A
SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE LOWENMAN PAPERS
Professor Q.X. Baghatch
Lecturer in
Late-Early-Modern Central European Renaissance Thought
Chair, Department of
Esoterics
University of North Waukepetonsett
Since it has apparently fallen to me to put the affairs
of Professor Julian Lowenman, assumed deceased, in order, then I must do it,
and do so with a good will and as much conscientiousness as I can muster.
Although I will confess, at the outset, that I do so with a great amount of
trepidation. Professor Lowenman remains as mysterious now as he ever did, and
his work likewise remains almost impenetrable.
As to why my colleagues have chosen
me to take over the custodianship of Professor Lowenman’s papers—well, again, I
must confess, that is nothing more than a happy, or unhappy, coincidence. An
accident of acquaintance.
I knew Professor Lowenman as well as anyone, I
suppose. We had been colleagues for fifteen years at the time of his
disappearance, although I cannot say that I knew him well. As well as anyone
knew him, but he was as unknowable a man as ever lived.
My tenure as Assistant Adjunct Instructor of
Late-Early-Modern Central European Renaissance Thought at the University of North
Waukepetonsett had begun a year before Professor
Lowenman arrived here. As junior members of the Department of History, young
men still wet behind the ears, so to speak, we felt a certain kinship.
Likewise, the extreme specialization of our disciplines threw us together in a
way that our elder colleagues, stolid and conservative men with titles like
“Professor of English History,” “Professor of European Diplomacy,” could never
understand. Professor Lowenman liked to say, as we sat, cramped in the tiny
office that we both shared, whiling away the office hours we kept for students
who never came, that there should be a separate department—the Department of
Esoterics—for us.
I used to
think he was joking, but he was in deadly earnest. Soon after the publication
of his first book, “An Inquiry into the Similarity of the Respective
Subconscious Free-Associative Natures of Grussetian Folktales and Indo-Aryan
Narrative Ballads,” (still considered a classic in its field) (whatever that
field may be), he began to pester the administration for the creation of just
that. Successfully, to my great surprise. And so it was that the Department of
Esoterics came to be founded at the venerable University of North
Waukepetonsett. Not only founded, but endowed, as
well. And generously.
Well do I remember the day when, my
eyes slightly glazed over, I first surveyed my new office in the new
department. Wonder of wonders—my own office! Wonder of wonders—a beautiful and
spacious wood-paneled office in the historic Van Palterpelt Building, a
building heretofore reserved for the offices of the very highest administrative
levels of our institution! Not only would I, myself, never have dared breach
the concept of an entirely new department, I would never have had the temerity
to suggest that I merited an office in the storied Van Palterpelt Building!
And yet, Professor Lowenman had done
both, and our colleagues in the Department of History could only watch amazed
as we took up residence in that historically significant building.
I am a bit of a plodder by nature,
so it was fortunate that I had hitched my wagon, again, so to speak, to the
rising star of Julian Lowenman—a remarkable man by any estimation. He was
possessed of that type of nervous energy, that sort of restless brilliance that
cannot ever be limited to one field of endeavor. So the Department of Esoterics
came into being—the kind of place where Professor Lowenman and I could study
and teach whatever it was that interested us at the moment.
I said that the Department of
Esoterics was established successfully, and it was. But it was not established
without some minor strife. To be sure, our colleagues in the more traditional
departments fulminated against us. Oh, how they shrieked that a Department of
Esoterics could never be considered a serious field of study! I particularly
remember Professor Chauncey Trillingham Portlehart, of the Department of
History…
“Esoterics?” he spluttered, turning
an unhealthy shade of apoplectic puce. “Whoever heard of a Department of
Esoterics? Esoteric what? Exactly what do you plan to teach, Lowenman?”
“Things of interest to the
esoterically-minded,” Lowenman answered, as if the question bored him. Our
faculty meetings tended to be explosive affairs, after Professor Lowenman
joined the staff.
“But what are you training students for?” whined Professor Addie Midgewater
of the Department of Art History.
At this question, Lowenman jumped to
his feet.
