EC 511

Upon Whom the Ends

of the Ages Have Come…

^{A fantasy for an Apocalypse}

© Ludis Cuckold (2015)

20 The Sorrows of Old Werther

The story told by the German poet Goethe that made him renown, and for which story he was to be known in particular (though he wrote many works, including the play “Faust”), was “The Sorrows of Young Werther”. The story in a few words:

A young artist visits the countryside, meets a young country girl, falls in love with her, then discovers that she is betrothed, and—like it or not—a lovers’ triangle develops. Realizing that he is the ‘guilty party’ or, if you will, the party that causes disharmony, and that Lotte will not renege on her betrothal, the young artist asks a friend for a loan of his pistols, and kills himself.

By taking suck of Daisy’s milk, and the fact that she was not shy about giving me her breast, led to a series of changing circumstances for me.

Though the difference in ages between us was more than fifty years, my adventurous spirit (my X once said that she admired me, because every time I fell on my face, I got up again and moved on) and physical contact with Daisy, caused me to acknowledge that my hormones and state of mind (unbeknownst to myself) had found me in need of love.

With the apparent failure of ‘renewed’ post-Soviet Latvija [its leading political party led by a former Chair of the Latvijan Saeima (Senate) whose assistant is famous for giving the Latvian Commons ‘the finger’], it did not take long for me to realize that the unexpected event, was a message from my ‘vegetative nervous system (aka the first of our three brains) that because off the failure of my community to survive yet another war, I was at a loss and in need of love. Whether I should focus my love on Daisy or whether she just happened to be there when the proverbial Jungian scarab fell on the desk, was a question that only time would answer.

There was, however, another question: What did Daisy think or make of it?

Daisy said nothing. If the offer of her milk was an act of surrender, she did not follow up on it with any other gesture.  

Still, if it was all an accident, Daisy’s milk served as the ‘host’ and, though I am not a believer in either transubstantiation or miracles, she had let the happenstance  become a transubstantiating event for me.

So, how does one read one’s own heart?

                                                                                 

If it was my heart that had spoken, it had probably done so, because it knew that Daisy was not the first woman to close the gap between need and succor. I remembered reading a story how Florence Nightingale had offered her breast to a wounded and dying soldier. Maybe it was some strange synchronicity that transubstantiated Daisy into Florence. Was I the dying soldier? Perhaps, perhaps not. My X once told me that the one thing she liked about me was that whenever I fell on my face, I got up again and went on. Daisy certainly put new life in me.

Given that the Latvian Commons had gone dead on itself (the dead and I continue to speak the same language, but somehow it is no longer the same), Daisy’s courage in facing me down (if that is what she had done) soon became my new emotional anchor to a Latvija its leadership had happily buried and sent the bill to the dead Stalin for his contribution. Though the relationship between  Daisy and me was not sexual, the sexual overtones were necessary to make my homecoming more than that of a skater skating over ice by the light of a half moon.

Daisy did not draw back her hand when I reached to touch it, but it led to a disappointment. When I attempted to ‘pet’ her thigh, she took the occasion to tell me that she did not wish me to continue.

Alright, I had over reached, but had she not opened the door just a little? The Greek word for ‘host’ is dora, gift. For the Latvijans ‘dore’ means a hole in the trunk of a tree where the bees nest and gather honey.

Just how much was Daisy opposed to my touching her? After all, the forebears of Latvians, while being sexual moralists and objecting to sexual contact by way of sexual organs other than for creative purposes, likely did not object (so goes my argument) to sexual contact if it occurred by way petting.*

*While the memory of petting among today’s Latvian youths has been practically eliminated by consumerist morality advocated by ‘business’, their forebears, by way of the Bosnian Bogomils, and Italian and French Cathars, may have been the inventors of the first condoms as a result of petting as a form of affection. As a widely traveled German geographer Johan Kohl observed in the early part of the 19^th century, the mitten is more than a hand warmer among Latvians by way of being a favored gift object. A gift of hand knit mittens among proto-Latvijans (and possibly hand knit socks among the Livs) was a way of saying “yes” in a language that had no yes word. As a gift that was exchanged between the sexes, mittens and socks were likely used as an object that brought the sexes together. Which is to say, petting among men and women using mittens as an object of modesty had it both ways: it facilitated sexually meaningful contact (interestingly, mittens were also used by beekeepers) even as it avoided unwanted pregnancies.

