(I cut out this picture of rice from a cardboard box.)
Dear diary,
Caesar…Kaiser…Tsar…
& then I think about Jesus who got labeled Christ, which means King; Saint Matthew sez that Jesus said:
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matt. 22:21)
So now we have Tsar, Christ, King, & God all sharing one meaning: they denote “a powerful person”. Also the LORD, whose birth-name is Jehovah (actually it’s YHWH, but the mispronunciation “Jehovah” is more popular where I’m from, in the U.S. suburbs; and I’m all for inaccuracies).
Some people like to force people. Some people prefer to lure people. Does anybody simply leave other people alone, let them live and do their own thing? No, everyone either acts directly, with swords, to conquer cities and enslave their populace to build empires; OR they act indirectly, passively, by laying out a net, spinning a web, or setting a trap to lure and ensnare the unsuspecting…
Either way, you want your actions to end up influencing others. Merely moving your own limbs around isn’t enough.
The ultimate partnership is the hand & the mind. They move as one. The mind sends a signal to the hand, and the hand obeys. But this signal is instantaneous: it’s practically one & the same with the act. Try to separate the mind’s message from the behavior that it calls for: it’s nearly impossible. It’s almost like the mind and the hand are one being; not two separate things, a King and a subject.
With masters & slaves here on Earth, it’s a slightly different matter. As a master, you can’t just sit down at your writer’s desk and pen a friendly letter to your slave, asking him to please fetch one jug of rum from the ark in the backyard; then, before you have a chance to seal the message in the envelope by licking it closed, you look up & behold your slave standing directly before you, holding out the jug of rum obediently, with the cork off, ready to dump it directly down your gullet. On the contrary, we masters and slaves are not a well-oiled machine. We’re more like enemies than friends. You can send your pretty letter, but you’ll be waiting in vain for a reply. The slave probably doesn’t even know how to read; and that’s partly your own fault, cuz you forbade him to learn anything. And you seized his wife & daughter and begot your own children upon them. So you actually need to whip the man, to get him to serve you a drink. It takes a lot of hard work on your behalf: you drink your rum in the sweat of your face — you really earned this.
But a man and his horse are a different story altogether. Can I liken them to a centaur, the creature from Greek mythology which fuses the head, arms, & torso of a human with an equestrian lower-body? No, that’s going too far. The man does not share a nervous system with his horse, like a mind and its hand; nevertheless a man-horse team is much more harmonious than a U.S. Prez with his fieldslaves. An experienced horseman will almost be able to control the legs of his nag better than his own human boots. He barely gestures and the horse dashes left. He gives a little click with his tongue and the horse leaps up: the horse jumps over a whole herd of cattle. And this is not even the winged Pegasus, who sprang immortal from the blood of the slain Medusa — no, my horse is just a great jumper. Her name is Dorothea.
I should also admit, however, that a heartless horseman will have just as hard a time commanding his vehicle as the above slavemaster did ordering his refreshments. It all has to do with how much you’re capable of empathizing:
The trick is to avoid using a stick to whack the being on its rump: that’ll get you bucked & stomped to death. Instead, try stringing a carrot to the far end of your stick: now dangle this reward before the stallion’s sparkling eyes. He’ll assume that if he paces forward, he will eventually reach the treat & be allowed to consume it. Thus he’ll continue galloping till death; as Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses explains:
For all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
And the reason that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. fashioned our government as a representative democracy is that the people who were residing here when the Founders’ ships arrived were enjoying life, liberty, happiness, meeting everyone’s basic needs, and sharing all things in common; but the Founders were reading the biblical book of Proverbs at the moment, which said:
My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not. If they say, “Come with us, we shall find all precious substance: cast in thy lot among us; let us all share one purse,” walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from their path: for their feet run to evil. (Proverbs 1:10-16)
So the Founders knew that this was a warning against Communism; and they therefore developed a system of representatives who obey the requests only of those menfolk who own gold and land.
It is true that, later, various other people were allowed to make formal requests thru these same representatives, as evil Democracy (a byproduct of Communism) started seeping thru the populace; but, thankfully, the Founders were genius enough to bar their representatives from heeding the rabble.
Again, this Representative Republic is not as slick as the mind-to-hand cooperative, but it’s better than nothing. For, recall that nothing (the state of having no convoluted system) brought life, liberty, & happiness to those fools we stole this place from; whereas what our Founders were going for is not happiness itself but rather a sustained pursuit of happiness — I stress: not the actual attainment.
Remember the earlier example of the horse? He carried us “for ever” thru “meadows, climates, councils, governments,” and “delightful battles on windy plains”; all because we arranged our relationship so that he was kept IN PURSUIT OF that elusive carrot. God forbid he actually eats it: then he’d become like one of us — dissatisfied. That would make him a lazy ne’er-do-well. He’d most likely quit trotting that instant, & never work a day again in his life. Not every employee can join the idle rich. (Who would then fetch our rum? Who would pick up our bins of trash, and our bins of recyclables; then drive a polite distance away to combine both bins into the same crate, and pour that crate into the ocean?)
Finally, consider the ultimate mystery: Is the relationship between a reader & writer more like a master & slave, or like a horse & rider?
I’d say it’s most like the hand-mind coordination, as there’s no gulf fixed between Emily Dickinson and us when we are reading her: the time of her writing is one and the same with the time of our reading — it takes place in an ultra-infra moment: a time inside of time at the same time as outside of time. She and we are the selfsame being, so long as the words persist in the air; by which I mean, so long as the text remains in our fancy: we become one spirit while our mind cogitates her prophecy:
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—And now We roam in Soverign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—
Here she refers to us readers as her “Owner”, but it’s not the same as the master-slave abuse above. Obviously we’re more like hand-in-glove, or rather mind-firing-handgun on the ecchoing green, as the mountains flatter us with imitation. And we never hit the deer, because, as Sir Thomas Wyatt always sez (in “Whoso List to Hunt”), this truth is written in diamonds around her fair neck:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
Also here’s another thing that we the reader & our Emily relay as one about ourself: that same piece whose beginning I quoted earlier ends as follows, turning upon a subtle distinction between two types of “living”: blankly continuing to exist as physical matter, versus being divinely vital (we can be He or She: gun or poet)...
Though I than He—may longer live
He longer must—than I—
For I have but the power to kill,
Without—the power to die—
(The Everlasting so loved the lethe of her weapon that she doomed it to persevere faithfully even in Arcadia.)
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