Edward Whittemore - Sinai Tapestry

But above all there was that major aspect of Strongbow’s work that had been suggested by his landlord of twelve years in Jerusalem, the shy antiquities dealer Haj Harun. As a result of their brief discussion on daydreaming one hot summer Sunday afternoon, when the old Arab had put on the rusting Crusader’s helmet and smilingly insisted that no event was ever too far in the past to be forgotten, Strongbow had devoted two-thirds of his entire text to his memories of the gentle Persian girl he had loved so long ago.

These tender passages described his few weeks with her in exquisite detail, the stream in the hills where he had found her and the new flowers of spring and the soft grass where they had lain under the sun and under the stars, the words they had whispered and the joy they had shared in those endless minutes of springtime when he was only nineteen and she a few years younger, love from long ago recalled now in a tale that spanned two hundred million words and was thus the most complete love story ever told.

Yet that part of Strongbow’s work was completely ignored. The beautiful passages devoted to the gentle Persian girl were passed over in their entirety as if they didn’t exist, of no interest at all to his Victorian audience when compared to such possibilities as a Damascus dungeon where Moroccan mercenaries could be hired to administer secret canings for life.

Clearly Strongbow had already abused most occupations and all political positions. But he refused to let matters rest there. Indomitably he pushed deeper into a licentious morass of insults until in Volume Twenty-eight, provoked by his own obscene ardor and raving out of control, he went on to pose the possibility that everyone alive, regardless of status or opinion, was sexually suspect.

Men have a tendency to project their own personal cause as the general cause at large. Thus a cobbler sees the world as a shoe, the state of its sole dependent upon him.

A naturalist with the wit to realize he has evolved upward since infancy by selecting this and not that, or that and not this, views all the species of the world as having done the same thing. And lastly a political philosopher with heavy unmovable bowels finds the past turgid and ponderous, the future necessarily destined to experience explosive upheavals from the lower regions or classes.

Of course each of these hypothetical men is right as far as he goes, which is to say all men are right when describing themselves.

As seen by a cobbler, the world is a shoe. Men do evolve out of their infancies and pent-up bowels may well and probably will explode. But all these innumerable individual acts must not be allowed to obscure what they only take part in, a chaotic universe boundlessly mad.

Strongbowism, it was apparent, ranged wide. It could and did attack every sort of person. And it was especially damaging to those who wanted to believe there was some kind of scheme operating in the universe, preferably an imposing or dramatic scheme that could provide an overall explanation for events either through religion or nature, society or the psyche.

Or at least a partial explanation. And if not daily events then events that occurred once in a lifetime. Or once in a century. Or even once in an epoch.

Or at the very least one reassuring explanation for some event somewhere since the beginning of time, some tiny structure no matter how pathetic. For otherwise what did it all mean?

And here Strongbow appeared to be smiling. Exactly the point, he seemed to be saying.

For nowhere in his thirty-three volumes was there to be found even a nascent conspiracy. Not even that. On the contrary, as seen by Strongbow all yearnings for the existence of a conspiracy in life were hopeless illusions from childhood that surfaced later in idle moments, the illusions having been caused by a child’s false perceptions of order above him, the subsequent yearnings arising from an adult’s inability to accept the sexual chaos beneath him.

To the whore’s interim statement, I’m sitting on a fortune, Strongbow now added a vastly enlarged final statement, I’m sitting on everything which is also nothing.

This argument appeared in its most cogent form in a barely legible footnote in Volume Thirty-two, printed in such fine type an acuity of eyesight worthy of a bedouin was needed to decipher it.

All of these various Levantine acts, heretofore described in detail and accounting for life as it is, I have found to be repeated incessantly among the nine sexes, in low stations and high, but never with a view toward organization or design.

The effect everywhere and at all times has been incoherent, and as much as I would like to think someone has known what he or she was doing at these most crucial moments in life, or even paused to consider the matter, I can’t honestly say I do.

Rather the obverse obtains. Forty years of research have taught me that men and women fuck with great avidity. When they finish they fuck again and if they are not fucking when next you see them, or gathering the strength to do so, it is only out of some bizarre lack of opportunity.

In point of fact there is a great deal of fucking in the world but no one is in charge of it, no organization controls it, no recommendations affect it.

Instead men and women fuck right along as they always have and always will, paying no particular attention to kingdoms or dynasties, ignoring the universal theorems that are regularly announced over the ages as applicable to all when they aren’t, in rapture and headlong chance, spinning round and round the sensual wheel.

It would be comforting news indeed if we could find a scheme or a plan or even a hint of a conspiracy in life, some stationary point where we could sit and be still at last. But having long studied the spin of our wheel, I have to admit there is none. Alas we are only right there. Each of us.

Blasting away in another orgasm.

Nor did Strongbow defend his depraved attacks on everyone by claiming his aim was to diagnose the rampant sexual pathologies of his age in order for them to be cured. In fact cures were inconceivable to him, for it was obvious he believed man was insane by definition.

This he made plain in Volume Thirty-three.

Within the animal kingdom we are an incorrigible and lawless member, deathly ill, a species suffering from an incurable disease. Wise men of all ages have known this, ignorant men of all ages have suspected it. It amounts to congenital insanity and because of it man has always wanted to return to the orderly and ordered conditions of the animal state where he once found contentment.

All memories of lost paradises verify this, as do all visionary dreams of future Utopias.

Whenever a prophet or a philosopher speaks of a new man in a new age his creation is invariably the same, the old man in the old age, the animal in his animal kingdom, the beast in the grazing herd that browses for forage digesting and rutting and evacuating in a seemingly timeless eternity, untroubled because unaware of the troubles on every side, undying because unaware of death, unliving because unaware of life.

For an animal this is most certainly a happy existence. But for you and me it can never be again.

Yet in the closing lines of Volume Thirty-three, Strongbow revealed that in spite of everything he was still willing to live with his findings and even do so with a certain gusto.

It’s true that life is crumpled and mindless and covered with hairs. But for the few years we have its good memories we also have to admit it remains as pleasantly soft to the touch as an old well-used wineskin.

Or for that matter, as an old man’s well-used balls.