EC 515

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

24 Priapus Unleashed

By every story there hangs another, especially when it comes to our own story. We can clearly see this in the story of Daisy, which begins even before her birth and runs as if independently of her: her father’s suicide leads to a stepfather who rapes her, to lovers who sexually canibalize her, to children she loves, but does not know what to do with, and whose stories will likely have little to do with her—in spite of her love of them.

Stories outside of ourselves are the result of the arrival of the virtual era, which is an era of ‘history’ that has no reality. History as it is written today is a story within a story within a story written by historians of the “big picture”, which betrays reality as it really is or ever was. In short, virtual reality only seems. It is as real as it is impermanent.

A story interests us because it explains how a series of events create a given situation or consequences and then resolves the misunderstandings or misperceptions. 

The story that I tell about my Godfather being the First President of Latvija is true, but only if my family’s subjective history is taken into account. It is of no relevance to the virtual or ‘big picture’*, which is a lie, a kind of movie or video by being its audience. We may compare ‘my story’ to the story of the Twin Towers in New York, which allegedly blew up because allegedly terrorist planes flew into them. The media overlooks the story that the buildings blew because of nuclear devices going off deep below their foundations.

*Indeed, I see myself as an actor in the 'big picture', then after the cuts have been made, watching the movie, the story from an auditorium.

Sometimes real stories that have become lost are rediscovered, but more often not, which is why the real may seem unreal. This is because the virtual has come to seem real.

The death of my paternal grandmother, the first wife of my grandfather, has been heretofore interpreted as a consequence of her being—unbeknownst by anyone else—bound by a profound love to grandfather. It is said that she loved him greatly (and who am I to deny it?), but if this is so, was she not a nuclear device (begin watch at 42 min.) that could ‘blow’ the twin towers of virtual reality, these towers being represented by ‘the other life’ that grandfather and Emiliya constructed for themselves. The real life, the one outside of virtual reality, continues with me, one who thusly has lived two lives.

Recently a farcical story called “Emiliya” was published as a book. The name of the book referred to my grandfather’s second wife. When I suggested to a critic that the book receive prepublication reviews and criticism, he suggested that I was trying to sabotage its predestined success. When the author of the book called me and wanted to arrange a meeting, and I refused to meet, one of  my own family members thought that I was trying to sabotage the reappearance of the family name in the Latvijan media. I let drop the matter when said individual refused my advice, and did meet with the author of the trash. There was little that I could do, but maintain silence as a public feud among family members would surely have been counterproductive and supported virtual reality.

Anyway, the possible murder of grandmother, and the absence heretofore of any note of such a possibility, went unnoted by the author who presumed a great enough familiarity with Emiliya to write a book about her. But had the possibility of murder been noticed, it would have been ‘a nuclear device’* that spoiled the worship of money.

*The nuclear device had escaped my attention as well, until in an obvious synchronous—or was it pareidolic?—event [I picked up a magazine that had been lying on the floor beside my bed for over a year and read a story (translated from a 2009 story in Harper’s Magazine) of the possible murder of the great Russian writer Llew/ Leo Tolstoy author of “War and Peace”, possibly by tea made of henbane. As soon as I had read the story, my grandmother’s unexpected death came to mind. Incidentally, the name of henbane in Latvian is ‘driģene’. If we remember that G may trnsliterate into J(Y), at some time it was also pronounced dri+yane, bal-driyahns, being a well known plant the roots of which are used to make a sleep inducing tea to this day.

At the beginning of WW1, my father was twenty-four years old and a student at St. Petersburg University. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he joined General Kolchak’s Army known as the ‘Whites’. The end of the war found him with other officers of the White Army taking refuge on a ship in the Black Sea. The ship was to be surrendered to the Red Army. Suffering death by execution must have been much on father’s mind. But fortune smiled. In 1920, a Peace Treaty was signed between the Latvijan government (established in 1918) and Russia, which allowed him to return to Latvija (in 1921) unharmed.

After father returned to Latvija, he began to work at the newspaper his father and paramour had started in 1911. Because grandfather was expecting great things of his son (by then twenty-nine years of age), father started work in the printing room. The job was given him by design, so that he would learn the newspaper business from the bottom up. Needless to say, he was quickly promoted, and in a short time joined the editorial office, and became the foreign news editor. Eventually father replaced grandfather as editor-in-chief of the newspaper.

