K

By Denn William Quinn

The squirrelly little professor Stanley Kosiewski occupies an unstable place in the world located between two realities: an imagined one in which he socializes and converses with some of the most famous characters of world literature and the academic world of dysfunctional Winston University. The latter is defined by his relationship with four colleagues. Together with K, they comprise the Fellowship of the Fire, a literary clique of philosophically minded, antiquated intellectuals with antiquated opinions on everything from soup to nuts. When faced with the prospect of retirement from academia, the odd little professor, affectionately known as the gerbil by students and colleagues alike, begins to reflect on the purpose and meaning of his life and his career. Waiting to be discovered in the vague space between these realities is something of an answer to his perplexing questions about his relevance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543444155

Denn William Quinn

Denn William Quinn is author of several novels and critical studies in literature. K is a novel in the serio-comic Winston University series, which also includes Restoration Court.

Book preview

I

Frisson and Aporia

Relative to how confident he felt about his location only moments before, he now felt quite possibly lost; more probably he was simply experiencing the disorientation of a moment. Even so, the effect of the moment was the same: a prolonged shiver of insecurity trembled through him. It was not a wholly unpleasant sensation; in fact, it struck him instead as strangely thrilling. It left him breathless with the expectation that something significant was perhaps about to occur. A frisson of anxiety, a part of him would have called it. It was just the kind of expression She would have used. Another part of him would not have used the word out of deference to her memory, which he accorded a numinous quality insusceptible to expression.

Everything around him seemed affected by the strangeness. Eerie. Surreal. Whatever else it may have been, the strangeness appeared to be profound. Everything that could be said to announce the world had removed itself to a distance, respectful of the moment’s right to characterize itself. It was as if a protective charm like unseen arms gathering him to a maternal bosom had softly circled closely around him, enfolding him, insulating him; but isolating him too, cutting him off, exposing him, singling him out, treating him to a passing awareness of a certain incompatibility in the nature of things, in the nature of the moment, an awareness of being lodged at the crossroads of contingencies, at the nexus of mutually exclusive states. An aporia, a part of him would have called it. It was another expression She would have used and a word that another part of him would not have used either. It was a condition otherwise uncomplicated by knowledge, undisturbed by opinion, ungrounded by relation, beyond longing. Perfect emancipation.

Something, he rather imagined, like death.

And so in this netherworld there was no telling sky from water. The lake like lead was gray; the sky like steel was gray. The mist in wispy sheets rising with tantalizing grace, pirouetting, curtseying in elegant curls downward from one to the other obscured the boundary between them—as locations, as orders in a hierarchy, as elements. With one final stroke of the oars he had entered on a soundless glide one of the dense banks of swirling mist that everywhere patched the lake this early morning. He left in his wake scarcely a ripple, only the tight, involuted eddies of water, marking where the oars had lately dipped, a trail of little spiral nebulae transecting the flat disc of the gray infinite, conceived by limitation in two dimensions, a line on either side of the stern like parallel universes precisely duplicate in almost every way, yet opposite in the way of mirror images. And like a collapsing galaxy, each shrank in circumference to little more than an umbilical knot, a depression in the flat surround, the suggestion of a hole in it, at once the well of death and the navel of life, and a challenge either way to its illusion of depthlessness. He thought of a slender youth crossing his arms tight across his chest and bending and folding himself from upright into a fetal position. Galaxies, nebulae, universes retreating to a fetal position. And then just simply disappearing.

His rowboat floated to the end of its glide and slowed at last to a peaceful stop, bobbing in place, calmed amid feeble laps of water. For all the uncertainty that left sky and lake ill-defined as fabrics, undifferentiated, he drifted restfully, acclimating himself to anxiety, his oars feathered, and he listened. In the gray stillness around him he could hear faintly the banks of oars rocking in the locks of the three racing shells whose crews with young muscle, young energy, cut a straight, sleek, determined path through the gray to an imaginary finish line lying somewhere beyond the mist that was impenetrable to the eyes. No one could see it, not even he who had directed them to it with a vague point of his finger, as at an opaque wall, but everyone knew that they would find it exactly where he said it was waiting for them. All they had to do, he said, their coach said, their mentor, their uncle, their father, their professor—to some, perhaps, their mascot, he thought wryly—was row like hell straight toward it, without deviation, without doubt, with every muscle disciplined in the service of performance, and trust that the illusion of flatness would yield to their penetrating energy.

