Memphis Blues Again: January 2012

Lest I be accused or suspected of slacking, here's a passage I've been working on the last few days:

. . . .Floriography, that's the word. Bloomspeak. Odds and ends. Give the gift that keeps on giving. The severed sexual organs of plants. Usually hermaphroditic, he/she blossoms on a stem.

From above and beyond the infirm ramparts of five-foot high imperfectly acoustic-damping fiberboard, all around her she heard the unceasing dissonance of ringing phones, twenty-some hands clattering at keyboards, the occasional gastro-similitudenous (Similitogenous? Similitogeny recapitulates philology.) gurgling of a water cooler, the phony pleasantries of telephonic information conveyance (Oh, no problem at all, glad to be of assistance. That's why we're here. Damned morons. Takes longer to call than to look it up. Don't these people know how to work a search engine?) and slightly sharply malice-edged whispery gossip exchange (And then he. . . .And then she. . . .) schmatta schmatta schmatta of vacuous interoffice half-hushed chitter-chatter.

She sat in her narrow, L-shaped eleventh floor cubicle. Functional office chair on rollers, faintly buzzing functional fluorescence high overhead (the natural daylight didn't penetrate this deeply into the workers' chambers) with a small, non-regulation desk lamp clamped to a divider pouring down its truly practicable hard incandescence upon a small functional desk. A semi-transparent plastic static mat was on the cold tiled floor under her chair. The wheels of the chair had a way of hanging up on its edge. The office computer pushed back as far as it would go into the corner to make room for her own laptop. A big, lidded, stainless steel coffee mug close by.

She used to feel as though she were laboring inside a droning hive of bees, except that metaphor failed because bees were industrious and purposeful, while her own fellow workers were generally less cerebral and goal-directed than those in the outside world, gazing with awe up at the steel and glass temple to erudition that was SPL-Central, might suppose. No, it was more like drudging within an ant den whose feebly hushed, scratchy acoustic signal had been radically, insanely amplified. Ants were more slavishly unthinking than bees, skittering about like mindless automatons, running into walls, recoiling, slightly altering course, resuming a boozy random walk through life, accomplishing anything useful only by accidental, dumb, instinctual group effort. Her colleagues might be able to accomplish as much, she imagined, three or four of them joining together to elevate and lug a giant crumb over their heads from one subterranean cavern to another. But if this were a den pressed flat between planes of glass, then whom, she wondered, might be peering in? Whatever they might hope to find, those pedantic and bookish voyeurs, they must often be disappointed.

No doubt God was likewise disillusioned, on a somewhat larger scale.

A long run of multicolored books was arrayed along a side table that was shoved into her allotted narrow space. One night last year Hallohan ‑‑ one of the night watchmen ‑‑ had helped her purloin the table from the fourth floor conference rooms. It left her cubicle even more cramped, but she'd found she could not work without the additional surface area. At present most of the books on the side table were related to Martin Luther King, Jr and the Civil Rights Movement, around twenty volumes that she'd obtained from the stacks during the last several days. Her supervisor had noticed them yesterday and asked her about it. An article she was thinking of writing, she'd replied. And. . . .who could say? Maybe someday she would write such an article.

Just this moment she wasn't thinking about billowing clouds of tear gas or burning, hollowed-out carcasses of roadside busses, but she sat regarding a slender green glass vase containing three large purple irises that had just been delivered. Fleur-de-lis, she thought, symbol of New Orleans. He would have thought of that too. When the Saints come marching in. Of course. Good news? No, a message of regret. Not even that. Patch things up and go forward. Seal the book.

A concealed message one aspires to transmit. Concealed from one's self? Maybe. The self-censoring aspirant. Aspirate, that's to inhale, to snort or to suck. Asperity is harshness or roughness to the touch, or to the feelings. To cast aspersions upon, to sprinkle liberally with slander, or worse: to sprinkle with liberal slander. Crime of the century. Dirty word, liberal. To Baptize in fiery Christ's blood, turning blood into wine into water. To undismayedly imbibe that blood just pretend it's wine.

Well, he had a point; or rather, a significant judgment might be extracted from his faltering diplomatic efforts. But let bygones be bygones. It was all clumsy human interaction anyway. Just personal. No malice intended. No harm, no foul. The genes pulled the chariot; the charioteer was just along for the ride, no matter how tempting it was to flatter the intellect. The deepest language was sublingual, involving flashfloods of hormones and dopamine reward systems, and how could off-the-cuff verbal murmurings, skimmed from the curds rising at random up out of the subconsciousness, be expected to compete with that? Sometimes verbal communications and expectations must fall flat. Let it go.

