The Only Self-made Man in the World

A few weeks ago, you'll recall a certain back and forth in the American election campaigns. Obama was quoted saying that business owners didn't do it all by themselves. Many people were incensed that he denied the they had built their success with their own two hands and their own pile of moxie. That "We Built It" idea became a centre piece at the Republican National Convention.

Photo courtesy of The American Spectator

We all know -- even those who won't admit they know -- that Obama's statement was completely out of context, but the Republicans cries got me to thinking. Has anybody done "it" by themselves? Has anybody ever completely, absolutely, never-ever-ever not received any help from any outside social group to live and thrive?


I immediately crossed myself off the list, I was on E.I. last year. My sister works for the government, so she's out. My father -- who used to spit and swear and crumple the envelope that contained his income tax statement just before he slammed it home in the post box -- he came the closest in my family. But his cottages, that kept the solitude that he breathed so deeply, backed on to Crown Land, and thus he owed his loneliest and therefore happiest times to the Canadian government.

Weeks passed and my search for the truly self-made man (or woman) expanded. It became an obsession. I traveled to the remotest parts of Ontario. I talked to every species of Canadian and they were all sucking, slurping, or at the very least lightly licking a used breast pad that was lactated on by someone else's teat: homeless (food banks and dumpster diving for pastries made by other people), survivalists (bunkers were constructed with cement made by, yes, other people), even the comatose (life-support and catheters inserted by others).

I was unsatisfied. I had to go further. To financed my quest by remortgaging my home. I sold a kidney, made a painful killing giving skin grafts to impatient burn victims. Every cent went towards financing my focus: even the $2.53 for suctioning my back fat for the starving children in Africa.

I traveled the world. I plunged into the darkest barrios without thought for my own safety. I listened to local myths and legends of hermits who lived deep in the jungles. Finally, just yesterday in fact, I found him. A 58 year old man named Paul Hammerschdat. I agreed never to reveal his exact location but I can tell you that h is somewhere in South America in the foothills of the mountains.

Paul  is a slight man, approximately 5' 8", all sinewy muscle. His clothing was a hodge-podge of animal skins (okapi primarily, but never llama because he worried that they may have been raised by someone and escaped). I saw that his boots were of molded rubber and, almost sadly, pointed this out to him. He smiled  and pointed to a small orchard that included rubber trees; he then led me to one of his 3 dozen rough-hewn workshop buildings and presented me with the boot molds he had sculpted out of river clay.

All of his buildings were constructed by him. He explained that until he had mined enough ore from the nearby mountains and forged them into tools, he had lived in the open or in a lean-to.

He hadn't an inkling of what medicine was. He had lost count of the infections he had contracted, from things as insignificant as a twig scratch. A simple cold could often develop into something worse. He suspects that he may have nearly died numerous times, but because he had no knowledge of numbers, we couldn't narrow that estimate. As hardy as he was, he was under-height and underweight from a lifetime of barely enough calories. I've mentioned that he was 58; I didn't mention that he appeared similar to pictures of centenarians I've seen in the Guinness Book of World Records. No people may have helped him, but luck was very prevalent in his meager successes.

Amidst his scant belongings there were no brand names, no electronics, no inviting colours. Most were made of wood, a few from stone, and only three from metals. The designs of these creations were ungainly. His aforementioned boots had a pregnant spider-like shape to them. His axe had verged on the spoon-like. Even its haft was all zig-zaggy. When I queried him about this, he explained quite smugly that he had to come up with his own designs or else he would have accused himself of standing on the shoulders of other men who had dreamed, designed, and improved upon.

No doubt, it's beyond amazing that he had been able to do this all himself. But, to be blunt, his creations were shoddily conceived and poorly constructed. If he had used the ideas of others -- ideas that had been tested and improved by generations of other folk -- he would have been far more productive and comfortable.

"So," I pointed out, "If you're aware that there are other people, you must have seen them, and seeing them, you must have accidentally picked up on their ways of doing things, making things..." He cut me off by angrily tearing the home-spun shirt from his back. Dozens of long thin scars blazed redly down his back. To excise the memories of other people and their ways from himself, he had whipped himself with thorny vines until he learned not to think of them.

Seeing this emotional reaction, I broached the next topic as delicately as possible: "Surely, even if you've 'cured' yourself of thinking of other men, you're still occasionally tormented by the need for a woman?" His reaction was not violent at all. He smiled warmly and said there were ways of expunging that need too. I noticed over his shoulder a small flock of tamed mountain sheep... mostly ewes. I rapidly shifted gears and went on to my next question.

And here I was sure I had him. Obviously, he was not using materials or items crafted and assembled by other people. He had no art made by other hands, and because, I assume, he was so busy he hadn't made any of his own. He used no roads blazed and paved. Even the language that we used to communicate, though crude and barely useful, was his and his alone. But there was some knowledge in him that hadn't been wholly his. I knew it and I cornered him with it, ready for any violence that might ensue.

"And your mother and father? They left you with nothing, Paul? Not even your name?"

I was right to expect violence. His eyes immediately bulged. His breathed threw open his nostrils. A froth began to form in the corners of his tensing lips. He tackled me about the waist and pinned me to the ground by placing a bony, scabbed knee on my chest.

He savagely screamed that he had not been with his parents long enough to take anything from them. He had never even seen this "father" person. And as far as a his mother went, he had crawled from her as soon as he had clawed himself from the prison of her uterus. His first meal he had sucked from his very own teat; he wouldn't even deign to lick her blood from his pudgy baby hands.

I knew I was about to die at this self-made man's hands, so I pressed him further: "Inside her... through your embelical cord, you took nourishment from her!"

Slapping me with his horn-hard calluses, tears pouring from his feral eyes, he denied it. He remembers scraping tissue and blood from his fleshy prison. He had never asked for anything from her. He even recalls knotting the cord.

He raised his hand to end my life, which according to his rules, I had sold off to others anyways...

With what I knew would be my last breath, I asked, "And the sperm and the seed from your parents? Did you grow those yourself before you even had a self?!"

His hand sagged. His eyes went very far away. He flung himself from me, staggering to and fro as the realization feasted upon him. I could imagine the hastily erected denials in his mind being crushed by the echo of my words.

A shriek peeled from him, and his emaciated form seemed to thin that much more.

I had never imagined a man could crush his own skull with a stone. Perhaps he thought that at the very least the cause of his death was only by his hand. But not even suicide can be entirely your own doing.

Another man had helped him to die by giving him the reason.

RIP Paul Hammerschdat 1954 - 2012