The Inventor Read online

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other books by W. E. Gutman

  Prologue

  Narragonia

  A Blueblood and A Commoner

  Letter from Rotterdam

  Popes, Pimps and Prostitutes

  As Dawn Alights

  Ecce Homo?

  Mythbusters

  Marxism of the Right

  A Potent Narcotic

  Cardinal Sins

  The Inventor Speaks

  The Monkey and the Fowl

  Hiram Falls

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Back cover

  THE

  INVENTOR

  W. E. Gutman

  CCB Publishing

  British Columbia, Canada

  The Inventor

  Copyright ©2012 by W. E. Gutman

  ISBN-13 978-1-927360-89-7

  First Edition

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gutman, W. E., 1937-

  The inventor [electronic resource] / written by W. E. Gutman.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-927360-89-7

  Also available in print format.

  I. Title.

  PS3607.U86I59 2010 813'.6 C2010-900697-6

  Additional cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  Original art: The Ship of Fools, by Hieronymus Bosch, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Cover design by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the express written permission of the author.

  References to real persons, alive or deceased, and allusions to verifiable historical incidents are meant to lend the narrative epic realism. All other characters and events are fictitious and any similarity to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Inferences and speculations readers may draw from this work are entirely their own.

  Publisher:

  CCB Publishing

  British Columbia, Canada

  www.ccbpublishing.com

  For the Widow’s Son, and in defense of Reason

  Also by W. E. Gutman:

  Journey To Xibalba –- THE SUBVERSION OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN CENTRAL AMERICA.

  © 2000. Reporter’s Notebook (out of print).

  NOCTURNES –- Tales From The Dreamtime.

  © 2006. Fiction (ISBN 1-4259-5951-2)

  ADRIFT –- Life In Transit.

  © 2008 Autobiography (ISBN 13 978-0-9810246-9-1)

  Flight From Ein Sof.

  © 2009 Fiction (ISBN 13-978-1-926585-17-8)

  A PALER SHADE OF RED –

  The Roots of Dissent, Memoirs of a Radical

  © 2012, Autobiography

  One Last Dream

  Un Dernier Rêve (French translation)

  © 2012, Screenplays

  ONE NIGHT IN COPÁN

  Chronicles of Madness Foretold

  © 2012, Short Stories

  Prologue

  Michel Montvert loves books. He was six or seven when he first leafed through an art album he had casually pulled off a shelf at home. With the old Blaupunkt radio humming in the background, he sat crossed-legged on a fading Persian rug, the large tome stretching across his lap. He would forever be transformed by the experience.

  “They were all there,” Montvert told me years later as we dined at Jo Goldenberg’s on Rue des Rosiers in Paris. “Titian. Botticelli. Michelangelo. Rembrandt. Van Eyck. Van Gogh. Corot. Gainsborough. Turner. Toulouse-Lautrec. Utrillo. Gauguin. Degas. Renoir. Monet. Cézanne. I couldn’t get enough. I was seduced by the interplay of light and color, awed by motion so deftly captured and frozen in space, inveigled by the lyricism and gauzy quality of impressionism, the precision of neo-Classicism, the refinement of the Venetian School, the probing intensity of portraiture.”

  There was one artist he kept revisiting, and one painting in particular among several strange works by an old master whose name meant nothing to Montvert at the time. Nor did the mysterious and exotic title of a legendary masterwork he found himself staring at and dissecting inch by inch for hours on end.

  “I was only a kid but I sensed that, unlike the other painters, this artist didn’t just replicate life. He imagined it, fabricated it, refashioned it, upended it,” Montvert had exclaimed, glints of childlike wonderment flickering in his eyes.

  “Set against gossamer landscapes and improbable perspectives, his images seem to jump out of their two-dimensional plane, splashing the optic nerve with exquisite melancholy, dotting his universe with things and creatures that nature, in its infinite wisdom, or utter lack of imagination, has chosen not to sire. Here you find monsters and mutants and grotesque hybrids. There you come face to face with warlocks and grimacing witches frolicking among aimless throngs given to paroxysms of elation or stricken with catatonic stupor. Encoded in the language of allegory and symbolism but crafted to bare enduring truths, his paintings said more than they implied. They seemed to be speaking to me with an intimacy that was both comforting and terrifying. I let my eyes be seduced and my eyes wandered, seeking to be challenged as they were being dazzled. In a way I could not fully process at the time, I was also stirred by their eroticism, which I found more beguiling than the prosaic photos I sneaked a peek at in my father’s medical books.”

  What Montvert finally grasped when, as an art student, he rediscovered his childhood idol, was that in his company he had been treated all along to a vivid and eloquent articulation of the idiom of conflict.

