Diary: March 24, 2016

　

For a day and a half, ice pellets fell from the sky. The pellets were imparted stinging force by the wind and they bit into your eyes and cheeks and lips when you went outside. On the ground, the particles of ice lost their form and integrity and melted into slush. After dark, the temperature dropped a little and the pellets turned to snow and the snow gathered until it was a foot deep, smothering everything in a heavy wet blanket. The snow was all rotten – when you put your foot into a heap of the stuff, water spurted from all sides of the impression and a greasy ice formed under the sole of your boot.

For a few hours, everyone was trapped. The vehicles that ventured onto the streets cut grooves in the snow and other vehicles trapped in these tracks were unable to turn (or forced to turn, as the case might be) and innumerable accidents ensued. Avalanches of heavy snow slid off roof-eaves and plows churned by spraying water in icy fountains in all directions.

It was the first day of Spring and, in fact, the sun reasserted itself. By midday, the roads were completely clear, although the fields remained draped in the heavy crush of soggy snow. The weather worried me – I was scheduled for a deposition in Fridley, north of the Twin Cities, at 7:15 am on Friday morning. (I was deposing an orthopedic surgeon, a busy man, of course, and, so, the deposition had been scheduled so as not to burden his ordinary work load – the man saw twenty patients before lunch and twenty post-prandial as well.) It was 123 miles to the orthopedic surgeon’s offices where the proceeding were to take place and, so, I decided to travel on Thursday afternoon – a plan complicated by the Spring blizzard that was still inflicting harm mid-morning.

The sun emerged. The gutters filled with water. At the edges of the snowfields, grass that was already green showed. Color returned to the streets and the clouds broke apart. I waited until 4:00 to leave Austin and, at that time, the freeways were completely clear. The snow lingered in the country and the shoulders of the highway were gouged with deep trenches made by semi-trucks that had crashed in the blizzard – every two- or three-hundred yards, the median had been shredded by tow-trucks extricating the jack-knifed rigs. Mere passenger cars still huddled in forlorn groups, abandoned in the ditches or under the overpasses.

My initial plan was to reach the Twin Cities by 6:30 or so, attend a movie at the Lagoon Cinema near Lake and Hennepin and, then, continue north to a Holiday Inn Express hotel that I had booked about a mile and a half north of the office where the deposition would occur. There was nothing really compelling in the theaters, however, and the film that I planned to attend was a horror picture, the sort of picture that I don’t like to see in movie theaters because the experience is too frightening. (I like to watch horror films backwards on the DVD, that is, with all the scares and gore proceeding in reverse – a disfigured killer pulls a knife from a man’s chest, pushing a spray of blood back into him, and, then, the killer comically lunges back into the shadows; later, the acid or fire that scarred the monster makes a halo around his face, gently depositing new, unblemished skin where previously there were livid craters and striations.) Accordingly, I drove past my exit to the theater, traversed the edges of downtown, mesas of sports stadiums towering over the east and west flanks of the city, and continued north. I left 94 somewhere north of the old belt-line highway, now embedded in suburbs fifty years old, and continued along the river to a mile of open country, all that remained of the separation between the Twin Cities and the ring of county seats outside the Metro. The snow was gone and the empty fields criss-crossed with stagnant drainage ditches were barren and muddy. Highways angled together making vertices where there were big malls terraced like oversized pueblos and surrounded by acres of vacant parking lots and there were great overpasses leading east and west from the northbound freeway, concrete colonnades standing in marshes, small half-drained lakes that had been converted into water features complete with little fountains to decorate the frontage roads lined with brand-new, identical strip-malls.

I recognized only one landmark, a Half-Price Books located at 8600 Springbrook in Coon Rapids, a store that I had visited before, although, perhaps, farther south when it was located in another exactly similar building set in the wasteland between two crumbling malls. I had visited this store before, but couldn’t exactly account for when or why I had been in this area. Using my cell-phone, I deviated from the four-lane highway to a side-street and, then, crossed another big highway, one that was even faster and more restricted in access, than the one that I had been traveling. The hotel was in a kind of industrial park surrounded by featureless warehouses and barracks-like office buildings – here and there, the glass tower of a bank rose four or six stories above the flat-roofed commercial structures set down in the horizontal terrain like Lego-blocks. Sullen canals brimming with cold, black water grooved the landscape – franchise restaurants sat next to complex intersections that were shaped more like asterisks or stars than cross-roads.

The girl at the desk was cheerful. The room was a mirror of every other room in every other hotel scattered across these suburbs. It was cold and the heat couldn’t be effectively regulated. The TV told me that the elections were ongoing. Ted Cruz said that a certain man was a "rodent -copulator" and that he didn’t "want to copulate with Donald Trump," but I couldn’t tell who wanted to have sex with the rodent and who didn’t and the more that I thought about the film and audio clip that I had just seen, the more baffled I was.

After depositing my gear in my room, mostly a very heavy brief case full of medical records, I went back to my car. The car needed oil and had been operating a bit rough when I changed speeds – it was as if the transmission was stalling, catching in place, so that the car’s engine raced for a moment before shifting. I opened the hood and tried to access the oil reservoir but the the screw-cap was so tight that I couldn’t turn it. I leaned over the hot engine and cursed the car, twisting at the screw-cap as hard as I could until I felt that my wrist would fracture before the cap would loosen. This was disappointing. I had a quart of oil in the back of my car and a funnel as well but I was helpless to provide the necessary oil because of an elementary obstacle – I was insufficiently strong to twist open the oil reservoir. This was humiliating and filled me with a vague premonition of doom.

I planned to eat at the first restaurant that I saw and so I didn’t carry my cell-phone with me. Instead, I had a copy of Vachel Lindsay’s utopian novel, The Golden Book of Springfield, in my hand. I exited the Holiday Inn Express parking lot and took a winding road between loading docks, Montessori schools, and strange churches located in the pavilions of what seemed to be fitness and work-out businesses. The intersections were complicated by one-way roads and so I was channeled onto a big four-lane thoroughfare, the sort of avenue that you might find in New Jersey, a vicious, limited-access raceway impeded by interminable traffic lights every two-hundred yards. I passed a sketchy-looking Chinese buffet, dumpsters crowned by big, preening black birds, and, then, saw an Outback Steak House inaccessible on a little sliver of ground where two highways intersected. A few blocks later, I passed the Half-Price Books store and, so, was relieved at encountering something familiar – I knew this area. The parking lot at the Olive Garden was entirely full and, so, I made a turn and followed a boulevard to a Red Lobster.

Red Lobster, of course, is the most foul and detestable restaurant in the United States and I am well aware of the place’s sinister reputation, its tradition of misusing seafood most damnably. Beyond the Red Lobster, I saw the Broadway Bar and Pizza, a featureless building that was shaped like a Midas Muffler place or Jiffy Lube, a shadowy box with pickup trucks rooting at its walls. When I was in college, my father joined a team of researchers seeking the best pizza in the Twin Cities. For a couple months, twice a week, my father went with the team to taste pizza offered by various restaurants throughout the Metro Area – if I recall correctly, the venture was sponsored by a life-style weekly that catered to young people, either The City Pages or The Twin Cities Reader. (These were free periodicals devised on the model of the Village Voice, featuring some investigative reporting, movie and music reviews, ads for live-music and stand-up comedians, sex columnists, and, of course, restaurant ratings.) Ultimately, the pizza-critics determined that the Broadway Bar had the best pizza in the entire metropolis, a conclusion that my father always claimed was based upon his witty and analytical prose delineating with scientific efficacy the various characteristics of the pie – it was my father’s contention that exacting criteria had to be developed, that all categories of the taste-experience had to be itemized (crust, texture, freshness of vegetables and cheese, fragrance, disposition and density of meat, sauce, as well as the all-important synergy between sauce and crust, that is, whether the sauce made the crust soggy, or was merely ornamental, "painted on" the dough as it were or was properly slathered onto the pizza and, then, baked into the crust), and that the rigorous accounting methods be applied to quantify the work of the researchers, the data neatly displayed in spread-sheet form (using the best Honeywell word-processing equipment) and each criterion graded numerically. I wondered whether I should enter the Broadway Bar and inspect its walls – surely, in some remote corner, I would find a framed copy of the article from 1978, my father’s pizza-exegesis, a certificate that this small unprepossessing tavern made the best pizza in the Twin Cities and, therefore, the best pizza in Minnesota and, possibly, the best pizza west of the Big Muddy (since I expect better pies were, perhaps, baked in Chicago in those days). In fact, I fantasized that, perhaps, there would be a photograph of the merry band of pizza-critics and, standing at their center, I would see my father, balding with his neat, pointed beard, fat, and round, and happy, possibly the eldest of the students and young professionals appointed to accomplish this task. The system of one-way roads required that I drive through the parking lot to the Broadway Bar to reach the despicable and loathsome Red Lobster and, certainly, I should have stopped and entered the bar and scanned its walls for some sign of the great honor earned by the tavern in 1978, but the place was windowless, a fortress harboring only locals, turned in upon itself and guarded by the shabby pickup trucks surrounding the bar and, in any event, how would I feel if I encountered a fading, yellow picture of my father among his pizza-cronies alive and well and opinionated when, of course, he has now been dead for more than twenty years. It’s best not to stir the ghosts and, so, I looked away from the haggard-looking Broadway Bar and aimed my vehicle at The Red Lobster parking lot.

Red Lobster restaurants are always smaller than they look from outside, more cramped and lightless. In some of these places, the windows are small nautical portholes, usually smeared with a coagulant of the lemon buttter served with the fish. This franchise had nautical porthole windows but they were fake – the portholes with their faux-brass fittings looked onto stylized beaches with a swath of blue representing the sea and heaps of drifted sand in the foreground. A snow-fence was half-buried in the sand; some of the windows showed the ivory spikes of lighthouses occupying windy headlands. The booth to which I was ushered was too tight and the table ground against my belly and next to me there was a bar painted in a noxious green to simulate, I suppose, the bowels of a merchant marine freighter carrying fertilizers and illegal immigrants across some storm-vexed sea. A blonde girl stood behind the bar, slouched half-asleep with a "do not disturb" snarl decorating the lower half of her face. The other customers were troglodytes with receding brows, people with faces and figures that looked as if they had escaped from a Flintstones cartoon. Behind me, a table of roustabouts teased the waitress, joshing with her about the long road over which they had hauled ass to reach this northern State – the good ole boys were from Tennessee and proud of it and the slatternly waitress flirted with the men, ignoring the other tables where people were slumped over their food either drunk or insane or, perhaps, even dead.

The lobster is a nasty denizen of the deep, a creature thought to be possibly immortal – no one has yet quantified the life-span of these monstrous sea-arachnids in the wild. The word "lobster" is derived from the Latin locusta ("locust") mongrelized with the Old English lope ("dangly thing"), the word for "spider". Thus, a lobster is a cross between a pestilential locust and a spider. (In German, the situation isn’t any better – the Deutsch word for "lobster" is Hummer; in French, homard from the Viking humarr. According, to this etymology, a lobster bears a resemblance to one of those absurd and fortified sports utility vehicles – that is the "Hummer" derived from "Hum-Vee".) The ungainly creatures are not easy to eat. Indeed, it’s my experience that a medium size "chicken" lobster contains about three table-spoons of flaky white meat, generally tasteless, encased in carapace and entangled with slippery greenish offal. And this food was not always accounted a delicacy. Indeed, I recall a business trip to Connecticut many years ago during which I encountered evidence of the problematic history of the lobster as victual. Somewhere near Hartford, there was a knoll capped by a spiral staircase leading into the earth to an old mine once used as a prison. I recall the interior of the mine as a round basilica gouged-out in soft rock, the clammy stone walls marked with pathetic grafitti. There were some chains and solitary confinement cells sunk like cisterns in the wet floor and, then, a huge midden heap of lobster shells. In the 18^th century, lobster was considered well-nigh inedible. Fisherman hauling forth nets of glittering tuna and cod were appalled to find the big and hideous lobsters trapped in their gear, sea-spiders waving their pincers about the sweet and succulent white-fish. Lobsters were considered garbage and fed to the very poor or prisoners. In the underground jail, the prisoners had rioted several times to protest their meals – they were fed on a solid diet of lobster morning, noon, and night.

