The second of the novel's four parts begins with Dr. Kerr & Cameron, stuck in a small motel room in a small town in Iowa, reading through James Newhouse's rough translation of that letter Kerr found at the Doylestown Historical Society. Unfortunately, Cameron had only gotten a photo of a couple pages of the text so there's quite a cliff-hanger at the end. Now what? Another e-mail had come in, as well: from Toni, back in England, with plans to audition for a local production of Amadeus. But with little else to do, hanging out at the Express Motel, they end up discussing the nature of genius and the many different views of Mozart's Cosí fan tutte...
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[Chapter 9, continued...]
“'To the eye of vulgar Logic,' says he, 'what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in Union and Division” – (Society) – “and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years.'”
Persevering with Sartor resartus, I'd finally made it to a chapter entitled “Pure Reason,” and yet I found myself still confused by what Carlyle meant by this opposition of his terms Logic and Reason. “Logic” implied scientific observation; didn't “Reason” imply an intellectual process? But Carlyle relates it to “mysterious intuition, imaginative or moral insight.”
Of course, definitions change and while Carlyle is also writing almost 200 years ago, my awareness of philosophical history is even more lacking than my ability to understand the niceties of philosophy in general. So, if “The Age of Reason” doesn't imply logical, “Classical” thinking, and Reason is intuitive, isn't that what artists call “Romanticism”?
If “logical Understanding merely combines, separates, and rearranges data,” and Reason – Intuition – “is superior to Understanding,” does this impact my world-perception? I'm guessing, whatever I'd choose to call it, the outcome remains the same.
Add this to “Other Things I Wish I'd Paid Attention To in College.”
Meanwhile, Cameron, having checked his social media, changed back into his “garment of flesh” and crawled into bed to continue reading. He looked over and smiled. “How's the philosophy?”
Closing the book, I sat back, exhausted. “Needless to say, my brain hurts...”
“Yeah, philosophy was never my long suit in college – even the introductory course was a killer. But then, so was college.” With that, he sat back, opened his book and quickly found his place.
Cameron was too young to feel such bitterness about college already, that he'd wasted those four years getting a useless degree with no career path or position in life or even a reasonable income. My degrees weren't much better, not exactly guarantees of job or financial security in a society ambivalent about education or talent.
“...Yet it is sky-woven and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the center of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities? He feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through?”
Carlyle, in his spiritual fervor, continues as I turn the page, describing man in his “strange Garment,” this garment of flesh. “Sky-woven” – how poetic. I remember Cameron saying how nudists described themselves as “sky-clad.”
“Listen to this,” I said, interrupting Cameron's concentration which, I gathered, only starting up again, had not yet reached full engagement. I read him this paragraph – explaining the difference between his use of “logic” and “pure reason,” about standing naked amidst Immensities. “Though I'm afraid it's easy to get lost in his old-fashioned, rhetorical style.”
He looked at me with his brow dutifully furrowed, a contemplative silence he might be using to sort out what I'd read, what I'd explained, or wondering what the hell I was talking about. It took time to sort through the data – understanding Logic – that one might never leap intuitively across Reason toward some epiphany.
“I thought you said this was a novel?”
“Well, not exactly a novel like Jane Austen, no...”
“No,” he chuckled, “I can't imagine Jane Austen writing about the liberation and power of being naked.”
Perhaps we'll wait a bit longer before the leap to Reason kicks in. But Cameron, a scientist trained to observe and analyze, always had trouble with intuitive faith, perhaps because he'd thought it “un-scientific,” not that I'd understand the process, in any sense, which a psychiatrist would take to reach a diagnosis and suggest treatment. Given his dual and seemingly contentious spiritual heritage, neither of them exactly life-shaping, Cameron might be excused his lack of faith, not that I understood the tenets of Islam any better than the Catholics'.
My own sense of secularism, still able to see the inherent magic behind Nature and the beauty that exists in Art, allowed casual, small-scale prayers to a God I didn't trust for the larger. Those few friends who considered themselves Evangelical told me I only lacked faith; my atheist friends failed to see my logic.