  “The seemingly mismatched details he crams into his paintings are like pieces of a puzzle,” he explained. “You can ponder each one individually and miss the big picture, or you can bring them together into a congruent whole that delivers the artist’s central message: Life is a journey across a minefield of ceaseless friction. Resentment spawns hostility. Envy elicits malice. Ignorance leads to rigid thinking. Fixed ideas breed suspicion. Greed, narcissism, scorching ambition and uncontrollable lust inspire violence.”

  Conflict is not only elemental; it is essential to life. Evolution of the species is driven by conflict and sustained by adaptation to the stresses it creates and the torments it inflicts. The clash of egos, the spark that ignites passions and deepens the ideological divide between men, leads to a more sinister form of conflict because the irreconcilable beliefs, opinions and value systems that trigger hostility are imparted, not inborn. It was Sigmund Freud who postulated the now widely accepted theory that we are the product of our subconscious. Freud was careful to add that the subconscious is neither amorphous nor indelible, but rather the aggregate of myriad post-natal influences and coercions. The psyche is fashioned, transformed and often fouled by early childhood experiences and warped by brainwashing -- the planting of preset ideas -- a technique parents, teachers, clergy and other public custodians whose authority we are taught never to question or defy apply with ferocious conviction.

  As children we eagerly swallow the “truths” these figureheads concoct to beguile or entrap us, from Santa Claus to the boogey man and the tooth fairy, from the supernatural übermensch who can part oceans, rain fire and spread pestilence and famine, to the “immaculate” birth of a virgin who, visited by “angels” bears a man-God whose recondite pronouncements -- if his biographers are to be trusted -- are conflated into a cult some 300 years after his preordained death, miraculous “resurrection” and subsequent ascension to “heaven.”

  Then one day, by word of mouth or the emergence of nascent intelligence,
we learn that the pixies and the elves that kindled our imagination and the ogres that populated our nightmares are myth and fraud, as are their principal agents -- our parents. With careful programming, which includes crafty counsel not to wander beyond the limits of time-honored “realities,” we enter adulthood conditioned to accept and encouraged to disseminate other absurdities that owe their being and their irritating persistence to the constant drumbeat of political and religious indoctrination.

  No one is “born” a believer or an atheist. No one spurts out of the womb a Jew, Baptist or Muslim, a Liberal or Conservative, a chauvinist or a freethinker. We all come into this world with a blank slate. Parental propaganda, our social climate and assorted constraints mold us into cookie-cutter replicas of our devoted retrofitters. We are all endowed with a brain capable of discerning the truth but we are by now so emotionally mangled by encoding and spellbound by the rote repetition of sanctioned doctrine that we submit to mindless, synchronized rituals alleged to benefit “society.” To survive, the conjurer, the master of doublespeak -- religion -- must cling to fictions that do not exist in the pristine vacuum of an untainted mind but are planted there so they may sprout, tentacle-like, the better to strangle reason.

  Held in check, redirected away from prefabricated truths, conflict can bring down the curtains of ignorance and shed light where there is none. It can help change minds, alter perceptions. I think, therefore I doubt, replaces the credo of inflexible dogma. Skepticism in the absence of provable fact has not only propelled science to its phenomenal heights, it has also freed minds trapped in ideological warrens from which knowledge, logic and enlightenment are kept out.

  Where does fiction end and fact begin? Do the two ever intersect at a point where reality, improbability and inevitability coexist? Can conflict engender a hyper-reality in which are found the truths that craven men fear to know and cautious men fear to tell? In the perfect geometry of coincidence, will these truths assume an aura of frightening plausibility?

  Knowing others is wisdom.

  Knowing oneself is enlightenment.

  Lao Tzu (circa 500 BCE)

  I call degenerate practices and senseless beliefs diseases of humanity.

  Maimonides (1135-1204)

  Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions.

  Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

  “Religion is a system of superstition that produces fanatics and serves the purposes of despotism.”

  Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

  Religion promotes and/or exploits personal guilt.

  What people who clamor that society needs religion really mean is that we need police.

  H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

  God and country are an unbearable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.

  Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

  Lies are fascinating for what they reveal about the liar.

  Federico Fellini (1920-1993)

  Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it?

  Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

  Sell the Vatican and feed the poor.

  Sarah Silverman (2008)

  To catch a glimpse of the evil in Man, one must first peel off the outer layers of piety.

  Itamar Sittenfeld (2009)

  Narragonia

  On permanent display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris is an oil painting on wood of very modest dimensions, approximately twenty-three inches high and thirteen inches wide. A work of nervous energy that captures the tormented expressions of its characters, the painting lampoons the credulity of the masses and warns against the greed, decadence and hypocrisy of the clergy. Perhaps inspired by Sebastian Brant’s moralistic poem, Das Narrenschiff, the painting is known as La Nef des Fous or The Ship of Fools. Dense in symbolism, it is one of the 15th century’s most inscrutable works or art.

