SFX Crackling of a campfire can be heard throughout, as well
as the sounds of the night typical of a western desert.
NARRATOR The mountains to the north lay sunwise in corrugated folds
and the days were cool and the nights were cold and they
sat about the fire each in his round of darkness in that
round of dark while the idiot watched from his cage at the
edge of the light. The judge cracked with the back of an
axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow
dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The
subject was war.
JOHN JACKSON The good book says that he that lives by sword shall
perish by the sword.
JUDGE HOLDEN What right man would have it any other way?
IRVING The good book does indeed count war an evil, yet there’s
many a bloody tale of war inside it.
JUDGE HOLDEN It makes no difference what men think of war. War
endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War
was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.
The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is
the way it was and will be. That way and not some other
way.
SFX Whispered slur or demurrer.
NARRATOR He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some
whispered slur or demurrer.
JUDGE HOLDN Ah Davy, it’s your own trade we honor here. Why not
rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.
DAVID BROWN My trade?
JUDGE HOLDEN Certainly.
DAVID BROWN What is my trade?
JUDGE HOLDEN War. War is your trade. Is it not?
DAVID BROWN And it ain’t yours?
JUDGE HOLDEN Mine too. Very much so.
DAVID BROWN What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
JUDGE HOLDEN All other trades are contained in that of war.
DAVID BROWN Is that why war endures?
JUDGE HOLDEN No. It endures because young men love it and old men
love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
DAVID BROWN That’s your notion.
JUDGE HOLDEN Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows
that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth
or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but
rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of
chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of
sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and
the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in
themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the
worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance
or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for
here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their
lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card.
The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking
to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s
hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a
man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the
game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning
the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is
a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man
indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without
agency or significance either one. In such games as have
for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions
are quite clear. This man holding this particular
arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from
existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once
the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so,
war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s
will and the will of another within that larger will which
because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is
the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the
unity of existence. War is god.
DAVID BROWN You’re crazy Holden. Crazy at last.
IRVING Might does not make right. The man that wins in some
combat is not vindicated morally.
JUDGE HOLDEN Moral law is an invention of mankind for the
disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.
Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can
never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man
falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in
error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial
gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness
of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality
which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of
the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment
are the opinions and of what great moment the
divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but
not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's
vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his
knowledge remains imperfect and however much he
comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit
them before a higher court. Here there can be no special
pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude
and moral right rendered void and without warrant and
here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of
life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar
all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are
all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.
NARRATOR The judge searched out the circle for disputants.
JUDGE HOLDEN But what says the priest?
TOBIN The priest does not say.
JUDGE HOLDEN The priest does not say. Nihil dicit. But the priest has said.
For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up
the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The
priest would be no godserver but a god himself.
TOBIN You’ve a blasphemous tongue, Holden. And in truth I was
never a priest but only a novitiate to the order.
JUDGE HOLDEN Journeyman priest or apprentice priest. Men of god and
men of war have strange affinities.
TOBIN I’ll not secondsay you in your notions. Don’t ask it.
JUDGE HOLDEN Ah priest. What could I ask of you that you’ve already
given?
No comments:
Post a Comment