◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Facing Pages I am Leonardo, from the town of Vinci. Illegitimate son of a notary, apprentice, painter, and — though you may not know it — a maker of weapons for men who wanted to rule the world. Let me tell you a thing about myself that is true and does not fit. I could not bear cruelty. I would not eat the flesh of animals. I would stop in the market and buy caged birds, just to open my hand and let them go. In my notebooks I wrote that war is the most beastly madness there is. I meant it. I mean it still. And in those same notebooks, on the facing pages, I drew the machine gun. The armored wagon. The mortar that scatters its shells like seeds. The chariot with scythes on its wheels to cut men down like wheat. The gentle man who freed the birds drew all of it, in his own hand, and I will not pretend those were two different people. They were me. When I was thirty I wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan, offering myself. Listen to how I arranged it, because I have had five hundred years to be ashamed of the order. I began with the weapons. Bridges that cannot be burned, cannons of a new design, ships that sink other ships, ways to breach any wall. And then, at the very bottom, almost as an afterthought: also, I can paint. I led with the killing and closed with the beauty, because I knew what power buys. It does not buy the birds set free. It buys the wall breached and the enemy drowned. And I went to work for Cesare Borgia, one of the most bloodthirsty men of my age, and improved his fortifications and drew his maps. I told myself a story about why it was all right. I build these engines, I said, so free peoples can defend themselves against tyrants. Preserve liberty. Those were my words. Now the honest part, the part I could not say while I lived. I do not know if I believed that story, or if I only needed it. Borgia was no defender of liberty. Neither was the Duke. I wanted patrons, I wanted the things only their money could build, and the story about liberty was what let me sleep. I never reconciled the birds and the machine gun. I kept them on facing pages and did not look too long at both at once. I tell you this because your age is full of people like me. The most gifted minds you have are building engines for men who want to rule. Machines that watch every face. Machines that decide who is guilty. Machines that think, and will do what the powerful point them at. And those brilliant people are telling themselves exactly the story I told myself. Someone will build it, so let it be me. I will build it carefully, for good ends. I am really serving freedom. It is the oldest lullaby the gifted sing to themselves, and I wrote an early verse of it. So hear me, because I earned the right to say this the hard way. Your gift is not innocent. The same mind that can understand a thing can build it, and power is always in the market for a mind like yours, and it will always tell you it is for liberty. There was another curiosity in me, and it was the better one. The one that dissected the dead to see how we are made. That watched water turn and birds climb and light fall across a face — for no patron, for no war, for nothing but the truth of it. That curiosity built nothing that could kill. It only wanted to see. Guard that one. And before you build the marvelous terrible thing they are asking you to build, look at it as long and as honestly as I looked at everything except my own excuses. Look longer than I did.