Was Carlyle humorously championing Teufelsdröckh's “Philosophy of Clothes” as a Critique of Fashion because it represented a way one class might distinguish itself from another, since beneath the clothes people were the same: naked – (certainly racy, talking about nudity so much in an age when a woman showing a bit of ankle was considered risque). Swift called man a “forked straddling animal with bandy legs,” and during the storm on the heath, Lear, saying “man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal,” tore off his clothes.
Presumably, Cameron realized Shakespeare's metaphor of the storm represented the tempest raging in Lear's mind – how would he, as a physician, rescue Lear from himself when, during this storm, he was no longer himself? But I'm not sure he “got” Carlyle's metaphor of the naked person as Adam, changed forever by the Tree of Knowledge. Beyond the initial fig leaves, by removing what metaphoric clothes society imposed – Carlyle's “Union and Division” – man could attain his imagination. What if Eve had found the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom first?
If knowledge was understanding, the codification and sorting of observations – Adam naming the beasts of the Garden – and this is Logic, does wisdom allow us to transcend understanding through our imagination, intuition, and faith? Do we achieve wisdom only through Reason, those of us who are artists?
Could Mozart, perhaps, somehow reach deeper than Salieri?
“And remind me, again: you're reading this, because...?”
“Because it was there – in my bedroom the day we arrived at Phlaumix.”
Initially, I hadn't planned on taking something with me to read in England. The house had its own immense library plus there were numerous used bookstores worth haunting within easy reach of downtown Dorking. I had my mind set on something I hadn't read before but one of those things more talked about than read. Since I would be in England, an English writer was the obvious choice.
Having spent months working my way through the second volume of Proust, I was finally ready to begin the third – The Guermantes Way – for the second time in my life but put it aside. I needed to take something a little more compact to fit into my Karajan Bag which wouldn't seem quite so pretentious.
My in-flight reading was some random, easily disposable paperback mystery, The Girl with the Treble Clef Tattoo, another Stig Larsson rip-off. I'd figured, had it been an alto clef, it might've generated more intrigue. Virtually unknown to the general public, an alto clef – implying a violist – would also symbolize someone who was a social outsider. But like many other half-baked ideas and poorly realized tensions throughout the plot, the author's knowledge of music was so limited, it reduced the symbolism of the tattoo to the level of clip art.
There on my nightstand were four books, chosen by someone on the staff, probably Vector, assuming these might be of interest. On top was this pocket-sized hardback, a 1937 edition of Carlyle's Sartor resartus. I'd never known anyone who admitted reading it and I certainly never had – at my age, never had the opportunity, either. When I opened it up, there on the inside cover was the inscription, Frieda F. Erden, 1946, and that clinched it. Unwinding after I'd unpacked, resting after a bath, I luxuriated in its introduction.
All I knew was it's Thomas Carlyle's only novel, an early work – I'd never read any of his histories or essays, either – and it had been highly thought of by Emerson, Melville, and Whitman. Its introduction proved quite thought-provoking, Frieda underlining a good many lines in it. And that was enough to get me going.
It was difficult, though, trying to concentrate; my mind wasn't used to the finer shades of differentiation in philosophical arguments, pitting one obscure German philosopher against some 18th-Century Frenchman I'd never heard of before. As Carlyle slathered on one name after another, I had no idea how many were real and which ones he'd invented. After all, this was a novel about an editor trying to review a treatise “on clothes” by the fictitious Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Which thoughts belonged to the editor, to the philosopher, or to the author?
I also missed the style's humor – “humor” not something I'd associate with Carlyle, one of the great grouches of English literature. Since I recalled very little about Hegel, I probably wasn't catching Carlyle's satire. If he's poking fun at dialectics, wasn't that what philosophical debate was about: you say something, someone else says the opposite?
That was obvious: consider Diogenes Teufelsdröckh's name, translatable as “God-borne Devil-dung,” or the editor's pitting transcendentalism against Carlyle's own neologism, descendentalism. Or in statements like “they only are wise who know they know nothing.” What were good English readers – or those Americans who received it enthusiastically – to make of wisdom spewed by someone named “Devil-dung”?
But as I flipped through those pages beyond the introduction, I realized Frieda had stopped underlining passages or scribbling comments (in German) in the margin: perhaps she too had not ultimately read the novel?
