Boca

    "Nature abhors a vacuum", theorists of both philosophy and
    politics assure us.

    What's more, the phenomena is not confined to mere
    physical science given the nature of human opportunism.
    Glance a map of central Europe for further insights. One
    side always replaced the other when a "common," enemy
    expired.

    Boca might well have studied such eventualities.

    Boca was a writer. More accurately, a "touch-dancer" with
    the written phrase, deftly painting the catchy one-liner with
    effortless ease and grace. Boca knew his craft, be it the
    arena of story, poem, drama, (it didn't matter the genre).
    Unfortunately, his oeuvre remained fixed and static. Boca
    never progressed beyond titles.

    "A right, jolly good thing, too", said Boca in his own
    defense.

    The short burst counted most, whether in thought, sport or
    field of battle. The utterance of a single breath. That was
    it! It all lay in the aside, the pun, a retort, the récit. If this
    were all to the story, there would be no doubt whatsoever;
    Boca excelled.

    "In the briefest expression, perhaps", said the critics. But,
    as they were quick to point out, it didn't lead "anywhere".

    "Where is the larger, more important fruit? His finished
    verbal passion?", intoned one.

    Still, this chance fortune led to the inspiration (and success)
    of unusually vivid titles.

    But ... titles? Just "titles", said others nervously? Yes,
    proclaimed Boca. Titles. Not epithets, or rejoinders,
    cat-calls even repartee.

    Not even wit in the normal understanding of the term. Just
    mere titles. Bushel-baskets of them. Worried looks crept
    onto the onlookers' faces.

    Encyclopaedic came the flowering. Ad factories should
    have tapped such a larder. Any creative department could
    have done worse than with Boca's dripping imagery and gift
    for the keynote phrase.

    "There is majesty here", said one, "and more than a little
    Blake. I am reminded of the great symbolists."

    "One has to be practical", cautioned still another. "What's
    here is hardly epigrammatic or even purely an aphorism in
    any truer sense of the word."

    "I'm simply perplexed", said the man finally to his
    colleague and both left without further ado or thought to
    Boca's work.

    Indeed Boca loved his words, tinkering with the very
    essence of language.

    "A great beginning", cheered a rare voice. "Let's hope one
    without premature end."

    Boca continued to conceive titles by the hundreds. He
    didn't merely dream up a few, in snatches, he proliferated
    them in vaster and vaster quantities. It was if a salmon left
    to spawn could endanger a sea shelf or river bed under the
    sheer quantity of her seed.

    "A one-man explosion at the typewriter", chortled an
    onlooker, happening to see the quantity of Boca's largesse.
    That was before he stopped to inquire of the nature of
    Boca's work. Then perturbed, this same man hurried away
    to the utter indifference of Boca who kept a steady
    pounding in spite of the interruption.

    On they came. More and more titles. By the hundreds -
    for scripts, larger dramas, treatises, epistles, monologues.
    All. And all without a scarce concern for their ultimate use.

    Are we to believe each one came to naught as the sceptics
    predicted? After all, in this practical world who has use for
    dreamers? We already know Boca was stymied at the title
    level. Nothing ever graced his newborn creation beyond
    that first utterance. It was like sending a baby into the
    world without proper bedding or clothes.

    One nastier commentator even alluded to Boca's work as
    the equivalent of premature ejaculation. All buildup with
    no satisfaction. "The promise", he chuckled, "without the
    delivery".

    And that is what came to pass.

    Each of Boca's titles, true to prediction, came to "naught"
    or, rather, nothing much. Blank. A zero. With each "title"
    one ran aground on the larger abyss of its central problem.

    That being, as Boca had been warned by his legion of
    critics, "one of size".

    What good are titles without textual description, chapters,
    scenes, the "overview?" said one literary agent gruffly.

    Boca, taking a respite from his typewriter, had had the
    temerity to approach one such man in the comfort of his
    office with reams of suggestions.

    Indeed.

    People shook their heads at Boca always scribbling
    furiously. Always working but apparently accomplishing
    precious next to nothing. "Something" was evidently being
    done in the strictest sense of the word, but what? What?

