Some time ago (or so the rumors tell)
As if he were to pick the locks of hell
An alchemist decocted a strange potion
That could endow the long deceased with motion,
Give them again the sail of living breath
And raise them from the worm-feast known as death.
Upon a night, right here in Chestnut Hill,
In an old graveyard near the ruined mill,
He sprinkled this elixir from a gourd
Upon a grave plot of neglected sward:
The tombstone leaned aslant and much effaced,
The names and dates illegibly erased;
So who it was whose corpse burst from the sod,
Wrestling from his prison clod by clod,

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There is no constraint more Procrustean than that imposed on contrivers of palindromes. Even a neatly apposite palindrome (for example, Napolean saying, “Able was I ere I saw Elba”) strikes one as aberrating from natural discourse. It is ironic that this supreme curtailment of language produces an effect not unlike that of surrealist automatism, ostensibly a removal of all curtailments. One method loosens to an extreme; the other subjects itself to an extreme of letter-shuffling precision. They appear, however, semantic offspring of the same genes.

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My name is Henry Jekyl, –As you see,
I am employed here by the library.
I was a doctor once–yes, that is true:
A brilliant theorist and a healer, too.
But I dared tamper with what no man should,
The fractal line that severs bad from good.
Now, though I was myself a sterling fellow,
A kindly gentle sort, quite sweet and mellow,
I always had grave doubts about my soul;
And so, the more my colleagues would extol
My scientific breakthroughs, right and left,
The more my troubled conscience was bereft
Of mooring and of equilibrium.
That’s why I filled my beaker to the brim
With that green foaming broth of bitter folly.
(I wish instead I’d leaped under a trolley!)
You see, I thought that I was bad, when good;
And what is worse I also understood
How to invoke the opposite of myself.
–I’ve many a trugid tome upon my shelf,
But one of them revealed the mystery,
(of alchemy it told the secret history)
–at least what part of it I had to know–,
And then, with patient labor, calm and slow,
I finally mixed a potiona [produces beaker] just like this:
It works, believe me, though it tastes like…
[sips beaker, undergoes transformation into Hyde]
That’s right, I’m Edward Hyde, the foul-mouthed bounder,
Beneath whose curses may the saints all founder!
The only thing I need now is a gun,
For you can bet they keep me on the run,
–those bleeping Bobbies with their funny hats!
There was a time I crucified some cats,
Just for the tune they sang and nothing more;
And who’d you’d think comes banging at my door,
But Messrs. Law and Order, neatly pressed?
I’d given each a bullet in the chest,
Except I had no gun and could but club them:
A silver handled cane I used to drub them.
I spurned their bloodied trunks and left them groaning,
In chorus with the cats who hung there moaning.
But Jekyl was a fool to swill the juice
And here in public turn the tiger loose.
He sets me up before this crowd of kids! [this was performed in the Phila Library for children]
He knows that I would do as Molloch bids,
(Old Carthage’s stern iron-oven idol)
And fear of law alone my fury bridle,
To keep them from my shovel and the flames!
And then the drink wears off, and me he blames,
The hypocrite! –But suddenly I’m gripped
And wracked! It seems he only…sipped…
[transforms back into Jekyl]

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Perhaps on account of his name, Bob was incredibly fond of palindromes — words, phrases and sentences that were the same backward and forward. I intend to transcribe Bob’s 88 word sample, which he loved to recite and put prominently in his memoir.

Here is a link to a hilarious and clever piece by the lyricist and singer Weird Al Yankovich, who, based on this song alone, is perhaps underrated. Watching it makes me miss Bob.

Canto I: Valley of the Kings

The mummycase at last had been unsealed
and Hotep’s bandaged figure lay revealed,
wherat the dark man in the fez observed,
“This mummy is imperfectly preserved.”
“But surely,” said the archaeologist,
“of those I’ve seen this one’s by far the best,”
–indeed, I’d say, more thoroughly intact
than Ramses’ famous mummy.” “There’a fact,”
replied Ephrami, “that you may not know:
a mummy’s not a thing designed for a show.
It is a vehicle beyond one’s death;
so if one finds the mummy draws no breath,
I’d say its preparation has been flawed–
though in this case–you see the wood’s been clawed:
just notice here the inside of the lid
Professor Marcroft gazed as he’d been bid
and shined his flashlight on the splintery grooves.
“What reasoning, Professor, here removes
this evidence of life beyond the tomb?”
“My dear Ephraimi, there is ample room
for reasonable explanation in this case.”
“But look,” rejoined Ephrami, “at that face!
Its panic and its horror well comport
with just such desperate struggle of the sort
those marks inside the coffin might suggest.”
“But surely, my good man, you speak in jest!
Here’s not a case of burial premature:
of that it needs no effort to be sure
when once you notice those canopic urns
by opening that which one swiftly learns
no heart could ever pound within that breast
as whatsoever urgent fear’s behest!”
“it is the other’s heart it lives upon…”
–whereat, before old Marcroft could respond
a bandaged hand reached up and seized his collar,
and soon as Marcroft’s throat let loose its holler,
the other hand plunged straight within his trunk
and brought thereout a bloody pulsing chunk
of something most unlike a valentine
with caption saying “Be forever mine!”
This morsel bolted, then at once he rose,
and to Ephrami said, “Do you suppose
I’ve waited here so long to hear your scorn,
you slave, you cur, of slavish parents born,
who would suggest I am but ill preserved!
–You seem a little shaken, quite unnerved,
what use now, all your estoric lore!”
Then did Ephrami on his knees implore
the risen mummy that he spare his life.
“Rise up, my slave, and help me find a wife,
–then will I not your wretched carcass splatter
nor serve myself your heart upon a platter.”

