Will to Power

 

Beaumont may be a lovely rooster but he is half the man that Franklin is. When Franklin rises up on his tiptoes and beats his wings, he takes up about four cubic feet. Beaumont, with all his valiant fluttering, is lucky to push past two. When Franklin crows at three in the morning, he punctures the gloom with hearty notes of defiance. When Beaumont crows two minutes later, he barely scratches the surface of the night. When Franklin asserts his manhood with the layers, they quietly submit. When Beaumont attempts an amorous alliance, he is firmly pecked away. 

Rather than internalize the constant indignities of being No. 2 Rooster, Beaumont shows no signs of giving up. The urge to puff himself up, to beat his wings, to crow two hours before dawn, to jump upon a hen, is stronger than any momentary humiliation.  He may be chased by Franklin and refused by Henny Penny but that doesn’t stop him from reasserting himself two minutes later. Still, I couldn’t help thinking he was making his life harder than it needed to be.

I thought about telling him that patriarchy was overrated. “You don’t have to buy into machismo,” I wanted to tell him. “Just because society tells you to beat your wings and go after the hens, doesn’t mean you need to do that.” I wondered what he would think about the theory that reality is socially constructed, that all this crowing and humping was just an arbitrary arrangement set up to support economic interests. According to this school of thought, everything we call natural, such as gender and race, is actually a fiction that human beings created. But as I watched him scratching the frosted earth where the winter sun had peeled away the snow, the premise of the argument seemed implausible. How could I convince a chicken that nature doesn’t really exist?

Instead, I appealed to his self-preservation. “You realize that Franklin will kill you if he thinks you’re getting too uppity. He only lets you hang around the hen yard because you stay out of his way. If you start acting as if you’re just as entitled as he is, things will go very badly for you.” Beaumont shook his head fiercely, making the silver cowl around his neck puff up like a cobra. Then he stood up on his tiptoes and beat his tuxedo wings boldly. Franklin came running around the corner to police the situation and Beaumont went back to pecking the ground. The minute Franklin disappeared, Beaumont let out one of his scratchy adolescent crows. Franklin rushed upon him and Beaumont took off like Roadrunner, the cartoon character who disappears leaving a single feather in his wake.

“See what I mean,” I said when I found him preening his feathers behind the woodpile. “You got to keep it cool.” But Beaumont looked pleased with himself. He’d made the big guy run and big guys don’t look quite so dazzling as small-boned dashers. At least that’s what Beaumont told himself. As far as he was concerned, his small frame and high-pitched crow embodied the new standard of rooster. “I am what I am,” he said, standing gracefully on one leg, his foot raised daintily above the thawing mud, his head tilted to a most flattering angle. But his elegance was marred when he crowed twice to rather pathetic effect. So pathetic that Franklin chose to ignore him. “Just don’t get too cocky,” I warned him.

Political theorists might call Beaumont’s behavior “resistance.” By refusing to acknowledge Franklin’s authority he subverts the established social hierarchy. Even though the big boss man tells him there’s no place for him in his world, Beaumont insists on taking up space. “You’re quite the revolutionary,” I tell him, but, so far, he has very little interest in politics. Beaumont’s interests are pretty much centered on just being Beaumont.

But being Beaumont is not just a matter of racing about the yard in a handsome tuxedo. This bantam bird has tapped into a primal energy that causes him to strut and crow even when safety recommends otherwise. Deep within him is an irrepressible need to fully be the little guy he is, to voice his soprano lustiness, to make his unrequited desires known. He’s been at this game long enough to know he’ll never be Number 1, but that doesn’t stop him from glorying in the loveliness of life as Number 2.

All of which suggests that the way out of the many humiliations this world provides may have less to do with deconstructing social reality and more to do with tapping into our inner deep springs. Friedrich Nietzsche called these deep springs “the will to power,” the individual’s primal urge to express something essential from within. According to Nietzsche, this intrinsic wisdom is constantly challenged by a social need to judge right and wrong by other people’s standards. Rather than take our life force seriously, he says, we tend to judge our efforts through others’ eyes.

But not Beaumont.

Having tapped into this irrepressible energy, Beaumont has transcended any shame associated with life on the lower rung. Franklin may think he’s a runt, the hens may cluck about his deficiencies, but Beaumont persists in being fully Beaumont. Indeed, one could argue that all that ostracism has created the perfect classroom. He didn’t need me to teach him about the social construction of reality nor about Nietzsche’s will to power. His lowly place in the pecking order provided lessons enough.

Beaumont tells me he doesn’t have time for this sort of philosophizing. The sun is up, the birds are out in the winter garden scratching in the thawing beds and Beaumont is crowing for all he’s worth. A squeaky adolescent crow, for sure, but with every expression he teaches himself the measure of his own self-worth.