‘The Consecrated Mask of Zeal’
Chapters 18-21 of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The religious personalities who did battle over Christian doctrine included the martyred Cyprian, the scholars Eusabius, Augustine, Athenasia [famous from Ethiopia to Britain, who had the mind to run an empire but fought heresy instead], Basil, Osius an Iberian bishop and favorite of Constantine and one Arius, whose doctrine caused a good hundred years of feuding within the Christian Church.
Constantine encouraged the greatest fanatic minds of his time to do battle in church synods, as he asked naive to practical questions concerning matters far out of his debt. He might have honestly been trying to learn the truth by way of using his power to gather the foremost authorities to debate before him as he humbly sat his stool. Or, might he have simply been thrilled that trouble being made concerned the next life and not his empire on earth?
Two things are certain:
>1. Constantine and his successors did not decline ratification under the old gods until Gratian succeeded in 367, 30 years after the death of Constantine, and 42 years after the first council of Nicea.
>2. It would take the rest of the century to sort out the Orthodox doctrine, with an additional council held in Constantinople in 381. Such doctrinal councils would be held throughout the Middle Ages. These never satisfied all parties and splits in the faith would continue well into modern times.
Constantius II ruled the empire until 361. Not the rugged soldier his father or grandfather was, he had generals do his fighting and encouraged numerous synods, or theological debates. He did a disservice to Christianity and to The Empire as he made of his father’s policy a theater. Elections of bishops and archbishops were as corrupt as any political election in American labor politics. Gibbon makes certain that we never forget the hand of the eunuchs behind the scenes in all of these religious persecutions.
Before considering the origins of this debate, a portrait of the great city built, as it seems, to conduct this debate on earth about heaven above.
Founded in A.D. 29, the city originally contained:
-Jupiter’s Baths
-14 churches
-14 palaces
-322 streets
-3888 great houses
-A wooden statue of Constantine
-A brazen statue of Apollo, taken from a plundered pagan temple.
There were economic and military reasons for founding the new capital at the Golden Horn, where the Black Sea violently discharges into the Aegean. This was an important passage mythically and historically. The most important consideration was probably proximity to the Egyptian grain supply and the Persian enemy, which was the most competent and intractable foe of Rome.
However, Egypt was ever so important to the soul of the Empire:
>1. Plato had learned theology in Egypt, and the Platonic school in Greece was the source of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, of the Triumverate Godhead: The First Cause [God the Father], the Logos [the Son] and the Spirit.
>2. Various sects of fanatical religionists, including Christian denominations, teamed in Egypt.
>3. The most popular man in Egypt was the saint like archbishop Athenasia, whose parishoners were willing to go to war for.
>4. Hellenistic Jewish scholars had schools in Alexandria which were influential in the Christian world, for the Christian world was, by the mid 100s, first, and foremost, Greek. [0]
From the view of a war fighter of the northern frontiers like Constantine, facing beatable but inextinguishable barbarians and possible rivals within the empire, in the east he faced the religious fanatics of Magi Persia, who were closer to his food supply than his posts on the Rhine and the Danube. And, his work force and managerial class in Egypt, producing and guarding and shipping his food supply, were also religious fanatics, fractious fanatics.
The founding of Constantinople was a conversion of physical and metaphysical internal lines, to include the balancing schools of philosophy in Athens, from whence his surviving son’s chosen successor, Valentinian, would be educated.
The first Christian doctrine, referencing the Holy Trinity was from about A.D.140 by the Bishop of Antioch, Theopolis. The Platonists were thrilled with the Gospel of John, who they claimed as one of their own. There was also a belief among some early Roman Christians that Virgil had predicted the coming of Jesus Christ just one generation before his birth. [1]
Constantinople was dedicated to The Mother Mary, something that would horrify modern Protestants, and indicates the metaphysical concerns of an emperor defending the fertile center of the known world from rapacious enemies. The Cult of Mary is easily understood as a compromise with pagan tradition, of honoring the motherland, and is traditionally made to fit in with the Holy Spirit aspect of the Trinity.
The mind-boggling hair-splitting of the various sects was most pronounced in North Africa, where actual religious wars broke out between Orthodox/Catholic [2], Manicheans, Marsianites, Valentinians, Donatists [3], the Arrians [4] in no less than 18 factions, the Montanists, the Novations, the Maxianists [5], and even the tiny sect of the Rogations based in what is now Morocco.
The weapon was excommunication. This great rod of damnation was alternately pointed at one sect by another with the deranged brat emperor Constantius II jeering on the debate. The bishops spent so much time on the road to these synods [6] that their ministries were neglected.
This was such an age of pain-wracked sorrow, that many excommunicated Christians in North Africa became bandits, others “excommunicated the world,” and still others became wandering suicides, seeking out pagans and attacking them so that they could be martyred and get to heaven!
The greatest disagreements came down to the definition of Plato’s concept of The Divinity as a Trinity of Uncaused Creation, Reason, and Spirit that was “of one substance of a kind.” This generally came down to arguments about the physical nature of Jesus Christ.
In the short term it was worth torturing and killing fellow Christians over. In the long term, although indigenous Christians would survive in Egypt, Judea, Syria, Turkey, Spain and Portugal, the bitterness of sectarian Christian hate in North Africa was such that no shred of the faith remained after the sword of Islam passed through. Might this have something to do with the fact that North Africa was not a military zone, that there had been no military threat in that portion of the Roman Empire since the days of the Republic, that between the defeat of Carthage and the invasion of the barbarians 600 years had lapsed? Was there ever a zone of the world so free from external threat for so long?
Must active minds without external enemies manufacture enemies within?
Yet, the most storied bishop of the age, variously exiled, condemned, regarded as a living saint, pardoned by various authorities, the most implacable foe of the creeds of Arius, who served as in the clergy as deacon and Bishop for 46 years, Athenasius, spoke to birds. Yes, the man shared the divination of Apollo—even of Odin—was known by friends and foes to consult the crows.
I am somewhat pleased, to find the ancient world too complex for all the scholars of modernity to unravel sufficiently for our small minds to encompass.
…
Notes
-0. See the Book of Solomon in the Catholic Bible and the work of Philo of Alexandria.
-1. Dante chose Virgil, having become a saintly ghost, as the guide of the infernal regions for Inferno. It is this reader’s opinion that Ovid begged for such a Savior in his melancholy Metamorphoses, written at nearly the same time, a contemporary of Virgil and Jesus.
-2. At this point that was one in the same as the great Latin/Greek schism had yet to occur.
-3. The second largest sect of heretics in this era, with 400 Bishops.
-4. The largest heresy every faced by the Church.
-5. These were 25% of the Donations, who hated the rest rabidly.
-6. Synods were sacred Greek fraternities, first of athletes, under Roman rule from about 100 B.C.
Fall 2024 Man Weekend
September 20, 21 & 22
Captain Sean has informed this old gimp hobo that this broken ass is required for the above dates.
He has also offered to open this training session to any readers who might wish to attend.
Friday, 20th, we arrive at about dinner time, giving the women and children time to evacuate the grounds. We shall then hold knucklehead conclave as to what we are training and who is coaching what for the following day.
Saturday 21st we will train and spar.
I suggest this as a good venue for doing some experimental self defense scenarios and for testing more weapons against the machete virus—a good cane for instance, and using the wrecking bar against a wider variety of machetes as well as inserting shirts and jackets as shields.
Saturday night a knucklehead review and planning for the Sunday morning training.
Sunday 22nd we will train and spar and disperse to our various rude habitations across the glorious Land of the Wee and Home of the Knave.
If you are interested text James at 443-686-0598
You will not be required to FIGHT!
This is simply free training.
Arrive with an idea of what you would like to learn, coach, practice, spar or test.
Simply bring some food and drink or some cash to get take out or groceries.
‘The Mortal Wound’
Chapter 17-21 of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Concerning the establishment of the Roman capital at Constantinople and the administration and nature of Constantine and his successors. As Gibbon would say, we here discuss, “interest,” of the micro-personal and macro-personal kind.
Constantius, father of Constantine, seems to have been a Christian or Christian sympathizer. Like his son he was a soldier and was possibly not literate. As Gibbon points out, the Gospels were a Greek text, studied in Greek, mostly written in Greek. The Latin texts available in the west were not suitable, really, for argument and debate. Although he died in York, in Britain, the fate of the family of Constantius would drift ever east.
This was in large part due to the administrative difficulties running an empire from a camp and requiring some civil order in the cities. Christianity, an almost exclusively urban faith, with its own spy network, own tax base, own behavioral code and punishments [of a spiritual rather than a physical nature, and not interfering with the State monopoly of violence] offered a core of educated ministers. For Christianity, mostly spoken in the west, was a faith of the written word, a faith of debate, of scholarship, a faith, that was in practice, very close to Law. Law spread side by side with religious debates conducted between Christian sectarians. [I make no causal claim, only note a corolary trend.] By being the patron of this young faith Constantine was guaranteed a loyalist core that waxed more numerous the furthest east one went. These loyalists, were also a minority that would be disinclined to make common cause with the majority. Of 1800 Bishops, 800 were Latin and 1000 were Greek, as was the language of the Bible.
Constantine, on taking the purple and receiving Jove and Herculean religious sanction at Rome, issued the Edict of Milan, that guaranteed religious liberty for all Romans. There would, and there had to be, some limits on religious freedom, as under Diocletion, who did not tolerate certain sects, like the Manicheans [from enemy Persia] and for a brief time the Christians who burned his palace in Nicea. The temple of Issus in Phonecia, where prostitution was part of the worship, was shut down.
Constantine appointed Christians to key posts and reestablished the estates of Churches that had been confiscated.
He did the following things to secure the growth of Christianity and its eventual place as State Religion:
>1. He learned at the feet of priests and bishops and monks, seating himself on a stool and saying on one occasion to one who questioned his submission to the clergy, “I am the mere minister, not the judge of these [debating clergy] established as priests and gods upon earth.” That was said in a very pagan way by a man seeking Heaven’s sanction through earthly intermediaries in a world upon which Heaven mostly frowned. [0]
>2. He protected Christian slaves from being circumcised by their Jewish masters, so every gentile slave who did not want his dick trimmed could claim Christ as his foreskin’s savior!
>3. Every person who became Christian was given a white robe and 20 pieces of gold.
>4. Crimes by Christians against pagans were simply ignored.
>5. A friend of Constantine, a Syrian philosopher, Sopater, was with Constantine when contrary winds delayed the Egyptian grain fleet. He had his friend beheaded, saying that the man had power with the old gods enough to cast contrary winds across the sea and that Constantine was now fully a estranged from the old gods, despite raising a brazen image of Helios Apollo in his new city, a city he claimed, was ordained in every way by God taking him by the hand in dream and while awake and showing him the way.
>6. He hedged his bets by declining to actually be baptized and become a Christian on his deathbed. His generation believed that baptism washed away all sins and that a ruler would wait until death was nigh, so that his many necessary crimes against humanity and God would be washed away at the final hour. Common men must be baptized first and then behave like saints.
Like Diocletion before him, Constantine had to continue dividing power among his functionaries to keep conspiracy and civil war at bay. This multiplied the government functionaries, with, for instance, a general requiring for his personal use 178 servants and as many horses. The church was no more exempt from taxation as the pagan temples had been. Some pagan temples were looted for tax revenue by Constantine and his successor, but most were not.
One excellent outcome of the Christian Church as Civil Service, was that the Church had elections, so that the class of voting person who would tend to vote for rebellion, or civil war, could now vote for a bishop instead, a person who had no military function and could not threatened the Emperor.
Legions were reduced in size and multiplied. These were increasingly barbarian legions who tended to like the cross as a war symbol, as it looked like a battle standard, a sword, or the nasal guard on a helmet.
Constantine would murder his eldest son, and his sons and nephews would nearly all share the same fate at each others hands. The empire he reorganized contracted a deathly necrosis at birth, a corrupt and cruel nature, in part because it was reanimated from the corpse of an already dead empire, an empire with no soul, only fear, thirst and hunger.
In the next section I will attempt to summarize the ages of witch burning, tortures and other religious murders ignited by the genius of Constantine. For he placed himself below and besides the religious sphere while igniting and fanning religious strife between Christians in a world of such suffering, that if people did not wax fanatic and kill and damn one another over points of religious doctrine, they might rise against him. It is not accurate to say that Constantine “used the altar as a step stool to the throne.” It is accurate to describe the church as his mechanism for channeling discontent laterally across religious lines, rather than vertically up into his political sphere.
He had Crispus, his son, murdered, even as he invited the 380 bishops and 2,000 odd debate researchers to Nicea, to fight over what doctrines could retain the name Christian. It was a fight he encouraged, even with some sarcasm, even though he admitted he could not fathom the arguments of the fanatic philosophers and priests, often one in the same, as we shall see in the next summary.
…
Some Imperial Dimensions
The three highest ranks of government officials were:
> 1. Illustrious
>2. Respectable
>3. Hoorable
There were three unnamed lesser ranks.
Of 13 Diocese, the two largest, in the east, had 600 and 400 vicars each, while the 11 minor diocese had 12 each. The weight of Christianity in the Greek east was hence heavier than the 1000 eastern bishops to 800 Latin bishops indicated.
Of 116 Provinces, 71 were run by “presidents” the rest by other officials of greater rank.
Slaves were reckoned as cattle.
132 legions of 1,000 to 1,500 men.
There were an equal number of cavalry bands.
645,000 soldiers in all.
583 forts
34 arsenal cities
Dukes were military commanders.
Counts were higher ranking commanders considered to be companions of the monarch.
City soldiers were paid 1/3rd more than frontier troops.
There were 10,000 “Eyes of the Monarch” or imperial spies.
Military service was so despised that many freemen cut off their own forefinger to avoid service.
The height standard for service was reduced by 3 inches.
…
Some Quotes by Gibbon
“The invitation of a master is indistinguishable from a command.”
Rights are, “Violated by power, perverted by subtlety.”
“Taxation favors the rich, not the poor.”
Constantinople, “...this artificial colony,” “…to feed a lazy and insolent populace at the expense of the industrious husbandmen of a productive province.”
Government functionaries, “…from the titled slaves seated upon the steps of the throne to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power.”
…
A Martial Maxim
Men fight in war for the following, with a descending order or effect:
>1. Love of war [barbarian]
>2. Duty [citizen]
>3. Honor [leading citizens]
>4. Payment [mercenary]
>5. Dread [slave]
…
Notes
-0. The various heavenly symbols that marked the victories of Constantine and his sons may well have been heavenly events accompanying the world’s descent into a cooling period.
The Mute Singer
Notes on Adapting Narrative to Character from SPQR: Selek, Washington, 1/18/24
Of late more young to youngish to younger writers have contacted me concerning writing. I do realize that this old special ed tard’s rate of writing seems amazing. I would emphasize that it was not so when I held down a full time job, when I spent 4 years writing Tribes,18 months writing The Fighting Edge, 18 months writing Of the Sunset World.
