Jay Vissers's blog

When I was a kid, I knew that grown-ups used big words with meanings I didn’t understand. There was always the assumption that as I got older, I’d learn these as a matter of course. In the meantime, however, I could always make up definitions based on other words I knew that sounded like the new one. Some of them still stick with me because, in my opinion, they’re better than the real things. For example …

I heard that someone had “matriculated”. This is a rather pompous way of saying that he or she had signed up for college, but I didn’t know that. So, what did it sound like. The main elements seemed to be “may”,”trickle” and “late”. “MAy TRICkle Until it’s too LATE” suggested itself very quickly thereafter. What could trickle until it’s too late? Aha! Matriculate means to bleed internally for a long time without knowing it until you suddenly keel over dead on the spot. I was already writing my epic, never-to-be-published story of an imaginary empire, so this new word fit effortlessly into the growing, convoluted plot.

“Old King Uzz was taking a bath when he banged himself rather sharply on one of the faucets. He looked down and saw only a small bruise on his side, but he didn’t know he had busted his thyrax and it was bleeding into his divercreas. He went about his daily business hunting dinosaurs and reviewing his army in the nude. All the while his blood was running inside, drip, drip, drip. In the evening he went to a huge state dinner in his palace in the city of ‘Poo. After eating he burped up a big bubble of blood and fell dead with his face in a cake. The palace doctor said he must have matriculated for hours.”

I wrote this when I was twelve years old and felt mighty proud of it then. I still do, and I haven’t lost my affinity for puns and other wordplay. Every odd word I hear automatically goes through the rolling and smelting mill of my mind where it’s compared to other words and filed away for future use. People’s names evoke a particularly strong response and, by their mere sound, can evoke responses ranging from euphoria to something akin to having smelled something nasty. This may verge on something called “synesthesia”, but that’s another story.

The whole point of this posting is to encourage people to learn lots of new words. Find out what they really mean, but make something up on the way to the dictionary. It’s lots of fun, and often what you invent is way better than the real thing.

There is a saying that some of the most precious moments in our lives are special just because we didn’t know that they were important at that time.

I mention this because for the past few weeks I’ve been experiencing a resurgence of interest in the topic of famous fires, a subject that has fascinated and haunted me ever since I happened across a book on the topic at the library at MacDill Air Force Base (Tampa, Florida) when I was eleven years old. I remember sitting in the aisle between the shelves, utterly spellbound by black and white photos of the aftermaths of great conflagrations. There I learned for the first time about the Iroquois Theater in Chicago (1903), the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York (1911), and the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston (1942). Even at that age, I could fill the images of the blackened and scorched buildings with visions of crowds of people being burned and trampled as they tried to escape. I saw in my mind’s eye the mingled bravery and helplessness of the firemen and could imagine the unavailing anguish of the victims’ families. I never forgot about that red-covered book whose name I cannot now recall, for it engendered an interest in me that resurfaces whenever a new book is published on the subject of a famous fire.

Habermann, Franz Xaver (1721-1796) - Engraver
“Representation du Feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck”
In: The Eno Collection of City Views
Published: 1776

Books on Famous Fires

I recently read the books “Chicago Death Trap” and “Tinder box” (both available from New York Public Library), about the Iroquois Theater fire. They are very well written, and it is easy for their readers to imagine themselves in the audience watching the musical comedy “Mister Bluebeard” on that fateful December afternoon shortly after Christmas.

One frame in life’s endless ribbon of events

And here is the core of this entry. The families and couples and shopgirls and children who filled the hall to capacity and beyond that day had no idea while watching a song-and-dance number called “In the Pale Moonlight” that a stage lamp being used to flood the theater with a beautiful blue light was sparking and setting one of the scenery curtains afire. Half an hour after this moment of ignition, over six hundred of the audience would be dead, many more trampled than burned in a terrible stampede to the narrrow exits. I am haunted by this last moment before the fire and the panic. I replay it in my mind’s eye and can iris in like a camera on any and every detail. …The ornate theater, newly opened. Men in celluloid collars and vests sitting next to their wives in corsets, high-button shoes and immense feathered hats. Children excited by the performance or bored and wishing they were home playing with their new toys. Audience members standing behind the last rows of seats or sitting in the aisles. The excited cast and crew members backstage readying sets, props and costumes. The gasps of wonder from the viewers as the theater fills with artificial “moonlight”. Aerialist Nellie Reed waiting high above the stage, ready to swing out over the audience during her number where she’ll scatter flower petals over the crowd. (She will be one of the few cast members to perish when she is forgotten on her perch after the fire breaks out.)… It’s all so poignant and pregnant with portent … to me, because I know what’s going to happen next! None of the people there in the theater that afternoon knew that they would soon be fighting for their lives. Until the fire brought its tragedy, this was an average performance in a typical theater for everyday people. I use my imagination to crystallize a moment into a myth that is very powerful for my mental picture of the world. I can put myself virtually into the audience and freeze that instant in time, viewing it from every angle. But in real life, this is just one “frame” in life’s endless ribbon of events, no more or less special than any other.

I know that events can’t really be frozen into a bell jar or vitrine. Logic says that there was nothing remarkable about the last distribution of pay envelopes that Saturday afternoon at the Triangle factory, or singer Goodie Goodell playing the piano atop a revolving platform that night in the Melody Lounge at the Cocoanut Grove. But I choose, emotionally, to focus on and reflect on them, combing them for meaning and sometimes being reduced to tears at the evocative power of their sheer ordinariness. To return to the theme of this post, these things and moments were special because they were not important at their time. I have the luxury of living later and being able to “stop the film”, so to speak. The people caught up in these events were forced into and through them and did not have this choice. Maybe this is why I think so much about them.

The Burning of Rome : descriptive march and two-step / E. T. Paull, c1903
From the “Treasures of the Performing Arts” digital project