Without ceasing to meditate during the journey, and in a kind of state of self-disgust, I very soon reached the conclusion that it was this identity which made it possible for every man to be loved neither more nor less than every other, and that it is possible for even the most loathsome appearance to be loved, that is, to be cared for and recognized–cherished.

Jean Genet What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet

‘I have abandoned my child, I have abandoned my child, I have abandoned my boy’, hollers Daniel ‘oh-how-delightfully-mis-fitting-his-last-name-is-for-the-incoming-cavalcade-of-words’ Plainview A.K.A. Daniel Day-Lewis, who not that long ago still kept pretending on the silver screen to make a living. Contrary to his explosive admission, I have no regrets that I have become deaf to letters, to the wild and restlessly reshuffling ABCs sprouting from the Deleuzian Baroque house metaphor, to my own concept of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, to novels which constituted its hypnotic, oftentimes convoluted entrails, its obfuscated crystal-clear interior, its rapaciously enrapturing floor plan – I have none. I have lost my way before. Every single time it was worth it. And I know it will be so in the future. Because losing is always a mode of finding another type of wandering, meandering, zigzagging. It’s taking five to take a hike. But some things just have to be SEEN THROUGH. They simply have to.

I’ve had a rather unexpected conversation the other day with someone who is very fond of giving space. As I conversed with this Space Giver, let’s call him that, about movies which are of no relevance here, he struck upon a peculiar note, or, rather, a theme. Inexplicable rules was it, and what it entails fits like a glove to the current situation with my Swan Opera. In the century overly fecund with unhealthy and straightforwardly damaging overexplicity, subduing oneself to unnameable rules feels surprisingly refreshing. Do it just because. ‘Just because’ has this air of innocuous innocence of children playing around in a kinder garden backyard in a somewhat dilly-dally-ish, somewhat dilettant-ish manner. But I digress…

Anyway, I donned myself in my grossly undersized and slightly shabby clothes of “just because”. I put on my “just because” sweatpants, my “just because” t-shirt, a pair of my “just because” sneakers, and went to see the Mansion of Litera(p)ture again. And upon seeing it, momentarily I knew the Space Giver was right – the mansion needed to be seen through. THAT was the inexplicable rule. Without hesitation, I came closer and reached for the door knob. The main entrance was locked. I looked around the porch and its immediate vicinity for some useful utensil to overcome this untoward nuisance. Fortunately, or, rather, precautiously, I had a jemmy on me, just in case, and with its invaluable aid I broke and entered the premises again.

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Passion

So where were we? Oh yeah, we stepped in and out of an “unmansionable” intrusion, humbly bloated with a post-existential gloom. Before that we had climbed the staircase up, down and sideways, fondled and fumbled within the obsessive confines of the crawlspace, wined and dined in the desirable fusion of kitchen and home cinema, and, last but not least, we sauntered around the enchanting vestibule. Not being all too keen on falling into the same rabbit hole of referencing our previous route in total, I’ll try to outdo myself and keep this unrelenting necessity as concise and precise as possible.

Our last purely litera(p)turing pit stop was a staircase a ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky summoned up with his deontologized diary. He went sideways into somewhere where every duty, obligation and imperative is deprived of its “should-y” nature, where every phenomenon is exempt of its haughty ontological necessity to boast about that it is (‘I AM,’ they holler, just like Daniel Day-Plainview does, ‘I HAVE BEEN,’ as if they expected some prize for having the ontological ability not to cease temporospatially, ‘I WILL BE,’ oh, knock it off already, will you!), where the relation of a human being to reality shuts up at last, and it is possible to hear the ever so elusive sound of silence and the ensuing ever so subtle roar of infinities unfolding, frothing, and fuming incessantly. Nijinsky checks out his new dance moves on an infinitesimally elusive and exclusive dance floor, metaphysically uncharted territory, topologically indefinable dimension. And he is full of one of the most bifurcated and “ambidexterously” ambiguous feelings one is capable of having – limerence. Besotted with the reality he surreptitiously tries to encapsulate on a couple of hastily penned pages, he almost forgoes all that made him connected with the world before. He is able to hear the silence, and feels voracious drive towards the mute plane of infatuation with the infinite, yet he stays firmly grounded in its finite apparitions. He hasn’t scissored the upper floor of his Baroque house by “unfolding” the frequency and intensity of his own dark and minute perceptions. It (the upper floor) simply has been redraped according to its in-itself topology preconfigured by the incompossibility, itself bordering on being impossible. That’s why he seems to be simultaneously secluded within himself and abject from another variance or mode of folding within the reality (the said ‘variance’ taken here as another human being like his wife, daughter, etc.), yet he exudes the notion of having been permeated with the world’s essence, resembling a whirlwind inside a vortex. Deleuze writes:

Such are the monads, or Leibniz’s Selves, automata, each of which draws from its depths the entire world and handles its relations with the outside or with others as an uncoiling of the mechanism of its own spring, of its own prearranged spontaneity. Monads have to be conceived as dancing. But the dance is the Baroque dance, in which the dancers are automata: there we have an entire “pathos of distance,” like the invisible distance between two monads (space); the meeting of them becomes a parade, or development, of their respective spontaneities insofar as their distance is upheld.

