1.5 The myth of the father. The father-voice is the voice that breaks the bonds of the enemy band. The strength of the enemy is his bondedness. We are the father putting down the rebellion of the band of brothers. There is a mythic shape to the encounter, and no doubt the enemy draws sustenance from the knowledge that in the myth the brothers usurp the father’s place. Such inspirational force strengthens the bonds of the brothers not only by predicting their victory but by promising that the era of the warring brothers, the abhorred kien tiem of Chinese experience, will be averted.
A myth is true—that is to say, operationally true—insofar as it has predictive force. The more deeply rooted and universal a myth, the more difficult it is to combat. The myths of a tribe are the fictions it coins to maintain its powers. The answer to a myth of force is not necessarily counterforce, for if the myth predicts counterforce, counterforce reinforces the myth. The science of mythography teaches us that a subtler counter is to subvert and revise the myth. The highest propaganda is the propagation of a new mythology.
For a description of the myths we combat, together with their national variants, I refer you to Thomas McAlmon’s Communist Myth and Group Integration: vol. I, Proletarian Mythography (1967), vol. II, Insurgent Mythography (1969). McAlmon’s monumental work is the foundation of the entire structure of modern revisionary counter-myth, of which the present study is one small example. McAlmon describes the myth of the overthrow of the father as follows.
“In origin the myth is a justification of the rebellion of sons against a father who uses them as hinds. The sons come of age, rebel, mutilate the father, and divide the patrimony, that is, the earth fertilized by the father’s rain. Psychoanalytically the myth is a self-affirming fantasy of the child powerless to take the mother he desires from his father-rival”. In popular Vietnamese consciousness the myth takes the following form: “The sons of the land (i.e., the brotherhood of earth-tillers) desire to take the land (i.e., the Vietnamese Boden) for themselves, overthrowing the sky-god who is identified with the old order of power (foreign empire, the U.S.). The earth-mother hides her sons in her bosom, safe from the thunderbolts of the father; at night, while he sleeps, they emerge to unman him and initiate a new fraternal order” (II, pp. 26, 101).
1.51 Countermyths. The weak point in this myth is that it portrays the father as vulnerable, liable to wither under a single well-directed radical blow. Our response has hitherto been the Hydran counter: for every head chopped off we grow a new one. Our strategy is attrition, the attrition of plenty. Before our endless capacity to replace dead members we hope that the enemy will lose faith, grow disheartened, surrender.
But it is a mistake to think of the Hydran counter as a final answer. For one thing, the myth of rebellion has a no-surrender clause. Punishment for falling into the father’s hands is to be eaten alive or penned eternally in a volcano. If you surrender your body it is not returned to the earth and so cannot be reborn (volcanoes are not of the earth but terrestrial bases of the sun-father). Thus surrender is not an option because it means a fate worse than death. (Nor, considering what happens to prisoners of Saigon, can the intuitive force of this argument be denied.)
A second fallacy in the Hydran counter is that it misinterprets the myth of rebellion. The blow that wins the war against the tyrant father is not a death-thrust but a humiliating blow that renders him sterile (impotence and sterility are mythologically indistinguishable). His kingdom, no longer fertilized, becomes a waste land.
The importance of the humiliating blow will not be underestimated by anyone who knows the place of shame in peri-Sinic value systems.
Let me now outline a more promising counter-strategy.
The myth of rebellion assumes that heaven and earth, father and mother, live in symbiosis. Neither can exist alone. If the father is overthrown there must be a new father, new rebellion, endless violence, while no matter how deep her treachery toward her mate, the mother may not be annihilated. The scheming of mother and sons is thus endless.
But has the master-myth of history not outdated the fiction of the symbiosis of earth and heaven? We live no longer by tilling the earth but by devouring her and her waste products. We signed our repudiation of her with flights toward new celestial loves. We have the capacity to breed out of our own head. When the earth conspires incestuously with her sons, should our recourse not be to the arms of the goddess of techne who springs from our brains? Is it not time that the earth-mother is supplanted by her own faithful daughter, shaped without woman’s part? The age of Athene dawns. In the Indo-China Theater we play out the drama of the end of the tellurian age and the marriage of the sky-god with his parthenogene daughter-queen. If the play has been poor, it is because we have stumbled about the stage asleep, not knowing the meaning of our acts. Now I bring their meaning to light in that blinding moment of ascending meta-historical consciousness in which we begin to shape our own myths.
1.6 Victory. The father cannot be a benign father until his sons have knelt before his wand.
The plotting of the sons against the father must cease. They must kneel with hearts bathed in obedience.
When the sons know obedience they will be able to sleep.
Phase IV only postpones the day of reckoning.
There is no problem of reconstruction in Vietnam. The only problem is the problem of victory.
We are all somebody’s sons. Do not think it does not pain me to make this report. (On the other hand, do not underestimate my exultation.) I too am stirred by courage. But courage is an archaic virtue. While there is courage we are all bound to the wheel of rebellious violence. Beyond courage there is the humble heart, the quiet garden into which we may escape from the cycles of time. I am neat and polite, but I am the man of the future paradise.
Before paradise comes purgatory.
