Personal History
A True Story by Stone Riley
June 2010, New England, a warm summer. In my third year now as a retired engineer with an adequate pension, and after searching desperately for quite awhile for something beautiful and good to do with my time and other personal resources, I have finally settled in at an excellent volunteer job, and been doing it for half a year so far, doing what's called "historical interpretation". In other words, I have become a costumed character in a living history museum.
So, one summer afternoon I'm there portraying a typical successful New England storekeeper of an earlier period. I'm standing in the back behind the back counter of a simulated successful 19th century country store among antique household items that are supposedly for sale there in my store and kegs supposedly containing nails and gin and whale oil and house paint pigment and shelves that actually display real handthrown jugs and handblown bottles and handsaws with gorgeous hard wood handles, a cornucopia of merchandise, some quite attractive, and all of this tableau got up to show a typical successful New England country store and its keeper in the year 1838, and me well trained to talk about it. The training here is excellent.
So there I am, presumably a sharp old bastard, standing there inside and toward the rear of one building in an extensive recreated village with a village green and mill pond and mills and a real working farm and trees, fences, roads, bridges, livestock very much like 172 years before, this being a well known and highly respected large living history museum.
A boy and two soldiers walk in. My heart dissolves in pity.
I bid them a polite hello, a very brief greeting but meeting the demands of courtesy, not unfriendly but not smiling either, tentative, and they reply in kind.
What I've said exactly is one of my standard greetings: "Good afternoon. Welcome to Judge Asa Knight's country store."
And what all three of them, the boy, a sturdy healthy clear eyed lad about fifteen, and the two soldiers, who are men in their thirties looking fit enough I guess but thin, have done in unison is this: Nod to me and answer "Good afternoon."
This is America in 2010. Our country's empire is a crumbling castle in occupation of a crumbling island world. And our country's army has been wasted. It was puffed up on propaganda and then ground down. During my lifetime I have seen that done.
And so our soldiers, different from the distant time when I was one of them, now seem to live in a strange fantasy of clean heroic virtue that is horribly absurd. In fact, our army's practice of the art of war now openly includes a full repertoire of cruel violations of the law of war, law that was signed in their grandfathers' blood. And yet you can hear the claim of virtue in their talk and see it in the poses struck so often by so many of them, as if their suffering makes them good.
And now I can see that desperate tragic awful fantasy of military virtue, in a ghastly pose of sunny optimism, on these two men.
Their clothing for one thing, just mentioning the obvious: Their lightweight informal civilian summer garb, pale colored garb, is worn with such an extreme of neatness that you are startled and wonder why it's done. Their informal civilian shirts look smoothly molded to their lean chests. Their slacks fit perfectly. The collars and sleeves and trouser creases all appear to lay or hang just right with precision that must have been deliberately measured, impelled by some strange faith or pleasure in taking every possible care however small, with any hope for luck utterly abandoned. Even on this warm humid afternoon they look as if their costumes were ironed with a touch of starch immediately before they briskly stepped into my view. You
may well feel that their pale colors, surely meant to reflect a discipline of mind and heart, glare with desperate grief instead.
And furthermore, more peculiar since at first I can't identify a meaning in this odd behavior, on briskly stepping in, following their boy, the two men stopped before me quite exactly equidistant to my left and right, separated by a width of floor they seemed to measure by prearranged agreement, an empty width of floor two arms wide which they could quickly reach across, as though a circumstance might spring from the unknown future where they must suddenly pass some important thing from one man's hand into the others, but definitely, in case a bomb explodes, no closer than they must, and I saw their minced little steps taking turns adjusting this, smiling in a playful pleasure I watched but did not understand, they glancing up and down into each others eyes and to the floor and back while taking tiny steps, one man then the other, to left and right mutually fixing their placement. And they are smiling openly in this brief joy. Technically you could say they were marching in column, have formed a squad line and are enjoying their parade. I feel astonished, actually, wondering what they're playing at with this movement. What is this?
But once they've found a balance, when they have finally found optimal comfortable positions of the floor in which to stop, both men stand in a firm straight pose that I do recognize, a firm straight pose I used occasionally myself, long ago, for addressing troops in formation. So now I understand at least that they are playing at some military activity
in which they are encountering me. And so I feel affronted by these two.
And then their eyes scan my country store tableau that is before them, scan it systematically, glancing top to bottom in a pattern touching on the bottles and boxes and saws and brooms and everything, with a darting glance that also finds my eyes once or twice or thrice, potentially pleasant, offering to share a smile with me provided that I recognize them first.
But I cannot smile because in fact I don't recognize them. I'm staring at them thinking: Why have they come here? Do I not know these people?
