Saturday, May 28, 2016



EC 540
A Happenstance Witness and The Holy Ghost:

Neither a novel or documentary, but for the patient reader
a timely story about the collapse of Modern and Post-Modern Times.

By © Ludis Cuckold

Mr. Godman’s Dog (8)

Some twenty-seven years ago, before I had returned to Latvija, my then wife of nearly thirty years, wished us to separate. We each took our own apartment at opposite ends of Washington, D.C. I moved into an attic room in a rooming house in Takoma Park, Maryland, and, as per usual, spent my entire spare time trying to extract something useful from my brain unto a computer.

As usual, it was a futile effort. I did not understand that my ‘inner fish’ or ’primal worm’ or whatever could not conceive writing as something to make money off. Sooner, for me writing was a kind of artistic endeavor, as avant-garde as walking or blinking one’s eyelids, as natural an event as a pine tree growing needles for leaves.

I could never get my mind around the idea that writing had anything to do with a career or money—whether as a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, or writer of advertising copy. For this reason, nothing what I wrote ever came together in the expected public manner, and gradually, I became a half done fictional character even to myself. Nevertheless, I continued writing, hoping that if I continued eventually something would emerge that made sense or entertained.

This is one reason why I took for my nom de plume or pseudonym the name Ludis Cuckold. ‘Ludi’ is an old name for ‘people’*. The name is reflected in ‘ludites’, the English weavers and spinners, people who objected to being cuckolded by mechanical weaving machines and tried to make a revolution by smashing the machines with hammers. ‘Cuckold’ stands for the male of the species, who allows himself to be fooled by a female, often his mother, in hopes that the day will come when she will invite him to her bed. Of course, the latter seldom happens; still, there are events that can be called close calls or simulacra.

*Ludi—other names: Leute (German for people); Ludwig (a German name for a German King of the People); Louis (a French name for a king of the People); lud (a Russian name that—given that consonant L may change into R—is now spelled and pronounced ‘rod’, which is part of the word ‘narod’/ nalud—the people; ‘rodina’/ ludina—motherland of the people); etc.

In the course of our separation, my ex told me that she had begun to date a man from Yugoslavia. When I wanted to know more, she told me not to worry and explained that the man was gay and not interested in women in a sexual way. Supposedly, they were meeting because both were interested in art and literature, and the Yugoslavian needed to practice his English if he was to get a job at the Library of Congress in Washington.

One Sunday my ex invited me to come visit her and meet her new friend. I drove over to her apartment and was introduced to Slavoy. He was a nice enough young guy, who did not show any obvious signs of being gay. We exchanged a few pleasantries, after which Slavoy excused himself and said that he really had to go. My ex told me to make myself another cup of coffee and went to escort Slavoy to his car.

As I took a peek out the window, I saw my ex and Slavoy stand in the drive way, embrace, and give each other a kiss that was more than a peck on the cheek. I suspected it to be a staged act.

After reentering the apartment my ex invited me almost immediately to have sex with her, and because I was still conceited enough to let myself believe it was for reasons of my own irresistable self, I soon forgot about Slavoy. The forgetfulness lasted for a long time—until many years later, my hard to get objet d'art in Latvija, Daisy, who as a teen had been raped by her stepfather, told me about Mr. Godman’s dog.


The story of my relationship with Daisy is a long one. I have told it in a related, but somewhat different context in blogs that constitute Part I of this 2 parts book. In any event, Daisy, now in her thirties, was playing hard to get with me, but when asked why, she declined to tell why my irresistable self* failed to arouse in her irresistable desire. I suspected that she feared that if she told of her true feelings, I would cease helping her and the three children her other paramours had blessed her and abandoned with.

*My ‘irresistable self’ was, in deference to my long beard, recently called ‘holy father’ by an inmate of a mental institution, when I accompanied Daisy and her mother on a walk in the institution’s small park. Daisy’s mother had suffered a mini-stroke as a consequence of which she had become demented.

Some time ago Daisy told me that a Mr. Godman, the owner of a garage and a car rental facility, had invited her to come clean his house. Because she needed the money, she had agreed to become his house cleaner. Daisy also told me that Godman had a neglected dog called Cerberus. She told me that she fed Cerberus, and the dog had befriended her.

As time went on, I heard Daisy tell that Cerberus was in the habit of escaping from Godman’s house and roamed about the village park. Several times her children had recognized the dog and brought it home with them. Daisy then called Mr. Godman, who came and picked up the stray. I did not give the matter much thought. It sounded as an innocent enough happenstance.

