The Triple Goddess (119 page)

Scrap said, ‘Pity we don’t have any free letters filled in from the down answers. The cross-clues look even tougher than this one.’

‘Stop wandering, Scrap,’ said Stink, ‘Comrades Scrag and Stink are correct, let’s focus on “return”. “Return” as in reversed or read backwards.’

‘Like what reversed?’ said Sputum.

‘Like the letters of a palindrome, which reads the same backwards as forwards, you big dummy,’ said Stink. ‘Palindrome, etymologically, comes from the Greek word
palindromos
meaning “running back again”. As in returning.’

Scrap feigned a yawn. ‘Enlighten us, then, O Sage, you’re the palindrome whizz. Stink is to palindromes as Scrag is for anagrams.’

‘Well,’ said Stink, ‘the second letter of the middle word, as we all know, is the pivot, the fulcrum.’

‘No w-way it’s a palindrome,’ said Scrag; ‘p-palindromes aren’t this long.’

‘Some of them are,’ said Stink; ‘and don’t forget the Hamlet anagram, which must be more complicated than this to solve, not to mention the difficulty of coming up with it in the first place. Though, granted, the longer palindromes get, the faker they usually sound. We’re not talking “kayak” here.’

‘For example?’, said Sputum.

‘For example, “Madam, I’m Adam”, being the words with which the First Man introduced himself to Eve. Rather silly. Then there’s, “Lewd did I live, evil did I dwell”, which is okay except for the last “l” if you want to be picky. And while I’m showing off, “Dog as a devil deified, deified lived as a god.”

‘There are also three Latin ones, one of which, Sputum, indeed describes moths:
In girum imus noctes et consumimur igni
. The others are,
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor
, and,
Subi dura a rudibus
. The perfect palindrome, in the opinion of a Mr Hourmouzios who wrote to
The Times
about it, is Greek, which as he pointed out is appropriate since the word palindrome itself is Greek:
nion anomhata mh monan oin
: “Wash my transgressions, not only my face”. It is carved on the
phiale
, or font, in the Basilica of St Sophia in Constantinople, as well as a number of other churches.’

Sputum said, ‘Show-off. Comes as news to me that Greeks had a sense of humour.’

‘Ignorant b-boy,’ said Scrag; ‘what about Aristophanes, Plautus, and T-T...’

‘Terence,’ said Scrap; ‘but look, let’s forget Roman emperors, I’m sorry I brought them up. They’re a red herring in my opinion, a sunburned or blushing with embarrassment Clupeoid. What about Napoleon?’

….

‘Eureka!’ said Stink. ‘Hot diggety damn, Scrappy—of course it’s Napoleon. How slow of me, I was forgetting the best known palindrome of all.’

‘Do share, Stink,’ said Sputum; ‘I don’t get it.’

‘“Able was I, ere I saw Elba.” That’s the answer! It’s old Nappy in exile plotting his return to France: “Despite humorous ribbing, handicapped emperor vows to return.” Handicapped as in disabled. The “able” of disabled is a palindrome, that is, Elba turned. Return is also figuratively palindromic in the sense that Napoleon was sent into exile from France to Elba, escaped from the island, and returned to the mainland. Elba is also hidden in “humorous” as in
humerus
, the bone of the upper arm that extends from the shoulder- to the elbow-joint; thus elbow-Elba, reinforced by “humorous” as in funny, and warranting a dig in the ribs with the elbow or funny bone.

‘Screwy, but there it is. Q.E.D., gentlemen.
Quod erat demonstrandum, faciendum, inveniendum
—“which was to be demonstrated, done, found”—but not exactly Quite Easily Done.’

Stink rose, put one arm behind his back and the other across his midriff, and bowed to his friends as they lightly applauded.

‘N-Nice one, Cyril,’ said Scrag. ‘With a lot of help from your friends.’

….