    "Could his ... well, problem be explained?" one vocal
    opponent of Boca urged.

    "What the hell is he up to?"

    Strangely enough, for the seemingly longest time this did
    not deter Boca. He was his own universe. His feet were
    on solid ground. The air about him teemed with ideas. He
    was too busy fishing for the "mot juste", he explained in
    a moment of clarification.

    "One man in the right is a majority", proclaimed Boca,
    remembering a snippet of John Stuart Mill.

    Too busy was Boca replanning the structure of the
    Colosseum so it might better accommodate his label, his
    notion, his re-christened version of the ideal verbal escort
    to accompany that ancient edifice.

    And write Boca did. Titles fell increasingly from his pen.

    "The Barking Tree."

    "The Leaking River."

    These were but two. Boca thought he would improve on
    Tolkein's efforts, at least in the direction of title. After all,
    to send a work into the reader's lap without proper
    introduction was like trying to get acquainted without the
    proper introduction.

    Maybe Boca had a point.

    "Assembly without Hope" and "Nirvana without End"
    touched on his mystical stage. He dropped this and
    proceeded into the area of historiography. And afterwards,
    dry epistemology would see him concentrate his efforts.
    These forums were indeed worthy of his attention. Too
    long had they been neglected. All were in need of good,
    metaphoric dusting by title.

    At last word, Boca was inching toward Kant's, "Critique of
    Pure Reason".

    "That one, in particular, has a poor ring", he was heard to
    say.

    On they came. Precise. Hard-hitting, or so he thought.
    They made the mind's eye swell with the promise of more
    and more. Indeed, that "eye" could get bloodshot reading
    all of Boca's interception.

    But the "more" in the sense of the follow-up, the "delivery"
    or accompaniment of pages never came.

    Nowhere was there to be found the Hemingway to follow
    the "Moveable Feast".

    Or "The Edible Woman".

    Even the promise of thrillers for a scary submarine epic like
    "Three Eggs on my Plate" never materialized.

    Nothing. Just titles. More, then more and increasingly
    more of them. Annoyingly so. Scraps of paper decorating
    a table without an intended victim ever coming close.

    It was as if so many salesgirls had left price tags off
    matching merchandise. That's all that remained. Just the
    stickers forlornly, white and detached, staring up from their
    adhesiveness.

    More than just a little tacky.

    A woman given to comparison confronted Boca.

    "Imagine a zoo where the curators had all the animal
    names, but they were not paired with their owners. That's
    your stuff. Everything in a weird isolation."

    Boca could not be Borca and not even Carl Sagan could
    rescue him. No large bottles floating in formaldehyde with
    the decapitated heads from Belle Epoque sailors were
    possible here.

    Boca was more obscure than Gaspirilla Island. More so.

    And a final verdict, if there is need for one, can be seen in
    Boca's last will and testimony.

    He let it be known of his intention to chisel the "ultimate"
    one-liner. One to grace his own tombstone. On this he set
    to work with a last burst of frenzy.

    "To mirror my tragic-comic fate", as he would have said.

    Perhaps Boca is still at work, either on the snappy final
    wording ("the right elasticity") or in the mechanics of the
    engraving itself.

    Only a stone-cutter could estimate the probable expenditure
    in time for the latter.

    Novelists in dire need of fresh insights should enlist Boca.
    He's definitely available, if difficult to reach.

    Boca might have rescued many a masterpiece from the
    dustbin, if not the Box Office, had his specialty been
    known.

    I look at Boca and hear fire bells. His plight remains the
    very stuff of tragedy. By epic standards, how many Bocas
    are there worthy of a balladeer and myth maker? Credible
    Boca may be, but understandable?

    Boca, the metaphoric equivalent of a Sisyphus chained to
    his rock of obsession.

    "This horrible rock", (or pebble depending on your
    viewpoint), wailed Boca.

    "I've become my own obstacle, my work is the
    personification of my own limitation."

    Worse, imprisoned in an inescapable logic and the narrow
    confines of a blink of talent.