18/09/2023
September 2, 2021
Near Uman, Ukraine, Europe
For Alexander Kepler to officially declare that that same old tune that many a prophet had sung, from Samuel to Isaiah to Jeremiah to Zechariah to assuming there would come “The Four Craftsmen”, namely: Mashiach Ben Joseph, Elijah, The Righteous Priest, and Mashiach Ben David, is a hell of a song to sing, but Alexander Kepler does it easily. And these people would be from the stump of Ephraim, the stump of Elijah, the stump of Aaron, and the stump of David, and Alexander Kepler believed he was from the stump of Ephraim, from the House of Joseph, and this made many people Kepler confided in prick their ears and stir their mind, and some developed a troubled conscience. It was baffling and bewildering to say the least. Yet, he sang it with full heart. To him it was no small matter. And now, as Alexander Kepler’s arranged feathers, plucked from King Jeroboam’s wings, were poised to give flight to some of history’s hidden parts, he was ready to begin what he called, Operation Rotten Luck.
So, before the fog of history settles over this story, here is an account of Kepler’s life from his 49th year and tenth month of life.
On the morning of the 2nd September 2021, Kepler, who stood just under the average height of a man at 5 foot 8 inches, broke out of his restrictive labyrinth of depression in which he had been confined to, on and off of late, and now as he escaped the irregular paths that all had seemed to lead to one dark, narrow dead end, he bounced back briefly into the colour of life as he rubbed his eyes and rushed into the kitchen, his boardroom notes flying, barking like a dog that hadn’t seen its owner for days. But before his wife, Marie Liouville, could say “Calm down!”, he launched into a fat tale about the royal mistress of King Henry IV of France being at the Rose theatre in London on Valentine’s Day 1596, with a few of her closest confidantes, to treat themselves to Romeo and Juliet. Kepler thought his words would have struck Marie with deep curiosity as if she had walked into a quiet room and everybody had jumped out and said “Surprise!” But all she mustered was curious detachment.
The 23-year-old royal mistress was a wanton vixen. Convenient scruples. Symbolic high hairline. Cute face. Slippery voice. Again, and again she had said to the king, “I am fiercely loyal.”
Marie’s reserved attitude expressed a deep cautiousness, and her exquisite face showed the beauty of prudence. The edges of her attitude were so clear-cut that for susceptible persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect. That hard fineness came out in her deportment immediately as Kepler began his long tirade, which it may seem to more sensitive types that she should have basked in the significance of the story. Marie, however, for reasons which she deemed sensible and shrewd, always took the vigilant road of detached enquiry, postponing a more methodical enquiry in seclusion should she believe it is worthy of her contemplation. She could have either an expressive, informative, responsive face or a secretive, unemotional, cold face. It was a face of deep beauty, of nature selecting the best of women before her and endowing her with the honour of wearing the trophy of womanhood. It had deep fertile crescent roots. Her sandy brown eyes locked onto her husband’s gunmetal grey with clear perception. “What are you rambling about?” Demanded Marie. “What does this have to do with us? Who is she? When was this?”
Kepler, who had a narrowing chin, a perfectly trimmed goatee, and a face that bore a great deal of tension, a staggering amount of pain, stared intently into Marie’s eyes. There was extreme intensity in his usual stare that made the hardest and toughest of men, much taller than him, bow their heads and look away. He said in a rather husky voice, “It’s a long story, Marie. The year’s 1596. Hebrew year 5736. She was one of the King of France’s wh**es. I can see her now in her French rose-coloured gown with matching hood, used to pedal William Shakespeare into hot passion.” Kepler said matter-of-factly, once he restored his placid calm. “I’ve come to the conclusion she was after more than his autograph.”
Marie rolled her majestic, intelligent almond-shaped eyes, eyes that had witnessed the cruelty and vulgarness of pathetic men who gawked at her astonishing beauty as an invitation to fantasise. She replied with an incandescent voice, “I suppose this royal mischievous mistress said with a surreptitious voice, “I swear on the Catholic bible I am unplucked”.” As Marie finished, she crossed her arms and threw back her shoulders.
