Miosso, Jessup Simon Latrias (1780–?1864), was born in Bartleton, Hesperdale to Thomas Miosso (1757–1823), a zymotech, and Faye Leshing (1756–1830), or Leshed. Faye had studied the arts of sovenance under Fulvia di Ruggero, and well into her later years kept a written record of the numens, nymphs, and other deities active in Hesperdale and parts of the neighboring Warth of Wyrth. While doing fieldwork, she came across Thomas, who, having sustained a fracture of the tibia while collecting exotic yeast samples from wild grains, was unconscious and suffering from rigors. After performing apothesis and cleaning the tetrous sore, both skills being then commonly imparted during paedeutics, she hoisted the oblivious baker onto her back and returned with him to town. She made her way through the market-hour buskling, where she was assisted to the chirurgeon's by the mistery of deservient townsfolk. Thomas warished, and the putid squames fell from the impostume on his leg, but Faye returned regularly and stood over the pistater, providing a human skew in place of the dark sky of the surgeon's quarters. He found himself enixly drawn to this sprightly, vigorous woman, and in his letters makes frequent reference to the meltiths she would spend, never sitting, by his side, and the expansive gratitude he felt for the miscasualty which had brought them together, and from which her extraordinary capacity had extracted him. He repeated often a desire to scarboyle the flimsy edifice of the surgeon's house and proposition Faye to encircle him like a sengilbond. And, after epoting an aqueous solution of absinthium, and in forbearance of his reticence, did so ask. Faye took the opportunity to remind him that she had first posed this question days prior, and that they had already agreed to make a life together, but that the repeated infusions seemed to be taking their toll on the memory of her partner. Uttering imprecations on top of calumniations concerning the bitter inadequacy of contemporary physic, Thomas suggested he be removed to better ventilated quarters, away from the stultifying effects of the cacagogue.
Deciding to relocate to Faye's cottage in Bartleton, they enlisted Hittie Norton, Faye's second cousin and a brumelusine, as their real-estate executor and elchee to the town, tasking her with the furnishing of Thomas's house, which they intended to make available as a shared community retreat and country cabin, as it abutted his aromatic bakery. Some understood these measures to forecast a troublesome conspirative element in this new union, but many of those inceptive suspicions were dispelled on the birth of Jessup Simon Latrias Miosso in late April of 1780, to which an en passant marginal note in Faye's Adversaria Compitorum (1787) — which, despite its airiness, remains one of the most reliable primary sources regarding the boyhood stories of Jessup — testifies.
The fearful fascination with live burial which would emerge in Jessup's sophomore book of poems saw a major contributory stimulus in his second year. Seated near a firkin of friable glebe soil which his father kept on hand, as the latter found it particularly efficacious in soothing the refrications of the escharotic strocking on his leg, Jessup, who in his developmental impetuosity was prone to rapid renuent motions of the head, became susceptible to such a fit, and dislodged a loose board in the keg, causing a sizable amount of the material, but not so much as to cover the toddler completely, to cascade around his haunches and chest, and invade his airways. Thomas, whose rudimentary medical knowledge consisted largely of folk cures — both boethetic and injurious — nonetheless attempted to rescue the boy using a draught of garcinia-gum tea. This yellowish concoction, though relatively unnocive, induced emesis, as it was frequently employed to do in that century, especially in those of weak stomach, and Thomas found himself helplessly hurkling a child in danger of aspirating his own vomitus and corpuscules of sod. The epigastric spasms soon subsided to Thomas's evident relief. Unfortunately, Jessup, relieved of his corporeal incommodity, could quite clearly be seen to be in the incipient throes of a psychological torment emerging from this brush with death.
When Jessup developed his locomotive and gradient capacities, he demonstrated an outré interest in the activities of the glue coöperative, which extracted various glutinous wheys and serums from hardy tree life in order to distill the liquid product into an adhesive paste for industrial and domestic use. The boy liked nothing more than to take upon his back an undersized cask (usually no larger than the size of a pin, or just over four imperial gallons) and trudgeon with it, alongside the train of slow-moving trewernes, to the refinery. Upon arrival, his burden would be removed by a chuckling technician, and the boy, without looking up, and barely straightening his dorsum, would just as determinedly make his way back to the groves. Thomas, for all his propriety, did not hesitate to confess his reservations regarding the muddled sexual symbolism implicit in this odd cyclical caravan, and frequently sought the council of some of the less salty members of the Viscicarium, who, if his letters are to be trusted, merely advised him to wait out the boy's notional hobby, particularly as his diminutive size prevented him from inspecting the consistency of the cremor he bore so gladsomely.
