The Wisdom of Samuel

“My Name is Sam-Yoo-El, Sam-Yoo-El.

My name is Sam-Yoo-El, Sam-Yoo-El

My name is Sam-Yoo-El, and I curse you all to Hell

“I curse you all to Hell,

God Damn Your Eyes”

So sang old Samuel standing at a very large surface grinder finishing some very small parts,

“I curse you all to Hell,

God Damn Your Eyes!”

He repeated.

Henry, having just walked in the door of the shop paused and leaned against a large compressor. He figured there would be more to come.

“I saw Molly in the crowd, in the crowd,

I saw Molly in the crowd, in the crowd,

I saw Molly in the crowd and I hollered, right out loud,

“Hey there Molly ain’t you proud,

God Damn your eyes!”

There was a pause here to prepare for what Henry hoped was the concluding verse.

“Well a swinging I must go., I must go”

Well a swinging I must go., I must go

Well a swinging I must go…

a long sad yodel here,

“While you bastards down below

Yell up “Sam we told you so”

Dramatic pause here,

“Sam we told you sooooooooo..

God Damn your eyes!”

Samuel had seen Henry come in and was obviously enjoying the audience.

“Ah,” said Henry, “The honest workman, I see, begins the day with a humble song of joy and prayer, I am lifted up.”

“Not a song of prayer, certainly.” answered Samuel calmly. ”Nor yet a song of despair, but rather an impassioned announcement of the self against the cruel indifferent tides of existence. Much as Job tells God “”Do what you like to me, Lord, nonetheless I will maintain my ways before thee.” Samuel continued, “If a personality is to be complete and robust, it is necessary to plumb the full range of human emotions regularly. We live in a “passionless age” says Kierkegaard and I feel I must try to make a stand for the human spirit.” He paused, “at least to the extent that I still can.” He chucked the hot little part into a container of oil where it sizzled for an instant and disappeared.

“Then you must love what’s happening out in the streets now Sam. Raging emotions and the nonstop, noisy celebration of self.” said Henry putting on his blue apron and tying it in front.

“My inclination is toward too much thinking, which is why I must remind myself to exercise my spirit with passion frequently or I might just float away and end up mumbling in the nuthouse like old Kant. The rioters in the street you’re talking about don’t ruin their good time with any sort of thinking at all as far as I can tell. Contemplating, they are a fish out of water as dear Hermie Hesse tells us.”

This last speech was interrupted several times by hacking coughs as Sam had never been known to wear a respirator even when standing in a thick cloud of solvents, lubricants and cutting fluids.

He quoted,

“The human dress is forged iron,

The human form a fiery forge

The human face a furnace sealed

The human heart it’s hungry gorge”

“That’s Old Bill Blake" he said "and there is more wisdom in those four lines than in the entire Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Version 5 or whatever the hell it is now.. Even your cute girlfriend, the sweet, gentle blond one is just so much emotional high explosive tamped down and waiting for an excuse to level the block.”

“So let me get this straight,” said Henry, clever and smirking, “Emotions are very good but they’re very bad and too much deep thought is very bad but it’s very good. Have I got that right?”

Old Samuel smiled, “Pretty much. Think of it in this way, young Hal, it’s like the SuperMarket Sweepstakes on the TV in the old days. The goal is to pack your cart with all the expensive fancy food in the store thatyou can, but to be at the checkout counter before the buzzer goes off. If you run to the checkout counter right away you won’t be caught by the buzzer but you also won’t have anything your cart either. You are like the foolish servant in the parable who, given money for investment instead buried it and had no profit to show on his Master’s return. There was a terrible wailing and gnashing of teeth and a casting into the outer darkness where, as I recall, the moronic servant was eaten by the dogs like Jezebel. The contents of the cart in this case is all the hard-won knowledge we have gained not just by being stupid but by realizing how stupid we’ve been and suffering for it. Proust says of those men, who live their live with nothing to regret, “They are poor creatures, feeble descendants of constipated doctrinaires and their wisdom is of the negative and sterile variety.” Samuel smacked the table with the butt end of a heavy hammer, adding “The lukewarm, God will spew them from his mouth.”

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“You don't seem to be giving me any hope for seeing a return to rationality any time soon ” said Henry, “a little logic would be nice, every now and then."

“Reason and logic and their wicked little sister Science are never in themselves a reason for human beings to do anything. They are just the handy, sharp little tools we use to facilitate the most efficient satisfying of our raging emotional needs. The murderer uses logic to bury the body and elude capture. The mathematician writes the equations for the next big bomb to get a better professorship. The young libertine plots the seduction of the maiden with hot blood and cold calculation.” Samuel rolled on.

“That was a nice bit from Blake,” said Henry patiently filling the parts cleaner tank with solvent and hoping to somehow retrench in this conversation which kept sliding sideways on him,

“I’ve read a bit of William Blake.” he said.

“You’ve never read anything deeper than “Machinery’s Handbook”. And besides, there’s a considerable gulf between reading and understanding.”

“Love seeketh not itself to please

Nor for itself hath any care;

But for another gives it’s ease

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair” Quoted Henry.

“Not his best stuff’ sniffed Samuel, “Besides, you think your other girl, the anarcho-communist fire-eater is trying to build you a peaceful Heaven in Hell’s despair? Fat chance. She’s busy trying to be Stalin’s right hand Soldadera but she’d be just as happy as Czarina. Probably happier. Probably a lot happier.”

