CHAPTER 4: BETWEEN THE ROOTS OF A FELLED TREE

Soldiers of our neighbor Locria were fighting in a distant place called Phrygia. Every month, it seemed, more young men were being surreptitiously scooped off the street or the farm and packed off to Phrygia. The more I learned about the origins of the war, and the more I listened to the public pronouncements of federal leaders, the more outraged I became. The Dictator and the collective Ecclesia were lying and killing, I thought to myself, and almost everyone else was mutely assenting. The fact that Father and Mother embraced official positions on treatise obligations, dominoes, and naked aggression only strengthened my resolve. I began attending meetings and rallies at an underground facility nearby. The people I met there seemed much brighter, friendlier, more alive than my awkward and lusterless school companions. Father first cautioned me and then forbade me to spend time with older students. They would not respect me, he said. They would take advantage of me, he said. I was pretending to a sophistication I did not have and never would. My style of dress was deteriorating. Military fatigues were inappropriate for a child and a travesty, a hypocrisy, for someone who claimed to oppose the Dorian intervention in Southeast Phrygia.

        Beyond pious exhortations to me and Father not to “fight,” Mother participated little in these discussions. Privately, she would plead with me to obey Father, to be “nice.” I now suspected Father of marrying mother for some life insurance-why else? He certainly showed no signs of loving her- and he was not predisposed to be “nice.” One day, in some agitation, Mother asked me to do something for all their sakes: attend Scroll class. While Father was still a skeptic on revealed religions, there was no talk of Scroll class. How could this have happened to Father? The question welled up in me for the thousandth time. Scroll class, Mother continued, would help instill the conventional virtues; but even more important, it would show Father that I was willing to make some accommodation. Out of love and pity for Mother, I acquiesced.

Father explained softly to me the nature of a soldier. And though his knowledge came from research rather than experience, he knew and he was accurate. He told me of the sad dignity that can belong to a soldier, how he is necessary in the light of all the failures of man—the penalty of our frailties. Perhaps Father discovered these things in himself as he told them. It was very different from the flag-waving, shouting bellicosity of his younger days. The humilities are piled on a soldier, so Father said, in order that he may, when the time comes, be not too resentful of the final humility—a meaningless and dirty death. And Father talked to me alone and did not permit anyone else to listen. 

        Father took me to walk with him one late afternoon, and the black conclusions of all his study and his thinking came out and flowed with a kind of thick terror over me. 

        Pierre: I’ll have you know that a soldier is the most holy of all Notares because he is the most tested—most tested of all. I’ll try to tell you. Look now—in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst sin we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands, and we say to him, ‘Use it well, use it wisely.’ We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.

        I wet my dry lips and tried to ask and failed and tried again. 

        Enriko: Why do they have to do it? Why is it? 

        Father was deeply moved, and he spoke as he had never spoken before. 

        Pierre: I don’t know, I’ve studied and maybe learned how things are, but I’m not even close to why they are. And you must not expect to find that people understand what they do. So many things are done instinctively, the way a bee makes honey, or a fox dips his paws in a stream to fool dogs. A fox can’t say why he does it, and what bee remembers winter or expects it to come again? When I knew you had to go, I thought to leave the future open so you could dig out your own findings, and then it seemed better if I could protect you with the little I know. You’ll go in soon now—you’ve come to the age.

        Enriko: I don’t want to. 

        Pierre: You’ll go in soon,

        He did not hear me.

        Pierre: And I want to tell you so you won’t be surprised. They’ll first strip off your clothes, but they’ll go deeper than that. They’ll shuck off any little dignity you have— you’ll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and to be let alone to live. They’ll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you’ll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You can’t even wear a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say, ‘This is me —separate from the rest.’

        Enriko: I don’t want to do it. 

        Pierre: After a while, you’ll think no thought the others do not think. You’ll know no word the others can’t say. And you’ll do things because the others do them. You’ll feel the danger in any difference whatever—a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men.

        Enriko: What if I don’t? 