There comes a saturation point, with any endeavor that requires the development of adaptive skill, such as fighting and writing, when our experience converges with our training, to light a spark. This happened for me in 2011 with the rewriting of When You’re Food. [0] And, since I am addled, brain damaged, retarded, and possibly not sane, that spark stayed to become a flame that has nearly consumed its author. For, when we try to become writers of art, we attempt to remake our self as a tool to serve our weird ego, that lad that remains under the weight of manhood.
The man I am living with has never permitted that lad to wane, has turned down promotions his entire life to work in the trades, and remains stoked with wonder. His arts are building, cooking, fishing and gaming. Mine have been reduced to writing. Having the honor of being picked up by him from Portland and transplanted to this wonder wind place, where I have written Nightsong of the Nords, Prentice Dolphin, Cube, Can, Timejacker and where American Dog and Slave are set, I found myself struggling with SPQR.
My most unique work has faltered, not for lack of idea, inspiration or mechanical skill. But because its a bigger book than I wanted. The characters are rising to exact the promise from the author—the silent muse pact he made to make up for his writing deficiencies—that he would not sacrifice them to the exigencies of plot.
There is also the problem of my eye, which has been banging under the howling winds—and there is the graphomania. I was supposed to only write fiction here, to finish SPQR and complete Slave. But, I listen to copious audio-books in those long hours when I do therapy exercises trying to shore up the back.
There are also the monastic inspirations that have attended me here: Tim’s work pants, a friend gone now three years, the Colonel’s coat with the hitched zipper, Toby, the American Dog, the feathered raptors in the poultry palace I helped build outside this pump room door, the wood stove that kept me alive when the power went out and the family was insanely clamming in zero degrees down on the ocean shore. I am again strong enough to haul and split wood. But writing health, ocular and posture, leaves limited ink in the writing well.
So I have returned to the plight of the 500 or so writers who do me the honor of reading my work. You are tired from work, weary from the world, gaslit by the over world, needed by loved ones, and stalked by petty crime thieves as well. I have 12 hours a day available to write, but the eyes can bare four at the most. What is more, the nerve medicine has clouded the mind’s eye, sent a couple muses off into the mire of some unwritable abyss. My succor, the feed for the mind, sounds from this computer in audiobooks kindly donated at great expense by my editor.
This triggers the graphomania to write history, book reviews, poetic impressions. And, at the same time, Doris Synchronus, Minicus Thrax, Max Born and Clyde of Taps demand more stage time on the shadowed stage of SPQR—Max misses his imprisoned Mum, for one.
The Synchronus Twins, Orpheus and Doris, are based on the Brickmouse and his Bride, she who used to sing at night while I shook in pain on their living room floor. As I was plotting the novel in my head, looking for non combatant characters to use for vantages in a gladiator story, I observed who close like spirit twins they were, not the opposite sorts of mates that men and women of old acquired. So, I cast them as orphan twins, as orphaned they are, being so at cross morals to this sick world, trying to be free in their little hidden space among the world dedicated to eating their hopes and drinking their woes.
I have been around such a sweet woman, whose house I clean in this near wilderness at the knee of Cedar Mountain, that I have been able to write a female vantage easily—and Doris wanted more of her story told. Having made the decision to create poetic content outlines for my remaining novels, I here abide by Aristotle’s dictum [In On Poetics] that a story is to be told in three parts. With so little time on such a busy stage, Doris’ revelatory chapter, something that I spent 20 chapters doing for Three Rivers in Of the Sunset World, had been arrogantly envisioned as a 2,000 word chapter. This is a woman—one cannot contain such a whirl of quivering, self-seeking chaos easily in one scene. So, for the second time in this novel, the first when introducing Minicus in Tyke of Pipes, I have taken a single scene and broken it in three.
Using my waning writing powers and declining health as an analog to the young writer’s increasing work and family commitments—I am thinking of Richard Barrett, Derek the Human and Andy Edwards here—I strongly urge this method of scene or chapter amplification by division. As a pulp writer I am guided by a need to keep posts below 2,000 words. When you come to a chapter, which you had envisioned covering one battle, one argument, one experiment by Brill Yates on a child procured by the Gorgon Queen from a pizza party, one chase, and find that you should have allotted three chapters, do nor rewrite the outline. It will go more smoothly if you stick with the same viewpoint character and develop them more fully in a scene expanded internally, deepened and broadened from within.
My experience has been that the more I lean on the character for this, the better the story has been. My host’ wife, Jenn, is another singing angel that got me through an illness. I see her looking, mouth agape at her husband when he says, “Whatever woman,” and dismisses her so that he and I may continue to thoughtlessly drink too much. Just thirty feet from here, surrounded by two adult sons wrestling on her dining room floor after her birthday dinner last night, yarns a muse too sweet to fight the weavers on the loom of fate, yet too emotive to resist applying her own hand to the composition of her plight. [1]
When stuck on this point, stop brooding over your novel on the way home from work, and listen to some woman on the bus try and talk her son out of some bullheaded act, or watch her tear up in concern over the plight of some homeless wretch you could care less about—use her. She is your muse, some bit of ink for your prose.
Notes
-0. The original 300 pages manuscript existed only in hard copy. So I did a scratch rewrite, copying interviews from the survey [2] but writing the narrative in real time based on events in my current life, otherwise it might have been a gloomy resurrection.
-1. I told Jenn how I was using her to composite with Guillo Girl for Doris, as well the two are composited with a girlfriend of mine for the intimate part as I don’t think about them sexually, and she said, “Oh, you mean those moments, when I become suddenly invisible to my husband and sons?”
-2. The Violence Project, 1996 to 2000.
Out of the Way!
Of A Gaslight Knight, Chapter 1: 2 of 3: Crew
The double oaken doors, proudly lacquered so as to preserve the hay fork and musket ball scars of yore, swung open before him as the Color Sergeant Major tolled like a towering, meaty bell, “Out of the Way,” an egress announcement repeated for 220 years now, in honor of “Wolf-Hound” Grant’s command to the risen Revolutionaries of the Restoration in 1804. The revolt of the Freemen of Baltimore, 172 strong, had been put down by one better man with sword in hand. The story went that some hillbilly among them so admired the Old Barrett that he turned sergeant for his erstwhile enemy then and there. The fellow's name had been Browning—just Browning—a runaway of some stripe that then and there selected for himself a proper Master. Ever since, it had been axiomatic among the Patriarchs of Dark Hall to act, and indeed BE, the very best Master to his servants, to cultivate loyalty in these treacherous American soils. [1]
Dusk was gathering. It was a tradition among the eccentric Barretts to never leave Wife, Mum, Sister, Daughter or Niece, bereft of comfort and protection, knavishly at dawn, callously at midday, or in any other way then to plunge into the night. Mother had often told him that this was not for her or her kind, but a metaphoric trope employed by the, in actual fact, callous, Barrett men to build and maintain their air of mystique and menace among the swarming “Baddies,” of revolting stripe and even among the cowed staff of Dark Hall.
The Negro doorman and the Colored lantern boy, he knew, each of them, were hiding behind the great door they had pulled open. After Old Grant had faced down those vile English, Dutch, Scotch and Irish ruffians, who later came to him hat in hand for this and for that and for the unspoken, Wolf-Hound, forever towering in Richard’s mind’s eye, had insisted that the doors to Dark Hall would only be maintained, opened and closed by free Negroes and Coloreds. [2]
This ethnic affront now, for over 200 years, held the power of hallowed tradition, to the point that Richard’s otherwise cowardly African Americans would fight to the grim end any white fellow who might move to crack the door—and lo to some Hindoo chamber servant who might ply his hand upon that portal in imitation of an Africa!
It was a very strict arrangement:
-Hindoos, Chinamen and colored women inhabited the house and saw to its many needs, Chinese preferred for librarians, coloreds for cooks, etc.,
-Negroes, Mulattoes and even Quadroons and Octoroons were employed as gardeners, gateboy, doorman, lawn boys, kennel hands and stable boys, lanternboys and spies…
“Ambrose!, Jubal,” Richard addressed the unseen doorman and lantern boy, “keep a keen eye until I return.”
“Yez, Massa Rich!” they declared from behind the great hate-pocked portals.
-Huntsmen, footmen, coachmen and colliers, the servants reserved for training, companionable conversation of the low sort that a leader of fighting men must engage in, for card playing, fencing, shooting and the like, were to be drawn from the dregs of American Humanity, a show of Barrett dominance: Anglo, Scottish, French… and God help us, Irish were to be employed in mixed company, never in an ethnic block.
-German and Dutch were employed exclusively in management of the manor.
Behind him towered his hideous one-eyed nanny, a cipher of stentorian humanity. The effect of that man’s steely gaze could be read differently upon the four figures before Richard, all at attention according to their various ken.
At far left, Dark Hall’s Marshal, Sergeant Jan von Husen, a mongrel Dutch-Bohemian bastard had for a song due to the indiscretion of his dissipated Bohemian sire, stood loyally at attention in paunchy middle years. His clean shaven face, button nose, and blue and gray uniform, was nicely offset by his sash, worn so proudly in Barrett black with white ivory buttons across the heart from right to left. His baton rode on the left, his holstered, .50 Caliber, 1891 Model, broomhandled, Springfield revolver, a monster of its kind, was tied down at the knee and holstered at the right hip.
‘Poor Jan, forever trying to live up to Color Sergeant Major, and falling a foot short among other considerations, his homeland under the Russian Heel, his ancestry defamed.’
A softness poured out of Richard on his account, as he saluted the prime defender of his Mother and siblings, arrayed to the far right. These would be nodded to, not saluted, and not engaged in any sentimental farewell. Such would mar the centuries of cultivated mystique.
“Marshal!”
“Sir!” stiffened wan Jan.
Next from left, before his mighty, belching charge, was O’Neal, his straight-punching coachman, most loyal of his two personal attendants. This man was taken hostage as a servant from the O’Neal cider liquor clan up in West Virginia by Grandpa Blake Barrett. Old Blake had always felt pale next to his nephew Rod, of about the same age. His one great action was the defeat of the O’Neal-MacCoy Clan above Romney, West Virginia—while he was on vacation for his tuberculosis, taking in the fresh Mountain Airs. Yet “duty calls in strange ways,” his dear Grandfather had told him before departing on another foray into the Appalachian Range on a conscription mission for the Queen's Own Rifles, having found the sharp shooter he sought in the terminal way.
O’Neal had been raised up loyal as a post, tall, strong and properly dressed in tweed cap, jacket and sweater over and above canvas trousers. Richard, recalling Old Blake, saluted hard and sharp, like the rifle shot that had taken his Dear Pap, “O’Neal!”
“Stoked and ready, Sir!”
‘Good God,’ he thought, ‘all of my men are twice my age or more!’
Richard then looked straight ahead at the half salute of LaFono, a godless, mongrel son of a French hooker who had fallen in love with an Irish highwayman and housebreaker and had given up his spry and perpetually active spawn to Mum, who declared him the very demon of boyhood and had him raised up by the Negresses. It was said that by age 15 he was ruling the Negroes of Dark Hall like their very king, from an egg crate throne in the barn. He would serve old Blake well, carrying his body back to Harper’s Ferry upon his wee back. LaFono was not much taller than Richard and thence made his favorite sparring partner. The mongrel saved his ring and cudgel ire for O’Neal, who was too solid and big for him to best with fists.
Richard—comically he thought—gave a salute so lazy and dissolute that young brother Donald barked a short laugh and was hushed by his older sister, who fairly hated LaFono, “LaFono?”
“Yez Boss,” drawled he, as enthusiastic as this brute could be for anything but a bottle, broad or brawl, fairly overplaying the Irish half of his heredity, as much negro as any of the true-bred ones. He was short, wiry, bald, wore a pointy China beard and a waxed curl of Irish mustache, moved like a lad of twenty, and grinned like as if Satan writing a review of Milton. Mother had groaned in dismay the first time Young Richard had been escorted to cards with the local gentlemen by LaFono while O’Neal was laid up with a lame ankle, “You right Irish beast! If my eldest son returns a drunk or venereal I shall shoot you myself!”
“Ma’am,” drawled he with a salacious wink that nearly had him shot on the instant.
LaFono, was dressed all in black in loose, rogue threads of fluff and canvas, no doubt to conceal various dishonorable device upon his person.
‘And so, the servant of my lesser nature stands well and ready too.’
With a sigh of reproach and a kind, thou stiff salute, Richard saluted the last of them, Blackie Pimpton, the collier, another old fellow, nearing fifty, who coughed perpetually, dressed all in gray and the darkest of the Negroes, due, so he claimed, to his trade. He held his coal shovel like a lifer in the Queen's Own Rifles and saluted like a saint in blackface at the very instant as his Master, who he read so well, “Sah! Stoked en ready, Sah!”
“Coal Master, Pimpton!”
‘So here we go,’ he thought, as Color Sergeant Major, bawled, “Sir Captain Richard Barrett, ON HIS WAY!’
And they all clapped, despite his duty not to acknowledge their appreciation.
Old Blake had ever said, “Richard, there is a power in mystique."
…
Notes
-1. Not “souls.” Americans of the Lower Orders do not have souls, but soils, a soul that is only elevated by toils in service to the better class of people, less it amount to nothing but a social stain.
-2. Negroes are 3 ¼s or more African. Coloreds are people of half [mulatto], a quarter [quadroon] or an 8th [octoroon]. A person who is less than 1 8th African is categorized based on nationality, Dutch, etc. The Crown does not recognize a mixed American Race of European descent, all such being designated according to native tribal or ancestral European national identity.
In A Theographic Way
Of A Gaslight Knight, Chapter 1: 1 of 3: Captain, Crew & Kit
Here the humble chronicler presents the cast and the means and frame of expedition. Each chapter of the adventure will have three parts, each with its own perspective: the Captain, The Crew and the Kit. This is done so that young lads wondering at what gadgetry and industry might do in the service to Queen and Country, as well as boys in service to their betters, and also men of good character and sterling daring, might all equally find a view of Our Gaslight Knight. The last Tory Barrett to stridently knock upon the slurry doors of insidious mystery, “Young Master Rich,” as his most loyal boy calls him, will be illuminated along with his kit and crew in an order appropriate to the narrative need of his overburdened biographer.
