Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Puns and Rotters - plus a little something-something from the Hippodrome
The most horrible horrors strike when you least expect them, and then strike again and again until you succumb to their sheer eeevilosity. They hit you when you’re not looking, and then they kick you when you’re down. Thus it is with scientology, re-runs, and bad falafel. You’re not finished with them till they’re finished with you.
In this vein, I had some hideous things come into my brain over the past few weeks. So hideous, I can’t forget them. So hideous, they haunt my days and blacken my nights. So hideous, indeed, that I am going to share them with you. For truly they are among the worst examples of wordplay that ever spawned unbidden in my mind, crippling my thinking and stunting my soul. And if I don’t unload them but quick, I’m never going to get over any of them. Therefore, with not so much an apology as with echoing hysterical laughter that frightens bats, I unleash upon you:
THE BAD, THE BAD, AND THE ALSO BAD
Cartesian poetics: I think, therefore iamb.*
As midnight struck at the Bauhaus residence halls, it was a stark and dormy night.**
The quality of mercy is not strained; however, the quantity of mercy is sifted into an even two-cup container.***
O the humiliation, that these execrations actually originated within my own shattered conk. So ruined I am, that I can’t even effectively deny it. And why should I? I mean, other than that humiliation I mentioned earlier. Oh, yeah, right.
Well, for putting up with that terrible triad of insults to my native tongue, maybe you deserve a little something-something. Click on through to the extended entry, then, and you can check out the first part of my little holiday story. It’s a bit premature, but so am I sometimes. In a good way, I mean. And here I’d almost gotten over the humiliation. But anyway, hope you enjoy the story - let me know if you want any more of it, or if I’m just writing it for myself, m’kay?
*My humiliation is not alleviated in the least by my just now Googling this phrase and discovering that I am far from the first to come up with it. If anything, it’s worse to know that I’m just another vector for this verbal virus, just one of 13,900 plague-carrying rats infesting the sewage system draining the english language. But thanks for asking, anyway. Sheesh. (Actual examples of pre-existing links omitted in misbegotten attempt to salvage some vestige of dignity.)
**This one also. Great. It’s like I thought I invented throwing up and then discovered that some yutz in Australia beat me to it. Maybe I can get a “participant” ribbon or something. Or “blogger,” that’s pretty weak. Or maybe I don’t even qualify for one.
*** This one too, eh? The good link I found last night eludes me this morning, but it was there, I assure you - mocking me. Et three, Brutus. I give up.
(The Hippodrome Story - first portion of a work in progress)
Dov trudged. Even on warm days he moved lugubriously, the effort evinced in his every step, walking as if he were shlepping the world on his shoulders regardless whether he was heading out unladen in the morning or returning after dark bent under a full rick of scraps and firewood. His worn boots slid a little with every shuffling step he took. The downtrodden snow was thick on the footpath, smeared and befouled by countless journeyers gone before him. His breath escaped in pale puffs from under his unkempt beard, hoaring the tips of the greying bristles. His hands, naked to the freezing breeze, tugged the lapels of his buttonless overcoat across his chest. His eyes he kept downcast, scrupulously watching for ice and other hazards of the way. His eyes were the brightest part of him, gleaming blue in the early Silesian dusk. He glanced up, then down again as his bootsoles slid a little - and on Dov trudged.
A shetl was receding behind him, the third through which he’d passed since his breakfast that morning of turnip and toast. He’d brought the rest of the boiled turnip along with him to blunt the evening pangs, holding off on his supper in the hopes of augmenting it or perhaps just finding a cozy place to eat out of the snow. Such luck had not befallen him, though, as the agglomeration of motley sheds and squalid outbuildings slipped way behind him. It had been his last chance to be vouchsafed a little comfort and satiety, as the machers had told him that his destination was not far beyond the village he’d just left, a village wan and exhausted in Kislev’s waning light. None of the few faces he’d seen there had favored him with so much as a smile, much less a plate of soup or a pickled egg. The kids he saw seemed hungry; the women, tired. He saw no men, which confirmed his belief that he was near his journey’s end. The men would be at the Hippodrome, he figured. Entertainment was hard enough to find these days, and they lived too near it to resist its lure.