Kepler knew what sort of person Marie imagined Gabrielle d'Estrées to be: a filthy, dirty slut, but the fact that Marie did not appear to understand where he was coming from shocked him. “That night, the 14th February, most likely a sold-out night, was the midweek performance. It was exactly 272 days before Gabrielle d'Estrées’s daughter Catherine Henriette de Bourbon, an ancestor of mine through Pharaoh Joseph to Writer Ephraim to King Jeroboam to Poet Shakespeare, was born, who the king of France called his own. Spectacular, isn’t it.”
“Hmmm. She wanted to play with Shakespeare’s crown.” Marie said, without smiling or returning Kepler’s excitement.
As she bent down to pick up Kepler’s boardroom notes from the kitchen floor, Kepler said rapidly, “You don’t understand, the daughter, Catherine, is her father, Shakespeare’s English spirit, doomed in the French royal family to pledge France as the greater nation, but her mother died three years later, and so did her secret. But her foul crime lived on, and nothing can purge or burn away the truth. And Shakespeare’s crowned quill then made a sharp turn.” Kepler paused as he looked down at Marie and wondered why am I bothering? But he continued with a sarcastic barbed tone, “Marie…sharp turn…huge…monumental…gigantic. Are you with me? Are you listening?”
Marie stood, handing all the notes to Kepler and said rather passionately, “You bore me, Alex. You bore me. Of course, I understand: You’re a…” She thought for a moment and gave a Shakespearean bow with her right hand towards the ceiling in jest, “You’re a come in spinner, you believe a dirty young w***e would want Shakespeare. She was with the King of France. Why would she risk her livelihood for a relatively unknown poet? Anyway, you believe the story. We’ve got to get ready for our boardroom meeting. I can hear,” Marie tilted her right ear forward, “the big boots of Danger stomping his way to my desk, saying “Where is my malka, my queen, my Salome Alexandra, our society’s lead moral axe? There you are. Are you ready for the big day? Remember close is sour, bull’s eye is sweet, What’s your plan? So, I can brief the low traitors in high places on our strategy.”
~~~~~~
Kepler, a captive of his past, imprisoned alone in a series of rotten luck events, locked up after quietly enduring an awareness that he was missing out on what other men his age were enjoying (a variety of women, sports cars, bling, power, reputation, an extensive array of devotees), jailed after being engulfed by a complex and intermingled, suffocating dread and commingled, stifling anxiety that made his surroundings crowd with colourless gloom and dead dread, that made the shadows of night seem heartbreaking and mournful, that made the coffee beans of morning seem sleepy and dull, that made the afternoon walks in the woods no longer a peaceful pastime but a panic-filled, immensely disturbing, seizure-pouncing trip of eroding agitation and foreboding anxiety. Where did this dread and anxiety and panic come from? Was it truly from his past, his experiences, his failures, his regrets?
He had brainstormed the answer in the extreme, but his brain’s storm, a veritable howling tempest of the mind, only worsened whenever he felt he was nearing an answer. It might be that he shall never learn of what caused his maladies, but this bold and brave and spine-hardened man dismissed medication for those who were weak, dismissed therapy for those who loved to talk about themselves, and dismissed self-acceptance as an admittance of defeat. For Kepler the only real healers were seclusion and time and the belief that sooner or later he would understand.