-Sincerely, Chester B. Pullman, Baltimore Daily Raven, 14, Durst Street, Thursday, October 3, 2024
…
The Yarn
Of A Gaslight Night: Chapter 1
-1. In A Theographic Way: Captain
-2. Out Of The Way!: Crew
-3. Upon the Highway: Kit
…
Nigh Gaslight: Chapter 2
-1. The Bit: Crew
-2. The Grift: Captain
-3. The Trick: Kit
…
Turns of Flight: Chapter 3
-1. The Ether Trail: Captain
-2. A Gawd Awful Tail: Crew
-3. Right Honorable Optical: Kit
…
A Patagonian Night: Chapter 4
-1. Hunishment: Captain
-2. Cutting the Rug: Crew
-3. Ole Right Colmarge: Kit
…
An Antarctic Bight: Chapter 5
-1. Over the Wrack: Crew
-2. Into the Maw: Captain
-3. Yer Gawd Awful Crank: Kit
…
A Saurian Blight: Chapter 6
-1. Fawking Hell, Boss!: Captain
-2. Hunting Hell: Crew
-3. A Bit of 1066: Kit
…
Of Ageless Kites: Chapter 7
-1. A Wondrous Find: Captain
-2. A Mutinous Kind: Crew
-3. A Muscular Mind: Kit
Captain
Richard stood in the long, high, narrow hall to his chamber—not his bed chamber, but that ancestral berth that contained the banner-draped and medal-festooned bed wherein not one of his ancestors had perished—all of them having died with their boots on—except, good old Grandpa Blake Barrett, who maintained but one boot upon his single foot after saving those fool revenuers from the terrible hillbilly moonshiners up in West Virginia…
‘Never mind, Richard, you are it, the last of the line, yet to marry for love like you pledged Mum… the best old hands all gone to dust.’
Doubt was tugging at his soul as he regarded himself dutifully in the mirror, of the dark door to the never before used Barrett Bier, the long, high, narrow hall of mahogany yawning behind him, exaggerating his already short height and broad shoulders. This hallway had been constructed by their Tory American Sire, that Loyal Knight of “Good” King George what had shackled Traitor Revolutionary George Washington himself in 1776, Grant “Wolf-hound” Barrett, the only one of their line to be exceptionally tall. Having accepted the Captaincy of Baltimore, Maryland, and having directed the building of this grand house, known as Dark Hall, their grandest of sires had, against the un-Christian threat of hubris, in 1800, hired the best German carpenters to construct this miracle of optical diminishment, by which the Lord Barrett, who readied himself beyond his bier door, in cognition of his duty to perish in service and not in bed, might appreciate how the evils of the world soared and loomed and yawned—the end of the hall even toothed with bison horns as gargoyle teeth—above, behind and beyond his tiny person.
‘I wonder, Mighty Grant, did you assign we your scions to short stature through this fey reminder of design?’
Richard did not mind the square-jawed face he saw under that black mink derby. The shoulders did cause the black cape to flare out over the white service jacket.
‘Thank got I did not loose the shoulder! I should look crooked and malformed.’
The hushed cough, the preemptive clearing of the NCO throat back in the Great Hall, reminded Richard that his kit and crew awaited. His high, red sable boots, braced within, supporting the twice broken ankles earned of leaping into the breach at Mogadishu—his one major action having ruined his entire frame—supported soft soles for exploratory tasks. The black, rhino horn buttons, offset the pearly linen jacket and opaque cape nicely, even as the blue crew trousers tucked in the boots helped distract from both the shortness and thickness of leg—a legacy of the adventurous Barrett men acquiring stout peasant women as battle brides. Dear Mum had hauled her own dresser once up those stairs, where she hid now weeping, when the Hindoo domestics had fagged out on the task…
His nose was still maddeningly straight, neither O’Neal or LaFano, his personal sparring partners, ever consenting to break it for him. How he envied their bent beaks! Darned lucky rustics!
‘I will not disgrace you, Mighty Wolf-Hound Grant Barrett!’ Yet the moisture in his eyes betrayed him.
‘Will the “Blunt Barrett” way do in service to such as are in the Theographical way?’
Another chill played up, rather than down, his spine. The members of the Royal Theographic Society had no head quarters, did not meet in secret chambers—for these sort of conspiratorial fellows held this impossible—cryptic-minded men one in all, many of them American, which did raise the old, “revolting!”, anti-revolutionary shade in his Barrett soul.
Richard’s mother insisted that he rise to full duty and inheritance on the vanishing of his father at the tender age of 16, publishing his first treatise on The Great War at 18. He had done quite well running the household since his untimely retirement, and had contemplated writing the complete Barrett history. A brother in the Queen’s Service in India, a darling sister of 16 and the Lads, Jake 10 and Donald 6, the increase in all their knowledge and the upkeep of Dark Hall Manor, upon the Rock of Loch Raven where his very men assured the quality of the municipal water supply against some Russian sabotage… this would have been enough to occupy a maimed life.
He had reluctantly agreed to wearing the chain mail vest under his service jacket and was conscious of a slight bagginess about his middle, plucking at the lower buttons.
Echoing around the Great Room and down the dark hall sounded, “Ahem, ah, Captain, Sir.”
‘Darn, my hideous, mutton-chopped nanny has found me out again!’
“Yes, Color Sergeant Major?”
The rest of the house was ghostly silent as he knew the servants, Hindoo and Christian alike, were with closed eyes saying prayers for Mum Barrett, his siblings out by the Coach, dear Mum at prayer in her bedstead sepulcher within the bay window that faced on the setting sun—poor Mum and her widow walk!
“Sir, do you require assistance concealing the mail that so affronts your Norman Honor? It were good enough for King William, Sir!”
“No, Color Sergeant Major,” Richard barked, clicking his heels, turning and marching down that hard, echoing harrow-hall that had failed to receive every one of his ancestors, in their own bleak turn. As the Great Room echoed and he marched past—as well as under—the towering Sergeant, to the twin hickory doors, oft pocked with musket ball and pitch fork in the days of Restoration, he wanted to turn and shout to Mother, that he would return, that he would marry for love. But all that would have ruined the mystique that kept the serving staff rather spellbound concerning he and His Kind.
Hardback Projections 2024
Conclusions and Outtakes from the Annual Editor/Crackpot Virtual Meeting: 1/10/24
Yesterday, Lynn Lockhart and the Crackpot had our annual publication meeting. This was supposed to be our second print podcast. The idea had been for us to record a podcast without me raising my voice, rendering a poor quality recording, in hopes of using the host system to generate a transcript that could be published as a print article on substack.
My voice could not be heard and the transcript could not be made.
So, we did our annual editorial meeting via skype.
What will be published this year?
First, I am taking over editing functions, since Lynn is now a school teacher and does not have the time she once had. You will have to insert their for there yourself.
Lynn does hard backs, has the rights to everything I have written on my say so.
I am trying to find paperback book publishers.
I just want the stuff in print. The publisher can have the money.
The following is what Lynn and agreed on for 2024 and 2025.
#1: Noose Born
… A Trilogy of Elder Earth: Sorcerer!, Ranger?, and Wife—
… 2023, edited, 140,778 words
This omnibus collection of my first three Medieval American alternative history series, is the first in the cue.
The following titles are long over due Aryаn histories. The reader and writer of the forwards is a young man of Greece, appropriated named Achilleas.
#2: Sons of Aryаs
… Soul of the West: Volume 1
… 2020, unedited, 117,436 words
#3: Beasts of Aryаs
… An Inquiry into Aryаn Culture, Domestication and the Monstrous
… 2021, unedited, 117,460 words
#4: Songs of Aryаs
… Considering the Strands of Aryаn Tradition with Blue-Eyed Daughter of Zeus [in paperback print]
… 2022, edited, 63,288 words
… 2021, Blue-Eyed Daughter of Zeus is 10,849 words
There we go, four huge books for the Lady to put out in hard back.
The Literate Hoodrat intends to complete, in this year a single history book. I am working on two, possibly four biographies of people I stay, with, which are on no time line, are episodic, and can wait for publication for whatever time I am unable to re visit those men. I am hoping to travel for two more years before staying put whereever this piece of junk collapses. Yet who can know what the Norns have in store for we, the puppets in their play.
#A: Shrouds of Aryаs
… Considering the PreConditions of Aryаn Decline
… 2024, 83 chapters complete, text un-arranged, 20 chapters outlined, unedited
#B: Fay Away, a Travel Journal covering from December 1 2023 thru March 23, 2024.
#C: Gimp, a journal, March 24 thru November 30 2024
#D: SPQR, A Novel of Brittanic Rome, January
#E: Slave. A Novel of Elder Earth, February
#F: Nihil: A Speculative Fiction, March
#G: Porch: A Harm City Novel, April
#H: Tinman: Science-Fiction, sequel to Motherboard, May
#I: Knight: A Novel of Elder Earth, August
As my mechanical health is steadily degenerating, I intend to dedicate the later half of 2024 to completing three massive Plantation America volumes of 700 pages each. Currently, 123 chapters are complete. 40-some odd chapters remain in outline: I require of the eyes to complete those 40 chapters and reread and annotate works by the following writers: Thomas Hellier, Captain John Smith, William Bradford, Moses Roper, Hinton Rowan Helper, Cotton Mather, Thomas White, William DeFoe, John Bunyan and a handful of others who currently slip my mind.
#J. The Planters: In This New Israel I, an investigation of the physical and political foundations of Plantation America
#K. The Sowers: In This New Israel II, an investigation of economic and ethnic exploitation in Plantation American
#L: The Inheritors: In This New Israel III, an investigation of runaways and revolts, post Civil War slavery in America and the post modern legacy of Plantation America.
That is an ambition of 12 books, a dozen crimes against Leviathan. I feel certain to hit 10.
2025 Book Projected for Hardback Publication
#1: Strange Yarns: The Collected Fiction of James LaFond, 2024
#2: Search for an American Spartacus, 2020, 768 pages, complete and unpublished, revolts and uprisings in Plantation America
#3: In These Goings Down, 2021, 518 pages, complete and unpublished, a general history
#4: Plantation America, 2022, 351 pages, complete and unpublished, a general history
There, Lynn has four massive hardback books to publish in 2025.
If you would like to publish any of my work in paperback, contact me at 443-686-0598 and at jameslafond dot com at gmail dot com
‘On TV’
In These Parts Sidebar 3: Two Brothers Speak of Fight Times: 12/25/23
Jim
The big man speaks with his elbows on his knees on the couch next to me, shaping the vivid scenes in his mind]s eye with a flutter of big active hands.
“We wrestled in school, of course. I boxed at [names small Oregon town rec center] and then finished boxing out of Mount Scott [the major Southeast Portland Rec center]. [1] Mike was the boxer in the family. Rick and I got involved in professional wrestling, which was crazy—in a way not as crazy as the arm wrestling scene. You need to talk to Kelley about that.”
Mike and Jim ask about stick fighting and I show them the oft broken right index finger. Mike shows a badly healed broken finger and Jim grins, working his left hand around his right hand like a curator of knuckle head mysteries.
“I was in a cage fight, had this guy against the cage on one knee and was grounding and pounding. I got the Kayo, didn’t realize that I had caught my finger in the fence. [I think I recall this being the left middle finger. I’m not waiting to check it as I do not know if I will ever see Jim again. The whiskey was beginning to impinge my recall.] So, I think, oh, this will be fine. I just need to straighten it out. I straighten the finger out, and it’s straight alright, but the bone is coming out of the skin!”
[This calls for, if I see Jim again, an interview focusing on just cage fighting.]
Mike
The long-haired man in the leather jacket with the wide cheek bones and hawkish face generally paces or stands, sometimes sitting near Kelley. He is cagey, but likes to laugh. He is still lean, with wide shoulders and long boned arms and hands at 62 years. Mike asked a lot of questions about the author’s boxing and stick fighting experience, which account for the gaps in the slim text below. Mike doesn’t talk at length, in narrative, like his younger brother Jim, but prefers bullet point exchanges.
“Middleweight, all the way, amateur, pro. I was mostly taller then the guys my weight, especially in the gym. Found myself punching down a lot and had to be careful of the top of the head.
“Only got dizzy once, but I won that.
“Did bare knuckle a few times.
“Yep, generally easier then glove, quicker.
“You’re not a loser if you boxed, if you fought. You maybe led with your face. But the losers, they’re the ones that never boxed. It’s a small club really.
“I only lost twice, to the same guy, Mike McCully. Those were the only two times I lost, and the only two times I fought on TV. I had sparred him in the gym and tuned him up. Then for the TV fights, it was like he was a different man, like he had a problem in the gym—but none in the ring! I can tell you that. So, I only lose twice. But no one knows who I am, because McCully beat me in my only two TV fights. Oh, well.
“A toast, to Mike and whoever the hell you fought twice and could never beat.”
I lifted my glass, and said, “Aaron.”
“Beat you twice, fist or stick?”
“Stick, thirty-five out of thirty-five!”
“God Damn!”
[laughter]
And we drank.
Notes
-1. I have recently visited Mount Scott, which is now closed for a 16 month earthquake proofing renovation. I knew from Kelley and a boxer named Derek, that Mount Scott produced amateur boxing champions and well regarded pros. I went in looking for a punching bag or two, figuring that there might at least be a bogus boxing fitness program. When I asked about boxing and boxing equipment the staff were horrified. I was pointed to the all weight training and machine fitness room. Beyond this point I wandered until finding an abstract art of two boxing figures. Next to this were two sentences memorializing a coach Minsky who had been a national amateur champion and was a cofounder of this same facility, whose staff members cringe at the very notion of a punching bag.
‘The Dog House’
In These Parts Sidebar 2: Three Men Speak of Wild Times: 12/25/23
As I was seated with these five big men, the conversation advanced to a story about a leather jacket which Kelley will have to tell again, and from thence to a tale of Mike and Jim’s father collecting some money in a menacing fashion, and thence to his not forging someone for not taking proper care of a piece of property. The Leather Jacket story will be related in The Devil’s Point.
Kelley: Whatever happened to Jack and Dianne?
Mike: Fuggin’ dead, I think, died in prison.
Jim: Dianne died in prison. She went up on federal charges, because she had her name on all six houses. He didn’t sign for shit.
Mike: That was some cold shit there.
Kelley: But she was a knowing partner—in up up her elbows.
Jim: He went up on state charges. She died doing time. He got released and retired for a few years in Tennessee before he passed.
Kelley: They got me to haul weed for them a couple times. But when I saw what they were doing, how big their operation was, I said, “Fuck you. You people are gonna get busted.” They had all these hydroponic systems. It was too much, were buying cars…
Author: Wouldn’t the energy consumption get them targeted?
Mike: Not so much back in the day. Things weren’t all computerized. Besides, they had the plastic caps on the meters. They eventually replaced them with glass.
Jim: Jack used to get into the gas meter and use a paper clip to stall the gear, but only long enough so that the reading would indicate normal monthly consumption instead of what they were using.
Kelley: Fuckers were into it, that’s for sure!
Jim: So, the one grow house, he paid us [author forgets the dollar amount] a month, each, to live their like a regular family, to never go downstairs.
Kelley: Like that ain’t fuggin’ suspicious!
Mike: Really, it was some Adams Family shit!
[laughter]
Jim: [Rises forward on the edge of his seat, eyes bright, talking with his hands.] Law enforcement didn’t have the satellite capability and the computerized energy records. It would only be one house in a neighborhood, and like I said, he was adjusting the meter reading, which not only throws that angle of investigation, but reduces the gas bill!
[spreads arms] He has a Big Dog lived in the yard. You could lift the dog house, which was on a wooden platform, and there was a staircase leading down to a tunnel into the basement. Only one time he had us get into a bucket for him.
Mike: And the buds were that big! [makes a circle with his hands as large as a baseball] It wasn’t gonna last—gettin’ too big.
