Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 10.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Some hours earlier, dashing into the library to escape the rain, she had promptly forgotten herself among the warm, friendly stacks.  It was one of her favorite places, and it was not the first time that she'd accidentally lost hours there.  Now, emerging from the west door and into the tail end of the afternoon, with the straps of her big orange bag with its embroidered long-necked cats slung up over her shoulder, Tormy found that the rain had stopped, but the wind was gusty.  The lane of sky that was visible up above the red brick laboratory building opposite remained overcast and mildly menacing.  Would it rain more?  She judged it might, but not immediately.  The umbrella could remain in the bag.  She turned left and her long stride carried her swiftly along her way.

Not too many representatives of the student body were out and about on campus.  The peaceful quiet of a late Friday afternoon had set in.  Friday afternoons were always pleasant on campus.  Most classes had ended hours before, and the students were already home, decompressing from the week and preparing for the night ahead.

As she walked she remembered:

I been Roy Bittaned and Edward Wittened

Undercooked and overbooked

Gastrogavaged the sour whey and curds of

Assorted untranscendent astonishments

And there's no dirty words, just

Salesmen with unrepentant consciences

It was a fragment of something of Charlie's that she'd read that morning before leaving home, in part a parody of "A Simple Desultory Philippic."  No, not a parody, because it was more gently respectful than that.  How then should she think of it?  A kindly-sweet temporally-shifted paean.  She knew who Bittan was because of her father ‑‑ she could hear the band introduction in her head:  "Professor Roy Bittan!" ‑‑ but she'd had to look up Witten.  Leave it to Charlie to throw the two into a wry, juxtaposed parallelism like that.  Perniciously antithetical.

Dramatizes the conflict between.

Ah, she was succumbing to the conditioning, she thought, reflexively weighing text for hidden meanings and structural architecture.  Adhere strictly to the recipe, down to the very last crumb.  She contemplated the torturous agony of vivisection.  From too much reliance on clinical definitions comes only death.

She came down the red brick walkway under the chessboard matrix of the library's illuminated windows glowing pallid amber and turned left again along the low stone wall.  Her bright, wide-spaced green eyes took everything in.  Shaggy, dirty blonde hair fell in wavy puppy dog tatters over her shoulders, framing her pixie features.  Her path brought her beneath soaring sheets of marble, she supposed it to be, still streaked from the earlier rain.  Four storeys high, five?  Lacking the drama of the northern façade, the rear of the library was flat and featureless, but somber-silent, encasing a majestic repository of accumulated knowledge.  All that unspoken strength whose brooding power awaited just the right supplicant like a sword in a stone.  Only the initiated could fully sense or appreciate the intellectual juggernaut lying latent and patient behind those walls.

She was thankful that the building temporarily blocked the wind, but the zephyrs came licking round at her again at the far corner.  She crossed the street and then jagged around the angle of the hedge.  On the right the Morehead Clock Tower sprang up stiffly.  Ridiculously phallic, it might as well be an Atlas rocket jabbing up against the overcast sky.  Like a perilously sharp pencil point, its conic glans was elevated by a circle of white columns in echo of the Old Well.  The gallant, exalted organ and the musky plunging well shaft.  The carillon commenced its ring-a-ting trilling on the hour as she was passing by.  Hark the sound!  The more head missile.

Wave willows, murmur waters,

Golden sunbeams, smile!

Earthly music cannot waken

Lovely Annie Lisle.

The most famous least known tune in the nation.

A strong gust shook through the pine tops around her.  It had not been so blustery earlier in the day.  She was grateful there had been no rain then because she'd been able to have her lunch in the arboretum.  The chapel crenellations were visible there from her bench between the trees.  The chapel was one of her favorite places too, although she thought how it was funny that she had never gone inside.  One day she must.  She was eating her lunch under her favorite old cypress tree and casually scanning through The Daily Tar Ball.  Now, as she walked along Stadium Drive in the early evening, she recalled the sad story about the poor Smith boy.  So tragic, and the story never seemed to stop, even though it was half a year since the cops had shot him down.  The story was one of those enigmas whose answer would never be recorded for posterity.  A minor, sad cul-de-sac in a narrow corner of history, end of file.  A confused kid, a lot of beer, a high-speed chase, and gunfire in the night.  A perverse, sudden truncation to a promising life.  But they needed something to put in the paper, and they dug, and they dug, and they dug.  Today they were making gossipy allegations against the Assistant Dean of Students.  She had talked with him that night.  She had not talked with him that night.  Or she had, but not by phone.  It wasn't a story so much as blowing on dying embers to see whether something interesting might flare up.  Just a lot of rustling whispers.  That was no way to write.  Make a blunt accusation or leave the woman alone.