With serene satisfaction he heard the exhortations of the coxswains, disembodied voices of authority. With quiet pleasure he listened to the long sweep of the narrow oars in the water; like a muffled sawing it was, rhythmic, untiring, purposeful. The mist distorted all sounds in a way that he found oddly exhilarating. It was as if an adventurous part of him stood on the threshold of some new world where the rules of nature with which he was familiar did not apply. In this, he mused, he was like Odysseus confronting with mild surprise the dark caves and narrow crevices that marked the furthest limits of experience. Following new rules, perhaps no rules, the sounds had a self-referential quality, superior to echo, replicas of authenticity. But nature imposed order on the addition of the echo too. Still smudging the outlines of the original, and now itself too, with faded accuracy quoting itself, the echo contributed to the general effect of confusion in which the real and the unreal became undifferentiable and every utterance, every call, every shout mocked every other. The choral voices, real and unreal, spirited, spectral, filled the air all around him. They were everywhere: nowhere if not there, nowhere if not here; but at a great distance wherever they were. They were abstractions, like individual thoughts independently inclining toward some nuclear center, seeking to coalesce into a unifying and interpreting idea, trying to become something coherent before too late, before either a trivializing apathy shrugging off the insight, or some new aesthetic blind to the old, washed over them, and either they vanished beneath the surface without a struggle or, gasping, they resurfaced in the service of new rules and new interpretations.

He could interpret the sounds under the old, established regulations of experience. The crews would soon reach their goal amid self-gratulatory cheers. These Orlandos and Claudios and Romeos and Lucentios. These Bertrams without their mother. These brave Ferdinands, so many sons of so many fathers. So many bold young men ironically rendered common, anonymous by the individuating name that should have argued the separable personality of each. It was an argument for the age—disambiguation—that failed to convince. From the gunwale up they were as busts consecutively numbered one through eight from bow seat to stroke seat. Their heads like stone that should have been softened by feature sat squarely atop their sculpted chests and blocky shoulders. But to what avail did the curly hair of seat one distinguish him, the sapphire eyes of seat two, or the olive skin, the aquiline nose, the floppy ears, the freckles of the remaining order? Function, purpose, set in stone, had bereft each head of its humanity. Left it something else upon a plinth. As a corrective, he imagined them with tigers’ heads, but that seemed not quite right: tiger connoted a certain solitary fierceness made dangerous by instinct. By long adulthood. No, tiger would not do. Instead he fixed on the shoulders of each the head of a lynx, in whose whiskered cheeks he rather fancied playfulness and as yet undamaged youth. Yes, the lynx would do just fine. As lynx-men they achieved perfect anonymity: all alike striving alike for a like end. All alike hooded in gray against the chill of the morning, in gray shorts sporting on one side the university logo, the W for Winston. On the other side, symmetrically placed, the monogram of crossed oars stitched in white. Symbols of their orientation. Their present significance. The order of their relevance. Each just one of a number of institutional voices eager to inform anyone all about himself, should that anyone be brazen enough to wonder. At the finish of their course—that imaginary goal made real by their having reached it—they would commence the laborious turn. Twenty-four young men and their coxswains, too, oarless but at the rudder, the type of every delegate of authority who in whatever way, by civil election or primal privilege, ordered or commanded others. Twenty-four young men, a Greek comic chorus, coxswains their choragos, the lake their orchestra, their efforts choreographed by training, their grunts the strophes and antistrophes of their ode. With edgy precision, a little ragged in synchronization without him to direct them, they would turn the stiff long boats. They would align them, approximating a competitive order of sorts, and then at the top of a breathless pause, reaching the right height of quiet, with a mighty heave of limb and voice and an explosive rock of oars, they would strike out toward him. They would strive toward wherever he was, the little fellow on the lake with the logo of crossed oars on the baseball cap that clearly and unambiguously identified him as their coach—or something of a coach, he thought with mild self-deprecation—lest he be mistaken for some other shortly built, bespectacled, swarthy little fellow out for his morning drift on the lake. It was toward that nearly mythic man of crossed oars they pulled with might and main. Toward wherever on the lake they had left him in the mist that had swallowed him, identifying cap and all, erased him with a smart swirl, leaving only a gray streak behind on the flat surface, marking the place where he had been. It would swallow them too, the mist, if for one careless and unguarded moment they ceased pulling at their oars and in this way offering no resistance became one thing else to be swept up in gyres of gray and erased.