And, so, I was seated at a booth, my book open before me on the greasy table-top, a tall glass of Schmidt Nordeast at hand. I didn’t want to wrestle with the lobster, crack shells and gouge meat, particularly because I abhorred the notion of drizzling lemon butter on the pages of The Golden Book of Springfield – if this occurred, I supposed that I would be obligated to eat those pages – and, so, I opted for something that could be consumed without the technology of mallet, cracker, or lobster shears. "I’ll have the lobster scampi," I told the waitress after she commended me to the pages in the menu featuring the franchise’s trademarked LOBSTERFEST. "Very good," she said, vanishing for a moment to return with a basket containing two malformed biscuits, sweet enough but without butter or honey.

I ate the crumbly biscuits and, then, drank some of my beer and the other customers engaged in marital spats or slapped their children who had become too loud and the cave-men gnawed on the empty lobster shells until the five-o’clock shadows on their chins glistened with a glaze of lobster juice and butter and the roustabouts were suggesting an orgy to the waitress who seemed mildly interested. My food arrived on a round, bowl-shaped plate, a snarl of overcooked and limp linguini drenched in a greasy, jaundice-colored sauce. Atop the linguini, eight or nine nuggets of rubbery lobster were strewn, small morsels flecked with orangish-red. Flanking the bundle of soggy linguini were two pieces of toasted white-bread, set alongside the pasta in an unsuccessful attempt to soak up the yellowish grease on which the noodles seemed to be floating. A shard of biscuit was also inserted under the linquini, presumably also a sop for the grease. The bread was sodden and slimy and the biscuit drowned in the oil was reduced to a scum on the grease. Nothing on the plate had any real taste – it was just a mess of different sorts of slime.

I ate the scampi with dismay. The tall glass of beer cut the grease slightly, but, generally, the food had the faintly disagreeable taste of rancid butter. I finished eating, downed the rest of the beer, paid the bill, and fled the place.

In the parking lot, my car rasped when I turned the key in the ignition. Of course, I was low on oil. A funnel and quart of oil in the SAE grade approved for my Honda was in the back of the vehicle and, so, I decided that I would try again to add the fluid at the motel. Emerging from the parking lot, I was immediately confronted by a conundrum – a one-way sign channeled me away from direction that I needed to go to reach the Holiday Inn Express. Turning in obedience to the sign, I found myself on a barren frontage street that ran parallel to a busy highway inaccessible beyond a fence and a filthy ditch. After driving a few blocks in the wrong direction, I encountered a wide, empty road leading in the right direction, three full lanes wide. I turned on that boulevard only to find that I was heading in the wrong direction on another one-way, the front of my car facing a solid phalanx of oncoming traffic that veered and honked as it swerved around me. There was no apparent egress in either direction and so I drove forward, burrowing through the outraged oncoming traffic to an on-ramp that I used as an escape, taking two more questionable turns until I arrived at a dead-end next to a shabby-looking liquor store. I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes looking at the Map-Quest print-out showing me the way to Holiday Inn. People staggered in and out of the liquor store and there was broken glass in the lot.

I ventured back onto the highway. The roads were a system of one-way streets that converged at acute angles and, then, criss-crossed, diverging in a wilderness of strip malls and featureless commercial buildings. After driving for ten minutes, I caught sight of the emerald green lights of the Holiday Inn, but beyond a roaring freeway and, therefore, inaccessible. I followed the highway to a freeway, was siphoned in a direction that seemed wrong to me, and, then, tried to turn around at the first exit that I encountered. That exit was located in a dark sector, marshes and trees on low ridges, a ladder-like broadcasting tower rising overhead. I picked a direction that seemed promising to me, traveled on a county highway to another intersection, turned there and, then, drove a winding way to a place that I vaguely recognized – some disreputable-looking Chinese buffets facing one another across a busy intersection, the mesa of a Best Buy rising over a pawn shop. I made some more turns and reached the liquor store in its cul-de-sac decorated with smashed bottles. I went into the liquor store clutching my map, but the proprietor wasn’t interested in helping me – a line of young men with glasses knit together with duct tape and mullets were buying 12 packs of cheap beer. I asked one of those kids if he could help me find my way to the Holiday Inn. "I moved here," he said apologetically. "I wasn’t born here." Apparently, being born in this area, perhaps, in the shadow of the liquor store, was a prerequisite to understanding the highway system. We went outside and he pointed down a dark lane to an overpass and, with some more apologies, sent me in that direction. I found myself on an on-ramp propelled onto a freeway that ran adjacent to the Holiday Inn Express. At the next exit, I left the freeway and sought a parallel road running back in the direction of Holiday Inn. By my reckoning, this meant a left turn. I took a left but the road quickly deserted my intended direction and I found myself gliding through a vast estate of warehouses, all of them silent and shuttered, where the wet intersections connected roads that didn’t seem to meet at right angles. In a low area, there was a drainage ditch or a creek. I cut back toward the band of lights that I interpreted to be a major thoroughfare, found the highway but could only access it in the wrong direction. This required that I drive to the next red light and execute a u-turn. After this maneuver, lights appeared behind me, a red glare sailing in circles atop a cop car. I pulled hard to the right and stop on the shoulder. As I awaited the police officer, I speculated as to my blood alcohol level – how big had that "tall one" been? The officer was a highway patrolman prowling the frontage lanes and the access roads to the big interstate freeway riding on its high concrete pylons two or three miles to the north (or was it south?)

"What are you doing?" the cop asked.

"I’m completely lost," I said.

"I’ve been watching you," he said. "You made lane changes without signaling, bad turns, erratic driving."

"I’m completely lost," I repeated. I told him that I was looking for the Holiday Inn express.

The cop was wearing a huge plush-looking hat. He looked weary. After taking my driver’s license from my trembling hand, he returned to his car and I sat for few minutes, brooding over my bad luck. Then, the officer returned, handed me a warning and my license, and told me to be careful. I handed him the Mapquest print-out.

"Where is this?"

"Don’t know," the cop said. "I wasn’t born here."

I eased back into traffic and found that I was going in what seemed to me to be the entirely wrong direction. Other squad cars were patrolling the highways and pulling over motorists and I passed the traffic stops where the blinkers and red cherries of the cop cars were whirling with eerie intensity, illuminating the shoulder covered with ragged debris and the low trench between the boulevard and the frontage roads slimy with water and garbage. Afraid to make any more u-turns, I turned right, pulled into a parking lot, and, then, reversed my direction, taking a left at the stoplight. The oil light on my console was blinking periodically and the car seemed to stagger a little when it shifted. I made a couple more turns and saw the Holiday Inn Express but, unfortunately, on the wrong side of the highway and too late. I drove out to the freeway, turned onto that road, and, then, found myself in the desolate valley with the tree-lined ridge and the marsh and the tall broadcast tower barbed with red lights to keep lost helicopters and Cessnas from crashing into it. I drove back in the way that I had come, reached the liquor store, and, then, went in the opposite direction to that which seemed intuitively correct to me. This returned me to the ghastly Red Lobster where, no doubt, the plans for the orgy involving the roustabouts and the waitress were further advanced, the Broadway Bar famous for its pizza, and, in the distance, a range of neon lights advertising fitness places, yogurt emporiums, a Hibachi Grill. After cruising in circles in this area for twenty minutes, I found a sign directing the way to the Stonybrook Nature Center. I took that lane and found myself on a remote stretch of Stonybrook in a terrain that incongruously combined a braided stream and wetlands with enigmatic, unlit warehouses. I crossed some more lonely intersections, passed the Half-Price Books, and, then, beyond a mall surrounded by a quarter-section of vacant parking lot, glimpsed the green light of the Holiday Inn Express. Although the hotel seemed to be in the wrong direction, in a place to which the road would not lead, I persevered and the highway snaked this way and that, crossing another busy intersection and, then, running in quiet darkness to the place that I was seeking.

I parked the car, lifted the hood, and strained to wrest open the oil cap. But nothing would move. I dug in my coat pocket and found a tattered white athletic stocking that, perhaps, once I used as a snot-rag. I tried to improve my grip with the rag but still the oil cap would not turn.

When I entered the motel, the night-clerk cheerily cried: "Welcome back."

I went to my cold room on the fourth floor and tried to read The Golden Book of Springfield. The sentences didn’t make sense. I fell asleep but awakened at midnight with stomach cramps. I recalled the lobster scampi and those sodden pieces of toast mixed up with the linguini and, then, had to hustle to the toilet. After that episode, I kept the bathroom light on, but it was too bright and I seemed to be suffering some kind of photophobia. When I was in law school, I worked as a law clerk for an attorney called, Ray Rossini. Rossini was a prickly guy, very easily offended, and didn’t like my verbose writing style. (Ultimately, he told me that I would probably be most successful working for West Law as a book salesman – not everyone is cut out to be a lawyer, he told me in a way that he intended to be reassuring.) Rossini had a relative poisoned by e.coli in a shrimp scampi eaten at an Easter buffet. It seemed to me, as I writhed in bed with stomach cramps, that the food poisoning episode had involved a...what was it?...a Red Lobster in Fridley. I recalled the memorandum that I had written for Mr. Rossini and the complaint alleging food poisoning that I drafted. My head ached and my eyes burned and the dismal hours before dawn stretched out interminably.

Just as I fell asleep and was resting in relative peace, the alarm sounded. I rose, sorted through my exhibits for the deposition, and looked out the window – it was still dark, but a glimmer of ashen light rose over the warehouses and ponds like puddles strewn around terrain. I went downstairs, was greeted by another cheery girl behind front desk, and, then, ate some greasy sausage patties and eggs for breakfast at the buffet adjacent to the lobby.

The car rasped again when I started it, but the blood-red oil light didn’t activate. I drove tentatively, as if on slick ice, along the boulevards to the Orthopedic Clinic where the deposition was scheduled. The Half-Price Bookstore stood across the intersection, beyond a Burger King and a parking lot. The day was clear and windy. In the bright and seamless light, I recalled that the defendant in the scampi poisoning case had not been Red Lobster but, indeed, a Holiday Inn in Fridley, although obviously not the place that I was staying.

I am almost 62 years old. When will I become wise? When will I achieve some measure of competency in the world?

At the deposition, the other lawyer said that during the blizzard of the preceding day, he was driving through the city. Traffic was snarled and visibility was poor and there were innumerable crashes. Then, he said: "I passed out of the blizzard. I have never seen anything like it. Within one block, the sky cleared and there was no snow falling at all. Behind me, in the rear view mirror, I could see this dark wall of white. That was where the blizzard was happening. But I had come through it."

After the deposition, I went to the Half-Price Bookstore. I looked at books for an hour. The place was busy with suburban housewives, stay-at-home mothers with their babies and toddlers. I found several books that interested me but didn’t buy them. Being interested in a book is not the same as resolving to read it: the volumes in which I had a mild interest would just clutter my house and sit in a stack unread, probably, even on the day of my death.