The man toward my left I take to be the father of the boy because he feels himself in charge. He stands a little firmer than the other man and holds sunglasses, neatly folded, forward toward me in one hand, prepared to gesture with them if the opening of our conversation falls to him; indeed, there's wordage taking shape behind his softly stirring lips. His eyes are bright. This is a gentle face this human has. I guess this trip was got up as an educational outing for his son and he is proudly happy in this family duty, for he loves the boy.
The other man, standing toward my right a little more relaxed, is more off duty. He seems to be here traveling as a friend, a guest, a brother officer. He might be uncle to the boy. He seems a bit less focused, less directed. I guess he's currently on leave or maybe even recently discharged to the reserves. But he is interested. He does not feel entirely committed to this moment with all of his resources, but he's glad to play a part.
The poor child himself is about fifteen and so of course he's working very hard to be a man. When they all stepped in briskly and took formation in this small dark place where sunlight falls on everything in patches, the boy instantly put himself forward, decisively front and center, just in front of me, two steps closer than his elders, closer to me than visitors usually stand, as though he's ready to assault the barricade presented by the simple ordinary plain wooden counter of a country store beyond which there stands a costumed character, a large man with gray hair and gray beard and glasses wearing a voluminous white shirt and over that a snug yellow vest that is woven with tiny flowers and over that a grocer's kind of apron, me standing there lounging (but suddenly struck completely motionless) leaning with my right elbow on a small wooden keg that is on the counter there for unknown reasons, me examining these persons who have arrived before me very intently indeed without a smile, and all of this extensive detail is pretty much as if this were instead some retail store in far Afghanistan that is very real and hazardous right now today, where I would be to him perforce either his enemy or friend. The child's innocent face shines up to me in happiness.
My heart is breaking for him. He is the creature life on Earth has made him, the male human youth of every age; he is myself in other days. But he appeared here so unexpectedly I don't know what to say. My efforts with other children bound away to war have usually failed. I am not prepared.
But it is, of course, the eager boy who speaks. He speaks up clearly and asks me of guns. Hearing that, his father smiles.
"Could a customer buy a gun in this store?"
The boy's question was, in fact, a rather common one: Could a customer buy a gun in this store? Visitors mostly ask this question idly or some mischievously but he sounded it deliberately and in his mouth the word of "gun" had a subtle peculiar treatment that, in all of my experience with American military people, connotes a larger thoughtful knowledge of that ancient echoing word, a knowledge of the utterly consuming grotesqueness of "gun" (like intimate knowledge of a brutal lover) which the general public does not share.
"Gun" in that voicing is abbreviation. You use a flat and lowered tone as though to speak punctuation, perhaps an asterisk or italics, and it is often followed by a tiny pause in which I gave the boy the customary tiny nod to indicate that I perceive the coded signal; I have recognized him.
So now, through this link of sympathy we share, the simulation he is running comes to mind for me with brighter vividness and more dimension. The question he has asked would be a living question, a significant or even major information item, if we were standing in a store like this today in far Afghanistan and he my enemy or friend. Among the saws and scythes and shovels here, what types of firearms would I have for sale, if any? Or, what am I willing to tell him?
Behind and to his right, his father smiled. The father had perceived the signal and the coded recognition too and so the father, eyes shining like the son's, leaned backward on his heels a bit, standing back a tiny bit, to mentally release his grip, to let his excellent child go on forward with the exercise of gathering knowledge.
I find the boy is gazing up at me. He is respectfully waiting for my next move.
I'm sixty-three years old. Through earnest practice over many years at many venues,
I have by now become an excellent storyteller. (That's why the management at this museum like me.) And of course along the winding way I've come I've been alchemically distilled into a poet / priest / magician. (The fundamental great arts do that to a human.) And so, in fact, to all intents and purposes, I stand here now before the boy today as an elder Druid.
In fact, to set the scene in classic images like it actually appears in my shamanic eyes: Our situation is the same as if we were in Celtic, Greek, Chinese or Persian legendary days and a proud warrior took his son, a handsome lad now come of age, out to the countryside to train and, wandering in a forest there, they come upon a hermit watching in a cave. The warrior thinks: Surely wisdom will support our noble purposes, and so he prompts the lad to have a go at asking questions. That is what's happening. Wild untamed philosophy to manifest the irrefutable divine, or else some powerful challenge, should now ensue.
And yet, that's not to say this moment is unusual. Of course all of us humans, awake and dreaming, are constantly enacting myths, enacting timeless play scripts that profoundly fully illustrate the tragic comic nature of human life on Earth, and by those means attempt to live like we should, and of course a smart old bastard like myself has learned to see the ancient stories constantly renewing and actually visible in my eyes as a kind of shadow show surrounding human doings. And so naturally my breaking heart is an ordinary part of the work day here. For mercy's sake, I tell myself, your mystic astrocasting fails so often; just answer the kid's questions. It's stretching things a bit, I reason with myself, to see the boy as Galahad.
