Korea, was already heating up.

These are my ruminations, not Mrs. Dykes’. I was slightly puzzled in all her replies, actually, by their sense of equanimity, and even serenity. Perhaps the wife of a detective grows used to crisis… but she had been Frank’s sounding board, and how could she express herself so tranquilly about Sellars, in particular? Had the slings and arrows of the latter twentieth century simply subdued any indignation she might once have felt?

I asked her in writing, and she answered in the same form. She said that Frank had come to adopt an almost pitying attitude toward Sellars as the business wound down. (You will already have noticed it in his narrative account.) He was not a hard man, she insisted, the popular representation of detectives notwithstanding. The evidence of Sellars’ complete isolation in his guilt—the way hot coals of commiseration were heaped upon him, the way he was impersonally applauded as a veteran of the War, the way customers dutifully bought life insurance from him as if he were a walking reminder of their mortality—and the way, especially, that he took the punishment of Dykes’ interrogations without lifting a finger in defense… all of this suggested that the man might be living in an inward hell. Mrs. Dykes believed that this evidence moved her husband very much. He remarked to her more than once, she claimed, that the very worst scenario was that Sellars had suddenly snapped, without any premeditation but perhaps after a lifetime of slow, torturous provocation. He was a sick son of a gun, not a monster.

She didn’t quite put it that way—those are my words. I dare to use them because I know exactly what the old cop was trying to say.

***

"I can scarcely write about what happened next. I have tried to write about it over and over. This is where I always tear up some pages. Everyone knows that Walter Sellars was never arrested—but even that says it wrong. It’s what everyone does not know. No one knows that a warrant for Sellars should have been issued, thanks to a truckload of circumstantial evidence. Everyone thinks they know that the killer got away. And as far as that goes, I guess they’re right.

"The Old Man hit the ceiling on Monday. He must have figured that I would run myself ragged chasing down phony leads. He wasn’t about to stir up the whole county, he said, by arresting a hard-working family man—and a veteran to boot—who had just lost his mother, all because he couldn’t remember where he had gassed up. Obviously, one of the service stations had made a mistake, he said. Or maybe the kid who’d pumped his gas was an idiot, he said, or a no-good liar or a con with a record who didn’t want to be star witness. He really excelled himself playing defense attorney. So let’s bring them in, I said, there were only two—one on duty at each of the two stations that were open early Wednesday morning and also close to town. Let’s sit them down and grill them, I said, and let’s talk to the wife, too, and see if she remembers.

"He hit the ceiling. Unlike Forrest (who was also there, but who kept quiet as a mouse during this adult-level explosion), his voice fell lower and lower as he got madder and madder. He ended up almost whispering. We weren’t going to make our whole department a laughing stock over some damn needle on some damn dashboard, he said.

"To this day, I think Sellars would have spilled it all if we had only brought him in in cuffs. I think he was that close that afternoon after his mother’s funeral. The only reason he didn’t tell me straight out then and there was because he knew I couldn’t simply listen to him like a father confessor—that as soon as he finished talking, he would have been arrested. It wasn’t me personally holding him back, and it wasn’t himself personally holding back. It was the game that we were both swept up in. Even with me knowing everything, he knew that his freedom wasn’t necessarily lost just because I knew. He knew that the next play wasn’t really mine, and he couldn’t bring himself to give up the bluff when he might still win. As it turned out, he did.

"Sure enough, they tried to collar some vagrant wino for the crime. Forrest had turned him up, and he practically confessed to everything without knowing what side of the boxcar he had fallen out of. It was pitiful. Even Forrest didn’t look very pleased with his job well done. It actually came to trial. Who knows whether our all-American hero would have had the guts to come forward if the poor slob had been convicted? I had come to feel kind of sorry for Sellars before, when I figured he had done a terrible thing in an instant’s fit of passion, but I couldn’t have held on to that feeling if he had let someone else take his fall. It never came to that, thanks to Trooper Nolan. I asked him and his partner (on the hush, of course) to turn over some of the hobos farther down the line. Nolan found several of this guy’s buddies who put him in another state that Tuesday night. You should have seen the parade in the courtroom, like a bunch of ghosts! Most of them had just had their first shave in a week, and were probably still waiting for their first square meal. The D.A. tried to make out that they weren’t credible, but with no more evidence than what he had—no prints, no eye-witness, none of Mrs. Sellars’ effects in the guy’s possession… well, the jury wasn’t in a lynching mood, is all I can say.