On Unfavorable Semicircle

　

　

Atlas Obscura, a website, touts itself as your "the definitive guidebook and friendly tour-guide to the world’s most wondrous places." Well-designed and sleekly informative, the website does not disappoint, offering a compendium of eccentric tourist attractions, macabre museums, bizarre geological and natural phenomena, as well as enigmatic, crumbling ruins, both modern and ancient. The atlas accompanies descriptions of these places with photographs and maps showing the location of the wonder, including directions to the place and, when relevant, admission information. (I used Atlas Obscura in Oslo, Norway to locate the remarkably peculiar and, mostly shuttered, mausoleum of Emmanuel Vigeland – a pitch-black vault in a sedate suburb open to visitors only three hours a week.) The staples of Atlas Obscura are industrial ruins, weird rock formations, caverns, and the outdoor galleries of half-crazed outsider artists. Atlas Obscura was founded by Joshua Foer, the brother of the prominent novelist, Jonathan Foer, and Dylan Thuras. The website is operated from Brooklyn, New York.

Recently, Atlas Obscura has expanded. The site now broadcasts a blog called "Weekly Wonders" to its subscribers. For some reason, "Weekly Wonders" is transmitted about three times a week and, indeed, on some occasions, twice a day. The blog contains short essays on various curious and peculiar subjects as well as videos that the curators of the site think its followers might enjoy – as I write, there is a short video posted at the site showing a manta ray giving birth on the deck of a fishing vessel. Atlas Obscura has far flung correspondents who sometimes host events for the public – there is a chapter in Iowa and a very active Atlas Obscura society in Chicago that seems to have a close relationship with the Field Museum of Natural History.

On the morning of Thursday, February 25, 2016, I received a "Weekly Wonders" transmission from Atlas Obscura. "Unfavorable Semicircle," said to be the "creepiest" enigma on the internet, was among the "wonders" featured in the blog. The story of "Unfavorable Semicircle" is legitimately bizarre and troubling. So I will recount it here.

On March 10, 2015, someone established a You Tube channel. The channel is identified as ucizqZSNNGKhnc Rvj GlwNpWw – at least, this is the http for the You Tube site. Ten days lapsed before the first video was posted the site. This video was 4 seconds long and consisted of a silent image of a dull-brown field pierced in one location by tiny eye-shaped opening. (Some people described the eye-shaped opening as a "colored pixel.") In some accounts, a color band for calibrating image hue appears along the right side of the screen – I didn’t see this on the version that I watched. The video was labeled with a elliptical circle from which an arrow protrudes on its right side and, then, an apparently random series of numbers – the number was 230511. (The elliptical circle is, in fact, a stylized representation of the astrological symbol for Sagittarius, the Archer – viewed closely, the symbol shows a bow bent into a circle and about to release an arrow.) At intervals of ten to twenty minutes, additional videos were posted. Initially, these were four to five second silent images of the motionless brown field with the location of the eye-shaped penetration, however, varying from picture to picture. Thousands of these videos were posted, all of them labeled with the enigmatic Sagittarius symbol and a random number.

At the end of May, 2015, the channel went silent. After about ten days, Unfavorable Semicircle began posting videos again – also at a rate of four to six per hour around the clock. Around this time, the Voice first manifested itself. The Voice is indisputably male, muffled, and expressionless. The Voice sometimes says a number or names a letter. In one video, the Voice recites the alphabet. On the videos that I watched, I heard the Voice speak over the brown field marked with the speck in one corner – the Voice said something that the Reddit commentators identified as "zero" (to me, the Voice seemed to say something that sounded like "duero.")

Among the thousands of videos, apparently more than 88,000 as of this writing, are anomalous images. One image of the field with its mark lasts a full eleven hours – that video seems to have been shown in short snippets initially, then for 11 hours, and, then, was rebroadcast again for one hour. This video is silent. Another video is accompanied by an ear-splitting high-pitched whine. (Some Redditors think they hear a low-frequency rumble – a sound that triggers feelings of panic and hysteria in many people. I didn’t detect anything like this in the thirty or so images that I watched.) Several videos show blurred images although it is unclear to me whether the picture is anything other than an evanescent and abstract mist of color that changes from blue to purple or green to blue. LOCK and DELOCK are the most famous of the "Unfavorable Semicircle" anomalies. I have watched them both. DELOCK, first aired on December 28, 2015, shows a neutral field with white bars oriented at right angles to one another – the bars look faintly like calibration color-bars but without the spectrum of colors. DELOCK is accompanied by a repeated refrain, something that sounds like distorted calliope music that loops incessantly during two-and-a-half minute video. LOCK, which preceded DELOCK, is similar and features the Voice reciting something – people who have attended closely to these images claim to hear a remote, distant scream. I perked my ears for this clue but didn’t hear it.

After DELOCK, the Unfavorable Semicircle channel went silent for a few days. But beginning in February 2016, postings proliferated. Someone or something was posting videos on the site, generally the 4 second brown field shot with the eye-shaped hole, at a rate of three per minute or 180 new videos every hour. The last 28,000 videos bore a different label – these were marked BRILL followed by random numbers. On many of these videos, the Voice mutters a syllable or so – there is no music.

As of February 25, 2016, no one had any plausible explanation Unfavorable Semicircle postings. Initially, some suggested that the videos were generated by You Tube itself. Enigmatic posting earlier made to You Tube under the name Webdriver Torso – color bars and sounds of various pitches – were revealed to be testing apparatus that You Tube was using to monitor picture and sound quality. The You Tube images posted by Unfavorable Semicircle don’t seem to have any utility of this kind – with a few exceptions the postings are simply too drab and minimalist to be used to test for image/sound quality. Other commentators think the Unfavorable Semicircle images relate to some kind of "alternative reality" game, although no one has proposed the rules of this game or how it might be played. Although some Redditors, claim the postings are malicious and cause computers to crash, I don’t think there is any substantive evidence for this theory. The most probable explanation, perhaps, is that the You Tube videos are a coded signal to covert operatives – that is, that a very few of the postings buried in the horde of featureless abstract images convey some kind of message. If this explanation were true, Unfavorable Circle would be the visual equivalent of various "Numbers Channels" discovered post-World War Two by shortwave radio enthusiasts. (The most famous of these channels is one called "The Lancashire Poacher" – this channel broadcast a mechanically generated phrase of music from a folk-song, the Lancashire Poacher, followed by a woman’s voice reciting a random series of numbers. The frequency, believed to be managed by the British Secret Service MI5, continued broadcasting at intervals through 2009). About sixty or seventy "Numbers Channels" are known to exist and they are, indeed, very odd – probably artifacts of the Cold War since several of them seem to broadcast in Cuban-inflected Spanish or Russian. If Unfavorable Semicircle is espionage, a spy code of some kind with messages embedded among thousands of instances of electronic detritus, no one is even close to understanding how the system works.

At the end of the Atlas Obscura article, a Reddit exegete of Unfavorable Semicircle is quoted: Someone should tweet a message to You Tube, the commentator suggests, and ask them what is going on with Unfavorable Semicircle. Other Reddit voices, however, quickly intervene and indicate that You Tube probably doesn’t know what is going on with the site and that informing the company about the postings might lead to the channel being shut down. "In that case," someone posts, "we will never know the solution."

The story of Unfavorable Semicircle haunted me all day. Later in the afternoon, before going home, I accessed Atlas Obscura to re-read the article. The article was generally as I remembered it. However, when I clicked on the videos from Unfavorable Semicircle posted within the blog article, they didn’t play. Instead this legend appeared in the middle of the screen – This video is no longer available because the You Tube account associated with this video has been terminated. When I tried to access the channel on which Unfavorable Semicircle broadcast, a message appeared indicated that the account had been "suspended for multiple and severe violations of You Tube policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service."

I mentioned this story to my daughter, Angelica. She was using her mother’s computer to research web images of members of the band Rammstein. My daughter told me that Unfavorable Semicircle was part of the so-called "Dark Web." I asked her about that. "It is like ‘Suicide Mouse’," she told me. "If you look at the video, you go crazy and commit suicide." She mentioned "Sad Satan," a deep-web video that was thought to be a game promoting child sexual abuse. When I sat down at the computer to see if there was any update on Unfavorable Semicircle, my daughter said: "Don’t go into the Deep Web. If you go in there, the computer will crash and you will never get out." When I began to type the name "Unfavorable Semicircle" into the computer, she fled the room.

On Simpering

　

　

Nothing lasts. Even gestures of endearment have their season: they come and go. There is no always, nothing semper.

Consider, for example, an elegant mirror case intricately carved from elephant ivory. The little, palm-sized casket is decorated with deeply incised, almost three-dimensional images of a hustle-bustle of knights storming a castle. The castle is reduced to a synecdoche – a tower in which women in tall wimples overlook the besieging army. On the left side of the tower, a knight teetering atop a ladder has reached the parapet of the fortification. One of the women bends forward to tap him under the chin. On the opposite parapet, a knight in full armor, his face hidden in sheath of steel, also has climbed to the top of a ladder. He reaches out with his gauntlet to lightly touch the woman facing him under her chin. The mirror case was made in the second half of the 14^th century and represents an allegorical figure – the storming of the castle of love, that is, the conceit in courtly romance that wooing a woman was akin to an army besieging a heavily fortified castle. This object may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In the Metropolitan Museum in New York, you can see a gothic casket also carved from ivory in France in the middle of the 14^th century. The casket shows a man on horseback riding next to a woman also mounted. The man reaches out to the woman to tap her under chin. In fact, this gesture, the so-called "chin chuck," is ubiquitous in medieval art – you can see this curious caress in medieval breviaries and illustrations to romances. Sometimes, the Christ child reaches up to touch his mother’s chin. In Book III of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cryseda, Pandarus observes the lovers petting by chin-chucking. (A reference to "chucking" in Chaucer’s Nun-Priest’s Tale is a misdirection – "chuck" is also the onomatopoeic sound that chickens make.) Shakespeare’s Macbeth indirectly refers to this gesture of endearment when he calls Lady Macbeth his "dearest chuck." As late as the early 19^th century, people understood the gesture: Washington Irving describes someone "chucking a barmaid under her chin."

From these references, and many others that could be adduced, we understand that people showed affection from around 1300 (and probably much earlier) until the 1850's by tapping one another under the chin. Sometimes, the man originates the gesture; sometimes, it is the woman who performs the endearment. Children chuck their mother’s chins; mothers chuck their children’s chins. The verb "chuck," derived from old French "chocer" – "shock" or "impact" – had an erotic meaning. Today, however, I don’t think any chins get chucked except for furry ones – people often "chuck" the chins of their dogs and cats. As an erotic gesture, or, even, a form of endearment, however, the chin-chuck has become extinct.

A poem by an unknown contemporary of Robert Herrick raises a similar question about the verb "simper." Here is the complete poem:


Sweet she was, as kind a love

As ever fetter’d swain;

Never such a dainty one

Shall man enjoy again;

Set a thousand on a row

I forbid that any show

Ever the like of her,

Hey nonny nonny noe.

Face she had of filbert hue,

And bosom’d like a swan;

Back had of bended yew,

And waisted by a span.

Hair she as black as crow

From the head unto the toe,

Down, down, all over her,

Hey nonny nonny noe.

She smiled like a holy-day

And simper’d like the spring;

She prank’d it like a popinjay

And like a swallow sing;

She trip’d it like a barren doe,

She strutted like a gor-crow,

Which made the men so fond of her,

Hey nonny nonny noe.