But there was one awkward problem, a rock and a hard place hid beneath the surfce of the water, which had the potental of sinking the Titanic so recently launched.

It was my father’s addiction to sex.

How and why the addiction came about, I do not know. But at the time when grandfather abandoned his family and went to Riga (1904), father was only twelve years old. It is conceivable that he interpreted the break-up of the family as an event provoked by his father’s liaison with Emiliya, which he may have interpreted as a green light for sexual licensef. His brother, a few years his senior (also a student at St. Petersburg) is said to have died of syphilis. Incidentallyt, he may have originated the idea for the newspaper —from Russian precedents, which, in turn, had imported the idea from London. In short, the idea of a penny newspaper surviving off advertisements was then taken up by his father and Emiliya.

The transition from life of a student in Petrograd to the life of a military officer facilitated turning of sexual partners into exploitable things. When this happened, love was destined to last until its victim had been cannibalized or the cannibal killed on the battlefield, after which time another damsel ready to become a ‘thing’ was found.

After discharge from the military, father’s addiction to sexual love was encouraged by the fact that he was the son of by then one of Latvija’s wealthiest men, that he was a handsome man, and there was no shortage of young women on the make and willing to risk being turned into ‘things’ (and turn their male partners into things in turn) to kick up their heels in a bedroom among piles of money. This is not to say that there is scientific proof for what I am writing. It is a simple enough conjecture. Still, there is some corroborating evidence for taking such conjecture seriously. The following begins to  explain:

My virtual Godfather, the President of Latvija, was not present at my baptism. His absence from the ceremony had a better excuse than his absence from the ceremony that founded the Latvijan state. That is to say, by the time that I was born, the First President of Latvija was already six years dead. But his oldest surviving son, a lawyer sitting on the Latvijan Supreme Court at the time, married to my father’s youngest sister, was willing to take the role of a bridge between the dead and the newly arrived boy child. A Lutheran archbishop oficiated at my christening as if to replace any memory of the Herrnhuters*.

*While I believe that grandfather continued to be conflicted by his Herrnhuter past due to the upbringing he had received from his father and mother, and many of the editors of the newspaper were of Herrnhuter roots, there was no outward projection of that past either within the family circle or public life.

In 1922, the son of the First President of Latvija returned from the war, and was discharged from the military (‘’Imanta’ division) that same year. Like a sensible young man, the following year he married my aunt, who was my grandfather’s youngest daughter as well as my father’s youngest sister.

One heard talk (behind the scenes) of how expedient it was for the daughter of one of Latvija’s wealthiest men, a media mogul, to bond with Latvija’s most prominent political family. The same chatter suggested how expedient it would be if father, too, were to marry, because then he and his sister’s issues could benefit from the prominence of their grandfathers.

If such a timely birth came true for my aunt’s children—my cousins, born 1923 and 1925—it passed me by. Instead, I have two half-sisters. Tamara born in middle 1920s, and Yolanta born in 1928, a year after the death of the President. My half-sisters had only a socially unacknowledged rumor to go by if they wished to learn who their true father was.

It took a scandal to bring my father to the altar.

The scandal was caused by the grandmother on behalf of Yolanta, my haf-sister born in 1928.

Yolanta’s grandmother spoke on behalf of Lutheran propriety and in censure of General Priapus’ denchik*, who having promised to marry her daughter, did not do so when the young actress** delivered of a daughter. When the news became public, the Latvijan yellow press waved my father’s reputation in the face of the public as a dirty rag. To stop the blood of the family’s reputation running down the gutter took interference by grandfather and his money belt.

*Denchik, a military commander’s aide in the Tsar’ army. I do not have any factual evidence whether my father was in fact General Kolchak’s denchik or whether  the accusation was only in jest, but this is what a Cheka official accused him of having been.
**The same actress became at a later date the mistsress of the first Soviet Latvian Prime Minister.

In one of his last letters to mother, which father wrote before being deported to the Gulag from his prison cell in Rīga, he called her Solvega (Sun’s Way), a character in Norvegian playwright Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. By making such an address, father admitted himself to be like Peer, a more or less lost son and soul.