Marginalia

Vina, I must betray you, so that I can let you go.
				     Begin.

			The Ground Beneath Her Feet
			Salman Rushdie



On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.
It was the devious-cruising Rachael, that in her retracing search
after her missing children, only found another orphan.

			Moby Dick
			Herman Mellville

The student, regrettably, is dead.

Before Lockhart could sheath the balled tip of his pen he noticed that the inked crosses that topped regrettably's two "(t)s" sloped oddly, two southeasterly migrating planes, so that the bisecting marks--the last impaling the bulbous musculature of an offended 'a'--surrendered to an inexplicable Saturnine gravity encamped somewhere in the fibrous white mesh of the lower right margin.

There was also the matter of the errant 'd' which, flattened against the stationery's marble finish, suggested a severed ear: The looping "l" of the letter's foot was swollen up like a sullen adolescent queerly disengaged from its distressed connubial "o." It marred the morbid symmetry of the word--D-E-A-D--its laconic, decisive grace. Conveyed an unintended and clumsy open-endedness which the content of the memo retreated from. "Two T's and the Mutant 'D,'" mused Lockhart. "Title for a love story. Postmodern."

Lockhart/Narrator's Commentary: Comment-"unbalanced, also word order."

The young woman regrettably is dead.

The sentence sprouts-leafy, green-sending a thin vapor trail across the split black screen of his closed lids and hovers there, dizzy like a mirage, a falsely accused child in the belly of an evacuated room. "Regrettably" sprouting up like the bright, unwelcome head of a dandelion wedged in between two lead vegetable wings. His eyes shutter. Open. Close. Click.

Journal Entry:Lockhart/5.14.98

A policy of disclosure should imitate the logic of parallel lines. Take two lines, each reaching forwards and back into the eternity of geometric space. Along the first falls the facts, the tell-tale truth, the expurgated 'there it is' decked out in an omniscient god's whitest finery. These facts fall along our first infinitely retreating/advancing line in smooth unexpurgated sentences. Text running along an infinite yardstick. The New York Times laid out horizontally along an undeviating thread of silk, broad as a universe not unnerved by Platonic dimensions.

On the other line, plot the public's acquisitive nature. Their greed for detail. The public, in this state of nature, is the Fact's dissimilar twin, perpetually in the dark and subject (as we are in this world, say, to gravity) to the unvarying principle of left and right. Successfully orchestrating a public relations campaign means resolving yourself to this capital mentality: Facts are facts and greed is greed and never the twain shall meet.

Interoffice Memorandum:Schoeple's Marginalia: "Distracting. Superfluous."

TO: J.Engle (GEN)
FROM: J. LOCKHART
DATE: 05/14/98

John, just met with Boltinghouse. From that interview, I can't agree with the council's decision to issue an apology to the woman's surviving relatives--a well intentioned but legally implicating step tantamount to admitting liability. Boltinghouse behaved--to his merit--professionally and showed, in his restraint, a good faith concern for the welfare of the student. The enclosed transcript--and the testimony of seven student witnesses to the event--will bear that finding out.

In compliance with the department's policy, Boltinghouse reported the incident to administration within the hour of its occurrence. We had a counselor up at the dormitory twelve hours before housing made the emergency call.

We're human. We want answers. But I've been in this position long enough to know that the inexplicable and the tragic often produce, wherever their expanding sphere of influence is felt, a chain reaction of spurious self-incrimination that is rarely justified. Perhaps the incident in the classroom yesterday precipitated the young woman's actions. That's not for us to say. Notwithstanding any guilt we may feel for being unable to produce a consoling explanation to the student body and to the girl's family, the university has no business complicating itself, or its faculty, in the sticky webwork of cause and effect. As I'm sure you already know by now, the young woman, regrettably, is dead

Regards,

J.D. Lockhart

Narrator's Commentary, RE Memo: fine the way it is. Advance after same.

A paragraph drafted following the logic of parallel lines-drafted in some offbeat, parallel universe that excludes Einstein and the refracting forceps of relativity.

