Tours of the Black Clock

152

I FOLLOWED THE POSTMARKS of the blank white cards west. In Pennsylvania I saw a burning house. In Ohio, in the flatlands, at the Mississippi, I looked for every sign of him, every sign of any bit of him that had blown and settled and taken root. When I found him, I pulled the root up. Fingers of him, the hairs of his mustache curling up out of the soil, the veins of him scaling walls like vines, I cut them all down. I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails. I did not turn my violence on them. I didn’t scorn them or call myself finer. I named them by what they were, sometimes in a place no one heard me, in a language no one knew; I named the evil that calls itself righteously destined. On the other side of a river that seemed to have no other side, I took a ride with a boatman who looked as though he’d seen one big man in his life too many.