        Pierre: Yes, sometimes that happens. Once in a while there is a man who won’t do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They’ll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can’t finally give in, they’ll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside—neither part of themselves nor yet free. It’s better to fall in with them. They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it. Within itself, if you do not hold it up to other things for comparison and derision, you’ll find slowly, surely, a reason and a logic and a kind of dreadful beauty. A man who can accept it is not a worse man always, and sometimes is a much better man. Pay good heed to me for I have thought long about it. Some men there are who go down the dismal wrack of soldiering, surrender themselves, and become faceless. But these had not much face to start with. And maybe you’re like that. But there are others who go down, submerge in the common slough, and then rise more themselves than they were, because—because they have lost a littleness of vanity and have gained all the gold of the company and the regiment. If you can go down so low, you will be able to rise higher than you can conceive, and you will know a holy joy, a companionship almost like that of a heavenly company of angels. Then you will know the quality of men even if they are inarticulate. But until you have gone way down you can never know this.

        As they walked back toward the house Father turned left and entered the woodlot among the trees, and it was dusk. Between the roots on the far side of a stump was my special place. It was where I went to cry.

As a boy I was sent to the seminary school in the provincial town of Erebos. Most were there to be educated for the clergy. It was a kind of boot camp, training young minds in the use of theological weaponry against the fortress of disbelief. Stubborn and fiercely independent, I suffered four friendless years in bleak Erebos, becoming isolated and withdrawn, my thoughts devoted to an imagined unworthiness in the eyes of the Almighty. I repented a thousand sins no more wicked than another’s and despaired of ever attaining salvation. But Almighty became for me more than a divine wrath craving propitiation. My Almighty was the creative power of the universe. And curiosity conquered my fear. I wished to learn the eschatology of the world; I dared to contemplate the Mind of Almighty. These dangerous visions, at first insubstantial as a memory, became a lifelong obsession. The hubristic longings of a child seminarian, I hoped, were to carry the rest of the world out of the cloister of primitive thought.

        The sciences of classical antiquity—burned at the stake in the Grand Archive—had been silenced more than a thousand cycles before, but now some faint echoes of those voices, preserved by stalwart scholars, began to insinuate themselves into the religious educational curriculum. In Erebos, I heard their reverberations, studying, besides theology, languages, familiar and unfamiliar, music, mathematics and philosophy. I came to the conclusion that in geometry I glimpsed an image of perfection and cosmic glory.

        In the midst of my mathematical raptures, and despite my sequestered life, the imperfections of the outside world must also have molded some of my character. Superstition was a widely available nostrum for people powerless against the miseries of famine, pestilence and deadly doctrinal conflict. For many, the only certainty was the stars, and the ancient astrological conceit prospered in the courtyards and taverns of fear-haunted world. I wondered whether there might be hidden patterns underlying the apparent chaos of daily life. If the world was crafted by the Almighty, should it not be examined closely? Was not all of the world an expression of the harmonies in the mind of the Almighty? The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.

The war seemed quiet, like a voice heard from a field’s length. But by cry and issue, the lead crescendoed at a postal pace. “The Phrygians are Invading Locria!” “The Phyrigians are Invading Aeolia!” Everyone in the whole hemisphere it seemed. Everyone except us. Perhaps they knew, clever tacticians they were, how well-stocked, capable and enthusiastic Dorians were of conflict. The self-proclaimed greatest and most powerful state in the world. Every Dorian was a rifleman by birth, and one Dorian was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight, they said.

        At the slightest provocation, Doria was to be plunged into the forefront of any global conflict. Because of this, many dissenters voiced disapproval toward the Dictator for being too patient, too careful in entering the war, leaving our allies alone in the sand. Well, alone with a steady supply clothes, victuals, ammunition and intelligence. 

        “It’s not enough” they said, “we need to send in the troops”. Indeed, these phrases were to become a litany amongst the proponents of military action, plastering the mantras on streets, placards and, in such extreme cases as my family, even their skin. It was a daily subject at our household. So fervent these ideations were that the family decided to host a celebratory event where neighboring clans and bosom friends were to gather and discuss the matter over a tremendous feast. There were not many causes for secular commemoration in Doria, maybe the observance of a historical battle from time to time, or if you finally vanquished a long-time mortal enemy or something. This would be a special occasion for my family and the community, yet I resented it. I could not, with conscious mind or dignity, be happy about the war. And in a week’s time, my family was to celebrate everything I was against. And it was to take place, by some cruel twist of fate, the day exactly 24 cycles after my conception. A wicked happenstance for me to behold. No one else remembered. I wished to spend the evening between the roots of a felled tree.