But still, this place in which we stand is a well known, large and very good living history museum. The staff here study constantly, we show the public a mantic heap of excellent material, and we draw an exciting crowd, on many days a crowd of thousands. This is a famous place where people come to seriously immerse themselves in serious play, both visitors and staff. This village every day becomes a hundred acre stage set brimming with fine performing art. And furthermore, besides all else, this place is supposed to be a fertile valuable educational institution giving special care to children.
Okay, let's recapitulate:
In the sixty seconds since these visitors stepped in through the open door of my shady den from the clear bright sunshine of the dusty road and tree lined village green outside, they have confused me. What should I do? What should I do with them or for them? What is my proper duty, my best practice, in this office that I hold as an artistic educator at this museum? For this audience here before me, should I act as a human encyclopedia and simply answer questions, or be a magical philosopher? It is currently my turn to speak. Should I ante up with some kind of tasty information item or a tale?
But I should not imply to you that answering questions here is so simple either. We exhibit a mantic heap of top quality material and so therefore, necessarily, at least among the better staff, you see a kind of intuitive process when a better member of our staff, at least when things are going smoothly, interacts with visitors to answer their questions. Speaking technically, we do a process like cold reading divination to guess what a visitor would like to ask based on where their eyes come to rest or on their evident personal character or their behavior among the other members of their party, or such as that, with minimum verbal clues from them.
Only taking Judge Asa Knight's country store, where I'm working for this day, as an example:
• • For one party of visitors I might launch upon a talk about the lovely fabrics on the shelves and the facts of how those fabrics got there on sailing ships from all around the world and/or on steamboats on the inland rivers or by the old canals or new railroads, and probably discuss the huge new textile mills of new New England cities that were absorbing large numbers of rural young women, with their entire human lives bundled in their luggage, in 1838,
• • whereas I might regale another group with an examination of the newspapers that are lying on a counter in a corner by a window for the entertainment of my store's customers, and the roughly equal space which they devote to ads versus news reports, and the entertaining character of much of their news (a shipwreck with insanity and blood, a huge explosion with ghastly wounds on a battlefield in Spain told by a correspondent who was there, the shocking murder trial of a respectable physician in New York, etc.)
• • or else the commodity price listings on the front page of the other paper, a Boston business paper, leading us to a discussion of the hard struggle that was farm economics here in 1838 and the young men who were moving west in droves in search of better land,
• • or else the varied categories of ceramic wares and glass that we have on offer; all compounded from Fire and Earth, made locally or imported, despised or treasured, with which the people staying here equipped their homes,
• • or else my visitors might be a large flock of young children with their school name printed on all their identical shirts who spot my few small glass jars of candy which I obligingly discuss and go from there to the toothbrushes made of bone and bristle that are also here for sale and the tooth powder that transforms into a paste when wetted on your brush and then the truly delightful tiny jewel-like bottles of brightly colored liquid labeled "Toothache Drops" and finally to the state of dental care back then which was not so very bad after all,
• • or else the school books on my shelves and the public school house our museum has rebuilt a short walk up the road and the great achievement of the very high rate of literacy in this region back then,
• • or else the different kinds of wood from which were made the various tools and containers that they see before them and that our museum tries to keep such wonderful information as the different properties of different woods from being lost amid the changing world and that they can do fine service for the world and earn my gratitude by learning and remembering things of practical use,
• • or else for teenage children my clearly labeled liquor casks might lead into the terrible epidemic of alcohol abuse in this region in those days and therefore the temperance movement and the slavery abolition movement and the female suffrage movement and the nature consciousness movement and the rest,
• • or else, occasionally for older students of the mind, the hot ferment of philosophical debate and spiritual seeking in 1838 New England, and the solid choice these people made for tolerance and universal human freedom,
• • or else the peculiar fashions in hats in 1838 New England, displayed for educational viewing on my shelves, and thus some little insight on the endlessly absorbing and surprising and demanding game of human clothes,
• • or else the items of my clothes, my authentic apron, shirt and vest and necktie and woolen trousers but then the fact my eyeglasses ought to be a different shape, my haircut is dubious at best and my beard is not in proper style at all,
• • or else how people wearing clothes like mine in buildings like this store lived with the summer heat and winter cold,
• • or else the surprising way the stovepipes in this building are arranged,
• • or else some details from the history of this building and the history of Judge Asa Knight who built it and worked it and was actually a judge and an active citizen of his community,
• • or else . . . . .
• • or else . . . . .