Journal Entry: Lockhart/2.15.99

Rachael Singleton's parents will never know how instrumental they have been in rendering their daughter into the stormy narrative of local myth.

A crumpled sedan. Broken glass on starched asphalt. New England, predictably, was all generous sympathy. Also riveted by the hint of scandal, the potentiality of an unsprung coed mixing with their fully parented, sane sons and daughters.

Rachael, what was it? The relentless front page snapshots? That dim image? Or the Texas plates, Texas inverted? Or the anonymity of the embankment, concluding in Greek ruins, the short-lived gasoline fire, a funeral pyre, on baked rocks in the Ozarks? Was it an accident, Rachael? A double suicide? You wouldn't tell. Wouldn't venture a guess. In fact, you weren't talking at all. Except in class. There you wouldn't shut up.

Transcript: 5/13/98

You said Rachael had a habit, that she had that morning-and these are your words-"literally hijacked your seminar."

Class discussion intimidated Rachael. To compensate, she engaged in lecture. Her personality is nine-tenths serin gas and plastic explosives.

She's the Unabomber, then?

If she were a firearm, she'd be a semi-automatic.

Verbose. But a terrorist?

She threw a book at me.

A book? Which book? A paperback?

Moby Dick. A Norton.

I see.

Marginalia: Narrator's Commentary/ Note: Advance after transcript; mark for revision "the ivory hue...white iris..."disharmony between past and present tense"-- Schoepel on first draft.

Under the scrutiny of the office's fluorescent lighting, Lockhart notes how Boltinghouse's face gleams-phosphorescent like a death mask; the ivory hue of frightened chameleon skin draped over the swollen petal of a white iris. He notes (with suspicion he notes) that when the man speaks his hands flutter nervously-hyperactive butterfly wings; how his chest slips upward and out like warm hydrogen escaping from an exhausted balloon.

Marginalia: Narrator's Commentary/ Introductory to Lockhart; See general draft remarks. Pare for clarity.

Colleagues disliked Dr. Lockhart not so much for his philosophy, his approach to teaching, to research, to life. It was that he approached life. He approached. From the rear. On tiptoes. Armed.

They disliked him because he endured, and only endured, the sometimes dispiriting mechanisms of social exchange by which so much at a small university is accomplished; endured with a martyr's forbearance the charitable discourse that filters through the corrugated and dimly lit hallways of an underfunded English department at the dark end of a hollow Wednesday afternoon and without which the claustrophobic urgency to produce, to pedagogue, to publish, becomes unendurable.

They disliked him mostly because on Fridays he slipped out of his office in the early afternoon to avoid the hallway confessionals made by exuberant graduate students who, relieved by the weekend release from Aristotle and The Phaedrus and the relentless tedium of Old English, curtained the department with the anesthetized rhetoric of acadame to which loitering, sympathetic professors, to underscore their relevance, would reply with a quote from Ginsberg or Cobain and, having spoken, nod agreeably with Greek wisdom at the inevitable, and inevitably sycophantic, countering of their response.

But Lockhart dismissed his critics on grounds that his profession obliged him to, like a silent street performer rolling an imaginary rock up a hill, confront life's momentary catches and false starts, the impregnable WHYs that confound and give life to philosophical discussions; quietly and with passion. He respected life's complexity, its ornate convolutions, complicating, dizzying contortions, contradictions, confusions, its half-truths, dead ends, despairing unanswerables. Where most people gave up, smiled, sat down and turned on the tube, he'd sit down with a slide rule and calculator. Draw the numbers out, isolate their strange pairings.

At the same time, it's a mistake to compare a philosopher's mind to an assembly machine: Conditions, functions, potentialities, constants falling off a conveyor belt into the mind's steaming engines and, on the other end, the answer-the mass of the moon in pounds, grams and ounces, fully assembled. A mistake because a philosopher doesn't multiply. He divides. He breaks down and builds up in his own image. A very human procedure. You treat the world and all its mysteries as your very own Erector set. No rules, no assembly instructions; just perforated metal and iron pegs.