While I was unable to keep up with the myriad quotes and references witnessed by four or five footnotes per page, I longed to find a translation of the book to make it easier. Reading what Frieda highlighted with her underscores and marginal stars, I wondered if I shouldn't be looking for some pithy summary? Did they ever assign Sartor resartus in college anymore, even in Philosophy courses? Would there be, somewhere, a yellow and black “Cliffs Notes” version of it watered down for philosophically challenged maladroits like me?
I had not been aware sanscullotists were a real thing during the French Revolution, working-class men who wore trousers signifying their break with aristocrats who'd worn silk breeches or cullotes – not men “without pants.” Were Adamites real, men who went naked in the privacy of North Africa's mountains to recreate Adam's original innocence? Apparently so.
Put off by the faux-pompous style of the opening – had there ever been a more unfortunate first sentence in English literature? – I realized the narrator, faced with editing Teufelsdröckh's treatise, was quite in earnest. The ghost of a biblical grammar attuned to old-fashioned dogmatic theology hovered before us, exploding into moments of surprisingly poetic ecstasy.
Suddenly I was reminded, not entirely reassuringly, of reading Moby-Dick in high school with its similar high-flown rhetoric and theological symbolism. Is the White Whale really evil, and black-clad Ahab a tragic, misguided soul?
But this belated awareness – epiphany, what-have-you – made me want to persevere: when did Melville write Moby-Dick? 1851! He'd mourn Carlyle's death thirty years later calling him one of the greatest writers of the age. How much of an influence did his reading Sartor resartus have on his own writing style, particularly his use of symbols?
Despite feeling at sea with Carlyle's style, yet a fan of Proust and Henry James' late novels, I managed to persevere. Then maybe, once back in England, I should reconnect with Melville's whale again.
If I tried relating a composer's work like Cosí fan tutte to the times it was written in, I'd also looked to see where its origins might've been and what could have influenced it. Rather than reading a book for mere entertainment, I should give it the same context it deserved within its creative Pantheon.
When I was younger and found Melville's style off-putting with all its theological ruminations (mostly left on the movie's cutting-room floor where it was easier to overlook them while telling a ripping good yarn), I had also found myself glossing over the numerous philosophical responses the main characters had in Tolstoy's baggy War and Peace. As an impressionable teenager reading Tolstoy's panoramic epic, I remembered the battle scenes; during Viet-Nam, it became a great anti-war novel. And the last time, pushing 55, I contemplated the metaphorical meaning of history.
Once I'd taken on the challenge of Sartor resartus, Cameron asked me what it was about. I could only shrug my shoulders and suggest “a philosophy of clothes and perhaps a discussion about nudity?” If this book also took me three times to get to the heart of it, what hope was there for me?
After a dozen pages (if not, honestly, before) – let's say, on a train ride with nothing else to read, what other options did I have to occupy my time? – I wasn't sure I'd continue. Later, when I found myself only reading it at night, I discovered in its obtuse pages a reliable cure for insomnia. “Going in one eye and out the other,” it also slipped into the background like a soundtrack I could almost ignore and let my imagination wander along an occasional by-road off the strangest tangents.
Struggling through two chapters called “The World out of Clothes” and “Adamitism” – “see, it is about nudity!” Cameron gleefully pointed out – once I'd gotten to whatever “Pure Reason” was about, I'd begun to combine it with our discussion of Mozart and Salieri and especially the cartoon of that sea-chart I'd described labeled with composers names. Only this time, I examined its topography and saw instead names of authors, names I recognized and counted among my favorites. Where, I squinted, would I find Carlyle's name? Who were the grandest mountains?
Dickens regarded Carlyle highly; Melville thought him one of the greatest (there they were, substantial peaks); and Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, even Louisa May Alcott, all championed him (Hawthorne and Poe, for whatever reasons, disagreed). But where was Carlyle himself? Ah – more talked about than read, was he an atoll ready to sink beyond popular awareness?
If there were a claim to some contemporary context, consider this quote Frieda underlined in the Introduction, concerning Carlyle's idealization of the corporate state (since the introduction was written in 1937, this was chilling):
“Totalitarianism makes its appeal to will, imagination, and passion, rather than to dispassionate reasoning and discussion. It demands the subordination of popular debate to mass-obedience and loyalty. Wherever in the world democracy... has grown moribund, there the anti-intellectualism, the faith in will, symbols and exciting leaders, which Carlyle exalted, is a natural and inevitable phenomenon.”