“A mockery of the ideals of liberal
arts!” he shouted. “What am I training them for? What am I training them for? I
am not training them for ANYTHING,
Professor Midgewater! What is, after all, the University of North
Waukepetonsett? A trade school? A
technical-vocational institute? No, no, a thousand times no! We are an
ivy-covered, red-brick, Colonial-style institute of higher learning, not some
practical-minded, tax-payer funded, outcome-based educational facility of
flickering neon lights and cinder-block walls covered with a thick layer of
poorly-applied, lead-based paint of calming shade! We have no metal-shop, no
experimental fields of hybrid corn, no Department of Auto Mechanics! We are a
gloriously anachronistic East Coast elite college, are we not? Our students are
housed in dormitories older than the United States, in worse repair than
the entire city of Philadelphia,
but saturated with character! We are the place where tweed-clad guardians of
arcane knowledge stroll in a leisurely, pipe-puffing fashion across leafy
quads, surrounded by undergraduates whose great-great-grandfathers went here!
Here, if nowhere else, will a Department of Esoterics thrive! Here, and only
here, will it find a suitable home! Only at such a place as the hallowed halls
of the University
of North Waukepetonsett
will it find existence!”
He tended
to get rather worked-up.
“But for heaven’s sake, man,”
persisted Midgewater, a tiny woman given to wearing long, jangly earrings and
togas. “There must be some… some purpose
to it, must there not?”
“Hear, hear,” grunted the bilious
Professor De Quagney of the Department of Classics. “Some purpose. Some raison d’être.”
“Raison
d’être?” Lowenman gaped, awestruck at the concept of something so mundane,
and he turned dramatically to the elegant, black-clad, black-haired woman to
his left. “Raison…d’… etre? Correct
me if I am wrong, my dear Professor Le Romagne, but is that not French for…
reason for being?”
“You are correct, mon cher Lowenman,” Professor Le
Romagne, of the Department of Romance Languages responded, screwing a cigarette
into her long, mother-of-pearl-mouthpieced cigarette holder.
“Reason for being?” Lowenman
glowered, rocking back and forth on his feet. “My God, ladies and gentlemen, we
of the University
of North Waukepetonsett,
we NONE of us have a reason for being! In the name of all the saints, my dear
colleagues, if the parents of our students had any brains at all, they would
send their precious poppets to the nearest State college,
where they would learn all sorts of practical subjects with practical
applications, but they don’t, and so we continue to exist. We charge them the
price of a new Jaguar each year for the privilege of studying the arcane, the
useless and the completely superfluous. If we had a mission statement, and I
doubt that we do, because we were founded before such things became
fashionable, I believe you would find that the Department of Esoterics would fit
in nicely.”
“Lowenman’s right, of course,”
nodded our Chancellor, Hadlingbury Fotherfield IV, putting an end to the
debate. “We’re bloody useless, and everyone here knows it. We survive on a
great name alone. If it ever became common knowledge, we’d be through in a
trice. The Department of Esoterics is perfect. It looks as though we have such
confidence in ourselves that we’re willing to fund another chair. That’ll make
the rest of them sit up and take notice. It’s a nice front.”
“A nice front it may be,” globbered
Professor Portlehart, “but Chancellor… in the Van Palterpelt Building? The
hallowed Van Palterpelt Building? The, dare I say it, sacred Van Palterpelt
Building?”
“And why not?” Lowenman snarled,
rounding on Portlehart. “Are you ashamed? Are you humiliated by it? Should we
be secreted away, back in the depths of Fangboner Hall, where the skeletons of
scientifically-minded alumni hang in the darkness and dust? I think not, my
dear Portlehart. We must display our inefficiency! We must parade our arcanity!”
“I don’t think that’s a word,”
muttered Professor Pardontadger of the Department of English, but it didn’t
matter. Once Lowenman got going, it was safer to get out of his way, and he was
magnificently worked up now. His untrimmed mop of black curls was quivering as
he fairly hopped from one foot to the other, and his high, narrow brow was
sweating. His huge tortoise-shell glasses slid precariously close to the end of
his long, curved nose.
“We must veritably GLORY in the very
IDEA of the Department of Esoterics!” he howled, as though he were Peter the
Hermit exhorting medieval Europe to a Crusade.