My initial interest in this 17^th century poem is the meaning of the line: "(she) simper’d like the spring." What does this mean? Ordinarily, the word "simpering" carries a negative meaning. To "simper" is to engage in a kind of hypocritical dissembling of emotion; we think of "simpering" as meretriciously feigning humility. But are there other meanings of the verb that are (or once were) positive – after all, the heroine of this verse is said to "simper" like the Spring? In northern European poetry, the season of Spring has an overwhelmingly positive denotation – so is "simper" a word that has migrated in its meaning from something praiseworthy and positive to the dark side of the lexicon?

This inquiry is essentially philological. Therefore, analysis first requires that we locate and interpret the word as used by other writers.

Shakespeare’s King Lear provides the canonical application of "simper." (In Shakespeare’s case, it is often uncertain whether he uses the word according to then-existing meaning or whether his usage of the word thereafter defines it.) At Act 4, scene 6, the mad Lear condemns sexual hypocrisy in excoriating terms:


Behold yond simpering dame

Whose face between her forks presages snow

That minces virtue and does shake the head

To hear of pleasure’s name;

The fitchew, not the soiled horse goes to ‘t

With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs

Though women all above.

Lear asserts that women "simper" – that is, dissemble with coy smiles – and suggests disapproval of sexual activity. (Shakespeare’s simpering dame is a monster: her face shows between her "forks", that is the twin peaks of her wimpled headdress – but, clearly, "forks" also means legs: accordingly, the "dame" has her head somehow thrust between her thighs, at her crotch or the "fork" of her body. Her simpering smile "presages snow" – that is, frigidity and sexual abstinence both in her face and between her thighs. But this prudish appearance is deceitful – in fact, the woman is truly monstrous, a "centaur" below the waist.)

Shakespeare application of the word is consistent with Philip Sidney’s usage, a few years earlier: a woman is said to appear "with a made countenance about her mouth, between simpering and smiling." In this context, we find simpering and smiling in close proximity just as we find the words adjacent in the poem cited above: "She smiled like a Holy-Day/And simpered like the Spring." "Smiling" in this setting seems sincere, while the "simper" is the contrived caricature of the smile.

Alexander Pope uses "simper" in a manner similar to the examples above: he cites "the conscious simper and the jealous leer" – again emphasizing the deceitfulness of the simper: it is "consciously" made. The word is invested with the same meaning to the present day. In Slate 2013, the singer Raffi is said to be "notable for his softly simpering style." Other examples from works as disparate as the Go Set a Watchman (Harper Lee) and The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan) use the word to mean falsely coquettish or coy affectation. Although the exact origin of "simper" is unknown, etymologists suggest that the word migrated to England from the Dutch. The Dutch use the word "zimpferlik" to mean "affected" or "ostentatious." In turn, "zimpferlik" seems to derive from the German word "zimpfer", an adjective with a related, less negative meaning – in 16^th century German, the word simply means "elegant" or "delicate."

(George Herbert, as in many other respects, is an outlier. Herbert died in 1633 and, therefore, lived between the generations of Shakespeare and Milton. He was a cleric who did not publish his intensely personal and idiosyncratic poetry in his lifetime. Herbert in the poem "The Search’ describes the poet’s despair at God’s seeming remoteness – he searches for signs of God’s presence everywhere and reports that looking skyward:


Yet can I mark how

Stars above

Simper and shine.
Here, most commentators would define "simper" in terms of an obsolete sense meaning "so sparkle" or "scintillate." However, I’m not convinced. Herbert’s speaker is appalled by God’s apparent absence from the world – thus, the sparkling of the stars seems to him to be false and meretricious. In fact, my guess is that Herbert also meant that "simper" suggest a coy or coquettish suggestion of something that is withdrawn and kept apart from speaker. The "simpering" stars are hypocritical in that they suggest God’s grandeur when, in fact, He is hidden. I like the notion that the sparkling of stars is a form of "simpering". Thus:


Simper, Simper little star

How I wonder what you are...
Or the Marine Corps motto: Simper Fi – that is, "simpering in a faithful manner.")

This philological excursion is directed toward discovering whether there is an alternative meaning to "simper" without the negative connotations of that word. No evidence demonstrates that "simper" means anything but to smile in a dissembling, coy, and affected manner. And, of course, this meaning is warranted on closer reading. Influenced by the powerfully evocative line "she smiled like a Holy Day" – the line used by Auden as the title to the poem in his famous 1938 anthology, The Oxford Book of Light Verse – I have misread the poem. (Auden seems to have lifted the line from the verse to name the poem – he also alters the orthography slightly in the title: "She smiled like a holiday" – not "Holy Day" as appears in the text. It is interesting that this title influenced me to misunderstand the whole poem – we should not underestimate the effect that a title has on our perception of a text.)

Inspected more carefully, this anonymous poem does not seem to praise the lady described. To the contrary, the terms of approbation used are ironic. Irony is famously difficult to ascertain, although, perhaps, not in this context. What does the poem really say about the lady that is its subject?

Swains, it seems, are enamored with the girl – therefore, her appeal is rural, or "country" as Shakespeare might say with the accent on the first syllable of that word. Indeed, it appears that the lass is available to be "enjoyed". The poem tells us that she is one of "pretty maids" all in a row – an allusion to the nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary, quite contrary" – that allusion suggests that we should consider this country girl’s merits, perhaps "contrariwise"; in other words, what seems to be praise might, instead, be sarcasm.

The inventory of the girl’s charms supports this "contrariwise" reading of the poem. The lady’s skin is "filbert hue" – in other words, she is a "nut-brown girl. This complexion signifies that her skin is tanned – contrary to received fashion and canons of beauty in the 17^th century. (Pale was good; sun-tanned skin suggested vulgarity, the complexion of a milk-maid.) Her back is like a "bended yew". This simile is puzzling – yew trees produced flexible wood much-prized for use in making bows. A back like a "bended yew" suggests sexual flexibility – I presume that the meaning is similar to the line in the blues tune: "Rock me baby, rock me good and long / Rock me like my back ain’t got no bone." The young woman’s waist is grotesquely small – a "span" or the distance between thumb and the tip of the little finger, in most people about nine inches. She is hairy – the poem quibbles on the meaning of "down," here both a direction and soft brown fur.

The only image conventionally denoting beauty is the likeness of the girl’s breast to a swan – that is, soft and white. However, the animal similes with which the poem concludes undercut any notion that the woman is conventionally beautiful. She "pranks" –that is, dresses ostentatiously – like "a popinjay." A "popinjay" is a vain and conceited person. She "trips" it (prances) like a "a barren doe." (The phrase means exactly what it says – a female deer that is sterile and has no fawns; this is not the forum to enter the longstanding debate among outdoorsmen and hunters as to whether there is such a thing as a "barren doe." Generally, hunters who saw a doe without fawns assumed the female deer was "barren" – that is, sterile; this assumption arises from the idea that does were always expected to be seen in the company of their fawns. In fact, without careful anatomical analysis, it can not be reliably determined whether a doe is sterile or not.) Finally, the woman is likened to a "gorcrow." A "gorcrow" is a "gore-crow," that is a "carrion" crow – probably not something to which a young woman would wish to be compared. Complicating the picture, however, is the reference to her voice like a swallow singing. A swallow’s song is not unpleasant and, in fact, would be found melodious by most people – it is certainly not the harsh and abrasive cry of the crow. Accordingly, the verse mixes imagery that is adverse to the lady with praise – the white bosom of the swan, the tiny waist (perhaps?), and the swallow’s song all seem calculated as praise.

This curious mixture of praise undercut by ironic metaphors is exemplified in the central lines in the poem – the girl "smiles" like a Holy Day, and "simpers" like the Spring. The smile of the Holy Day seems unambiguously praiseworthy and positive. But it is equally clear that the "simper" of Spring is invested with negative qualities – Spring pretends to kindly warmth and fruitfulness, but this smile can be deceitful: a cold night might bring frost and ice and violent storms may imperil the growing crops.

The contrast between the authentic smile and meretricious simpering characterizes the poet’s ambivalence about the lady described. The little lyric exemplifies the vehement paradoxes of romantic love – the object of desire is, at once, adored and reviled. Shakespeare’s sonnets supply, perhaps, the best example of this effect. In Sonnet 130, the dark lady is described as having "black wires" for hair; her breath is not "perfume’d" but said to "reek" and her breasts are not alabaster but rather "dun." Nonetheless, the poet persists in his devotion, although his mistress is not a goddess treading upon this earth:


And, yet, by heaven, I think my love rare

As any she belied by false compare.

As always, Shakespeare’s succinct brilliance renders the other, later poem superfluous. There is nothing in the verse Auden called "She smiled like a holiday" that is not more forcefully and effectively expressed in Sonnet 130. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s sonnet suggests an application to the verse Auden anthologizes in his 1938 volume. Ultimately, what is it that "simpers"? – the lady, of course, but, also, the metaphors of conventional love poetry that the verse subverts. Shakespeare unmasks an element of "simpering" insincerity in conventional love poetry. As Sonnet 130 reminds us, "false compare" is the literary equivalent of "simpering." An inauthentic metaphor, particularly, in a love poem is one way that language "simpers."

On a Mechanical Bird

　

　

　

I don’t recall exactly where I acquired the robot-bird. But I think it was a gift of uncertain provenance received at my mother-in-law’s house. The weekend before Christmas, my mother-in-law hosts a gathering at her home in Albert Lea and gifts are exchanged. This year, I drove back to Austin with a couple of plastic bags loaded with gifts. In one of those bags, I discovered a small box containing a red plastic cardinal. The cardinal was made in China and the legend on the box assured me that the little plastic effigy was equipped with a motion detector so that it would sing when something stirred in its presence. I believe that the bird, about three inches tall with bright eyes and red folded wings, was designed to perch on the branch of a Christmas tree – at least, there was a small clamp between its black wire feet.

At home, I removed the automaton from its box. A strand of filmy plastic extruded from the bird’s underside. I extracted the rectal integument from the cardinal and, immediately, it began to chirp at me. The mechanical bird’s song was a repetitive melody comprised of three different sounds. First, the bird made a shrill noise like "Soo-eee Soo-eee." This was followed by two chirps best approximated by that onomatopoeic word, "Chirp - Chirp". A metallic rat-a-tat-tat followed, a noise that simulated bird song only by its proximity to sounds that were vaguely avian – that rat-a-tat-tat might also have been a sound plausibly associated with rocket-fired laser beams dissolving oncoming enemy aliens in an arcade game. The bird’s cry was rhythmic, high-pitched and easily audible from a distance of thirty or forty feet – if I set the bird in another room, I could hear it singing across the distance, even with a shut door intervening.

The cardinal’s song was, indeed, motion-activated. If nothing moved, the robot-bird didn’t sing. However, the photo-electric detectors were sensitive – on occasion, I heard the bird mysteriously crying-out in an empty room, animated, I suppose, by motes of dust dancing in a sunbeam, or an unstable pile of books and magazines slightly shifting or, perhaps, the shadow cast by a car passing in the alleyway so as to cause the light to flicker in the vacant space. Maybe, ghosts crowded around the little bird, curious as to its mechanism, and this caused it to sing.

I brought the bird to my law office and set it on my bookshelf near the door opening into my room. When my secretary or associates entered my office, the bird greeted the. Whether this appealed to you or an annoyance depended on your disposition. Some of staff took to stooping and bending to avoid activating the bird. I suppose they found its repetitive shrill cries an annoyance.

