Ike Snopes: Boy-Idiot
“the slobbering mouth
in its mist of soft gold hair”
—William Faulkner,
The Mansion
It was the cow again: her big fat pudgy bovine womanlike simulacrum, waiting in the barn for the usual oversized primitive crude you-know-what treatment, dumb lame-brained Ike Snopes the pea-brain of Yoknapatawpha Country, the harelipped boy-idiot whose brains had for some strange reason meandered, migrated, taken up residence down there between his legs in that other futile outraged male head, leaving the kid up above with nothing but vacant idiotic dumbness.
Too slow to keep up with anything except that instinctual connection that all men have with that other head of theirs, the one that gets them in trouble, because their destiny is irrefutably caught up in the ancient male traditions and expectations dictated by the shape of it, the very simplicity of the male anatomy’s conflicts and battles, the denouement of which, except for a few irrelevant infinitesimal minute (too minute) brain cells, is the same with both geniuses & boy-idiots.
The different particulars between the dim-witted retarded boy-idiot Ike Snopes and most other men being not even worthy of mention, for neither geniuses nor boy-idiots can change themselves: all men are basically beasts whether dumb or smart in their irrevocable mutual pursuit without substance or intelligence or decency into and through immutable worlds of garish sex and the simplicity of smut.
Its very speciousness having always been its sole appeal and charm, the very existence of which is a refutation of human dignity upon which decent culture and conduct is based, the tasteless male frantic kinetic pace demonstrating the masculine folly which is not only unutterably predictable but that very predictability indispensable to our continued existence as despicable members of the human race.
The only one not outraged by the moo Oooooh’s!!! breaking the intractable miasmic male silence of the big red barn and then the beast’s slow emergence with inscrutable female satiated sexuality from her seemingly ubiquitous moo-hole without which all the ogling eyeballs from Varner’s store would seem useless and then her voice: the great moo uttered over the chronic and perpetual mastication of the absurd cud in her drooling inexplicably and certainly anachronistic way with her not so urban big fat lips.
How exasperating it was if not in fact infuriating, her sense and disregard for the impetuous male spirit and soul selfish again and again, furious but still impotent and immemorial frustration squeezing the trigger that she ignores, neglecting the force of the preordained retrograde blast of the young Snopes’ suddenly cuming bawling loudly obliterating himself: the eyes which stared ridiculously through the holes in the barn walls bulging in impotent and static amazement at the not-even-blushing, outrageous, totally amazing bored outrage of love.
Such a bestial pursuit: indistinguishable from that primal Garden of Eden scene between Eve and the Snake, the one immediately preceding the downfall that would lead at once to that ancient, sudden and inscrutable Exile and disappearance with a brief shake of the scolding almighty finger above, angered by all leftover messy evidence and traces and vestiges of spoiled, besplattered Eden-like innocence.
That it couldn’t or wouldn’t or wasn’t even remotely possible for Ike Snopes to have loved with any innocence like Adam or Eve simply because his face was blank, stupid as the cow, having no knowledge of sin or any possible reality other than whatever was his spurious cartoon-like naïve existence (which was never really any different that any of Varner’s ogling voyeurs)?
And so with futile predictability and with neither applause nor negation, the boy and the cow were immune, impervious, virginally ignorant of time, the passage of months years decades the same as simply their brief afternoon bovine soirée so that the immemorial abject desire for getting off by the kid with his rather ravaging and unabashed adolescent dignity and animalesque manhood ended up mocking and outraging all the local uppity Yoknapatawpha impudence, proceeding unchecked and irrevocable each afternoon in Madame Littlejohn’s big red barn, so that even that obscenely divine moo-cow moment was able to surpass the mere ignorance and apathy of the immemorial indestructible Mississippi moment.
“the slobbering mouth
in its mist of soft gold hair”
—William Faulkner,
The Mansion
It was the cow again: her big fat pudgy bovine womanlike simulacrum, waiting in the barn for the usual oversized primitive crude you-know-what treatment, dumb lame-brained Ike Snopes the pea-brain of Yoknapatawpha Country, the harelipped boy-idiot whose brains had for some strange reason meandered, migrated, taken up residence down there between his legs in that other futile outraged male head, leaving the kid up above with nothing but vacant idiotic dumbness.
Too slow to keep up with anything except that instinctual connection that all men have with that other head of theirs, the one that gets them in trouble, because their destiny is irrefutably caught up in the ancient male traditions and expectations dictated by the shape of it, the very simplicity of the male anatomy’s conflicts and battles, the denouement of which, except for a few irrelevant infinitesimal minute (too minute) brain cells, is the same with both geniuses & boy-idiots.
The different particulars between the dim-witted retarded boy-idiot Ike Snopes and most other men being not even worthy of mention, for neither geniuses nor boy-idiots can change themselves: all men are basically beasts whether dumb or smart in their irrevocable mutual pursuit without substance or intelligence or decency into and through immutable worlds of garish sex and the simplicity of smut.
Its very speciousness having always been its sole appeal and charm, the very existence of which is a refutation of human dignity upon which decent culture and conduct is based, the tasteless male frantic kinetic pace demonstrating the masculine folly which is not only unutterably predictable but that very predictability indispensable to our continued existence as despicable members of the human race.
The only one not outraged by the moo Oooooh’s!!! breaking the intractable miasmic male silence of the big red barn and then the beast’s slow emergence with inscrutable female satiated sexuality from her seemingly ubiquitous moo-hole without which all the ogling eyeballs from Varner’s store would seem useless and then her voice: the great moo uttered over the chronic and perpetual mastication of the absurd cud in her drooling inexplicably and certainly anachronistic way with her not so urban big fat lips.
How exasperating it was if not in fact infuriating, her sense and disregard for the impetuous male spirit and soul selfish again and again, furious but still impotent and immemorial frustration squeezing the trigger that she ignores, neglecting the force of the preordained retrograde blast of the young Snopes’ suddenly cuming bawling loudly obliterating himself: the eyes which stared ridiculously through the holes in the barn walls bulging in impotent and static amazement at the not-even-blushing, outrageous, totally amazing bored outrage of love.
Such a bestial pursuit: indistinguishable from that primal Garden of Eden scene between Eve and the Snake, the one immediately preceding the downfall that would lead at once to that ancient, sudden and inscrutable Exile and disappearance with a brief shake of the scolding almighty finger above, angered by all leftover messy evidence and traces and vestiges of spoiled, besplattered Eden-like innocence.
That it couldn’t or wouldn’t or wasn’t even remotely possible for Ike Snopes to have loved with any innocence like Adam or Eve simply because his face was blank, stupid as the cow, having no knowledge of sin or any possible reality other than whatever was his spurious cartoon-like naïve existence (which was never really any different that any of Varner’s ogling voyeurs)?
And so with futile predictability and with neither applause nor negation, the boy and the cow were immune, impervious, virginally ignorant of time, the passage of months years decades the same as simply their brief afternoon bovine soirée so that the immemorial abject desire for getting off by the kid with his rather ravaging and unabashed adolescent dignity and animalesque manhood ended up mocking and outraging all the local uppity Yoknapatawpha impudence, proceeding unchecked and irrevocable each afternoon in Madame Littlejohn’s big red barn, so that even that obscenely divine moo-cow moment was able to surpass the mere ignorance and apathy of the immemorial indestructible Mississippi moment.
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