A Rain of Frogs

A Rain of Frogs

The Bookworm #2

Umberto Eco and the pygmy shrew

A Hymn of Terror:
O Lady Mother, goddess and queen.
You who have existed from the beginning,
Alas! alas! alas!
In the galleries of our generation the creature is a fearful thing.
Alas! alas! alas! Cry chaos and shambles.
Arise, awake, leave us not unprotected on the way.

The bookwormThus goes an excised stanza of the hymn to the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers that bookends my story Song of the Rice Barge Coolie which appeared in Aeon Speculative Fiction #11. Ginny Levitan and her husband, Jim, are inspecting a possible retirement home. With the aid of real estate agent Barbara Casmirczak—“Call me Babs”—they buy the odd dwelling and soon discover they have an ant infestation. Later, Ginny discovers that Jim is having an affair with busty Babs. Ginny’s bond with reality frays with the infidelity of her husband and the arrival of a strange music that only she can hear. The singing “...like a cheap battery radio playing Armenian music in a far-off room. I just imagined it. I’ll be fine...” is a message from the Lady Mother, queen of a colony of carpenter ants. They may perhaps collaborate to solve their mutual difficulties. In an early draft there was an episode in which a pygmy shrew invaded the ant colony:

Large, pallid bodies lay lifeless in a row.
This was not the usual order of things—Housekeeping should have long since cut them up and hauled them away. The Lady Mother of the Long Walkers sang a catalog of sorrows. The kidnapped queens, her sisters, were dead; her own great bulk made escape impossible. The Lady Mother sang of her wedding flight in the world of the winds where against all reason fallen white blossoms floated upwards on a fragrant breeze.

“Strange air. Strange air. The Scourge is in the walls!” sang the Icaros. The alarm was raised too late, for those who would have informed the goddess, the Mother of Us All, were dead. A pygmy shrew was in the nurseries. It ate well and quickly. White bodies squirmed, severed, at its lips.

The pygmy shrew’s flashing teeth slashed and the Icaros lay dead in scattered parts, the slippery fluids of crushed body cavities now growing viscous, severed legs waiting for a command from a separated head. Frantic cadres with no thought but to repair the walls died as they rushed to fill the gap with their bodies. The Lady Mother sang her song of bereavement as maniples of plug-headed soldiers swarmed to the attack.

The invader squealed in pain as the Icaros bit deep. Its saber teeth slashed, its digging talons clawed at gallery walls, causing collapses and obstructing air shafts. It had been wounded, but at great cost to the warrior caste; the soldiers lay dead and in scattered parts. One larger Icaro, a vexillary, cried, “The eyes, the eyes,” and a century threw itself at the shrew’s face. The smell of death hung thick in the unvented air. To the perfumed slaughter of the Long Walkers was added the hot odor of fresh blood.

The shrew was weakening; too swollen by its feast to turn around and mad to escape, it began backing off. But too late. Now sightless, robbed of water from gorging on salty larvae and weakened by loss of blood, it died slowly and in the dark. Housekeeping scuttled and swarmed, disassembling the fallen enemy. The Lady Mother sang on unperturbed. There would be more Long Walkers, for this was in the annals. Time was of a piece; this all had happened before.

*  *  *

Alas, the battle of the ants and the invader did not play well and, as much as I loved it, never made it into the final version.

The Umberto Eco connections

are of course, Baudolino, Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose among many. The author, an Italian university professor (Semiotics at Bologna), was, at the time I moved to Maine in the late 80s, on Everyone Who was Anyone’s short list of writers to read or read about so as to exercise panache at cocktail parties. A review of Foucault’s Pendulum was intriguing and, alone by the woodstove, I sat down with the book. Two weeks later, I got up again. The next year, I rented a video of The Name of the Rose, the book also by Eco, and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held a yard sale paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes time. And, in the fullness of time (ya gotta love that), I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown's DaVinci Code—pale stuff when held up against Eco’s.

In 2002 I enjoyed several weeks of enforced leisure while being bombarded by focused-beam radiation. My digs were the Ronald McDonald House in Bangor, Maine where there was an infestation of ants. Ronald McDonald called in the Orkin Man. Pending his arrival, and knowing what was in store for the McDonald House ants, I watched the ants and started writing. I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. I read, went to be zapped, worked out at the Bangor YMCA, and read more between naps. I picked up Brecht’s The Measures Taken at a local bookstore and started blocking out The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie. I trust that very little of the Brechtian or the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge Coolie. If it has—well, we learn from the masters.