Transcript (cont):5/13/98

Tell me again what happened.

Fifteen minutes into discussion-she hasn't said a word. Then she's up, like a blitzkrieg. Screaming.

Not screaming. Speaking. Loudly. What does she say?

"There's nothing outside the text."

Just that and she walks out?

Just that and she walks out.

...

Nothing outside the text.

...

Derrida.

...

Il n'y a pas de hors texte.

...

Referring to a question I'd posed.

...

Ishmael. The first line. I said 'Call me Ishmael.' Now why that? Abraham's black sheep. What's the relevance? or 'What about that' or something. It's funny. I'm thinking 'there she blows. Again.'"

That's an old line, Scott. Defensive: "The serene politics of a benign authoritarian dictatorship violently overruled, cast out, replaced by a rouge, a lunatic accent." Is that what I tell the student press when they come barreling into my office this afternoon carrying beaten ploughshares and torches radiating the light of truth? Do I have it right?

Yes. And afterward. Her standing there. Waiting. Like she's waiting for a bomb to go off. This furious atom cloud. But it doesn't. That's when she throws the book at me.

Marginalia: Internal Dialogue/Lockhart/Advance after transcript. Note comments, Schoepel's, for revision.

Boltinghouse could have it backward. Perhaps this clamorous Rasputin hadn't boiled herself over and out, extinguished the fire of unreasonable emotional chatter with her own foamy bubbleheadedness but was in fact waiting, waiting as if she was prepared to hold out against the universe's collapse back into its primordial, dense walnut shell, for an answer. Waiting, waiting, and then, like the train whistle at a track crossing-the Big Bang. Nothing outside. Yes? Yes? Is that it?

Transcript (cont)

What did you do then? When the bomb didn't go off?

After she ran out? I called class, Jim. Melville can wait.

The women's dorm called administration this morning. An overdose, apparently: little blue pills and Bushmills. The autopsy will be conducted this evening so we don't know for sure. Of course, the university's taking the matter very seriously.

Marginalia: Narrator's Commentary/Recommended for cut; sentimental vague schmaltzy-Schoepel (who else?)

Before leaving, Lockhart noticed Boltinghouse glance at the paperback in his lap. It was opened to the title page. Rachael Singleton's name penned in a Mediterranean pink rose ink. Framed in the far-left corner of the page. Outside the text.

Transcript (cont.)

Did she leave a note?

Of course.

Marginalia: Draft copy: concluding comments/Schoeple

B-

Alison:

   Faulkner (William) tells us to write our postage stamps. It seems to me that by imagining what comes off as a rather contrived discussion between members of a tribe with which you have had, by my count, only a single semester to become aquatinted with, you may be--to strain the metaphor--guilty of mail fraud. It's a fine first attempt. But don't feel pressured to write outside your zip code! Let's hear from Rachael next time around. Okay?

   A family member contacted me yesterday. We spoke about your mother. I'm so sorry. I lost my father last year. Also to cancer. This is a small campus, Alison. You'll find that your professors are not all "locked hearts" and "bolted houses." My door is always open to you.
P.S.

   I'm a little worried about your choice in subject matter. Maybe you need to get some distance. Don't feel obligated to turn in a revised draft. I'd like to speak to you about forgoing the semester assignment. You wrote some lovely poems for me last semester that I'd like to see published in the graduate school's literary journal. Drop by during office hours so we can discuss the revisions.

   Are you okay? Is there something I should know?!

Marginalia: Reply to my Critics/ May 15th 1999

X-Sender: asmith@mail.utexas.edu (Unverified)
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Date: Sat, 15 May 1999 14:43:11 -0500
To: schoepleb@mail.utexas.edu
From: Alison Smith
Subject: A Message to My Critics

Dear Professor Schoeple:

                                 ...Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
                                 ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
                                 qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
                                 si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
		                 et quod pruriat incitare possunt...