Undercooked and overbooked

Gastrogavaged the sour whey and curds

Gastrogavaged.  Leave it to him to disinter such a word.  Gastro of course was stomach, but gavage?

Straightaway she'd blipped over to Douglas Harper's site, and what do you know, there it was:  "from Fr. gavage, from gaver 'to stuff' (17c.; see gavotte)."  Good old dependable Harper; gotta love him.  And gavotte?  Fascinating references to a lively dance from the late seventeenth century, but also to gluttony:  "to stuff, force-feed poultry."

Force-fed the sour whey and curds.  Yep.  Telepathic Charlie might have written it with this very incident in mind.  Newspapers cracking soaked and spattered with the insides of damaged lives.  Human softness.  Fragile.  Handle with care.  Sure to sell.

She was not fond of this part of the walk where the road flared out to accommodate parking like an SUV-packed aneurysm, brandishing back crabwise into the trees.  It was unseemly, unethical, immoral, displacing the native forest in favor of environment-murdering internal combustors.  And the CHT with its free fares.  Where else in the land of the almighty dollar did you find such a deal?  The land of milk and honey.  But she was a hypocrite.  She'd driven to school that morning herself, up to Spencer Hall, all the way from Purefoy Road.  How far?  Two miles?  She'd already walked about half that distance today, and she'd have to retrace her steps later tonight to return to her car to drive home.  So easy to scorn the collective, faceless others while protectively preserving an unexamined self-righteous self-image.  Ridiculous conceit.

How do you force-feed poultry, she wondered, and why.  It reminded her suddenly of when, as kids, her father used to take them to the Cape Fear Fair and Expo.  Later, she must have been a junior or senior in high school ‑‑ a junior, she thought ‑‑ she had gone into the poultry barn with some of her friends, just looking around, messing around.  It was a great big shed with a corrugated zinc roof, airy, but smelling of chicken shit, with the farmers or farmer-wannabes in their blue and golden jackets, and the lanes between the pens watered down and raked and slightly muddy at the edges with yellow straw everywhere, and the roosters crowing, little beggar tin cups of feed in their cages, and the many breeds of rabbits in their cages, too.  They had found by accident the rooster that belonged to Robert Corrigan, a boy from school, and an enormous purple ribbon attached to the cage.  Inside, the bird was enormous and really rather beautiful, she'd had to admit, quite plump with gorgeous golden-yellow plumage and a wise, if fierce, old face with bright orange, otherworldly eyes and a thick, fleshy red comb and wattles under his horny yellow-brown beak.  Great spurs sprouted from his legs.  She was bent low to look in the cage and he was watching her closely, puffing himself up even bigger, pacing back and forth in the small space, pushing his breast up against the pen, challenging her to a duel.  Then her friends started giggling and she looked up wondering what it was, and one of them pointed to the ribbon and she read what it said.  Best Cock in Show.  Always after that they remembered the year that Robert Corrigan had won the Best Cock award.  It was more funny because whenever any of them asked him about it he always said it was for Best Rooster in Show.  Besides, Robert Corrigan was a short boy with pipe cleaner thin arms.  Now that she thought about it, she considered that maybe he'd been born with insufficient muscle stem cells in his arms or something.  But his legs were good enough because she remembered she had seen him running track and he was actually pretty fast.  But books and covers and the judgments associated therewith.  Shortcomings in one area often led to compensatory and hyperbolic embellishments elsewhere.  Robert Corrigan had married that plain Jane Jordan Brooks girl right after high school, and they now had two or three little babies of their own.  Maybe there was more to the Best Cock award than her friends and she had supposed at the time.  You never could tell.

Now that she looked closer, she saw there weren't very many cars parked on Stadium Drive this afternoon.  Everyone gone home.  She angled across the parking lot with the stadium off to her right, crossed downhill between the array of enormous floodlights high on a pole and the alumni building.

