Lesson in the Uncanny

Jack knows best. Jack knows better. Jack doesn't know jack! What Jack knows, and this is why he knows best, and better, is that Jack doesn't know jack. But, now Jack returns to the phlegmatic pretense of his office -- to what he knows best. Cleans the slate and starts again. This is Jack's hope at least, though he knows Saint Augury won't permit it. He is already jack-ass, too far gone, too far from the sea for everything to be washed away.

This begins in K-town, 9,000 miles from the City, with Jack lonely but not alone. Everything was bothering him, always had been, really... Since an early age Jack knew he was an old man ... born gray, Jack stayed that way. What was inside, though Jack would deny this, had always matched the outside... There were no differences to be negotiated, no mythology to maintain, no saga to be recaptured and transliterated.


First Memory:
Less than a month before Jack was born the Psychoanalyst gave his famous seminars. At the exact moment the Psychoanalyst began to speak, Brother-Poet abandoned verse for visual art.

Jack's birth was long and difficult, causing great pain to his mother and it was initially thought that the newborn Silosopher might have been damaged in the process. He didn't cry for days but continually sighed and cocked his head either left or right as if in contemplation. The Doctors and Nurses were baffled by this behavior, while Jack's parents worried for the health and welfare of their cherished runt. It was obvious to all that Jack was not a normal child and everyone wondered what would become of him, what Jack would become, if becoming was in the cards, the stars.

As Jack grew, childhood proved not to be his cup of tea. Already an old soul, an old man by kindergarten his tastes were well beyond crayons and eating paste. Jack preferred his great-grandfather's wine, his grandmother's inventive use of gestural profanity, and the pretentiousness of his friend's parents and his parent's friends to pretending with his own friends. He never was his own age.

___

Jack had always thought about writing this story. What prevented him from doing so was that he thought the saga ultimately boring. Even Jack was bored by the thought of it, so its retelling had for the most part remained limited to bar-time anecdotes, and drunken shanties better fit for bawdy nursery rhymes than literature.



Second Memory:
Brother-Poet, who now called himself the Artist, came into Jack's life early on. When they met it was immediately obvious that Brother-Poet, the Artist had little to teach Jack. Brother-Poet, the Artist who was Jack's elder, found this rather frustrating, since his employment depended upon his success in educating Jack. They argued endlessly, not over aesthetics or color theory but over what one could offer the other. It was minutes after one of these heated discussions that Brother-Poet, the Artist suffered a debilitating stroke, and hours later died.

Jack was introduced to the Psychoanalyst while at University, but it was not until after college that he was introduced (in)to psychoanalysis. The latter never really worked for Jack, as even here, on the couch he found himself somewhere else and the Psychoanalyst refused to interpret daydreams. Though Jack paid dearly for the sessions, he never quite bought them as curative. He considered the sessions to be research, and from the Psychoanalyst he learned how to draw.

___

That was then. Not even Nostalgia (stepmother of the muses) could overcome the shortcomings of jack-memory. The stacks of children's blocks ... a wood framed shanty ... the ticky-tacky flat.