Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless. Some questions for you: Should Ben’s tones be transcribed by our listener (using twelve-tone behavioral notation) and then sent to a musicologist for interpretation?

Is it safe to make an audiotape of the young man, and if so, where against Ben’s body, or elsewhere, should the microphone be placed?

What are the bootleg risks for such an endeavor?

Could a clever parent or person-producing company (don’t fucking get me started) divine information about a person like Ben based on the sound of his body, and do we then run the risk of a person-dilution duplication, a behavior theft, in case his person is sampled and stored and broadcast for the benefit of other families, who were too lazy to raise a boy of their own, who were too stupid, who couldn’t be bothered to think for even one second about what it was they were doing in creating a brand-new person, that no one in the world had ever laid eyes on, so why not steal the very details and parameters and attributes of the person they’re calling Ben Marcus?

Do we leak details about our boy by allowing others to hear the sound of his body before we officially release him to view?

By publishing such sounds from our Storm Needle on a clear day, when person sounds will travel unobstructed as far as the state border, as clear as birdcalls, do we compromise our Newness Incentive and contribute to the derivative child-rearing styles of America?

And, ultimately, will learning something new about Ben end up mattering? Is it healthier to maintain, even to cultivate, a degree of mystery about the boy, so that we ourselves will not lose interest in him? Can we find out too much? Or should we strive to lose interest, in the economic sense, so as to zero our own panic in case he does emerge as a bold and altogether hardcore person with an approach to the world that might ultimately harm our own physical selves?

I have stopped short of fully disrobing the boy to finally trace the source of the sound, and the Quiet Sisters seem shy of him when his person is so loud (producing person evasions, fainting onto body rugs when he passes, hiding under cloth when he speaks, weeping if he eats grain). A young girl here, operating covertly under the name Julie, performed an Anderson out of the widow when Ben’s volume grew too unbearable.

I assure you that I am not afraid, in the technical sense, of hosting a version of Ben that is naked, particularly if it means discovering tactics that might be crucial to his future. Sometimes, while scrubbing my face before undergoing the Posture Hour with Jane Dark, I might entertain a memory of the very young and undersized Ben, who, as I’m sure you’ll recall, was often unattired in our midst. Dark’s Posture Hour is a strenuous regimen that always seems to disarm my thought stream and render me susceptible to nonuseful recollections, and the mandatory facial scrubbing beforehand only accentuates this vulnerability. (Is the face more important than we had thought? Should it be scrubbed more vigorously, scoured, brushed? By assaulting our own faces, do we possibly somehow access all-new behaviors? Should we tear off our faces? Should we cut them free with a knife? Is there something under there?) But I recall that Ben was a baby nudist, who showed no instinct for clothing and seemed inclined, like a young buccaneer, to stride across the living room in such a manner as to foreground his sharp, angular genitals, his penis slashing here and there, often cutting the fabric barriers we’d slung from the rafters to deter his free passage within a cloth-made world: hips forward, probing the wind, arms folded behind his back, his bottom tucked so far under him that it appeared as a gaping seam up his puckered front side. His behavior was a sort of vaudeville youth pornography that came from nowhere, as though he were puppet master of his own penis, conducting it through flight patterns that seemed nearly impossible. Where did someone so young learn to make such a horror of his own crotch? He had seen no movies and read no books; in fact, he was only recently free of his life-prevention hood, the cotton bunting meant to limit his experience of the world. Was such a display consciously designed to alarm his young mother?

So you’ll understand if I feel that his nudity is too emotionally treacherous for the women here who might encounter it. The nudity of a young man can lead to a wide range of emotions, most notably disappointment. And, however much I subscribe to long seasons of vague disappointment, accompanied by a low-chain starch diet to suppress my desires, disappointment produces a listless clientele, a sluggish workforce. Even as a sire, Ben was not required to fully disrobe (why complicate sexual collaboration with full nudity, introducing curiosity and repulsion all at once, a combination that all but shuts down the reproductive organs?). Not to mention that Ben could only sustain an erection if it poked through the unzipped fly of his denims, a fact I am reminded of every time I encounter a pair of his buttoned, unzipped trousers in the hamper, encrusted about the fly area with excess albumen. Even with his pants at his ankles, his concentration flagged and he lost his temper, and while the denim ringlet you designed acted briefly as a tumescence sustainer, or, in the Spanish parlance, a “cock ring,” it seemed far less cumbersome to let him operate his fornications through his zipper hole, though his blue jeans were chafing to so many of our young women here. Just one more reason there was so little conception in the house that winter.

Being his father, at least for these last days, I hope you might assume the task of disrobing Ben to sleuth a possible torso sound hole, and report to me what you discover. If you anticipate experiencing bouts of sudden loss while encountering a nude young man — your body seized by “plummet mode” though indeed you remain seated, a sure sense of descent gripping your skin, a vertical wind shaving up your legs, you will do best to conceal these sensations from our boy. Attire yourself properly in the sterilized examiner’s equipment, a doctor’s smock, and shoe guards. Visor yourself, or wear your hood. But in the end, it is not for me to tell you what to do with unbidden emotions (is that a redundant phrase?), or outsized reactions to the basic consorting styles between men, as with, in this case, a large man disrobing a small boy to discover the source of a mysterious sound, leading to your loss of breath, your frozen hands, your back seized up, your total body collapse, your Deep Regret, which actually feels like a blood condition and not just an emotion. It is so petty to feel things just because you can, and to indulge in feelings you might like to call “strong,” and to then be proud of what you call your “ability to feel,” as though it were a talent. As though, as though. He is your boy and his body is modeled after yours, apprenticing it while introducing improvements so subtle we could never guess at them, however much we believe ourselves to be raising him. To raise: to flay off skin and insert another body inside the pelt. From the perspective of relevancy, your response to Ben is no longer interesting. You would do well to remember that your reaction to our son is anecdotal at best. You showed long ago that feelings couldn’t be proved. Should you now live by your own lesson? You should. Should you live at all? We’ll see.

The real alarm: Even with the clear helmet you’ve introduced to Ben’s wardrobe (let’s see that more youth pay attention to his equipment, if not his tendency to weep during field events), he seems highly breakable and far too temporary a person, and I should like at once to rectify our home atmosphere so that our young man might at least breathe enough air to promote his little body toward a more common manhood, armored against those small dull birds that clog our Ohio airways and seem a little bit too interested in Ben’s passage, trailing his sloping body like a long black kite whenever he leaves the house to stick his unmistakable and prematurely bald head into public airspace for anyone to see it. (Isn’t there a famous old story about a boy who is followed by birds from city to town to country, until he is running into the woods, the birds not far behind? In the story, doesn’t the boy finally hide underground, where the relentless birds can’t go, though they try anyway by crashing into the earth at the perforation of the boy’s disappearance, leaving an ever-growing smear of beak and feathers in the soil? Does the boy not meet a terrible end underground, a place so dark that his body has been twisted upside down for weeks, before his head, so fruity with blood, grows too enriched, too large? Is the phrase “terrible end” also a redundancy? And if there is such a famous old story, what exactly are we to deduce from Ben’s apparent casting in it? Was the character’s name also Ben? Did he die? Why would our Ben be taking part in a story that was written down long ago? Do the stories repeat themselves, or is Ben being derivative?)