EC 412 / God’s War
© Eso A.B.

Speaking of War Subjectively 2

Before I read James Joyce’s Ulysses, I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which is said to be among the best of American novels written in the style of stream of consciousness. This is more than fifty years ago. I remember that I was taken with the name ‘Vardaman’, which belonged to the young boy whose mother ‘lay dying’ and indeed soon died. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/asilay/summary.html The name impressed me, because the word for a word in Latvian is ‘vahrds’ (vārds). Thus, the name Vardaman suggested to me that perhaps Vardaman’s mother Addie, who had likely named him, was of perhaps Baltic origins.

How Faulkner discovered the name is beyond me, though googling it leads me to a link http://www.houseofnames.com/vardaman-family-crest that tells me that the name evolved from the word ‘guard’, re ‘ward’. Though this puts my association in jeopardy, we may want to remember that before we guard ourselves with a sword, we guard ourselves with the word, a prayer. To this day there are people who believe that the better watchman is the wardsman who wards off evil with the magic of words.

The name Vardeman came to my mind after I had the dream which I record in the preceding blog. When I thought about it, it came to mind that the body of the wingless white drone stood for a coffin. According to Vardaman, the body of his mother in the coffin is that of a fish; and an airplane, too, is a sort of fish of the air. Unfortunately, a coffin does not fly, but if within it is locked a spirit, then if Vardaman bores holes in it, the spirit may fly. Again, the smoke coming from the chimney of my house is a hole in my house, and the smoke coming from the chimney is the genie escaping Aladin’s lamp to tell me a secret.

What is the secret the genie of the other 90% of my brain wishes to tell?

First, two years ago, I was visited by five men from the criminal police of a nearby city, who had been informed by Inguna—let it suffice a traitorous spirit, now a middle aged woman, who I had once helped get a college education and had recently paid arrears on her rent payments—that I was growing on my property marihuana. As the police in Latvia need not consult with any court, but may freely trespass on anyone’s property or privacy, one forenoon five men sans police uniforms arrived in my backyard, confronted me with their police IDs, and asked where I was hiding the ‘narcotic’. I invited them to go ahead and see if they could find any, which the police took this as an invitation to crisscross my properties, which included the kitchen of my apartment, where I allegedly had hid a tin of oatmeal cookies fortified with cannabis. The police found nothing, which gave me an excuse to explain to them that I was in fact for the legalization of cannabis, and that I found the tactics of the Latvian government which are aimed to repress discussing the desirability of legalization presumptuous to say the least. The leader of the gang of five told me that I should not be preaching such stuff.

Ever since the visit by the police, I have wondered if they left in my kitchen or apartment a listening device to entrap me. This is why in my dream, I am approaching my own home as stealthily as a spy. If the dream had provided me with a drill I would no doubt have drilled a few holes into the body Trojan of the drone left so casually in my back yard by the secret police created expressly to protect the government against such people as myself.

It may interest the reader that I am not against the police, and believe that it has a useful function in assuring that society functions in a nonviolent manner. However, I do not see the function of the police or government as one that interferes with a community’s privacy. Granted, ‘privacy’ can be interpreted to mean any number of things. In the case of the Latvian people, I see it as defined by the lifestyle cultivated by a homestead in the wood, which is where Latvians come from: as long as there is no violence committed against any of the neighbors or its own, the household defines itself and in so doing creates a culture.

To return to the invasion by the police of my home: no, I am not an angel. I have enjoyed partaking of a ‘toke’ ever since my early twenties, which is some sixty years ago. I was indeed growing a few plants scattered in a few inconspicuous places about my property and had told about this to a one who I presumed a friend. When that ‘friend’ informed on me and caused the police to come investigate, apparently this was not a well kept secret among its own—among whom I had a friend or two. It was these friends (I had facilitated the education of some, contributed money to this or another fund) who perceived that entrapping one whose godfather was the first president of Latvia would only facilitate criminal behavior of a corrupt government. Anyway, the way I know who betrayed me is that the police did not look for the single plant more or less right before their noses, which I had not confided to my foul ‘friend’.