Then came the day when Daisy solicited me to bring her mother home from the hospital to which stay I had contributed a small, but under the circumstances significant amount of euros. I was to meet her at 11 a.m. at her apartment. Daisy made the request after the day before I had picked her up at her mother’s countryside home, where she had gone to, she said, to give it a cleaning before her mother’s return. When I met her at the house, Daisy was wearing a see-through blouse with a bright day-glow orange bra showing through. An unfamiliar car was parked at the far end of the driveway. Though for the most part I tend to be dead pan over such surprises, I grew suspicious.

I do not call myself Ludis Cuckold, because Cuck-koo may stand as a symbol for who and all that Life betrays. Unfortunately, a larger than life Cuck-koo is the Mother of Life Herself, the Goddess, the woman whom the German poet Goethe called Das Ewig Weibliche—the eternally feminine. For an old man like myself, Daisy was the very essence of this spirit of Das Ewige. I was of her as butter is the child of the cream of a mother’s lactating breasts.

My fear of not being able to hold the Spirit of Desire in my hands ever again caused me to be on the alert and jealous of those who could still capture it with relative ease.

As I was driving toward Daisy’s apartment that Saturday morning, I was suspicious to see drive toward me a black and very shiny car with a middle aged man at the wheel who looked like said Mr. Godman. Well, I thought to myself, even garage owners in Latvija can pretend to be millionaires. All they need do is ‘rent’ a car from their own garage office.

I believed I was right! When I stopped at Daisy’s apartment, I was surprised to see her waiting for me in a flowery dress. The neckline was low cut and showed an ‘irresistable’ cleavage. Not that this is such an unusual sight when coming to meet a young woman, but it was so on this occasion, because it was the first time that I had ever seen Daisy wear anything but jeans.

After she strapped herself into the seat of my car, Daisy told me that Cerberus had again escaped from home, and as if to explain the shiny black car which had just minutes ago passed me, told that Godman had just come to pick up his dog. With some shock the thought flashed through my mind that Godman had not come to pick up his dog, but had just dropped off Daisy, and the stray Cerberus was in his pants.


By coincidence it was Mother’s Day. The children were nowhere to be seen. Either they had forgotten mother or mother had forgotten them.


What else could I say, but—“Oh Mother of God!?”

Tuesday, May 24, 2016



EC 539
A Happenstance Witness and The Holy Ghost:
Neither a novel or documentary, but a story that
for the patient reader may, in retrospect, make sense.

By © Ludis Cuckold
The Aura of Whimper (7)

1939 was a year of foreboding. It began with my paternal grandfather dying, but due to my young age without my knowing it. My ignorance was partly because it was then advocated that children be spared knowing about death. Another reason was due to grandfather being as much of an enigma to his descendants as his son, my father. The old stag had finally been run through by the boar’s tusk of capitalism—clogged arteries, a fat covered heart, and a rich wife. He now lay dying on the battlefield among the stumps of a clear-cut forest.

I grant, it cannot be denied that grandfather kept his distance from his first family due to his second marriage, which had his second wife Eniya, who could not have children, adopt her sister’s son as her own. Grandfather did not resist this scheme of theft by Eniya, which she initiated in a transparent effort to deprive him of any say in an enterprise he had started and cut his children by first marriage off any and all inheritance.

Being aware of Eniya’s schemes, grandfather’s first wife, my grandmother, a Godly woman, did not go quiet into the night. She had a hand in the defense of her own by means of subtle threats and neatly planned schemes.

Her first scheme (its public being the family circle) was to refuse grandfather an agreement to a divorce. In effect, she withheld from him her permission to marry his paramour. The laws of the day did not permit either quick divorces or remarriages as can be had today. Grandmother gave her permission only after grandfather and Eniya agreed to write a Last Will she could accept. This took some twenty years in doing. She was savvy enough to know that an oral promise in legalistic Catholic Christian society had no weight as it had had among the members of the Moravian Church that had founded self-consciousness among Latvians. For all his role in helping create a Latvijan consciousness, grandfather had not managed to wrap his mind around the ways of the new age of legalist crap.

Another take down of Eniya occurred when grandmother had a gypsy fortune teller crash an uppity Eniya’s birthday party. The gypsy predicted that in the course of time Eniya would become ugly and die in dire poverty. What kind of information grandmother had to make her presence to be reckoned with is not known with certainty, but there were dark rumors that grandfather had abandoned her for a whore, who solicited her ‘tricks’ as a hatcheck girl at one of Riga’s theatres. She had got that part-time job because at the time she was married to a poorly paid actor of that theatre.

Eniya’s job description was that as she took the man’s hat with one hand, she would brush her other as if accidentally over his crotch. A rendezvous was agreed on after the theatre performance, when the man came to retrieve his hat. Evidently grandfather came along just in time.

