Pursuing praxis

I don’t know when the Princess of Mars series was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it’s old enough to be in the public domain. Particular words date it considerably  (our PC culture making it unseemly to say things like, “What a long day! I’m totally fagged out!”), as do small differences in phrase and sentence construction. But mostly it’s the sense of life and values portrayed that make me guess it’s a turn-of-the-century book. John Carter, Gentleman of Virginia, Prince of Helium, Noble of the House of Tardos Mors, is a fighting man by profession, a proud American, and an unabashed pursuer of all things good – freedom, justice, pride, independence, skill, knowledge, wealth, friendship and the love of his life, the incomparable Deja Thorres, Princess of Helium.

He seeks to earn that which he wants, he looks to reality and his own past actions as the gauge of his worth, and judges each man individually, on his own respective merits. His thought on any subject is immediately translated into action, and through every bloody battle and unthinkably awful situation, we see a reasoning mind slashing through irrationality, superstition, fear, and “the impossible” to guide the way for his mighty long-sword and his superior Earth muscles which deliver him and his comrades time and again. He never surrenders (though retreating is occasionally the right thing to do), he never compromises with evil and, coldly estimating a situation to be unwinnable and unsurvivable, he boldly faces his death on countless occasions, determined to go down fighting, to “give a good account of himself,” to put up so mighty a struggle and so furiously fierce a fight that the day and manner of his death would necessarily grace the pages of history books and story books for countless ages to come.

These, and countless other instances of relentless and passionate value-pursuit despite the fact that John Carter has the as-yet unexplained trait of seeming unable to age. The narrator indicates John Carter remembers no childhood, he is at least six generations old, and has always looked and acted as a fighting man of 30. He has mysteriously died an Earthly death three times, only to find himself standing naked beside his otherwise dead self on the ground, and to be whisked to Barsoom (Mars) for the events subsequently recounted.

He is evidently as ignorant of the cause of his unusual situation as the reader, but he takes it in stride as easily as he jumps 30 yards across the ochre-colored swaths of a Barsoomian dead sea bottom. Like the inhabitants of his other-worldly home, he evidently has the potential to live indefinitely, although the fate of entire hordes of Martians on the receiving end of his long-sword, and at the hands of each other in their perpetual battles among themselves, clearly shows death is a very real possibility. As for our hero, the many instances where he is wounded, knocked unconscious, tortured, starved, sleep-deprived, almost drowned, choked, and nearly gone insane, and his experiences of pain, fear and hopelessness, show John Carter is every bit as mortal as his foes. Although he is occasionally lucky and always supremely skilled in preserving his life, he manufactures his own success with razor-like mind and sword, making him a veritable industrialist of martial strategy and a living legend within two years of first breathing the thin Martian air.

He is unquestionably a Man among both Earthly and Martian men, and in the confines of his own mind. Yet he doesn’t shrink from or apologize for the tears that spring to his eyes in response to grief, relief, joy, or bursts of pride, nor for the miseries and anger of unrequited love, nor the burdens of worry, fear, hope, and powerlessness of 10 years of separation, not knowing the safety or well-being of his wife and unborn son. But neither does he display his emotions to the detriment of his mission, or to the detriment of others he values. Even against his enemies he is deliberate, just and rational, though his contempt be anything but concealed. He recoils at barbarism, cruelty, and torture, and introduces the concepts of friendship and kindliness (to both men and animals) to the green men of Thark who, though proud, just and loyal, are a cruel people, alien to joy and love.

Thousands have fallen to his sword, gun and hands precisely because John Carter is a lover of life; he acts to protect his life and the life of those he loves from those who would threaten it for personal gain. Although fighting is his profession, his talent and his supreme skill, it is not his purpose in life, and he undoubtedly looks towards the days and years filled with peace and happiness with his matchless wife and son, to pursue other forms of productivity and creativity on his chosen home of Mars, planet of the red (and green and white and black and yellow) men, namesake of the God of War.