Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Yet, when the son’s topic has so trespassed on the deeds and designs of his former father and the corps of persons once commanded beneath him — to treat, for example, the moments of his demised sister, the implementation of a women’s television device to produce new strains of behavior in his person, a secret history of women in the American townships, a supplementary women’s chronology of lost events, the vital teachings of the figure known as the Female Jesus, the advent of a women’s currency devised by my “wife” to allow an exclusive economy to occur between women, and the ultimate so-called capture of the father by the person Jane Dark, together with her listeners and Silentists (I can still hear them shushing me) — the father feels deliberately antagonized and forced into a category of fatherhood heretofore vastly underutilized, that of the Refuser (a word which also means to process and eliminate garbage), who is meant at all costs first to enact a deep and lasting condemnation of the offender, in this case the figure posing as my ostensible son, and next to retract the manuscript, and all copies, to its likely destination, the incinerator, where the language upon it might be burned from the page and forever prevented from such a heinous arrangement again. Indeed, I herewith ask all readers, once they have absorbed and studied my remarks, and then transcribed them as an exemplary caution against the treason of children, to forgo whatever follows in this book, all of it certainly folly, I assure you, and burn the thing to cinders with the greatest haste. Bring a hard fire upon it, please, and see it all as an aberration prosecuted by a disease called “Ben Marcus.”

Any other father would agree that corrections in this life must always be sought. A son’s goal, if the son is operating at capacity, must be to extend the bodily range and mental power of his father, particularly, especially, if that father is interred in an underground compartment where language — I should not need to repeat it — is funneling down in an ever-menacing stream by a man hired to burst the father’s body with words. When that task is compromised, the father is expected to speak loudly and with force to ensure that a correction is registered. The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time. He rehearses various forms of error and attempts at every turn to incorporate them into his arsenal of actions, using the Behavior Bible if he must, seeking always to dilate the range of conduct available to a father and the persons he commands, remembering that morality (that is, what to do when another animal gets too close) is often regulated by figures unwilling to commit the necessary harms, the incidental bloodshed and trespasses that a mastery of daily life requires, never feeling sure that an act is wrong until it feels life-threatening to the father, which can only be signaled by the appearance of the father’s blood, or by levels of pain in the father that are unbearable, at which point a powerful verbal gesture — written, spoken, carved into the wall — is required to bring the matter to its correction. Even a muffled voice of a father, as if uttered from underground, for fuck’s sake, has more force than a clear and booming voice of the boy who is his son. The boy’s voice is anyway sheer ventriloquism on the part of the father, is it not, since I cocreated the awful lad? Yet sometimes that ventriloquism, if too accurate, must be adjusted in pitch and brought to a falser modulation, lest an audience mistake the dummy for an actual person with its own heart and head and hands, a boy rather like the father in matters of hair and skin, certainly, but deeply different at the level of mind, only an apprentice — and here a poor one, a stick figure, convincing only if viewed at a distance — to the range of thought the father himself has cultivated.

It should never be forgotten that Benjamin Marcus is being commanded at this and all moments by the person whose words you are reading.

The corrections I mention are not only required to assert dominion of the father, which here hardly needs doing — since even in prison I can choreograph realistic situations in the living world — but to protect my former son from the wake of disaster inevitably impending when such a degree of falsity and incompetence has been registered, as with the book at hand. He will not be forgiven his mistakes.

Given Ben’s statement, however, that the father only possesses a reproduction of what the son has written, indicating the presence of other copies out of the father’s range, in areas the father’s body is restricted from, the father must here be content with producing a disclaimer that will sufficiently mute all that follows of the son’s labor, a short introduction to the man acting as my son that might warn a careful reader— because you had better be careful — sufficiently clear of his despicable person.

While Benjamin is not entirely retarded in the conventional sense, a slowness and singularity to his behavior have been unfortunately observed, and other fathers and mothers might grimly relate to the lowering of standards that becomes necessary during such situations when the boy in an American family proves to be just slightly craftier than an imbecile. Yes, he can eat and laugh, play simple outdoor games, dress himself in the appropriate gear, and carry on a sensible conversation. Yet one is so eager to witness a son whose mind can operate at the highest levels, who can synthesize the confusion of a world clogged indiscriminately with trees, persons, and repetitive shelters into a regulated drama with causation, revelation, and redemption; a boy who can cut through the mystery of daily life with confidence and thus come to control the people in his range of sight and beyond, simply by outsmarting and outfighting the motherfuckers; yet in the case with the Benjamin figure, the apparition so similar to my son, no such control has in any way been evident. His complicity with mediocrity has been impressively well realized.

Nor do I mean to suggest that a retarded or simple man such as Ben can have no use in a society. I am in favor of a caste system in which the dull, the boring, the slow and sugar-minded American animals — often mistaken for “people” and likewise privileged — are given challenging tasks and rewarded with carefully controlled sexual intercourse, excellent bread and butter, and weekend meat. Ben is a strong lad and can reliably carry sacks of soil, sing a convincing love song, and show unmatched devotion to his “mother.” These tasks certainly can find their expression in the world at large without offending or hindering the more necessary living persons. Indeed, the front-runners of civilization need helpers such as Ben, and not just for sexual release, but also to fix roads, level trees, and dig position trenches for women’s-frequency hijacking.

But if you are in a position to look at this Ben Marcus, who I’m sure will do his best to get in your face at every opportunity and show himself to you (such is his ignorance of his own hellishly depressing appearance), then I invite you to do so, and not uncritically, being honest with yourselves about what you see, and what you don’t, allowing your deepest judgments to emerge. It will help to scan smartly away from his form on occasion to the more realistic objects in the landscape — the trees and houses and people that happen to fill your view, or the bookcases, lamps, and flowers — in order to appreciate just how wrongly Ben’s body juts out of nothingness into a space worthy of a more substantial creature or household object; considering all the while, if you are able, what a miracle it is that even routine self-examination on his part — while brushing his teeth or soaping his face before a mirror — has not yet led him to quietly end his own life down at the river, with a rope or gun or razor, and give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence.