“Conceived,” Uncle Kev said, “when the Emperor Augustus was sampling a rare vintage from one of his cisalpine estates and found out that three of Rome’s finest legions had been massacred in the wastelands of Germania—which rendered Augustus not just speechless but incapable of hoping the news could be other than it was, proving philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conjecture that those who lack the capacity to speak, like dogs, cannot possibly conceive of hope.”
“Because you see,” Uncle Kev said, “hope is not the thing with feathers that beats eternally in the human breast. No laddie, it’s a linguistic construct whose delusory felicity we often foolishly cling to as a result of the language game we’ve been taught to play. Which is not to throw shade on canine intelligence. God blast my soul dear boy should you infer such a thing,” he said, lowering his voice and crossing himself. “As no less an authority than the ancient Greek philosopher Chrysippus had observed that hounds when hunting took full advantage of the disjunctive syllogism: for when coming upon a crossroads, they never bothered to sniff the last remaining pathway before taking off after their quarry.”
“But returning to Augustus and the mud-soaked messenger before him whose dire news was certain to spread in panicked contagion when Rome got wind that nothing stood between it and those Germanic hordes. For even though Hannibal and Mithridates had brought Rome to the brink of ruin, they never represented an existential threat. No, they were just irredentist arrivistes whom Rome knew exactly how to deal with, even when they started getting davka, yes, davka, davka,” he said, swirling the word around his palate like a fine claret, gazing at me in that hawkish way he got when circling in on his prey—which meant I was about to get that day’s lesson in his ideal educational venue: The Cheeky Pint. For ever since Uncle Kev had moved in with us, between sewing dresses and painting his nails, he’d made it his life’s mission to replace the ‘abomination’ of my high school’s curriculum with his own.
“A very elusive word, davka,” he said, “an Aramaic word that transitioned to Hebrew and then Yiddish, an eely, protean, Schrodinger’s cat kind of word that connotes in certain contexts a self-destructive stubbornness, a cutting-of-the-nose-to-spite-the-face, imp-of-the-perverse mode of being that Freud tried to make intelligible but ended up constructing a labyrinthine, Rube Goldberg mythology instead.”
“Yet don’t quote me on that,” he said, pausing to wipe his lips, “just as you won’t tell mum where we’ve been today, for the good doctor’s heroic efforts to define the essence of this particular word should be admired, its magnificent failure applauded, since really that’s the most we can hope from our lives, that they end up magnificent failures. So, boyo, let that be another lesson, perhaps the most important you will ever learn.”
“Hoi! Stay sharp laddie! Snap out of it! We’re not in that shite school of yours.”
“For davka captures something so ineffable and je ne sais quoi about the human condition, that were you so kind as to fetch us another pint, I could be induced to tell you how it conceals some attribute beyond the human condition, extra corpus, cross-stitched and hardwired into the universal fabric (forgive us our mixed metaphors), like Planck’s Constant and the speed of light. So, should aliens or other intelligent life forms exist, trust me, they know this word too.”
“But back to the Romans because they also knew how to deal with fractious spirits like Spartacus and Vercintogerix, the skinflints and freeloaders who couldn’t be bothered to pay their taxes for the benefits of aqueducts, paved roads, steam saunas, and pirate-free shipping, as pirates were a pernicious drag, especially when they raided the grain ships from Egypt, because then the price of bread in Rome would soar and the next thing an honest whore’s fellating or coitus modus canem costs twice as much as before, the plebs start smashing everything in sight, and the exchequer’s got to work overtime to revalue the coinage to correct the fiscal crisis.”
“But, as said, when the troublemakers couldn’t be enslaved, taught to kneel, and pay their taxes, Rome always had its “Carthage Rules” to fall back on, which basically meant decimating the ingrate recidivists, incinerating their fucking towns, and burying them under an ocean of salt. A costly enterprise to be sure that led to a lot of handwringing considering Romans really loathed wasting their hard-earned Sestertii and Denarii.”
“Which brings us back to our hapless messenger who in the twisted contours of his face Augustus witnessed, as if through a portal, the barbarians tearing his legions to pieces like Thracian Maenads, the howling chieftains pissing into the rictus-stretched maw of the once-mighty general Publius Varus, and taking in the turned-cabbage breath that clung to the messenger like some foul vapor burped up from the Cloaca Maxima, knew he would never again relish the taste of primitivo and pinot noir, that Rome’s axis had tilted for good and the Carthage Rules were null and void.”
“And that,” said Uncle Kev, his right-hand index finger rising, “was when the birthing waters of that word broke in a deafening screech, shriveling Augustus’s scrotum, frosting his hair, shattering the priceless chalices and goblets in the imperial palace, including the one in the messenger’s hand into which a slave boy had just poured some of Aquitania’s finest, as a new word rang out into the world echoing across the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and the Capitoline, eventually coming to rest on top of the gore-soaked leaves in the dark woods of the Teutoburg Forest from where it had originally sprang, that word today every playground child revels in and knows as FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.”
for Cameron