PNS 554 |
| William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off
from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and
tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody
in the hierarchy even if he hadn't been officially ordained. The ramparts
of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William.
He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After
they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going
-- used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the
long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they
got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William
wasn't really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself.
He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day --
Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people -- and most of all just being with
those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions
in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom,
their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day -- pigs out on the
road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn't, and you can imagine
what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter, and dreary pigless
return back up into the hills must've been like for William. Of course
he took it as a parable -- knew that the squealing bloody horror at the
end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled
pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in cross-country
movement. It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action
and reaction were in the air. William must've been waiting for the one
pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones whod had to, all
his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed
not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying ... possessed
by innocence they couldn't lose ... by faith in William as another variety
of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life ....
He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition. It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to've been not only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these 'second Sheep,' without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows. They did finally 86 him out of Massachussetts Bay Colony -- he thought about Rhode Island for a while but decided he wasnÕt that keen on antinomians, either. So finally he sailed back to Old England, not in disgrace so much as despondency, and that's where he died, among memories of the blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers over hemp and tobacco with the Indians, young women in upper rooms with their aprons lifted, pretty faces, hair spilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables horses kicked and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early morning when the backs of his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and surprising road to Boston, the rain on the Connecticut River, the snuffling good-nights of a hundred pigs among the new stars and long grass still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep .... Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back -- maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up ... |