Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

J. Alfred

3:45 AM

Sylvia’s three witchy friends are also in Foundations of Western Literature 440. Their names are Emily, Charlotte, and Virginia. They’ve spent most of the term filling Sylvia’s head with green bile. Old Rex is their enemy and they intend to bring him down. He has every right to be worried. A white male in the 21st Century, I suspect his time has come.

But the weird sisters won’t stop there. They’ve started The Womyn’s Co-Opt, which aims to use the machinery of male oppression against itself. Instead of getting hammered at the Grad Centre, they lure lonely females onto misty promontories and perform ball-crushing rites. The misty promontories represent the Penis, the Male Organ jutting into the Oceanic Female, the profane penetration of the Holy Mother Sea. The Promontory Penis is surrounded by a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. For this reason they build bonfires at dusk and invoke the sirens of the deep. Their aim is to lure passing sailors and pirates to the rocky shore and then rip them to shreds with their maenad teeth, sharpened with barb-wire phrases torn from the novels of Margaret Atwood. They then throw the dripping limbs into the air, thus fretting the majestic roof of the sky with golden fire.

Here’s a picture of the weird sisters on a crackling heath, tempting Hecate with their postcolonial charms:

Watching the weird sisters spar with Old Rex is something that I would dearly love to see. Yet they’re a sullen crew, and have apparently decided to weather the burden of this Colonial White Male with stoic silence. This isn’t the case with Juniper, however, whose bright pink hair and luminous green eyes weren’t made for scowling in a corner.

✏️

The class on The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock had started so well. Serious as the oracle at Delphi, Old Rex had quoted straight from the epigraph of Eliot’s poem, borrowed from Dante: But since no one has ever returned alive from these depths, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy ... Old Rex was in a mystic’s trance. Like Prufrock, he had licked his tongue into the corners of the evening, and lingered upon the pools that stand in drains. He intimated that he would soon reveal the answer to the overwhelming question. His voice trailed off to let the class appreciate the profundity of it all. Voices from the other world. Listen, my little ones, voices prophesying war… He even drew three dots in the air so that we could see the dire import of his words… 

In the middle of Old Rex’s sentence, Juniper started to fidget and guffaw. Old Rex then decided to do a close reading of the opening stanza, Six convinced that the students were either too lazy to have read them or to stupid to have understood their epic reverberations:

Let us go then, you and I, 
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherized upon a table; 
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, 
The muttering retreats 
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels 
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: 
Streets that follow like a tedious argument 
Of insidious intent 
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . 
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ 
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go 
Talking of Michelangelo.

Intoning the final line, “Talking of Michelangelo,” Old Rex was lost in David’s marbled thighs and powerful forearms. And his finger tips… Juniper coughed out loud several times, “C-c-ock-a-mam-y, C-c-ock-a-mam-y.” Old Rex turned a lighter shade of purple and looked up at the class. They were all on their phones, except Juniper, who coughed one more time, just in case he’d missed it. “Cock-a-mam-y.” He asked her indignantly if there was something she’d like to say. Continuing to slouch in her seat, she said, “I know you’re an expert on the old man’s tale of insecurity and all that, but haven’t you noticed the similarity between you and Prufrock?

Old Rex was about to answer her question with a sincerity it hardly deserved, and tell her, Yes, they both walked in the footsteps of Dante, and dared to ask, but clearly it was a rhetorical question. “You both have all the privilege in the world, and you both get indignant when woman don’t listen to you. And yet still you go on with your philosophizing. You make everything abstract. You don’t listen to the women, and when you do, you assume they’re speaking gibberish. The women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Don’t you see they’re mocking you?”

Before Juniper said this, Old Rex had such high hopes for Prufrock — and for Juniper, his star pupil. Yet after Juniper’s little speech, things didn’t go so well. He got all flustered and started talking to his shoes. It was hard to tell if he was quoting T.S. Eliot, if T.S. Eliot was quoting J. Alfred, or if J. Alfred was quoting Old Rex. In any case, it had something to do with a hundred indecisions and with a hundred visions and revisions, and it all got mixed up with the bald spot in the middle of his hair and with the perfume from a dress that made him so digress.

But then, recalling the tenacity of Achilles, prophecy of Tiresias,  Old Rex took another run at the overwhelming question. Looking up from his shoes, he lifted his finger and pointed at the wall at the back of the room. He made a fist with his other hand and announced that he had squeezed the universe up into a ball. He raised his fist and shook it angrily at imaginary colleagues who never answered his emails and who never read his book, The Siren in Byron’s Eye. He rolled all of his indignity into his fist and told his befuddled students, “I have the answer to the overwhelming question!” Rising like a god in pain, he screamed, “You will never know The Secret. Do not even ask, What is it?”

