On Domestication

4. The whip is the first law of domestication: the making into property of animals and men.

 

9. The beating of farm animals into submission: man's first practice of domestication—teaching him the usefulness of brutality—a domestication he would learn to perform upon himself and other men.

 

10. The hunter-gatherers banished a man from their lands, but the farmers (the early Statists) instead took custody of the man and through physical coercion attempted to change his behavior. For when all lands are owned—are the property of States and other men—there is nowhere to banish a man. Outlaws must be whipped in the public square, imprisoned (made the 'property of the State'), or put to death.

 

14. The hunter-gatherer had no use for the whip. He had neither animals nor men to swing it upon.

 

17. The first instruments of war were implements of farming, for the tilling of fields, repurposed to kill other men. The first weapons of war were made in the same blacksmith shops as scythes and ploughs.

The Iraqi

from the forthcoming masterpiece Slime Line

The Iraqi named Menter was a refugee from the war. He came from Baghdad to Alaska in the middle of winter through a job placement program for refugees. He came to America already unhinged and his discovery of alcohol, cocaine and loose Alaskan women had only unhinged him further. His English was a barely comprehensible mumbling of words that he ended with a smile. He seemed altogether harmless if you didn't know him better.

The Iraqi enjoyed smashing things. He would push over and kick the 160lb. metal totes while cleaning them, making huge booming crashes along the dock. Down in the ship holds where we pitched black cod and halibut, Menter would overhead slam the fish into the metal totes. Esteban would joke that he was trying to re-kill them.

For many months he had an off-on relationship with the moody, big-boned Russian girl from Alaskan Fish and Game. Her job was to stand on the salmon sorting belt and do some sort of analysis on the brains of red salmon. She would lobotomize the reds by cutting off their foreheads with a knife and then, with a tweezers, pluck out the tiny brain and place it on the back of her hand. She examined the brain for a moment before flicking it away and beginning again on another salmon.

Every few days the Iraqi threatened to kill her. He left hundreds of messages on her cell phone saying, "I kill you. Bitch I kill you." Sometimes he threatened to bomb the cannery and kill everyone.

A Dialogue on Surplus

Moraline: I feel a restless in the city. I have rested for long enough and must return to training and writing. The city imprisons me while far away, in some frozen north, I feel there is what I am looking for.

 

Maximin: But anything is better than the West. I just wonder if the bike has any place anymore. I now think it may be the backpack and the hiking boots to explore the wilderness.

 

Moraline: Got to go and get your wilderness skills up first with some small trips.

 

Maximin: Right, perhaps a base camp of some sort, then exploration in well organized efforts to gain the skills.

 

Moraline: I'm more unsure of myself and my next move than ever before. Acquisition of skills makes sense.

 

Maximin: Indeed, you have moved beyond boundaries. Perhaps the gods are now wondering your next move.

 

Moraline: I looked into learning Inupiat but there are less than 2500 speakers left now in Alaska, and the young Eskimos have no interest in it.

 

Maximin: You have travelled so far from the system that you are in an ether few men know.

Something Strange

Gil, the crew chief, came over to our table.

"We got nothing more coming in until after lunch. Maybe we get a salmon boat then, man." He grinned. Bald-headed and squinting he always looked happy. He was a good chief and a good man and we all liked to work for him. "Come back after lunch and see what's going on, man."

"Okay, man."

"Yeah, man. Go into the town. See what's going on in the town. You might see something strange."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, man. School just let out. Maybe you see something strange. Maybe come across it,"  Gil grinned broadly and showed the yellowed stubs of teeth. "Yeah, man, something strange."

On Greatness, Again

In spite of the many accounts of historians and biographers, there is no chain of choices and explanations for a particular man's rise to power, or his technological invention, or scientific discovery, or work of art. Great men act according to obligation: the mysterious obligation of a lineage, both genetic, historical and divine.

 

Verily, greatness is a destiny thrust upon men by gods and it will more often destroy men than make them memorable. For divine destiny is more often a fatal, life-shortening curse, than a gift. For the few who have their achievements remembered, there are multitudes of similarly disposed talents who through some sort of bad luck died early—struck down by angrier gods—or succeeded but were not acknowledged (e.g. Wallace who theorized about evolution contemporaneously with Darwin; or Tesla and Edison; the list of painters and writers is a longer one; the list of warriors and hunters still longer).

 

But in this, the Epoch of Middle-Class Equality, of scholarship and domestication, greatness is peddled as achievable by all. Universities teach men and women to be creative in the arts (MFAs) and in business (MBAs). Self-help books abound. Middle class men call themselves alpha men, and women proclaim themselves the equals of men. Drugs and surgeries improve their bodies and computers provide assistance and reminders.

 

The divinity inherent in greatness, its wellspring in mystery, its terrifying irrationality, is subsequently repudiated through the reasoning of lesser men, through their scholarship and history telling. Greatness, they argue, can be reduced to charts and 10 step programs. The great man of history appears as someone who was manufactured and that other men can replicate.

 

In the historical post-mortem of the great man the scholar makes no acknowledgement of the terrifying and irrational and the great man's courage before it, his lack of hesitation, his grace, his inability to see any choice, or probability of success. For in greatness there is no calculation, there is no cost-benefit analysis, no weighing of alternatives for and against. Greatness is the push beyond measure, a man alone obligated to trespass upon divine lands.

On Cowardice

1. It is not nearly enough to conduct the epoché. A man must have the courage to live the way of life that he seeks to understand. To really fucking live it, regardless of consequences, scholarship must be suspended along with judgment.

 

4. Objectivity: an admission of cowardice.

 

11. Understanding arrives in silence. To understand is to no longer need to write.

The Osprey

Today was the opening of the fishing season and I went into the shed and rigged up a rod with a lure and went down to the dock. I made some casts and thought about the better fishing that was over in the channel, and all the good spots that I had fished as a boy and young man. But I didn't have a boat to get over there and now someone else owned that property and it would be trespassing to walk onto it. So I continued to cast out into the very weed-less waters around the dock.

 

I could see I would not catch anything. There was no activity in the water. The lake was brown and dead. It was a late thaw for the ice and it had gone out only two weeks before. Spring had begun on the land and the birds were active and building nests and the trees were budding and the animals had returned from winter, but under the water the spring had not yet come. None of the underwater plants had started to grow. The water was still to cold. The fish were in some other place. They were not yet ready to spawn. I did not know where they were.

 

Across the lake I watched a great black bird soaring back and forth over the water. The bird was hunting the water for something. I saw the angle in his wing and his white head. It was an osprey. He must have been six feet across in the wings. The great osprey stopped in the air, flapping its wings dramatically, and held itself over the water, studying it. Then he soared high and dove, crashing through the surface of the water and then flapping out of the water, he soared along the height of the pines, hunting the lake.

 

The osprey had seen something. I didn't think there were fish yet but the osprey was hunting them. The osprey again hovered on beating wings and dove and crashed into the water and he came out and gliding low across the lake and towards me on the dock and soaring over me, I saw in his talons he had one, he had a fish. The osprey had caught one. It looked like a little perch. The osprey circled back and showed me again the perch he had caught and I watched him soar along the tree line and down the channel. For the great hunter the spring had come.