Kneel and Pray

Kneel and Pray

       Black Stream More Rye

                        If thy tongue offend thee, cut it off.

                        If thy mind can’t see, slice and cauterize.

                        If thy head regard thee, turn away.

                        And if thy thing offend thee, kneel and pray.

   

Petrol scarce in all this country, we took to our bicycles when the last of the fuel ran out and pedaled the rest of the way to Pretoria. Peter Dussendorf, our guide the last two months, seemed precariously loaded, with his carbine slung in a holder beside the frame in front of him--much as a Chilean outrider would have his mounted on his nag--for quick access. A lion does not wait on ceremony. He carried Marne’s pack as well as his own, my box of samples sat bulkily over his rear tire, a large bag holding all our combined clothing had a place over his front tire, and another smaller satchel found a spot over his sprockets, in a triangle of the frame.

       Marne and I felt free to explore as we went and to continue our research. She gathered evidence about the shifting influences of weather, going north, on the population density of the Congolese Red Dwarf Hydrangea. I had less ambitious aims, but nevertheless, studied plant life and its variant abundance for the University of Leads. That academy might not use the material, but it paid me a sabbatical to follow my instincts in these matters. We had decided on this portion of South Africa because of the remoteness of the region. No farmsteads had changed its natural evolution. The ecological cycle here was pristine, unadulterated by chemical sprays, motorized traffic, massive hydro projects, and the like. Our perspective would be as close as can be achieved to the one that savages and nature must have enjoyed, I say with some irony, before the advent of the Dutch into these regions.

       I will briefly digress for the sake of the exposition of this story that treats of plants and their histories. Technology thinkers—McLuhan and Rathsford and that bunch—had it entirely right when they announced the man-centered future of the world, one determined not by nature but by the eyes that see and consciously record that world. They knew, did these critics of technology, that the past with its naive hour by hour living, its great restfulness, and its innate freedom, constituted mankind’s ‘once upon a time.’ Now, in our current moment, was the age of inwardlookingness. Forever that quality--soul searching--would be our destiny. Right as the theorists of our modern psyches are about what cannot anymore be, Marne and I nevertheless capture that earlier human simplicity as well as can be done today, in the work we do in these remote places of the world. But my digression concerns the Dutch.

       The Dutch are a backward race. They live on hog's fat and bacon. Meat-eaters, they exist mainly south of the tropics in lands that allow for ease of livelihood. Never offer a Dutchman options for he will take the one that requires the least of him. A typical Dutchman sleeps till ten and retires again at ten a dozen hours later, taking at least two lengthy naps in between. He is awake at most ten hours of the day. That leaves him fourteen hours for sleep, which he claims, in any conversation whatever, that he absolutely requires for, being heavy of frame, he burns a great deal of caloric energy and so counts on, for his very survival, a lengthy daily slowing down of the metabolism. Failure to do so, his argument insists, risks quick and irreversible slimming, a slimming resulting in extreme weight loss and a dangerous reduction of body size.

       The Dutch baby their boys. Dutch men may as well as not be women for all their virility. Oh, they shoot, yell, carouse, whine, rant, haggle, ride, heckle and race with the best of the world's males, but their hearts are weak and fickle. (Forgive me, Marne; I do not mean to imply that all females suffer from such imperfection, but generally speaking, women do, you must admit, derive from a genetic stock less likely to attack a wild beast or tackle a mountain peak then their male counterparts, wouldn’t you say?)

As I was suggesting, the Dutch need no special introduction for their ways are universally understood. Their laziness and weakness of body and spirit are nothing to their craven lustiness. They tend toward sexual prodigality to such an degree, if I may be so candid, as to throw a grown Englishman, who allows himself to contemplate it, to the ground and trod on him without cessation for two and a quarter hours. They harbor no end of yearning for the forbidden. Mark. They imagine anal practices of such kinds and intensities as to make a normal human blush and writhe in shame. They participate in genital handlings and manipulations of such unheard of variety and directness that the civilized mind swoons to comprehend it in its least surprising limits (de Sade, before he became a Marquis, was a Von de Sade with parents of the most common Friesian descent, all, himself included, devout church members and pious). Dutch men engage in mutual kissing and fondling with such public brashness that the unfortunate observer may readily witness these Gomorahaic inclinations simply by glancing out of the kitchen window toward the main road or even out of the bathroom casement into the alley behind.

Dutch women, and especially the females of Brüüg, near the German border, publicly expose their breasts and shamelessly play with them as they read the daily papers in cafés and roadside cafeterias and bars. A single drink will utterly undermine any pretense a young Dutch woman may have had to modesty and restraint. I myself have been in attendance when an attractive blonde Dutch maid, apparently demure and coy, shy and reticent, entered a dråånkenhüt and ordered an åpfelweene and before she had half consumed it, began to bend her neck this way and that, eyes strong and haughty, searching for any nearby male on whom to perpetrate the immediate release of urges natural to all the women of her race and which, though they may not inevitably appear in clarity and in full view, rage just beneath the surface of their outward beings.

When I consider, as I have just done, their laziness, weakness, and bestial carnality, I have only begun to lay out the categories of Dutch salatiousness and provided only a few brief samples of the sorts of excessiveness inherent in her breast. They make a mockery of religious zeal, they sodomize at will, they compulsively gamble (already from the age of four years when they are first left alone to wander the streets of their cities), they eat with a careless insatiateness to make an elephant appear dainty, and they lie with cordiality and cleverness. Only the most educated might hope to escape their subterfuges. They steal vigorously. They back bite and betray. They gossip, incessantly and with whomever they manage to inveigle to pay heed to their vilenesses. They whisper behind their pastors’ backs about the lasciviousness of the pastors' wives, wives who seek for carnal coupling the moment their reverent husbands leave the house of a morning. They attack all that is virtuous without regard to position, rank, influence, status, social standing, or fame. They constitute simply the most reprehensible of earth's creatures and I do not mind if I never encounter one again.

But to return to the matter at hand. As I was saying, the project we are on has some scientific merit. It will help humanity, God willing, to understand the world of plants as it once happily existed. I hope in all sincerity to contribute modestly to world knowledge, knowledge intended to bolster the pleasure of those few left who revere the purity and pacific beatitude of the past.