‘Bingo!’ shouted Bonvilian from his soundproof room on the other side of the two-way mirror. It was a muffled exclamation, for during this final exchange, so absorbed had he been in it, that he omitted to finish chewing the last of the dry ball of yeast and sawdust that was his Tarnish sandwich. Now, as he swallowed prematurely, the bolus of bread and bituminous gunk became lodged against his epiglottis. He choked, his face turned red, his eyes watered and he began to hiccup. Standing up, he staggered and knocked over the chair.

When he was restored, and had confirmed that the group next door had heard nothing, he reviewed the implications of what he had heard, and smacked his forehead at his lack of foresight. The action had the incidental effect of stopping the hiccups.

A palindrome! Yes, a palindrome was the answer to the great Cosmic Conundrum: “In the beginning was the Word…”. Because the Word, around whose axis the double helix of Creation was entwined, spread like the wings of a giant albatross from Alpha to Omega, the Word was at the End as well as the Beginning. Reflexively, the End was therefore also the Beginning, whence from Eve—E.V.E., the palindromic first woman out of Adam’s rib—sprang all human life.

As the Ancient Romans portrayed the twin-faced god Janus looking forwards and backwards, from a perpetual zero point of timelessness where present, past, and future coexisted, and by adopting
ana+khronismos
—backwards time—as his principle, after he had discovered the biological formula of Creation that lay at the centre of all things, Bonvilian would have subdued Time just as Gorgeus Georgius Villian Tiberius Caesar Britannicus did the fiery Arab stallion Staminus. Then, the relentlessly self-aggrandizing Hugo Bonvilian told himself, he knew that he had it in him to seize the reins of power and rule the world, once and for all timeless time as a modern King Arthur,
Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus
, The Once and Future King, over his subjects composed of countless reproductive particles of human DNA uncorrupted by the Original Sin of mortality.

As Hamlet might have said, before he went wacko, the bosses would avow that there were no more things in Central’s heaven and State’s earth, Horatio Bonvilian, than were dreamt of in his philosophy. For his were realities, not dreams. That other Greek word,
kudos
—“softened expression”, per W.W. Skeat, but used colloquially to mean glory, praise, or renown—would be far too weak an epithet to bestow upon 4285
∞
; for of course he would zoom through the top of the alphabet to infinity. As the supreme intelligence behind this most amazing combination of deductive and practical accomplishments, at the name of Hugo Bonvilian, per the hymn by Caroline Maria Noel, at his name every knee should bow, and every tongue confess him king of glory now…and proclaim him not just Emperor, and a god, but
the
god, the Big Freakin’ Cahuna himself.

The man formerly known as Hugo Bonvilian 4285 would just be known as ∞.

In his office, Bonvilian had pinned to the wall behind his desk Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem
The Lady of Shalott
. Ever since studying it in English class at the Academy, he had been mesmerized by the cadence of the verses; as he had been by the same poet’s
Tithonus
. Whenever he was worn down by the round-the-clock intensity of his work, re-reading those lines inspired in him fresh reserves of energy. They encapsulated the sense of emotional stasis, the perfection of stillness and the stillness of perfection, so much better, he thought, than Keats’s stab at timelessness,
Ode to a Grecian Urn
. The image of a maiden, whether she be the Lady of Shalott in poetry, or Gloria Mundy in life, was preferable to any design on a clay jug. Similarly, Tennyson’s much lengthier
Idylls of the King
, because it adopted an episodic rather than a narrative structure, he considered superior to Sir Thomas Malory’s treatment of the Matter of Britain in
Le Morte D’Arthur
.

The facts are simple: the fairy Lady of Shalott lives in a castle, on an island in the river, with “four gray walls, and four gray towers”. Rather like the Exeat Institute, in fact, but not like it at all. No description of the Lady herself is given, and all that is known about her is that she is under a curse: she cannot look out of her casement window, let alone descend from her tower and participate in life, without being destroyed. Her immortality is contingent upon her only being able to survey reality in a glass, darkly. All she can do is view the world at first remove as it is reflected in her mirror; wherein, as the poem puts it,

...moving thro’ a mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.

Night and day, the Lady weaves on a magic web everything and everybody that she “sees” passing below on the highway that leads to Camelot, transmuting lively shadows into the “colours gay” of her art, and thereby translating them into second remove: from common labourers and field workers, in their wains and on foot, and shepherd lads; from courtiers and their pages to funeral processions…and, most importantly, the procession of knights, including the famed Sir Lancelot with whose image the Lady has fallen in love, and their squires and damosels.

As to the name, the “Lady of Shalott”: it was fortunate that Tennyson was unfamiliar with Malory’s original for the Lady, who was called the Fair Maid of Astolat, because it gave him licence to invent a rhyme for Camelot and Lancelot. Otherwise, because none of the Knights of the Round Table had a name that went with Astolat, the poet’s muse might have been restricted to suggesting a limerick about an Astolat lady called Pat who thought the Lancelot knight was a twat, and in choosing a sirrah from the view in her mirror, she preferred what she’d seen of Sir Pratt.

The poem is about reflections, and oppositions: the fields of barley and rye that lie on either side of the river; the wold and the sky. The mirror-line of the river, the natural mirror that runs through the poem like a meridian, represents the artistic paradox that life only exists in what is refracted by the mind’s eye; and that reality is death. The Lady is so mentally besieged and affected by the repeated vision of Lancelot, that her precarious sanity is upset: “I am half sick of shadows,” she says;
half
sick only, for she already possesses the romantic side of Lancelot in her heart and mind; what she lacks is the physical half.

As much as the Lady yearns to look directly at the object of her desire, she knows that to do so will destroy her. When she gives in to her emotion, and mortality descends upon her, the pace of the metre and language quickens…becomes
lively
:

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look’d down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

“The curse is come upon me,” cried

The Lady of Shalott.

The intensity of the Lady’s first-hand experience is thrilling and palpable, and so strong that it bursts the tensioned bubble of her existence. Ejected from the symbolic tower, she joins the sequential flow of humanity below that she has observed for so long; literally to immerse herself in the river that bears everything away in the current of Time. She lays herself in the boat that becomes her bier, “robed in snowy white |That loosely flew to left and right”...there it was again, that counterpoint, that balance, that equilibrium, but this time she is moving...down to Camelot where Lancelot, unaware of his role in the episode, joins the wondering crowd and muses that, “she has a pretty face”.

That river line, Bonvilian now knew, was a metaphor for the Word’s middle letter, the palindromic fulcrum or pivot that Stink had referred to, wherein lay the solution to the greatest crossword puzzle of all, that of Creation. And the tower was the monument that he, Hugo Bonvilian, must create and occupy as he directed implementation of his vision for the New World. As Tennyson put it in the
Idylls
, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” Bonvilian’s tower would not be a metaphorical one, and instead of being accursed like the Lady he would become an Immortal, and acknowledged as the reality poet who had been predestined to write prescriptive formulae for the anthology of the Universe.

In so doing he would be ever mindful of Dante Alighieri’s pronouncement, in
De vulgari eloquentia
, that “The proper subjects of poetry are love, virtue, and war.”: Bonvilian’s poetic love for Gloria; the virtue of his belief in his eternal association with her; his undeclared war against any who might dare to come between them.

The Exeat’s Director decided to leave Stink, or Scrag, or Sputum, or Scrap’s cerebellum intact a while longer to employ in doing crosswords at the Farm. Although each of them had served a much more useful purpose without knowing it or having a hair on his head touched in the name of science, all four would live to squirm another day as proof of the theorem.

Instead, 4285J rushed from his own room on the hidden side of the mirrored wall at the Farm, back to his office. There, after flossing and brushing his teeth and tongue twice to get rid of the Tarnish, and with a clear head, he began to plot a schematic of how he would fill the Void, and still the rapids that led to the Niagara Falls of oblivion. No, the Victoria Falls, one had to think big.