Kelley: When he started buying cars you knew it was only a matter of time. It’s like senior skip day every day, you’ll eventually get caught.
Author: What is senior skip day?
Mike: You mean you never been in high school?
Kelley: He’s from Baltimore. They probably have head hunting day instead.
[laughter]
Author: I flunked out in high school.
Jim: So, it would be a Friday, towards the end of the year. No senior’s who skipped school would be listed as absent, unless they got caught. The teachers would try and catch us. This one teacher [name searched for and found but forgotten by author] he would stake out the parks where we liked to party, park across the entrance and call the cops—total prick. So I would scope out where the bulk of the seniors would go to party and get myself a vantage above that, so that’s we’d have plenty of time to pack up and clear out.
Kelley: So movin’ weed for years, especially when you’re growin’ and distributing in an urban area, it’s like senior skip day every day.
Mike: Just couldn’t last.
Jim: But The Dog House, that was genius!
To be concluded in On TV.
‘Howdy, Neighbor’
A Day in San Jose Walking the Setting for the Novel Nihil: 12/7/2023
I planned on writing a novelette, Nihil, over these three days. This ambitious but not unrealistic project [1] has wilted under fey old age: I sleep 10-12 hours in the soft lit, cool night, listening to audio recordings of history books. The resulting history articles are taxing. I have brought back books to the recycled book store. The articles still need complete, before their return.
The stacks in the history room beckon. I find a book on Crazy Horse and Red Cloud for my roommate Little Boy, who is Northern Cheyenne. I find a Plantation America source in the stacks, copy the title and author and date, and text it to Lynn so she may render me a usable word file. I find readable, thin volumes on the 1381 Peasant Rising and on De Toquerville’s American observations.
I had thought to write two chapters today in Nihil. I woke groggy, listening to The Alchemist, a nice short novel by a man with a Spanish name, narrated by Jeremy Irons.
Tired after history, I cross the street to eat, the last dose of my traveling Iᴠermectin apple flavored horse dewormer that I eat a morning to hold back various plagues, leaving me wanting food before the return fast. 20 hour train trips down and back make excellent times to fast with little temptation. The last twenty pounds needs to come off so I can get back to Iggy Pop levels of emaciation and hopefully take some strain off of the lame leg and certainly much strain off of my sore shoulders.
I was tired and hungry. Last night I stayed up and finished my two nights of eating this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, munching on peanuts and pork rinds washed down by a $10 six-pack of cheap beer while listening to audiobooks. [2] The grog did not want to leave the cloudy mind—the nerve medicine making it worse, the medicine for the eye seizures that have been plaguing me twice daily making all the more sleep creep sure.
I outlined a novel and a biography yesterday: Siren: A Fable of Nike and the Seven Sires and In These Parts: Remembrances of Kelley B. Days of fading health and gathering shadows can make for good fiction writing quality if not pace, so long as these are not action scenes, but perspective. I am hoping after this piece to write a chapter in Nihil, to be completed on my next visit. Or, a chapter in Kelley’s life, might for the monkey on my back, suffice.
I just received a phone call from a long time lady friend who game me a pep talk and helped some…
The cafe across the street is manned by Julio and a younger, bald fellow. This fellow pats me lightly on the back and calls me, “Buddy,” while Julio, older and full haired names me “Sir,” and “Bro,” alternately, causing the younger man to chuckle. The corned beef skillet is $19.99 and coffee $3.99 [4 cups] with 9.375% California tax and a 3% living cost fee.
I had brought enough money to have a meal like this daily. But the rooms went up to $120 a night and the greedy Hindu at the counter beamed when I asked him if he took cash, “Cash, yes, cash!”
I prefer not to use a debit card and most hotels insist. But this clean, small motel, well, it is run by the new managerial class in America, Indians, who use Mexicans for labor and Caucasians for contractors.
Yesterday it rained, so the cute blonde with the big natural rack and the green tube top split by her purse string, would not be out in the winter sun, in the cool, cloudy aftermath. No sense in taking a walk.
A broken down cracker is returning from his beer and snack run on his bicycle to his room as I leave.
When I return, knocked almost cold by the good meal, the darling Latina maids ask me if I need anything and seem depressed when I told them I leave today, as I tip them.
Grabbing my glasses to take next door to the book stacks a new SUV packed with four Asian babes stops to speak with me, smile, and point to the room they are staying in, wondering, it seems, if I would like to visit. I suppose they are being dispersed soon to some of the numerous massage parlors on the Left Coast.
It’s a shame I’m not staying, four tiny cuties in a one bed room, well, that would kill a day of writing energy for sure.
The street crossings are easy, even cholo gang bangers glad to let an old crippled cracker crumble across the street. Really, criminals in San Jose are nicer than the cops, karens, groes and wigger yos of the hollowed [not hallowed] east.
The forty-something cracker grunt standing outside the liquor the night before last, just drinking his six-pack of Hineken, did not have to worry about being the target of a feral groe chimp-out.
A handful of young women say good morning to me.
The only crappy personality is the Hindu merchant down the street who sells $10 6-packs of Busch.
The book store staff is very nice, including the cute, blocky-bodied dyke who looks at me with a warmth not found among the Lesbos of the East, and shapes her soft greeting, Welcome, come on in,” and her energetic farewell, “Thank you so much for stopping in—would you like a bookmark, sir?”
I teeter out, determined to get back here to this tiny night stand, between the bed and the fridge, where the only light hangs above, to compose something worthwhile at this makeshift mini desk.
I am in room 18, which is, of course, right next to room 6, the door of which is generally partly open. Yesterday I heard a noise and opened the door, wondering if it were one of the maids. A squat Latino in rain gear with fishing pole was walking away. When I opened the door he turned around and waved.
The room on the other side of me, 21, I think is occupied by Jerry Springer, a foul mouthed blond man organizing a meet up of some kind, while speaking to a woman in a small white sedan.
After entering and getting ready to write, there is a knock on the door, a man’s knock. I open the door and it is the Latino next door, holding out a chocolate covered ice cream bar by the stick, still in the wrapper, who smiles and says, “Howdy, neighbor!”
I might have smiled as I stammered, thought of declining, and said, “Oh, oh thanks.”
I took the delicacy, which must have run him $2 in San Jose and we waved to each other. I tossed the bar in the trash, feeling bad about that and recalling Guru Rick’s sage advice: “Living with eaters is tough, tough on discipline.”
It is interesting that these recent Americans, just learning to speak American, treat this wandering stranger so much better the those people who are supposedly his fellow citizens.
Outside I hear by the cars rolling by that it has rained again, and according to some walker or another, the leaves on the double wide sidewalk of the 70 year old commercial district, yet claw at the concrete: big, beautiful maple leaves, fallen from a breed of beige and vanilla two-tone trees that line the concrete and asphalt Beautiful Way. There, in three short hours, this fantasy of being able to rent a room and live in autonomy, will once again end, as the gimp shoulders its 25 pound life and crutches back west to the enabling railway.
The kind Spic next door is playing Christmas music—perhaps the first real neighbor I’ve had since I lost the house next to Eric in 1999.
I will try to write tomorrow morning on the train.
…
Notes
-1. I wrote Thunderbird at about 30,000 words in one weekend in 2017.
-2. 3 cans a night, jest enough to keep the liver in trim for Portland. Train rides are now coffee only, the beer at Manhattan prices. As a cripple, about my only remaining human skill is drinking companion.
A Gaslight Knight
An Ether Ark Novel
…
Copyright 2024 James LaFond
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart Publisher
In association with Pulp Fiction Renaissance
…
Dust Cover
Young Master Richard Barrett, whose Norman ancestors subdued England in 1066, who crushed Cromwell and saved King Charles in 1646, who, in 1776, hunted George Washington like the dog he was and had him drawn and quartered before the Continental Congress cringing upon their gallows, before they swung from the long Arm of King and Country—has a dilemma…
Since the guns of August roared in 1941 and Germany was crushed between Britannia and Russia, the Great Game had grown more bitter, and by fits and stops, had dithered, even withered. “Why,” wondered Young Master Rich to his faithful Color Sergeant Major, in the cold summer of 2024, “has not one technological improvement been brought from drawing board to factory to battlefield to finally permit the Russian Bear to be brought to heel?”
He had begun to suppose that only the Royal Theographical Society had a clue, and resolved to approach their secretive door.
…
Dust Cover Continued
“And the Russians, clods that they are, have they not had a fresh mechanical idea since the telescopic dueling pistol depleted their officer corps beyond all recovery?”
As if the very walls had ears, the doorbell rang and O’Neal the Scotch coachman and LaFano the mongrel Irish-American footman, apparently having fought to a draw over who had the honor of delivering the post to their Master, stood, bruised, bleeding and tattered, in great shame, as the official post had been torn asunder, each holding half.
Color Sergeant Major, huffed, “Properly indented by ye loyal rabble, I see, Sir.”
“Young Master Rich,” winced O’Neal, sliding his eyes to his smaller fellow, who completed the announcement, according to some truce that must have been more awkward than the combat “Roil Social, pos’, Boss,” as they both, with surprising cooperation, extended their half of the official dispatch from that most noble fraternity of Truth Seekers, in service to Queen Gloria and Great Britain: The Royal Theographic Society.
Richard, a mere thirty years of age, recently discharged from service bearing the Victoria Cross from wounds sustained defending Mogadishu from the Fanatic Maddi Hordes, extended his one and only arm, his sword arm thank God!—and received that Gaelic indented letter with an ominous chill coursing up his spine. For Reeves “Colmarge” Barrett, his great, great grand sire, hero of the Great War, as well as Uncle Rodney “Rod” Barrett, hero of the Third Sepoy Rebellion, “Savior of the Raj,” had both vanished mysteriously, in their own time, in service to this secretive fraternity.
He could not bear to finish opening the envelope and letter and handed it to his faithful Color Sergeant Major, the both of them having retired with honors after the same mad, Somali affray. He feared news of one of these men, or of Father, that he must deliver to Mother, who had been inconsolable since Father, cartographer for the Royal Geographic Society, had failed to return from his survey of Antarctica.
Following the rustle of blood and snot stained paper, a hum of interest and a click of boot heels, the Color Sergeant Major—no one did really know his name, except perhaps his dear Mum, if he had one, yet it was opined that a mother could not bring such an automatonish fellow into this world—announced: “Sir, God surely interceded in the affray between your Loyal Beast and Savage Imp here, for they failed to tear the side note, appended upon the STATIONARY OF and with the dainty pen hand OF Her Majesty, Queen Gloria, who regrets to inform you, Captain, Sir, that you are to report for duty to The Royal Theographic Society, post haste, with such effects, equipment, adjutants—ahum, and if fit for duty, man servants—for business of the most urgent nature, Sir.”
Richard opened his eyes, feeling the assurance of his sergeant’s towering presence next to him, and saw before him his two man servants, doing their burly best to imitate a military salute. Recalling the last ragged line of godless crooks and brig rats he had led against the Maddi, and that victory had been theirs, Richard regained his characteristic confidence and saluted the only command he had:
“O’Neal, never mind the carriage, Color Sergeant will direct the domestics as to that. Attend me on the packing of my library and science instruments.
“Yes, Sir,” nodded O’Neal.
“LaFono: the gun locker, the sword rack, and the liquor cabinet—medicinal grade liquors only; we travel light; The Theographers prefer airship to steamer, weapons and liquor must not exceed the combined weight of us four—do you understand?”
“Yeah, boss,” mumbled LaFono.
The two brutes shuffled off, as apish as creatures bred to northern latitudes could appear, and Richard grinned up at his faithful companion and fellow medical retiree, whose left ear had been lost to a scimitar and his right eye to a lance, offset by his black pith helmet, “At it again, Color Sergeant Major!”
“Indeed, Captain, Sir, into the wind we sail again.”
…
Inspired by a boxing bout with my friend Beast O’Neal and a conversation with young Richard Barrett of Pulp Fiction Renaissance, and two weeks spent living with the most terrible little bird of hell, Ripley the carnivorous parrot.
…
Dedicated to Damien of Arkham Reporter.
…
“When considering the words of the powerful, we should focus on their actions, not what they say.”
-Witeny Web
...
Ether Ark Premise
What if the British Empire never fell?
This would be contingent, primarily on stopping the American Revolution. Such an event would have required intercession, by angels, time travelers, aliens or demons. As Benjamin Franklin opined, "If God takes notice of the death of a sparrow, he surely takes notice of the rise of a great empire."
Thinking back to conversations on British Empire pulp fiction with Young Richard Barrett, it occurred to me, that combining H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness concept with the idea of a giant avian race ruling humans through mind control at the center of a hollow earth, in an Antarctic setting, might supply such an interceding race. Many UFO and ancient alien theorists suspect that aliens were alerted by the nuclear blasts of 1945 and began interfering with humanity then.
In order to maintain a gaslight era, steampunk setting for pulp adventures, the author here supposes that beginning with the voyage of Drake, near to Antarctica in the 1580s, that ancestors of the protagonist, the storied Barretts, made contact with a terrestrial alien intelligence of ancient extraction. These evolved saurian scientists, similar in type to the villains in Harry Harrison’s West of Eden trilogy, and to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mahar villains of the Pellucidar novels, are raptors that retreated to an Antarctic sanctuary to escape the extinction event of some 60 millions years ago. Do note that ten foot tall, carnivorous, ax-beaked bird fossils have been found in Southern South America.
…
The Royal Theographic Society
This world is conceived of by its more inquisitive theorists as an Ark, adrift in an Ether Universe and stalked by evils from other dimensions. These dissident minds, who suspect bankers in service to some dark powers of buying off and doing away with leading inventors and scientists, and of barring colonization of Antarctica in service to their alien masters, are The Royal Theographic Society, founded by the occult minds of Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1913.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Mervin Peake, Eddison, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert. E. Howard, L. Sprague De Camp and C.S. Lewis, rather than being pulp fiction writers and fantasy authors, where instead recruited as early agents of Theography.
A Gaslight Knight is a refraction of the ideas of the above authors and Theographical Investigators into what is hoped to be a pleasingly disturbing fiction.
-James LaFond, Pittsburgh, PA, April 6, 2024
‘A Beast’
In These Parts Sidebar 1: Two Brothers Speak of He They Lost: 12/25/23
Jim is in his 50s, tall, thick, barrel built, with crushing hands, a bald head, a clear cadence to his voice and high level recall, the youngest of four brothers, the natural family historian. Jim smiles wide, and leans forward. He is the designated driver. Jim wears jeans and a sweater of polo type, has bright sparkling eyes that reflect the keen recollections of a clan’s curator.
Mike is not as tall, not near as thick, lean, with big snakey hands and wide puncher’s shoulders. He reminds me right off of Allen Hoyt, known as Stick in East Baltimore, a natural punching machine. Mike has a deep, low, mumble prone voice, and understated tone marking him as having been oft feared. Mike grins, sly and grim, attended by a pleasing lady glad to have his company. He dresses in jeans, black T-shirt and black leather jacket, with shoulder-length brown hair and a hawkish beak of a nose, cutting a rakish figure that in another age would mark the duelist.