• • or else . . . . .
and better members of our museum staff, at least when things are going well, navigate this mantic heap of brilliantly beautiful material by an intuitive process, guessing what a visitor would like to ask, given very few clues, by watching our visitors intently. So even just answering questions in this place is not so simple.
And the question on the table is metaphysically complex. Physically, superficially, it's just a common miscellaneous question often asked by miscellaneous visitors. But in a meta dimension these soldiers here
are offering me a role in a mocked up training mission. In their view our simulated village simulates an area of guerrilla war, I simulate a local inhabitant of probable high value, and the marvelous sturdy young cadet who stands before me in his bright colored but modestly trim clothes has taken the initiative in seeking valuable intelligence. By their lights I'd do my duty best by offering their cadet a training experience that is nicely tailored to their purposes. In their projected total sum, in the farthest / closest or closest / farthest dimension of their current thinking, I am supposed to help these heroes win our wars.
But actually, on the other hand, in the real reality of these events, their real patrol has accidentally run onto an elder Druid.
How should I play this?
What I did, finally, was kick the can on down the road. I met his bet and did not raise, requiring him to either deal again or fold. I gave the boy, the trainee cadet, and his officers who I felt were trying to conscript me, a version of my standard answer, which I would give to any miscellaneous person too, but now for them in a spicy and enticing tailored presentation.
With only small hand gestures as I leaned there on my keg, and with a slight animation of my face and stance, here's what I said, in these words exactly as I now recall:
"No. You could not. For reasons that I do not fully understand, this store did not offer firearms. They did carry ammunition: shot and powder, and also some parts: flints and flintlock mechanisms, but not the arms as such. There is some discussion here at the museum about this issue. Perhaps it was because there were many firearm factories in this region. You could walk to a firearm factory."
(With that final sentence there's an instant glance shared by the boy and I in which he asks me if I know and I assure him that I do: This youth whom I am talking to could walk for any reasonable number of hours or days if he had a destination and found fair weather and a road.)
And then my mouth closed.
It did entice them. In fact it was only information anyone could get from me but I spoke it in their language. At least I tried to use their words and syntax and conjugation and rhythm and apparently succeeded. It was, or at least it sounded in my ears, like professional quasi-intellectual American military jargon of gleaming pristine quality and they did buy it. All three of them were strongly reassured. Their tentative uncertainty vanished. They gave me jolly smiles. The father raised his eyebrows high and clasped his hands around the glasses that he held, as though applauding. The boy looked grateful.
In their great relief, immersed in their high value horrific simulation (the men naturally seeing themselves as trying to save the boy's life through good preparation, and the boy struggling to be a successful honest man) they almost laughed out loud. The men surely felt their child was walking step by step along the razor edge of survival and sanity and health and currently succeeding well, currently with assistance from this costumed character whom luck had found for them, succeeding in a harrowing acrobatic act which they were very familiar with themselves through terrible experience.
Their relief was palpable. These men wanted their boy to live and prosper and be sane and good and they believed that I was now helping. Meanwhile, the boy was glad as if the engine of an automobile which had been grinding down to silence suddenly caught and started. He felt some power and was suddenly at ease. They now all obviously felt that I was on their side.
And it was their side's turn to speak.
And again, the boy was both direct and clever. In this same store today in far Afghanistan, having found a friendly source of detailed information, what information should he seek? In retrospect I have to say that his solution to the task was obvious: One information item that is very high on his Must Know List must be the current availability of high tech weapons to the enemy who are hidden among the population in this area. For the sake of life and limb and hope and pity, he should ask me about the availability of high tech weapons. And furthermore, a person in my position in this community would surely have some information, or at least some rumor, to offer in reply. And this very good boy has a very good simulation of that question per our 1838 community immediately ready on his tongue, also thereby demonstrating a valuable historical perspective on the current situation.
So, he wants to know what I have heard or seen about the availability of high tech weapons in this area in this time.
The good boy licked his lips to wet his mouth so he could speak with perfect clarity and tossed his handsome head and looked directly in my eyes and asked:
"What about percussion caps?"
What about percussion caps?
The men behind him grin at this accomplishment.
Raised into the height of vision then by his power of vision, I look farther out than he is looking and I see the story:
By luck, recently, in a series of events already lit with magic, a tale has crossed my path that could fit into our puzzle here very neatly indeed. So, judging from that train of circumstance, judging from the converging multi-dimensional forest path of that other story through my life, knowing that all things are coincidence, trusting thence to luck, I surely think it is the story that he hopes to hear, the riddle that he hopes to riddle out, a coded treasure map of his island's labyrinth. It will be a true tale, therefore certainly a wisdom tale, but wrapped around a hard enduring challenge, a challenge to his father's vision and therefore to his father's power. In other words, it will be a story for a hero. So now I think this all makes sense. It seems I've been recruited to the young man's quest.