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Jacob Boehme wrote: “As the many kinds of flowers grow in the earth near each other, and none contends with the other about color, smell, or taste, but they let the earth and the sun, rain and wind, heat and cold, do what they will with them, while they grow each according to its own nature, so it is with the children of God.”

An aphorism can be its own example, as this one is.I sense the oakleaves of Dodona quivering, feel pregnant with a gnomic whopper: Nope, false alarm.

Evasion is sometimes the best defense.

On the left side, under Pages, there are some photographs of Bob, taken by his good friend Mark Garvin and an ode for Bob on his 60th birthday, written by yours truly.

There was something strangely poached about the way things looked to Hurgelrood that morning. The sun had dawned like wet yolk on the toasted horizon. The wheels of passing cars seemed glazed and greasy like bad donuts. Everything he looked at suggested a repugnant breakfast.

He could not recall if he himself had had breakfast or if in fact it was his breakfast that had just escaped him and now adorned the curb. He rose. He staggered. The pavement disappeared and now he slogged through weedy sand and then sand only. He fell. He rolled over, unable to brush the grains from his face. He was alone. If he could only rest a little he might recover himself. A lullaby of rolling surf soon granted oblivion.

But suddenly (or it seemed suddenly) there was noise and bustle. Reedy little screeching voices, laughter and splashing. One small voice cried out: “Mommy, look! The man is waking up!” He rolled his head. The beach was crowded that afternoon. all but for a large circle of which he was the focus.

Hurgelrood was no gutter-diving sot. He’d been mickeyed. He’d rented a cheap place on Crabnut Spit in order to debate with himself whether or not to give up being a private eye. When he finally found his way back he stumbled onto the porch, lost balance, and grabbing the screen door, tore it off its hinges. He made instant coffee with hot water. And it took three cups of the vile sludge before he could even vaguely remember the mantled and betrubanned Madam Dropofsky and the fly-by-night seance parlor she presided over.

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If my mother could request it at this time, she would probably prefer a wake to a dirge. She was always vivacious, quite capable of having fun, though sometimes impatient when she was not having it. So I would not wish by these proceedings to make her deal soul fidget too long in the pew. She was a bit of a tempest, was old Mom! But her mirth was easily brought to the bubble. It would always amuse her when I tromped about the rug at age fourteen reciting Shakespeare. My father, bless his soul, thought it contributed to my being a trifle “pompous” — that was his word — for a boy of my age. But my mother allowed herself to be entertained by my antics, chortling over them and calling me a nut-wagon or some such affectionate phrase.

I will pass over the fact that I entitled myself to that epithet in a somewhat less humorous way during my later adolescence. But barring the episodes of dystunctional crises, my mother and I just naturally got along, both of us highly eccentric, onbly with me tending to emphasize my eccentricities, while she sought more or less to muzzle hers, at least to near the parameters of 50s conformism. Her artistic spirit, however, she did not constrain. During her middle age, when I was absent from the scene, she produced many fine oil paintings. She painted excellent still-life compositions and beautiful Bucks County landscapes, but one of my favorite things that she did was a very free but faithful copy of the Winslow Homer painting of two oil-slickered fishermen hauling fishladen nets into their dinghy. Her father was a Newfoundland fisherman, captain of a fishing-schooner, in which he and an elder brother of my mother’s braved the North Atlantic tempest and did not return. She told me once that she had seen a total eclipse of the sun while she was walking home from school as a little girl, an even t that had not only not been foretold to her, but one of which she had not even an awareness of the possibility. She was of course utterly terrified. And for some reason she took it to mean that her father had been lost at sea. By coincidence, or through some other inscrutable causality, this proved to be so.

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