He smelled it, first - fried potatoes and cholent and brisket wafting across snow-strewn meadows, weaving insidiously between bare birch trunks. He couldn’t see or hear it yet but he knew then he was close, so he paused, pulled the rag-wrapped turnip from his pocket, and consumed it it in a few quick bites washed down with a handful of snow. He decided it was lucky not to have lucked into more sustenance along the way - there was only so much luck in the world, and to each man only his allotted share. It would have been spendthrift, he thought, to waste his allotment on such a triviality as a stoup of pottage.
The turnip gone and his mouth rinsed with frozen dust, Dov resumed his trek. With the speed of approaching nightfall he felt increasingly confident that he was on schedule; the realization buoyed his spirits, which, after a day of walking, after a lifetime of working, after millenia of wandering, needed a boost. It was coming together, he realized as he saw hearthsmoke in a blue break though the trees. It beggared his beggar’s belief: he was nearly there.
In short order the Hippodrome appeared briefly through a forest gap beneath its plume of smoke, and Dov’s heart raced even as his weary, measured tread continued unchanged. The barn reappeared off in the woods, but closer, and yet again, nearer still. Now he could begin to hear the activity inside, voices still indistinguishable, shouts and laughter garbled by distance and slivovitz. This was when he knew he’d start to feel nervous for real, and on cue his belly froze around the turnip and his hands compulsively rechecked the the small sack he’d tied to his belt, groping the few items in it through its rough cloth. So little he carried, and so much he’d sacrificed for it. Now a new reality loomed; the bare wooden barn door seemed to glower down upon him. The future is betrothed to no one man, he reminded himself as he prepared to knock - it is a wanton, free to him who demands her first. And with that, his fist moved of its own accord, and his knock on the raw wood of the door rang hollow though the now-fallen night.
A small window slid open in the worn boards, barely big enough for an eye to see out of it, an eye with a gleam that was jovial, suspicious, and condescending all at once. The vision greeting that eye aroused no concern, though - another shmendrik, holding out the two-part passport for entry - a zloty and a pony. The wooden pane slid back into place; Dov heard a derisive mutter and hard laughter from several throats, like hammers dropped down stairs. The big barn door swung toward him, pushing him away to let him enter. As he stepped over the threshold, a burst of stale air exhaled over him like the breath of a fat drunkard rolling onto him in a crowded common tavern bed. The air was thick with food smells, resonant with laughter and convivial conversation and the sharp clatter of coins and ponies in the chamber beyond. Dov’s heart soared. It was exactly as it had been described to him, exactly as he’d pictured it.
The burly boychik who’d let him into the vestibule still stood in his way, though, beard bristling and forearms bulging as he extended a hand wordlessly. Dov handed over the zloty and his pony, and involuntarily held his breath.
He’d found a heavy scrap of solid mahogany, barely the size of his palm, two years ago on a roadside, and the dreydel inside it had just called out to him. At first, for months, he’d just sat with it and held it in his hands, not yet daring to start to carve it. When he was ready to whittle he carefully sharpened his only knife on a whetstone each evening. He had started by shaping the block, that appeared to him to have come from a heavy table or chest that had fallen off a wagon and then been scavenged to its smallest remainders. The dense fistful of wood evolved in his calloused hands into a regular polyhedron, square on one axis and identically rectangular on the other two.
Lacking an awl, he had painstakingly worked the spindle from one square end, twirling it every few minutes to gauge thickness and length. After months of work on a microcosmic scale he was satisfied - the spindle was perfectly centered, perfectly shaped for his thick clawlike hand, bulging slightly in the center and finally coming to a graceful point at its apex. He then reconfirmed and refreshed all four sides, marking out the letters cleanly and clearly with sinuous hair-breadth grooves, defining the place where the descending faces would fall away to join together in a smooth arc of convergence. The understructure he left for last, shaping it with sand stuck with sap to a scrap of cloth, letting only a flake or two of dust descend from his handiwork at a time. The vortex was unwrought - too garish; too much potential for error. Fretwork would not have been a true expression of his self, as the rest of it was.