What about percussion caps?
The percussion cap was an important step in the march toward modern war, a small tentative invention in itself that became a key to major developments. With this hardware item available, it became conceivable to put a weapon in a warrior's hands that would shoot bullets in fast succession even in the most demanding combat environments. {{The rolling deck of a ship at sea and galloping horseback will be important in the story.}} A percussion cap was about the size of an aspirin pill. It was a tiny pinch of highly explosive chemical cradled in a metal shell, reasonably safe and easy for a warrior to handle, beaten with a little mechanical hammer to create the initial spark of a firearm.
The boy cadet and I both know that much.
I also possess the following further information and the boy apparently does not but at first this secret item seems to me to be of low value for him:
In America in 1838, percussion caps could be manufactured at agreeable quantity and cost, and they were being used in experimental weapons worked up at various factories by various smiths, but an attractive application for percussion caps had not been discovered by them yet.
No simulation metaphor for that secret further information springs to mind, no obvious resemblance between those facts of 1838 and the battlespace today in far Afghanistan. Indeed, America's current enemies there definitely obtain some high tech gear and any Judge Asa Knight in that community today certainly hears at least some rumors about the enemy's weapons trade. And that current reality is very different from the facts in 1838 New England. So for me to tell the uncompliant facts per 1838, even though it's what the boy requested, would be disappointing. In fact, his question missed its target by about 10 or 15 years.
But on the other hand, visualizing it, I quickly see that as a dramatist I can shape this material into a pause, an anti-climax in our play. The disappointing stuff about the nonexistence of percussion cap high tech weapons in our place and time can be a segue, an empty bit of stage beside the wing, an empty bit of salesroom floor before an exit. I can invite our Galahad out through the curtains of that exit gate into the meta-meta-space of the shaman conjure story. Out there
on that guarded circled magic plane, that parking lot for mythic ships, that central depot base of many labyrinths, I shall exhibit to the hero's gaze a horrid demon.
Enter: Samuel Colt.
Of course, when a familiar figure of our everyday world is sketched as a monster on the epic scale and the picture looks realistic, that does surprise us. But of course the epic age is every day and the banality of evil is profound. It's often true that when our neighbors say a thing is definitely good, but good in some problematical way, a close examination by our conscience will reveal that thing as simply bad, and knocking that small chip out of the smooth tableau of everyday will sometimes knock a chink out of a wall of blindness.
And so the demon I will conjure for the child's educational examination {{re Dr. Faust?}} will be Mister Samuel Colt, industrious and patriotic famous American master gunsmith. {{In a rarely told surprising true tale of adventure that I myself have only recently heard.}}
But first I must craft the segue.
The boy has just now conjured into himself sincere bravery, sincere awareness of life and limb and hope and pity, and suddenly has shot a look into my eyes and asked, "What about percussion caps?"
I have taken heart from his intelligence and courage. Therefore I now plan to exit from our current web of metaphor and invite him out a hidden backstage door onto a different sheet of drawing paper where an industrious, patriotic and successful gunsmith of our country will be realistically sketched as profoundly villainous.
What about percussion caps?
"Well …" I shrug, "not here in this region at this time." And I gesture empty hands and shake my head "no" and visibly relax my stance, sagging into my keg a tiny bit (the keg that is standing there beside me on the counter) (me thinking oddly that this bit is like the cameo appearance by King Lear in the comic brothel parlor scene in Joyce's Ulysses). And I use informal language: "It was pretty much all still flintlocks here."
It is obvious I'm disappointed. It is obvious I am not happy with the historical facts because they will not let me go on forward with our student's rather brilliant metaphor.
The second soldier, the man who seems to be the brother officer and friend, perhaps an uncle, shrugs his shoulders too and smiles a smile that looks ironic. In other circumstances he might offer a humorous comment of some kind to release our tension.
But the father disagrees. The father shrugs his shoulders, gestures empty hands, smiles false modesty, releases the tension of his stance paradoxically with an impatient dissatisfied toe tap and utters the short laugh you use when pretending to be embarrassed about your pride. In fact his pride is hurt and wants its turn to speak. If this were some different circumstance in which he was supposed to speak, he might be pleading an excuse for his son's failure.
And our student, our boy, our excellent cadet, leans his head to one side with his eyebrows up and lips pressed shut in a sincerely modest smile of pleasure, an expression that strikes me with the amazing talent of the human face for communication, an expression of the face that undoubtedly contains a shrug and yet is still clearly proud, clearly meaning: "Oh well, I took a pretty good shot."
Is that nobility? In our place and time, is this proud modesty of his in fact nobility?
