Deep South v.1 n.3 (Spring, 1995)
A dead Ukranian of the thirteenth century who took a Mongol arrow in the throat for you. How to thank such a person . . . by going to the mall, perhaps? "He would have wanted it that way" as basketball players are taught to say when their supposed best friend and teammate dies just before the tournament, their big chance? No, I don't think so. How do you thank the dead Ukranian? Think fast, because even as we speak They are here -- the Mongols. Picture it morning then, farm folk, walking to the fields as their breath huffs tiny dragons in the air. No -- not yet, wait, wait . . . They're poor and thin, and the wind blows, it's the spread East of Europe, it's the Little Ice Age. Only farm folk, not quite enough food, so they're pretty short on average; still some of them, see that girl feeding the chickens -- pretty in her feudal, slave way . . . Wait, wait . . . Now. They are here. It has to be imagined . . . No; I mean has to be. Well, just imagine; just imagine what you could do if you'd ridden three thousand miles over the steppes in Winter after Winter from a place with no water and no books and no nothing, killing, killing as a job, a boring job with still some odd funny moments, when the arrow takes a little one at a funny angle and it runs around dead but running; but dull for the most part, dull and always cold and bored. Eating horse dog and villager meat cooked by the friction of the saddle; and no rules at all, no sensibilities, no science and Voltaire no Gandhi or vaccines . . . So the Mongols come. A rumble, a rumor, color then the first wave washes through your village: at dawn the creak of carts and then stumbling, sobbing, Turk-seeming folk, fearful enough but only fleeing, defeated, from the real devils. All month they pass and they fight if anyone tries to stop them. They are so afraid of what's behind them that nothing ahead, nothing westward, can frighten them. (What waits at last westward is Pleasant Hill, California -- but that's much later.) At the end of the thirtieth day one these Saracen women who has just reached the edge of the village falls forward gurgling, an arrow in her back. And at last, They are here. Trotting up quietly: The little men on their little ponies; and they dance about the village, a horse dance smaller and smaller, and the oldest woman in the village goes out to talk to them and falls down and dies, and the circle gets smaller and smaller like a circle of cows, and everybody inside it is dead, and then the houses are burning, and there is another and another village to take care of, and then it's dark, and then they stop and eat and tell stories. And at the village, a day's ride eastward, it is quiet now, every one, every man woman child is quiet, and the village name will not even be remembered . . . Well; it's true, it happened many times . . . Doesn't the truth have some kind of rights? The Mongols didn't even take casualties most of the time, usually fought outnumbered; oh how they danced in the saddle, at the tip of bow-range and used up their arrows, no emotion -- a day at the office, fire drill, point A to point B, already practised it across a three thousand miles, a black arrow on the map in which every village is dead. By now it is only a kind of manual labor, and they daydream as they pick off villagers, vaguely wondering -- as some Hungarian goes down gurgling with a feathered stick in his throat some Lombard who begged the saints to take care of his cattle falls huffing to the ground -- the horse dancer nocks his next arrow, vaguely wondering What do they call it here? Good grazing . . . end of story. Go among the dead and collect your arrows. Let the Turk auxiliaries play with the women, as long as they remember to cut their throats afterward. You have never thanked the villagers. Instead, somehow you want this to have a moral, or an anti-moral, yes, better yet -- the usual cheap soy substitute for a moral -- Ah, there is or Ah, there isn't a God; but why? The problem is not whether but how, and not God but all the dead villagers you have slighted. What will you get them for their birthdays? What would be the perfect gift for the old woman who stepped directly in front of Descartes when the Mongol aimed at him? What can you write on the thank-you card with its picture of a kitten to the Persian archer who delayed Subotai a second or two so that Voltaire could perfect his dialogue? What would satisfy the Khazar spearman who gave Hume time to wax facetious? It makes one nervous and irritable. It can be avoided. Whately made fun of Hume on miracles by arguing that Napoleon Bonaparte was a figure of myth; can I say the Mongols are a say "Freudian thing": onset of menarche (blood, the East, migration as metaphor for kin-marriage)? And we could then . . . Something about being able to enjoy the freeway architecture more (because they really are beautiful, the overpasses, dolphin-flank curves, and unconscious -- that's the secret of their beauty . . . why don't we love them more?) If you could deal with the dead-villager problem you could feel good about your weight, be nicer to people around you once you didn't have to feel inferior to a dead short Ukranian of the twelfth century who took an arrow for you like the Brooklyn kid in a Guadalcanal movie, who died who died so that . . . So you father's father's father could itch in relative safety his own (necessary!) way through a scrofulous lice-ridden life as a twelfth-century slave to the Norman pirates occupying their benighted scrap of Irish rain; so that in turn his son's son's son could fill the same office 400 years later to the ever nastier retired Cromwellian dragoons to whom were parcelled out land, sept, daughter, stock and wife; so that in turn, in time, your father's father -- in the fullness of time, the goodness badness blankness of time -- could eat the famine grass of the Cavan roadside and die -- but only after siring (like the salmon, his only real use) a son; so that his son could punch Malthus' clock for another fifty