Hephaestus, the lame smithy to the Olympian gods, was said to have fabricated singing automaton birds from iron. The Greek engineer, Ancytas, designed a mechanical pigeon capable of flight round 400 BC – it is not recorded whether that prodigy could also sing. Various Chinese emperors amused themselves with robot-birds equipped with the power of song. In the fifth century BC, the Mohist adept, Lu Ban, built a wooden bird capable of remaining aloft for three days – it was, I suppose, a kind of drone. Of course, Hans Christian Andersen refers to singing Chinese bird automatons in his famous story of the emperor and nightingale. In that tale, we are told that a Chinese emperor owned a live nightingale that sang most beautifully. Concerned that the little bird might die, the emperor commissioned an artisan to make a replica of the nightingale capable of song simulating the live animal. The replica was so beautiful and sang so dependably that the emperor preferred it to the actual nightingale and, indeed, even allowed that creature to escape into the forest. The automaton failed and could not be repaired and, so, the emperor sickened. As he lay dying, he heard a sweet song – the actual nightingale had returned from its haunts in the forest and was singing to him. The living bird’s song was an antidote to the emperor’s malaise and he rallied. In this fable, we detect several themes revolving around mechanical singing birds – first, the robot-bird seems associated with the human desire for immortality, the hope to attain a prosthetic, and, therefore, deathless body; second, the story rouses a sense of pathos in those who hear it – we imagine the living nightingale disregarded and singing forlornly in the dark, green woods and, then, consider the fate of the broken toy-bird, the damaged robot that is cast away, a source, as it were, for all of mutilated and pathetic automatons in later fiction and films, for instance, the disfigured robots in Spielberg’s A.I.

Cuckoo clock makers in the Black Forest around 1730 began installing singing birds in their time-pieces. Accordingly, in Western Europe, automaton birds were first manufactured as horological devices. (In Enlightenment France, a duck was built by Jacques Vaucanson to simulate, not bird song, but the alimentary canal of a fowl – food was fed into one end of the automaton, digested and, then, excreted at the other end. This machine is precursor to the nightmare Cloaca, an immense art work by Wim Delvoye that transforms food into fecal material. The golden robotic bird emitting song has as its counterpart the mechanical duck intestine producing shit.) By the middle of the 19^th century, elaborate bird-robots were built by Parisian toy manufacturers, particularly Bontems and Roullet & Decamps – these birds were, in effect, intricately constructed music boxes. When the cloisonne box was opened onto its velvet interior, a small iridescent humming bird was disclosed perched on a shell of mother-of-pearl – a wasp-sized automaton that fluttered its tiny wings and sang loudly. Such mechanisms were expensive and wonderfully useless – to own and collect such things was a symbol for decadence, esthetic folly, an embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s dictum that all art is perfectly useless.

Yeats probably knew the story of the Abbasid Caliph, Al-Muqtadir, the ruler of Baghdad in the early tenth-century. Al-Muqtadir was ineffective as a warrior – he lost territory to the Greeks and had to pay massive ransoms to retrieve noblemen captured in those debacles. The Caliph was more interested in his collection of robotic singing birds, mechanisms that delighted him with their chirping perched on boughs and twigs of trees made entirely from gold. Al-Muqtadir lingered in his harem, delighting in its pleasures and savoring the singing of his flocks of mechanical birds. As the kingdom collapsed, the people revolted in the streets. Again, the automaton bird is a symbol of decadence and self-indulgence. The City Guards dragged Al-Muqtadir from his seraglio and hacked him to death outside the gates to Baghdad.

Yeats was appalled by "decrepit age," a condition that he said was attached to him "like the tail of a dog." In his two great poems about Byzantium, Yeats imagines a singing mechanical bird as a prosthetic body, a machine made from gems and intricate enmeshed clockwork to replace the mire of flesh and blood. In "Sailing to Byzantium," the poet proclaims that his physical body, a "dying animal," will be replaced by this "artifice of eternity":


Once out of nature I shall never take

my bodily form from any natural thing

but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
(The song of a mechanical bird is repetitive – notice Yeats heavy, soporific repetition of the long-syllables "form" and "gold": goldsmiths, gold and gold enamelling, a golden bough, all of these words chiming with the "om" pronounced in "Byzantium" and "to come." The bird’s song here doesn’t so much arouse the drowsy emperor as plunge him deeper into revery and, then, sleep.)

This same mechanical bird appears as well in "Byzantium". In that poem, the automaton symbolizes the prosthetic machine that replaces the flesh, a kind of "death-in-life":


Miracle, bird or golden handiwork

More miracle than bird or handiwork,

Planted on the starlit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud,

In glory of changeless metal,

Common bird or petal,

And all complexities of mire or blood.
Like the mechanical bird in Andersen’s fairy tale, the emperor scorns the "common bird." But Yeats, of course, expects his readers to recall that fable and understand that the salvation offered by the golden robotic bird is both quixotic and fatally flawed.

My red-molded plastic bird flashed against the winter, a droplet of blood amidst the grey gears of blizzard and ice-storm. But like all mechanical things, the cardinal was prone to fail and, ultimately, its machinery broke-down. In mid-January, the robot-bird began to sing without stopping. The automaton’s motion sensor either malfunctioned in its "on" mode or became manically sensitive detecting the Brownian motion of air molecules or minute tremors in the crust and mantle of the Earth or, perhaps, the filmy spirits of the dead as they wandered here and there. The bird’s cries contained unabated for several days, extending across a weekend when my office was mostly vacant. Conceived as an unceasing song, the cardinal’s melody took on the character of a lament – at first, I detected a tone of sullen resentment in the chirping that, later, lapsed into indignant resignation and, then, exhaustion: endless iterations of the same mechanical song looping again and again and, as is wont to happen with minimalist music, absorbing emotions and timbre circumambient to the repeated sound. As the cardinal’s cries continued, the robot was banished to more and more distant locales. After a day or so, the bird was placed in the men’s toilet, perched uneasily on the urinal. But the tiles in the toilet echoed and seem to redouble the vigor of the bird’s song and, so, someone placed the automaton in the medicine cabinet, behind a mirror reflecting the strained and haggard features of those condemned to hear the bird’s endlessly repetitive chirping. Confined in the medicine cabinet, the cardinal continued to sing, prompting me, at last, to place the bird in an basement room where old, closed files rest in their thousands on bare wooden shelves. At the corner of that room, an ancient steel desk occupies an alcove and in a crooked and grim space under a flight of descending steps, there is a file cabinet that seems to have been retrieved from a military installation or some long-forgotten, and long-shuttered asylum for the insane – a drab khaki-colored filing cabinet, apparently, immensely heavy, its corners and sides dented as if it had been rolled down the side of a rocky ravine, a metal boulder, a meteorite with drawers in its forgotten crater in the bowels of the law office. I found the filing cabinet, cold as ice to the touch, completely empty and, so, I secreted the cardinal in that place, wrapped in a ragged towel and lying on its side in the cabinet’s top drawer. The bird continued to sing defiantly sensing ghostly motions that were completely concealed from me.

A day later, the cold sarcophagus of the filing cabinet seemed to have affected the bird’s song. The cardinal’s tones were now metallic, a kind of tapping at subterranean walls, each chirp distorted and raw. Periodically, I visited the file room and looked at the shelves groaning with the weight of a thousand transactions, innumerable divorces and criminal charges, deaths and personal injuries, cars shattered on lonely highways and partnerships defunct or wrecked by avarice or misunderstanding, wills and estate disputes, bankruptcies, dwellings invaded by water or vermin, traumatic amputations, pre-nuptial agreements and adoptions – the whole vast and variegated pattern of human life and, all of this opposed, it seemed, by the failing voice of the cardinal, the robot’s cries increasingly distraught, fragmented, heard as if at immense distance. And, then, at last, the mechanical bird stopped singing.

A week passed. One morning, as I parked my car next to our law office, I saw a curious black angular package lying in the scurf of ice and slush in the driveway. I didn’t pay any attention to the strange valise until later, when I met my partner in our break room. As he poured coffee for himself, my partner said that someone had knotted a dead crow around the handle on the law firm’s front door. "I got a paper towel and pulled the crow out of the door and tossed it in the parking lot," he said. This made me curious and I went outside, approaching the black parcel lying on the ice. On closer inspection, I saw that it was, indeed, a large crow, frozen stiff as iron, with its wings outstretched so that the dead animal made a roughly rectangular silhouette against the crumbling ice. The crow’s head as bent to an odd angle and both its eyes had been pecked out so that the carcass had a peculiarly abstract appearance. I could see no wound on the desiccated animal. I plucked the dead crow out of the winter’s debris and set it atop a garbage can. Later several other crows approached the dead bird, worried it a bit with their beaks, and, then, knocked the carcass back onto the driveway, darting up to perch on an overhead power line. The crows saluted the grey, colorless day with a few disgruntled cries.

"What does it mean?" my partner asked me.

"I don’t know," I said.

"Someone doesn’t like us much," my partner remarked.

Of course, we are lawyers and have many enemies.

That afternoon, the red plastic cardinal revived. As I stood in the mortuary of closed files, the bird began to sing once more. The robot-cardinal’s chirping was muffled by the heavy metal filing cabinet in which it was immured. I slid open the filing cabinet and picked up the plastic bird. It sang with renewed and vibrant energy, sounding shrill and piercing notes. Some new and sinister energy suffused the automaton and, when I set it on the shelf, the cardinal was unbalanced, toppling over and refusing to be set upright, perhaps, tipsy with the volume of its cries. It was too much, of course, and, so, I imprisoned the bird in the filing cabinet again. When I checked on the automaton the next day, it was silent. The bird rested on its side in the empty upper drawer of the filing cabinet – there is nothing so inert has a robot that has stopped working.

In the summer, someone brought their drone to the office. We stood in the parking lot as the man programmed the little flying machine. Then, its rotors buzzed and the drone rose upward, tentatively at first, tilting this way and that, but, then, climbing high above the parked cars and, even, the utility poles and their crisscrossing power lines from which the crows were wont to regard the shingles on our roof and the tops of the trees where the squirrels were nested. The drone broadcast pictures back to us – out-of-body images of the bald spot on the top and back of my head. Standing on the asphalt, heads cocked up att he drone, we seemed particularly weak, mortal, naked to the pitiless sky. We looked at ourselves from the drone’s aerial vantage, watching the images on the drone operator’s computer tablet. It was warm and sunny. The drone dropped down to chest height and hovered among us. A starling in a nearby tree rendered its dismay at the invasion of its aerial realm with a skeptical and raucous cry.

On Urological Symptoms

　

　

　

Professor S–, emeritus at the University of Minnesota, is eloquent and speaks with the precise and expressively allusive diction of a literature scholar. Although his specialty is modern American novelists, writers like Robert Stone and Norman Mailer, Professor S– is widely read and flavors his discourse with quotations from Dostoevsky, Kafka, and, of course, Shakespeare.

The business of adorning one’s conversation with allusions is tricky, a balancing act. If the citation is too familiar, the allusion risks condemnation as a cliche or a mere truism. Alternatively, one who cites to a text that is too abstruse runs the risk of seeming to speak nonsense. An unattributed reference to a barren and obscure verse from Spenser or the Lotus Sut ra may simply mystify listeners and cast doubt on the sanity or good faith of the speaker. Some literary works such as Hamlet or certain poems by Keats or Robert Frost or Edgar Alan Poe are so well-known that they furnish quotations to their cognoscenti only from those textual pitches and declivities less frequently traversed by readers. It was a quote of this latter kind that caught my attention during my recent lunch with Professor S–.