What had been the sequence of events in the last hour or so, she wondered, the decisive and climactic chain of cause and effect culminating in his final moments standing, lightly swaying, drunk by the side of the road early one summer morning?  The way you asked the question betrayed human assumptions about time and reality.  The auxiliary verbs imposing tense.  Had been.  Were.  Is.  To be.  Hamlet pinned forever onto a mounting board for public inspection and consideration from all possible angles.  Submitted for your approval.  Hamlet never died, did he.  Works of literature sustain life; they are vital; they continue to exist; not were, they are, eternally, amen.  And every life is a poem, a breath.  In the dark shadows of unseen trees blotting out the explosion of the universe in the unending silence overhead, extending for uncounted lightyears, eternity beckons, hushed animals in the woods startled by the Forerunner rumbly-rattling off the road, gravel popping, lurching to a sudden precipitous stop, end of useless velocity, the piercing cry of dual sirens in unmelodious harmony, your ancestors watching on, holding their breath.  Moments become momentous.  He could not have suspected that the last twinkling points of his life were rushing straight at him; but then, neither could the policemen who had been racing through the night, patrol car lights reeling brightly, have known what kind of fateful consequences awaited them, either.  Because they must live with those unfortunate memories.  It was the elusive, unknowable causal connections that everyone wanted to understand.  To reconstruct vaporized minutes as if that collision of disparate human experiences could be reduced to the punched holes in a scroll of instructions for a player piano.  Cause and effect, as if half-asleep human beings populated a universe of Newtonian billiard balls.  Clockwork.  Entropy:  things fall apart.  But that was just an empirical perspective, not a physical law.  A way to grasp the mundane, to comply with our expectations, this messier state must come sequentially after that tidier one, strictly phenomenally observational, trying to make sense of the arrow of time experienced by human observers.  Create bins of past and present and future, and distant past, and distant future, pick up the rubble and neatly file everything accordingly.  Once upon a time begat conflict begat resolution begat happily ever after.  But the laws of physics could not distinguish between forward and reverse directions through time.  The arrow of time was only a trick of the limits of human perception.  Human experience, the totality, might well comprise an extended manifold through all time and space.  The distant past no less immediate than right now, she, walking down this sidewalk.  Step.  Step.  Step.  Maybe a young Cherokee girl superimposed in exactly the same space moving softly through an unbroken forest long before any white men had come to disrupt this continent and its timeless natural cycles.  Her heart then softly pounding, just like her own did now, both beating, superimposed in space, separated only by six or seven hundred years.  God blinks, a thousand years fall away like stardust between galaxies.  And so in that sense no one ever really dies, and nothing ends.  Ah, but this deep-rooted desire to carve up events into distinctly granular causal significance, that was so human a trait.  And embedded deeply, firmly in the present.  Tells you much more about human beings than it does about the nature of time.

And that was what she found objectionable about the university, too.  Studying poetry.  As if.  A poem was alive.  She believed that.  If not, then it had no point.  And so an explication, the way the professors meant, was no different than vivisection.  No poet wrote with any hope or expectation that his or her work would be perversely sliced open like that, its guts exposed and steaming in the classroom.  She smiled, imagining Whitman imagining stuffed shirts trying to rip his words to shreds.  Professors of literature ought to know better.  Well, she was sure they did know better, or many of them, anyway.  But how to make money out of it?  It was a shadow world, or a dim reflection.  A sideline too easily mistaken for the real thing.  The literary academic game.  She could play games too.

Salesmen with unrepentant consciences

She crossed the bridge to the grassy green roof of the parking deck, packets of breezy gusts pursuing her into the clearing to renew their bursting assault at her back.  The lamps around her were flickering to life.  A few people came and went at the intersection.  Late prowlers like herself.   Stop for a coffee?  No.  She kept left to pass by the rec center and over the far bridge through the trees.  Briefly she glimpsed the fat, squat water tower in the distance against the cloudy twilight, like a white mother ship descending to impose universal peace and harmony or to destroy the wicked denizens of Earth.  Or, perhaps, to serve man.  So silly, that, she thought:  as if translations from one language to another retained accidental homonymous meanings.  To serve.  It's a cookbook!  The water tower bore certain structural similarities to the Old Well too, she suddenly realized.  Subliminal thematic replications and variations dipped and weaved all through life with fractal dependability.  A weird winding staircase dangling underneath the globose lower curve of the tank like a perspective-deforming Escher sketch.  Red Escher-sketch with two little dials?  Hmm.  She surreptitiously eyed two shirtless boys who were shooting hoops under the up-thrust warrens of a great termite den of a dorm.  The twanging, thuddy sound of the rubber and the backboard and the breaking squeak of sneakers.  Flailing naked arms and rapid staccato dribbling.  She continued on to the open plaza and moments later entered by the second door.  She went downstairs.