“Let all and sundry who pass through these gates see who and what we are! Let
the Department of Esoterics be the first thing prospective students and donors
see when they pass through our gates! Let our department be a proud banner of
pointlessness!”
He was spinning around and waving
his arms madly now. There was a mad glint in his eye, and his face was a study
in the ecstasy of fanatical devotion to a cause.
“Would it be too much, Lowenman,”
ventured Professor Peter Askinwald of Archaeology, “to ask what courses you and
Professor Baghatch intend to teach?”
“WE MIGHT NOT TEACH ANYTHING AT
ALL!” shrieked Lowenman. “What more blatant statement of superfluity could we
make than that?”
“Oh, enough with the histrionics,
Lowenman,” grumbled Chancellor Fotherfield, whose pipe had been knocked from
his hands by the dervish-like Lowenman, irritably. “You’re going to break
something. Askinwald’s question is a fair one. What courses do you intend to
offer?”
“That is a damned fine question, Chancellor,” Lowenman answered, dropping
with a thud into his chair. He pulled a yellow silk handkerchief out of his
breast pocket and mopped his streaming brow with it. “What do you think,
Baghatch?”
I shrugged.
“Well,”
Lowenman said, furrowing his brow and steepling his fingers, “I thought we
might begin with a quick overview of the similarity of witchcraft practices in
the Caucasus to those of the Friuli
region in northern Italy.
I’ve been curious about that for quite a while.”
“What about something like the
impact of Renaissance Humanism in Central Europe?”
I piped up. “Fascinating study, that.”
“Oh, honestly, Baghatch,” Lowenman wailed, “you got your degree in that. How dull. Can’t you think of something else? The effect, say, of how
the extinction of the Moa-bird affected the Maoris’ conception of the
Aboriginal myth of the dreamtime, say?”
“I’ll get right to work on it,” I
promised.
“Gobbledygook,”
sputtered Portlehart.
“Rancid nonsense,” whined De
Quagney.
“Arrant balderdash,” groaned
Pardontadger.
“Perfect,” Chancellor Fotherfield
said crisply. “Well then, that’s settled. I think we can call this little
meeting a success.”
“How did I do?” Lowenman whispered
to me as we all filed out.
“Very well, I think,” I answered
him. “Lowenman, honestly, do you really believe what you were saying in there?”
“Certainly not,” he responded. “Do I
look like a madman?”
To be
perfectly frank, there was something of the manic clinging to his long, rangy
person, but I didn’t tell him so.
“Then why are we…”
“Because it’s fun, man!” he grinned, shaking me by the shoulder. “Because it’s
marvelously fun! Don’t you see? Now we can do whatever we want! We’ve been
given carte blanche to study whatever we want for the rest of eternity!”
* * *
He was right, of course. A
department such as the Department of Esoterics had, indeed, carte blanche to do
whatever it wanted, and there was no one better suited to such a field than
Julian Lowenman.
His interests ranged from Central
Asiatic folklore to obscure Turkish dialects to evolutionary biology to high
art, and they constantly grew in number. I never knew anyone else so
passionately devoted to learning for its own sake. He devoured books on every
subject in languages that I never knew existed. He could lecture with equal
fluency on the Albanian succession struggle of 1375 and on the breeding habits
of the hoatzin-bird of Central America, and
what is more, he could divine connections between them that no normal human
being would have noticed. In the course of a minute, he could flit from
freshwater tropical fish (he was quite a fancier of them) to Sufi theology and
mid-Victorian chimney structure without making the listener feel as though he
had changed the subject. His mind was a gloriously anarchic melange of
information.
Although I learned much from him, he
was curiously silent about himself and rarely brought up the topic. I knew that
he was a descendant of an ancient rabbinical dynasty of Prague—he blamed a “mad
Talmudic ancestor” for his powers of recall and his ability to discern
connective threads between areas of knowledge—but I never found out anything
else about his family. I never found out exactly what he had studied, or where
he had done so. I never knew if he had any siblings.
He was rumored to live in a tiny
apartment on the far side of Waukepetonsett, but I never knew exactly where. It
was said that the place was crammed from floor to ceiling with books and
fishtanks filled with strange and vicious species. That might have been merely
gossip. Nonetheless, I don’t doubt it. He once strolled into the Department
with bandages on each of his fingertips.
