Wednesday, July the 21st, 2004

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Curd

The above quotation from Sabine Baring-Gould describes an insubstantial, phantom figure with a “complexion of curd”. That phrase applies perfectly to the indubitably solid, corporeal person of Dr P V C Pote, the subject of one of Dobson's most inspiring pamphlets. Indeed, Dobson begins with a highly-wrought flight of fancy in which he suggests a number of alternatives for his subject's ever-enigmatic initials, among which is “Pallor Very Curd-like”.

Dr Pote would be forgotten today had he not achieved a kind of immortality via the sixty-page biography in which Dobson's prose achieves an almost hallucinatory opulence. Here is the celebrated passage in which Pote's prowess as a speaker is lauded:

“This pallid man with a complexion of curd held his listeners spellbound as, standing upright in a high wind, he told them of the death of Avicenna, by taking nine clysters together in a fit of the Colick. His audience had no sooner digested this news than the good doctor moved on, informing them that all the air beyond Thule is thick, condensed and jellied, looking just like sea lungs. They badgered him with questions, all of which he answered with good grace, and no little humour, before describing to them a snow piece, of land and trees covered with snow and ice, and mountains of ice floating in the sea, with bears, seals, foxes, and variety of rare fowls upon them, then explaining the priests' curing of mad dogs by burning them in the forehead with Saint Bellin's Key, before describing the quite unrelated matter of a noble Quandros or stone taken out of a vulture's head. Brains bedizened by the doctor's magpie mind, his listeners were near replete, yet he had one more topic for them, ending his lecture with a twenty-minute anecdote of bewildering complexity about a glass of spirits made of aethereal salt, hermetically sealed up, kept continually in quicksilver; of so volatile a nature that it will scarce endure the light, and therefore only to be shown in winter, or by the light of a carbuncle, or Bononian stone. And then he was done, and he pulled his black cape about his shoulders, and swept away, into the wind, implacable and majestic, of the finest fibre from which a man can be hewn, notwithstanding a pallor of curd.”