He was supposed to be keeping time, but he had dropped that pretense of responsibility a while ago in deference to the beauty of the stillness of the moment that seemed of unending term. He could well enough judge the quality of the sprint from the sound alone. This is what he would tell them when afterward they would ask for a quantifiable measure of their effort. Absent anything empirical to challenge him, to undermine the legitimizing power of his opinion, they would be happy in his approval. The shells would be borne on muscular shoulders to the boathouse and stored there. And then something remarkable would happen: the cheerful young lynx-men made anonymous by name would emerge from the boathouse with monitors for heads, each rectangular tablet or video terminal busy with windows of text or images or other data accessed wirelessly and in place of a heartbeat emitting a soft undertone of operating energy. The monitor-men would disperse to their cars and drive to the campus a few miles away, their workout done for the morning; and he, following at his own leisurely pace would likewise return to the university, to the halls clamorous with the bustle and hum of monitor heads and cellphone heads, all thin, all flat, 3G, 4G, data-planned to death, life is good, could each one hear the other now? He would repair to his office, review his lectures, prepare his classes. At day’s end he would wend homeward to his modest unlocatable little bungalow situated on the outskirts of the city somewhere. No one, monitor or cell, knew where.

Home and the moment. They were united, bonded like the terms of metaphor. That too was part of the strangeness. He was paradoxically at home in the alienating moment, lost as well he might have been in the gray between, which it comprehended. But—he fell to wondering idly, for that was his way, to flit in thought from here to there—what, in fact, was a moment really? Was it a relatively meaningless increment of time, too small, too inconsequential for consciousness to register? Or in the way a drop of water could be said to contain a universe, did the abbreviated moment, the half-blink of an eye, comprise whole lifetimes? If its ephemeral nature was its defining feature—and it would not matter if it comprised the duration of an eye-blink or, as here and now it seemed, something much longer—what properties were intrinsic to it, what, of its qualities, were knowable but through retrospection so quickly did it pass? A succession of them together might yield measurable value, the way an accumulation of metaphor might march a poem toward a coherent meaning or inexorably leave an impression in its wake. In what lay its relevance? Could it be said to have functionality? Was there enough of it, in any event, to sustain performativity? Were functionality and performativity in themselves reliable indicators of relevance? What other markers were there of the apposite quality of the moment?

In any event, fundamental to the moment were its indeterminacy and its amorphousness; for whether compressed to a lyric brevity or protracted to epic proportion, it conformed itself to fill whatever ill-defined space lay between the end of something and the beginning of something else, fulfilling a perverse function in obscuring the boundary between the two by embodying traits of both. While spatially it thus could be said to be ambiguously situated, temporally its location was relatively fixed and certain. As abbreviated or as protracted as it may have been—and the moment at present seemed interminable—it was as nothing, really, in the long chronicle of moments, each alone a nothing, that preceded it, announcing it, predicting it, and those nebulous increments of time that presumably at some point could be expected to follow it, answering it, maybe fulfilling it, maybe undoing it. The work of history, he imagined, could be said to be enacted in this succession, every moment culturally uncertain and unstable to the perceiving mind that found itself right smack-dab in the questionable middle of its relentless unfolding.