Baudolino

begins in 1155 in the ruins of a Europe that hasn’t the wit to lie down and stop breathing—farrago on the nature of truth. Truth is subjective, depending on who is telling it and the receptive qualities of truth’s hearer: “And I may also have invented: I spoke to him of cities I had never visited, of battles I had never fought, of princesses I had never possessed,” Baudolino declares.

Baudolino is a liar, a peasant boy and slave-cum-adopted-child of the Holy Roman Emperor. And an inveterate fabricator of realities. He is believed by unbelievers: “Give me a break,” murmured Aleramo Scaccabarozzi known as Bonehead, “listen at him!” The inventions, travels and Gnostic epistemologies of Baudolino make Eco’s work high-style SpeciFic, indeed. “Crusaders in Space” has replaced “Pigs in Space.”

The Name of the Rose

is a simple detective story, much in the way the US Criminal Code is about littering.

Main Characters: Adso of Melk, an aged Benedictine who narrates the tale from his days as a novice apprenticed to William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan sent on a mission of reconciliation among the Emperor Louis of Bavaria and the Emperor Frederick of Austria (two emperors, one throne), and the Roman Pope. William is a failed inquisitor who now seeks truth instead of facts. The Abbot, Abo; heresiarchs of the Friars Minor, Fra Dolcino and the beautiful Margaret of Trent—burned before our story, their doctrines are a continuous thread of reference; Bernard Gui, a zealous Inquisitor, and Jorge, blind and bitter, passed over for the post of Abbot decades before our story; and The Labyrinth, an allegorical and physical maze in the cavernous upper stories of the tower keep, designed to maintain inviolate the secrets of sacred scholarship.

Minor Characters: Satan, Christ, The Virgin. Ubertino the Wise, a minorite friar.The part of the Father is played by God, who forgives, and Jehovah of the Hebrew Bible, who doesn’t. And murdered monks—Benno, Severinus, Malachi, Vanantius, Berengar of Arundel, Adelmo, Berengar’s catamite—bumped off to serve a greater plan, the plot, slaughtered each in turn, in and about a Benedictine monastery in the piedmont of northern Italy. The abbey is never named in the course of the novel; the time is the early 14th Century. There are two simultaneous popes and a small core of devoted, educated religious brotherhoods seeking to hammer out an accommodation amongst feuding factions that, unchecked, will tear apart the Church, erase civilization (lay and secular, not to mention the ever-threatening Saracens, and three squabbling, mutually opposed, empires), and destroy the few remaining centers of learning.

The Plot: a fulfillment in torn human flesh of the allegorical coming of the Antichrist foretold in the ravings of St. John the Divine, the Book of Revelations. William of Baskerville is on a private envoy from Louis of Bavaria, Pretender to a restored Holy Roman Empire. A commission of factions warring within the church will meet secretly at the isolated mountain abbey to negotiate an internal peace. The seeming realization of Revelations’ schema at the site of their deliberations sets many and various plotters and counter-plotters to work. Factions-within-factions require a final, bloody conflict to rationalize their interpretations of scripture.

William of Baskerville will solve the riddle of the crimes, but will despair of the human condition at the end: “Super thronos viginti quotuor,” “twenty-four elders upon their seats, what does this mean!” and, “Graecum est, non legitur,” “It’s Greek to me!” to reach a secret room and a solution to the murders.

The Theme: redemption through knowledge, not necessarily Brother William’s encyclopedic, schoolman storehouse and applied syllogistics, but any knowledge that we can test, and which, in turn, tests us. Oh, yes—Jorge of Toledo, mad and blind, did the murders, burned the abbey and poisoned himself to close the mystery at the detective story level. However, the imponderables raised in Brother William’s adventure lived on, past the death of William, the death of Adso, and the end of the book.

“Quintilian,” my master interrupted, “says that laughter is to be repressed in the panegyric, for the sake of dignity, but it is to be encouraged in many other cases. Pliny the Younger wrote, ‘Sometimes I laugh, I jest, I play, because I am a man.’”

“They were pagans,” Jorge replied.

—Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose

Next I’ll reread Foucault’s Pendulum. Like The Name of the Rose, a book to read (at least) twice. I did not feel cheated when, after 611 (The Name of the Rose in paperback) pages, Adso closed his memoir with, “I no longer know what it is [all] about: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.” There is much Latin, William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas, apologetics, and sentences that ramble on for a page or more. This was the style of their time. And in the style of my time, I have just enough Latin to translate Adso’s either/or kicker: The pure rose has a name, but the name is all we have. Go figure.

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