Archive for the ‘Trent Walters’ Category
Biographies
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Note: Although this story stands alone, this is part of the Pandora series.
Pandora had not known then what we today take for granted: Our houses are watching us: from the center hole in the ceiling fan, to the constellations of faces and creatures inhabiting spackles in the painted ceiling, to the creatures frolicking among the knots in the wooden paneling. So it was that Pandora was taken completely off-guard by the house’s incisive observations.
Pandora returned from the gym after a half-hour on the stair-master, which somehow felt like her work at Widget Manufacturing, Inc. She stripped to her Underoos and struck muscle-man poses in front of her bedroom mirror. She pinched her gut and slapped her jiggly thighs. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fattest in the mall?”
“Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really want an answer?”
Being self-conscious of her body and her silly underwear, it wasn’t the best of times to hear a strange voice in her bedroom. “Who said that?”
“Rhetorical, then. My father always said I couldn’t keep my reflections to myself.”
“Mirror?”
“Yes?”
“What were you saying?”
“Simply that you have a body-image problem. Just accept yourself.”
Pandora stared into her reflection and nodded at it, slightly. She wrapped herself in a fluffy pink robe and stepped into the bathroom. She undressed in the shower, washed, and wrapped her body in a towel before standing in front of the bathroom mirror. “So,” she asked, “you think I have a body-image problem?”
The mirror snorted. “That’s one way to put it. All you do is primp and preen: Is my hair perfect? How’s this shade of lipstick? Vanity, vanity. I’ve never known anyone so damn self-absorbed.”
Shell-shocked, Pandora stared at her steamy reflection. Then she walked stiffly into the bedroom and laid herself across the bed, face planted in a pillow. After a good cry, she draped her towel across the bedroom mirror, dressed in her pajamas, and lay with the covers up to her chin. She tried to read, she tried to sleep, but her eyes kept leaking.
“Excuse me, Pandora. I couldn’t help noticing your distress.”
“Who said that?”
“Me. The ceiling fan. Look, I know I shouldn’t interfere, but those mirrors don’t see you for who you really are.”
“Thank you.” Pandora smiled up at her ceiling through bleary eyes. “It’s nice to know I have a fan.”
“Sure. Your problem is laziness: All you ever do is lie around.”
Life Is for Living, Plots for Burying Things in
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
[O]n the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally…. We can cut wherever we please…. Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone. — Charles Baudelaire, “To Arsene Houssaye”
It was that great modernist monk of the late fourteenth century, Baudelard, who first codified the principle of spontaneous generation. He had stowed away a porcelain saucer of skunk meat high in a cupboard where no animal–including the human kind–could reach it. In truth, he had set it aside like manna, afraid that one day the countryside would have scant meat if he and his fellow monks kept hunting as they had all that blustery fall.
A week later, as Baudelard dusted the cupboard, he rediscovered the meat, writhing with worms, and quilled his findings in a thirty-pound volume of accumulated observations.
Yet Baudelard was no one-trick pony of a natural philosopher who folds his hands and rests on laurels. He understood this principle had to be developed to its fullest, for “To understand the essence of nature,” as he was fond of informing his fellow monks spraying a sibilant mouthful of his noon meal: day-old bread, goat cheese and wine, “is to understand the mind of God.” So Baudelard cut worms at varying lengths to see if life might sprout again.
And, lo, they did grow full and wriggling blood-red with both head and tail intact, whichever was the original of which. The confusion brought him to recall a minor poet friend of his, the Englishman Geoffrey Chaucer. He had started a series of semi-bawdy, semi-humorous tales of wanderers mocking the Old English tales of heroes, using the vulgar, common English tongue. Chaucer and Baudelard both saw the stories–pale imitations of Boccaccio–as best fit for lining refuse bins.
To test just how far the principle of spontaneous generation went, they took his original manuscript, mulched it, stirred in earthworms, water, and ink, and let the rotting mass germinate for several months. Chaucer was probably over-eager and exhumed the manuscript prematurely. The Canterbury tales were still unfinished and a bit raw, but Chaucer corrected the earthworms’ grammatical errors and found ways to punch up the bawdiness.
The triumphant success of Baudelard’s literary experiment, logically lead him to human beings as his next test subject. The rest, as you know, is history–eternal glory springs from temporary gore. Even now, a century later, Baudelard’s achievements remain the high-water mark of natural philosophy and letters.