As he worked his way down to the (need to find the right word here!), the distinctions between himself and his task, the creator and the creation, grew indistinct for him. When, after more than a year of work, he realized his dreydel was finally, truly finished, he took it out into the woods and just sat with it by himself, basking in its simple geometric perfection and sheen burnished by countless hours in his hands. It seemed to him to be an object of inexpressible beauty.
But beauty is subjective, and this pony needed to run a true course. Testing would be necessary. Dov had procured for this purpose a nugget of marble, perfectly smooth, a remnant of some ruined tabletop. Out there in the woods he pulled it out and set in the soft earth, pressing it down gently and carefully until a drop of his sweat rested still on it, hemispherical and quiescent, belled at its center like a crystal globe emerging from marmoreal blackness. The surface was as level as he’d be able to make it. He had no excuse to put off the trial.
He hesitated nonetheless. Till that moment the carving had been a perfect objectification of his will, but if it failed upon testing, it would henceforth be nothing more than a waste, a frivolity, an indictment of the compulsion that had driven him to squander his essence upon it - or worse, an indictment of that essence itself. A weak, wobbling trial might betoken a weakness in his spirit, a wobble in his very spark. He therefore sat quietly, afraid to do more as the sunlight slowly drained out of the sky and dusk crept down. Soon there were no more shadows; the woods themselves were drifting into evenshade and the moment of truth could be no further postponed. With a deep inhalation he hovered the top above the marble; with a steadiness that surprised him he spun it out, landing it square on his target. And there it spun, straight as an arrow and true as torah, till the shadows overtook everything and the dreydel faded from view in the murk of dark earth and black stone. When he put forth his hand to retrieve it, it seemed to cast vibrations and radiances from its honed edges as it whirled in place. Dov felt them penetrate his palm, a sensation akin to how light feels. The feeling filled him with power and peace. This was one powerful pony, and was furthermore unequivocally true. He had known it all along, in the marrow of his bones - but it was nice to have been proven so right.
Dov stood in the small vestibule of the cavernous barn, and handed over a piece of his soul to be weighed and measured and found sufficient. Though he knew well enough the protocol, it felt wrong to relinquish possession. He was encouraged, though, by what he thought was a glimmer in the doorkeeper’s eye as he took the pony, a recognition that this was an exceptional piece of work. With a practiced eye he surveyed its gross dimensions, tracing the thin outlines of the thickly-drawn letters at a glance, measuring with a fingertip the contours of the spindle and the voluptuous curve of the convergence. He took his time looking it over. It was his job to guard the doors of the hippodrome, after all, and to protect the courses from weak or weighted ponies, designed to drop on Gimmel or not designed at all. His duty was fell and he took it seriously. He knew quality when he saw it, and Dov saw him see it here.
“Make it y’rself?” the doorkeeper asked; “All myself,” Dov replied. The doorkeeper looked him over one more time, grunted ambiguously, and spun the pony onto the testing table. The dreydel’s edges blurred, forming a vague cylinder that evaporated at its edges into thin air. It seemed to hum and the spindle stood proudly at attention, glinting in the dust-filtered lanternlight as if perfectly motionless.
Dov was paternally proud but hardly surprised by its performance; the doorkeepeer, on the other hand, watched with wide eyes, his professional reserve gone in the presence of the little top’s unerring performance. After a few minutes he took it back from the table with apparent reluctance and succinctly pronounced, “True” - but then added in a quiet voice, barely to be heard over the din seeping in from the main chamber, “Gevalt, chaver - that’s a strong pony.” Dov smiled in return as he retrieved his dreydel, and stepped aside to let the door to the Hippodrome itself swing open for him.