The Outsider Appendix (Part I)

This is an appendix to "The Outsider." It, too, is "written" by Tedmund Arlen Shinarook.

To read the original poem, click here here.

NOTES

Much of the prophecy, as well as some anecdotes and personal remembrances in the poem were adapted from Professor Charles P. Gainsworth III’s book on Stone Creek municipal history: Stone Creek: Present Iniquity and Future Doom. Incidentally, while I do not recommend trying to read it in one sitting, Professor Gainsworth’s work illuminates brilliantly many of my themes; and his volumes resonate (in the tradition of Gibbons and Trevelyan) with the peculiar energy that makes the citizenry of Stone Creek do as they do. There is another book that has had a profound influence on my outlook, as this poem clearly reveals; On the Heights of Despair; I drew particular inspiration from the essays On Death, On Sadness, and Capitulation. No one familiar with Cioran’s oeuvre will misapprehend my choices regarding references or anything else.

I. QUADRIVIUM

Line 5 Cf. “September,” Earth, Wind and Fire.

20. Cf. Matthew 11:28.

31. Cf. The Consul, II. i.

40. Id. II. i.

41. I of course am referring here to the seven liberal arts of the medieval Western university, whose manifestations have been adopted for my own purposes. Music, strangely one of the sciences back then, would have been characterized in the following fashion: a woman in a robe with twinkling discs at the head of music-makers, a procession of poets, musicians, goddesses, and the daughters of Zeus, the three Graces Aglaia (brilliance), Euphrosyne (Joy) and Thalia (Bloom). Geometry and Rhetoric were accompanied by Pythagoras and Cicero respectively; Arithmetic is portrayed traditionally, but Grammar and Dialectic had many more accessories than were mentioned here. Astronomy of the golden wings (who has much in common with Urania in Part IV) is crucial, Mistress Thomas insists, to any understanding of the future.

58. Verlaine, Mon Rêve Familier, Poèmes Saturniens, VI.
Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant
D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime
Et qui n’est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même
Ni tout à fait une autre, et m’aime et me comprend.

72. Ionesco, Rhinoceros, III, Dudard.

74. Verlaine, Sagesse, Livre I, vii.

This is a continuation. For the next installment, click here.