All Bound Up

Yesterday was Constitution Day. Not that that is terribly relevant.

Perhaps the most important thing to record is that I have finally bound Ralph and Jane; they are all bound up in marriage. Their wedding was on the Fourth of July, and they are spending their honeymoon in Paris.

I finally got around to explaining why Ralph loves her. It is actually quite fascinating and somewhat unexpected a rationale, even for me as the author.

For a moment, as the sun sank in this dazzling radiant fashion, he felt what she felt. He felt the sheer joy of living and loving—the mere radiance of being. The goodness that he had smelled in her at the funeral over a year ago now intoxicated the air. He breathed it in deeply, urging it to invigorate his cells with passion. He wanted to live life as a brilliantly glowing meteor, as Jane did, and not as a cold, dead planet. He wanted her freedom of being. She was unbound by the supposed law of gravity; she had the ability to simply fly away into the glorious blaze. Her spirit could detach itself from her body, and she could ascend to the heavens. She felt life with every atom of her being, lived as if they were burning with joy, and she felt so much! She felt the usual array of emotions, yes, but she felt so much more than that. She felt the last remnants of the day’s exhilaration pan out over them in the watercolor of the sky. She felt the city alive with motion. She felt the air pressing down upon their backs and shrugged it away. She carried no burdens or duties but those to life itself; that was her only duty—to live and to love. And thus she simply lived and loved.
That was what he loved in her. All the things that he was not she was. He tended to be unhappy, but she was always bursting with happiness. He tended to think about the dead, but she never stopped thinking about the living. He was earthbound by duties, obligations, and oaths, but she just flew away when she so chose. He tended to doubt that outside his basic moral convictions, but she always knew everything immediately. He tended to do everything impersonally, but she injected her whole self into anything and everything she did or saw or experienced. In this manner she had injected herself into him. She overflowed the casing of her small body and filled in the cracks in his. She was so complete, he so incomplete that they between them averaged out into near perfection. She made him infinitely better, lifted him out of the metaphorical mud and pulled him to his feet. What he did to her and what she saw in him he really did not know. He figured that while she pulled him up he must be pulling her down—but then again, the laws of physics and motion did not apply to her.

That's really all there is to say.

Fighting the Good War for Liberty

Today, or I suppose yesterday, was the seventh anniversary of the day that made me what I am today. I would not be a political writer if it were not for September 11th. I would not be interested in history. I would not be considering joining the Air Force. I would not believe so strongly in traditional Republican, conservative values. I would not love America like this. I would not value life--the human spark--so much. I would not know the meaning of sadness as I feel I do. I would still be the child I was back then, seven years ago.

So today--I mean yesterday--felt like a good day to do other hard things, like write Ralph's eulogy for Mark. The beginning and end are too similar to the Gettysburg Address, thus I will quote only the slightly original middle:

“When the assassin held the gun to his temple four days ago, President Adams straightened up and looked at me with the most profound sort of courage. He said, simply in steady voice, ‘Now I become another American martyr; do no let me be the last.’ See, he was always prepared to do whatever was necessary for this great nation, whatever the cost. When he was just eighteen, he swore an oath before the Statue of Liberty to give his life to America—an oath that he fulfilled in full. This might seem foolish to some of you listening—to promise your life away to a flawed, bureaucratic system. So how can we call it laudable for one to damn himself so?
“Because despite its many imperfection, America represents the best in us. She is liberty and truth and justice in the purest forms. And while she may not always carry out these noble goals perfectly, she always tries. That is what matters, and that is what makes her the “city upon a hill” that John Winthrop promised. As Socrates said, ‘The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.’ The glory is not merely in the outcome but in the intention. Thus, it does not matter if we fight a battle for our ideals and lose; it is the good war we fight in knowing we will lose that matters.
“This is what I learned from Mark in those seven infernal days, and that is what I hope America learns from his death..."

I think that is truly what I learned from creating and murdering Mark Thomas Adams as I did--that it is nobler to fight for an ideal and lose than not to fight at all. That was where I got the title for the first book, coincidentally, The Fallen Caryatid. She is the one who fights a losing battle simply because she must fight it. She knows she will be crushed, but for her own sake, she must fight it. She cannot shrug, for doing so would mean killing all that strives to be right in the world. And so she fights the Good War, even if she must do it alone, doomed to failure. It is the highest form of courage.

Maybe I misjudged the War on Terror in the past. I used to say it was silly to fight against Terrorism because you can never defeat an ideal, which is true but irrelevant, it now seems. I see flashing that we never really fight against anything--we fight for something. Always. Only the glass-half-empty-pessimists see it that way. But as an idealist, I should see it as fighting for something. Always. We are fighting for liberty; we are fighting to prove that Evil cannot defeat Good. It really is, as I called it in my in-depth study a few months ago, a "Good War on Terror". At this moment, at this hour, it doesn't seem that different from any other war. It feels the same. It feels just as real, tangible, and worth fighting as the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II.

