The Expansive Howl (Part V)
...the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors...
My boss is essentially a page from a magazine. His appearance and comportment, his associates and accessories, his diction and bearing all point unmistakably to his stature in life, all point to his hillside house somewhere outside the city, near a train stop but not too near it, near all the conveniences constantly maintained by the folk pouring off the trans-oceanic boats in the harbours, the grey folk, the shawled folk who don’t speak the good English like him, who don’t in their faces bear the marks of youth, the Nordic marks of power: the chin, the jaw, the rut in the cheek, the straight forehead, the sideburns maintained at geometrically perfect proportions. You can read from his face the house he owns: at least twenty rooms, warm, solid, rising to a third, or even fourth story. He is a human being who has built a granite cave from making other human beings place marks on papers by operating levers dipped in ink. Do you feel as if I’m talking around him? Well, that is how I talk around him. It is also how I behave around him. When he comes, I feel the pathway of my possible thoughts, the tree of possible things I could say constrict and wither. The branches containing the implicit punning rules disappear first, then the question transformations, then the passive ones, then the familiar forms of address, then the clichéd sayings I use to plug holes in conversations, unfairly. Nobody else makes me talk on my toes like the boss: nobody else has ever washed over me that sense of “smarter-than-thou”, that sense of uncaring mentorship, of initation into almost-Gnostic mysteries my troglodyte mind will never grasp. I copyedit for him. I read the hissing waves of his prose as he discourses on great events, as he presses his sage opinion into the public pages, to reach the millions of breathing bodies in this city, which itself breathes with its steam vents, and bleeds out its buses and trams, its cabs and limousines. When work finishes and we’ve exchanged mandatory pleasantries we’ll retire to our respective trains: his the over-ground white train that is cleaned weekly and I to my mostly-underground tube where old organ-grinders mouth-breathe next to me, where old squat men who never mastered the good English since they stepped off the boats thirty years ago, the same men who offer votive candles to polytheistic pantheon of saints back in the Mediterranean islands where their grandmothers covered their heads with black scarves year-round, never mind the heat. Here are the people who bring out my words, who unwrap their academic crispness, who unravel the rules of spelling, all the arcane of one “l” or two “l”s or “ie” or “ei” or extraneous vowels, or “g”s and various other interconnected star-like clusters of meaningless dressed-up bullshit. Here, in the tunnel world of speech, none of that matters. “In the workman papers you don’t see the injunctions against split infinitives, or even complete phrases, or the “bad taste” of having two exclamation marks. (You need only one. How insufferably Anglo-Saxon.) But here with men named Nico or Gino or Xerxes we’ll see the happy medium of human rationality out of the confused babble of the world, and I even deign to feel a little Neo-Platonic, before my disgust responses come online. If all reality were One, then my discourse on Gino the mouth-breathing organist would amount to the highest affirmation of The Boss’ theoretical outlook, that well-fed, corpulent yet disciplined world of lines and angles and the forms of circles. I doubt my sometime master ever ventured into these tunnels—these tunnels that, in their sinews, go against the spirit of geometry.
Consider: "Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!"
My boss is essentially a page from a magazine. His appearance and comportment, his associates and accessories, his diction and bearing all point unmistakably to his stature in life, all point to his hillside house somewhere outside the city, near a train stop but not too near it, near all the conveniences constantly maintained by the folk pouring off the trans-oceanic boats in the harbours, the grey folk, the shawled folk who don’t speak the good English like him, who don’t in their faces bear the marks of youth, the Nordic marks of power: the chin, the jaw, the rut in the cheek, the straight forehead, the sideburns maintained at geometrically perfect proportions. You can read from his face the house he owns: at least twenty rooms, warm, solid, rising to a third, or even fourth story. He is a human being who has built a granite cave from making other human beings place marks on papers by operating levers dipped in ink. Do you feel as if I’m talking around him? Well, that is how I talk around him. It is also how I behave around him. When he comes, I feel the pathway of my possible thoughts, the tree of possible things I could say constrict and wither. The branches containing the implicit punning rules disappear first, then the question transformations, then the passive ones, then the familiar forms of address, then the clichéd sayings I use to plug holes in conversations, unfairly. Nobody else makes me talk on my toes like the boss: nobody else has ever washed over me that sense of “smarter-than-thou”, that sense of uncaring mentorship, of initation into almost-Gnostic mysteries my troglodyte mind will never grasp. I copyedit for him. I read the hissing waves of his prose as he discourses on great events, as he presses his sage opinion into the public pages, to reach the millions of breathing bodies in this city, which itself breathes with its steam vents, and bleeds out its buses and trams, its cabs and limousines. When work finishes and we’ve exchanged mandatory pleasantries we’ll retire to our respective trains: his the over-ground white train that is cleaned weekly and I to my mostly-underground tube where old organ-grinders mouth-breathe next to me, where old squat men who never mastered the good English since they stepped off the boats thirty years ago, the same men who offer votive candles to polytheistic pantheon of saints back in the Mediterranean islands where their grandmothers covered their heads with black scarves year-round, never mind the heat. Here are the people who bring out my words, who unwrap their academic crispness, who unravel the rules of spelling, all the arcane of one “l” or two “l”s or “ie” or “ei” or extraneous vowels, or “g”s and various other interconnected star-like clusters of meaningless dressed-up bullshit. Here, in the tunnel world of speech, none of that matters. “In the workman papers you don’t see the injunctions against split infinitives, or even complete phrases, or the “bad taste” of having two exclamation marks. (You need only one. How insufferably Anglo-Saxon.) But here with men named Nico or Gino or Xerxes we’ll see the happy medium of human rationality out of the confused babble of the world, and I even deign to feel a little Neo-Platonic, before my disgust responses come online. If all reality were One, then my discourse on Gino the mouth-breathing organist would amount to the highest affirmation of The Boss’ theoretical outlook, that well-fed, corpulent yet disciplined world of lines and angles and the forms of circles. I doubt my sometime master ever ventured into these tunnels—these tunnels that, in their sinews, go against the spirit of geometry.
Consider: "Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!"
posted by A. D. at 3:07 PM
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