As Kepler was reading his emails alone in his study he had interrupting and interfering thoughts that were dreadfully irritating, “Cancel the speech. You can’t do this. You’re pathetic. You’re useless. Nobody wants to hear from you. Kill yourself. Go on kill yourself. You’ll be at peace, then.” And on and on and on. The study was a spacious rectangular room with deep burgundy oak bookshelves from floor to ceiling that burgeoned with some one thousand books, many of which were eclectic, some unknown normally. Some of the books he had restricted himself to these days, besides some particular favourites he regularly reread sections of such as Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Osip Mandelstam’s 140 1 January 1924, or William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, were, despite, at times, a part of him feeling he was entering a beastly abyss, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and David Livingstone Smith’s Less than Human, and Roy Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Also, in Kepler’s collection were scrolls he kept in the safe, which were hidden behind an enlarged copy of Raphael’s self-portrait, an ancestor. One of the scrolls, parts of Revelations, handed down through his family, written in Hebrew by Johnathan Apphus, the Maccabean's Rebel Leader and Jewish High Priest most likely between 161 BCE and 151 BCE was very rare, indeed. (Johnathan’s brother Simon Thassi was Kepler’s ancestor.) Kepler kept it a secret from everyone, including Marie who knew about the safe but had never been given the combinations. There was not one person in the world who knew of the Hebrew scroll’s existence.
His desk nestled against the bay window overlooking the rear gardens was handmade in 1765 CE from cherry red oak (rumoured to have belonged to Pope Gregory XVI, an ancestor, before he was ordained as a Catholic priest). Emails had been coming in thick and fast from his ardent devotees and supporters, from his intelligence networks, from his mercenary contacts, and from his rabbi. People seemed to think Kepler was insincere, that his Operation Rotten Luck plan was tongue-in-cheek. His most powerful allies were saying, “It’s okay Alex to walk away now. No harm, no foul.” He skimmed through the email subjects and chose Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch’s email titled, ‘I’ll see you in the morgue’: “We’re 5 days before Rosh Hashanah and 14 days before Yom Kippur, how is your preparation going? I hope you’re doing it with a sense of great urgency. What I want to remind you of with fervent intensity is compassion. It is one of the highest high virtues of Judaism, as opposed to cruelty that is considered the lowest of values man can endow…”
It had been in a street called west 68th Street, New York, proudly called Upper West Side, on the evening of the 4th September 2020, an hour after sabbath finished, within a residential hub of young professional white Jews, within a brownstone club of old Italianate 1830’s buildings, when Kepler was bound in between Broadway and Central Park West that he met Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch. Kepler prided himself on being able to determine the exact temperature of people: hot, warm, cold, freezing. As he walked towards Central Park to meet Malachi Gustav of Tactical Defence International, a cutting-edge global security and intelligence and consultancy firm, he spotted Rabbi Eveline Goodman-Thau, the rabbi whom he met on the first sabbath after he was released from Garsten Abbey prison in Garsten, Upper Austria, talking to Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch outside Stephen Wise synagogue.
Kepler knew instinctively their temperatures were boiling. They were in a heated debate about British supercentenarian Annie Turnbull, who died the day before at 111. Goodman-Thau was defending that even though Turnbull credited her longevity to persistent hard work as a table maid and a daily glass of sherry, it was God who declared in the 6 days of creation how long she would live. It was God’s will. But Hirsch rejected Goodman-Thau’s view stating, “God didn’t plan his creation in 6 days. His plan took 6/7ths of whatever length of time the universe was decreed to exist. If that’s 50 billion years than his plan took 300 billion years. That’s right, God worked hard, worked long, worked laboriously. Poor God, all alone, every day and every night didn’t have the luxury of just clicking his fingers. But once the work was finished, once he had considered it, once he had known it was the best he could do, he pushed the button so that our pre-recorded universe began, and from that moment he began other work.”
Of the two rabbis Hirsch secured Kepler’s vote. From that day forward he developed a wholly open relationship with Hirsch, one where both men were free to speak with frank and brutal honesty. Kepler leaned back in his chair and considered Hirsch’s email, and even though he was alone he ranted and raved to the computer screen, “If my eyes sweat compassion, if I cry what good will it bring me? Oh rabbi, what are you doing to me? Do you not know that the world is like a troubled ocean spinning with rocks and sharks? Do you not know you may win a supposed victory, but it will be my certain death? Oh, what do I do? Do I relinquish my cruelty, my meanness, my harshness, my hatred? What for? So, I can be a good little boy, a sleepwalker, a truant in my own life. Oh please, do you want me to defy my true nature? If after everything God has done to me I stand down from my manhood, from my bravery, from my honesty, and kneel before the filth of this world with a glass chin and say, “No more will I see the trash of this world as trash but I will see it as treasure,” I will have a child’s voice.”