And I am fighting it, I know that. I am fighting it with these glorious words that no one but myself ever reads. I just wish America would undress herself to see the truth as I see it at this moment. The beautifully naked truth is, as John Stuart Mill wrote:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.

I only wish America could know herself again--could know this truth so pure, so simple. So forgotten. Thus, let us never forget. On this surreal day after, let us swear to remember that liberty is always worth fighting for. Always.

Moving On

Every morning for the past few weeks, I've gotten up at 4 am. I don't really need to get up until 6:00 or so to be ready on time, but I decided I would make better use of my mornings. This started with exercising right at 4. However, then I still had an hour to be productive. Writing seemed like the logical solution, but I had nothing to write. Mark and Ralph had been in my head, of course, for they never really leave it, but writing about one and not the other hurts. I have explained that before. So I know what it must be like for Ralph. I figured, I have kept him alive in my mind, so wouldn't Ralph do the same to cope with a grief even more profound than mine? So he starts seeing Mark.

The face looked so perfect—so clear and lucid. His skin seemed to belong to the Harvard law student he had once been, not the President. It glowed vaguely with the simple brilliance of living, real living. His eyes sparkled as they hadn’t sparkled so marvelously that it thrust a stake in Ralph’s heart. Mark hadn’t looked like that in the last week of his life, he knew; the burdens of the wartime Presidency had sagged his face and dulled his eyes. Ralph knew the same was happening to him now, too. But Mark’s face was the most beautiful, idyllic image, possible only in death and in his own head. Oddly, it wasn’t the thought of being crazy and grief-stricken into delusions that frightened him so but that knowing that would mean accepting that Mark wasn’t there.

Death is deliverance. It is peace. It is relief. It is a great, gasping shrug just as one thinks his burdens will crush him. I feel a little less guilty about killing Mark off when I think of him so light and free and true. Speaking of true, Dead Mark says things Live Mark would never say. He is so much more candid and open to feeling irrelevant feelings.

“Why did you pick me for Vice President?”
“Ralph.”
He shook his head. “I had even less experience in government than Benny Dove, and I had never really demonstrated anything like leadership. All I had ever done was get too scared to go to med school the day after I got in. No one even knew who I was, outside of those who were so unlucky as to have me as the Baltimore DA. No one even thought I would run for any political office, let alone be elected.” And then Ralph’s expression changed, not to regret but to a profound sadness that he knew could not, or perhaps should not, be erased. “No one ever believed me corruptible,” his truthful eyes shimmered as they looked dejectedly at the desk, “and now here I am corrupted.”
“Stop it Ralph.”
Ralph met his eyes.
“Do you want to know why I picked you, Ralph? I’ll tell you, but first realize that everything you just said is false as water. Unlike Benny Dove, you worked your entire adult life in a real job. You led Baltimore’s crusade against common criminals. You served your country quite valiantly as a lawyer and saved countless lives—more than any doctor. You created a national reputation for yourself of placing law, justice, and morality above trifles; duty came before personal fancy. You could have won most any Maryland election, including Governor or Senator. Do you want to know why I picked you, Ralph? Because, for God’s sake, you got one thing right: you are incorruptible.” Mark had only paused for air, but the pain in Ralph’s face touched him; it was contorted with surety in wrong and the most torrid sort of guilt. He had wanted to flay it away—watch the doubt and sadness fall off in strips—but he seemed only to have made the wounds raw. He softened his tone, “You have not been corrupted, Ralph. The fact that we are having this conversation shows that you cannot be corrupted. You, Ralph, were always the best of us—better than Erikson, Davidson, or me. I was so dogmatic as to, at times, do foolish things for my ideals; I wanted too much to mold the world into my idyllic childhood vision of how it should be. You are practical and seek to make the world better in ways that are possible and don’t essay to raise the earth to the sky. That is why you and your type will win, in the end. The moral pragmatists and realists will beat out the idealists on both sides of the spectrum—libertarian and totalitarian, capitalist and communist. You will be the ones to save the earth from the fall that seems so inevitable. Oh, if anyone can, Ralph,” the smile faded from Mark’s pale visage, “you will be the one to save her.”
Ralph’s spine wriggled like a worm gripped in a bird’s claws. He shook his head and shut his eyes, “Then she won’t be saved, sir.”
Mark’s smile returned in part, “Have a little faith, Ralph; you are so much better than you know. Never think that you have been corrupted because, by God, you haven’t and won’t be. Just remember that, and you will be able to get along without me.”

That's what I keep thinking: if I write a little more of this, hold on a little tighter, I will be able to move on sooner. I will be able to stop writing about a Mark who speaks and thinks. I will be able to get past his story and tell Ralph's. I will stop thinking he means so much to me. I will write as any good writer should--with an element of detachment. But by God! I can't help answering as Ralph does after the last passage:

“What if I don’t want to?” he queried with crumpled face.