Jim: I’m the youngest of five, Mike is the oldest, not the biggest.
[laughter]
Mike: And I can still beat your ass—all of you.
Jim: Always could—have to say though, that it got harder not easier as time went on.
Mike: That’s the truth, there. We wrestled, boxed, professional arm wrestling, pro wrestling—Rick did—and he did [Jim.] Cage too, that crazy shit.
Jim: There was Mike, made a name wrestling in school, got women, had fear and respect. Then there’s Carl, Rick, and myself. Our father, who could always kick all our asses until he hit seventy and always packed a pistol—he told us, you each pick a sport, one sport, and don’t quit, stick with it until the end of the year. If you don’t like it, try something else next year. Well, Mike wrestled. We wanted to be like Mike.
Mike: Good luck!
[laughter]
Jim: Rick was the strongest, a real beast.
Mike: He made Olympic alternate, didn’t get to wrestle in the Olympics. Was national champion.
Jim: Mike moved up in weight, just declared he’d wrestle higher, over his weight, so that Rick could wrestle.
Mike: I still won. [grinning]
Jim: Of course you won! [smiling] So Rick only ever loses to one man. Our father was at every match, always giving a hard time to the officials. They hated to see Our Father!
Mike: Motherfuckers knew, off the mat, in the world, he was the judge. He carried himself.
Jim: Oh, that he did! So, Rick is very hard on himself when he finally loses. Then I say to him, you know who that guy is you lost to, right?
Mike: Losing did not come easy for Rick—didn’t do enough of it to ever get used to it!
[laughter]
Jim: I tell Rick, look, that man you lost to, signing those shoes over there, that, is Dan Gable.
Mike: An honor that was—a good match.
Jim: We all loved fishing. We set a fishing date and we roll up and he doesn’t answer his door. Go inside, and he’s gone, stiff as a board. I had a toxicology report run on him and there was nothing, no alcohol, no weed. Rick liked to drink and smoke.
Mike: He must have been broke and his friends broke too—he liked his weed!
[laughter]
Jim: [looking dreamy-eyed up to the white ceiling as we six men sit around the living room] Such a good brother, so hard to lose. In six months we lost Rick, our sister and our father. That was a hard year.
Mike: Our sister used to have anxiety attacks.
Jim: She would have these anxiety attacks and it would raise her heart rate, and then she would calm down.
Mike: She has one, and as she’s coming down, right when she should be alright, she falls over and is gone.
Jim: Like that. It was terrible. Quick. [musing with hand under chin.]
Mike: You really thing asthma killed Rick?
Jim: Combined with sleep apthnea, it can be fatal. He always took care of his yard, had just cut the grass. What I think happened is he cut the grass, got stung by a bee and didn’t know it, and had an asthma attack in his sleep.
Mike: A damned bee—but that makes sense, even a honey bee that got blow off its clover by the lawn mower?
Jim: We had such a good family, such a life.
Mike: Still do, brother. I’m beating this cancer, commin’ back.
Jim: [smiling with a far away look] You know the cops have 82nd staked out, they’ll be pulling over everybody, and I’m sober.
Mike: Off to the kitchen for a toast, for them that’s here and those that aren’t.
To be continued in The Dog House and On TV.
The Spoiler
In These Parts Sidebar: Ken Speaks of Times Gone Wrong: 12/25/23
It is Christmas and I am having a beer while my Land Lady visits her friends dear, on our way to visit Kelley and his clan for Christmas cheers. Most of this involves sitting with Ken, while our owners gossip and smoke out on the deck. Ken retired as a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, and has a dark sense of humor.
A few weeks ago, the news of a deceased First Lady triggered a memory of stocking Marine 1 with barbie dolls and candies for the first daughter and her friends. The class stratification of military society provides a strong undercurrent to Ken’s many stories. He describes retirement as kind of suspended animation, with the embalming fluid being beer.
A pretty Indian girl named Stephanie, with shiny black hair, suggests we play a game, by placing all of our phones in the center of the table and the first one to pick one up buys a round. We had a nice conversation and then Ken, asks the Land Lady to make a fact check, tricking her into picking up her phone and buying a round.
The matriarchal officer class repair to the deck once again and Ken grins, “I call myself The Spoiler, just born with a penchant for rocking the boat…
In Saigon we used to have these Doughnut Dollies, we called them; round-eyed Red Cross girls. Base life was full of grim humor. My bunk mate woke one morning to one of these giant thirty pound rats eating the callouses off his feet, drew his .45 and blew that thing to hell—lucky he didn’t shoot off his foot.
Anyways, the Doughnut Dollies, you know, they are 4s back in the States and 10s in Vietnam, so they act it. They were in their early twenties and me, I was 17, youngest soldier on the base and I was already running repairs on airplanes. A helicopter is an airplane, our arrogant insistence on defying the laws nature.
The Doughnut Dollies, these Red Cross honeys, they treated us enlisted men like children, stand you up and have you spell the name of your state. I had no time for this petty bullshit, these games. So, while this woman, this Doughnut Dolly, round-eyed queen is playing her kindergarten word games, I head out of the hanger onto the tarmac.
This woman then says, “Where are you going, Baby Cakes?”
You know, I’m only a hundred pounds, young, and I don’t know what I was thinking or where it came from. But I returned, “They don’t call me Baby Cakes. They call me The Spoiler.”
Of course, later, I am called into the office by the Sergeant Major who makes me issue a former verbal apology to this person, this non war-fighting cutie. They were there for the officers, spent their time in the Officers Club. They weren’t there for us enlisted swine.
When I was on Deago Garcia—it’s a British possession but it’s all American stuff. The SR-71 Blackbird used to land there. They have underground hangers, vast facilities, underwater facilities too, that you can see under there. We had this one pug-looking woman there, the only female on the island. Our Colonel came back to base and had a shirt made for her that said, ‘I was a Ten on Deago Garcia.’
She loved it.
Recall a few years back, when that airliner went down in the Indian Ocean?
Occasionally some pristine piece is found, too clean, for what was supposed to be a deep sea crash. I have sometimes wondered if maybe that airliner saw something it shouldn’t. It was headed that way, and possibly fell prey to that cryptic facility.
As a Master Sergeant on Marine One it was part of my training rotation to fly mock missions to carry off the elite into the underground bunkers, and there do training, in case we end up being the post apocalyptic slaves of the few designated to survive. These things are so deep they can take a direct nuclear hit. I dislike ever going through Wyoming. It is pocked full of these Air Force facilities. The doors are a foot thick steel and have to be opened and closed on railroad tracks.
These facilities are not for scum like us, they are for the higher ups, the politicians and such. There are eight such facilities within a thirty minute flight of Washington D.C. On my rotation, I was running procedures at the one near Winchester, Virginia. Of course, we are being guarded and supervised by the “real men” the alphabet soup deep state goons, if you will.
We are just mules. But these men are sharp enough to want feedback from their mules. We were given a procedure for transporting the Primary, the top man of our refuge. He might be the V.P., Speaker of the House, whatever. The President, he’s not at one of these things, he is re-feuling in the air forever, until its time to land and survey what is left of the fucking planet.
They give us this procedure on informing this person, the primary, the head-uppity-up-in-charge, if you will, of the disposition of his wife and children, his loved ones. When they asked for feedback at debriefing, I said, put up my little spoiler hand, “In such a situation, the man in charge’s family is toast, they’re out there with the general population being deep fried. He should not be informed of the fate of his loved ones until some point later. Otherwise his ability to make decisions will be compromised by his grief.”
They told us that no one had ever offered such observations, that not one man other than this ordinary rural boy, of the thousands of military folk run through this process, had ever offered the most obvious observation concerning maintenance of the commander’s peace of mind, or at least their sanity. This makes me wonder, it does, are we all afraid of making the honest observation? Or are we just too darned stupid?
So, anyways, I have maintained The Spoiler in me. It’s my dark little search light.
‘The Deal’
In These Parts #5
The deal was, Friday night. Almost all coke is sold—or was, back in my day—on Friday night. Just like I didn’t drink far from home, I didn’t sell far from home. I had a job, that is number one. Don’t sell on the job. Near the job. Only sell to friends, people you know, or on a stretch, in a bar where you were regular, so you knew who wasn’t.
Pushing? The idea of a drug pusher is crazy. You have to push people away, people you don’t know, people you don’t trust, people that might be in trouble with the cops.
Get it and go, no cutting it, playing with it, storing it up. I learned that the hard way. We had cops out front. I had coke. I thought, oh, shit, this is bad. Well, the cops were here for the neighbor’s idiot son or something and my coke ends up scattered around the garden on the dirt—try sorting that out! The rats were happy, I can tell you that.
That weed was ever illegal is kind of crazy. I didn’t deal much in that. I did, one time, bring a bag of weed and ajar of the oil camping. We were way out, a hundred degrees, enjoying ourselves at a rural lake. We were horse playing, karate fighting, diving off the pier and here comes this county sheriff down this long ass hill, all by himself. Took him a half hour to walk down to us.
There was no radio, just him and us, three big fuggers and him. I dump the weed, scatter it about. But he saw us through his binoculars, had been spyin’ on us. He wanted to know what was in the jar and I told him. He asked about us and I told him I had a DUI on me and that I was a truck driver.
He said, “You know, you could be in a whole lot of trouble here.”
I said, “I know, but we just came out for a good time, don’t know nobody out here, not sellin’ anything”—and we weren’t. It was just a good-time supply.
Well, what was in the jar was weed oil. It was leaking, so when he took it and put it in his pocket it stained his shirt—his uniform I guess you’d say.
Weed was just too bulky, not discrete enough. You had to sell a lot to make money—just a pain in the ass. I was just a guy that knew a guy and everybody wanted to do coke on Friday, cut loose after work...and that guy can only be so many places at once.
Now Mike, he told me about the docks, down on the waterfront. There was this bar where all the longshoremen went to cash their checks. The barmaid had a safe full of money. Big Irish fuggers, always wantin’ to know who was the biggest and baddest, ready to fight.
Now Mike [redacted] he was a good boxer. Then there was Paul, the hard hittin’ knock your ass out guy. [1] So, we go down there on Friday night after work when everybody has got paid. The deal was, bare knuckle fights on this pier that looked like wood covered with asphalt, a real power punching surface. These fuggers would go down hard and quick. Was not a lot of dancin’ around. Now Mike could get out there—being a real good technical boxer, not just a big lug like me or a knockout guy like Paul—and you could bet on the fights.
I was not fightin’ with these fuggers. I would put up money and it was a good time. Mike was the guy knew everything about the fight game and knew these longshoremen who were, tough, tough guys.
You’re dealing with men like that, a lot of them, at their bar, where they work, in their world—you behave yourself and don’t pull any shit. Three of us and thirty of them, all of them big, unloading stuff all day. The fact that I was a driver and dealt with men on docks at various pick up and drop off points, well, none of these were places I’d sell—that’s my job—what’s some side money to a good job?
Deal is, I knew these kind of men, knew how they behaved, knew how to get along. That is the key right there, to know people, to avoid placing trust in people like at the bar the other night [1] with big mouths. You deal with people you drink with, are involved with through fighting, arm wrestling, working the door at bars.
There were times that friends called me to a bar they worked at for some backup when there was a big mob of fuggers causing trouble. You’re working a door, that little world there in the bar and just outside, having one or two brothers show up, that will more or less settle it because you have the solid focus, the bond—the people misbehaving, maybe touching the bar maid or the strippers, they have a negative focus that doesn’t bind well together under pressure. Faced with men with that bond that are shoulder to shoulder—or commin’ up behind them to help out—they tend to disperse, which is what you want.
You don’t want the cops called.
The thing is, the wild card, is that strippers love coke, will flock around anyone that has it. I guess there has to be something wrong in the mind of anybody that is gonna get up and take their clothes off and dance. Strippers are great. But strippers are trouble… so that’s one reason to step away from that side gig, risky shit combined with flaky women.
…
Notes
-1. I was at The Dive Bar last night, and a man named Donnie, same age as Kelley, was talking about this same Mike, that he had lost a good union job for selling something illegal on the job. I asked nothing, just burglarized that conversation. Few people at the bar like this Donnie fellow, who is a real, loudmouthed man. He is a big fellow who is nice to me.
Sons of Arete
The Acts of Fists & Furies: 480 to 367 B.C.
Copyright 2024 James LaFond
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart Publisher
…
Dust Cover
In the years when the boldest men of Hellas battled the slavish armies of the King of Kings, at the Hot Gates where Leonidas led according to royal obligation in 480 B.C., down to the fields of Cunaxa, in 401 B.C., where Xenophon was elected general by a leaderless army, one boxer “lived to an unnatural old age.”
Sons of Arete is the story of that man and a handful of his fellows, as if written by the poet Menander 342-292 B.C. These obscure heroes where five boxers: Theogenes, Euthymus, Timocreon, Polydamas and Astyanax, and a poet: Simonides. The novel is written as if in experimental form by Menander as an ode to Simonides and Euthymus, their rivals, their cruel masters, and their defiant acts, as they fought a metaphysical battle across the face of the same world where generals, now well-remembered, battled the gross forces of the same Westward Reaping Evil, forces that these six men grappled with alone and in obscurity.
…
To the Reader
All chapters of Sons of Arete are based on the author’s findings concerning the deeds of the ancient boxers for his book series The Broken Dance:
-The First Boxers
-The Gods of Boxing
-AllPowerFighting
-The Boxer Dread [unpublished]
Each chapter shall have a citation from one of the volumes above, so that the reader might check the veracity and the time line, a time line traveled by many another heroes of the Fist and the AllPowerThing, and on many a battlefield as well. Sons of Arete is only fiction in form, crafted in a manner best suited for illuminating the shadowed lives of such great men who have been relegated to history’s dustbin. These stories are intended to present a long forgotten struggle against the enslavement of the human spirit, which did take on a traceable form across nearly 120 years, most of that span of time accompanied by the man invoked some 40 years after his passing by Menander, as a figure of salvational aspect, and over half a millennia later by Pausanius in his Geography of Hellas.
Menander [an Athenian, who saw his nation fall under a foreign heel in his youth] wrote as the deepest spiritual writer of his era, a time of despair when men such as he looked back to an earlier age of heroics. It is assumed that his writing [over 100 plays, comedies and poems], along with the histories of the many authors alluded to by Herodotus, were lost in the various accidents and disasters of the library of Alexandria.
However, Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West, makes a convincing case, that the writings of Antiquity were passively aggressive [simply declining to copy old texts] purged by the NeoPlatonic, anti-mystic, anti-masculine literary curators of late Antiquity. For these men were also in doctrinal competition with rival Early Christian Didacts. In this volume, this author come lately, posits that Menander and other soulful, masculine-minded writers of his age, were deliberately purged by later, mass-minded writers of a subsequent fallen age.
…
Dedication
For Achilleas
…
Inspirational Quote
“By some way other than death.”
