Lancelot

perfectly still under a sour-wood tree as the sun sets in the west. He is waiting and watching for something. What? A sign? Who, what is he? WASP Virginian? New England Irish? Louisiana Creole? Jew? Black? Where does he live? It is impossible to say. He is dark, burned black as an Indian. He could be a Sabra from a kibbutz. All one can say for certain is that he is careful, that he has something in mind, and that he is watching and waiting. For what? For this: presently he sees something, a mirror flash from the last sun rays from the mountain across the North Fork. Still he waits. The sun goes down. Quickly it grows dark. He faces northeast watching the faint green luminescence from the great dying cities of the North, Washington to Boston.
    As quickly as he appeared, he vanishes.
    Presently there comes a sound from faraway of young men singing. There is a cadence and a dying away to the sound. Are they marching?
    Oh Shenandoah, we long to see you
    How we love your sparkling water
    And we love your lovely daughters
    From these green hills to far away
    Across the wide Missouri
    Oh, Columbia, our blessed mother
    You know we wait until you guide us
    Give us a sign and march beside us
    From these green hills to far away
    Across the wide Missouri.
    What? What about the women?
    Women? How will it be for women?
    In order to understand that, you must first understand the strange thing that happened to the human race. It is an event which you people had an inkling of but then turned upside down and inside out for your own purposes.
    It is the secret of life, the most astounding and best-kept secret of the ages, yet it is as plain as the nose on your face, there for all to see.
    You were onto it with your doctrine of Original Sin. But you got it exactly backwards. Original Sin is not something man did to God but something God did to man, so monstrous that to this day man cannot understand what happened to him. He shakes his head groggily and rubs his eyes in disbelief.
    The great secret of the ages is that man has evolved, is born, lives, and dies for one end and one end only: to commit a sexual assault on another human or to submit to such an assault.
    Everything else man does is so much bushwa and you know it and I know it and everybody knows it.
    Women have only just now discovered the secret, or part of it, the monstrous absurdity of it. Can you blame them for being outraged? Yet even more absurd are their pathetic attempts, once having made the discovery which men are too dumb to make, to pretend it isn’t so, to cover it up, or to blame it on men.
    What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life is to be assaulted by a man.
    Ah, sweet mystery of life indeed, indeed yes, exactly, yes indeed that is what it is: to be rammed, jammed, stuck, stabbed, pinned, impaled, run through, in a word:
    Raped.
    The meaning and goal and omega point of evolution is at last clear. It was obscured in past ages by the servitude of man. The poor bastard was so busy surviving and mainly not surviving, starving and dying, that only recently has it dawned on him what an extraordinary apparatus he is. He was decent because he was overworked.
    Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.
    Why do you look at me like that? After all, the facts are elementary. They are as every biology student knows: of the three million species on earth the human female is the only one capable of living in a state of constant estrus; of having an orgasm; of making love face to face with her mate.
    Ha, it’s funny in a way, women liberated and educated, free at last to learn the truth, and the truth? That she is the only creature on earth in perpetual heat. What a discovery! That she is good for only one thing.
    Eye to eye, face to face, belly to belly, breast to breast, day in and day out, in heat the year round—there is the omega point of evolution! A comedy isn’t it, women trying to escape that? That’s like a hen wanting to be a hawk. A lioness, yes, a lioness can do it, for she is a lion most of the time, fighter and hunter, and only periodically hikes her tail.
    But a woman? She is your omega point. Take such a species, the human, give it a two-hour work week and a life expectancy of a hundred years and it doesn’t take a genius to see what God has in mind for man.
    What hath