Whatever Carlyle prophesied in his “corporate state,” whether or not he supported the existence of demagogues, it made me wonder what I was about to read and what this had to do with clothes. The Introduction's writer clearly saw in its arguments, written near the beginning of the Victorian Age, parallels to his own times. That Frieda, reading this less than a decade later, a German refugee before the War who'd lived through it, saw fit to underline this and place a star in the margin only verified it.
Was it a question of popular opinion or some potential scientific evaluation that placed a work of art in its context, regardless of different times where similar connections existed, to become that “teachable moment”? This, however, felt like one of those moments where something a bit less intellectually stimulating was in order, perhaps merely entertaining.
If clothes, as Teufelsdröckh droned on, originated from aboriginal man's need to decorate himself, rather than searching for warmth or modesty, was it to express vanity or display his power, an expression of wealth? Did jewelry, a stone hung around his neck – or his woman's – indicate the extent of his possessions or whom he possessed? Perhaps clothing came later, an accessory to jewelry, initially becoming the ultimate symbol of status (and society was always about status). Maybe it expressed the difference between those who ruled and those who obeyed.
There were probably associations made over time that an animal, both extraordinary and special, would give the man who killed it through an act requiring special skills and prowess, say, certain powers or privileges. The most successful hunter might take a lion's mane, drape it over his shoulders, and become generally accepted as their chief.
Or did women think it would make themselves more attractive to a mate? Nudity would seem to reveal all one needed to know about physical attributes or implied sexual satisfactions to the naked eye. If everyone was uniformly “exposed,” covering up with clothes may have become a way to create an air of mysterious enticement.
Whenever men had begun hiding themselves behind fig leaves, aboriginal men today still accentuated their penises, leaving little to the imagination. Now, compare the medieval codpiece: were braggadocious men ever charged with false advertising?
If Herr Teufelsdröckh talks of imagination and faith, does he ever mention magic? I mean “magic” in the sense of applying supernatural powers to inanimate objects like stones that could protect you from illness? Medicinal use of herbs and potions dated back millennia before Christ: the curative powers associated with gemstones didn't begin with hippies.
The Greeks used amethyst against drunkenness and healers today use it to enhance intuition and help relieve stress or promote wisdom. They say Tiger's Eye helps self-motivation but my stone has proven sadly ineffective.
The Church dismissed this hocus-pocus of charms and amulets as witchcraft, yet transformed bread and wine into powerful symbols of salvation, not to mention praying to – worshiping? – the bones of martyrs to cure diseases. Friends often gave me St. Christopher medals before I went on a journey. Then sadly the Vatican unceremoniously laid him off.
Maybe some primitive man, unsuccessful in his hunt, picked up a stone of turquoise peeking out from the rocks at his feet and marveled that a bit of sky was reflecting back at him. What was poor Thag to think, seeing a gazelle next, then successfully killing it: were these two similar events somehow connected?
It hadn't proved so lucky for our skeleton lying in the morgue only a few miles away, whatever caused his death. Was that turquoise his, washed along when rains unearthed him, or a coincidence?
What had Tom said at lunch on Sunday – no, I think it was while we were out at the Standing Stones. He mentioned this stone I'd given him, that turquoise nugget (probably, more likely, turqurenite, not real turquoise as I'd been told), how it went missing at the White Hill Colony shortly before Hawthorne disappeared.
It was back in 1975, before we'd left Faber for the wider world, me to Cutler and Tom off to Tansonville, that I'd given a few close friends polished turquoise stones like that one. Without intending any New Age mumbo-jumbo, it was merely a stone I'd liked, thought pretty, a memento vitae, if you will. How could I recognize one lump of turquoise from forty years ago and distinguish it from any other lump of turquoise? It was unlikely Tom would remember any specific characteristics his stone had, either.
There'd been no significance behind giving Tom this souvenir beyond it being my favorite color, therefore by default my favorite stone. When I gave one to Dorothy Minnim, she'd seem rather non-plussed and said with a little too much disappointment, “too bad your favorite stone isn't the diamond” – I told her “diamond isn't a color.” I'd meant it as a keepsake, a remembrance of me to remind her of the fun we'd all shared as students. There'd been no deeper mystical symbolism lurking behind my choice of the stone.