  Brant, a humanist and a contemporary of the painter, tells the story of a craft laden with fools and steered by fools sailing toward a fools’ paradise, Narragonia. The ship is a metaphor for life and Narragonia a satirical emblem for a world gone mad. Written in 1494, two years after Columbus’ first voyage to the “Indies,” the poem attacks the failings and extravagances of his age. No folly is left uncensored as it lashes unsparingly at the hydra of popery, the parasitic idleness of monasticism and the perfidy of false piety.

  In his groundbreaking Madness and Civilization, French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault writes about the ancient practice of “shanghaiing” the “insane” (and other pariahs) and forcing them to serve as crew on ocean-going vessels. Penned by a noted New York psychiatrist, the late Dr. José Barchilon, the introduction to Foucault’s book relates how

  “Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water and sea, as everyone then ‘knew,’ had an affinity for each other. Thus, ‘ships of fools’ criss-crossed the seas, oceans and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.”

  In his book, Foucault examines the ideas, practices, institutions, art and literature relating to madness in Western history. He begins with the middle Ages, noting the social and physical alienation of lepers, and argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy, madness replaced the dreaded and disfiguring disease in the public’s perception, hence the practice of sending mad people away on long-distance ships. During the Renaissance, madness came to be regarded not as a consequence of impiety but as an omnipresent disorder brought on by man’s obsessive search for God. It was also thought to signify the limits of social order and point to a deeper truth. A century later, insanity was regarded as the obverse of common sense, as the inability (or unwillingness) to reason. The mad had lost, or surrendered what made them human; they had become animal-like and were treated as such. It took another 100 years for insanity to be regarded as an illness that must be treated.

  Like Brant, the painter of The Ship of Fools attacks with biting wit the weaknesses, ideological deformities and vices of his time. He aims his sharpest barbs at the Church.

  Whatever the source of the work might have been, the painting beckons us aboard an overloaded craft brimming with wantonness and psychosis. Hugging the shore, its course unknown, with nary a wharf in sight, it drifts on currents of metaphor and dark premonitions. Madness spares no one, least of all the clergy and its compliant flock. The waters are opaque and congealed, clearer at the far end of an inhospitable coastline. A leafy barrier rises from an inaccessible beach.

  Eight travelers huddle in the narrow boat. Another is perched on a tree branch grafted into the hull. Two more wade in the water, another emerges from a hedge. Emaciated or grotesquely bloated, their faces express mulishness and angst. In a scene rife with sexual over-tones, a Franciscan friar and a nun who plays the lute, a symbol of eroticism (as are the luscious cherries scattered on a makeshift table) are poised to take a bite out of a loaf of corn bread hanging from a string. Leaning on the prow, another nun clutches a pitcher, an allusion to her sex, as she pesters a man holding a large glass container, also a phallic symbol. Hunched over the stern, a man retches convulsively. More than the consequence of intemperance or debauchery, his queasiness is the first echo of the terrible nausea that grips the damned. It also diagnoses the early symptoms of the diabolical disintegration of the spirit.

  The two men in the water are naked. Are they enjoying a swim or are they immersed in ritual purification? Brandishing a knife, a phallic symbol, a rapscallion roosting in the boughs, attempts to
cut the thread that ties a fried chicken, or swan, to a mast from which flutters a banner decorated with a crescent-moon, a symbol of lunacy.

  The oddest character, perhaps the most noteworthy, is the hunchback astride a three-pronged tree stump: He is The Fool, the twenty-second card of the Tarot, and he represents the highest degree of initiation into the hermetic sciences. He is the ninth voyager, with nine being both the universal integer (the sum of any number multiplied by nine equals nine) and a symbol of regeneration. Turning his back on madness, he drinks from a chalice. Two horns protrude from his hood. With his left hand, he clasps a pole from which dangles the head of a nun or witch. The fluttering fringes of his tunic accentuate his agility and cunning.

  In an article published in the Revue des Arts Initiatiques, Michel Montvert, a noted art historian and Surrealism expert says there is little doubt that

  “The artist, in his quest to exhume and explore the subconscious, encourages creative minds to seek intellectual independence in the pursuit of free thought. Modern surrealism has inherited, or perhaps wrenched, from him its ingenuity and irreverence. But whereas the Moderns deform or upend reality to convey abstract concepts, the author of this disquieting painting draws from Apocalypse, alchemy and the demonic realm of fiends -- real and imaginary -- to expose the iniquities of his time. Through them he expresses profound pessimism about the fate of man.

  “A youthful work, the diminutive Ship of Fools is filled with secret language and nuances that invite endless interpretations. We know that the master painter served two patrons: the Church, in conventional religious iconographies; and, with palpable relish, radical adversaries who fought against the Church’s despotism and immorality. The very complexity of his haunting renderings has denied us a clear understanding of the mood, feelings and insights that fed them.”