Posthumous; flash fiction by HW fitzroy
Posthumous
HW fitzroy
I was born. I learned to write. I found out why I was born. I found a pen. It was black. It felt indistinguishable from my hand. When I was not holding it, I felt my hand tingling, a phantom limb, a loss indistinguishable from the great trauma. I was in a bed. I was in a warm bed. I could not sleep, so I wrote. I used words. I used many words. I ornamented those words with adjectives. Those adjectives were less stark and beautiful and kind and natural and unwavering as the ones I used to describe the pen. Smooth. Black. Fecund. Waiting. Ready.
I lied. I lied on the bed. I invented a life worthy of my pen. I invented a story worth reading. That is true glory they say: to write a story worth reading. I sometimes think I would rather live the life worth living. Some scribe would follow close behind and catalogue that great battle. I ran fast, held the weapon aloft, and all trembled. They trembled at my might. They trembled at my fearlessness. They trembled out of envy. They wondered too, in those last moments, whether their life was worth living. They wondered whether anyone would remember them. They felt it a trauma. I meanwhile stood as they took their last breath and assured them that there they would end amid laughter and ignominy. I told them that no one but I would have a statue built by some sculpture whose name would too be erased. I told them that posthumous was the most honorable word.
I climbed a mountain. The mountain was puny. The mountain felt nothing. The mountain was my inferior. The wind was more salutary. The wind was palliative. The pen was forgotten then as I cried out something so extraordinary that the seraphs trembled. They invited me up. I looked about. I scorned the clouds. I told them they were wasting their time. I told them myth and legend were more real than their fantasies of purity and light. I walked down from the clouds. I took three steps and was off the mountain.
A horse had arrived. It had been waiting. It knew to wait as I know knowing. As it waited it was silent. It breathed. It breathed silently. I breathed and the earthed quaked. The earth quaked and the birds awoke. The birds awoke and they sang my name. The horse and I ran together. I was taller. I was faster. I was more graceful. I needed no wings. I needed no hooves. I needed no permission. I needed not to wait. The scribe found me. The horse was exhausted. I named the horse. The horse had a name that would never be forgotten as a consequence.
The scribe asked me a question. The scribe did not understand my answer. I told him in seven generations they would understand. I told him all great wisdom is posthumous. I told him what is wisdom now is foolishness after. I told him what is wisdom after is madness now. I told him truth is mad. I sat by a fire I conjured and the scribe was warmed. I played a flute I had made and the scribe was enthralled. I danced and the clouds obeyed. I whispered and the wind obeyed. I thought and the animals obeyed. I leapt and gravity obeyed. I closed my eyes and the world obeyed.
HW fitzroy is a Visiting Instructor of English at Purdue University Northwest, where he maintains a steady output of critical thinking stylists. When he is not writing or teaching writing, he is rebelling as environmental activist. He lives alone in the Midwest.
Inquiry
The following has been provided by the author:
RADICALISM, n. The conservatism of to-morrow injected into the affairs of to-day.
Ambrose Bierce
If I were to as obliquely as possible approach the impetus for this story, I would ventilate something that has irked (or enraged) me for some time. I labored to find a book about the Paris Commune and found one of a mainstream variety and found after thirty or so pages the thesis of the author: The Commune was a vindication of Liberal values such as education, the separation of church and state, labor organizing, women’s suffrage, etc. This claim is not merely ahistorical but anti-historical: Proudhon, the radical anarchist and mutualist, who had likely the greatest hand in inspiring or at least providing the intellectual framework for the insurrection, had one footnote in the index. The “liberals” of the day were utterly opposed to the Commune and thought it so unthinkably radical as to be impossible and a threat to their privilege. Thus, what is radical at the time is indeed vindicated, but only in some cases centuries later, and the “liberals” can then retroactively adopt what their historical analogs would have repudiated. Truth, in other words, takes time to fructuate. Nietzsche sold very few books in his lifetime, but his ideas about the subjective nature of truth and values is now common sense to anyone of intellectual worth, from mainstream thinkers to the more radical postmodernists. Nietzsche, thus, was a postmodernist before it was fashionable. Put plainly, he said: “my time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously.”
As for the imagery and actions of the narrator, I discovered recently that all my main characters are fragments of myself, and that what is so meditative and sublime about writing for me is that I can explore facets of my ego as dispassionate observer, and obviously my ego is on full display. To step out of one’s ego and observe it is the true measure of sophrosyne. I do not think that I see far enough to have access to the higher expanses of the radical philosophical or political ideas that will take seven generations to bear fruit, but I do hope at least that those “radical” ideas I hold today will take at least a few lifetimes to become conservative.
1. What values/beliefs/practices/attitudes of today do you think people one hundred years from now will look back on and conclude us at best barbarians?
2. What currently radical positions that the mainstream reject do you think will appear in a century to be basic common sense?
3. What might your ego get up to if allowed to frolic about on a page? Consider giving her/him some room to play.