Better than a thousand hollow words is the single word that grants peace. - Buddha
{A} word spoken with the whole being can give life. - Henry Miller
{A} word spoken with the whole being can give life. - Henry Miller
Two Characters in Search of an Exit
by Don Plansky
Click footnote number to link to note page.
“Words, words, words.[1] Too many words,” grumbles the Professor, shaking his head in disgust.
You might imagine him to be aged (four-scorish), short, with a massive and shiny bald dome, whiskery about the chin, wheezy, overripe, tweedy, bespectacled over gleaming turquoise eyes, energetic and cantankerous. There’s a vacant melancholy about his aspect, a slight limp to the gait. Or you might prefer to imagine him otherwise.
He’s looking up and around at the dusty tomes of his vast library, which houses the finest collection of semiotic texts in the world (25 volumes authored by his own hand).
“Professor Klopstock, what’s the matter?” I inquire, announcing my eavesdropping presence in his office.
“Between who?”
“Hamlet, Act II, Scene II, Hamlet to Polonius,” is my dutiful response.
“Very good, young man,” he replies, apparently unable to turn away from his books. “I was not altogether remiss when I made you my research assistant.”
After this opening exchange, he seems to forget about me, and, held captive by his books, begins again to fulminate against the excess verbiage that threatens to engulf him.
Ezekiel Klopstock, the world’s foremost authority on semiotics—sworn enemy of Umberto Eco, author of The New York Times bestseller The Death of Meaning: A User’s Manual to Good Times and Hijinks in an Age of Nihilism, cause celebre in the Profumo Affair, and onetime paramour of Princess Grace of Monaco[2]--had taken a liking to me, once confiding, “Benton, you are less worthless than I had supposed,” which, by Klopstockian standards, was high praise.
His behavior in recent months had devolved from the merely eccentric to the wholly incomprehensible. Rumors were about that Provost Arlene Thomason was prepared to declare Klopstock non compos mentis and to golden-parachute him out to the funny farm.
At this morning’s Syntactic Structures Seminar, for instance, he had written the following sentence on the blackboard: COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY, then said, “Write a thousand word essay on the meaning of this grammatically impeccable sentence, and, when you’re done, destroy your handiwork.”
Before he left the classroom, he looked vaguely in my direction, where I was ensconced in my habitual first row niche, and said, “Benton, see me in my office when you’ve finished the assignment.” Such a peremptory summons from Klopstock was almost unheard of, a kind of special election, and must be obeyed.
After I finished my essay and deposited it in the trash can, I made my way to his second floor office. When there was no response to my repeatedly knocking on the door and calling out his name, and as the door was ajar, I had slipped in through the aperture.
After our brief prologue of Shakespearean banter, he had continued for nearly ten minutes to bend his eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air hold discourse. He seemed agitated, at times overwhelmed, as though surrounded by hallucinatory specters, and steeling himself to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.
“Professor Klopstock, to whom do you speak?”
He turns around, looks distractedly in the approximate direction of my corporeal manifestation, and says, “Who’s there?”
“It’s Benton, sir. You asked me to come see you in your office. Almost ten minutes ago, we acted out a bit of Hamlet. I played Polonius to your Hamlet.”
“Ten minutes you say. I think it was ten seconds. Alas, I do forget myself. It was capital of you to play so brute a part.[3] It won’t end well for you.”
“Nor for you, sir. The text is a Shakespearean tragedy. The time is out of joint. You play the part of the eponymous hero born to set it right.”
“It won’t end well for any of us.”
“The readiness is all,” I reply, moved by his melancholy.
“True.”
He motions at me with a palsied left hand, and says, “Come.”
I follow him at a respectful distance to the center of his spacious office. Next to a modest mahogany desk, a very large object, perhaps four feet wide and five feet in height, is concealed by a beige canvas. Without preamble, he yanks the canvas off in one violent motion.
“Behold! The Eliminator!”
I’m staring at a Rube Goldbergian device of intertwined yellow and green tubing, pulleys, pinwheels, dials, buttons and foul smelling containers of variously colored viscous liquids. If this were the handiwork of anyone but Klopstock, I would suppose my leg was being pulled. But the Professor is the most humorless man I’ve ever known. Only an extraordinary act of will keeps me from laughing out loud.
“What does it do, sir?” I say in a carefully crafted tone of scientific detachment.
“This is a bullshit detector, Benton. If properly calibrated, it will devour all the useless written words within a hundred mile radius. With some relatively minor modifications, I’ll be able to extend the range to cover the entire planet.”