He continued to read the rabbi’s email, “…God chose Moses to be the shepherd of his flock. Just like Moses stood up when an Egyptian taskmaster was beating a Hebrew slave, Alexander, you must stand up and be a man. Your sense of compassion must stand up to cruelty. Otherwise, your cruelty will stand up to cruelty. And that will lead you to the morgue.”
Kepler froze. His earlier rant and rave had drained him of excitement and passion. He considered what Rabbi Hirsch had said placidly, and then he said out loud, “Well, that’s certain. Every day I clean up, show up, stand up. I’m a stand-up guy.” Kepler laughed. “Oh, rabbi if you only knew my plan you would say your plan is as good as any plan ever devised. It’s a stand-up plan. And as for Moses, was he being compassionate when he chose to beat to death the Egyptian taskmaster and bury his body in the sand? Or, was he being cruel?” Before Kepler could finish Marie entered the study.
Marie frowned while holding up her splayed fingers as the carnal-red nail polish dried. She said with a commanding voice, “Alexander what are you doing? You told me you couldn’t talk before because you had to get ready, yet you’re in here.”
Kepler ignored her as he continued to stare at the screen, and droned, “Yes, yes, yes. What’s wrong? What do you need to say?”
“I know the Alex I fell in love with is in you somewhere. I know that you’re afraid of failing. I know that you’ve been afraid lately of being close to me, to the children. I know that you’ve been afraid lately of us as a family. We were your greatest victory once.”
“I’m listening Marie. I just hope you realise in my deepest wishes I had a normal life, for instance I wish I was an accountant who worked 9 to 5, came home and kissed my wife, hugged my children, played with them, made love to my wife, played golf with my friends, yada yada yada.”
“I understand that, Alex, but what wife would tolerate her husband being absent from the matrimonial bed for…How long has been since you’ve slept in our bed at night? Two months. Made love to me? Three months? Tell me what wife would tolerate that?”
Kepler said bitingly, “Many wives, Marie.”
Marie raised her hands to her sides, as if to say stop, scrunched her face, and let out a silent scream, “Those wives,” she said slowly, “have wax love. I have real love. Mine doesn’t dissolve when things get too hot. Tell me, Alex, what is it that has taken you away from me? What has snapped in you? What’s making you bend your eyes to the floor as you walk around the house? What’s making you flinch when I walk in on you when you’re alone sometimes? What’s making you so lethargic and torpid when it comes to our usual walks? Where’s the blood-pumping heart in your promises? Why have you traded my treasured love and time to dodo-eyed musing and pensive sadness?”
Kepler said in a curt, dismissive tone, “Away Marie. Away! I haven’t got time for this. Now is not the time for lovey-dovey affection, sweet romance. Now’s the time for war.”
Marie narrowed her eyes and stroked her temples for a moment, but she was unable to compose herself. She was hurt. She raised her voice, “Talking about war, at times I have stirred at night, have come down and checked on you. You’ve been mad in you sleep, Alex. Ranting and raving. You haven’t even been close to the peaceful sleeper you once were. Nowhere in the vicinity. One time you were saying, “404. 404. Combat analyst 404.” And you’ve talked about young girls being r***d.” She paused momentarily, and lowered her voice, “Raped, Alex, r***d. Some right of passage or something. Some monster of a man. You’re at war with yourself, Alex. Your spirit is broken. You were soaked. Sweat pouring off you. And you just don’t look the same anymore. Your face has grown features you only see in the really old. Lines so deep that are not meant for a forty-nine-year-old man. I must know now, Alex, is our love still our love, is mine still yours? Are you tired of me, tired of us? Have you reached a point in your life, like many men in their 40s and 50s, when young women become your focus? Am I still attractive to you? Speak to me, Alex? Speak to me.”