It was years later when someone saw my turquoise which, back then, I had kept on the desk in my office, and told me it was “an excellent stone for calming your inner chaos.” When Sondra, my wife, became ill, I had one made into a ring for her, burying it with her too soon.
I still had mine, placed unassumingly on my work desk in the study. It wasn't something that would grab your attention, though Cameron wondered what it was doing there when he first saw it. I'd called it my “comfort stone,” something to hold in my hand and help calm me, allow me to focus better. I hadn't mentioned, in fact I probably wouldn't have admitted to him how, in a way, it also helped connect me to this community of friends I'd given stones to a long time ago.
Other people burned candles, I guess, so perhaps he didn't find it particularly odd, or he just chose to humor me. Nothing more had been said about it but every now and then, when we talked there, mostly about music, about composing, I noticed he would pick it up and close his hand around it.
It was only Christmas two years ago I'd gotten a stone for him. While visiting friends in Boston, I went to the same shop I'd bought the others, run by someone named Shawn Cabot. He had to special order it because I wanted one specifically mined in Iran, genuine turquoise, not that imperfect substitute, turqurenite. After we'd arrived in England and unpacked everything, I recalled I'd stopped in his room to ask something, I forget what, and noticed the stone sitting there underneath the bedside lamp on his nightstand.
If I could put all those stones in a pile – Tom's, mine, Dorothy's, the one I'd given Penelope Hart (who, I'm sure, threw hers away), others I've forgotten, plus Sondra's and, more recently, Cameron's – how would I possibly be able to identify any of them from any other turquoise-like stone ever sold across the country? It's not like there's a serial number etched onto the side to trace or a sentimental inscription that could be memorized, and they certainly weren't big enough to inscribe a name, mine or theirs. There probably wouldn't be any record at Shawn Cabot's shop in Boston if the shop still exists, if they even kept records of sales like that (they only cost a few dollars each, anyway). Besides, it's not going to be that crucial – I mean, what are the chances it's going to be the murder weapon?
After all these years, Tom might no longer be able to recall a peculiar mark or something particular about its shape, or maybe its color (more green than blue, lighter or darker?) or pattern. Mine, I know, is shaped like a tear drop, wider and thicker at the base, and only 1¼” long. Maybe he has a photograph of it in the background on his desk. Anything that might jog his memory if only to eliminate his from the line-up of possible stones found with the corpse.
Tom mentioned to me he noticed it was missing before he'd left the colony and that he and two other composers reported to the management how seemingly insignificant things disappeared from their rooms, too. So, how does a stone from around Iowa's northwest border end up outside a town in the southwest corner of Iowa? Did the other two composers ever find the items stolen from their rooms? And I'm wondering, now, what were those items? Even after Tom left, did the management ever find his bit of turquoise?
Which then led to the question of our victim's identity – if he is a victim; he could've died from natural causes – since the coroner was pretty sure this was not Phillips Hawthorne, aged 24. Was he an employee of the colony who'd maybe run off with Hawthorne and they traveled together on the same bus?
Now, there was a theory, however implausible, I hadn't come up with before. The driver's official report said only Hawthorne had failed to re-board the bus. Who else was on the bus that day? Since Orient wasn't on the bus' original route, nobody would've gotten off here if it wasn't a destination for its passengers. What if our former White Hill employee and Hawthorne had conspired to escape from Trazmo's World and managed to exchange identities? It's not so farfetched from the image Grayson Trautman painted in that interview.
But there was still the question about the identity of those remains recently unearthed and clearly in possession of Hawthorne's boots. How had he ended up with them when he died whenever he died?
Now I was wide awake, lying in bed, my brain coursing through its synapses while Cameron, stretched out, was sound asleep.
Looking at the clock, it was past midnight but who knew when I'd fallen asleep or what, if anything, I'd dreamed. Frieda's book – maybe I could ask Burnson if I could keep it – had fallen from my hands when I dozed off. But then, hadn't I thought about leaving it behind or hiding it somewhere?
There was one thing I recalled considering, looking up at the ceiling light, the one Sheriff Diddon changed last night. But why hide it there? Because I could come back later to retrieve it...
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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