He had long supposed history to manifest itself in a linear progression of moments each determining the next in succession with ineluctable authority that precluded the possibility of alternative in the process of its unfolding. Until this uncertain moment seemingly pregnant with possibility—something of a pause in which God, or whatever, nodded—he had been content, even comfortable, with that understanding of the nature of things, for it was uncomplicated by the cooperative effort of human agency and will. And while a traditional upbringing and a brief sojourn—a moment—in the seminary had reinforced that belief in him, his extensive education, if not his experience alone, had led him otherwhere than the familiar and convenient refuge of teleology.

To this skeptical moment in fact, in which the abstract nature of it all—and only in such vague unphilosophical terms was he ever able to articulate the matter—seemed strangely objectified in the unstable dialectic of water and sky and the swirling mist which in substance partook of both. Time could very well have been a barren landscape wanting a fertilizing inscription, or a chaos of alternatives sharing only a sympathy of randomness—or some other thing as ambiguously compounded, as this of water and sky. If a barren landscape of uncertain state—solid or liquid or vapor—it was an expanseless concept comprised of granules or drops or molecules sterile in significance until the human spirit stirred them up with meaning. Excited into relevance to wheel with purpose around some developing center, why could these not figure the manner in which history became immanent? Many little dust devils springing up simultaneously across a barren landscape, whorls of storied moments—comic, elegiac, tragic—sweeping upward, swooping downward, each spiraling independent of every other, each as random as the other and as nomadic, and the contribution of each together as like to produce a coherent narration as not—like words in a statement unsyntactically arranged, frustrating interpretation, negating meaning, but words nonetheless remarkable for their self-predication: why not this?

Regardless of in what manner history made itself known, whether it was one cosmic swirl composed of many unpredicated events, or nothing of the sort, but a myriad of swirls as the countless whorls of mist confusing water and sky presenting only an illusion of coordination in which he was presently lost or simply disoriented, man seemed to him to live most of his life as uncontextualized in the one as the other. On reflection only, did it further seem to him, could man possibly discover his relation to the whole, though he might long suppose that he bore some such. In this moment when the great unfolding, however it was to manage itself, seemed suspended, he felt more than in any other moment the burden and the expectation of awakened consciousness and the fear—ah! the frisson—that the one with all its weight should be too much for him to bear and the other mocked by the demeaning smirk of Necessity.

The mist. Sky dissolving into water; water resolving into sky: a vague profound was this moment, this interstitial thing on either side of which, and assimilating it, lay the appropriating and contextualizing process of history, whose course, if it had one, was inscrutable, but tyrannical for all that. And in microcosm—whether half an eye-blink or an entire age—each moment of which it was composed was a self-contained nothing, or a thing ideologically premised, or dialectically generated—or not. And at this moment, whatever its character—frisson notwithstanding, aporia unsolved—he could see no way out of it but to drift in the fold of its gray arms until the charm should release him. That was the long and short of his purpose: with passive aggression to liberate himself from the tyranny of –ism and –logy. He could see nothing for it but in his silent way to declare the sovereignty of the self against the encroaching apparatus of wills antagonistic to his individuality; and with the illusion of some vague right to self-determination to sustain him and reinforce him in his resistance, defend the integrity of his borders against the rapacious incursions of the institutional voice.

Frisson notwithstanding. Aporia unsolved.

As he waited, he snorted to himself. Oh, what thoughts! A waste of time! A waste of a goodly number of moments! Over his sixty-odd years, how many such half-blinks of an eye had he given up to aimless meditation of the kind that furthered his understanding not a whit more than might trigger a snigger of cynicism and self-ridicule? As he waited, he noted how his oars, pulled inward and crossed at the grips, might be imagined to form a W also, like the logo on the shorts of the young men approaching him, approaching him, where he might be sighted. These Orlandos and Claudios and Romeos and Lucentios. These Bertrams without their mother. These brave Ferdinands, so many sons of so many fathers. If he was lost, he was for the moment, peculiarly, comfortable with being lost.

Frisson notwithstanding. Aporia unsolved.