The hallway was empty.  Tormy let herself in with her key and flicked on the lights.  She dropped her key ring on a desktop and the cat bag down in a chair and pulled up another one close by.  No one else was around.  Good.  No witnesses.  Couldn't leave any living witnesses, and she was generally opposed to unnecessary violence on principle.  Settling down to business, she typed in her password, not unmindful that of course they could track her that way, but she thought it unlikely it would come to that.  It was a subtle kind of subversion in which she was engaged, and by the time it was noticed it would be too late to hope for a faithful reconstruction of present events.  Reaching down into the bag, she pulled out the notebook that held a hardcopy of the replacement document.  Then she detached the flash drive from her key ring and plugged it into the front of the computer tower, turning her attention to the monitor.

She located the original offending document on the server and double-clicked.  The file opened up, and she scanned bits of it quickly, scrolling downward.  A poetry explication is a short analysis. . . .How are the dramatized conflicts or themes. . . .We must focus on the poem's parts. . . .Look for certain patterns. . . .Present the large issues. . . .Do not write. . . .You can write. . . .Suggestions for improvement. . . .Despite her intimate familiarity with the mini-article, her nose wrinkled reflexively.  Execrable opprobrium.  This is the acceptable formula to follow in order to win public acclaim.  Might as well instruct the malleable minds of witless youth in the way to look out at the world through their own eyeballs.  How you are to constrain your unique, God-given voice.  Binding mantras extolled by a self-styled writing resource center.  It offended every sensibility she'd been a lifetime in developing and evolving.  A lifetime's myriad experiences and hard lessons and nuanced apprehensions slamming dead on into a wall of pretentious commandments as handed down by prudent and sagacious potentates draped in predictable folds of sanctioned and sanctimonious tweed.  No.  She had a duty to art itself, or perhaps to the idea of art, to the very notion that these crippling instructions completely neglected.  And certainly she had a duty to her own sense of identity.  It was not to be endured.

She had previously copied the virginal document directly from the server, preserving all its formatting intact.  This cloned duplicate she had taken home and, working privately, she had painstakingly rewritten it as it ought to have been written the first time.  Away with its contemptuous crushing assaults on intellectual liberty!  One does not explicate a poem by systematically anatomizing it according to academia's rigid prescriptions.  That path led only to mutilation.  A poem was a living thing, breathing, and every word it contained directly and indirectly informed and sustained and influenced and charmed every other word; by pulling it apart you instantly severed those silky, delicate links; you did violence to language; you killed it.  Poems were not understood in destructive dismemberment but by inhaling them, by taking them into one's own lungs and letting them infuse the bloodstream.  To be carried throughout the reader's body, to interact with his or her own consciousness in a manner that was unique to every reader, so that every poem finally had as many meanings as the number of minds and hearts it encountered.  That was the only way to know a poem, and to hope to touch the soul of the poet who had found it in the world and written it down.  Such was the gist of her rewrite.

She overwrote the original version on the server with her rectified adaptation.  Now, anyone consulting the Writing Center for resources in the explication of poetry would have a new and liberating tool at his disposal.  It was a small act in a wider revolution, perhaps, but she had done her part.  Now there was only one more action to be taken.

Unplugging the flash drive and snapping it back onto her key ring, she logged off the computer and returned the chairs to their earlier places.  She opened the notebook and removed from it the printed version of the corrected text.  On the other side of the main desk was a wall rack holding laminated versions of the various resources offered by the Writing Center for rapid consultation by walk-ins.  She flipped through it and pulled the original, replacing it with the new and improved rendering.  Then she tucked the original back into her notebook ‑‑ she'd destroy the evidence later away from the scene of the crime ‑‑ and, returning the notebook to the orange cat bag, she hoisted it back onto her shoulder, shut out the lights, and left the room, making sure the door was locked behind her.

Nobody here but us chickens.

Back outside it had begun to rain again.  She swore softly, digging around in the bottom of her bag for her umbrella.  The sun had finally set somewhere behind the clouds.  Darkness would come on quickly, and she still had to walk all the way back to her car.  Well, there was nothing to be done but to go.  She started back up the brick walkway, the rain pattering on the bright pink vinyl over her head.

"No dirty words, just salesmen," she murmured aloud to herself.  Then she thought:  No dirty words.  Hmm.  Now that, really, is sort of an interesting idea.  If you stop to think about it.