Not without joy, I have girded myself for purgatory. If I must be a martyr to the cause of obedience, I am prepared to suffer. I am not alone. Behind their desks across the breadth of America wait an army of young men, out of fashion like me. We wear dark suits and thick lenses. We are the generation who were little boys in 1945. We are taking up position. We are stepping into shoes. It is we who will inherit America, in due course. We are patient. We wait our turn.
If you are moved by the courage of those who have taken up arms, look into your heart: an honest eye will see that it is not your best self which is moved. The self which is moved is treacherous. It craves to kneel before the slave, to wash the leper’s sores. The dark self strives toward humiliation and turmoil, the bright self toward obedience and order. The dark self sickens the bright self with doubts and qualms. I know. It is his poison which is eating me.
I am a hero of resistance. I am no less than that, properly understood, in metaphor. Staggering in my bleeding armor, I stand erect, alone on the plain, beset.
My papers are in order. I sit neatly and write. I make fine distinctions. It is on the point of a fine distinction that the world turns. I distinguish between obedience and humiliation, and under the fire of my distinguishing intellect mountains crumble. I am the embodiment of the patient struggle of the intellect against blood and anarchy. I am a story not of emotion and violence—the illusory war-story of television—but of life itself, life in obedience to which even the simplest organism represses its entropic yearning for the mud and follows the road of evolutionary duty toward the glory of consciousness.
There is only one problem in Vietnam and that is the problem of victory. The problem of victory is technical. We must believe this. Victory is a matter of sufficient force, and we dispose over sufficient force.
I wish to get this part over with. I am impatient with the restrictions of this assignment.
I dismiss Phase IV of the conflict. I look forward to Phase V and the return of total air-war.
There is a military air-war with military targets; there is also a political air-war whose purpose is to
destroy the enemy’s capacity to sustain himself psychically.
We cannot know until we can measure. But in the political air-war there is no easy measure like the body-count. Therefore we use probability measures (I apologize for repeating what is in the books, but I cannot afford not to be complete.) When we strike at a target, we define the probability of a success as
P1 = aX–3/4 + (bX – c)Y
where X measures release altitude, Y measures ground fire intensity, and a, b, c are constants. In a typical political air-strike, however, the target is not specified but simply formalized as a set of map co-ordinates. To measure success we compute two probabilities and find their product: P1 above (the probability of a hit) and P2, the probability that what we hit is a target. Since at present we can do little more than guess at P2, our policy has been round-the-clock bombing, with heavy volume compensating for infinitesimal products P1P2. The policy barely worked in Phase III and cannot work in Phase IV, when all bombing is clandestine. What policy should we adopt in Phase V?
I sit in the depths of the Harry Truman Library, walled round with earth, steel, concrete, and mile after mile of compressed paper, from which impregnable stronghold of the intellect I send forth this winged dream of assault upon the mothering earth herself.
When we attack the enemy via a pair of map co-ordinates we lay ourselves open to mathematical problems we cannot solve. But if we cannot solve them we can eliminate them, by attacking the co-ordinates themselves—all the co-ordinates! For years now we have attacked the earth, explicitly in the defoliation of crops and jungle, implicitly in aleatoric shelling and bombing. Let us, in the act of ascending consciousness mentioned above, admit the meaning of our acts. We discount 1999 aleatoric missiles out of every 2000 we fire; yet every one of them lands somewhere, is heard by human ears, wears down hope in a human heart. A missile is truly wasted only when we dismiss it and are known by our foes to dismiss it. Our prodigality breeds contempt in the frugal Vietnamese, but only because they see it as the prodigality of waste rather than the prodigality of bounty. They know our guilt at devastating the earth and know that our fiction of aiming at the 0.058% of a man crossing the spot we strike at the moment we strike it is a guilty lie. Press back such atavistic guilt! Our future belongs not to the earth but to the stars. Let us show the enemy that he stands naked in a dying landscape.
I have to pull myself together.
We should not sneer at spray techniques. If spraying does not give the orgasm of the explosion (nothing has done more to sell the war to America than televised napalm strikes), it will always be more effective than high explosive in a campaign against the earth. PROP-12 spraying could change the face of Vietnam in a week. PROP-12 is a soil poison, a dramatic poison which (I apologize again), washed into the soil, attacks the bonds in dark silicates and deposits a topskin of gray ashy grit. Why have we discontinued PROP-12? Why did we use it only on the lands of resettled communities? Until we reveal to ourselves and revel in the true meaning of our acts we will go on suffering the double penalty of guilt and ineffectualness.
I am in a bad way as I write these words. My health is poor. I have a treacherous wife, an unhappy home, unsympathetic superiors. I suffer from headaches. I sleep badly. I am eating myself out. If I knew how to take holidays perhaps I would take one. But I see things and have a duty toward history that cannot wait. What I say is in pieces. I am sorry. But we can do it. It is my duty to point out our duty. I sit in libraries and see things. I am in an honorable line of bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity. I name no names. You must listen. I speak with the voice of things to come. I speak in troubled times and tell you how to be as children again. I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.