So, if Nijinsky, our incompossible dancing monad, remains convergently ‘imbibed’ by the limerence towards everything, although having redraped his upper floor beyond conceivable recognition, and therefore manifesting within the world in a rather incomprehensible way, resembling a spaced out yet tangible phantom (a ghost ballooning from the world-membrane, pullulating as yet another multi-fold of highly indiscernible knots, loops and manifolds), where does the Clarice Lispector’s protagonist situates herself, then? How is she able to surpass Nijinsky on our lovely spectrum, and in what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture do we end up trailing along her passion?

The Monadic Calamity

In order to reorient ourselves on the floor plan of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, to which we have not yet fully grown accustomed, we have to apply the Baroque house allegory on ourselves, or to put it simply, go back to basics. Why don’t we (re)turn to Deleuze again:

It is the upper floor that has no windows. It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a stretched canvas “diversified by folds,” as if it were a living dermis. Placed on an opaque canvas, these folds, cords or springs represents an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action. Matter triggers “vibrations or oscillations” at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of “some little openings” that exist on the lower level. Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into the sounds above.

Since the Baroque house has two stories, however abstract or even body-horror-ish they might look, it also has the fold as a border which separates the upper floor from the lower, stretching, snaking, wreathing according to two different orders. The fold coils, unfurls, and is generally subjected to all sorts of inflection planes. It is a den from which a sort of two-way convergent piping or, as Deleuze puts it, “cords or springs” sprout forth, constituting and decorating both floors. Every oscillation in the lower floor generates the resonance in the draperies in the upper. Now, imagine this: what would happen, if one of the cords from the lower floor oscillated so wildly that it shattered a part of the fold, cracking open the upper floor? Or better yet, what if it pierced the latter, and barged in with its obtrusive air of total ontological de-calibration? That’s exactly what happened to the protagonist of The Passion According to G.H.

Lispector, the Passionate Inspector of the Metaphysical

Constraining myself just the way I like it, just like contorted boa constrictor crushing a careless capybara for dinner, plot-wise, I am going to give you only what is unavoidable. The nameless protagonist of Lispector’s tour de force, who is known only by her initials, G.H., is a rather well-to-do sculptress who lives on the last floor of an apartment complex in a finely furnished penthouse. A refined woman, a woman of all human predicaments (here, taken as broadly as possible), she crosses the backrooms of her apartment to take care of the room vacated by the recently dismissed maid. Stumbled by the barren condition of the chamber – with blinding, sun-soaked, whitewashed walls, one of them being doodled with speculative and crude outlines, Keith Haring style, of a man, a woman and a dog – her complete set of beliefs and ontological constitution is soon to be turned upside down by an enormous cockroach which is unintentionally almost released from a dilapidated wardrobe…

The interaction, altercation, the silent encounter with the cockroach wrecks G.H. so profoundly that she is forced to redecorate the perforated upper floor of her Baroque house. Like houses of two not so diligent pigs, her entire worldview crumbles and is blown down by a big bad wolf of fierce, totally unexpected, raw metaphysics, completely incommensurable with everything she has believed up to the point of fateful confrontation with the shattering crustacean. A metaphysics of such a pervasive intensity, raw nakedness and insurmountable power as to strip down all cultural and/or civilizational accretions, causing them to dwindle and wither in the liberating pureness of the profound ontological blast. Or rather a particular dimension of the metaphysics we all intuitively know and, under the skin, sense that it’s true, but which is obstinately obscured by its blatant counterpart with the tendencies to overshadow and to take the credit for what it simply shouldn’t. Frankly, so penetrating is the shock the cockroach induces in G.H. that she reaches a certain point, where the restrictive plane, the hindering boundary between phenomenal and noumenal–itself a profoundly peculiar space, where the being allegedly acquires “translative” powers to turn the bifurcated incompatibility of externality and internality into seemingly comprehensive and corresponding mutuality–reveals its true nature. The primordial ferocity with which pure life non-differentiates itself within the world exempt of all conceptual contaminations and misappropriated appearances, unfolds itself as a neutrality full of unquenchable thirst to depersonalize, desist, and distance itself from everything to the point of reaching non-being. For only on this level of non-existence, absolutely full of life, miraculously pure and existentially barren, G.H. claims one may fully and truly experience what passion towards everything genuinely means. Taking with a pinch of salt the literalness with which she names the clichéd three-lettered wholeness of the passion through which she becomes a oneness with everything, nothing and the ominously clandestine raw modes of in-betweenness, Lispector dives into infinity, perhaps not headfirst per se, but her dive has divine repercussions which simultaneously cannot be called that, for the words bear the stigma of a past full of complacent timidity of an everyday well-organized life. For life, as very few know it, is extremely close to (and ‘with’, too) infinity. Sometimes, perhaps, it is all too close. And when it opens, there is a gasping gaping and a spasmodic panting which both leave our gobs agape. Oh, but am I all but foreshadowing again?

