The Wandering Mind ...

I started thinking about something early this morning. I finally gave into my obsession and looked it up. I thought I remembered reading it in 1968 when I was in the United States Navy. The Navy, no matter where one was moored, always had a small library, else I never would have read Ditmars’ Snakes of the World, Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, among others. In those days, people in power preferred underlings who read to keep busy while off-duty rather than join in less productive endeavors.

Anyway, somewhere about that time I read the little masterpiece by Franz Kafka called The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der ChinesischenMauer). What amazes me the most was that he wrote this in 1917. He could have written it this morning without losing a shred of its insight. Like the Chinese of old, we have, in America today, an absentee ruler who would like to be Emperor for Life. Another great wall figures into his plans, plans guided by feints and distractions. The ancient Chinese would have found it fascinating. And so it goes.

I don’t know if the account by Kafka is accurate. After all, we are talking about an odd sort of a man who lived out of wedlock with his lover during his adult life, wrote at night, and died young of TB. His complex and mystifying writings gave birth to the term “Kafkaesque” to describe the nightmarish struggles between humankind and faceless organizations. He dwelt upon, among other things, the concept of original sin, the sudden transformation of one’s person, the horrors of struggling with faceless beings inside a bureaucratic castle, and a mystical place he called “Amerika.” I won’t go into these further, for any educated person has probably read them and formed opinions.

The work here today, The Great Wall of China, deals with a project he compares with the Tower of Babel in its poor conception, poor planning, and poor technical expertise. In his account, each segment of the great wall was built in a somewhat autonomous manner so that, in the end, many sections failed to connect, obviating the future failure of the structure to achieve its stated purpose: keeping out the enemy hordes to the north.

Thus we observe the journeys of the plans of dictators through the perpetual comedy stage that we call history.

Most likely, like the great pyramids of Egypt, the true purpose leading to the construction of the wall was to keep warring and independent tribes, fiefdoms, and clans occupied with actions other than war. Yes, it may have just been a great public works project designed to keep the poor folks distracted. It didn’t matter if the individual works, like the books I read in my youth, had no apparent connection.

At any rate, it created a cult, according to Kafka, consisting of those who were sure the Emperor acted in good faith and for the betterment of society. My favorite passage follows.

“There was a great deal of mental confusion at the time … perhaps simply because so many people were trying as hard as they could to join together for a single purpose. Human nature, which is fundamentally careless and by nature like the whirling dust, endures no restraint. If it restricts itself, it will soon begin to shake the restraints madly and tear up walls, chains, and even itself all over the place.”

Yes. He wrote that in 1917.

Ain’t that something? Perhaps that is why are now so many, working so hard, and spending so much money tying to destroy any concept of public education for the common folks in America. An educated society is a dangerous society for the Emperor and his followers. Let us now mourn for the American who will wake up, as did Kafka’s famous hero, surprised and dumbfounded. Kafka described this way: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

At that moment, the existence or non-existence of another great wall will be as meaningless as that of the original.

I've read that it is the only
human-made structure that
is visible from our moon.

The Allegory of the Hogs

I had a dream last night that might have been allegorical. It took me back to my childhood and my long-departed father’s hog pen. As I say, it was allegorical, certainly not historically accurate. Sainted Father raised farm animals, a few, but was very kind to them. His reason for raising them? It was so he would have an excuse to go out, after 14 hours of running his grocery, and have a good nip of Old Yellowstone under the pretense of feeding his animals. One nip. One nip only. If a rare case of backsliding occurred, and one nip became two, all hell would break loose. You don’t even want to imagine Sainted Mother in a state of rage.

Anyway, back to the dream. In a bizarre setup, he had three pens where he fed animals. In one were ten huge boars. Next to it, in another pen, stood a crowd of sows and piglets with their noses pressed against the fence. In the last pen stood a male skunk who was rumored far and wide to be stricken with rabies. All the neighbors, along with our family, wanted the skunk gone and forgotten.

On a typical evening, Daddy would come out and ladle bucket after bucket of nourishing food to the boars while the sows and piglets watched. The skunk would sulk.

In the dream, Daddy, suddenly, one evening, decided that things were out of balance. When the usual crowd gathered in the store next morning, he vowed that he was going to straighten out the problem of imbalance he had with feeding his animals.

“About time,” said Sam the bread man.

  

“That makes sense,” said Sol who ran a body shop next door.

“It just ain’t right what you are doin’ now,” said the canned-goods salesman.

“Yep,” Daddy said, “I need to feed my pet skunk more.” Before the startled group could respond, he eased out the front door of the store to “wait on” a gas customer.

True to his word, that evening, he instituted his redirection of nourishment. After he ladled the usual rations to the boars, he cursed the sows and piglets for not growing fast enough and slopped a quarter-bucket of feed into their trough. “Here, losers,” he said.

He walked over to the skunk, who pretended not to notice him. He smiled and then walked back to the boars’ pen and dipped a full bucket of feed from their share, hoisted it over the fence, and poured it for the skunk.

You should have heard the sound from the boars’ pen. Although they could rarely manage to eat all their rations at once, the unfairness of losing any of it caused great uproar. In fact, they stampeded to the gate and began trying to get to the skunk’s pen to retrieve their lost rations.

Yes, you might imagine the scene. Each boar would try to scoot his swollen form underneath the exit only to get caught. Then each would raise the most unholy ruckus you’d ever heard.

You might say that each of them was squealing like a hog stuck under a gate.

I still don’t know what it meant, but the sounds woke me up. They might have awakened Sainted Mother too. Too bad for Daddy if they did.

Please Sir ...