Every morning Anson Grant felt more and more like an animal. He rose from his bed just before dawn, voided himself after a long night's sleep, dressed, unlocked the front door, peered out across the lawn and down the street, sniffed the air, and returned to fix breakfast.
How was he different from rats in the sewers, squirrels in the trees, foxes and coyotes wandering in from Rock Creek park, or the lions and wildebeests on the veldt, the tigers, hyenas and jackals on the savannah? Nothing, and the older he got and the more his routine became inescapable, perennial, and the most significant part of his day, the more he felt like an animal.
His children had poked and sniffed at every new dish he prepared, hesitant, wary, cautious. He had prowled the bars of the Upper East Side looking for women, fought in Vietnam and fought with his colleagues at Peabody, Finch & Adams. He had built a stockade fence around his property and installed halogen lights on the perimeter, jealously kept his wife in tow, and increased his holdings in offshore investments.
He travelled in packs - men from the same social milieu with the same education, background, breeding, and social status; associates in the same or allied professions. He dined with politically likeminded people, fiercely protected and promoted his sons, fought the city's attempts to 'diversify' the neighborhood.
'Ah, so', he said as he sat alone at the table watching the sky get light, listening to the increasing traffic on the street, and hearing the sounds of neighbors stirring. Nighttime was an unsettling time and he, an early riser never ventured out, and waited for the sun to come up.
Ever since he was a child he had been told about moral rectitude, right behavior, living a life of respect, duty, and responsibility. Every wild, aggressive instinct had been stifled, smothered by the church, the school, and every adult. He was an animal being tamed, corralled, broken, and disciplined until he was a blindered dray horse plowing furrows. The threat of punishment was always in the air - the fires of eternal damnation, the darkness of Purgatory, reform school, expulsion, dismissal.
He felt particularly bound. He felt like a tiger in a zoo, reduced to pacing the perimeter of his cage, eating what was given to him through the bars, sleeping restlessly, sniffing the air for prey, for a mate and finding nothing.
Anson had been sent to the best schools, attended Christmas balls, cotillions, and coming out parties, learned to dress and speak properly, was encouraged to travel in the right circles, marry well, bring up children who would follow in the same patrician, aristocratic tradition. He might have been created with individual will, spirit, and soul; but he had been coopted from the moment of birth.
These days much was made of the black community. The black man, a child of the forest with a preternatural sense of the environment, a tribal soul in touch with the most primitive but essential instincts of humanity (he was closer to the dawn of human evolution than any white man), and a vast, untapped well of creative, expressive qualities which, when realized, would fundamentally change society for the better.
Anson dismissed all this as political cant and inspirational politics. His image of forest legacy was quite different from that imagined by his progressive colleagues. The inner city was as tribal as a Congolese jungle - the laws of white, patterned, confining civilization did not apply. Men were aggressive, predatory, sexually uninhibited, and defiant.
While most of white America was afraid of the black man, still hesitant to welcome what they considered a still unsocialized being into polite society, Anson looked on with admiration and envy. He wanted ten children with six different women. He wanted to take things, not line up and sign for them. He wanted satiety - sitting on the stoop smoking a joint and drinking malt liquor, catcalling and tomcatting, a member of a gangs, crewes, and cliques. He wanted every bit, part, and parcel of black life.
Josef Conrad in The Heart of Darkness wrote about African primitivism. Kurtz, the main character senses the feral power of the neighboring tribes. At night he could hear the drumbeats, the ecstatic cries and howls, and feel the ferocity and the animal savagery of the human sacrifices performed.
He wanted to experience - to have - the same primitive, instinctive power they had, a power which would give him access and eventual sovereignty. He would rule the forest, not just be a player within it.
As he becomes more initiated into the pagan rites of the tribe, he feels more complete than he ever has been. He has touched and felt the primitive, the essential core of human nature; but as time goes on he begins to see that the uninhibited savagery, the total lack of civilizational restraint, the idolatry, and the fierce animality is an expression of the worst part of human nature.
As he lies dying, he utters the words, 'The horror...the horror' at the moment that he realizes that this primitive savagery is not limited to the uncivilized of the forest, but in all of us.
Anson understood this - he was himself an idolater, an idealist of the most unconscionable kind. His idealistic colleagues saw progress as real and possible. Utopia was attainable - a land of milk and honey, a garden of Eden, a perfectly harmonious, gentle, compassionate, and verdant resting place. He wanted no part of it. He wanted the savage completeness of the cannibalistic tribes that Conrad described.
As he sat over his coffee, dry toast, and oatmeal - a capitulation to good health and wellbeing but hated for its insipidness and example of cowardly obedience - he wanted to get up and shout, break something, run through the forest with a spear.
'We are made in God's image', Father Brophy used to say from the pulpit at Sunday Mass; but Anson had always wondered what he meant. God was supposed to be ineffable, indescribable, existing everywhere without form and substance but immanent and powerful. As he looked around at the congregants crowded into the narrow pews of St. Maurice's church, he could not believe that he was looking at the faces of God; and it was that day, despite his attraction to the metaphor of the Mass - the sacrifice on the cross, and eating the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ - his mind wandered, his spiritual evolution lay elsewhere.
'So, this is what it comes to', he said as the sky lightened and he heard his wife stirring. This inevitable thing, this Kurtz 'the horror...the horror', this end of life as a bound and tethered, strapped and tied animal about to be summarily excused, sent off into no-man's land without fanfare.
Now undeniably, depressingly, but inevitably a creature of habit, the rinsed his coffee cup and breakfast plate, placed them in the dishwasher, and left.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.