As a boy, Alfred Coker never felt
much happiness. But as he grew, even the
few annual stabs of joy he thought were his diminished to paltry intimations of
something other than despair. By the
time maturity clasped him, the constant gush of flesh humans dotingly call life
seemed to him a mistake Death once made and couldn’t fix.
He’d wake in the morning. Peer at the calamitous solitude below the
lumpy sheet. He dryly tasted the foul
archaeology of his dreams, once glittered with wailing demons, now stagnant,
vaguely anxious. Night’s stored
flatulence assailed his lungs. Dust,
soundless dust from unswept corners established shrines of oppression in his
nails. What had been called his manhood
by one or maybe two littered the wastage of his groin, a withered blossom
without destination or even the primitive pentecost of vulgar song. Oh limpid morn.
He heard his dripping wife already
complicating the day. Clouds of
twitter. Intractably rummaging for her
special teapot in shelves of gossip, she moved in clumsy constellations of
ignorance. Love was a dahlia sleeping in
the empty silence … nothing human.
He thought of the Bank patiently
waiting for him. So patiently. That house of voiceless fallacies and
financial lizards. As triumphant as a
bramble. As permanent as glaciers. His frigid desk. The office bile. Ganga, snake-eared boss, Mr. Eugenides and
his gaseous Phlebas, often known to be in Mrs. Porter or her office,
genetically malefic Tiresias, Bill and Lou and Lil and May, Lil’s husband, Mrs.
Porter, the hooded Chair, Madame Sosostris, sometimes also sweet Marie, Mrs.
Porter, Lord Robert Nonsense, exhumed Leman, the Very Mrs. Equidrone, Philomel
Hyacinth of silent staves, Mrs. Porter, carious George, Albertetta, Porter’s
daughter, with her breasts, Victoria Breen of Poxford, coffee-unguent Elizabeth
Leicester, snarling Data, damned demoted Dayadhvam, the numbers man, Damyata, the
rats, Mr. Warren, Mrs. Porter’s antique laquearia … the whole collegial mess.
His unpropitious body, the
closet-minded wife, apotheosized endless pompous competition of production,
shabby blood, deceits of wisdom, hebetative scorpions, gods and roses,
follycocks, vortex futures, value, value, happy executive sortilege, ice-cap
stocks, post-mortem waste and things and budgets, the life of significant oil,
decayed mountains, reminiscent rumors, arid hand gusts falling down like
London, swallow all the sordid dreary
daily horror and that was it, the car was in the fir trees, Coker’s sea yelp gulped
by squirrels.
So it was from this desiccation
that on September 26 1888, under the conscious heritage of Henry Ware Eliot, a successful businessman and president and treasurer of the
Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe nee Stearns, a flimsy
poetess, St. Thomas entered interminable sodden life
in St. Louis
A fluorescent light of
transitional aesthetics, a gastronomical wordman, skilled at turning misfortune
into fate, he tiptoed through despair to religion’s muted blood. Never a husband, he became one. Never modern, he described what he wasn’t. In love with nothing, he turned his love
around and showed her to the world.
Believing in extinction more than days, how was he to navigate life’s
flower but from the muddy shores of death?
He swooned. Swooned from
muliebrity’s stark origins and the great flowing stream of human
physicality. Swooned in disgust and fell
to the desolation of self-sacrifice.
Life passed over him in a triumphal chariot, and he remained, a slave
harnessed to it.
Worn by the dust, dust’s
decadence, dust’s desultory derisions, he knelt to pray on a possum skin in London