I heard rumors that Daisy’s stepfather Stefan continued to make sexual advances on her. I tried to persuade her to leave the shack, where the family lived in one room. Daisy told me that she had applied to the village authorities to assign her living space in the village.

As it happened, such a living space became available. Though the apartment had been used as a meeting place by local alcoholics and the walls were mildewed and nearly black, Daisy accepted the offer in a hurry.

Apparently the hurry was because her stepfather Stefan continued to violate her. Indeed, since her return from England and recent birth, he had forced her to submit to him and had caused her to become pregnant again. I was shocked to discover that Daisy had recently had her second abortion.

Only by means of such belated information did I begin to understand that Daisy’s  attachment to me and acceptance of my help was related to such hidden and  untold abuse.

Through a media contact, I succeeded in persuading the town officials to pay for the renovation of the rooms assigned Daisy and her children. Nevertheless, I was surprised that after I showed up to help paint the rooms, I was introduced to a young man, whom Daisy said was her cousin. She also told me that—in deference to my age—he was to take my place as painter.

It did not take long for me to realize that ‘cousin’ was a word meant to divert me, and that the young man was (like for some women their ‘gay friend’) her new Stud. In short, this was her way of escaping, both, her stepfather and me.

You may think, ha, ha, that’s that.

No, not actually, because love has ways of persisting, even harnessing sexuality in unusual ways when denied.

Though Daisy stopped asking me for work and did not visit me, there were occasions when the fact that she had children and was economically distressed, and because I had a car and sometimes money, an occasional call from Daisy was inevitable when one of her children got sick and needed to go to the hospital, when there was a toothache and the only dentist’s office open was the next town over. I never refused to come help.

Such occasions kept us in touch.

I used these occasions to speak frankly. I did not hide my point of view. I told Daisy that I was surprised that she believed that Stud could protect her better than I could. I told she was making a mistake if she believed that her ‘cousin’ could protect her better than her ne’er do well friend in England. I tried to avoid speaking impatiently. When I touched her hand, she did not pull it back. Sometimes I wondered if she responded only because I was so many years older and she felt that an old man was little more than a thing among other things. Was this the reason I was useful to her?

When I discovered that her ‘cousin’ was eight years younger than she, I became angry. Her Stud in England, too, had been younger than she. (I had my ideas why this was so.) I could not resist asking Daisy if she and her latest lover planned to marry. Daisy responded by saying that she did not know, but that it was a possibility. Then she asked me why I thought marriage was necessary.

Soon after one such conversation, Daisy asked me to drive her to work. She also asked ne to give Stud a lift. I got up my courage and used the occasion to broach the question of marriage. Stud replied “yes”, he would marry her. While the statement seemed firm enough, I had my doubts about its honesty: the “yes” was not followed up by any further affirmative words or conversation. I kept my peace.

The lie is common practice among the Latvijan Commons today. When giving the matter some thought, one can only conclude that the people of the Commons are reacting to a voice that speaks from within: ‘Do not trust anyone, make use of anyone you can fool.’ While the Commons is told that such a voice was the result of the Soviet times, it was a little surprising that Capitalist times did not change anything.

But why should it? The ‘shock’ therapy that was said to come with ‘freedom’ and by way of Harpard University did not improve the lot of the Latvijan Commons. While some individuals became wealthy, the majority who found themselves ‘freed’ from the Soviet yoke could not find jobs and were destitute. Most Latvijans who returned to Latvija from the exile (trimda) were  so brainwashed by their host nations that when they sold their former properties in Latvija, they took the money with them back to the U.S. or England or

wherever. Initially, I was one of these innocents. Surely what I did was lawful. The entire ‘free’ world was on my side of any argument even though I was robbing the community and country my forebears had founded.

