Torsade Literary Space 
A Figure from the Common Lot
SeeChapter One: Cette Illusion de la Mortalité
Section i. Battlefront
Honoré Gremot is the first of four narrators, a Belgian not of the working class, not of the bourgeoisie…and not (though, like most Belgian Gremots, consumptive) persuaded life’s options are limited. Richard Everard has lost the family farm, having this fate in common with Honoré’s father; in Richard’s case, through intemperance and loathing, rather than the fatal Gremot ambition. The Everards and the Gremots have a connection (annoying to both clans if they knew it) through the Sartains of Paris and New Orleans. Young Richard inherits the full weight of the Everard legacy, and the unrequited admiration of Élucide Gremot, of the Indiana Gremots.
Excerpts: A Figure from the Common Lot
Chapter One
Cette Illusion de la Mortalité
section iii. Passage
“I see.” Honoré undid the top button of his coat and reached inside for his letter. The clerk, after a cursory and disdainful glance, shook his head; he spoke to Honoré, but with a commiserating face, nodded to the man who crowded Honoré from behind.
“I don’t want to see this. Do you not understand me?”
He did understand, now…that Broughton meant to test him.
“Please, monsieur, where do I go, then?” He heard a snort from the man whose business his ignorance delayed, and was told, in a voice impatient and incredulous, “But, where do you imagine you are to go? What house have you come from?” Unable to believe such naïveté, the man pushed Honoré aside and stepped to the counter.
“I am next,” he told the clerk.
Chapter Two
Possente Spirto
section i. Jerome
The memorial was inscribed with a short poem, uncredited.
Hail! Aegis uncorrupted, flag of my Republic
Call to me! And I, ever to thy summons rising
Rally! Men of valor, to thine Union rent asunder
By base Treason’s sword.
Dare brute cowardice imperil Liberty;
Valiant champions of Freedom―forward!
Chapter Three
Peas in a Pod
Fish was not there, and so Richard did not take the liberty of disarranging his hoard. He knew what Mrs. Purfoy would think of him for this foot-dragging. Already, she’d told Richard that before Saturday—which meant he must begin the work this afternoon—he was to dismantle Hopper’s “business”; and paint the walls in Hopper’s old room.
She knew what was in there. By some means, she knew it all; all the doings within her domain.
Chapter Four
The Eye of a Magpie
section i. The House of Gremot
My friends, often we say in our hearts, “I cannot forgive”; when, what we mean to say is, “I cannot excuse.”
Many acts of a selfish or heartless kind are more than we can make excuse for; and failing to find reason adequate to justify such cruelty, we feel that the act is unforgiveable. Yet, it is not the act; rather it is our sin, our human weakness, that frailty which is the inheritance of all mankind, that we understand and forgive. And this we may do, without excusing the act. It is myself that I forgive, when I forgive my brother.
(Honoré, an inmate of the almshouse, reads a religious tract)
Bedlam (sequel) predicted for 2020
Bedlam continues the story, with the railroad scheme forcing evacuation of the county Hospital for the Insane, triggering a search for names of the unknown buried; a journalist from Paris comes to scrutinize Garfield assassin Guiteau, another, from Cookesville, ordered to Nashville to dig dirt on a rival; a self-confirmed fortune-hunter among Ebrach’s spiritualists; a reunion for Honoré, a rise in fortunes for one Everard brother, a fatal convergence for another. And Élucide, ambitious only to live and work as she chooses, finds…as Young Richard had said long ago…that the world makes a place for you and keeps you there.
“1881: the perfect palindromic year”
Poems and Songs
The Culture
We are important
Our three-letter alphabet
Constructs our limited language
The gravitational center
Draws our attention-seeking message
The message is
I am important
Yet you don’t know me
On an oxbow
The current passes
A fallen tree, submerged
At a cross-angle, green murky-brown
Depths, hot from the sun
The surface still, gnats rise
Kingfishers, blackbirds, bank swallows
The river has right-of-way
Its current carved the land
Many more miles long
Than the eye can see
Landholders, granted degrees
On the bank, exchanged in principle
The ornamental alloy
Gold
Leaf, sharp, continuing, under-hand
Wheeling gears, dying in prison
The message
Is a low-rate postcard
Issued by the government
One follows, the other is drawn behind
A fuse, a wreck
The weight of gold
The magnitude of moral conduct
Floods the bank and leaves behind
Slippery oil, combustible
Where is your confident belief?
Your commitment and your care?
You have competition
You have been consumed by fire
You have not lived five hundred years
You have not risen from ruin
But you have bought a tract of land
You have enclosed the grounds
Unlawful, inhumane
Spoiling by ineptitude
Every act and every choice
Must be a contest
Nothing you know
Bends to accommodate
Your love is a word
The word is nothing
The word is the deed
And love is nothing
The Culture II
The Kreutz Sungrazer
Should it return
Centuries ahead
Trail its nebulous vapor of ammonia
Methane
Carbon
The devil’s alloy
Nickel-plated offerings
Commodify your tears
Make your work efficient
Import your tears in boxcars
Be done with it
A question harms you
A word destroys you
Step from the shadows
We will hear your voice
No?
Then hear mine
Pearls to swine
Cede to the shake-down
Know yourself, protect yourself
Donate early and often
To the community coffers
Pull down the rafters
Pry up the shingles
Break the foundation
Menace with symbols
Your road-blocking
Your smoldering debris
May burn like lime
But the times
Have your back to the ledge
You hold
Within a shaking hand
Your fortune told
Doomed to wander, or to linger
Once the card is drawn
Your pyramid is the inverse
Top-weight crushes the future
Leverage, secrets, access
Entrée to other classes
The Culture: Prurience
Entrée
High-pitched and shrill
Take notice, be alert
Be furtive, surreptitious
Come out of your hiding place
Make overtures, besiege, beset, bedevil
You bear a close resemblance
Today’s project
Is your own desire
You feel an unreasonable emotion
An unwanted preoccupation
Akin to stealing
You play a traveling game of pursuit
Sidling, confiding private matters
This intolerable passion
This disordered invention
This fulfilled wish
You have a political character
An organized policy
The power to sway
You’re inflamed, excited, fear-mongering, obsessed
Talk around, talk about
On the rooftops, in the hallways
Talk it over, talk it out
In the gutters and the alleyways
Eye-popping, nodding, hand-waving, humiliating
Slippery, oily, through side-doors and back-doors
Silence and darkness
Clutching
Unyielding, unapologetic, intractable
You’re a victim
The unfair scrutiny
The world’s cruelty
The life blood
The backbone
The veins and arteries
The fortress stones
The den of righteousness
The good people
Die Schönheit
They have gone before.
Alone sightless above the chasm,
A fainting soul cowers here,
And takes never a step more—
Wakes at a dying breath unheard by Heaven;
Still muted cries bestir the air,
With an endless echo of despair.
They have gone before,
Who falter on this narrow span,
Made treacherous by blood and tears.
Unreconciled in wordless horror;
Their ranks unceasing none return,
But fall into the tomb and claw at air,
With an endless echo of despair.
They have gone before.
The wheel will turn and turn forevermore.
The hour is foreordained, no hand may steer,
Our fated vessel from her destined shore.
A-sail on waters black where starlight falls,
A sigh at place of parting fills the air.
With an endless echo of despair.