"Nolan testified that he had been looking for a burglar when he rousted them out. He had it sounding like they just suddenly came forth with the defendant’s alibi—and who am I to say they didn’t? Nolan was that smart, he could have engineered the whole thing to happen just the way he wanted it to. His head didn’t end up in anybody’s platter, I’m happy to say. In fact, he made captain within the next dozen years, and darned if he didn’t end up County Commissioner before retiring. Nothing can dim a rising star. And I’m not sure that there was ever a cry for anyone’s head. The Big Chiefs got their trial, which was pretty much what they’d always wanted. Any voter who was still disgruntled could get mad at the jury for acquitting.

"Am I outraged that Mrs. Sellars never had her ‘revenge’? Well, how can a mother be avenged upon her son? If her spirit needed such a sacrifice to rest in peace, I doubt that it was ever a peaceful kind of spirit to begin with. I would have liked to look into her past—what the neighbors thought of her, what had happened to her late husband, how the daughter who didn’t return for the funeral had got on with her… but, of course, I never got the chance. Circumstantial evidence—a needle on a dashboard? What other kind of evidence was I allowed to collect? That needle was pointing down a lot of roads that I never got to explore.

"I saw Sellars one more time. It was about a year after the murder, another late summer evening when the sun just wouldn’t go down. And it was a Saturday again, oddly enough, like that time I had parked across from his house. I remember that. I had rushed up to the supermarket when we ran out of charcoal while getting up a cook-out for Jennie’s sister’s brood. I’d already parked the car and was about to get out. Then I noticed it—that blue Chevy wagon. It froze me in my seat. At about that time, out comes Sellars with a brown grocery sack in either arm and a kid on either side. He never did see me: I just sat very still. I watched him very carefully put one sack down on the front fender so he could open the door for the kids. The little boy suddenly saw something on the tarmac that he wanted—a baseball card or something. He almost knocked the other sack right out of his daddy’s hands. I held my breath. I had the window ground down, but all I could hear was a very low, short word that must have been the boy’s name. When the boy came to heel, Sellars peered at what he had picked up and ran his free hand over the mop of hair that barely reached above his own waist.

"I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. I don’t know why, but it almost choked me up."

***

Why did Detective Dykes never finish his piece? It had no finish, of course—no "story" finish. In real life, endings either descend upon you out of the night and from behind, like that alabaster horse, or else they arrive at some indeterminable point upon a series of progressive fades: you happen to blink for an instant, and then you realize that nothing remains any longer, or not enough to call something. Sellars didn’t come to an end. He faded into the unabated, even accelerating pace of life around us.

But why, then, the attempt at a story? Why the persistent revisions of something that could have no end, as if the end were there all the time and a shaft of light from the right angle would reveal it? Even Mrs. Dykes seemed to have been caught up in the game: why else did she send me the manuscript? What else was I supposed to do with it, but supply an ending? To be sure, I remember writing some pompous rot about Dykes’ style and the case’s lack of contemporary interest; but I understand now that his style bothered me because it was that of a man haunted, and I understand that what haunted him was the lack of an ending.

I further understand (as far as contemporary interest goes) what a gullible, shallow crowd I write for, and how much like them I have become in exploiting their naïve crudity. I understand that I will never write another mystery again, if I can possibly get out of it. I understand how much I have been hating it all, and for how long, and why. The crime, the crucial clue, the confession… Perry Mason stalks up to the witness, pauses dramatically, and at last drones, "Then why was the needle almost on full?" That isn’t the mystery. The witness is supposed to break down and scream, "Yes! Yes! I did it, and I’m glad! I’d been wanting to do it for twenty years!" Case closed: gauges don’t lie. But the truth, you see, is precisely the real mystery. The real question is, "How can this truth be true?" How can human beings do what they do? That is the mystery beside which all others pale. The killer had been longing to kill for twenty years? So what—so have we all! The real mystery is, how do you go from thinking the unspeakable to doing it? The killer is the last one to say, because he is always the most puzzled. He always says, "It was like I was another person. I seemed to be watching myself do it, as if from a distance."

