American Agoge: Ash on the Mississippi

by Caleb Giachelli

There is something to be said, to seek. I want to walk like Alexander, Bonaparte, Julius, or even you, Marcus. Authenticity, passion, and purpose are at the heart of the existential crown. In a classical helm, as I have so graciously befriended, it is the construction of principle, a familiar path, or simply a code to live by […] […]

A strange chemistry teacher from Oxford Mississippi, a peculiar fellowship in my Walk, he had at once explained; it is this: to strive for “beauty, truth, and the good.” That is how he summarized the totality of all great knowledge, inexplicably important things, heroics and noble pursuit, and all the greatest redeemers who once dwindled in barbarism, flame, and sin[…,]

“For these are the only three things that we never got bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because are three attributes of God, and therefore all God’s creation.” (Kreeft).

Albert Camus, progenitor of finding the “I” in me, and perhaps my first true taste of digesting transcendence by the word, or as The Good Book defines, “the Sword”. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he proposes, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” (The Myth of Sisyphus 3). You don’t have to die, but you should ask the question. […] […] This defiance, this revolt, that is the point. Perhaps that is why I, maybe with the eternal mind of infancy, or maybe just autism, I have never once been able to draw a truly sincere differential between the gangster and the soldier, of organized mafia and of naval special warfare. I know it to be true, because I’ve tried both, and quite a many times they each said no.

Of the unproven unity between yourself, your mind, and something in the air that just seems to always answer if you kneel under light, silence, and of righteous heart, and you ask, and so you are given; we all know for might — it is requiring of the blessed to be stepped on by the likes of square-toe, preferably in fine Spanish Leather. “And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4 ESV). Pray, pray for a hard rain, of “dead oceans” and “black dogs” said the great free-wheelin Bob Dylan. Fall is inevitable, and for the “Silver” Seekers, pray for cold and mud, my friend.

The arrival of myself to the Word was synonymous with entrance into a mysterious underground fighting club inside the Mississippi Delta. Of those who still cry for truth; fighters, farmers, philosophers, addicts, assailants, helpers, and killers — there could be no dungeon on the whole of Earth where I was righter to crawl. In the rising sun, of every letter which singed itself into my heart; Jeffersonian ideals of Civic Duty as the forgotten centrality of Republicanism, Milton’s Lost Paradise, Shakespearean humanism with that wretched Machiavellian edge, the deconstruction of consciousness, empirical historicity for the happenings of God, and Faith’s provincial domain where once astrophysicist and Believers stood on the same ground, magic.

By evening’s fall, the demonstration itself would come alive. Instead of the humanitas, of analyses and the contemplative, the performance would become shins on rib, tiny little insignificant grapplers strangling the tall and broad as if a child, or most impressively, the inhuman triumph of flow achieved when two aggressors can dance violently and mightily swift, yet their strikes make no mark; the thunder of a Thai spar is but two weightless feathers, each swaying with the metronome of understanding, a harmonious truth lost to the Magi, of Heaven and of Earth, a true display of the highborn spirit.