so remarks sir thomas browne author of a book on the religion of doctors and another on commonly held errors full of 'a sense of qualified despondency because fabulous yet enchanting beliefs ... must be sacrificed on the altar of demanding truth' (as patrides his editor puts it) and yet the prose itself continues to celebrate the lamprey with its nine eyes and the beaver's biting off of its own testicles when hunted. there is browne the would-be scientist but also browne the religious man who believes in eternal time, that 'the last trump is already sounded' and that they are not inconsistent with the browne who is not so afraid of his own inconsistencies to mix humour into his prose.
similarly unafraid of his own inconsistency is samuel clemens who was not even afraid to steal his name (just as horsemouth stole his) not just from the activity of sounding the depth of the river ('mark twain' the boatmen would yell - this horsemouth already knew) but from an actual living pilot of a mississippi paddlesteamer - one isiah sellers. clemens (now rebaptised mark twain) returns to his old haunts travelling down the river to new orleans working in earlier manuscripts to his life on the mississippi as he goes, even as he tells us that it draind delaware and that the waters of the mississippi and missouri rivers will not mix.
in returning to water and to his childhood clemens finds the way (as jefferies did in after london).
clemens (twain) travels on down through (or past) the towns named by johnny cash in big river (st. paul, davenport, st. louis, memphis, baton rouge, new orleans) and then (after a decent interval back up returning to new york). he gives us as southern the word lagniappe, a spanish word (allegedly) for the sweetener added to the end of a transaction - the little something 'thrown in', a word that horsemouth had only previously heard (but not understood) in treme. the penguin edition show us a bird's eye view of new orleans drawn from nature on stone (1851) on the cover - a city on a grid with broad french avenues stretching down to the paddle-steamers on the river.
faced with text that can only with difficulty tell the truth clemens opts for the lie, the routine, the confidence trick of the riverboat hustler (as mellville does in his the confidence man), the trick of language that first annexed these lands for france.
'i taught the weeping willow how to cry' lies johnny cash at the start of big river and again at the end when he's told us he'll 'dump... (his) blues down in the gulf' , just as people in scatter the ashes of their loved ones at new orleans and into the ganges.
'all things began in order, so shall they end and so shall they begin again: according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven'
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