Nearby, someone laughed overly loud in response to a dim pun uttered by a passerby. Her eyes automatically flicked up above the flowers at the top of the cubicle wall in time to see the jester's retreating head. He was infamous in the office for his relentless wordplay and groaners. Not actually a bumbler like most of them, she knew; in fact, she suspected a more cunning intellect at work behind his eyes than he let on. His jokes were probably just a way of trying to make it through the day inside the hive. He disappeared and she looked down at the flowers again.

The king's spear is asphodel, daffodil, she thought. Another language. Wide wildflowery fields in the early morning light. Elysian immortals. I mourn with thee; I feel thy pain; or, confusion; uncertainty; unrequited love. Yes, it's all daffodil jumbly-tumbly: to strive for, or to inspire, or to breathe, spirit moving on the face of the deep, endeavoring to obtain, yearning for, reach out your arm.

Desire. Ooh, dangerous desire. Almost almost. Lacanian yearnings forever receding just beyond one's reach. Sisyphean frustrations. Once non-elliptical Nabokov's proboscis-snout greedily sucked up that nectar with his flittery-fluttery lepidopteron lexicology. But then he went and expired on us didn't he, dammit, dramatically enough though I admit like an Olympian diver into that final, fateful, purple, pitching sea of no return with an unforgettable triple moan of descending pitch. . . .The nosegay of the senses grows unavoidably compensated. Embeds us all in the fleshy-drab quotidian present.

She broke her gaze from the vase with its flowers and swiveled her chair to look back past the books on the side table and into the crowded labyrinth of other cubicles beyond. Voices. Blah blah. Bzz brngzt. Ha ha. Small talk. Of what use? Like the clucking of barnyard hens. It was so hard to find others with whom you could talk, really and truly intercommunicate. Noises. Changing and unchanging.

As great books are wasted on lesser readers, enchanting raconteurs require skilled listeners, rapt attention, in plastic wrapped. Dissect and prune the larynx sparing the jugulars. Listen.

Pale, secretive, heretical young Thomas kneeling all Platoesque at Vlad's feet. If you wanna learn anything you gotta be a dweeby satellite elliptic-orbiting the teacher at the front of the class. By rhetoric was young Thomas fangfully impaled, entangled in his own second order equations of plunging payloads across the channel ax² + bx + c that bend rainbows between directrix and his other focus.

She allowed herself a sigh and then pivoted back to her small, functional desk. Closing her eyes to better blot out her surroundings, she leaned forward slightly in her chair to smell the flowers.

Nice.

The lingering senses are too sharp and prepossessing; they get in the way of memory. Rewrite the past in a discursive, disjunct present vernacular. But musical phrases and aromas can trigger memory like an avalanche, like floral fragrances delicately wafting. Then stereoscopic remembrances of things past vie for today, for the present, for the now. Proust. He was a weak asthmatic. Physical weakness sharpens artistic senses through another compensatory process. The whiff of the rose, and lost time is found again.

She opened her eyes. Poof: back in her cubicle.

He meant well. Epigraph.

The gift that keeps on giving until wilt sets in so quickly and undermines it. What kind of useless language is that? Self-sabotage.

I just finished reading The Half Not Told: The Civil War in a Frontier Town, copyright 2001, Preston Filbert's fine and useful compilation of information about St Joseph, MO and surroundings during the Civil War period. In the funniest part, Filbert recalls his early research for the book:

. . . .I asked some of the local historians what happened in the city during the war.

"Nothing," I was told.

Among many other things, Memphis Blues Again concerns itself with events in and around the Platte Purchase during that time period; research for the novel eventually led me to Filbert's book.

An ancestor of mine is inspiration for a character in the novel. He (the flesh and blood ancestor; not the fictional word-and-image-mass) was recruited for the Union up in Rock Port on 3 Aug 1846. The 43rd MO Volunteer Infantry regiment was organized at St Joe, MO, attached to District of Northern MO, Dept of MO, during the period 22 Aug-7 Sep 1864. Part of this regiment took a boat ride down the Missouri River on the steamers West Wind and Benton on their rendezvous with some of Sterling Price's more skillful and professional raiders at the Battle of Glasgow on 15 Oct 1864. In addition, I've learned within the last month or so that this ancestor had family (via his stepfather) living in the thick of it down in Buchanan Co during the decade of the 1850s. The Half Not Told has definitely helped me fill in some of the missing pieces to the puzzle so I can better understand what was going on in the parallel heads of my character and my ancestor.

Read a bit more about Filbert's book here.

31 January 2012

Glory.

30 January 2012

PBS: The American Experience: Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.

28 January 2012

History Channel: The Underground Railroad.

27 January 2012

Sheriff Jones of Douglas Co, KS.

23 January 2012

History!

Lead Belly and John Lomax.

22 January 2012

Excerpt: Cubiclized.

Preston Filbert's The Half Not Told: The Civil War in a Frontier Town.

12 January 2012

Bushwhackers hit the Sam Gaty near Sibley, MO.