“Good Lord, Lowenman,” I gasped.
“What happened to you?”
He waved airily.
“Oh, I made the hideous mistake of
putting the Lake Tanganyika Rottweilerfish in the same tank as the
Surreptitious Weedmocker,” he explained. “They are both aggressive species, and
I should have known, only I forgot where I had put my fish-books. I found them
under the refrigerator, but not before I had to reach in the tank and extricate
the little darlings from each other’s mouths.”
* * *
He was an animated lecturer, and his
classes were very well attended, but whereas I strove for some kind of focus (a
slave, I suppose, to the prevailing educational theory that students should
come away from a class knowing something), he didn’t. On the few occasions I
sat in and listened to a Lowenman lecture, he perched, cross-legged, on the
edge of his desk and lectured, stream of consciousness, on whatever happened to
be on his mind at the moment. His students sat spellbound, but not a one of
them took a single note.
“There’s no point,” one of them told
me later. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the test.”
“What’s the test about?” I asked.
“Well, he gave us three essay
questions,” the student replied, pulling a crumpled sheet of paper out of a
notebook. He smoothed it and handed it to me.
YOU MAY CHOOSE TO ANSWER ONE OF THE
FOLLOWING. YOU MAY CHOOSE TO ANSWER ALL THREE. YOU MAY CHOOSE TO MAKE UP YOUR
OWN QUESTION AND ANSWER IT. I WILL NOT TOLERATE A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER. LET ME
BE ENTIRELY CLEAR ON THIS POINT.
1) As is well known, the Mongol
hordes enjoyed a game similar to modern day football, only played on horseback
instead of foot, and with a live goat instead of a ball. What are the chances
that Marco Polo witnessed this game during his visit to the court of the Great
Khan, and what, if any, effect did this have on the future of European sport?
2) The concept of the
Enlightened Despot held sway in Europe
approximately until the Congress of Vienna. In your estimation, is the
Enlightened Despot an oxymoron, and is it possible to practice both enlightened
despotism and cannibalism?
3) The theory of punctuated
equilibrium purports to explain the gaps in the fossil record. Had he been a
Darwinian, how would Adam Smith have reacted to the rather sudden occurrence of
birds with teeth?
“And what will you write about?” I asked the student
as I handed his test paper back to him.
“I think an asteroid killed the dinosaurs,” he
answered. “I think I’ll write about that.”
* * *
I believe it was Alexander Pope who said, “A little
knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I fully agree with this statement, but I
believe the converse to be true as well. Too much knowledge can be just as
dangerous, or perhaps it is merely the wrong sort of knowledge that is
dangerous.
Julian Lowenman—brilliant, eclectic, quite possibly
mad, was not at all discriminatory about what he put into his head. He was
completely amoral, apolitical, non-judgmental, free of agendas. He was an
aesthete of learning—the acquisition of knowledge was to be undertaken for its
own sake. All and sundry went gliding into his brain.
But ideas have consequences. Knowledge is power, but
power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Information fueled his
burning intellect, but it consumed Julian Lowenman.
Julian Lowenman is no longer among
us. Where he is, I don’t know. I don’t doubt that he is dead. But I don’t know
for sure, and the one thing that I do know for sure is that I will never know
for sure. Did knowledge kill him? Or was there something else? Something
darker?
I have said that he was secretive,
and he was. As I read through his papers, copies of articles, his own notes,
the story of what happened to him becomes clearer. But I have no answers. Murky
water may settle a bit, and you may begin to discern shapes on the floor of the
lake, but if it is murky enough, those ominous aquatic shadows will never gain
enough clarity to make out exactly what it is at which you are staring. And
whatever happened to Julian Lowenman is murky, very murky indeed.
But enough. Enough of these
disconnected ramblings about the man. It is not my task to explain him or his
fate. Any attempt to do so would be futile. All I can do, all I can be expected
to do, in my plodding, methodical manner, is to try and impose some kind of
order on his papers. I have tried to do so.
The true answers will never, I
suspect, be known. All we have is the Lowenman Papers, and an apartment full of
fishtanks, whose occupants have probably by now all eaten each other without
the hand of their master to separate them.