Tear this off, Coetzee, it is a postscript, it goes to you, listen to me.
Three
When I was a boy making my quiet way through the years of grade school I kept a crystal garden in my room: lances and fronds, ochre and ultramarine, erected themselves frailly from the bottom of a preserve-jar, stalagmites obeying their dead crystal life-force. Crystal seeds will grow for me. The other kind do not sprout, even in California. I planted beans in a jar for Martin, at a time when I still took a hand in his upbringing, to show him the pretty roots; but the beans rotted. So did the hamsters, later on.
Crystal gardens are grown in a medium called sodium silicate. I learned about sodium silicate and crystal gardens from an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia is still my favorite genre. I think that an alphabetical ordering of the world will in the end turn out to be superior to the other orderings people have tried.
It was on the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1939 edition, that I ruined my eyesight.
I was a bookish child. I grew out of books.
I am living a crystal life nowadays. Exorbitant formations flower in my head, that sealed airless world. First the enveloping skull. Then a sac, an amnion: moving, I feel the slip-slop of passive liquids; at night the moon draws faint tides from ear to ear. There I seem to be taking place.
I was beginning to feel easier with Coetzee. I was going to do better for him. I was going to do my best, to show him all I was capable of, what prodigious thoughts I could think, what fine distinctions I could draw.
If he had taken notice of me as I really wanted to be noticed, if he had offered any sign of acknowledging his election, I would have given myself utterly to him. I am not envious. I am not rebellious. I want to be good. He has his place, I have mine. I want him to look on me kindly. I hope one day to be like him, in certain respects. Although he is not actually a brilliant man, he thinks authoritatively. I would like to master that skill. My own thought tends toward the flashy, I find. I cannot maintain an argument. I would appreciate discipline. I have a great talent for discipline, I feel. I am certainly a faithful person. Even to my wife I am faithful. In Coetzee I think I could even immerge myself, becoming, in the course of time, his faithful copy, with perhaps here and there a touch of my old individuality.
But his present behavior disappoints me. He avoids me. He no longer smiles as he used to or asks kindly how I am getting on. When I linger in the corridor outside his glass cubicle (we all have glass cubicles, cubicles because we are monads, glass to discourage our eccentricities), he pretends to be lost in his work. From her cubicle his secretary gazes out, giving me her reserved, old-retainer’s smile. I smile too, and shake my head, and drift back to my cell, where I have nothing to do. This is the state of affairs nowadays, since I submitted my judgment on Vietnam.
It is intended that I feel I have disgraced myself. But I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I have merely told the truth. I am not afraid to tell the truth. I have never been a coward. All my life, I have found, I have been prepared to expose myself where other people would not. As a younger man I exposed myself in poetry, derivative but not shamefully bad. Then I moved nearer the centers of power and found other ways of expressing myself. I still think of my best work, the best of my work for ITT for example, as a kind of poetry. Mythography, my present specialism, is an open field like philosophy or criticism because it has not yet found a methodology to lose itself forever in the mazes of. When McGraw-Hill brings out the first textbook of mythography, I will move on. I have an exploring temperament. Had I lived two hundred years ago I would have had a continent to explore, to map, to open to colonization. In that vertiginous freedom I might have expanded to my true potential. If I feel cramped nowadays it is because I have no space to beat my wings. That is a good explanation for the trouble I have with my back, and a mythic one too. My spirit should soar into the endless interior distances, but dragging it back, alas, is this tyrant body. Sinbad’s story of the old man of the sea is also apposite.
There is no doubt that I am a sick man. Vietnam has cost me too much. I use the metaphor of the dolorous wound. Something is wrong in my kingdom. Inside my body, ben
eath the skin and muscle and flesh that drape me, I am bleeding. Sometimes I think the wound is in my stomach, that it bleeds slime and despair over the food that should be nourishing me, seeping in little puddles that rot the crooks of my obscurer hooked organs. At other times I imagine a wound weeping somewhere in the cavern behind my eyes. There is no doubt that I must find and care for it, or else die of it. That is why I have no shame about unveiling myself. Propriety is an important value, but life is after all more important.
I am mistaken if I think that Coetzee will save me. Coetzee made his name in game theory. He has no natural sympathy with a mythographic approach to the problem of control. He starts with the axiom that people act identically if their self-interests are identical. His career has been built on the self and its interests. He thinks of me, even me, as merely a self with interests. He cannot understand a man who experiences his self as an envelope holding his body-parts together while inside it he burns and burns. I was brought up on comic-books (I was brought up on books of all kinds). Enthralled once to monsters bound into the boots, belts, masks, and costumes of their heroic individualism, I am now become Herakles roasting in his poisoned shirt. For the American monster-hero there is relief: every sixteen pages the earthly paradise returns and its masked savior can revert to pale-faced citizen. Whereas Herakles, it would seem, burns forever. There are significances in these sories that pour out of me, but I am tired. They may be clues, I put them down.
Coetzee hopes that I will go away. The word has been passed around that I do not exist. His secretary smiles her grave smile and looks down. But I do not go away. If they refuse to see me I will become the ghost of their corridors, the one who rings the telephones, who does not flush the toilet.