-Pausanius, circa A.D. 170
…
Apologies
To Pindar and Dorieus, whose odes and family story deserve a book all their own, and have here been neglected, along with Timeaus of Thebes.
Episodic Contents
-1. The Tip Toe Circle: Theogenes & Euthymus
-2. The Dug Up: Theogenes & Euthymus
-3. The Hot Gates: Simonides
-4. The Great Hall: Simonides & Timocreon
-5. The Butcher: Simonides & Timocreon
-6. Odysseus’s Sailor: Euthymus
-7. The Virgin: Euthymus
-8. The Demon & The Hero: Euthymus
-9. The Footsteps of Achilles: Theogenes
-10. Tears of Thasos: Theogenes
-11. Two Towards Night: Theogenes & Euthymus
-12. Court of The King of Kings: Polydamas
-13. Bullies and Whores: Xenophon
-14. Before the Altars: Agias & Polydamas
-15. Beauty or Victory?: Promochus & Polydamas
-16. FrontLineFighter: Promochus
-17. The Tyrant and the Grotto: Polydamas
-18. TownChief & The Seven Parasites: Astyanax
-19. My Prize Slave: Menander
Undertaker
Prologue to Nihil
He never thought to see
Spring’s Soft flower,
As he fought to be free
In Winter’s cruel power.
Solace she sought by the sea—
A fay quest stalked by the All-Sower.
…
The train rattled and clattered with a mad cadence that rendered her somehow more sad. Helen was alone, all, tall and alone. There had been a time when she could have been a runway model, a tennis pro or a choral singer. But, hiring practices as they had been upon her gradation in 2024, she went for the easy money, taking her long blond looks, her voice and her composure, into Men’s World.
Her mind’s eye cast back with some bitterness, “I made not decision one: some pencil necked twerp, some fat slob, or some jelley-gutted sleazeball always made the call. I was nothing but a marionette.”
Her eye began to wet, the traitor left eye, that alone could cry, and could not be kept entirely dry. If the rest of her class could see her now; those dumpy white girls, witchy Latinas destined to look like beanbag chairs, under-foot aloof Asian princesses who envied her on one hand and saw her as a zoological exhibit of barbaric splendor on the other hand, they had found their place by now, quaking underground, shrinking above ground. They, were, at last not alone. The sub par woman seemed to have a knack to hit the ground always with a man—scum though he might be.
‘Whores,’ she seethed inside as she looked out upon the miles long expanse of tents under the condemned interstate span between Emmeryville and Oakland. ‘You meth whores at least have your tweaker husbands—not alone in this cold world,’ she whimpered inside.
Despite the fact that the train coaches were all but rattling apart, the doors, at the nearly deserted Emmeryville platform
had opened automatically. The station attendant had been a wheeled janitorial robot, the like she had once laughed at in a supermarket. The cafe attendant in the bottom level of this viewing car, had been replaced by a kiosk. There was not a passenger on this train, other than shoulder-shrunken Helen.
People were not visible outside the tents or the buildings. No primping homo was darting forth from his bird cage condo.
A shiver struck her.
Lonely to the bones, she rose in a panic that she really was the last one above ground. Helen, rose, brushed her skirt just so, just in case there was a man in there, making certain that her beige skirt covered the broken vein on her 40 year old knee, still showing off her still smooth and full calves. Hopefully this would take away from the hasty makeup job done in the clattering train, down in the changing room out of Reno.
Reno had shivered her to the bone, with the handful of other passengers from Salt Lake City and points east having detrained there to spend the last of their sorrows at the nearly deserted gambling Medina.
‘Fucking Saudi Mormon,’ she steamed within, marking her rejection by what was such an unlikely hiring officer for the whitest refuge available. This caused a worsening chill in her back as she realized, clearly, her mind having rejected the idea before, that she had possibly been the only passenger returning to California. Now, the jittery thought that she might be the only passenger on the train from Seattle to California, triggered a spasm of self-recrimination.
“Dumbilina,” she bitched out loud, “the LDS has all of the tall, good looking blondes they need—Seattle should have been the call!”
‘But I haven’t made many calls,’ her lesser half wilted inside.
‘I am still fertile…’
“No body wants babies anymore, dumb dumb.”
She wore her winter boots, sensible shoes these days. Kicking the foot plate of the door from within the coupling housing. The silvery door slid aside and she entered the dining car, with its white table clothes and tiny tables, where one figure did sit, as conductors of old had, when she took the night train to Seattle or Salt Lake City on business. Going away from San Francisco had always felt so liberating. Now, this return, to its wretched outskirts, drew her haltingly down.
It was a man, an older man, in his early sixties, owning a silvery mustache twisted in that ancient waxed way, underneath his conductor’s hat, his Amtrak uniform worn, but neatly appointed. He wore medical glasses, the ones that did let you see there were eyes behind them by how the soft blue optical dots on the external screen behaved like an iris, mimicking the actual activity of the compromised eye behind. Everyone ordered blue, the blue iris. But that brown eyed camel jockey had sent these blue eyes packing.
His shoulders were broad but bony. The leg that could be seen was so thin that the black slacks hung on a knob of knee. The man searched her face, not admiring her still shapely body. Seduction was out—not that sexual charm had ever been her game. Daddy was in—how life might have been different if she had a daddy, rather then the limp fish that involved himself in social justice and ignored her, to the point of blaming her for his lack of protection when the unthinkable did occur.
“Ms. Brighton,” the man intercepted her budding question.
“Is everything to your satisfaction—you are my final duty, the last ticketed passenger. When you detrain, I retire.”
Flustered, she smoothed her skirt down again and sat as daintily as a six foot woman can.
“Sir, I applied with the LDS for ecological asylum.”
“As did, many, Ms. Brighton. You had, and I see still, have the good character to refrain from the Reno option. I wonder, if it was compassion or cruelty that moved the LDS to comp rejected applicants with yet another low odds wager.”
She noticed his crutches propped between table, bench and window, wrist crutches with what seemed to be medical reading bands, with opaque display screens which seemed to sync with his eye movement.
He noticed, “No need to apologize or inquire. I was brought out of medical retirement to conduct this last train, and possibly another, so that one of my colleagues might be accepted at the Cheyenne Mountain refuge.”
“Do you have anyone?” she inquired, concern for him rivaling her own self pity.
“No, Helen, I do not. I detrain at San Jose, de-commission the Starlight… and, like so many, wait. In that, I am not alone.”
“No one is headed to LA?”
He chuckled slightly, “No nearer than San Jose.”
“I was used to getting my way, making my way…” she confessed.
He completed her spoken thought, “Based on your remarkable beauty and health—a rich voice as well.”
“But what do I do when it all goes to hell?” she cried, cried from both eyes, her hand inching across the table for a caring grasp.
He took her hand in a cold yet dry hand and his voice held a deep raspy quality that she had failed to notice—he was concerned, “Helen, I have de-listed the stop from the Jack London Square Station kiosk. Those that wait there will expect no passenger to detrain. The station is the nexus of four powers. If you remain at the station you shall be the subject of a battle or a barter. East rule the Angolans, practicing the most unfortunate dietary habits. South, along the tracks, are the tweakers. North, where we pass now, is Mexican cartel territory, the most likely purchaser of a woman from the other factions. To the west are the Muslims.”
He patted the back of her hand with the other large, cold, arthritic hand, “You have a minute to choose, Helen.”
“South,” she blurted, cringing as she did so, her choice being based on race rather than power, in deep violation of her American conscience.
The man then rose crookedly, clamped his wrists into the medical braces, and turned before her, pivoting on a pair of odd looking crutches that must have been heavier than his withered legs, “Than follow me, luggage be damned, in your sensible boots. I have an engineer’s safety jacket for you, and a hard hat. You shall detrain from the crew car.”
“Thank you, so much, sir,” she blurted.
He stopped and froze, his shoulders tight, then continued crutching with every word punctuated by a rubber thump, “I should be cursed, rather, for failing to abscond with, or at east defend, the last flower of my kind. I am a slave, a creature of duty, and have been instructed. So I conduct, ashamed, Helen. Only forgive me if it makes your burden the more bearable.”
“Can I have a weapon?” she asked.
“The sledgehammer, behind the glass, next to the exit. Take that. We have found it too heavy to swing in repelling boarders. Hold it behind the head with one hand and near the butt with the other, and thrust and chop with the head. I earned this injury in such an encounter battling an unticketed mob in LA.”
…
They soon stood at the door as the train slowed, Helen holding a sledgehammer rather than her discarded purse, as she listened to the shrieking, rattling, clattering sound of her delivery into Hell.
The conductor slammed the door open before the train stopped and said, “As soon as she’s at a dead stop, step off and run. I’ll roll slow for a mile so you can’t be seen by the Angolans.”
“Thank you!” she stammered, and he cringed, looking down and away.
Why Clown?
Comedy and Societal Decline: 12/28/23
“This clowning and shuck and jive bullshit, even in the end zones, used to be against the rules. Now, after every play you have to see a clown show! Why is that?”
-Master Sergeant L., Thanksgiving Night, 11/24/23
After the author’s short verbal answer:
“You know, when we were stationed in Okinawa, that was a ticket punching stop. There was this one kid who did everything in uniform: dress blues in town, etc. Every chance he got he would read his Bible—always had that Bible with him. I was known, in whatever unit I served in, as the always good for a poke in the ribs or a stick in the eye. Hell, for two years, I suppose I was even regarded as good looking, rather than the hog-bodied individual that sits before you. So, I ask this kid one day, “Have you finished reading that Bible yet?”
“No, Gunnery Sergeant L.,” he says.
“Now, you must know that I was once on track to be a preacher, knew that book forward and backward. But I could not help myself, “Well, Private, I hate to ruin it for you, but the hero dies.”
…
The old Marine hit the nail on the head. We should look at the two societies the most like America:1804 to 2019. You must know that America did not survive 2020, that, as a nation state, it is entirely captured by cabals of greater and lesser entities. It is properly represented by the medically animated zombie head of state.
Popularly, Americans like to think of themselves as a democracy, and have since the beginning, even though the framers of this state constructed it as a Republic. Those men, most of whom were scum bag conspirators, were towering geniuses, just like our lead corporate men of today: Brill Yates [whose search engine has delisted this site] Hefe Brazos, Shekelberg and Eloi Hush. They knew, that although the men who died in the war wanted a democracy, that the only civilized democracy to leave a mark on Civilization was Athens, which survived less than 100 years as a sovereign democracy. Thus, the Framers constructed a republic precisely on the Roman model, reflected in our civic architecture. Both Athens and Rome were empires. America has been an empire since 1848, with articulated aspirations of such as early as the 1780s.
At peak social ascent, such as Athens after the victory over the Great King of the Archimedian Empire, the focus of sports was amateur competition, with men competing for their home town and father. As society declined, even these sacred athletics were dominated by touring professionals, who, like modern football players, would be paid handsomely to abandon their civic identity and become a citizen of some richer, large city. Rush Limbaugh, was correct in describing Football, as “the religion of football.” It has been precisely calibrated to supplant the remnant of Christian focus, with nearly all games played on Sunday.
In literature, peak Athens told tragedies. As it declined, comedy became more prominent. Finally, after decline, Athens invited foreign teachers to instruct their leading men on the art of oratory, or political discourse and philosophy [always a sign of social death].
Competing Hellenic communities did not go through this, but went from heroic song [Tyrteus or Sparta], odes [Pindar of Thebes] and epigrams [Simonides of Cos] to literary silence.
Parallel to athletics becoming professional and not community based, and literature degrading, Athens did not suffer a military degradation from citizen soldier to professional, but rather withdrew from military affairs and became a center of learning, a university town.
Under Rome, Greek philosophy and professional athletics linger and expand at the same time.
In Republican Rome, literature focused on morality and history. Under the empire, after Augustus as he was a transitional figure from Republic to Empire, literature focused on political and cultural commentary, and again, comedy began to emerge. Comedy is a lower class pressure valve art form, and when adopted by the upper class places the despair that fuels comedy at the top of society. Any adoption of lower class values by the upper class is a sign of society in decline.
Roman literature did not decline as steeply as the Greek, with serious historians continuing to emerge. Poetics did degrade from Virgil to Flaccus and Lucan.
In the athletic sphere, the gladiator, formerly a POW, was now often a much loved figure, and the charioteer, a slave like the gladiator, might become as rich as a senator, and even gain the company of his wife.
Since Rome lasted multiple Athenian lifetimes as a polity, both under republican and sham republican imperial rule [1], the degradation of Athletics experienced by both was, in Rome, reflected in the military degradation of military staffing, with foreign mercenaries beginning to replace Roman citizens as early as A.D. 70, with this process complete by 220 and the ascension of the Barbarian Emperor Maximus.
It might be noted that one does not have to be a citizen of the U.S. to serve in military or law enforcement, that a French colonel in 2020 was commanding American psychological operations against American subjects, in Virginia, and that men from Asia, Africa and Latin America, like indigenous American service men, need only swear loyalty to USG and the Constitution, a document, not a People. In terms of professional service, the American Military has been professional since the 1970s, for the very real reason that the citizens of the nation disagreed with the government’s foreign policy, and would thence need be bribed with privileges superior to that of the other citizens [free college, for instance] to go in harms way.
In terms of the NFL clown show, in which players are coached and/or encouraged to do group dance routines and affect signature poses [expect these to be trademarked] punctuating a successful play, it seems to be a simple emotive device for mob mind control. Focusing on the feminine need to cheer, the athlete is now trained to bring out the bitch in the viewer, at the same time degrading the player and including and honoring the otherwise passive spectator. The ancient Roman was supposed to view gladiatorial death with a stoic reserve, as a study on a good death. The most common wrinkle in NFL theatrics is to hide the suffering and elevate the status of the injured player by placing him in a tent.
The postmodern American spectator is encouraged to lose HER mind in the game, to jump and scream and clap and caper. In this, SHE is led by her hero, the millionaire mercenary, not from her home town. This is encouraged by the weird anonymity of the player in his helmet, face cage and now mask. This affect is deepened with the vast majority who do not go to the stadium and view on TV, by the use of the faceless robot football player increasingly used as a titanic icon before going to a commercial and to accentuate a comment or performance announcement, to include statistics.
Of course, she is most likely not from her home town, both being paid to relocate there and attach themselves to the local identity. It is of great interest, that I do not know a single female sports viewer who can maintain an interest in a game that does not feature her team. Men will watch any game with interest. But as they have become emotive neo-women, fantasy football leagues have implanted in them a vested interest in every game. The very interesting thing about football viewership today, across the nation, in bars and in homes, is that very few people, only being men, and these usually estranged from society, can view a football game with interest that does not involve the emotional hook of “my team.”
The same clowning gambit has been imparted from the top down in Major League Baseball and has been partially resisted by the players, who are of a less debased charter than football players for reasons I leave to the reader.
In the terminal analysis, clowning will continue to expand around dangerous sports as a way of magnetizing the mob of non contact clowns that make up the she-male body economic into a delusion that makes money for the master class, distracts the clowns from the activities of their rulers, and programs the clown mob for future compliance.