“Let’s just lighten up on Rachel. That’s only a part of her. She’s just going through, you know, that phase in an a sensitive girl’s social development.” said Henry dumping the oily parts into the cleaner tray. It’s like Raymond Chandler said, “A jazzy weekend but terribly wearying for a steady diet. She’ll grow past it!”

Old Samuel nodded and said, “My sweet innocent boy, from what I’ve seen, you’re the weekend and not even a particularly jazzy one, and I say this as your friend. I suspect her steady diet is going to involve considerably more live ammunition. Just saying. Be nice if I could pour brains into your head like 90 weight gear lube into a crankcase, but , like they say, you can’t fix stupid.”

Henry just smiled, he liked Samuel a lot, but sometimes the old guy would drift off In his head and ramble a bit too much. He was a seriously great machinist though. Should probably get that cough looked at.

Henry Revealed

Henry Frances Knowles was a pretty happy guy. At least he was well satisfied with his life and situation. He had things to do, and these were things that he loved doing. He had things to look forward to, though these were generally just the successful completing of the projects he was already working on and the subsequent moving on to new projects involving design, creation, redesign, repair and the solving of obscure technical issues. As for someone to love, he had two girlfriends which was problematic but not for the usual reasons. Actually they liked each other, probably more than they did him. The situation, however, made necessary the navigation of interpersonal emotional complexities of which he had only a primitive understanding and for which navigation he had no aptitude. If he had had the understanding and the aptitude he might very well have avoided the relationships.

He owned seventeen acres of desert ten miles outside of town which had come with a well and a small adobe house dating to the late nineteen forties. That was the degenerate period of adobe building in the area when the adobes were made using soft low clay dirt and plastered with hard cement stucco which combined to start the walls absorbing moisture at the first opportunity while simultaneously trapping it to ensure crumbling from the base. But it was a structure and simply a problem to be solved. In no time at all Henry had rebuilt all the walls sturdy enough for a hundred rainy seasons. A new corrugated tin roof, wrap around porch, recycled solar panels and batteries, an arrangement of black painted pipes in shiny cradles to supply solar heated water, some big plastic barrels to store rain water and more plastic barrels capable of spinning to convert garbage and yard trash into mulch and a small garden to use up the rainwater and mulch and it was time for more projects. If someone told him he was trying to live off the grid or prep for doomsday he would have been quite startled. These were simply projects he did because they seemed more sensible and efficient than the ways most people did things and also met his criteria for being interesting and cool.

There was a highly polished old Airstream trailer behind the house lovingly restored but used only for storage and the occasional old friend passing through.

He had a fair sized unit in an industrial complex on the city Southside filled with large, high quality metal and wood working machines he had bought cheaply at auctions and set up to his own exacting standards. There were auxiliary machines for fine sawing, milling, grinding and polishing and racks full of aluminum, brass and steel stock of every description as well as other racks of Maple, Mahogany, Ebony, Rosewood and other rare woods. At the center of the shop was a large CNC horizontal milling machine with tall red letters announcing “HAAS VF-3” which was connected by multiple wires, hoses and tubes to coolant tanks, electrical utility boxes and a computer running the latest bootleg copy of the Master-Cam CAD program.

The old machinist who had kindly contributed a considerable length of time for his instruction in the trade had kindly bequeathed him his prized income producer. A small assembly of four interlocking parts and a spring were used by the pair on the standard machine universally employed for testing the strength of cotton fiber. The little jaws were necessarily replaced on a regular basis and had been ordered since time immemorial from old Samuel. Nobody else had bothered to make them since the original manufacturer had gone out of business fifty years before. They were now ordered from Henry Francis Knowles. In three days on the CNC machine he could manufacture and assemble a six month supply leaving him lots of time for all the other projects which interested him far more. He had become fascinated by the mechanism of the pedal steel guitar with it’s forest of interacting rods, springs, cams, stops, adjustors, articulated arms, levers, pedals and rockers. After making parts for other steel guitar builders he began building complete units himself. They were very highly regarded by players but his fastidiousness limited him to a very small production and his customer pool was small, not wealthy, dying off at a much greater than replacement rate and usually had too many instruments already. Knowles was not in it for the money which was a good thing.

He was 36 years old, had a number of friends, some going back as far as high school and others who were connected through common creative enthusiasms.

He was not a smoker but was fond of social drinking and certainly willing to take a hit if a pipe were passed his way.

He read extensively and the little adobe had a number of walls packed floor to ceiling with technical manuals, philosophy, parts and supply catalogs, history and biographies. He was not politically partisan probably as a result of having read too much history to fail to be weary of human folly generally.

Julia, girlfriend number one was intelligent, attractive, quiet and usually involved in art projects, gardening, weaving and finishing her master’s thesis. She was no more politically involved than Henry.

Rachel, girlfriend number two, however, was as politically passionate as any ten girl revolutionaries rolled into one and insisted on dragging him along to meetings and protests whenever he didn’t have a damn good excuse not to go. He had once tried to point out to her that it was the bored wives of aristocrats and wealthy French businessmen who had held salons to introduce around the exciting young revolutionaries. The very same exciting young revolutionaries who would later throw mud at their tumbrils and cheer as their former sponsor’s heads were chopped off. This he felt she should consider, as the pampered daughter of an extremely wealthy family who owned high end department stores in Houston, Atlanta and Phoenix. The savage tongue lashing he received for these remarks made sure he never said anything remotely similar again, which, considering the course the world was about to take, was probably for the best anyway.

And this comprises the life and attainments of Henry F. Knowles in the period immediately prior to the Political Wars and the worldwide Seismic Incident.