Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

wall into an admirable ice sculpture, a ten-foot-tall man with star emblems across his jacket and DNA brocade trimming his cape. The figure stood gazing toward the ceiling as if reading the mysteries enshrouding the ends of the universe.

“That’s m’daddy, Jobuseen-Ya,” said Wally, “th’late an greatest defender of th’late an greatest planet.” He looked around for support, then offered, “Argon. Y’all knew I meant Argon, right?”

“Beautiful craftsmanship, Vally,” said Hnossi. “Impressive vurk viss my ice. But, mm, perhaps you should freshen up, ja? Haff a coffee or sumsing? You’re looking a tad…overvurked.”

Iron Lass fooled no one. To the extent that Wally’s icon was masterful, Wally himself was a sluice-floor hackwork: unshaven, straggle-haired, mud on his suit, rips in his cape, and the even worse reek of ozone since his last trip to the rest room. “Tell me about your icon, Wally—”

“Eva, like, you haven’t even looked at my icon yet?”

I was about to ask Syndi to wait her turn, but when I beheld what she’d built, I was both shocked and shocked at myself for being shocked.

Syndi’s mannequin-based icon, with its dominatrix-inspired attire, was an image of herself.

Having anticipated someone’s possible failure to notice her icon’s identity, Syndi had glued gold glitter into the forms of the letters P and G around the nipple spikes of the black breast cups of her monument to herself, and AUTOGRAPHS HERE in the same gold glitter across the mannequin’s buttocks and GRRRLS DO IT BEST upon its crotch.

“And, like, I gave myself dreads,” she said, pointing to the sections of rope festooned from the mannequin’s skull, “cuz, like, I’ve been thinking about getting some?” She tilted her head with her trademarked coquettishness. “What do you think, Eva? They look good, don’t they?”

The X-Man swore.

Syndi tilted her head the other direction. “Kareem, if you, like, use the word ‘appropriation’ even once, you can talk to my, like, autograph dispenser?”

With everyone’s work complete, I moved them out of their workbays to their datapads on the table and had them type out why they’d made their icons, what these images meant to them, and what they’d learned from what they’d made. But as important as their answers were, my real purpose was to prime the pump for phase two.

“All right, everyone. You’ve completed your answers,” I said. “Now it’s time to destroy your icons.”

Iconoclasm Means “I Can”

The F*O*O*Jsters stammered and sputtered with outrage, demanding to know why I would ask them to put such effort into their artwork if it existed only to be smashed. After reminding them that nothing real lasts, I told them one of my favorite Zen stories.

A monk had been walking through the jungle for several weeks on his way to a grand pagoda, when he encountered the Ganges. Where he found himself, the river was too deep and too wide to cross by walking or swimming, so he wandered downriver for half a day or more in search of a narrower, shallower point. The river grew only deeper and wider, and throughout his search, his unease grew that each step was taking him farther from his destination, which he could see above the canopy in the sunset, glittering golden atop a mountain.

The monk finally realized that his only means across was to build a raft. Never having done so, he worked past sundown experimenting with construction methods and then spent the entire night lashing together logs with vines, weaving a sail with fronds, and fashioning an oar.

When morning came, the monk tentatively ventured upon the river, not knowing whether he’d drown or be eaten by piranhas and crocodiles. But to his amazement he reached the other side of the Ganges in less than an hour, his unsurpassable barrier conquered easily.

Alighting upon the shore, he surveyed his work with pride. But he couldn’t imagine abandoning the craft of his craft. So he gathered vines, hoisted his heavy raft upon his back, and trudged through the jungle and up the mountain toward his pagoda.

“Why did the monk haul his raft with him?” I asked.

“Because he was obviously intending to sell the vehicle after he left the goddamned monastery. Or trade up, at least.”

“Becoss he vanted neizer to litter nor to vaste.”

“Cuz he had hisseff a nice lil ol boat, an he probably wannid to take er out fishin when he was done monkin for the day.”

“Because he didn’t want anyone to, like, rip it off?”

“Because he was too blind, too self-delighted, or too afraid,” said Kareem, “to accept that something useful had become a burden.”

“Precisely, Kareem.”

A small smile—not insincere—crawled onto the X-Man’s lips, and I saw him then as he once must have been: the smartest student in the class. I tried to imagine him at a time before his awesome bitterness, when that smile would have been broader and more frequent, but it was difficult to picture.

And yet, despite myself in that moment, I found myself liking Philip Kareem Edgerton, and the impish twist of his lips suggested the feeling was slowly, surprisingly, becoming mutual.

“And the same is true of your icons,” I continued, building from Kareem’s solution to my wisdom-riddle, “not the artifices you’ve constructed this afternoon, but the ones that hold hegemony over your hearts and mastery over your minds.

“Especially during this id-crisis that’s crippling your work environment, it’s critical for each of you to examine how you are exploiting your ideals and your idols to excuse yourself of your own dysfunctional behavior.”

The F*O*O*Jsters’ arms were crossed, their faces dour. Except for Kareem’s. Perhaps he chose to believe I wasn’t including him in my description. Or perhaps it was something else entirely.

“Consider this, you men and women whom the world calls ‘heroes.’ By maintaining an icon, you are permanently placing yourself below someone or something which you consider to hold greater wisdom or intrinsic merit than you do. Icons, therefore, are ‘virtual parents’ situated inside your psyches, indefinitely infantilizing you.

“If you want to terminate your internal id-loops and deactivate your interpersonal dysfunction, you need