11/10/07

In the obituaries the batman, descendant of Emerson who decried the foolish consistencies of clerics, although his descendant, a frequent recluse who summered on a South Pomfret hillside although he also taught at Harvard, had become a Unitarian minister, and this a cleric of a church his ancestor might have also decried as corpse-cold as the Congregationalists, descendants of the Puritans from which he sprung.

The batman had been a scientist at Lawrence Livermore when he changed fields to study the echolocation of bats, proving there are second acts, contra F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The descendant of Emerson was nicknamed batman because he’d studied bats for nearly all his adult life. Where was the foolish consistency?

When he drove to the end of the road in South Pomfret, barely anyone saw him. To the end of his life there he lived, unmingling, an unmingled substance in his integrity, a reader of bats teasing the mysteries of echolocation from the creatures so that they could be applied to the manufacture of stereo headphones, an application that he never sought to help nor hinder, who himself owned no stereo headphones, too acquainted with the real things to be interested in their mechanical approximation.

I walk a rural road in darkness and the bats gingerly dart above my circumference that they sense and skirt, never landing as I fear, on my shoulder, from the muscle-knowledge and the laws the batman teased away from painstaking observation, requiring the consistency his more famous literary ancestor decried when it sat on the corpse-cold pulpit of the Congregationalists. I like to think that Fred Webster the batman informs those turnings/wheelings, but he’d be too modest to claim as much.

Bats in the belfry circle to find just where they are. They are all along in place, where they were meant to be.

For Fred Webster, 1908-2007