To judge from Jessup's confessions, he first began to compose verse during weekly outings to a wide but shallow arm of the sea which made profection five miles from the Miosso and Leshing home at Bartleton. Beginning in late summer, he would arrive at twilight, the tide regularly being favorable to such an arrangement, as to allow for a recreation of his own devisement. Reclining upon a tidily-made raft of logs and twine, he would wait for the receding tide to coax the assemblage slowly down towards the center of the waters, where prestolating coveys of gannets, inured to human presence by the avian symphonies in the spring, glid softly next to his bark, their disruptive diving habits muted in the cooler gropsing. Such halcyon moments in the manant sea must have twitched or twanged some psalloid nerve within him, for his first book of poetry, Ælodhunia, a Ramble (1789) uncontroversially regarded as his most mature, treats of a solitary littoralist whose ecphrastic journeys up and down an unspecified riverbank (usually taken to be the Wyrth) find counterpoint in a sorites of her extempore persiflage with the spirits of the warth.
From this point on, Jessup parted ways with these idyllic sympathies. Dividing his time between assisting his mother with her fieldwork — intended to form the raw matter for the sequel to the Adversaria — and trying his hand at stonemasonry left little time for serious versical compositions. Indeed, his next collection, titled Various Poems on Leeks (1790), was released under the nom de plume ‘S. Esau Latrias’, providing some hint that the young man may, in some measure, have been embarrassed or unsatisfied with the result.
He first came into serious contact with the practice and principles of clerkship while throwing himself in with the carpentry collatition, whose negligible bookkeeping needs were typically met during a rudimentary tally conducted at the end of each lunar year. His jubilation upon being introduced to the variorum of goods and supplies coursing through the association was far in excess of what might have been expected, and he devoted the great majority of his spare hours to cataloguing this flow. The registry which he developed was likely never put to any practical use, but appears as one of many appendices in his monumental Intendment of Lists (1st edition, 1794) which, all recommendations to the contrary, was published as a single volume exceeding 1200 pages when he was but sixteenth. If the dedication is to be believed, he leant heavily on the connections of his alloy-sister Otto Miosco, then thirty-nine, who was close friends with one of the master printers at the Splean Press (though not Henrietta Splean herself, printer of his mother's Adversaria), in order to “transcend the indices and gnomons of those atramented constables.” Such limits were insufficient to contain the comprehensive taxonomies of the town-building going on around him and the extravaging theories which form the bulk of the monograph, and which he spent almost five years collecting, schematizing, and inditing.
The Intendment went through two more editions in the following two years, its surprising popularity attributed to the wide-ranging matter of the inventories and the whimsical manner in which they were expressed, rather than to the dilettantish exergasy of these ethnographies of itemization. Indeed, some have remained skeptical that the primary material could all have been acquired by this untraveled and unworldly youth, but the fingerprints of his style shine forth irrefutably on every list. At least one scholar has posited that, given Jessup's close ties to the epiterrestrial world, and the uncorroborated contents of much of the book, he believed himself to be willing recipient of the anatomized speculations and imaginings of the regional deities (Winnington, 1935). However, no evidence of such an assumption exists, which, given Jessup's universal parrhesia, makes such a conviction unlikely.
During the next seventy-odd years of his life, Jessup — perhaps exhausted by the superhuman effort of the preceding quinary of a century —largely disappears from the public record. The last certain mention of his existence is in the preface to U. U. Tustin's Inventory (1864), where she describes in some detail a meeting with a “scrawny gentleman, affected with repeated inclination and straightening of the paxwax [neck tendon], which he seemed unable to mollify, though taking frequently of a mustard colored tincture.” Having sought this man out on the understanding that he was indeed Jessup, she solicited from him his thoughts on laying out a eutaxic plan for an eventual componency, thoughts which she makes sure to include, in unabbreviated form, in her own regrettably corporate-commissioned work.
It is thought that his remains reside under a gravestone marked ‘S.E.L.’ in Prithwater-upon-Hyle.