I thought I had written my last word, but another ending has flashed across my mind like midnight lightning. Mrs. Sellars—not the old woman who was murdered, but her daughter-in-law. They got in a quarrel, the two of them. Maybe even over the alabaster horse, but more likely over a far, far more wearied matter wherein it was a mere token or the latest example. The old woman turned her back in fury or disgust, but the younger one followed her—perhaps followed her into the bedroom, still empty-handed but with clenched fists—and the shouting continued. Or maybe the daughter-in-law couldn’t extract a response: worst of all, maybe she was being ignored. Maybe it was then that she impulsively reached out for something heavy, and maybe she intended just to hurl it on the floor. That horse which they had given to the old hag—sure, why not? Shatter it at her feet! And then… well, who knows? Who will ever know now? One word too many from Mother, a sarcasm muttered over the shoulder… and suddenly the throw was redirected. Or maybe the young woman had had murder in her heart from the instant she crossed the bedroom’s threshold.

But not before that. For she was horrified, perfectly horrified, at what she had done: it was like a dream, a nightmare. She ran from the house in a panic. The two houses apparently were just blocks away (Mrs. Dykes had written that they were part of the same neighborhood that was re-zoned), so perhaps she ran all the way home. It was now almost dark—certainly dusk—and she either passed unseen or was unrecognizable from various front windows. At home, however, she was beside herself. She couldn’t keep her voice down, and the children began to cry. Sellars did the only thing he could think of: he bundled them all into the station wagon, hushing them every step of the way, and drove quietly out of town. He didn’t go very far before he turned off the main highway onto a farm road, and from there into the woods. He parked the car and told the children to go to sleep in the back—that they were having a kind of camp-out. Then he led his wife to one side, and together they concocted their story. They mustn’t let on to the truth, because she would go to prison, the children would have lost their mother as well as their grandmother, and they would forever after be pointed out as the offspring of a murdering lunatic.

So they closed ranks, Sellars and his wife—Sellars and his mother’s killer. It was what a family man would have done back then: he would have fought tooth and nail to save what was left of his family. He made sure that he took the brunt of the questions while his wife stayed in the background. He let Dykes come at him from every direction and never once sought to throw suspicion off himself. He looked after the children as their mother deteriorated—a chore he was probably already somewhat used to, for her instability almost certainly did not begin in that unfortunate evening. He was a hero, indeed. A local hero forever unsung.

And Dykes—did he ever reach any of these conclusions? Could he have kept rewriting the story because another perspective was gradually dawning upon him? Or was he, perhaps, rewriting it for his "sounding board"? Maybe he wanted Jennie to figure out that the most suspicious figure was the one we only ever saw in the shadows. Perhaps he was trying to spare her the horror of the full truth viewed from straight on. Men were like that, too, back then: they concealed the dangers of the mind as well as those of the world from their women (and even from other men—from silly idealists like Forrest). Yet perhaps Frank also desperately needed Jennie to suffer the same revelation as he had, to share it and confirm it. If so, he was dismally disappointed.

Naturally, I couldn’t pose any question in my letters to Mrs. Dykes which would inspire that reflection. If the old cop, for that matter, had only been trying to spare his life’s partner an especially sickening facet of reality, I was in the same bind. It wasn’t my place either to pull the veil on his private distress or to neutralize his self-sacrifice.

Yet how probable is it that Dykes believed any of what I have just written? He had certainly thought Sellars guilty on the day that he went to argue for a warrant. I have read the story over, from top to bottom, looking for the slightest hint inserted during some revision which underscores the daughter-in-law—the slightest invitation to take a second look at her. I have found only one gesture: those awkward intrusions of "she" and "her" in afterthought at the narrative’s beginning whenever the detective refers to the killer as a male. Is that evidence that Dykes was thinking along the same lines as I am… is that enough? It clearly isn’t much—and there’s nothing later on. Granted that Dykes was no master of literary subtleties—but I would at least have thought that he might have described the young woman somewhere with a certain ominous emphasis: her hair hanging unkempt, a wild look in her eye… that sort of thing.

What if I wrote to Mrs. Dykes to inquire after which revision of the story first bore the "or she/or her" insertions? Maybe they were the last changes Frank made before his stroke. What if I could construct an objective timeline suggesting that my theory had suddenly burst upon the detective? That would be something: to be able to suspect reasonably that I was not alone with the truth would be something. But it is the other man’s loneliness that frightens me. Sellars. A man who suffered as he did should not lie in a grave without flowers.                         back to top

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Dr. Palaver

De omnibus pauca, de nullo omnia.

