Steve Kowalski,
I really need you to confirm that I’m Byronic, and I need you to pretty much do it ASAP, meaning right now.
Waiting for your reply. I’ll thank you when I get it. Maybe.
The Ferret
Steve Kowalski cannot resist answering The Ferret, himself not truly knowing why – from Pride… or Vanity? Or perhaps a peculiar strain of Remainder Dumbness…
In any case, in his reply this is what he says:
The Ferret:
You are definitely not Byronic for many reasons, chief of which is:
You most surely (and sorely) lack in great measure, among most other senses, and if not altogether, the ironic detachment and profound self-reflection utterly necessary for the trope of high cynicism endlessly and variedly extemporized by the truly great Lord Byron, so much so that you are not even close to being Byron-like! let alone Byronic!!!
I believe the below-documented following, liberally taken from the tremendous Perkins volume, English Romantic Writers, will more than make the case, which is open and shut, as far as I’m concerned, to this effect; to wit:
Sir Walter Scott spoke of Byron’s ‘misanthropical ennui’. While ‘misanthropical’ surely slips over your deformed and freakish carcass like a body stocking, even ‘ennui’ is a mental state not only too good for you to languish in, but far beyond the ken of the frayed Davies Wiring short-circuiting somewhere in that otherwise empty dented oversized can that passes for your head to achieve.
Moving along, the towering German Genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of Faustian Fame described Byron as the Zeitgeist, a demonic and revolutionary force, but lacking a complete culture and depth of reflection. As pertains to you, Ferret, only the second part of that statement – while arguably unfair to Byron himself – need apply… except even more so anent YOU; since you not only lack a complete culture, but you completely lack culture, period, while the non-existent depth of your non-existent reflection speaks for itself, which is more than I can say for you. Also, ibid, this point is the first major point I make (have made) in this missive, even without relying on citations from my predecessors.
Moving along, William Makepeace Thackeray, the pretentious hack behind the twaddle that was Vanity Fair, is, in any case in regard to you an appropriate quotable, insofar as he found Byron to be insincere – a quality that I can finally aver, if it were indeed true of Byron, wholly relates to you, thereby truly making you similar with him. But alas, that’s as far as the false comparison rings true, for Thackeray went on to say that Byron never wrote from his heart, which, for you, is entirely impossible, since YOU DON”T HAVE A HEART!!!; but, Thackeray continued, [Byron] got up rapture and enthusiasm with an eye on the public, which may remotely relate to you in a freakish depraved and demented sort of way, given the loutish manner of your reportage and so-called ‘journalism’, your lowly love of gossip and rumor, both listening to and harmfully spreading the same, and the juggernaut guile of your unstoppable truck, filled with its bottomless cargoes of sneakiness for its own sake, conspiratorial schemes, conniving, duplicity, dishonesty, lies, deviousness, and underhanded double-dealing deceit.
Nay, rather, I again, ibid, refer and defer to Scott’s ‘misanthropical’ – without the ennui.
And again, nay, for you are, rather, far closer to, if not practically identical with, the characterization by Percy Bysshe Shelley – an equally great if not even greater than Byron contemporary – of Milton’s fantastical creation, Satan, at the very core of this infernally unending monster’s essence; characterized namely by:
‘[1] IMPLACABLE HATE, [2] PATIENT CUNNING, and [3] a SLEEPLESS REFINEMENT OF DEVICE to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, [which] things are evil’ (capitalized emphasis and bracketed numeration mine)…
… sans any imagined Romantic allure possessed by a fallen Lucifer, as the Romantics had conceived, and far more benignly flesh filling in which role Byron himself had been seen, and whom you, most emphatically, do not even approach, dirty and shifty, snake-like and sullied, humpbacked and broken-winged, staggering and stuttering forward on the pulp-beaten remains of your worn-down cloven-hoofed stumps to fasten the buckle of his unfortunate but never for that the less heroic club-footed shoe.
Of these verities I most assuredly assure you by any stretch of the imagination,
SK
After reading which, and actually understanding some of it, The Ferret immediately replies:
As far as you’re concerned, eh, Steve?
Anytime, anywhere, you want to meet to discuss this, just let me know. For you, Steve, I’ve got all the time in the world.
And if you don’t answer me immediately with time and place, then that’s okay – I know where you work and I’ll just come get you. It’s no problem at all! How’s that?
As for the girl, the one you with such false toughness sometimes refer to as ‘Chicky’, I’ll deal with her separate.
‘Is this a challenge?’ dumbstruck and suddenly thrown off his guard Steve Kowalski blinks as he reads and rereads The Ferret’s reply… ‘To be finally unfettered by being first un-Ferreted,’ he thinks…
Filed by Saint Stephan. Undated