Notes
-1. Deep State control of American politics is, to the person who has not been mesmerized by the media priesthood or the sports clown show, is as glaring a corporate capture of the American Nation by a predacious USG, as the sham of the Roman senate remaining in powerless, theatrical session under hundreds of years of actual tyranny.
The Reavers #3
Fiction by James Anderson
The humming and droning of insects vibrated the heavy humid night air. A crescent moon peeked out from behind clouds passing high above, casting a dim light which failed to penetrate the murky marshes. The reeds and grasses were silent, no breeze whispered through their stalks. The insects chirped and buzzed away.
A paddle broke the stillness of the water, which rippled gently away shimmering in the tenuous starlight. Large black hulks glided silently through the marsh. An oar hit something hard and an alligator splashed away noisily into the reeds. “Careful!” the coxswain hissed in a sharp whisper.
The men in the boats looked like ghouls sent from hell. Gaunt grim faces starkly shadowed in the dark, piercing eyes scanning like ravenous beasts. Knives glinted from between their teeth; their hands wrapped around cruel weapons.
The first boat thudded softly into the muddy bottom and without a word its crew slid out, knee-deep in the black water, and stalked slowly forward. Each boat joined them in turn until they had all unloaded their fiendish occupants. The crickets stopped briefly as these predators passed by but beyond this there was no indication of their coming. Wading in silence, well-worn weapons at the ready, they went on as the water grew shallower and shallower, until it was at their ankles. A bank of hedges and reeds separated them from the estate grounds.
On the edge of Colerites’ estate by the water stood a grassy rise. A few guards milled about here, appointed by the court and often bemused at their dull position. One of these, Mark he was called, yawned in boredom and leaned on his halberd. The insects droned on, he swatted at something buzzing by his ear.
He never saw the eyes fixed on him from beyond the stalks, just a rushing shadow and the wink of starlight on steel. There was no time to shout before the blade rent his throat and his corpse was laid gently onto the grass. A few other guards who stood together chatting investigated a rustling in the reeds, but never returned to their post. Shadows of terror slipped over the grassy hill in their place, converging on the manor.
There was but one light shining from the whole estate, a faint glow emanating from a window high in Colerite’s tower. Far below in the shadows furtive figures rushed up to every door and window, some raising each other up onto balconies or scaling up vines to reach high ledges. They waited in tense silence, eyes darted back and forth, hands shifted their grip on sword hilts and axe hafts. A group snuck up to the front door, making themselves hidden on either side.
Three sharp cracks shook the door followed by heavy silence. To each man his breathing was akin to the heaviest gale of the sea, any shift in his feet like quaking earth, yet to another they were silent as snakes laying in the grass. A distant sound broke the silence, the steady plod of feet from beyond the door. A dim light lined the cracks in the frame, growing brighter and brighter as the footsteps grew closer and closer.
The footsteps stopped. A loud clanking came as locks were turned and bars set aside, the door swung inward and the light of a single lantern escaped into the night, held by Basam, Colerites black servant.
“Hello?” He asked in confusion. He received no answer but the shuffling of feet. His eyes opened wide in terror when he saw the men rushing from beside the door. Before he could shout he was seized from all sides, gagged, and his lantern was snatched away and snuffed out. The last thing he saw before being knocked in the head was what looked like the pirate captain who had been there earlier in the day, rushing past him into the manor.
The light of the lantern being snuffed out was seen by a lookout, who passed a signal that went to all of the men waiting by the doors and windows. There came a few crashes and bangs from within as men tripped in the dark and doors were forced open. The stamp of feet ran all the way up the many steps to the top of the tower, another loud crash and a few moments later the dim light flickering in the uppermost window went out.
Darkness and silence reigned over the manor; gray ghosts slid out of doors and windows back into the reeds, burdened now with a wriggling sack thrown over Grim’s shoulder. The boats were crewed and pushed off the mudbank back into the marshes; they rowed as quickly and quietly as when they came.
Silently the boats slipped across the bay. Their black silhouettes like ferries of the dead winding down to the underworld. A few distant lights from the city danced on the surface of the water.
They approached a moorage lined with pleasure-yachts and gondolas on the northern end of the bay. A massive dome outlined against the night sky showed them to be near the Great Library of Vernilion, citadel of the world’s knowledge.
From the moorage a lantern was opened and closed in steady succession, the signal that the coast was clear. The boats, however, slid past it, all the way up to the sea-wall wherein was set a massive grate leading into the sewer. A door in the grate was opened at their coming and the men stepped into the pitch-darkness with familiar ease, bearing with them their struggling burden.
From within the sack Colerite’s saw nothing, only perceiving vague changes in the light as they went under the cover of the sewer. He lost any sense of direction. His efforts to discern his location by sound had all been in vain. He was jostled for what seemed like hours. The echoes of shuffling feet changing with the height of the chambers. At some point the ceiling must have lifted well away from them, as the echoes grew substantially and the air cooled rapidly. It felt as if they climbed a stair.
There were whispers, a door opened, and suddenly he was put down and stood upright. The sack was lifted away and the flickering light of a lantern stung his weakened eyes. As they adjusted to the light his surroundings became clear; intricate stone arches, rows and rows of tomes and scrolls, and the smiling face of Captain Aerin Vane.
“The book.” Vane said in menacing monotone.
“Thththe bbbook? I…Oh that led to the…what was it?” Collerites stammered in confusion and fear.
“The idol.” Vane punctuated his speech with the click of a flintlock hammer locking to the rear, “Find it.”
Colerites suddenly lost the expression of fear he had been wearing, “What an…an…an affront to knowledge! To disrespect this…this sanctuary! I..Guards! I will…I will not be finding anything! To be..to be…misapropriated!” he shouted indignantly.
Vane smiled patiently, “Think of us as research partners, wizard, I seek only knowledge. Think of the opportunity to discover a civilisation wholly unknown to us!” he said, gesticulating with the barrel of his pistol, “Or I’ll splatter your brains on the floor and you won’t think ever again.”
“I! You! Well…it is in the interest of…scholarship…to not lose a mind such as…well mine.” Collerites replied in rapid agrement. “I will need the..what was it..with the..that led to…oh..”
Vane handed him the map.
“Yes! I will..oh where would it be? Perhaps…” Collerites hemmed and hawed.
Vane pressed the muzzle of his gun onto Collerites’ chest.“I do not mean to rush research, but you had better find it before dawn.” He said with deadly intention.
Collerites set to work quickly after this, rushing from row to row, floor to floor, pulling out books with abandon. He mumbled to himself; crescendoing with each new lead and idea. The pirates followed him haphazardly by lantern light, struggling to keep up with his mad dashes.
Vane could tell Colerites was getting close, he had a few choice selections tucked under one arm and kept mumbling a word over and over to himself. Vane struggled to make it out, something like “calima, calima, calima”.
Suddenly Colerites stopped in his tracks and dropped every book and scroll he had been carrying, “Of course!” he exclaimed, it was the clearest and most confident Vane had ever heard him. Colerites took off at a surprising pace down a long corridor, stopping abruptly at a nondescript door and hurtling himself through the threshhold.
“There!” He could barely contain himself as he pointed at a shelf stuffed with books. The pirates looked on from the doorway with confused faces. Colerites rushed up to the shelf and removed a single, slender volume bound in plain leather, “The records of the voyages of Vitienne and Flore Riosa, with a rendering of one of their maps if I recall correctly…” Colerites thumbed through the pages as he spoke “Aha! Here”. He held up an open page witha crude and fragmentary map in faded ink.
“You’re sure?” Vane asked with doubt in his voice, “Rather a short book, and a rough map”.
“Were you expecting charts of a place uncharted?” Colerites quipped with surprising wit, “The book is short because their…voyages were, well, one man returned from Vitienne’s and Riosa followed after him…with much greater success. Five men made it back, half starved and driven to madness.”
“And the place they sought was connected to the map? The idol?” Vane pressed him eagerly.
“I..well…I believe so” Colerites said “A place they called Calima.” The word rang like music as Vane and his men envisioned this exotic place overflowing with glimmering treasure.
Their collective dream was cut short by the echo of hinges. Vane pricked his ears and scanned down the passage. “Medulous, Deckard, go and look for what made that noise. Meet us at the docks if we can’t rendevouz here”. The swashbucklers obeyed silently, slipping down the hallway like prowling cats, “Good you found that when you did, wizard, lets go.”
Seizing Colerites by the arm they rushed back through myriad stairways and chambers towards the secret entrance into the sewers. As they were nearing the final bend shouts echoed from ahead and their ears rang with the unmistakable thunder of a gun being fired indoors.
Rounding the bend their muffled hearing picked up the sound of steel biting steel, and the lantern confirmed what their ears could not. A city guard lay sprawled on the marble in a pool of blood, his cuirass blown open. Medulous and Deckard were engaged in a desperate fight with at least six more, tumbling and hacking with axe and shortsword. Deckard clutched at a gash in his side.
Vane lunged into the fray with his men, catching the guardsmen by surprise. Halberds clattered to the floor and blades flicked in the half-light of the lantern. For a brief moment silence reigned again, and the heavy breath of the pirates roared in their pounding heads.
“How did they find us?” Vane cracked at Deckard.
“I don’t know, but they caught us up nearly by surprise” The salty old bosun answered between breaths.
“Hell’s devils” Vane cursed “We must hurry, how is your wound?”
“I can manage, captain” Deckard groaned and stumbled as he tried to take a step.
“Drown me you’re no good, you two take him up”
As the two nearest sailors held up Deckard by the arms Medulous exclaimed suddenly, “The Wizard! He’s gone!”
“Flog me for a fool!” Vane cursed with all his might “He can’t have gotten far, you two get Deckard to the boats, the rest of you with me!” With this he flew towards where they had left Colerites.
The wizard meanwhile was a stumbling mess of fear and rage, mumbling to himself as he navigated the narrow alley lit dimly by lamplight. Book still clutched in trembling hands, he was trying to make his way to the court. He had friends there, guards, he could be rid of this whole mess. Yet he had never himself made the walk, always carried by carriage or palanquin.
The streets closed in about him like a jungle. He wanted to shout for the guards but he feared the pirates were after him and would reach him first. Crickets sang from gardens and cats dashed in the shadows, each one a lurking buccaneer to his terrified heart.
He stopped at a corner exhausted with terror, with labored breath he leaned on a mossy garden wall and turned his powerful mind over with plans of escape.
“The houses.” He thought “Yes yes..the…houses..yes this is in the…the..this is the…the noble quarter yes! I could…a gentleman…yes they would…the court. They would know me from there. Yes. I just need to find…” The trailing thoughts led him to a massive oak door of a nearby mansion. He hesitated as he reached for the brass knocker, the noise, he had but one chance.
He cracked the knocker five times as hard as he might and listened. At first there was silence, then a clatter from inside as that of an interior door opening. “Yes” he thought “I’ve done it”. A light glowed suddenly beyond the door and it was opened a crack. A slight and proper butler came to answer.
“Baine residence, who are you and what can I do for you at this hour?” He said looking the disheveled wizard up and down.
“I..sir..I am Colerites. Court Magician of Vernilon….Advisor to the Viscount-Governor…sir.. I am in…well…there is danger, you must let me in.”
Colerites calculations had been correct. He was swiftly let in and joined by the Lord and Lady Baine in the drawing room, the curtains tightly drawn. The Lord Baine spoke with great wrath and gripped an officer’s saber tightly.
“I cannot believe these ruffians would have the audacity to abduct you! So esteemed a magician and member of the court! The guards should be sent for at once and..”
“It is…no! You musn’t” Colerites interjected “They…they are still…I fear they hunt me still. You may…they might find me!”
“And I will slay them to a man!” The Lord said proudly while thrusting his saber at the air. He was an imposing figure, if aged, and distinguished by a gargantuan mustache.
“Yes if..well…We had better wait until…I think morning will be safest”
“Perhaps…” Baine wrinkled his mustache in thought “I must defer to your respected wisdom, but I will not rest until we find these scoundrels!” He swung his saber in a broad arc nearly slicing the couch Colerites sat upon.
“For now we are delighted you are safe” The Lady Baine reassured Colerites “a dreadful tale you told us…what a terror!”
They sat up for some time drinking wine and discussing the events of the night. Colerites was starting to lose his fear. It must have been nearly dawn, and if they had not found him yet it was unlikely they would.
Three sharp knocks shook the door in the entry. Terror and panic surged back to Colerites.
“It is the guard!” A stern shout came from outside “We have been sent to investigate a disturbance!”
“They must have heard of your troubles! Or perhaps came upon the fiends!” The Lord Baine exclaimed “What luck!”
Colerites mumbled and bumbled as he watched Lord Baine stride confidently to the door. The Lady Baine stroked his arm and reasured him, everthing would be alright.
“You’ve come just in time gentlemen!” The Lord Baine exalted as he threw back the heavy door.
There was a loud crack and the Lord Baine reeled into the drawing room unconscious as his saber clatterd to the floor. After him Vane sauntered leisurely, followed by his men who quickly overan the room. The Lady Baine shrieked and rushed to the limp form of her husband. Colerites was left alone trembling on the couch.
“You held on to the book, good!” Vane said with a terrifying warmth, “There’ll be no more of that I’m sure. We had better get going, wizard”.
The sack was shoved back on Colerites’ head and he was hurled over a brawny shoulder. He could hear the wailing of the Lady Baine fade as he was carried out into the street and the door shut behind them.
The pirates made their way swiftly, but carefully, through the dim cobbled streets. Men were sent ahead and behind to watch for patrols of the guard or anyone who might raise the alarm. It was still pitch dark except for the tenuous flickering of lamps. Colerites heard naught but the tramp of feet and fountains bubbling in walled gardens.
The rogues halted at the signal of one of their scouts and melted into the darkness. A pair of watchmen sauntered by, engaged in idle conversation, unaware of the eyes watching their lantern light fade away down the lane. Colerites thought to call out at the sudden halt, but terror held back his voice. Vane and his men resumed their escape.
At the docks the boats were waiting. Loaded quickly, they shoved off into the night-shrouded bay. Slithering across over glimmering reflections of the dark city, they pulled up to the longships, already rigged to go out with the tide. Swiftly they were hoisted up and made fast, the limp body of the wizard was passed up and sent into Vane’s cabin. No commands needed to be passed as the ships all got underway together, gliding out of the bay just as dawn began to paint the sky.
James Andersen
link › jamesrandersen.com
author
‘The Crown of Martyrdom’
Chapter 16 of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“It is difficult to attain and dangerous to publish knowledge of the true God.”
-Plato
…
Gibbon defines himself as a devote Christian, noting the “purity of Christian doctrine,” “its humble origin,” and its unquestionable “truth.” He reads as no humanist and does admit to having to set aside faith in order to conduct history. He is impatient with pagan inability to fathom “the inscrutable nature of the Divine Perfection,” and dismisses a lack of pagan understanding for “the birth and character of Our Savior.” He does note, that Christianity did “dissolve the ties of custom and tradition,” forming a counter tradition in which “every Christian rejects with contempt the superstitions of his family.”
