They Can't Kill You Yet

“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

― George Orwell, Animal Farm

*********

Dear Kate,

This life, the "work" of our time, our entire earthly existence, is meant to be strictly voluntary, shouldn't it be?  Anything more or less would be tyranny, isn't it?

I've been aware of the tyranny of Man for as long as I've been my singular existence among but distinct from it.  "It" being the tyrant I had not a name for, even less the vocabulary to call it one.  Control was what I felt, no articulation needed on my part: the depth and necessity of the feeling spoke the Word of truth about the World, with me in it.

Dream your dreams, Alex, but you know where you got your materials from.

In the beginning, Alex created stick men.  (No women.  I was socially regressive right from the get go.  Please speak to my parents about my sins.)  Then he added flesh and blood to them, and started telling stories about how they came to lose what were given them: chunks of flesh, pails of blood, in his violent world of comics.  Freud would have a field day with his drawings, cruel and crude, and opulently so in both regards.  One time Alex enjoyed a career high of producing three simultaneous series: a four-square copycat of Old Master Q (to his otherwise tender soul the prototypical iconoclast), an episodic (read: derivative, regurgitating on the same under-reaching narrative arc) sit-com about a very short guy trying to make it big in Rock 'n Roll, and an ongoing, drawn-out magnum opus, a fantasy tale of moral struggle, with, naturally, himself being the Hero and the villain being first his brother, then Beelzebub itself, and finally the Hero being possessed by Beelzebub, who takes over everything at the end.  (I loved the Book of Revelation.  Didn't find the ending inspiring though.)

Then I (first person now, at an age to own my misdeeds) stopped drawing, at around exactly the time I finished elementary school: my father told me to.  My grades were plummeting.  In my last year, out of 40 student I ranked 33.   My father was a teacher, and a seminary student at the time, too busy to care that I threw my last report card into the bin right beside my teacher's desk, tore in two halves before ink dried.  I still don't know why the janitor didn't report me.  I still don't know why my father didn't ask.

What he did ask though was that I stop fooling around with my pencil.  He was my supplier of cheap fiber paper (that my pencil would often pierce, sometimes going through more than one sheet, usually when the story became piercing), so you could say my retirement wasn't voluntary (now you see how I am finally getting to my theme).

I am glad he did that.  Because the next thing was that I walked myself into a library.  When the teacher was preaching up there I was reading something I found more interesting, a book, and then another, hidden on my lap beneath my school desk.  Your tyranny can't kill me yet.  Such was my battle cry, dying words if needed be.  As long as the final Word has yet to be spoken, you can't kill me yet.

I am going to end this piece now.  I realize I am not telling this story right.  When I said the "World out there" was trying to kill me, you don't really know what I was talking about, right?  You can't feel my suffocation then because you have yet to breath in the Control I first mentioned.  I have yet to draw you a picture of the air I breathed, which, mind you, I am not suggesting is more or less repressive than that in any other school system.  Because, remember, they can't kill you yet, not if the final Word has yet to be spoken.

I am telling my thanks to you in slant.  Thank you for gathering throughout the pandemic all these books from second-hand bookstores in your land of plenty, the U.S.A., a magnificent country made so by receiving great words and in turn bespoken into greatness.  All these books you brought me this weekend speak about a heritage that no mob of vandals could burn, no tyrant could kill.

Please don't let her die.

Yours, Alex