The esteemed scholar was indexing for my dismay a variety of physical ailments from which had suffered during the interim between our luncheons – distance and scheduling prevents me from seeing this gentleman more than every three months or so. We were seated in a pizza place near the intersection of two thoroughfares famous in the city, a quiet place where familiar drunks sat on their familiar barstools as the morning turned the corner into a gloomy afternoon, a dark day a week or so before Christmas. Professor S– explained to me certain urological afflictions that filled me with dismay and nauseous horror – I have an intense terror of blood, particular swampy clotted blood, and hematuria induces such vertiginous disquiet that I am apt to swoon. Fortunately, I had ordered a tall beer and could sip on that beverage while Professor S– spoke, taking some solace in the slight blurry warmth that the alcohol produced – it was if a tiny discontinuity had opened between Professor S–‘s words and my audition of those words, a little fissure that was sufficient to keeping his horrific tale at the slight, but significant, distance.

Professor S– could not be faulted for his narrative. I had asked him directly how he was feeling and, further, made inquiries as to his health and he was merely providing me an answer to these questions. Furthermore, Professor S– had warned me that I might find his account disquieting. Here is what he had said:

"If I were tell the whole story it would make your hairs stand on end like quills upon the fearful porpentine."

The expression "quills upon the fearful propentine" baffled me. "What is a propentine?" I asked, thinking that he was referring to some kind of aquatic animal, perhaps a hybrid between a terrapin and a porpoise. "Porpentine?" he said. "It means ‘porcupine’ – it’s from Hamlet." I told him that I thought the quote was very wonderful.

When I returned home, that phrase involving the "porpentine" had dissolved a little in my mind, become as slippery as a stepping stone a half-inch under the swift-flowing waters of a mountain stream. "If I tell you what happened," I said to my wife,"your will be as shocked as the fretted propentine." The adjective "fearful" had dropped from my imagination and I now pronounced the "porpentine" to be "fretted". The notion of a "fretted porpentine" seemed to wonderfully apt that I used the phrase a number of times to amuse myself and those with whom I was speaking.

A few weeks later, I read Hamlet and tracked the quotation to its source. In Act I, scene V, Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost and has a colloquy with that spirit. The ghost tells Hamlet that he is enduring the torments of purgatory, a fate so awful that


To tell the secrets of my prison house

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.

"Porpentine", I see, is an old word for "porcupine" – derived from Latin "porcu," meaning, of course, "pig". "Spine" seems to be a translation from the Greek "acantha" into Latin as "spina" or Old French "espina", meaning "thorny" or "spiny." Hence, "porpentine" means "spiny pig."

But how I had substituted "fretted" for "fearful"? Perhaps, I had made no substitution at all. Several definitions for "porpentine" cited Hamlet at Act I, scene V, and those quotations glossed the usage of the word with the phrase "propentine." Indeed, all other editions of Hamlet that I consulted seemed to prefer the reading "fretful" porpentine for " fearful" porpentine.

"Fret" is a word derived from various old English and Germanic terms for eating ravenously or like an animal. "Fressen" in German means, in effect, to devour one’s food like an animal – descriptions of humans eating use the word "essen"; cows and dogs at their victuals are subject to forms of "fressen". Thus, "fretting" had come to mean being "eaten away" by something. The "eating away" can be literal as in the "fretwork" stone ornamentation around a Gothic arch – the "fretwork" is a arabesque pattern, vaguely floral and symmetrical cut into (or ‘eaten out of") the stone above an medieval Cathedral window. Metaphorically, to "fret" is to be devoured by ravenous and uncontrollable fears or worries. Hence, describing a porpentine as "fretful" makes perfectly logical sense: first, the little creature is worried and fearful, thus inducing its prickly noli me tengare reaction, the erection of a portcullis of quills around the rodent; second, the erect sphere of quills englobing the animal is like "fretwork", that is, an elaborate spiky pattern replete with sharp and rebarbative edges. Not surprisingly, therefore, most sources attribute the quality of "fretful" to the porpentine imaged by the Ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Shakespeare’s imagination operates associatively. If he happens upon a word or metaphor that is particularly apt to the concerns of his play, Shakespeare reiterates that expression, playing variations on the theme with an obsessive intensity. Clearly, something is fretting, or worrying, the body politic in Denmark. Hamlet’s brooding is a species of fretting. And, as a consequence, variants on the word "fret" appeas twice in the play – in addition, to the phantom adjective that I imagined modifying propentine (a place in the text where the word doesn’t appear).

In Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet notes that he is melancholy and "has lost all mirth (and) forgone all custom of exercises" – that is, abandoned his normal routine. Hamlet says that the world has lost its savor and seems a "sterile promontory," a "congregation" of "foul and pestilential vapors". He asserts this perception notwithstanding the fact that earth is objectively beautiful, its "brave o’erhanging firmament...a majestical roof fretted with golden fire." In this application, "fretted" means adorned – although an adornment that is a form of ulceration: the firmament is pierced with openings through which the fire of the empyrean shines. Later in the same act, Hamlet reproaches Guildenstern for manipulatively interrogating him:

"S’blood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe. Call me what instrument you will, although you fret me, you can not play upon me."

Here the word "fret" has a double meaning – that is, "harass" or "annoy" and, also, to play an instrument by putting fingers on its "frets" (that is, ridges to guide fingering on a stringed instrument.)

The shadow of these words falls across our "propentine". As a consequence, I imagine the quills of the animal standing upright to signify that the beast, like Hamlet, is "fretful."

In my mind, the word "porcupine" is Native American, even, perhaps, derived from the Lakota. I know this is untrue but the idea persists because of certain of my enthusiasms. One of the pleasures of driving across South Dakota is tuning your radio to KILI, 90.3 FM, the voice of the Lakota nation. KILI was founded by Russell Means, the Lakota activist in 1983, and the station broadcasts from its transmitter tower at Porcupine, South Dakota, a tiny hamlet on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The signal is powerful and you can track it from the Missouri breaks at Chamberlain all the way past the Badlands and to Rapid City. KILI’s broadcasts are peculiarly endearing: the station frequently plays requests, mostly a combination of head-banger heavy metal and classic blues interrupted occasionally by traditional drum-circle songs. Since many Indians are war veterans, the announcer often dedicates his tunes to the "brothers" in the VA hospital in Sturgis, old warrior alcoholics watched over by the sacred mountain, Bear Butte. There’s a lot of dead air on KILI, long intervals of silence when, it seems, that the DJ has left the room, and, even, perhaps, the station. Between halting, incoherent interviews, KILI plays public service announcements – advisories about fetal alcohol syndrome or pot lucks at local churches or "honor rides": on the reservation, it seems, that people are always gathering in processions to ride on horseback (or, sometimes, on motorcycles) across the beautiful and barren land – the reddish serrated teeth of badlands always on the horizon – to commemorate something or other. The announcers giggle and make inside jokes: on KILI’s website today there is an effusive article about the installation of new air conditioner in the studio at Porcupine. Most of all, I like the way that the on-air disc jockeys pronounce "porcupine." At KILI, the fretful "porcupine" is a "porky-pine".

On being eaten by a Lion

　

　

　

It goes without saying that people are most interested in seeing things that they are not supposed to see. The lure of the forbidden and the obscene, meaning that which should not be shown, is powerful. It is the nature of the images forbidden, however, that changes with each generation.

As an obedient child in a one-television household, I did my homework at night, watched a sit-com or two with my father, and, then, retired to bed. People in our home rose early in the morning to make their way to work – it was a long commute for my father from Eden Prairie to the Stinson Boulevard Honeywell plant a couple miles north of the University of Minnesota where he was employed. As a result, late night TV was generally banned. Unlike many of my generation, I didn’t grow up watching Johnny Carson on the Late Show.

Once, however, I recall that I stayed up late to watch that program. I may have been in sixth or seventh grade and, at this melancholy remove in time, can’t exactly remember what occasion authorized that viewing – it may have been an appearance by Orson Welles, a person that my father admired and that he usually encouraged us to watch with him. (Curiously enough, the other celebrity that my father admired and that he would let us stay up late to watch on the talk shows was Truman Capote.) In any event, some long-forgotten actress or chanteuse was occupying Johnny’s couch and chirping to him about her recent safari in Africa. The actress, a diminutive and busty blonde bombshell, said that her safari had seen many wild animals including lions. In a hushed voice, the woman announced that the company in her Land Rover had come upon several lions feasting on the carcass of a wildebeest or gazelle that the animals had killed. She told Johnny and the audience that she had a film clip showing the majestic lions and their prey. Johnny turned solemnly to the audience and issued this warning: "We will show this film, but I need to warn you that the pictures of the lions eating their meal are not too pretty and you may be upset by watching this." The actress batted her eyes for the camera and, then, the film clip was shown. People in the studio audience gasped as they watched a lioness tearing bloody gobbets from the flanks of the dead animal. I recall the carcass’ rib bones were exposed like a macabre ivory xylophone. I am writing about something that I saw more than 45 year ago – clearly the appeal of the forbidden inscribed these images in my memory.

A few weeks ago, I was channel-surfing and happened upon a re-run of an episode from The Walking Dead, a zombie-apocalypse series widely popular during the last couple years. In the show, four men and a couple of women had been captured by a group of desperadoes holed-up in a ruinous slaughterhouse. A mob of zombies, badly decayed and with their exposed inner organs leaking suppurating fluids, staggered around the perimeter of the place, periodically pawing with necrotic hands at the chain-link fence. Unfortunately for the six prisoners, their fellow survivors in the embattled slaughterhouse had become cannibals and planned to feast on the flesh of the protagonists of the series. A burly men dressed in gore-spattered leather aprons, swinging an iron club like a baseball bat, bashed in the brains of three of the prisoners. The dead men and women flopped forward, head down in a zinc tub and one of the cannibals slit their throats so that gouts of blood spurted into the basin. The other three prisoners knelt next to the tub, awaiting their turn to be butchered, trembling and crying out for mercy. All of this was staged in a grisly blood-encrusted industrial run replete with corroded hooks and chainsaws. Just as the butchers were about to smash in the heads of their remaining prisoners, someone burst into the room armed with a shotgun. The man with the shotgun fired at the butchers and the impact of the shots hurled the cannibals against the concrete-block walls imprinted them with huge rosettes of gore. At the same moment, a crowd of shuffling, mewling zombies broke through the perimeter and everyone was engaged in mowing these monsters down with machine guns, bullets ripping the zombies into writhing fragments. The three survivors at the zinc basin that was rapidly filling with blood rose to their feet and vamoosed down a shadowy corridor, fleeing through a kind of cooler where the flanks and torsos of butchered humans hung on hooks. At the far end of the cooler, the escapees encountered another crowd of zombies, but, fortunately, there were chainsaws available and the good guys made short work of the walking dead. All of this mayhem was filmed in close-up with the utmost attention to anatomical detail and realism. As my readers will know, The Walking Dead is a prime-time show and exceedingly popular with audiences of all ages.

For the Victorians, sexual images were forbidden and, therefore, much prized. The Reverend Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey, began his life under Queen Victoria although he died in 1932, a victim, more or less, of forbidden sexual fruit and a highly publicized and calamitous photograph. It’s a peculiar story and, I think, worth reprising.

Three images and a picture that wasn’t taken define Rev. Davidson’s curious career. One picture shows a middle-aged man with commanding presence standing in the pulpit. The man has fierce eyes, an aquiline nose, and regular features. He wears the vestments of an Anglican clergyman with a row of medals in military style deployed in an even row across one side of his chest. Davidson grips the side of the pulpit with one hand; the other hand is locked around the edge of a slanting book-stand on which the pastor’s Bible is located and Davidson seems to lean slighly forward. A garland of ivy or interlaced evergreen decorates the pulpit. The preacher’s heavy brow and dark embattled eyes make him look slightly like the actor, Boris Karloff. The two other photographs are much more peculiar and I will detail them when the events that they depict arise my narrative: one of them shows the fully clad Davidson standing next to a naked teenager; the other picture shows a big crowd of dark-clad merrymakers watching as Davidson pokes his head out of a barrel. There is no picture to stand for the final event in Davidson’s life.