So I conceive some optimism as a sister to my hope. Maybe this youth actually is Sir Galahad in some particular personal characteristics that will be effective in our world today. Maybe this one can find some Grail of holy transubstantiating divination fluid through which to gaze into our world's real reality and thus understand our surroundings in some new way and thus break his mold and thence enact some really useful unusual achievement with his beautiful life and his profound resources. Maybe he can help somehow. Maybe hope is real.
Maybe hope is real, or maybe not. My other efforts along this line have seldom been successful.
Two summers prior to this I chatted with another lad going for a soldier. It was at a nearby college where I visit in assorted guises now and then to talk with the kids. This fellow's graduation from the school was coming soon and he had learned valuable skills he hoped to exercise honorably. This child was convinced that he could do the people of the world some good as a member of the American army, the same lie I believed. If currently alive and whole I guess he's on the job right now. I failed that child. I tossed out every argument my grasping mind could find for half an hour but could not cast a shadow of a doubt across the fantasy.
And then last month another failure, this time personally a deeper bruise. This young man is more like I am now. This one shares my gaze far more clearly than the last one did. This one sees some of the visions that I see, holds some of the sacraments I hold, knows some of the gods I know and owns some of the pain I own. We both bring medicine to our talk. He is an Indian like I am a Celt. He touches my heart deeply and it seems that I touch his. But he chooses a different future than I choose: I swear to work against the empire for the world; he swears to work and fight. And I have seen us together talking later in a future in a tragic dream.
But on the other hand, there was at least one day when I pulled a child (who had already even hung the garb of martyrdom upon himself) back from the wars, and did it by telling stories.
But on second thought, I really ought to explain that incident somewhere else, perhaps elsewhere in this book. It's interesting enough and this episode here has grown too long already, this episode where a warrior takes his son out to the countryside to train and they find a hermit in a cave, simulated by an elder Druid in a museum, with whom they are now playing a game of questions in which the sides have shifted and the boy seems to be winning.
But at least you have become aware that I have had some prior success restraining someone from going to war by telling them a story, a difficult magic trick I am planning to try again now.
So let's resume:
I have said: "Well, not here in this region at this time. It was pretty much all still flintlocks here."
Each member of my audience, each in their own way, has sincerely demonstrated disappointment at my breaking of the web; and well they may, for it was a web of deep suspense and high drama that we were weaving, all of us laboring together at the magic loom of human conversation.
So now I need to wait a finely graduated time. First heartbeat: Each member of the audience has grown to appreciate my disappointing speech and my own personal disappointment. Second heartbeat: They have probably conceded that our army game, the vehicle in which they traveled here, has stopped. Beginning of a third: They have probably begun to mentally change the subject. Good: Now me suddenly picking up the broken end of thread may give the pleasure of surprise.
I shrug again, much more largely now, and gesture toward the boy with an open hand of grateful praise. I put on a mask of raised eyebrows and pursed lips (almost comic). I nod and haul a dramatic tenor voice (not quite excessive) up from the center of my chest to say:
"But it is interesting that you mention percussion caps ..."
They laugh, unembarrassed to be entertained as I am gratified to entertain them.
And I return their smiles but only briefly. I smile long and large enough to share their enjoyment, to agree with their enjoyment in sincerity, to say their pleasure is good. And all of that is true enough, but I am smiling only long enough for them to see it: Yes, our agreement on everything we've said and done so far is real enough and so I welcome you into my place and, oh by the way, this is a place where you are guests of mine.
So then I strike the classic pose announcing an important story.
There is a certain gesture of the face and hands that has a certain psychological effect among a human audience: It gives them to understand that the performer now intends to tell an important story. I first noticed it in Greek and Roman sculpture, first a famous bust of Homer then monumental statues where assorted Caesars are shown as lawgiver. Under favorable conditions this pose can silence crowds. Also contraly: I have have not seen any depiction of Hitler using it; Hitler's patented salute seems to be his substitution for it, a claim of godhood rather than a claim of truth and a call for noise instead of quiet. Also, judging from the few pertinent old photos I have seen, the classic storyteller announcement pose was apparently an ancient worldwide commonplace among shamans. Also, it was continued in use by silent film actors, re Brigitte Helm as Maria in Metropolis and many others. For a modern audience it sometimes seems to give a feeling of primordial existence, which I view in general as a visitation of real reality. The classic pose has variations to show a performer's friendliness or formality, the seriousness or humor of the tale, and probably some other issues. I enjoy it.
