Matthew Funk

Outside The Lines Excerpt

Siegfried von Krieg doesn’t know whether it’s the curse of an ancient alchemical tome killing his fellow mental patients or just the curse of being on psych leave in the German Army.
  With saboteurs, fanatical Nazis and his own doctor after him,
he better figure it out soon.

Printable Version ~ Download Excerpt (Word Document) ~ Download Query Word Document

BACK

Matthew Funk
About The Author

Contact
Email & Postal
Information

Truth
Novels,Plays
& Short Stories

Speculation
Non-Fiction Writings

Observation
Opinion & Analysis
Political Blog

So, you want me to tell you.  

You can’t want me to just talk, for where’s the point in that? So much of our lives are filled with the sound of talking, all of it adding up to little more than the keening of tram wheels, less than the canticle of birds. So much of life spent listening for purpose and hearing only a pathetic fumble of sound.  

You can’t just want talking.  Telling is what you want. 

So you want me to tell you about my soldiering. 

So you want me to tell you about war. 

So I will tell you about Prague, and why I am here. 

Tell you what though, and to what end? Have you not been told that – the most important of questions?  After all, what is telling besides a matter of direction? Direction not only to a temporal place or date, but to something of immutable, superior meaning – that is what is sought through telling. Direction to the room assigned to you long ago in the mansion of quintessence, to which you seem to recall misplacing the key.   

I assure you my pockets are empty. 

So you want me to tell you about killing. 

So you want me to tell you about saving lives. 

So it’s Her you want me to tell you about. 

Thinking of her reminds me.  It reminds me of many things of course – of times that still believed in sleep, and flesh without death in it, and the Black Forest. She unlocks the double manorial doors of my home, unbolts cool larders which we would paint with our sweat, unfastens buttons from crinoline dresses and wool tunics, undoes curtain stays, opens lips, closes eyes, offers the world.  She is open bottles, empty clothes, sketchpads stretched like picnic blankets to absorb the sun as we lashed pictures into shape with charcoal lines.   She is everything the mountains cannot hold, everything that lifts the sky and she is far away.  You want me to tell you about her, but there is so much blood, dust and death on my tongue.  If I tried to speak about the world we lived in, it would be trying to speak a foreign language with only native words. But thinking of her reminds me. 

It reminds me that telling is as sanctimonious as it is seductive.  It does not only offer ‘a way’, but ‘the’ way.   One can tell a lie, but never does one tell ‘the’ lie. Alternately, one tells the truth, not a truth.  And so you wish for me to tell you the truth, as I did to her and she to me before our world was destroyed.  I once told the truth, I did, but I do not think the place it survived still remains.   The world in which I now inhabit is the world where even shadows can be broken. This world is bent on destroying so fast that it has no time to build. This world has sent me to Prague, to you, Doctor, because my mind sabotaged the body that rightly belongs to the German Armed Forces and so belongs at the front. This world has cast her to Paris where she lives with intellectuals and other less pretentious breeds of whores. Our world has proven itself to be just so much sand and distance. And it is here that you wish such a skittish, fragile creature as truth to survive? Truth is the first casualty of any war.  I am still alive enough to tell, but all I have to offer you is maimed. 

I cannot tell you the whole truth. 

I will tell you a truth. 

Then I will tell you another. 

Be certain, Doctor, that I will tell you about Prague and all that I experience here under your care and the care of this great city.  I will tell you every true thing that happens to me, hoping it doesn’t perish in the chaos between my words and your head. I will tell you about what it will take for me to get better – to get well enough to be able to kill again.  

And I promise.  

I will tell you about Italy. 

I will tell you the lie.

Jan Huss was a very simple man in all the important ways, and this made him extremely dangerous. His writings did not concern themselves with confusion, with artifice, or with sectioning off the truth.  He wrote only to convey the importance of words.  This is why I’ve come to seek his writings. 

Huss was a scholar here at the Charles University of Prague – a student and a professor, the rector of the college and the city’s intellectual elite. When he wrote, he delivered sermons, and vice versa. Many of these sermons concerned themselves with matters of the spirit but none of them fell prey to the vanity so many self-avowed spiritual leaders ornament themselves with.  None of them presumed to section the world of man from the heavens.  When Huss delivered sermons, it was to prove that though words and ears might change, meaning was virtually universal. He spoke because what he said could be heard just as well by cardinals and kings as by commoners. He did not consider himself immune to politics.   He did not refrain from slander.  He spoke not because people wanted to listen, but because they could. 

This is why I seek his writings. 

Many matters of mankind and the soul troubled Huss. This was, I am sure, because he was not loath to admit to himself that he too had a soul, just like everyone else.  Many people in Prague, then as now, so readily succumb to the notion that the entirety of what they are can be bought and sold, sorted and commanded, measured, crushed, forgotten. The echoes of their own interior are so easily ignored when there is so much more to listen to in the courthouse, marketplace or battlefield.  Those echoes, however, do not die down.  To them, Huss listened.  He then repeated what they said. 

He also repeated a good deal of what an English scholar, John Wycliffe, said, but that’s of little importance.  Because you hear something from someone else needn’t make it any less true to you – after all, you heard it. The truth can’t exist without someone to talk to. Huss knew that and spoke as much as he could to whoever he wanted. 

Initially his subject was the Catholic church.  Huss criticized them for defying basic philosophical and ritual traditions of the Christian practice by giving the body of Christ to the congregation while letting only priests drink the blood.  Huss opposed the notion that the Pope was any form of supreme authority when, after all, God could talk directly to anyone He pleased. He refused to invest value in the finery, gates, and titles that Catholics had used to divide the spiritual kingdom among men like the family farm. Finery could always go out of fashion. Gates could not stop speech from uniting parties on either side of them.  Titles could be written over. Words could accomplish all these things.  

It was indulgence that infuriated Hus the most.  What he had to say about indulgence was not only written in words, but in whole lives.  Hus spoke about indulgence and the people of Prague wrote what he said with swords and firebrands on Catholic faces. 

Indulgence was the tradition of granting temporal absolution as well as spiritual forgiveness, for a price.  The church was selling amnesties on earth and heaven. It did this to finance war. 

Huss charged that no Christian leader should ever wage war; enemies were for blessing and wars only damnation.  That the Pope was whoring heaven’s splendor and salvation in order to buy the blood of heathens – lost souls needing saving, slaughtering – was all the worse.  That this was used to push around the laws of man made a travesty, an injustice, into an obscenity. 

This is why I understand his writings. 

Huss spoke and wrote, and what he wrote was called the Cruciata.  It was issued to the university and the church.  It was followed by sermons to his congregation. 

Huss’ followers spoke and waged war.  They butchered Catholics, were butchered in turn, betrayed and were betrayed, and everything was set afire.   People who had never heard of Jan Huss died in thousands. 

After a time, the cause changed, the words changed, but the killing continued for other reasons.   Now, here I am in a city my government forced under its protection, hunted by the rest of the world, extolled by my people as a killer.   I go to sleep with Italy’s artillery in my ears and in the churches I hear ministers whispering to their congregations about killing Germans. 

I must find the writings of Huss.  I fear it may be too late.

All contents copyright © Matthew Funk 2007, all rights reserved.