Harold Davidson was born in 1875 to a family for many generations comprised of Anglican clergy. Although he was a rebellious boy, Davidson’s parents felt that he was destined to follow the family trade and become a pastor. As a teenager, he was sent to Croyden town, a neighborhood in south London where he lived with two aunts and attended public school in preparation for theological training. Davidson was an indifferent student and stage-struck. While still in school, he began performing as a comedian on the British equivalent of vaudeville stages – we can imagine him as a contemporary of Charley Chaplin and Stan Laurel, although, perhaps, a few years older than those two actors. Davidson’s routine was apparently very funny and he was quite successful, touring Great Britain for several years. He acted as supporting man in a number of London comedies, including Charley’s Aunt. During this time, Davidson retained the values of an Anglican clergyman – he was a strict teetotaler, incorporated Bible readings into his schtick, and, by and large, avoided trouble with women. Beginning in 1894, however, Davidson began to develop an unseemly interest in prostitutes. Davidson explained that, in that year, he had met a desperate teenage prostitute about to throw herself from a bridge into the filthy Thames. Davidson talked the girl out of her suicidal plan and gave her some food and money. In that encounter, Davidson sensed his vocation – it would be his calling to rescue prostitutes from their trade and to lift them up as children of God.

Ultimately, at his father’s urging, Davidson retired from the stage and, in his mid-twenties, attended the seminary. At the seminary, Davidson was a terrible student and failed most of his exams. It is reported that his lodgings were wallpapered with autographed pictures of famous Covent Garden actresses. Davidson prevailed in his studies, earning his admission to the clergy when he was 28. Soon thereafter, fortune smiled upon him and he was granted a prosperous parish, Stiffkey – the appointment came with a pleasant manor house, a good-sized acreage, and generous annual Living (or stipend). By all accounts, Davidson was an enthusiastic rector and performed his pastoral duties effectively. This appointment made his situation sufficiently secure to allow him to marry an Irish actress with whom he had toured during his days on stage. The marriage was tempestuous and during World War One, when Davidson was away ministering to sailors in the British navy, his wife became pregnant – although the child was clearly not his progeny, Davidson raised the boy, said to resemble him in a peculiar way, as his own son. The name Stiffkey – Davidson was the Rector of Stiffkey – an appellation almost too good to be true in light of Davidson subsequent travails, refers to a river in Norwich, the rural parish that he served.

The first signs of irregularity in Reverend Davidson’s performance of his official duties preceded World War One. Davidson made frequent forays into London, apparently seeking prostitutes and other fallen women to counsel. He became a trustee of a mission settlement in the Docklands and, further, was the chapel priest at a church that ministered to show-people in Covent Garden. Some of Davidson’s parishioners expressed some discomfort at their rector’s community service in London and, from time to time, women of a disreputable sort were seen to frequent the rectory. During World War One, in a turbulent period in his marriage, Davidson volunteered for service abroad and worked as a chaplain in the Navy. In the course of that service, he was arrested in a brothel in Cairo. Davidson proclaimed that he had gone into that den of iniquity to hunt down a temptress afflicting with venereal disease who was poisoning crew-members on the ship where he was assigned.

After the war, Davidson’s ministry to the whores in London expanded and came to dominate his pastoral activities. At times, as many as 20 young women and girls, were housed at the rectory where Davidson attended to their needs. Davidson proudly announced to his clerical superiors that he had resolved to become the "Prostitute’s Padre." Although many of his Stiffkey parishioners objected to these activities, he persevered in this mission. Controversy ensued: not all of the young women with whom Davidson associated desired his particular form of salvation. Davidson haunted squalid tea rooms in London, often approaching girls with the disingenuous statement that he had mistaken his prospect for an actress famous on stage or in movies. Sometimes, Davidson masqueraded as an agent and suggested that he could find theatrical work for the impoverished women that he met in the tea rooms. In that capacity, he was said to audition the girls by asking them to dance for him. In some respects, Davidson’s behavior verged on what we would characterize as "stalking" today – he pursued his mostly teenage quarries with persistence, repeatedly importuning them to come to the rectory in Stiffkey where he could minister to their souls. Davidson backed-up his pleas with small gifts of money, purchasing the women meals and groceries, and sometimes supplying them with medicine. In this process, Davidson incurred substantial debts and lived beyond his means. People began to complain that his ministry to the prostitutes was monopolizing his time, distracting him from duties he owed to the upstanding members of his congregation, and, further, impoverishing his church.

Things came to a head in 1930 when Rev. Davidson inadvertently insulted the formidable Major Philip Hamond, one of the church wardens within the district for which the pastor was responsible. Davidson’s attendance at Sunday services had become erratic – often he missed train connections to return him from London to the Stiffkey parish in Norwich; on other occasions, he arrived obviously disheveled and ill-prepared, just in time for the service to begin – on several occasions, he appeared in his parish churches without bread and sacramental wine and the services had to be delayed while he procured those necessary elements. As it happened, Davidson failed to appear for an Armistice Day service at the church supervised by Major Hamond in Morston. Hamond took this as an insult to the all members of the British armed services and made complaints to the ecclesiastical authorities that Davidson was derelict in the performance of his duties. Things devolved between the two men to the extent that on one occasion, Major Hamond, who had a habit of putting his boot into people’s backsides, kicked Davidson – a substantial blow that resulted in litigation and a conviction of assault rendered against Hamond (he was obligated to pay Davidson damages).

On Hamond’s complaint, an ecclesiastical investigation was convened, witnesses were deposed, and, ultimately, a hearing was conducted in the Consistory Court of the Anglican Church as to whether the Rev. Harold Davidson should be defrocked. The proceedings were a media circus, avidly covered by the gentlemen of the press. A flock of soiled doves, fallen women, Jezebels and harlots testified that Davidson had harassed and importuned them, secured the keys to their flats, and, then, made visits at all hours of the night. Lurid accusations were advanced in the form of scandalous letters. A woman named Rose Ellis, who had advanced some of the most garish accusations, retracted her written statement, a document in which she detailed a ten-year meretricious liaison the Prostitute’s Padre. (In her retraction, she limited her intimate contact with Davidson to lancing a boil on his backside. This retraction led to reams of testimony as to the woman’s contact with the pastor’s buttocks and culminated in Davidson’s bizarre assertion that he didn’t know the meaning of the word "buttocks", had never heard the term before, and guessed that it referred to something below the waist.) Davidson gave jocular testimony, first acknowledging rendering professional assistance to one-hundred to two-hundred women but, then, amending his estimate to a couple thousand.

Of course, as in all media circuses, appearance trumps reality and so, when a compromising photograph of Rev. Davidson surfaced, and was much published, the result of the Consistory Court proceedings was a foregone conclusion. The photograph, the second image defining Harold Davidson, shows the Rector in a shabby-looking room with a potted plant on a tripod and a half-naked girl. The room has wallpaper that looks like the decomposing stuff in a Terence Davies’ movie and exudes a low bourgeois squalor – a typical low-end London lodging reached by climbing four or five flights of narrow, serpentine steps with each landing adorned with ashtrays full of fag-ends and framed engravings of sea-battles. Davidson, wearing a clerical collar, extends his hand to touch the arm of the girl. The Rector was a tiny man, standing slightly less than 5 foot 3 inches tall and the girl looks sideways and down on him – she doesn’t exactly tower over the clergyman but is palpably larger than him in all respects. The girl is holding some kind of garment in front of her body and we see her from behind. Visible to us, but, perhaps not to Davidson, are her naked buttocks, legs, and back. The girl’s figure is weirdly impoverished – her legs are white stalks like sprigs of asparagus under the saggy buttocks characteristic of late-nineteenth century glamour girls. The contrast between Davidson’s fussy clerical attire and the girl’s nudity is shocking, particularly since the girl doesn’t seem to be particularly attractive – we can’t see her face, only the tight little helmet of her black hair, ala Louise Brooks, crowning her small, velvety head. Davidson looks at the girl’s profile with a peculiar glittering eye and fixed jaw.

The picture is enigmatic. It doesn’t explain itself and, certainly, there is nothing clear about the setting or occasion. When the photograph was produced before the Consistory Court, Davidson claimed that it was staged. He asserted that he had been asked to judge the suitability of a bathing suit for a fifteen-year old girl, Estelle Douglas, the daughter of a close friend. The girl appeared before him with a cloak covering the front of her body. Davidson denied that he knew that the girl was naked under the cloak and asserted that the picture was taken to falsely corroborate the claims of immorality against him. But the photograph was widely disseminated and claimed to speak for itself and, ultimately, did its nasty work: the Rev. Harold Davidson was duly defrocked by the Court.

Rev. Davidson retreated to Stiffkey where some of his parishioners still supported him. But he was asked to surrender his churches to their wardens and, it was at this time, that he received the resounding kick to his backside delivered by Major Hamond, a tortious indignity for which the former Rector was paid money-damages. Davidson appealed the Consistory court’s ruling and, to finance his legal battle, reverted to show business. He enrolled himself in a freak show on the seafront boardwalk in a resort town in Lancashire, Blackpool. Davidson’s sojourn in that establishment is the source of the third and last photograph characterizing the reverend’s peculiar biography.

The black and white picture shows a great crowd of men and women, all of them wearing jaunty caps and dark coats; the people are watching something and the spectators all grin toward the camera that looks down upon them. The mob of people entirely surrounds a round, mortar-shaped cylinder, something that looks like it might be used to make beer or distill whiskey – there are some odd tubes and box-shaped appendages atop the barrel. At the lower right edge of the picture, we can see the silver mane of the little Rector of Stiffkey – he looks up appreciatively at the camera, showing his matinee-idol profile and also smiles. Again the picture shows an odd disconnect – it isn’t clear that the majority of the spectators can see Davidson; he is on the other side of the barrel with only his head emerging from inside the cylinder. The caption of the picture tells us that it shows Reverend Harold Davidson, the "ex-Rector of Stiffkey," preparing to enter his barrel for a fast "unto death".

Davidson announced that he would reside in the barrel displayed in the congress of oddities on the Blackpool boardwalk, "working on his appeal," and taking no sustenance until he was restored to his clerical officer. His supporters and the curious public were admitted to the exhibition after paying an admission fee and allowed to gawk at the ex-Rector through a glass panel. Other exhibits on display were the "world’s fattest man," a shabby and melancholy gorilla, and a "bearded woman from Russia." People who saw Davidson in his barrel recall the press of the crowd, their mockery and vituperative remarks, the stink of the seashore mingling with the rank odor of animal piss coming from the cages. (Presumably, Davidson took to a barrel for his dwelling in imitation of Diogenes, the cynic. After Diogenes was expelled from Sinope for defacing its currency, he was said to have lived in a large ceramic jug, a pithos used for storing wine – this habitation is variously described in English as a tub or a barrel. Like Davidson, Diogenes relished making a spectacle of himself and was said to masturbate and defecate in public.)

