Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“Anxiety and uncertainty for you, ‘the enemy.’ In their view, it’s no more than you deserve: you aim to bring down their ideals, kill off the leaders they worship precisely because they inspire fear. They want fear.”

“I’m not relying on those trained monkeys!” barked Don Fernando furiously.

“Whom are you relying on, then?”

“On men! On free, proud men who feel their human value, their dignity—”

“Again, this is a question of standards: what is human value?”

“Standards …” Don Fernando was smiling quaintly, in a “last straw” sort of way, like someone tried to the very limit of his patience. “I know just where to claim my right to the discovery of new value and I reject any attempt to drag in standards as a piece of bothersome claptrap! I have no time to waste on procedural ins and outs, the only thing that matters is value , and I have a perfectly clear idea of what it is!”

“So let’s get on with the shooting, poisoning, setting of time bombs, bashing people’s heads in with ice picks? And all that on I-know-who’s-worthless grounds. Here take a look at the little man on the corner — that’s right, the one selling newspapers.”

The news vendor was crying the third edition of the Morning News. He was indeed a little man, as Melkior put it — ageless, scaled down, as if he had been built with an eye to skimping on material, his arms and legs short, his head small and narrow, but with a hunk of trumpety nose protruding from it, along with two large and floppy ears topped by a vendor’s cap like an upside-down pot, showing a logo for the Morning News. He was trumpeting through his nose, in a snot-ridden and tearful voice, as if begging alms, “Mawnen Ooze! Mawnen Ooze!”

“There, he, too, is a man, the Mawnen fellow. You can hear him braying, struggling for his existence. He, too, to use your words, is capable of feeling. If you were to come up to him and pull his ear (just look at those ears!) he would try to hit you, perhaps even kill you, for offending him. Because he has his pride. In other words, he feels his value. He is a value, by his standards, he, Mr. Mawnen. A human value. While Michelangelo’s David in Florence, a fine figure of a nude young man (and incidentally, a masterpiece of human anatomy), large, self-assured, and proud, full of strength and daring, is not a man. He’s not capable of ‘feeling.’ He’s of stone. He isn’t even ‘human’ enough to be able to utter the nonsense word Mawnen which that little freak over there is able to say. And yet David is a value, an enormous, unique value … or perhaps he isn’t, perhaps you disagree — you said just now you didn’t care for ‘arty rocks’?”

“I didn’t mean anything in particular, I meant it conditionally …”

“And I say, even ‘conditionally,’ that all the Mr. Mawnens in the world, however many there may be, and I’m sure they run into the hundreds of thousands, are not worth David ’s left leg. And yet, listen to what I’m going to ask you, ‘conditionally’: supposing that saving David from destruction required the life of a single Mr. Mawnen , of our Mr. Mawnen over there, for instance, would you approve of the sacrifice?”

“That’s a typically ‘Russian’ pointless question. A piece of pure Dostoyevskyism,” muttered Don Fernando with intellectual disgust.

“Even granted it’s ‘Dostoyevskyism,’ the question is there, regardless of who posed it or why. Never mind, you needn’t answer it yourself, let’s ask the others, the ‘common people,’ ‘your’ people, the ‘passersby.’ Hardly anyone would approve. Not even you yourself, in particular view of your disregard for ‘arty rocks.’ Were we to show them our wretched news vendor sniffling on that corner over there and tell them, We’re going to pounce upon him: right, go die for David (David who? I don’t know him!), all of ‘humane’ mankind would rise most resolutely against the very idea of such a price being payable for the salvation of a ‘man of stone.’ All of a sudden all of mankind becomes ‘uncultured.’ Forgetting the unique, irredeemable value of Michelangelo’s sculpture and throwing itself with the full force of unbridled philanthropy at the little man of a news vendor. Raising him to the point of being an extraordinary, ‘human’ value, which of course not even Mr. Mawnen himself can properly understand. He becomes an exceptional, indeed legendary person (many a Mr. Mawnen has gone down in history that way), a kind of saint and martyr. And why is all that? Only because Mr. Mawnen is ‘capable of feeling.’ The mere elementary sensitivity sets that hideous body above a genius’s unique and unrepeatable work. Because Mr. Mawnen has an epidermis capable of feeling pain, while David is unfeeling stone. Therefore long live the epidermis, death to ‘stone’!”

“This is a conclusion in favor of the epidermis and generally in favor of the sensitive-living, stupid, and mindless, ‘valueless,’ ugly tissue of a freak who has picked up a handful of attributes along the way which under very superficial conventions are granted to man, too. The David is also a synthesis of attributes, which, by somewhat more cautious conventions, have turned stone into a ‘man.’ They both exist in some way. Don’t you feel that the Siamese concrescence of those two existences, no matter how it might intentionally be arranged to suit my purpose, is a question of existence in general? The question of who and what should go on living. Chang or Eng? But how is one to decide — that is to say, by what standards?”

“But I can’t wait until the standards have been agreed upon — I must live now. I must act, I must continually make decisions.”

“Well, whom do you find for: David or the news vendor?” Melkior slipped the question in with derisive curiosity.

“Sometimes for David , sometimes for the news vendor,” replied Don Fernando at once, without pausing to think.

“Depending on the circumstances, is that it?”

“Of course. It’s easy to find for David. What he stands for can never be a threat. But that which can be conceived by the news vendor, the news vendor idea, the freak idea …”

“But I’m not talking about an idea, I’m talking about this here flesh-and-blood news vendor, that nose and those ears, do you understand, the man who’s selling Mawnen …”

“That’s just what I mean — if those noses and ears, if hundreds of thousands, if millions of those Mawnens usurped the right to assess all values, if they established themselves above us as the masters of our lives …”

“That’s impossible,” Melkior interrupted him halfheartedly, merely for the sake of contradiction; he did not believe it impossible himself. He meant to provoke Don Fernando.

“Impossible?” asked Don Fernando in an almost offended tone. “Impossible to find such an idea for freaks (and I’m not talking about only physical deformities here) which will draw everyone like flies to vomit? (After all, haven’t they already been drawn in?) Impossible to tell them: you have been chosen to live! Destroy and slaughter anyone who is not like you! In the name of your superiority! You are the chosen species! My dear chap, do you think they won’t form an alliance? You bet they’ll form one, because they have something in common. Each one of them has an epithet — like those notorious rulers The Lame, The Stupid, The Beardless —implanted deep in their flesh and bones, where it humiliates and offends them, and that’s what binds them together. And what’s going to bind together the so-called normal people? The proud, pure, strong Davids? They have nothing in common, no shared trait, no grounds for ‘brotherhood.’ They have no attributes, they’re ‘only human.’ Each one of them is normal and good and honest and handsome in his own way and knows of none other. Each one of them is a discrete individual, a solitary contemplative monad, and in between them there is an uncommunicative and desperately senseless void. The strength of the freaks is that they are organized and dynamic, because there is something that binds and propels them, and so they bring us down piecemeal, finding us unprepared, in an hour of weakness, in ‘prayer,’ that is to say in an hour of sensitive poetic contemplation, in hours of wonderment and love’s rapture.”