years of filthy poverty and die after siring another who -- and then his son -- and his, and his, and at last, at last in the full full fullness of time could as reward for their I say really most extraordinary patience be allowed to pay steerage to Jersey city and there organize the streetcarmen and get fired for it and have to wear those horrible celluloid collars and form a singing group (tin pan ould sod three verse) called unfathomably the Owls and feed ten kids one of whom died, so nine; so that your father could move to Denver then Oakland (westward ever westward) and then, the end of all things, (cause there's ocean after) Pleasant Hill, California so that you -- you, end and purpose of all things, crown of creation, who make worthwhile an eon of suffering! could could -- Agh. You get the idea anyway. So let's say it's just data, light as paper; or or something worse, or a mocking oblique theological proof that yesterday's falafel was a mortal sin -- but that's only a really adolescent, far-fetched vanity; make yourself the dead hero of the dead story; Hey come on this is America; nobody has to swallow this. Dry, freeze-dry and blow away; just a fact, stratum of innocent animal bones over other (earlier) bone-strata and under other (later) ones, innocent; even their precious Gandhi had to walk on something, I know! let's walk on the dead? . . . and why not, or rather how not? How not? Like this Andrea Dworkin, who maintains that intercourse is rape; What was the species supposed to do? Our little warm mammal-innocent-selves that we have, that are real, that are not just something for people in German cars/ and seminars/ to laugh at; that we have, that are real, that we touch, that we touch with; that are real, that are innocent and real . . . VISUALIZE IMPEACHMENT as the saying goes; visualize the paradigmatic homo-intermediate-thing waking up in its cliff-condo, one bedroom, panoramic view of Ouldavai Gorge, Brushing its teeth, shaving, looking forward to another day of eating dead things, walking on dead things, competing in the recapitalized bumpercars American economy not blameworthy because built-in, cause a capital and all labor as Engels could've said for all I know comes from dead things; well then? What's our ape grandpa, half-ape half socialise, sympathy without context, supposed to do? Buddha, I think it was Buddha, seem to remember he had a bigger frame than Gandhi -- Buddha passive-aggressive prodigy, once made the rabbit jump in the flame and cook itself for him when he was making a show of starving. Paragraph Two: But the rabbit was sorry afterwards in the holy stomach and wondered if it would not have been better to eat plants and sire offspring, the old, humbler, Dravidian, pre-Aryan-conquest script; and wondered, the rabbit, as it felt Buddha's digestive juices begin to disassemble its tissues, if this auto-immolation, though sufficiently dramatic, had not been a sort of error of enthusiasm, literally suicidal. For, said the rabbit, dirt is dead things. Coal is dead things. Oil is dead things. Noodles is dead things Wood is dead things, the same dead things as paper is, this page for instance, and the fingers that touch it; You, that is; are dead thing talking, walking, just not cashed in yet. Just a reminder. We find our clients tend to neglect things, the paperwork can get so tangled . . . But not a fable, not with a moral; it's not like a movie, not like they mind, really, the slighted dead -- not like that famous series of films, Night, Dawn, Day, Evening and Late Brunch of the Dead -- with those resonant malls-full of zombie nuns, zombie kids, zombie blue-faced hare krishnas -- no, not quite like that, although -- and anyway, How as Michael points out would all those zombies get out from under an inch of mahogany or zinc and then six-plus feet of dirt? Plus the fact that now, for the first time, the living outnumber all the dead. (Fact, I read in "The Grab Bag.") We could not only pick them off by the hundred with a single hunting rifle but outvote them if it came to it. Democracy in action: Resolved, you dead people not entitled to walk up and eat us alive . . . Because (A)it's not our fault and(B) we're taller that you (on average, though some say it's just that small clothes get preserved, while bigger are worn out -- the Norse bones in Newfoundland they say were big -- I found that oddly troubling) and there's more of us; moreover, more fundamentally, and this, I think is the true issue here, the hunting rifle we must ruthlessly employ against these (imaginary anyway) zombies: "Granted, you suffered; yet suffering is not a claim, less still a virtue; Shamelas all -- your claims, `We were oh very poor'; `We took a Mongol arrow in the throat just so you could go to the Mall'; grant these too; yet poverty is not claim nor suffering virtue nor death canonization and You'd've had air conditioning too if you could've! They can't hurt you. Just dirt, just evidence in an old murder like the bones on the Peninsula they thought were the disappeared gird but she carbon-dated out as a Miwok, one of those passive California tribes -- disappointing by comparison with the Sioux or Iroquois, as if casual were in the climate; without wars or headdresses, and when the Missions came they just sort of vanished, not even massacred -- though the girl whose bones they found had been killed, they decided, by a blow to the head in Something-hundred B.C.; something must have gone on. Still those Miwok corpses are boring, difficult to canonize even ecologically; their "hand on the land" (unwanted internal rhyme) was "light" simply because they didn't do anything, especially fight. No Miwok martyrs -- or none remembered, which in terms of weight on the poor cranium of ourselves, unworthy living heirs, is much the same thing. They're dead as opposed to deceased; dead of being too far away from everything, Jerusalem and the Goths; which is to say I never wanted to read about them so eventually they turned into dirt.
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