(Today’s guest post is by Librarian Extraordinaire and Master of Texts Norman Stevens, who plays with all the references we know, and then some.)
A Grand Allusion; or, the Last Event in the Minstrel Show
“Of arms and the man, I sing the body electric”
Last night I had the strangest dream. I dreamt I held you in my arms while dwelling in marble halls here in the groves of academe. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken. I realized, however, that attention must be paid to the stuff that dreams are made of. Listen my children and you shall hear a tale told in a wayside inn by an idiot. Remember it, and me, at the end of a long, long day.
Live Free or Die became my motto when, a Yankee Doodle Dandy, I was born, in a very good year, on the Fourth of July. When I was young and twenty, I began to follow a guiding light down life’s mountain roads always diverging onto the less traveled hot and dusty roads. First the yellow brick road led me to St. Custard’s where I learned to appreciate the lighter side of life.
Next the road to success took me to the Abbey of Thélème and an acceptance of its motto “Do what thou wilt.” Finally country roads took me home to the groves of academe (remember the groves of academe?) where, in a cave filled with shadows, I taught the huddled masses yearning to be free at last. Whenever time allowed I continued to roam always, somehow, finding myself in Rome. In the good old summertime, I neither toiled nor spun. Summer trips included a climb of Mount Abora, and an easy motorcycle ride through Asia where I watched the long trains roll as the sun came up like thunder over the bridge on the River Kwai and shone across the river where I rested under the shade of the trees.
Along the road to Mandalay I had a close shave, near-death experience where the road was wholly lost and gone. I tilted at the windmills of my mind wherever I went and cared not whether I earned five easy, or thirty tainted, pieces of silver. I wandered the world, as lonely as an aotearoa, through golden fields of daffodils where I depended on the kindness of strangers until I met you. You were temptation.
All I could see from where I stood was you. Fresh with the scent of new mown hay, you came from the green rolling hills of West Virginia, you saw me as I wore my trousers rolled and walked along the beach, and you conquered me with your endearing young charms. The first time ever I saw your face, you walked like beauty in the night. Your’s was the face that launched a thousand ships (including the Hesperus, Alice May, Julie Plante, Reuben James, and Edmund Fitzgerald). Above all you had one of the best minds of my generation. Your dissertation on the fall of the rupee was, in itself, a thing of beauty. By the shining Big-Sea-Water, I gave you the silver apples of the moon.
Our candle gave a lovely light although it did not last the night. Our first close encounter was in that prominent bar in Secaucus, NJ where our eyes met over a menu that featured Lobster Dante. That day we read no farther. We adjoined to the men’s room where, after I checked behind the old-fashioned toilet tank to be certain that nobody had left a gun there, we engaged in a passionate zipless f— reaching a climax just as a band on the nickelodeon played Waltzing Matilda.
We lived in a very, very fine house by the side of the road. All we wanted was music, music, music. That became our pattern but what are patterns for? Back when the world was new, I thought you were above any dark suspicion until I saw those two purple shadows in the snow. I kept all these things and pondered them in my heart. Thus I was first made mad by the gods who sought to destroy me.
Each man kills the one he loves.
After a dark and stormy night, I the jury, when the cock had crown three times, achieved my sublime objective by making your punishment fit your crime. After all I had hungered for your touch a long, lonely time. Another man might have been sad but I was angry and determined to implement the thirty-nine steps that would make me free at last. And so I, left behind, put out your light and you left the world to darkness and to me. God, in his mercy, grant you grace.
Although I am not Prince Hamlet, when, like stout Cortez, I contemplated the sweet mystery of life as I was composing my ode on immortality, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel of love. That train of thought brought me back to the realization that you were always on my mind and that, in turn, led me, as Leona cried out “Yo Ho The Crow”, to declare “Nevermore!” Or should it have been, as one of the saddest words of tongue or pen, “Evermore?”
In the end there was no end. I’ll never get out of this world alive so I’ll just let the mystery be. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Such is life.
Epilogue
How many ages hence — perhaps at least four score and ten years from now — will some old bitch gone in the teeth measure out our fifteen minutes of fame in coffee spoons?
Ave, Atque, Vale
(Image from Photobucket.com)