The Novo Ordum Seculorum of post-Soviet times and the Latvijan government—likely installed with the aid of Western intelligence services—in fact initiated a quick divorce between the government and the people. When one looks for a cause for the pronounced split, one finds the cause is—money. Bizarre as it may seem, money was the only glue that bound the government to the governed and to the nation’s past. Since to research and tell the story of the past costs money, and money was scarce, the past became irrelevant.

A German author had once described the Soviet government, including those of the West, “The Tin Drum”: the Commons was forced to dance to shallow vibrations inside the heads of the mindless descendants of The Age of Enlightenment. Of course, there had been a past once, but there were no sinews left that bound it to the present and the world was coming to an end with a wimper.

As far as Daisy was concerned, arguments on behalf of marriage, such as: # for the sake of community stability; # for the sake of security of personal relationships and children; or # how the fireman’s common-in-law wife receives no insurance benefits when her ‘husband’ is killed in a burning building—such arguments held no weight for either her or most Latvijan youths. Discussions of such matters did not occur at the kitchen table, but—if they occurred at all—it was at the bar, where alcohol blurs the unreality of virtual reality, and the ever present television set in the background offeres well packaged delusional ads telling of prosperity just ahead.

For its part, the Latvijan government, composed of people desperate for a job and, therefore, consisting mostly of bribed bureaucrats, bought into the ‘secret’ of the Western Empire—re: people can be easily fooled by gradualism, a near unnoticeable creep of events, that only a secretive ‘deep government’, and a well-paid and well organized political bureaucracy can carry off. The means of executing such a gradualism are many.

One of the methods of gradually destroying a nation is through ‘strategic depopulation’ or accelerated migration. At the time of this writing, the Baltic nations have been forced to endure such strategic dispersion for twenty-five years and the end is not in sight.

Another method of destroying a nation is by occupying the country with refugees from far away cultures. Of course, these refugees have been subjected to similar stresses that the Latvians have been. While foreign occupations offend the natives, they do not offend the secularists and shareholders of major corporations that have most of the money* and are the true owners of the country defined as a corporation. These tactics go unnoticed in countries with large populations.

*Money; though I do not agree with all the ideas puts forward by the lecturer, I find the gist of his argument rather compelling. The argument is a bit long (1.17-1.41 =24 min.), but interesting, and may be at least amusing to the readerOs. 

In any event, the sinews that once held a people to a land and a geographic area, have been loosed to the people’s despair.

De-culturalization of a Commons is the result of denationalizing a county by means of mongrelizing, in one way or another, of its population, which—given it has access to money—has no interest in bonding as it had done in former ages when one believed that “Greater love has no man (the word ‘man’ has been changed to ‘one’; two words that have no pareidolic associations) than this, that a man  become ‘one’ lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13) has been replaced by burnt toast. The same is true for marriage. A soldier fights to defend money, not his community. Daisy is a perfect example of a mother living in a de-communalized village. It is unlikely to matter to her children what country they are born in.*

*To be born in the wood is not the same as to be born in the city. The environment of nature is not the same as the environment of a virtual setting. When the city-born act on their instinct, they act as those born in the wood, and (no surprise!) act destructively.

As much as Old Werther may desire  Daisy to respond to his love for her, none but a winning lottery ticket that brings a large sum of money will gain her for him. Were such a lottery ticket to come in, Daisy would come to Old Werther post haste. But who then is she and who is he? Is she not a whore, is he not one who pimps for himself by happenstance?

Neither old nor young stand much of a chance when in the path of a deadweight juggernaut hauling money from an Empire called Hopium on a planet known as Utopia—unless Nature itself comes to their aid.