“I see.”
“I began cautiously—at first. I took up Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that ‘the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’.”
“Yes, I remember. Whitehead made that statement on page 39 of his masterpiece, Process and Reality. You told us to think of nothing but that quote for an entire year.”
“Three weeks ago I made some adjustments, fine-tuned the Eliminator, and aimed it at the philosophy section on the third floor of the undergraduate library; and, presto, I had instantaneously reduced that unwieldy bulk of futile speculation to the one volume edition of Plato by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Of course, that meant Process and Reality went too, a book no one reads, or needs to read.”
He laughs uproariously at the tepid joke until convulsed by a fit of wheezing and coughing.
The mystery of the theft of the undergraduate philosophy books had not as yet been solved. Provost Thomason was being pressured by the Board of Trustees to uncover the culprit. The University’s accreditation status, already shaky with its rock star Professor of Semiotics in visible decline and with students swarming to business schools, would not be helped much when it became known that the entire undergraduate philosophy library consisted of one book. I suppose Klopstock must have paid off some undernourished undergraduates to carry out his demented designs.
Once recovered from his seizure, he seems bewildered, unhinged, as though newborn into a strange world.
“Good Horatio,” he begins haltingly, “my dearest and truest friend.” He makes tentative eye contact for the first time. “Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice and could of men distinguish, her election hath sealed thee for herself. Something too much of this . . .“ He turns away, embarrassed, and fixes his attention on his books. When he resumes, his manner and tone are imbued with megalomaniacal fervor.
“My success with the Eliminator has emboldened me. I realize now that all self-help books must go. All the wretched scribblings of the pious, as well as the fusillade of insults directed at them by their mortal enemies, ‘the New Atheists,’ must be eliminated. All political rants—whether of the left or right—consigned to oblivion. All books that require other books to explain them: Heidegger’s Being and Time, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. And, for God’s sake, all the words of writers at work on the Great American Novel . . . “
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t, I think to myself, and then say aloud to the Professor, “Goodly Prince, perhaps a young person in tattered jeans, typing on her laptop at the local coffeehouse, is about to emerge as the next Shakespeare.”
“You believe that?”
“No, I suppose I don’t.”
“Well, there you have it, noble Caius.[4] We have all the words we need. Indeed, we’re suffocating beneath trillions of words we don’t need. The Eliminator will detect, and then remove the detritus of all the unnecessary, useless and hollow words so that we may, at last, uncover the one indispensable word that will grant us peace.”
He holds up the index finger of his trembling left hand as though about to bestow a benediction.
“And what is that word?”
“What? Word? Yes, yes, yes—the Word! That’s what I must discover.”
He turns back to the device, and begins spinning dials and pushing buttons. The machine wheezes and belches out smoke. It seems as though he’s about to be completely absorbed into the vortex of the volatile mechanism, as he attempts to free himself from the tyranny of words.
I begin to back out of the room stealthily, whispering to myself: “He is far gone, far gone! Now cracks a noble heart.”
Man and machine seem to be merging as the ground swells and sways beneath me. There is no up or down anymore. I see, or think I see, row upon row of books toppling off their shelves. I watch as Klopstock’s oeuvre descends, volume by volume, into the maelstrom: The Structure of Absence; Lunacy and Language: Prolegomena to an Aesthetic of Silence—Volume I; Syntactic Structures: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Death of Meaning; “Perfect Language,” Umberto?—An Open Letter to My Wayward Disciple; A Reinterpretation of “Interpretation Interpreted”; My Beef with Eco—An Italian Semiotician Full of Bologna...
I begin to make out individual sentences swirling in the insubstantial air, moments before each is sucked into the black hole of Klopstock’s diabolical invention: Every asshole in the world wants to write[5]; No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence[6]; I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork[7]; In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable[8]; Anything that isn’t writing is easy[9]; Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day[10]; He is a writer for the ages—the ages of four to eight[11]; Rarely are writers a winsome sight[12]...
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go, I tell myself, as I clutch blindly for the doorknob behind me, searching for an exit that will release me from the dark, turbulent, swirling, wind-swept and frothy seawords surging beneath my feet, whistling above my head—an exit that will deliver me onto a shore of light, calm, reason, people and things.
At last I’m able to escape into the cool, still air of the corridor. I gasp for breath. As I steady myself, I think, I must be cruel to be kind. I make a sharp turn to the right, glancing over my left shoulder toward the poor, fallen octogenarian—unmoored and cast upon a seaward course from which he will never return, incapable of [his] own distress, drowning in a whirlpool of words. I cry aloud into the empty hallway, “O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world shall so wear out to naught,” as I make my way with a heavy heart toward the Provost’s Office.
