The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [152]
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
45 See note 15.
46 I am pleased to see that my mock-romantic “lampoon,” a parody of the Greek poet Anacreon, hit its mark.
47 Can 5’ 81⁄2” be considered “dwarfish”?
48 There was only one other writer involved, who was dismissed not because he told the truth, but because his translations did not convey the tenor of my endnotes. The workmanship, in other words, fell short of the material. Regarding NXB’s other insinuations (product-placement, miserliness, quackery, etc.), see note 9.
As for the “chapter of Norval’s novel” alluded to earlier, it is reproduced in Chapter 18 below. Norval may have refused permission, but his publishing house did not. My industry connections and name had something to do with that. See note 52.
The reader may wonder at this point why I run my own house (which NXB described, through ignorance, as a “vanity press”). The answer is quite simple: people are often blind to new ideas. Especially scientists. I have not always managed to get my complex research understood or appreciated by some of the more “famous” scientific journals and publishers. And I am far from being the only genius, in the annals of science, to have had this problem! Although I attempted, repeatedly, to explain this to my wife, and to account for the many long evenings devoted to publishing matters, she remained unyieldingly sceptical, portraying me in one English newspaper as a “vain, condescending, name-dropping, spotlightseeking, philandering monomaniac.” Because her English is unfluent, I can only assume these epithets came from her feminist attorney.
49 See note 9.
50 See note 9. For the record, our department director, a supremely skilled administrator, is not “cross-eyed.” She has a glass eye.
51 Niobe has a special resonance in my own life. In Greek mythology she is the prototype of the bereaved mother, weeping for the loss of her children. She was turned into a rock on Mount Sipylus, which continues to weep when the snow melts above it. Her story conjures up memories of a holiday my wife and I took to Turkey in 1996. It was to be our last. We hiked to the top of the legendary mountain (Yamanlar Dag, northeast of Izmir), and saw Niobe in stone. “Du hast mich betrogen,” my wife said calmly in the failing light. I remember I was wearing Tyrollean lederhosen and an alpine hat with bersaglieri feathers. When we arrived back in Montreal, my wife and daughter moved out of our nineteenth-century (and now echoingly empty) mountainside home, never to return.
Yes, I was unfaithful—I will admit it here for the first time. I am a man of vigour, I won’t deny it. Women in the lab threw themselves at me, knelt before me. With a wife who deprived me of what are considered conjugal rights, and with my ongoing studies of Viagra (of the blue-green colour blindness associated with the drug), who can blame me for the odd indiscretion? Does this signify, to quote a Montreal tabloid, that I am “suffering from satyriasis”? Do I deserve to be bracketed with a swine like NXB? (See note 26.)
52 This chapter, except for the last two sections, is taken directly from Norval Blaquière’s autobiographical novel Unmotivated Steps (London: Faber, 1992), with one modification: real names have been substituted for the fictional.
53 Florence Crandall obviously suffers from mysophobia, a dread