II

Voices

One might expect of a narration that a few words should be spoken concerning the background of its hero. Such an expectation, however, would signify presumption of the first order. For one thing, to denominate as background a personal history, a life ab ovo so to speak, is in questionable ways to imply that we are foregrounding behavior of the present in a context that is believed to explain it somehow. This is not to dismiss the relevance the past bears to events of the present. Surely the past informs the present in myriad unacknowledged ways. But to suggest that some relatively inconsequential event or behavior of years gone by encapsulates the whole of a profound existential dilemma in microcosm, to suggest that responses to certain stimuli of the past may usefully be supposed models for responses to current circumstances analogous to or approximating those of the past, to suggest that such responses symbolically foreshadow one’s future moral compass, seems all very much like irresponsible psychologizing—a tautology if ever there was one—not to mention that it appears to be somewhat mean spirited, for who wants to relive in endless permutations in the present the dumb things one has done in the past? This is not to say that the subject of a narrative is not doomed to repeat his inexpungible history symbolically if not in actual fact, to suffer over and again in new and inventive ways without relief the consequences of past actions. Rather it is intended to strike a note of caution about assuming too readily a meaningful correspondence between past and present—apart from some few curious parallels to the present one might instructively draw from the past that suggest the one might be in ironic, metaphoric ways a spiritual derivative of the other. Regarding the background of our subject, whom intimate friends knew simply as K, a practice of appellation we will make bold to adopt for the sake of convenience, we can assert nothing further for now than that he was presently a professor at a midsized university located in a midsized New England city—spare facts of time and place avowedly in need of future elaboration.

A second narrative difficulty arises when we attempt to cloak our character in the mantle of hero. By no stretch of the imagination should the subject of this narrative be considered heroic. That is, of course, unless our sense of the word departs from modern acceptation, which, obedient to populist opinion in its unthinking disregard for the preservation of distinction, confers the word liberally on anyone who can be said to serve and protect society, typically those conspicuously outfitted in uniforms of one kind or another. This is an unfortunate acceptation owing more perhaps to gushing panegyric than to the word’s kinship with the Latin verb servare. Our subject is not a hero of this manufacture. If the word itself is not far removed from the Sanskrit vira, which appears to mean hero, that would anticipate the later Latin vir and a barrel of connotations filled with words like virility and virtue. In the main, however, these are connotations that do not apply to our subject either. It seems that for our purposes the most fitting etymology of the word is the Greek hero, or ηρο, a term whose application Pindar reserved for the aristocracy. And though Pindar’s notion of the aristocratic resonance of the word may have worn away to an echo of itself across the long centuries of its misuse, in which troubling discrepancies began to appear between the character of an action performed and the quality of the character performing it, the word seems stubbornly to have retained a sense of exclusivity and privilege, the very attributes we persist in assigning it. Circumscribed by this Pindaric sense of the word then, we can on such a ground accord our subject no special distinction. Instead we are rather more inclined to invoke, for what it is worth, an even earlier signification of the word as used by Homer, who applied it with democratic largesse to every man, provided he was not a slave, in which case he hardly merited any consideration. Our subject would seem to be imprecisely located in a certain trackless place between that occupied by world historical individuals who make a difference and to whom it falls by fate that fetters should not bind them; and that occupied by the supernumerary figures who merely serve to swell the ranks to mark the progress of others and who, beyond that service, appear to add nothing to anything. It is a groundless region, a middle space, a kind of existential limbo, in which individuals of the middling sort are comparatively free to explore their potential within the small circumference of opportunity described by their class to which they are tethered by the uncompromising circumstances of their birth, breeding, and education, and where all too often such souls lose themselves quite thoroughly in their life effort not to lose themselves at all.

In like manner, and assuming for the sake of argument that it not belong to the subject ego and is otherwise facelessly expressed and indeterminately derived, a few words should be said about how and why precisely there often emerges from among a number of competing options one settled point of view which claims intimate knowledge about a subject. Narrative strategy, typically unquestioned at its manifest surface and beneath that surface valorized in subtle ways by ideology, privileges this disembodied voice with knowledge of the narrated subject more or less omniscient as the inclination in the speaker toward verisimilitude in representation proves weak or strong. But seldom does one interrupt his absorption in an unfolding story to wonder how the narrative voice managed in the first place to assimilate the experience of the subject in order faithfully, that is, without prejudice, to tell its story. It is as if out of intellectual