262. Veldaro the Younger and the Brick Missile

Veldaro (the Younger, since we're making things up) was sitting on the balcony of a run-down hotel one morning writing a poem about palm trees and women when he was struck in the head by a piece of red brick.

It wasn't a direct hit, nor was it an indirect one.  Shock, terror, pain, disorientation, blood, and rage ensued, all in their particular Veldarosque manifestations.

Why, who, and what to do informed his interrogative response.  Veldaro would never find answers to these questions, except that, regarding what to do, he sought first aid.

He would bear a small scar (and a chronic loss of confidence regarding writing outside) for the rest of his life.  He would save the piece of red brick, however, and become fond of it.  He would wonder, too, about the efficacy of writers' deploying the future conditional tense.

Like him, the piece of red brick had been ill used, concluded Veldaro.

Veldaro the Younger's poetry lost much of its exuberance after the incident.  It became saturated with absurdity and gloom, and its epistemology slipped and staggered between melancholy fatalism and morose despair.  He did not associate himself with the truly oppressed; he knew better than that. Yet he also knew that often our defeats spring from circumstances less than tragic but, in the long run, as corrosive in their effects.



hans ostrom 2016

261. Looking for Stephen Crane

"I want to know where Stephen Crane is!" shouted a man in the desert, which was not obliged of course to reply. "Get back in the car--let's go!" cried a sensible woman sitting in a red, courageous Buick on the shoulder of the highway.



hans ostrom 2016

260. Concerning Umberto Slovea

I am in a vast library, one of the few building complexes where activity still occurs in this abandoned city. Sometimes I imagine the river that passes through our wounded metropolis and past the library has had a deep rust-red caste for the past seven years.  It hasn't.

Today I learned that Umberto Slovea, one of our most senior and accomplished librarians, has been demoted because he often goes too far when research a question.  The more minute, oblique, or trivial the question, the more Slovea is compelled to doubt the most current consensus concerning the answer.  In established fact he sees a suspicious facade hiding a more pertinent factual version of the answer, or, more likely (in poor Umberto's mind) an aggressively rival answer.  I shall not give you an example because doing so might spread the contagion of his compulsion.

That Dr. Slovea (the Third) is a gifted researcher and archivist only feeds his mania.  I must visit him next in the basement of Building RQ, where he has been exiled, assigned to overseeing a collection of unimportant postcards from 19th Century Luxembourg. I shall make up a question for him to research and answer. That is something like the least I owe him.

I know that in the long term, he will transform the sad collection into something rare and splendid, and once again he will begin his rise to a position of considerable responsibility in the organizational structure of the library, and he will hold that position for approximately nine and a half weeks before he goes too far and gets mired in maniacal research, unable to extract himself from incessant seeking, even though a sound, acceptable answer has already made itself manifest.




hans ostrom 2016