I struck the classic pose of a friendly person who is calling your attention so they can tell you a tale that is important and serious. And I began to tell a tale that I had only recently heard:
"In our year,
1838,
the year we are enacting here … "
My small audience nod their acceptance of this "once upon a time", accepting this invitation to set foot and heart inside the ancient human story space. Their eyes focus high and toward a distance, past my head and shoulders. Also, the two men fold their arms upon their chests in a show of judgmental assessment while the boy shoves his thumbs into his waistband indicating readiness to go. They have entirely entered my lair.
{{ Two months later:
{{ I'm struck by a new thought while struggling with this manuscript: Why do the two men settle in for my performance so easily? Why do they accept the strange change of mode so willingly? For the two men, though not the boy (who was lured by adventure), this seems to want an explanation. So in fact was I, without knowing it, elevating their guerrilla war simulation, which they thought had been exhausted, to a sophisticated and interesting new level of play? Maybe my archaic oratorical gesture (the so-called "storyteller announcement pose") helped them assign me to a location on their stage that was more comfortable for them. Originally they saw my role as more or less "trainer cadre personnel", a potent authority indeed, something like a Trump card in Tarot, but then they saw my archaic primitive gesture and both simultaneously crossed their arms upon their chests in a powerful pose of "judgmental assessment": so this might show they expected my next pose to be relatively weak, so maybe, I'm thinking now, they have suddenly tagged me as a simulated Afghan native storyteller. They have surely heard of such a person and maybe even heard one in person themselves; they are intelligent imperial officers whose duties must occasionally include observing local cultural stuff, a military task they are being called on to simulate now. And they certainly ought to care what a person of that kind might say, me being a kind of primitive newspaper. So maybe I've become, in their dimensions, a simulated Afghan native haji nigger storyteller? And if so, is it therefore also real, unperceived by me, in my dimensions? And if so, and if this guise helped open their ears for my secret real anti-war subversive message that was aimed against their side, unperceived by them as yet, was it therefore okay for me to play in blackface? And on the other hand, was I even competent to attempt a role with such Shakespearean complications?
{{ Two months plus several days later: But on the other hand, I'm thinking now, maybe these two soldiers are just weary and they are just happy to find intelligent entertainment, provided that I do turn out to be intelligent and entertaining. I apologize for this digression. }}
And I am speaking gradually, making chunks of talk, leaving breath for thought and vision between the clauses of a very brief paragraph or verse with which I now begin the tale:
"… Samuel Colt
opened a factory in New Jersey,
in Patterson New Jersey,
to manufacture
his new design revolver pistol,
that used percussion cap technology,
that would become the first repeating firearm
proved in combat …
… by the Texas Rangers."
I have spoken gradually with chunks of talk, so that these opening lines can sound like abbreviations, can appear in the mind's eye like hypertext tags, like pointers into other tales, and I especially strove to craft that final line (that darting invocation of the Texas Rangers) so that those legendary horsemen, of whom so many tales are told, might appear in the mind's eye like gleaming silver arrows arcing high away toward myth.
{{ Although there was also a powerful but softly spoken anti-climax in the verse's earlier line: The phrase "repeating firearm" which was merely whispered.
{{ When that phrase "repeating firearm" shaped itself behind my lips, before I spoke it, in that fleeting moment, (me surprised and worried by its weak location in the poem's structure) reaching toward these people through my common knowledge with them, reaching toward their minds, I seemed to find a telepathic confirmation. I watched a slow blink of their minds' eyes turning inward while the phrase "repeating firearm" was brushing past my lips into the air, for in their eyes it seemed I saw:
{{ These here are infantrymen. These here are foot men. These here are men committed to the fight in the closest possible intimacy of mind and blood, the victors on the field of Agincourt
where Shakespeare called to them "we happy few, we band of brothers". These here are men Napoleon named "the queen of battle". And automatic weapons are the modern plague of their professional existence. These men are both the slaughtered mass lain down before machine gun nests along the River Somme and also the operators of those guns. And in the recent years which their own eyes have seen, a new design gun machine packed full of interacting little hammers, cheap to make and good in any land and weather, a new design compounded out of all improvements made in hand held bodily destruction since percussion caps, (a gun named "AK47"), out to the farthest corners of the world has finally replaced the last remaining swords and spears and arrows. So here's a thought they cannot help but think: Automatic weapons are their profession's contract with the Devil, luring them from ancient honor to a modern Hell. What damage have they done themselves with rapidly repeating bullets? Repeating firearms are their brutal lover's most attractive and distressing face.
{{ And that phrase "repeating firearm" went down whispering into a silence in the half a breath it took to say itself. So then a half line later at the climax of our tale those famous galloping hoof beats of the Texas Rangers, their excellent mustang ponies charging flat out straight into the enemy's mass, their percussion cap pistols flaming from outstretched fists, those hoof beats echoed down into infinities of quiet, cavernously empty. }}
To help my visitors weave that spell, I used risen stopped hushed vocal tones like adventuring question marks, prompting them to do their best to fill those footnotes in, to go searching for other true tales that would twine in here, to go questing off into the woods of all human lore for the gleaming deepened complex colors they could weave into our vision truthfully, other truthful stories which they may already possess or which I trust they will henceforth watch for in the universe.