Dear Doctor,

In Praesidium’s last issue, you fell just short of declaring that Spanish is the most demotic of Western languages. I wonder if English can be very far behind, especially American English? What alarms me about our practice isn’t that we abuse words shamelessly: the sad process of linguistic erosion has always been ongoing everywhere. I am more concerned about our arrogant contempt for education which masquerades as a kind of down-to-earth distaste for stuffiness. The erosion is greatly sped up when we laugh off anyone wise and brave enough to attempt to correct our news- and sportscasters. The word "fortuitous" for instance, is often trotted out by media types when they want to appear eloquent—except that they invariably misuse it as a synonym for "fortunate". Yet if one tries to expose their crass pomposity by explaining the distinction between the two words, one draws all the indignation down upon oneself.

Truly, we are becoming a silly, vain, vulgar, and empty-headed people.

Cato the Censor

Cato Carissime,

What do you expect? America has always been the land of the common man. Warren G. Harding’s "normalcy" is no longer uttered with a smirk by anyone, least of all the Whitehouse correspondent on your TV screen: it has become sanitized to the full satisfaction of a populace which doesn’t give a damn about intellectual hygiene. At least the gaff which you mention is not yet accepted as standard in dictionaries throughout the forty-eight "contagious states" (as Mrs. Malaprop would say). The word "jejeune", on the other hand, has been permitted by Webster’s to mean "young" on an indefensible, wholly misinformed, and really quite ridiculous analogy with the French jeune. Now that particular surrender of the city’s keys was utterly disgraceful.

Did you know, by the way, that disgrazia in Italian means a mere misfortune, not a morally shameful lapse? Our English transformation of the Latin gratia in "disgrace" is probably the more licentious employment of the root. As you say, such liberties are the lifeblood of language. The issue is not whether usage is fully faithful to tradition, but whether current usage insists upon clear, sharp distinctions between terms, thus leaving a discarded meaning free to be assumed by another word. In our case, no sensible person can fail to notice that words are simply collapsing upon one another, leaving only the sketchiest impression of their borders.

Dear Doctor,

I would be interested to read your response to the toilsome naming of our military operation in central Asia. "Infinite Justice" was rejected because the Arabs whom we were trying to woo into our alliance squirmed at the second word, feeling that Islam was being associated with injustice. Then we had the new christening, "Enduring Freedom", which seems to have been so thoroughly "vetted" beforehand that all critics are now silent… except for those of us who care about what words mean, as opposed to how they make a given political constituency feel in its gut.

I have a problem with both names, frankly, and it concerns the first word in either case. The concept of "infinite justice" never did and never could make sense. Only God’s attributes are infinite—and even His justice could not be so, it seems to me, because justice is an applied rather than an abstract quality. Divine goodness is infinite, and when applied to the finite cases where free creatures have made choices, it would yield perfect justice (which we must hope will be tempered with mercy). The word "enduring" in the second proposal simply projects infinity into time, and I don’t see how it can be any more appropriate in that context. Again, even God is not infinitely free in every sense (e.g., to be evil—though to observe this is probably to play a rhetorical game, for any competent theologian would counter that to defy goodness is to become enslaved). That human freedom has always existed and will always exist throughout history is part of the definition of humanity. On the other hand, there is something wrong-headed about the phrase in every specific application, since freedom can only exist in the context of limitation. (Absolute freedom would be the moral abomination of anarchy—which, again, paradoxically subjugates anyone who approaches it.)

So what was really intended, I ask you, by either of these two fuzzy-headed handles?

Still Sober

Dear Fellow Tea-Lover,

You haven’t left me much space for a response, and I cannot improve upon your remarks, so… ditto.

As for what was intended, you have already identified that, too: a soft purr in the gut of the body politic. Since when did these things have any other intent? I will add, however, that it has disturbed me to note the utopian vector of both phrases. It would appear that childishly naïve notions of a war-less, crimeless world have not only implanted their sugar-plums on either side of our political aisle, but that they have also been successfully exported all over the planet. The most dangerous aspect of Enduring Freedom’s worthy undertaking is that it may create the widespread expectation of a safer, fairer, happier life for everyone looming just around the corner.                         back to top

**************************************

Holy Warrior

by

John R. Harris

The greatest fear awaits those

who understand only too well.

I tender my apologies for these relatively unrefined lines. They came to me literally hours before I put the present issue into its final shape and noticed that a page of free space remained. I would have found something else, all the same, had I not decided that a further meditation upon September 11 would not come amiss. If what I have written, beyond being mediocre poetry, offends because it seems critical of Islamic zealotry, I can only answer that I see no reason why Islamic zealots should be granted a broader dispensation by moral reason than any other kind—and, of course, the poem doesn’t name many names. I myself understand the appeal of zealotry and once flirted with it when I was young: hence my intense dread of it.

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