Grandmother died just three months after grandfather. At the time an anecdote was propagated and people were convinced that she had so loved her former husband that she continued to love him even after he had abandoned her for Eniya. Such an attachment was ascribed to her due to her Moravian Church loyalties.

The real truth was more mundane. After grandfather died, his two surviving daughters sued Eniya for taking more than a half of the inheritance which in the testament was said to be but a half of the estate. Grandmother would have had a role as a witness at the trial. Because of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the court case came to nothing, and because murder became common, all personal and family issues became moot. Also, grandmother’s death was most likely by poison secretly slipped into her food by an Eniya surrogate.

At the time the events took place, they were reported as anecdotes. At the time such anecdotes had little credibility, because the high social positions of those involved did not allow for the idea that Latvijan society’s most prominent people would get involved in such a bizarre undertaking as murder. On the other hand, in retrospect, the years 1939, ..40, ..41 were bizarre the world over. Uncertainty, instability, and dire premonitions were in the air. The farcical Peace Treaty of WW1 was coming to an end. Only children had no inkling of what the adults were up to—they were left the hearsays and anecdotes and auras of whimpers of the slain.

Today, more than seventy years after the fact, the rumors and anecdotes become plausible, and the fact that grandfather’s heirs were left without resources propels rumor into the sphere of fact that only an exhumation of grandmother’s bones may resolve as either true or false or not convincing.

As grandfather lay dying, I was taken to his estate, and my nanny had me pick forget-me-nots. It was May of 1939. It was a day without a cloud in the skies. I brought the flowers directly to grandfather’s bedside. As I put the flowers beside him on his bed, grandfather moved his left hand in acknowledgement. That was all he did. He said nothing.

A long time before grandfather died a few days later (May 16), suggestions were made that he should put some of his wealth into some socially useful project—he could build a hospital, a school, or create a scholarship fund. But he never responded to any of the suggestions. This was a mystery to people, who knew that his past was associated with the founding of the Latvijan nation, which could not have been done without his forebears from the Moravian Church of Herrnhut in Germany.

Instead, there appeared news that he had funded and bought a small squadron of military biplanes for the Air Force of the Latvijan government. I remember the planes roar low over our house—which lay in line with grandfather’s house on the Riga Beach (JÅ«rmala) only a few kilometers away—in a salute. As a five or six year old, I was thrilled by the spectacle.

Given grandfather’s religious past, a gift by him to the military makes no sense—unless one takes into consideration the fact that Eniya had taken to raising her social status yet higher by appearing in public with Latvija’s President Ulmanis, who was an unmarried man.

A closer look at who controlled the finances gives a ready explanation as to who bought the biplanes: it was not grandfather, but the wife he helped make a millionaires—Eniya.



I am sorry to say: grandfather had no say over the newspaper he had founded or the money it made. Because he had bankrupted himself as the owner of two small hardware stores before he began his newspaper career, the bankruptcy laws of the day did not allow him (unless he wished to subject himself to an endless battery of law suits) to become the publisher of the newspaper. It was Eniya who became the publisher instead, and, thereby, had the final authority to say how the money was spent. However, the cuckolded “old man” was given the credit. It was to maintain the image of political correctness of the day (the male in those days was held to be predominant over the female*), and so Eniya could use her political connections to transfer her wealth out of the country and into a Swiss and other foreign bank accounts.

*This image was upheld by Eniya herself. While the reporters reported that The ‘Old Man’ always wrote their paychecks himself, it was Eniya who authorized them. When at one point grandfather wished to divorce his second wife, his lawyers (including senator M. Chakste of Latvia’s Supreme Court) emphatically advised him against it.

When my father, aware of the imminent danger he and everyone else was in, went (according to yet another ‘anecdote’) to Eniya and asked her to relent on the monies and suggested that the family clan seek safety in a foreign country, she refused to help. Perhaps she did so, because the Hitler government of Germany had refused her request to immigrate to Germany along with the Baltic Germans. It was a decision that cost, Eniya and a number of other family members their lives, destroyed all that had been created and brought about in a period of some thirty years, and caused great deprivation to many.

The trap that held grandfather helpless is not dissimilar to the situation of the nations which in our day belong to the European Union (EU). None of the current 27 members of the EU is any longer a sovereign nation, because the final word on most anything belongs to EU’s Central Bank, the military, and the U.S. government and its proxies.

Indeed, the U.S. sponsored European Union has put all EU countries into an untenable political situation—the countries are still alive, so to speak, but only a leadership in possession of an unfaked European thumos may dare think of how to get free of the trap into which lies and false promises have caught its Commons of nations and create a history other than one of little and no real validity.