Walker Percy - Lancelot

Virginia?

Yes, don’t you see? Virginia is where it will begin. And it is where there are men who will do it. Just as it was Virginia where it all began in the beginning, or at least where the men were to conceive it, the great Revolution, fought it, won it, and saw it on its way. They began the Second Revolution and we lost it. Perhaps the Third Revolution will end differently.

It won’t be California after all. It will be settled in Virginia, where it started.

Virginia!

Don’t you see? Virginia is neither North nor South but both and neither. Betwixt and between. An island between two disasters. Facing both; both the defunct befouled and collapsing North and the corrupt thriving and Jesus-hollering South. The Northerner is at heart a pornographer. He is an abstract mind with a genital attached. His soul is at Harvard, a large abstract locked-in sterile university whose motto is truth but which has not discovered an important truth in a hundred years. His body lives on Forty-second Street. Do you think there is no relation between Harvard and Forty-second Street? One is the backside of the other. The Southerner? The Southerner started out a skeptical Jeffersonian and became a crooked Christian. That is to say, he is approaching and has almost reached his essence, which is to be more crooked and Christian than ever before. Do you want a portrait of the New Southerner? He is Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week. He calls on Jesus and steals, he’s in business, he’s in politics. Everybody in Louisiana steals from everybody else. That is why the Mafia moved South: because the Mafia is happier with stealing than with pornography. The Mafia and the Teamsters will end by owning the South, the pornographers will own the North, movies, books, plays, the works, and everybody will live happily ever after.

California? The West? That’s where the two intersect: Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Las Vegas, drugs, pornography, and every abstract discarnate idea ever hit upon by man roaming the wilderness in search of habitation.

Washington, the country, is down the drain. Everyone knows it. The people have lost it to the politicians, bureaucrats, drunk Congressmen, lying Presidents, White House preachers, C.I.A., F.B.I., Mafia, Pentagon, pornographers, muggers, buggers, bribers, bribe takers, rich crooked cowboys, sclerotic Southerners, rich crooked Yankees, dirty books, dirty movies, dirty plays, dirty talk shows, dirty soap operas, fags, lesbians, abortionists, Jesus shouters, anti-Jesus shouters, dying cities, dying schools, courses in how to fuck for schoolchildren.

The Virginian? He may not realize it yet, but he is the last hope of the Third Revolution. The First Revolution was won at Yorktown. The Second Revolution was lost at Appomattox. The Third Revolution will begin there, in the Shenandoah Valley.

Now I remember where I heard the music. Do you believe in dreams? That is, do you believe that a dream can be prophetic? You smile. Christ, don’t you believe anything any more? You smile. Your God used to send messages in dreams, didn’t he? No, this was not a message sent to me by God but my own certain vision of what is going to happen. I know what is going to happen. I dreamed it, but it is also going to happen.

A young man is standing in a mountain pass above the Shenandoah Valley. A rifle is slung across his back. He is very tan. Clearly he has been living in the forest. Though the day is very hot, he stands perfectly still under a sour-wood tree as the sun sets in the west. He is waiting and watching for something. What? A sign? Who, what is he? WASP Virginian? New England Irish? Louisiana Creole? Jew? Black? Where does he live? It is impossible to say. He is dark, burned black as an Indian. He could be a Sabra from a kibbutz. All one can say for certain is that he is careful, that he has something in mind, and that he is watching and waiting. For what? For this: presently he sees something, a mirror flash from the last sun rays from the mountain across the North Fork. Still he waits. The sun goes down. Quickly it grows dark. He faces northeast watching the faint green luminescence from the great dying cities of the North, Washington to Boston.

As quickly as he appeared, he vanishes.

Presently there comes a sound from faraway of young men singing. There is a cadence and a dying away to the sound. Are they marching?

Oh Shenandoah, we long to see you

How we love your sparkling water

And we love your lovely daughters

From these green hills to far away

Across the wide Missouri

Oh, Columbia, our blessed mother

You know we wait until you guide us

Give us a sign and march beside us

From these green hills to far away

Across the wide Missouri.

What? What about the women?

Women? How will it be for women?

In order to understand that, you must first understand the strange thing that happened to the human race. It is an event which you people had an inkling of but then turned upside down and inside out for your own purposes.

It is the secret of life, the most astounding and best-kept secret of the ages, yet it is as plain as the nose on your face, there for all to see.

You were onto it with your doctrine of Original Sin. But you got it exactly backwards. Original Sin is not something man did to God but something God did to man, so monstrous that to this day man cannot understand what happened to him. He shakes his head groggily and rubs his eyes in disbelief.

The great secret of the ages is that man has evolved, is born, lives, and dies for one end and one end only: to commit a sexual assault on another human or to submit to such an assault.

Everything else man does is so much bushwa and you know it and I know it and everybody knows it.

Women have only just now discovered the secret, or part of it, the monstrous absurdity of it. Can you blame them for being outraged? Yet even more absurd are their pathetic attempts, once having made the discovery which men are too dumb to make, to pretend it isn’t so, to cover it up, or to blame it on men.

What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life is to be assaulted by a man.

Ah, sweet mystery of life indeed, indeed yes, exactly, yes indeed that is what it is: to be rammed, jammed, stuck, stabbed, pinned, impaled, run through, in a word:

Raped.

The meaning and goal and omega point of evolution is at last clear. It was obscured in past ages by the servitude of man. The poor bastard was so busy surviving and mainly not surviving, starving and dying, that only recently has it dawned on him what an extraordinary apparatus he is. He was decent because he was overworked.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

Why do you look at me like that? After all, the facts are elementary. They are as every biology student knows: of the three million species on earth the human female is the only one capable of living in a state of constant estrus; of having an orgasm; of making love face to face with her mate.

Ha, it’s funny in a way, women liberated and educated, free at last to learn the truth, and the truth? That she is the only creature on earth in perpetual heat. What a discovery! That she is good for only one thing.

Eye to eye, face to face, belly to belly, breast to breast, day in and day out, in heat the year round — there is the omega point of evolution! A comedy isn’t it, women trying to escape that? That’s like a hen wanting to be a hawk. A lioness, yes, a lioness can do it, for she is a lion most of the time, fighter and hunter, and only periodically hikes her tail.