Kepler seemed bored. His right eye was partly closed as if he was about to fall asleep. He let out a big sigh, and said coldly, “Why is it, Marie, you always do this. You store up all this “stuff” and then when a critical moment comes, like today, you then offload? I hate it, Marie. I absolutely hate it. Right now, I don’t need to be thinking of us. We’ve been married for 19 years. Can’t it wait?”
“Oh, you’re a mad-headed Neanderthal. But even they knew how to love, how to dedicate their time to their loved ones. So, what does that make you, Alex: an anomaly, a fluke of nature, or does it make you a sad old, man? I fear the reason why you want to avoid talking is because you’ve lost the ability to love.” Marie had had enough. She began to well tears, and for a moment she hid them from Kepler with her hand, “You’re kidding yourself, Alex. You’re kidding me. You’re kidding everyone.” She turned and walked out.
Kepler’s answers to Marie’s words had been curt. He hadn’t wanted the distraction, yet now her words began to absorb him. There was plain honest form in them, formed by the heart and therefore like the heart full of intense hard to understand depth, of 19 years and 248 days of force-backed oaths and heavenly habits peculiar to Marie and Alexander, varying in subjects such as s*x, children, intimacy, tenderness, loyalty, devotion, togetherness, and just as the heart rolls when one of these varied subjects come into focus, Marie’s words abruptly pierced the jury in Kepler’s heart, pierced his ears, vibrating deep inside him, so much so that he had been turned from reading the rest of Rabbi Hirsch’s email. After she had gone, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, and even though he knew time was against him, he used this time to think. Marie had told him to think of what she had said, and, indeed, he did so. The suggestion that he had snapped had given him a shock that made him recoil inward. Was it true that he had fractured, had broken apart at the seams, had cracked? Kepler to this point, after everything he had gone through in his life, prison, humiliation, success, failures, beginnings, ends, had never asked himself if he was able to handle everything life threw at him, but now he was asking himself if it was true, and it frightened him. Yes, there was something—something on Marie’s part that was womanly exaggeration, melodrama, but there was another part that was bereft of exaggeration. When he had on the 28th June 2005, on that freak of a downpour night, when all he could smell was rain, when he had been drinking all afternoon to celebrate the birth of his third child, his last child, Liesel, with Jonas—a friend from school, who was the worst example of manhood the world had ever seen—to then, at the request of Jonas, drive drunk, and this is where Alexander Kepler’s life took a sharp and dramatic turn: He ran over a sweet sixteen-year-old girl, also called Liesel, who was walking home from the cinema with friends along Dametzstraße, Linz, Austria, but she didn’t have an umbrella so she ran ahead and mistakenly judged the closeness of Kepler’s car. Kepler and Jonas ditched the joint they were smoking and the w**d into the drain, and rushed to the girl’s aid, but her friends screamed at them to back away as they carried out CPR. Kepler was charged with drink driving and vehicular homicide, but to this day Jonas and Kepler have never said a word about the w**d. Kepler knew he had shrugged off similar words to Marie in the past, such as what the judge told him at sentencing, “…Why does a once peaceful dog snap and become aggressive? Normally through pain, injury, illness, or abuse. Why did Alexander Kepler, who had no criminal history, snap? He had no pain. He had no injury. He had no illness. He had no abuse…” So, if Kepler’s reason for drink driving and vehicular homicide might have been a snap in judgement, and his reason for distancing himself from his loved ones might be a snap in love, and his reason for his mind wrestling with sanity might be a snap in sanity, what must he do to cultivate that old once peaceful dog in himself? Kepler, who had been denied bail all throughout the trial, was sentenced to 10 years and 8 months. He was paroled after two thirds on the 12th August 2012, and his parole finished on the 15th March 2016.
