Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The Professor’s lips around the marble cigar had turned light blue. His eyes were closed.

“Had he been more attentive to detail,” Father continued, knees pumping like an adolescent’s, “he would have noticed that when his soldiers stripped the bodies on the floes of the frozen river the next day, they found women among the dead, their heads and arms cut off, but clearly women in armor. When you find a woman in armor, the campaign is over, my friend, whatever the results of the battle. It’s time to turn around the elephants and go home.”

The Professor popped the marble from his mouth, holding it between his first and second fingers.

“Why is it, Councilor,” he rejoined, holding his own against the rhetorical onslaught, “that everyone these days thinks they’re a Herodotus or Thucydides?”

But the narrative trance was not to be interrupted.

“Ah, Marcus,” Father whispered across the table, gripping its edges with his hands, “Marcus, Marcus, Mar-cus !” He cupped his lips about his mouth and called across the table as if it were a river. “Marcus Aurelius. . has a little penius,” he giggled. The Professor’s face had by now sunk into his beard.

“I’m not at all sure,” he said gravely, “that as a general rule I would recommend listening to those shouts from across the river,” which of course is the most provocative thing he could have said.

“No greater fear than to be named by those who have no name! And when someone hates you, Professor, one must approach their souls, penetrate inside, and see what sort of people they are! And to do that, one must give up notions of both literary and military fame. One must cross the arbitrary river which divides Cannonia Superiore from Cannonia Inferiore, enter the black room from the white chamber. To discover our people, Professor, when we were all Jews! There they sit watching across the ancient barrier of the Mze, so often violated and so often restored. Shall they sweep it away, shall they enter Europe by the Mze in a shower of faggots and arrows, so all Europe is a mangled stag? For across the river, they see what soothing relief it is to turn the personal into the intellectual.”

The Professor absently took a puff on his surrogate cigar.

At this point Father grew exasperated, and leaping to the south wall, tearing down more manuscript, drew down with a crack like a rifle shot a map which for the rest of the decade covered “The Scale of Being” and “The Tree of Life.” It didn’t appear to be a spontaneous gesture, but one he had been preparing for some time, with wide reading and a good deal of note-taking. From what I could judge through the closed doors where the dogs and I lay panting, our noses squashed against the keyholes, he’d been rehearsing even the cadences of his delivery, as he often did before his rare jury trials. He was about to give the master speculator himself a complicated history lesson, and hopefully reinvigorate their conspiracy to unite Logos and Eros.

The map was a conventional one of European “Christendom,” with the outlines of the Roman Empire superimposed in all its varicose purplescence, cutting improbably through Spain and England, across Middle Gaul to the Rhine, then falling precipitously along the Danube, where the lines veered off to the northeast, to the no-name land of the beech forests where we made our home. On the far left edge of the map was Martha’s Vineyard, and on the far right, Ulan Bator, both pink, the former incised by the three diagonal lines indicating marsh, the latter surrounded by scalloped lines denoting desert.

Father addressed himself to the pretensions of those Rome-centered minds who bequeathed nothing but ruins, noise, and organized cheating in merchandising the corpses of their ancestors. As long, he insisted, as the Professor was so interested in regions which could not, as it were, speak for themselves, perhaps he might pay some attention to the 95 % of the dehellenized ancient world from which both their ancestors had come by cart (albeit from different directions) and to which they would undoubtedly one day return by similar conveyance. Then he drew an X upon the map at the exact location where they now sat. He would speak, he made it clear, not on behalf of the empire and its labored self-conscious chroniclers, but of those who exploded it, those whose lands stretched from northern Ireland to northern India, whose names and languages we do not know. He would speak in brief for all barbarians, celebrate their perpetual playful ambush of the pygmy Romans humping away in their lonely bathhouses on the Mze, all balls and no prick. In his tumultuary acclamation, the Roman cavalry was cut to pieces by an immensely tall and exotically beautiful people, with long penises and tight scrotums, those warriors whom the Professor blamed for the glacial battles in our hippocampus, whose campaigns resurface in wife-beating, pederasty, and all the other gratuitous violences of street and stable.

“Why is it, Professor, that the story is always told in terms of inner collapse, of debauchery in high places, poor leadership, corruption, subversion of the constitution, debased currency, or flawed electoral processes? Why not in terms of the superiority of the invaders, not only tactically, but in the measure of their courage, and the superiority of their nomadic culture?”

Father took up a shooting stick from the umbrella stand and tapped it on the map as if it were a divining rod. “Do we measure a people by its glut of architecture, their impulse to brick over every last inch of green earth on the continent, rivaled in excess only by the Dark Ages, when they built a church for every two-hundred inhabitants in Christendom? Architecture tells us zero. When our people moved they didn’t have any idea of where they were going or what they would do when they got there. They failed to seize almost every favorable circumstance. Is this so hard to grasp? All they knew is they had to turn the pressure from their front and rear somehow to their advantage. Now, that’s a human heritage to be proud of, Professor. No lyric there, I suspect, just the purest kind of physics. Look!” The shooting stick slapped the map with a sharp report. “In one pass it’s all Wagnerian flame and thunder; in another, a miserable group unsure even of its own race, driven by abstract ratios of bears to berries, indifferent to treasure, hair golden and pitch, eyes both bright blue and dark as midnight. Startled fugitives, they look into the cradle of the world and all they see is a vast landscape of categories, and small works of art that you might bury with your mother. And each time they made a breach, inadvertently overrunning another tribe, they would absorb whomever was there, and in so doing only open an inroad at their rear for a tribe even more savage and disconcerted than themselves! That , my friend, not Master Gubik’s mythotherapy, is the story of civilization, and one which does not lend itself to excavation.”

The Professor continued listening courteously, with a quizzical look on his face.

“But look!” Father exclaimed. “In the last millennium before the nailed-up corpse shows up, look.”

The pointer flashed to the passes of the Unnamed Mountains, down the great angled rivers and tributaries renamed with every change of government, through the dissipated empires like moist blotting paper smoldering and blackened at the edges.

“Tribes pushed by even more shadowy tribes, falling upon and absorbing other tribes. Nothing but an avalanche of mineral dialects and honest disbelief informs their armies, changing their names each time they cross a river. Bowl-faced and hatchet-faced, long heads and round heads, dark and fair. Once across the river they begin to undress, shed their sodden clothing and leather armor, and take their trousers off. Brandishing their javelins, painted blue with a paste of cedar and cypress, long penises tied up around their waists, not as a show of masculinity but on the contrary, to remind their foes of their own swinging soft vulnerability, the oddness and fragility of that member, the only thing in nature which is beautiful when wrinkled, that moiety which they cut off and stuffed in the corpses’ mouths, as that odd sarmentum which once produced a scream of pleasure now stoppled one of fear! There was panic in the outposts. Livius speaks of the barbarians moving across the landscape like dancers, their muffled vowels and harsh dactyls piercing through the spruce and poplar, so that frozen lakes with black holes became burned pastures. And what do the Romans make of them? Herr Marcus’s stupor mundi: ‘Men murder and die of remorse. They never get back home. The privileged seem to fail at crucial times.’ He retires once again to the dark tent of his nocturnal to ask, ‘What is evil?’ And there under the heading, ‘To Himself,’ he begins those self-sodomizing speculations on why we are here. It’s not success in ventures that counts, he concludes, but the moral attitude with which they are undertaken. Phui! In the forest,” he whispered hoarsely, “in the reed-beds, our people wait for the hour to strike. And we wait with the superior knowledge that everything is going to vanish!”