In this book on this page let's punctuate the chords that I was pulling in the human voice and ear like this:
"in Patterson New Jersey […*?] ,"
"his new design revolver pistol […*?]"
{{ "repeating firearm […]" }}
"Texas Rangers [… !!* ?]"
So in that brief opening verse I have found myself striving to compress the introductory chapters of an epic song or poem. This oratory is old magic.
And this is high magic because it is high art. In fact, by the moment when that verse's first word brushed out past my lips the artistic trance was present. My consciousness by then felt fascinated with things that are echoing in the infinite dimensions of reality of which my consciousness is only one.
… … … … …
{{ Are you serious?? You can't possibly be serious. We are on page 35 and you haven't finished describing (much less understandably describing!!!) a conversation that lasted maybe 5 minutes. This is astonishing. You'll never get this finished. You know what this is? This has decayed to the level of self obsessed pompous hyper analytic navel gazing crap. This is braggadocio. This is thin gruel. How long do you expect a reader to put up with this stuff????? This is twaddle.
{{ That is unkind.
{{ Unkind? Unkind? Really? You can't even open up this manuscript in the morning any more until you've read the news and had two cups of coffee. Are you trying to stuff the whole book in here? We're running out of time and space.
{{ Okay okay. Admittedly, to be honest with myself, this manuscript is embarrassing. But it's definitely not finished yet, definitely not, not even close. There's so much more to tell.
{{ Oh well; look; why not just insert here a complete transcript of our little hero play?:
{{ Scene: A Dark Cave. Enter: Young Galahad followed by Old Sir Lancelot and Old Sir Guy.
{{ Galahad: Approaches Merlin who startles and awakes.
{{ Galahad: "Could a customer buy a gun in this store?"
{{ Old Lnclt: Smiles.
{{ Merlin: "No. You could not. For reasons that I do not fully understand, this store did not offer firearms. They did carry ammunition: shot and powder, and also some parts: flints and flintlock mechanisms, but not the arms as such. There is some discussion here at the museum about this issue. Perhaps it was because there were many firearm factories in this region. You could walk to a firearm factory."
{{ Galahad: "What about percussion caps?"
{{ Old Lnclt & Guy: Grin and elbow each other.
{{ Merlin: "Well, not here in this region at this time. It was pretty much all still flintlocks here."
{{ General murmurs of disappointment.
{{ Merlin (pulling a jester's wand out of his pocket, complete with bells and ribbons and a grinning puppet head, and waving it): "But it is interesting that you mention percussion caps …"
{{ General amusement.
{{ Merlin: Steps up into a beam of light that suddenly appears and, having produced a magic harp, begins to pluck a stately Chopin polonaise.
{{ Old Lnclt & Guy: Assume an attitude of judgmental assessment.
{{ Galahad: Assumes an attitude of readiness to gallop off.
{{ Merlin: "In our year, 1838, the year we are enacting here, Samuel Colt opened a factory in New Jersey, in Patterson New Jersey, to manufacture his new design revolver pistol, that used percussion cap technology, that would become …"
{{ … (On his harp, Merlin strikes the most famous four notes in Western music, the great Mozart passage, the famous four notes in which the fist of Death is beating on your door: Dah dah dah daaah.) …
{{ … "the first repeating firearm proved in combat …"
{{ … (Merlin's harp suddenly gallops into the overture from William Tell.) …
{{ … "by the Texas Rangers."
{{ Galahad: "Mmmm."
{{ Merlin (shifting now into Mozart's Requiem and singing now directly to the boy with occasional choral harmonies): "The Republic of Texas ordered a few of the new pistols, a few dozen of the pistols, intended for the Texas Navy." (There he weaves a little nautical hornpipe theme.) "But then the Navy was disbanded and the Texas Rangers took them. One Ranger company trained with the pistols, the new design revolver pistols, and began defeating Comanche forces." (A distant echo of a tribal drum.) "By then it was six years later, six years in our future, and Colt, Samuel Colt, was out of business bankrupt." (Gentle ending stroke upon the strings and then the harp is silent.) "But when the news got out, he was back in business."
{{ Old Guy: Angry laugh of accusation.
{{ Old Lnclt: Bitter laugh of weary disillusioned powerless acceptance.
{{ Galahad (whispers): "Ah!"
{{ Darkness falls. Merlin sleeps. Guy, Lancelot & Galahad depart. }}