You might imagine him to be aged (four-scorish), short, with a massive and shiny bald dome, whiskery about the chin, wheezy, overripe, tweedy, bespectacled over gleaming turquoise eyes, energetic and cantankerous. There’s a vacant melancholy about his aspect, a slight limp to the gait. Or you might prefer to imagine him otherwise.
He’s looking up and around at the dusty tomes of his vast library, which houses the finest collection of semiotic texts in the world (25 volumes authored by his own hand).
“Professor Klopstock, what’s the matter?” I inquire, announcing my eavesdropping presence in his office.
“Between who?”
“Hamlet, Act II, Scene II, Hamlet to Polonius,” is my dutiful response.
“Very good, young man,” he replies, apparently unable to turn away from his books. “I was not altogether remiss when I made you my research assistant.”
After this opening exchange, he seems to forget about me, and, held captive by his books, begins again to fulminate against the excess verbiage that threatens to engulf him.
Ezekiel Klopstock, the world’s foremost authority on semiotics—sworn enemy of Umberto Eco, author of The New York Times bestseller The Death of Meaning: A User’s Manual to Good Times and Hijinks in an Age of Nihilism, cause celebre in the Profumo Affair, and onetime paramour of Princess Grace of Monaco[2]--had taken a liking to me, once confiding, “Benton, you are less worthless than I had supposed,” which, by Klopstockian standards, was high praise.
His behavior in recent months had devolved from the merely eccentric to the wholly incomprehensible. Rumors were about that Provost Arlene Thomason was prepared to declare Klopstock non compos mentis and to golden-parachute him out to the funny farm.
At this morning’s Syntactic Structures Seminar, for instance, he had written the following sentence on the blackboard: COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY, then said, “Write a thousand word essay on the meaning of this grammatically impeccable sentence, and, when you’re done, destroy your handiwork.”
Before he left the classroom, he looked vaguely in my direction, where I was ensconced in my habitual first row niche, and said, “Benton, see me in my office when you’ve finished the assignment.” Such a peremptory summons from Klopstock was almost unheard of, a kind of special election, and must be obeyed.
After I finished my essay and deposited it in the trash can, I made my way to his second floor office. When there was no response to my repeatedly knocking on the door and calling out his name, and as the door was ajar, I had slipped in through the aperture.
After our brief prologue of Shakespearean banter, he had continued for nearly ten minutes to bend his eye on vacancy and with the incorporeal air hold discourse. He seemed agitated, at times overwhelmed, as though surrounded by hallucinatory specters, and steeling himself to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.
“Professor Klopstock, to whom do you speak?”
He turns around, looks distractedly in the approximate direction of my corporeal manifestation, and says, “Who’s there?”
“It’s Benton, sir. You asked me to come see you in your office. Almost ten minutes ago, we acted out a bit of Hamlet. I played Polonius to your Hamlet.”
“Ten minutes you say. I think it was ten seconds. Alas, I do forget myself. It was capital of you to play so brute a part.[3] It won’t end well for you.”
“Nor for you, sir. The text is a Shakespearean tragedy. The time is out of joint. You play the part of the eponymous hero born to set it right.”
“It won’t end well for any of us.”
“The readiness is all,” I reply, moved by his melancholy.
“True.”
He motions at me with a palsied left hand, and says, “Come.”
I follow him at a respectful distance to the center of his spacious office. Next to a modest mahogany desk, a very large object, perhaps four feet wide and five feet in height, is concealed by a beige canvas. Without preamble, he yanks the canvas off in one violent motion.
“Behold! The Eliminator!”
I’m staring at a Rube Goldbergian device of intertwined yellow and green tubing, pulleys, pinwheels, dials, buttons and foul smelling containers of variously colored viscous liquids. If this were the handiwork of anyone but Klopstock, I would suppose my leg was being pulled. But the Professor is the most humorless man I’ve ever known. Only an extraordinary act of will keeps me from laughing out loud.
“What does it do, sir?” I say in a carefully crafted tone of scientific detachment.
“This is a bullshit detector, Benton. If properly calibrated, it will devour all the useless written words within a hundred mile radius. With some relatively minor modifications, I’ll be able to extend the range to cover the entire planet.”
“I see.”
“I began cautiously—at first. I took up Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that ‘the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’.”