From the side of the room, Juniper cleared her throat and said “OK.” She scraped her chair along the floor so that she could lean it against the wall, and added, “I’ve lost interest, anyway.” Leaning back in the chair, she told Old Rex, in a voice that was at once aggressive and exasperated, “Aren’t the days of overwhelming questions over? I don’t think you’re even reading the text accurately. It’s ‘an overwhelming question’ and ‘some overwhelming question,’ not ‘the overwhelming question.’ It’s fine and dandy to make grand statements, but you should at least try to be accurate about the text. Some clarity would also help. What exactly, for instance, is the entity or concept that’s being overwhelmed?”

Old Rex’ throat was parched, yet he decided to tell the class The Secret after all. He would take one last stab at Oracular Meaning: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,” at which point Juniper drowned him out with a noisy display of unzipping her backpack, placing her aluminum water-bottle on her desk, and emptying the contents of her backpack to get at her sweater. She scrunched it up into a ball between her shoulder and the wall, the legs of her chair squeaking this way and that. She muttered something about catching up on her sleep.

Old Rex exploded into rage: “Young lady! Sit up straight this instant! You think you can disrespect the Great Poets of this Age? You think you are greater than T.S. Eliot himself?”

Re-arranging her sweater like a down pillow beneath her head, Juniper looked away from Old Rex and stared nonchalantly out the window. She was thinking about the mermaids at the end of Eliot’s poem, the sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown. She read the poem the night before and didn’t want him to ruin it for her. She wanted to ride with the mermaids seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black. In a voice more resigned than angry, she said, “Please, Dr. Rexroth, calm down. That’s not what I meant, at all. I love T.S. Eliot. I just think you’re not doing him justice. He isn’t talking about some higher Truth. Or maybe I’m just bored, that’s all.”

✏️

Now that classes are over it occurs to me that Old Rex, like Prufrock, is like all of us, with desires left washed up on the shore. At one point in his life, he thought he heard the mermaids singing, each to each, and said to himself, There will be time to murder and create, / And time for all the works and days of hands / That lift and drop a question on your plate. Yet at what point did he see that he was running out of time?

What time is it, anyway? I look at my watch but it’s not there. I put it on the counter before getting into the bath. Time is flowing like water through my fingers, just like Camus said.

Where to situate Prufrock’s crisis of meaning? With the death of the epic, which once encompassed the meaning of entire civilizations? With Beauty’s revenge, or with the perfume from a dress that makes us so digress? Does Prufrock’s journey signal the end of love, and the beginning of tragedy?

[Chart of topics with arrows?]

I share in Prufrock’s uncertainty, the slippery current of time cascading down the faucet right in front of my eyes. I see the months, weeks, and days that I should’ve spent huddled over my books instead of sitting on Wreck Beach and lingering by the chambers of the sea. Like Macbeth, I’ve made my own bed, drawn my own bath.

The three witches hail us from the side of the road. I’m too surprised to ride on, so I listen to their strange and terrifying words. List, Matthew, the Earth will come crashing down in a hail of orange lightning beams and tidal floods. Your English exam is the least of your worries!

8:45 AM

Emily, Charlotte, and and Virginia triangulate their thoughts, which appear to be on their exam papers, but which are in fact in a necromantic dimension, somewhere at the bottom of a sinister brew. They’re dipping their ladles in the pot, fishing for big words with Greek prefixes to dispel the old phallologocentrism, which Emily defined the other day in the Student Union Building as a Darwinian inevitability because of its phallolinguistic and antisubalternative causality. She said this as she reclined on a pillow, her light brown hair glowing in the sunlight of the afternoon.

Berry looked across at Juniper, and just managed to suppress his laughter. He responded, “Emily, you’re dumb as a post.” Juniper broke into a guffaw.

Undeterred, Emily continued: “Men fixate on cleavage while the smell of womyn’s burning hair drifts into the air. Salem. High school football. War. George W. Bush. Trump. Global Warming. It’s all your fault.”

Charlotte added, “And we’re tired of your noisy stand-up peeing routine, splashing all over the place!”

✏️

I see the smoke from the singed hair of burning witches float toward the rafters, up through history and basketball hoops. Reaching the ceiling, the smoke sits still or malingers. I hear Virginia saying, Your images are all wrong. That’s not it. That’s not it, at all.

✏️

Next: 🧚 The Mothership

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines