Quote-heavy Filler Chapter

The next part of my fake novel BRYAN THE TYGER is heavy on the quotations and, beyond that, filler material. Bon appetit!

P.S.

In other news: my Public Private Diary is fully printed; also I made a list of my latest novels that have been printed but not included in any collection.

Chapter Fifteen

Well that last adventure yielded a hefty payoff. We acquired two new heroes for our story: now there’s not only Zephyros the ex-housecat living in the castle with his friend Bryan the Tyger (that’s me); but we have my old flame, Myala the Black Panther, who is my own perfect match; plus her little friend Nous the Kitty-courtesan, who immediately and with eagerness joined my castlemate Zephyros in feline matrimony. (Don’t worry: this is not restrictive like human marriage — for just as all cats have at least nine lives, they also normally wed as many spouses — the crucial point is that now neither Zephyros nor Nous is lonely.) So, instead of turning around and immediately heading out on another dangerous adventure, I decide to indulge in a stay-home vacation and simply savor the passage of time with my new Cat Fam:

For about seven years we all relax together in our lofty gray castle. “At leisure on the peninsula” is what one might subtitle this part of our story. We form simple routines and enjoy our daily existence. We develop relationships with the sharks of the sea that surrounds us. (The leviathans keep to themselves; but there’s no enmity betwixt their kind and ours — we hold each other in mutual respect — it’s just that, as old wise souls, they prefer a reclusive existence.) Myala orders all her books and artworks to be shipped over from Jupiter, and she and I combine our collections. Yes, this is the Good Life.

One day I say to my soul-mate Myala, as we’re reclining in the moonlight under the glass dome of our castle’s observatory, “Do you think that we’ve luxuriated enough, and that we could go on an adventure soon? I’m really itching to globe-trot; but I don’t want to leave you, and I don’t want to force you to join me in any swashbuckling catastrophes before you’re ready.”

Myala’s eyes light up, “Before I’m ready? I’ve BEEN ready – I thought you’d never ask!”

“You mean to tell me that, just as I was thinking that you wanted rest and relaxation, you yourself were thinking that I wanted these same things?” I laugh; “whereas the truth is that we’ve both been longing to set sail upon the deep and go exploring, as we hunger and thirst for action and danger?”

My soul-mate Myala the Black Panther sits up straight and holds her forepaw at a right angle to her torso.

After studying her bodily display for several moments, I ask: “What are you doing?”

“Follow my arm,” she sez; “look in the direction it is pointing.”

I then understand what she means. So my eyes trace a straight line out from her forearm to her paw and beyond, and my vision at last alights on the nearby seaport. I notice our chariot is tied to the dock.

“You prepared our ship by docking it at the port before this present conversation even occurred?” I gasp.

“Let’s rock,” sez Myala, already halfway to the exit.

So we embark upon our excursion without even telling our fellow castle-cats, Nous and Zephyros, where the heck we are going. (They probably won’t even notice that we’re gone until several weeks have passed, because the two of them have fallen into the kitty-version of puppy-love: they spend every instant of every day together, playing with twine and chasing twittering machines.)

Now I just wanna give a couple quotations from our favorite poems, to color the scene that Myala and I are enacting. This first one is from “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear:

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did, 
     In a Sieve they went to sea: 
In spite of all their friends could say, 
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day, 
     In a Sieve they went to sea! 
And when the Sieve turned round and round, 
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’ 
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big, 
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig! 
     In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’

That’s just the first stanza before the first chorus; but you should really go seek out and read the whole entire poem, cuz it tells you everything that you need to know.

Also, Myala wants me to give just one more quotation from a poetic tale, to set the scene. This is from Simon Watson Taylor’s translation of Alfred Jarry’s neo-scientific novel called Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician:

. . . Since the days when saints and miracle-workers went sailing in stone troughs or on coats of coarse cloth, and when Christ walked barefoot on the sea, I know of no creature—apart from myself—other than the filiform water-scorpion and the larvae of water-gnats, capable of making use of the surface of ponds, either from above or beneath, as a solid floor.

It is true that it has been possible to construct sacks made from a material which allows air and steam to pass through but is impermeable to water, so that one can blow out a candle through the cloth and yet the same cloth will retain its liquid content indefinitely . . .

But this bed, twelve meters long, is not a bed but a boat, shaped like an elongated sieve. The meshes are wide enough to allow the passage of a large pin; and the whole sieve has been dipped in melted paraffin, then shaken so that this substance (which is never really touched by water), while covering the web, leaves the holes empty—the number of which amounts to about fifteen million four hundred thousand. When I place my sieve on the river, the water’s skin tautens against the holes, and the liquid flowing beneath cannot penetrate . . .

My sieve, then, floats like a boat, and can be laden without sinking to the bottom . . .

These two scriptural excerpts should give you some idea of the type of blank that Myala and I are undertaking. The only difference between the above quotes and our own situation is that, as both passages deal with seafaring sieves, our boat is just a regular wooden chariot that is on fire. It’s the same one that I built in that prior chapter, when I knocked down the trees in the Nighttime Forest. But I carved the name “Sieve” upon its side. So this craft of ours continuously hisses as it cuts the watery way, and, as it smites the sounding furrows time and again, it perpetually rekindles its quenchless blaze: for true hellfire never sleeps.