Born as a negation of most of all of human religion, irony seems to have been reserved a judgment seat at the terminus of Western Civilization. [0] It is this reader’s opinion that Gibbon was no civic humanist, but a Christian civics investigator, as he names history as the process of examining the past for the benefit of the future.
The Judaic Connection
Two generations after the destruction of the temple in A.D. 71-72, Cyrene, Alexandria and Cypress saw hundreds of thousands of gentiles slaughtered by displaced Jews in ethnic cleansings. 220,000 gentiles in Cyrene and 240,000 gentiles in Cyprus were murdered. Egypt was also a bloody scene, with “great multitudes slain.” It was said that many of the victims were sawed in half and then eaten. A two year insurrection was successful at holding back the power of Rome, until it was not. Then 580,000 Jews were put to the sword under Hadrian and used as filler in his famous wall, apparently marched there and thrown in.
Afterward this harsh punishment, by the famed civic engineer who broke his own slave teacher’s leg [1], the still thriving population of Jews adopted the merchant life as a niche under the mild tolerance of Antonius Pious, who re-extended the hand of “tolerant polytheism” to that intractable nation. Gibbon, describes the ancient Jews as “dwelling in treacherous friendship,” among other races under Rome and that their
“irreconcilable hatred of mankind” could now be expressed in “trade.” New Synagogues were constructed under Roman protection. Jews were permitted their own police force, and were enabled to maintain a parallel government within Rome, taxing their own. The Jews must have expressed a higher birthrate than other Roman subjects. [2]
One must recall that the first 15 bishops of the Christian Church were Jews, and that the condition for religious tolerance of the Jewish nation within Rome extended by Antonius Pious, was that Jews refrained from practicing circumcision on non Jews. This marked a problem with any exclusive faith, such as the Hebrew or Christian doctrine that declared lone possession of the knowledge of divinity and cursed all other faiths as devil worship, that Jews and Christians held slaves of other faiths. These might turn on their masters as government informers, as the gentile slaves of the Christian martyrs of Leon did.
After the Atonines, persecution shifted to Christians, but mostly the political class. Pliny, under Trajan, had distrusted the Christians, not due to any criminal behavior, but to their steadfast refusal to engage in the common pagan religion. He was confused at the difference between Christian and Epicurians.
Gibbon finds that the best, most educated and most prolific Roman historians who lived alongside “the primitive Christian church” before Constantine, knew little or nothing about Christianity. He describes this as fate having placed a veil over the face of the early church to maintain its flame in secrecy. Even the Augustinian Christian history, composed in part under Constantine, had very scant mentions of the early Christian church, to include scant mention of persecution.
Circa 180, the Whore of Comodos who had him killed by a wrestler, was a Christian.
Circa 200 to 230, Mamia and her son and nephew emperors sponsored Christians.
The First Cause sought by the philosophers, particularly the Neo-Platonists, was equated by these elite academics with the Christian God. But such a vague notion was too impersonal for the common rustics, particularly rural folks who saw evidence of divinity all around. The urban and suburban Philosophers and Christians spent their lives predominantly in man made environs. Saint Augustine, whose On Christian Doctrine I have listened to alongside of Gibbon, was a highly sensual, very urban, former Neo-Platonist and Gnostic, of, I think, the Mannicean sect. His view seems very modern, very Epicurian and is based on self-love, particularly of the body.
Night Mass
Gibbon marks the adoption of nighttime worship as an attempt to bring converts by gaining respect from pagans in imitation of the Elusynian mysteries, as an initial disaster. This left Christians open to charges of child sacrifice, orgies and even incest, very similar to the charges of cannibalism and blood drinking leveled at the Jews under Hadrian, carrying an echo of the charges by Romans of 200 B.C. that the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice. This seems to have no end as propaganda in the West, such as the Iraqi-Kuwaiti incubator executions that were manufactured as a fable by USG to convince Americans to back a petro-dollar war in Iraq in 1991.
Cyprian, an author and actual martyr, emerges as a true imitator of Christ, from what Gibbon describes as “a mass of undigested fiction and error.” In his execution in North Africa, the official charged with this duty by the emperor of forcing Christians to recognize the imperial cult, pleads with Cyprian to save himself, even suggesting after the sentence is withdrawn that he can go back to teaching Christianity. Cyprian insist on being beheaded, lays out his own cloth, pays the executioner and forgives him. At his death his flock clamored to be martyred as well wanting to flee the tumultuous hell of collapsing Rome for eternal bliss.
The local officers declined most common requests to be martyred. Christians of the early church thirsted to be killed in imitation of The Savior and to join him. They did successfully defend themselves against charges of nocturnal perversions and orgies before pagan officials. Within Rome, capital punishment was reserved first for slaves [the bulk of humanity] and second for displaced politicians and their families. There was a reluctance to slaughter ordinary citizens.
The early orthodox church had an implacable problem as “an incorporation,” which churches remain to this day. Rome, as an entity, distrusted corporations. The Sacred Synod of Heracles was one of few, as these men served the power structure as religious combatants and diversionary celebrities as well as body guards. In Nicomedia a company of firemen wanted to form and were not granted a charter by Trajan. The Romans, had a keen instinct for power, and knew that companies would eventually exceed and destroy the nations who granted them power in their infancy. This was reflected in their creation mythology. They proved right, as American Independence, founded on company charters granted by the Crown, would turn the mother country into its slave within 130 years of separation.
Another aspect of Christianity that disturbed the pagans, was its apparent atheist quality, denying all but a few iterations of divinity. It is a fact, that atheism, in history has three sources:
-the Hellenic schools of philosophy: Cynic, Epicurian and Academic, with the later two providing many converts to Christianity
-Judaism, with men such as Marx the sons of rabbis
-Christianity, with the gradual expansion of early Christian divinity to conclude in the distillations of deism [3] secular humanism [4] and currently transhumanism and the cult of science. [5]
The Meeting of the Co-Emperors Galerius and Diocletion, in which the former pointed out that the women and eunuchs sabotaging their government were Christians, resulted in the burning of Diocletion’s palace by his Eunuchs and wives who had been spying upon them, resulted in the most infamous persecutions of Christians.
Under Diocletion’s purge, 9 bishops in 92 martyrs met their end. He and even the brutal Galerius were reluctant to kill too many Christians as they so infested the government that it would weaken their administration.
The great strength of the Christians was that they had, like the Jews, a parallel government. [2] This gave Christians experience in governance, especially as they were nearly all residents of provincial and imperial capitals, with very few, if any rural Christians. Pagan is a term that means rural person of the village. The key to the success of Christianity, in conquering Rome from within were:
-1. intolerance of other beliefs, encouraging fanaticism
-2. secrecy of worship, encouraging conspiracy, which is the internal function of government
-3. parallel taxation and government, preparing the faithful to rule the non faithful
-4. urban position in administrative hubs, placing the faithful in the geography of rule, for the origin of the city, to tax and rule outlying communities, remains a function of its continuing structure
-5. willingness to adopt Roman military methods and civic cruelty in suppressing internal dissent and expanding external submission. [6]
In this latter category, Gibbon notes that modern Christian monarchs such as Charles 5 and Louis 14, conducted more brutal persecutions of dissenting Christians than any pagan emperor had under Rome. Indeed, Constantine, who seems to have not been a Christian, made Christianity the state religion on his ascension, after the Christian wife and daughter of the pagan Diocletion were butchered by Lucinius, a pro-Christian co emperor of Constantine.
In the end, Christians, when persecuted, were treated less harshly than slaves, barbarians or displaced political families, who were exterminated wholesale. Christians were only slain for their insistence that their faith exceeded their loyalty to the State. The answer, to harness this Christian genius for civic craft and solidarity, was to combine the Faith with the State.
Ironically, most Christian denominations today mark the combination of Church and State under Constantine, as the end of the Age of Miracles. Once in political power, few church leaders of any nation or state, were willing to recognize the miraculous in their own time, under their own stewardship.
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Notes
-0. Pagan and heathen life was relatively timeless in the respect of faith and tradition. It is the signature of Western Civilization since Constantine to erase its own past and indict its founders, ancestors and forefathers as ignorant and evil, either childishly or maliciously so.
-1. Epictetus, a practitioner of the divinity based school of Stoicism, the only philosophy that does not tend towards atheism, was the slave and teacher of Hadrian, who seems to have broken his leg. Alternatively, the teacher is thought to have been lame at his birth to a slave girl.
-2. This makes of a religion a government in waiting, as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints declares itself to be, ironically the only major protestant denomination with a positive birthrate as the rest drift towards a sterile atheism.
-3. See The Jefferson Bible
-4. The acquisition of tax based military force
-5. Humanism was pioneered by the catholic church, who used trained academics among the clergy as missionaries to heathen tribes in Prussia, Latvia and Estonia, and later in North and South America, targeting “the might makes right” nature of pagan religions in favor of quality of life, the center piece of current Christian missionary activity. See The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, William Urban. The humanistic stage from 900 to 1800 saw the conversion of many times more souls across many times more lands than it did under its salvation phase. Salvation worked within the Roman system. In traditional tribal settings, salvation was purely a secondary mode of conversion, with military force #1 and humanism #2, these working like the jab and the straight rear hand in boxing as a knockout combination.
-6. To “follow” a system of thought is an explicitly religious act.
-7. Here I disagree with Gibbon, who places the truth of Christianity as the prime cause.
‘Of Sorcery, Not Only of Heresy’
Worlds in Collision by Dr. Emanuel Velikovsky: 12/27/23
In 1946 the author completed his second book, which would be published first, in 1950. In 1949, in the preface, he warns that man who had always had godlike pretensions was on the verge of nuclear destruction. The publisher faced such pressure from academia, including threats to cancel text book orders, that he had to go to a second publisher. The knives of the priests of lie craft came out and Velikovsky was not permitted to rebut any charges in science journals.
In his first preface, he named himself a heretic, and never had the text redone to address any charges or any mistakes, wanting to see how his work held up against the many new scientific findings that most scientists thought would not happen, as having split the atom, they had achieved godhood. He notes that this act, was merely a use “of a few of the bricks of which the universe is built,” for man’s own purposes.
In the preface to the recent edition, an editor of Paradigma Limited, states that the author of World in Collision was “harshly punished by members of the scientific establishment,” and that his work was placed in a “purposeful oblivion.”
What was hilarious, though never corrected, about the charges, was that Velikovsky used Hesiod’s account of Venus being an unrelated and late-coming deity as a clue to that planet’s weird nature in all cosmologies. He predicted that Venus would be much hotter than the science of 1949 predicted [only 7 degrees above earth temperature] and that it would be found to have either no rotation or a slow retrograde rotation, both of which were proven by probes in the early 1960s. In fact, the temperature on Venus proved to be more than 100 times hotter than the best science had predicted. The ancients, once again, were proved right.
I regard this work as one of scientifically-informed comparative mythology and investigation. For an amateur researcher looking into a few certain regions, having had an obsessive professional scouring the world record for common threads is a great help. Further, in a world where science has lied to us obsessively since the mid 1980s, a campaign that intensified to a science hysteria in 2020, it is nice to see a scientist taking historical records before the newspaper [1] era at face value.
He named himself a heretic for going against Newtonian and Darwinian Law in 1949. Then in 1965, declared, that the few retractions claimed he merely had an unusual intuition rather than a use, rather than worship of, science. To this he declared, that he must therefore by charged as well with “sorcery, not only of heresy.”
In the body of his work, in the first section, the author demonstrates that no aspect of the solar system, from the moons, to the planets, the short and long period comets, held to any of the theories ascribed to their actions and origins. He methodically demonstrates that science had not one satisfactory explanation for the origins or actions of the sun, the planets, comets, orbits, or of planetary densities, sizes, processions and orbital bodies.
Further, he assess the reigning slow motion and erosion theories of geology and Darwinian evolution and finds these grotesquely wanting. Even Newton’s Laws are found wanting, and in one major case not even explained by the author, who did write primarily on religious matters. There are many theories masquerading as laws, that are mere educated guesses. When these are contradicted by Facts, he notes that facts should be taken over laws, in particular such laws as have internal contradictions that disprove themselves.
On man’s puny position in the cosmos he notes that this being inhabits: “a third [planet] in the row,” of a small, young sun, and that man has fancied himself in many guises as the “Prince of Creation” and “has felt godly long before he could talk to his fellow men on the other side of the globe,” and that now he would soon possess the means of destroying that globe. I would suspect that science came after its rogue practitioner for failing to worship the fraternity, on account of his doubting the unique godliness of Atomic America.
Perhaps it was due to his naming modern scientific man as “homo Ignoramus” that he struck a contentious chord with his fellows. He warns against “sacred law in science,” of man claiming to know all when science could not explain mountains to its own satisfaction, let alone why the Bronze Age came before the Iron Age, how the massive Andean monuments came to be built, how mammoths with undigested food in their mouths frozen in blocks of ice so perfectly as to be eaten by sled dogs in the 1790s, came to their state of preservation, and how the Ice Ages actually came and went.
Finding the mechanics for all of the planetary sciences of his day wanting, and proven right often in the intervening age of ignorance despite means, Velikovsky admitted to be leaving a barely inventoried trove of “amazing questions for the future reader of earth’s riddles.”
The ancient astronomers of many nations declared that Venus or Aphrodite came lately to the dance of planets, that she was an adulteress, wed to Science [2] lover to Mars. Should it surprise us that her night side is hotter than that facing the sun?
The defamed Doctor used the Bible, Herodotus and myriad sources attempting to fill in the cataclysmic past of our shared garden-like delusion. It is of great interest, to have listened to pulp horror/fantasy Writer Clark Ashton Smith an hour earlier, who spoke through a learned acolyte of an ancient earth, who had finally learned enough in service to his master to glimpse his own doom, when he spun these words:
“And many but nameless are the visitants who have come to us… In my master’s marble house I have written.”
-The Double Shadow
That a pulp writer of a hundred years ago understands more of science than our so called scientists, is quite an indictment of man’s haughty belief that he can delve for, capture, and control every aspect of the unknown—and above all, that there is no unknowable, no omniscience beyond Holy Science.
I read Worlds in Collision as a youth and as a young man, and turned away from the text when a college man told me it was bunk. Since I have since discovered that college learning is mere indoctrination that prevents actual self-learning, I have returned to the old book as a meditating mirror upon the epics, myths and histories of the ancients.
Thanks, Mrs. Lockhart for the audio version.
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Notes
-1. Newspaper writing is structurally hyperbolic, deceptive and obfuscating all at the same time and has disabled most modern and post modern readers from extracting useful information from the written word in general. The honesty of pre Newspaper Era authors in placing blame upon their own faith or race or nation, and the plunge into jingoistic afterthought pretending to be inquiry since, has rendered most modern history mute, and as well struck the reader deaf.
-2. Hephasteus, or Vulcan, maker of the Shield of Achilles [Homeric totem of Civilization itself] and reluctant jailer of Prometheus.
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