Of course, Rev. Davidson did not perish in his barrel. When the novelty of the exhibition faded, he revamped the show to feature various ordeals – first, he sat in a freezing chamber, covered with snow and ice, proclaiming his innocence to the world. This display was sufficiently disturbing to induce the local authorities to prosecute the ex-Rector for "attempted suicide" – presumably, the charge and the subsequent trial, a proceeding that Davidson won, were, themselves, publicity stunts. Later, he had a diorama rigged-up so that he could sit among flames, roasting as a mechanical devil prodded him with a pitchfork. But, ultimately, the public’s interest in his case was exhausted, admissions declined and Davidson withdrew from the Blackpool sideshows.

For a couple of years, the ex-Rector pursued various endeavors. He sold books door-to-door and gave lectures; for a time, he lugged trunks and suitcases as a porter at St. Pancras Station. (In 1935, he was charged with solicitation at Victoria station – Davidson was accused of trying to seduce two teenage girls that he had approached under the false auspices of winning them roles in West End musical; he was convicted and paid a small fine.) When his repeated appeals for reinstatement failed, Davidson went to Skegness, another seaside resort town, where he developed a sideshow attraction based on the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. The gimmick was simple enough: Davidson preached for ten minutes and, then, boldly entered a cage where two fat and middle-aged lions, Freddie and Toto, awaited him. The exhibition was the center-piece of a number of animal-themed shows operated on the Skegness boardwalk by Captain Fred Rye. (A possible basis of Davidson’s interest in this exhibition was the fact that the lions had been tamed by a 16-year old girl, Irene Sommer.) The show was a big success; people flocked to hear Davidson preach before entering the lion’s den, and, in fact, a number of clergy attended the sideshow exhibit and recommended it to their congregations.

On July 28, 1937, Rev. Davidson delivered his speech, nodded to the crowd, and, then, marched into the lion’s den. What happened next is unclear. By some accounts, Davidson is said to have "trodden upon" one of the lion’s tails. Other narratives say that he cracked his whip too loudly near Freddie, unduly alarming the beast. In any event, Freddie charged Davidson and seized the little man in his jaws. Holding Davidson by the throat, Freddie pranced around the lion’s den until Irene Sommer was able to persuade the beast to release his prey. Unconscious, Davidson flopped to the floor of the den. He was rushed to a hospital but never revived. Newspapers reported that over 3000 people attended the funeral of the ex-rector of Stiffkey.

Captain Fred Rye, the proprietor of the animal show, capitalized on the tragedy by displaying Freddie to the public for an additional admission fee – the animal was exhibited under the banner: "SEE the Actual Lion that mauled and caused the death of the ex-Rector of Stiffkey." By all accounts, the show was very popular.

Of course, there are no images of Reverend Harold Davidson dangling like a rag doll from the jaws of the lion. A lion’s repast is a gruesome thing and unsuitable for public display.

Diary: A Church Service (2nd Sunday of Christmas)

Diary: A Church Service (2^nd Sunday of Christmas)

　

　

　

The law was a drinking profession in 1979 when I joined the Bar. The silver-tongued lions of the Old School consumed alcohol in great abundance. Once, my senior partner told me that he always stayed home on New Year’s Eve: "I don’t like the large numbers of amateurs out and about," he explained.

I have roughly the same attitude toward church attendance. I avoid Easter and Christmas on account of the large numbers of amateurs cramming themselves into the church sanctuary. My preference is for the dim, anonymous Sundays on the liturgical calendar – the endless winter weeks before Lent when the church is cold and dark and empty or those Sunday mornings in mid-summer when everyone has departed to their cabins and lakeshore cottages leaving the sanctuary vacant except for the very elderly and the very pious. Normally, therefore, I am reasonably faithful in my church attendance in January with an exception – I try to avoid the first Sunday of every month since that morning is when Holy Communion is celebrated, a painful occasion for me since my old knees are no longer fit for kneeling.

On Saturday afternoon, January 2, 2016, I was pushing a grocery cart through the aisles of HyVee when I encountered a Church Lady, a woman who customarily occupies the pew behind me at Our Saviors. This church lady was leaning over her cart in an alarming manner, using it both to collect her groceries and as an aide to ambulation. I wondered if her back had not, perhaps, failed her. As we met in the aisle between brightly colored boxes of cereals, she admonished me to attend Church – "Hope to see you tomorrow in Church," she said cheerfully.

So it was that on January 3, 2016, on the grim 2^nd Sunday of Christmas, I sat in my familiar pew at church, surveying the scene before me. Poinsettias still stood in red ranks behind the altar and stacked up against the sides of the church. The petals of the flowers were so red that I could sense the darkness lurking under their pigment, imparting to the scarlet blossoms a dismal profundity – the red was tinted with the deep, moist darkness of the insides of our bodies, the color of blood while it is still coursing through the vessel of the body. Next to the ranks of sinister poinsettias, a wooden lean-to was set against the side-wall of the apse, perhaps ten feet from the altar laden with golden trays and goblets, the place-settings for Communion. A bale of straw sat in front of the lean-to shack and a life-size lamb and donkey fashioned from cardboard loitered in the manger from which the Holy Family had now fled. Under the altar, plastic sacks labeled HyVee after the grocery store where I had met the Church Lady, were packed full of foodstuffs, mostly, by the look of things, boxes of cereal. People go to foreign countries and are delighted to observe peculiar religious customs, but here, at home, I was gazing at a church furnished with a great multitude of ruby-red poinsettias, a shack equipped with images of livestock, and a dozen bags of groceries of the most prosaic sort packed neatly under the altar. The serving trays on the altar had the vaguely smarmy appearances of the furnishings of a very wealthy man’s table.

The plump intern pastor came forth from vaulted arcade behind the altar. She spoke into her microphone and said that the service required a procession around the sanctuary. Unfortunately, she admitted, no preparations have been made for the procession. Anyone experienced in ceremonies knows that processions do not just happen – rather, a procession must be cunningly planned and carefully executed. "I am afraid," the plump intern said, "that I will have to march around the church in a procession of one, just me." At that moment, the assistant pastor appeared, coming to her rescue down the central aisle. She was carrying a wicker basket full of white, battery-powered votive candles, the sort of tiny appliance that you squeeze so that it will emit a wan light only vaguely simulating a flame. The assistant pastor rousted out children from where they were sitting with their parents in the pews – it was slim pickings, the church was, of course, almost completely empty. With a posse of about eight children, the plump intern marched around the church, making a circuit of the aisles at the sides of the sanctuary. Votive candles had been handed to each of the children and they held them aloft, squeezing faint light from the little white capsules.

In the area where I sit, the Church Lady and her disabled husband occupied the pew behind me. In the pew ahead of me was an old man. I have known the old man for many years and, indeed, once he was a client. Recently, the old man’s wife died and was buried and, now, he was alone. He sat in front of me inert and clean-shaven, his round bald head and circular face abraded by grief into a sort of rosy smoothness, an pinkish quartz tint to his cheeks and jaw. The old man, whom I will call "Dewey", had something of the demeanor of a turtle resting comfortably in the shadow of a boulder in a great and featureless wasteland – his face was not wrinkled; to the contrary, his skin was tight and functional as that of a desert tortoise.

The procession of children led by the plump intern approached our pews. As they passed, one of the kids became tangled in the metal canes that the disabled man married to the Church Lady had left propped against the side of the wooden bench. The child fell to the tiles, tripping several others in the procession who, in turn, dropped their votive candles. The candles, round as wheels, rolled in various directions setting off a scramble among the children and, almost, knocking the plump intern onto her backside. It would have taken too much energy for the desert tortoise to turn his head to view this slight contretemps – and, perhaps, in any event, the old man didn’t hear the momentary eruption of chaos a few feet behind his head. In any event, he looked forward to the altar with placid serenity. After a couple of seconds of disorder, the procession was restored and, albeit limping slightly, the parade continued while the congregation bawled out "Go tell it on the Mountain."

A little later, an earnest farmer ascended to the pulpit and read scripture from Ephesians. In Ephesians, Saint Paul proclaims: "God chose us in Christ before the foundations of the world – having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself." In the King James version of this epistle, the verb "foreordained" is translated "predestinated". The notion of God’s predestination has a certain gloomy logic, particularly when it applies to things like heaven and hell and the end of the world. The doctrine of predestination is reasonably persuasive so long as our meditation on that subject preserves the glamor, as it were, of the events predestinated – emblematic events in the life of the soul and revelation of God in history. But it gives one pause to consider God pausing in the hour before the Big Bang to predestinate not only the war in Syria and the drowning of the innocents off Lampedusa, but, also, the parishioners cane left athwart the church aisle as a trip-hazard to the meager procession of children led by the plump intern pastor. In fact, the concept seems to implode when one imagines God the Father with his mighty beard as vast and impressive as the whiskers of a Civil War general carefully configuring how the cane would trip the child and, thus, trigger the chain reaction, involving as well the escape of the faux votive candles and their various peregrinations across the church floor. Was the plump interns failure to properly arrange for her procession, in fact, predestinated from the beginning of time itself? And, if so, why?

These reflections led me to consider the sheer strangeness of the Lutheran confession to which I subscribe. Here is a church with cardboard livestock standing in a wooden shack next to the altar. Everyone is singing. If we are true to our theology, each of us believes that there is nothing whatsoever that we can do to earn salvation or grace. Salvation is predestinated from the inception of the universe and there is nothing that I can achieve that will change or alter God’s election. Indeed, the more avidly I seek salvation, the more actively I attempt to implement my redemption by acts of contrition or good works, the more obviously I am damned. Here is a religion of utter passivity, the complete suspension of any meaningful role for my works in the scheme of salvation. And, of course, all the more peculiar that a faith that believes with perfect serenity that no one can, by his own merit, achieve salvation would, also, insist, as if by recompense, in a sort of muscular activity in the world – building missions and caring for the poor and beating swords into plowshares, not because these actions will bribe the Almighty, but because these works might, at least, exemplify to ourselves the proper conduct of those irremediably doomed to Heaven.

Robert Burns in his poem "Holy Willie’s Prayer" captured some of the strangeness of this strict Protestant doctrine:


O Thou, wha in the Heavens dost dwell,

Wha, as it pleases best theysel’,

Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell,

A’ for thy glory

And no for ony guid or ill

They’ve done afore thee!

Before Holy Communion, the pastor bade us to greet one another. The Church Lady behind me said: "So you did come." "Yes," I told her, "you made me come." It was a colloquy that didn’t exactly express what either of us meant.

I followed Dewey to the pillow for kneeling in front of the altar. Holy Communion was served. I took the piece of doughy bread proffered to me and tucked it into my cheek. My weight bore down on my knees, aching sharply in the places where the cartilage is ripped and deficient. Dewey was on my right, trembling a little. The tray with the tiny glass cups full of red wine hovered in front of his terrapin profile. Dewey put out his hand but couldn’t find a cup. He groped among the cups set in their little sockets for one to lift to his lips. I watched as his hand, beset with tremors, searched the tray and the cups. "I can’t see it," he said, gasping to me.

"Here," I said. "Let me help you with this."

I lifted a tiny cup half-full of wine and set it between his trembling fingers. His fingers closed like a vise and he spilled the Blood of Christ down his throat. I followed suit and, then, we stood wearily and staggered back to our pews in the rear of the Church. The crippled man behind me was unable to reach the altar and so the officiants were administering the host and wine to him in the pew behind me.

We sang a hymn written by an African and, then, went outside into the cold and wind.

It is odd to think of God, before the beginning of time, devising my trip to the grocery store, my encounter with the Church Lady, her admonition to me to attend church, my positioning in the pews and at the altar rail – all of these things to accomplish the administration of the Blood of Christ to Dewey, a sacrament that might otherwise have failed. But, I suppose, this is the meaning of those events, a bagatelle for God to compose between his orchestration of genocides and wars and the rumors of war.