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Dear diary,
There are many more details to disclose regarding those centuries during which I was enrolled in the Herdsman College of 1960, being taught by Monica Vitti and Anna Karina about how to raise and watch and keep and tend living creatures, alongside my co-student, dormitory roommate and all-around best-friend Fernando Pessoa; but I’ll either tell those stories later or just forget to tell them, because I want to shove the Muse forward and force her to help me describe the eons that Fernando and I actually spent on the rolling green pastures wearing our blue mantles and doing herdwork. We served as shepherds, goatherds, swineherds, neatherds, and otherherds.
(The reason I add that we also labored at herding “others” is only to cover all types of possible beings. It’s actually not true: we stopped at neats. But I might go on to tell about herding different styles of foreign animals and alien beings, nevertheless. Just know that, if I do so, I am lying.)
So, after receiving doctorate degrees from Herdsman Graduate School, our first move is to acquire for ourselves some blue mantles. To help with this, Monica Vitti and Anna Karina lead us in person to the textual conclusion of John Milton’s “Lycidas”. (The college that we attended does not only instruct one how to become a master herdsman, it also guarantees that its students find professional placement in the field; hence the behavior of our teachers on this occasion. However, Anna and Monica end up enjoying our company so much that they abandon the college to spend the rest of their lives with us, among the rolling green hillocks.) — At the end of the monody “Lycidas”, after all the main lyrics that the poem wants to sing have been sung, the song reveals the secret vocalist who’s been improvising all along within its own self:
Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touch’d the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.
And now the sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
Again, this is the part of the text that Ms. Vitti and Ms. Karina guide us to. They now approach its “uncouth swain” to pay him compliments and eventually ravish the fellow, resulting in sections of his mantle being torn off to share with me and Fernando. Yet Anna and Monica assure us, for the record, that the swain offers his outfit willingly — it’s important to mention this, lest it appear that the damsels trickt or swindl’d the swain, or pull’d off something like the wife of Potiphar does to Joseph in Genesis (39:12 “She caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out”). Both maidens stress how crucial it is that we keep our stories straight about how splendidly they all got along:
Returning from a nearby grotto with Monica and Anna, the fellow is blushing, and the women address the swain (I’m not at liberty to disclose his name in this present scripture), saying “Rabboni, meet our students: Fernando and Bryan.” — We both kiss his hand, which is suspiciously soft and feminine; then we bow down, embrace his boots, and weep ourselves tearless. After this, all five of us sit down for drinks, at a table in the desert. (For a spell, the scene has gone grassless, I cannot say why.) “Absinthes for all,” I order; and the angel of the LORD hastens back and forth from Paradise to serve us. Fernando and I tell jokes, and the uncouth swain laughs heartily in his winsome, womanly way. Later, in private, Senhor Pessoa and I remark how perfectly this swain resembles Leo da Vinci’s La Gioconda — if only it weren’t for the fellow’s facial hair, which is so mysteriously dainty that it seems inked on.
Anyway, like I said, we all got along. We end up exchanging contact info; and Ms. Vitti and Ms. Karina initiate a new tradition of paying the swain regular visits. And they continue their ritual to this day.
So we sew ourselves mantles from the swathes of blue that the swain tore for us from his own shepherd’s cloak.
“Look how mine continues rippling, even when it’s not windy,” I remark.
“So does mine,” Fernando marvels at his garment. “It’s like the surface of a gently flowing stream.”
§
The first beings we choose to herd are sheep. We spend our days strolling among the hillocks, watching over our flocks as they graze. Fernando tells me his thoughts, and I tell him mine. Monica and Anna also listen to us and tell their own thoughts, and we admire their ideas as much as their physiques. Sometimes we stand on a hilltop; sometimes we recline on a grassy slope; and sometimes we lean against the palm tree that’s always nearby.
I reach into our 1942 L’Œuf électrique (or “Electric Egg” — the model of car that everyone drives in the far-off future) and pull out a paperback airplane novel. “Shall we read this together, aloud?” I ask. And everyone sez either “Oui” or “Sì” or “Sim” — which all mean “Yes!” in everyone’s native tongue. (Again, except for simple answers in the affirmative or negative, all the lines spoken by my fellow herdsmen in their respective languages are translated by way of golden subtitles into North American: the furthest future’s lingua franca.)
The book starts in Chapter Two. It’s titled The Goatherds.
“The whole book, or just the chapter?” asks Anna Karina.
I turn the book from the front to the back, and then flip thru the pages rapidly, looking for an answer. “I don’t know,” I reply.
The first sentence depicts our four zoas as leaning and loafing among the green hillocks, simply watching their herd of goats and voicing their thoughts.
Fernando Pessoa now raises his arm and points to a few goats near the distant palm tree who are frisking about. “Look how they’re frisking,” sez Fernando. We all laugh and sigh.
The sun exists, which is not ideal, but it’s at least enormous and blazing loudly while we bask in its dreck.
Monica Vitti now rises and walks to the well, and we all shift our attention from our goats to her constitution. Each one of us feels a pang of reverence for this sight. Even Monica herself undergoes an intense moment of admiration when she views her own act replayed from the security camera.
[AUTHOR’S NOTE to the gentle reader: Freely swap the name of any other woman for Monica Vitti in that last paragraph, as its truth is universally applicable.]
Goats are as holy as sheep; that’s what Fernando and I conclude. Anna and Monica agree.
Next we tend swine. This is fun. Swine are intriguing. Fernando and I borrow the lab smocks from our former teachers and we do some scientific experimentation, while keeping our swine: We take one of the least polite members from among the herd, and we splice genetic information from the cell of a paradisal seraph together with its porcine gene-pool to make a swine-hominid combo; and we repeat this process again and again, tweaking the mix more and more toward the angelic side of its nature, until we develop a being that’s sort of like the first male-ish human; and we name this creature “Pig”. Then, using our survival knife, we hollow out the pages from a boring airplane novel, and we craft the hole so that it is shaped like a man named Pig, and we place our invention therewithin. Then we open up the trunk of our bookmobile and toss into it the volume that we just tied up, and we light the fuse so that the rocket that is affixed to the bookmobile’s underside causes it to blast off and eventually crash-land on Planet Earth. That’s why our Pig’s nickname is “The Devil.”
The rest of our herd we teach to swim, so that they don’t drown if anyone tells them to rush off a cliff into the ocean. Then we register our herd of swine under the name of “Legion” and sell them off at the county auction. They are immediately purchased by a private party named “God” and sent to play the role of the owners of the United States of America.
We reinvest the proceeds from our swine sale to purchase a herd of neats. Now we are officially neatherds. Anna and Monica favor these neats, so we decide to hold on to them and make them our family instead of grooming them for commerce. We build a barn for our neats, and we manufacture a pontoon boat, which the goddess Athena helps us to transform into a cloud float. We cruise around on the ocean with our extended family of neats; and, while doing so, we end up befriending the alligators that infest the swamps of all our suburban neighbors’ moats. Anna Karina teaches the gators to speak human words. This is one of our more memorable adventures. Then we all return to the rolling green hillocks and lean on the palm tree and think for a while.
Soon we discover, inside the trunk of our 1936 Stout Scarab, another airplane novel and a whole herd of strange beings that we take under our wing.
[To be continued...]
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