“Yes, I remember. Whitehead made that statement on page 39 of his masterpiece, Process and Reality. You told us to think of nothing but that quote for an entire year.”
“Three weeks ago I made some adjustments, fine-tuned the Eliminator, and aimed it at the philosophy section on the third floor of the undergraduate library; and, presto, I had instantaneously reduced that unwieldy bulk of futile speculation to the one volume edition of Plato by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Of course, that meant Process and Reality went too, a book no one reads, or needs to read.”
He laughs uproariously at the tepid joke until convulsed by a fit of wheezing and coughing.
The mystery of the theft of the undergraduate philosophy books had not as yet been solved. Provost Thomason was being pressured by the Board of Trustees to uncover the culprit. The University’s accreditation status, already shaky with its rock star Professor of Semiotics in visible decline and with students swarming to business schools, would not be helped much when it became known that the entire undergraduate philosophy library consisted of one book. I suppose Klopstock must have paid off some undernourished undergraduates to carry out his demented designs.
Once recovered from his seizure, he seems bewildered, unhinged, as though newborn into a strange world.
“Good Horatio,” he begins haltingly, “my dearest and truest friend.” He makes tentative eye contact for the first time. “Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice and could of men distinguish, her election hath sealed thee for herself. Something too much of this . . .“ He turns away, embarrassed, and fixes his attention on his books. When he resumes, his manner and tone are imbued with megalomaniacal fervor.
“My success with the Eliminator has emboldened me. I realize now that all self-help books must go. All the wretched scribblings of the pious, as well as the fusillade of insults directed at them by their mortal enemies, ‘the New Atheists,’ must be eliminated. All political rants—whether of the left or right—consigned to oblivion. All books that require other books to explain them: Heidegger’s Being and Time, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. And, for God’s sake, all the words of writers at work on the Great American Novel . . . “
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t, I think to myself, and then say aloud to the Professor, “Goodly Prince, perhaps a young person in tattered jeans, typing on her laptop at the local coffeehouse, is about to emerge as the next Shakespeare.”
“You believe that?”
“No, I suppose I don’t.”
“Well, there you have it, noble Caius.[4] We have all the words we need. Indeed, we’re suffocating beneath trillions of words we don’t need. The Eliminator will detect, and then remove the detritus of all the unnecessary, useless and hollow words so that we may, at last, uncover the one indispensable word that will grant us peace.”
He holds up the index finger of his trembling left hand as though about to bestow a benediction.
“And what is that word?”
“What? Word? Yes, yes, yes—the Word! That’s what I must discover.”
He turns back to the device, and begins spinning dials and pushing buttons. The machine wheezes and belches out smoke. It seems as though he’s about to be completely absorbed into the vortex of the volatile mechanism, as he attempts to free himself from the tyranny of words.
I begin to back out of the room stealthily, whispering to myself: “He is far gone, far gone! Now cracks a noble heart.”
Man and machine seem to be merging as the ground swells and sways beneath me. There is no up or down anymore. I see, or think I see, row upon row of books toppling off their shelves. I watch as Klopstock’s oeuvre descends, volume by volume, into the maelstrom: The Structure of Absence; Lunacy and Language: Prolegomena to an Aesthetic of Silence—Volume I; Syntactic Structures: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Death of Meaning; “Perfect Language,” Umberto?—An Open Letter to My Wayward Disciple; A Reinterpretation of “Interpretation Interpreted”; My Beef with Eco—An Italian Semiotician Full of Bologna...
I begin to make out individual sentences swirling in the insubstantial air, moments before each is sucked into the black hole of Klopstock’s diabolical invention: Every asshole in the world wants to write[5]; No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence[6]; I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork[7]; In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable[8]; Anything that isn’t writing is easy[9]; Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day[10]; He is a writer for the ages—the ages of four to eight[11]; Rarely are writers a winsome sight[12]...
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go, I tell myself, as I clutch blindly for the doorknob behind me, searching for an exit that will release me from the dark, turbulent, swirling, wind-swept and frothy seawords surging beneath my feet, whistling above my head—an exit that will deliver me onto a shore of light, calm, reason, people and things.
At last I’m able to escape into the cool, still air of the corridor. I gasp for breath. As I steady myself, I think, I must be cruel to be kind. I make a sharp turn to the right, glancing over my left shoulder toward the poor, fallen octogenarian—unmoored and cast upon a seaward course from which he will never return, incapable of [his] own distress, drowning in a whirlpool of words. I cry aloud into the empty hallway, “O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world shall so wear out to naught,” as I make my way with a heavy heart toward the Provost’s Office.