Squeaky Clean Bathroom in a Shaken Attic

So, where did we end up in the Mansion of Lite(r)apture? The room is dark, only a frail smudge of light pierces its interior as if a stray ray of unknown luminescence mimicked the décor of the dreaded drapes, still in shock from their recent defilement. The meager illumination suffices for us to see we are in the bathroom. It must have unfolded right there, at the moment of impact. Its walls made of glass bricks, mocking the orificial nature of the lower floor, invoke images of a certain inaptitude of rules that must have redefined themselves in order to create surfaces which allow seeing through. The bathroom fittings and piping, threaded wildly throughout the files, ascertain the whole room must have been (re)decorated hastily, as if adapting strenuously, an invasive bubble within the hapless realm of punctured enclosure. Its bizarre aura of authenticity and falseness intermingled together in an unprecipitable solution convinces us it touches the true essence of life. The quintessence of it, in itself, unexpectedly as welcoming as possible.

For it is bathroom, no matter how otherworldly furnished or refurbished would it be, where we are most likely to shed our masks of dealing with life, the world and ourselves. How many of you have ever read a book while having a bath? Soaked inside an intentionally frothy and fragrant multiverse of escapism, you shed your outer selves and plunge into the opposite of you, forgetting about one ontology in favor of the other, conjured up by the text. Or, on the other hand, how many of you have ever been so absorbed in a so-called “moment of truth” in front of the mirror–staring into the abyss all too “post-” it didn’t want to stare back anymore–so much so you jumped on the other side of yourselves into the pure absence of every “I” you could have at that moment constituted? It is the silent triumph of the overshadowed, clandestine realm of metaphysics. It is how the Bathroom attempts to regain its intrinsic ability to reverberate and resonate with the oscillations from the different parts of the Mansion. But it forgets, just as we forget while donned in a foamy “sumo suit” of being somewhere else, or gone through the looking glass of our quasi-enlightenments. It was born out of the jolly nature of contingency, a fortunate aberration. The fold – which serves as a ceaseless beginning and fateless end to the unbreakable continuity of the feeling-spectrum – we surf upon while relocating ourselves on the premises of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture must have gotten an ontological hiccup. Just as the infinitely “loveful” neutrality, which has revealed its ineffable nature before G.H., is tautologically taut, immovable, unshakable, and, thus, impalpable neither by word nor any concept (yet Lispector is able to touch upon it somehow, using this abominable all-too-human invention like prose), so is the quietude of our realization that, surprisingly, this bathroom is already different.

Exit through the Toilet Drain Pipe

Surprisingly, this bathroom is already different. It is sterile, insipid, susceptible to perfect anonymity, as if belonging (to) “somewhere” else. The shelves are empty, the drains aren’t clogged with a stinky gooey mass made of rotting strands of hair and a defoliated outer skin. There is no piece of used dental floss lying on the rim of the wash basin. Water splashes, which precipitated into nameless constellations of semi-translucent matte grey-ish blotches, are nowhere to be seen, neither on a mirror nor on the files in its immediate vicinity. A little trash can containing the holy trinity of hygiene disposability- tampons, cotton buds, and makeup remover pads with the accompanying wrappings – still awaits its first meal. The bathroom is so unbearably pristine, unfathomably spotless that the parts of its interior lose their ability to uphold the meaning of concepts which designate them. It is dirty with pure unrecognizability. The unglued names drop on the floor and smash, their “re-lettered” shards and splinters creating a thick layer of grit, as if a bunch of stray cats have frolicked in a litter box for hours without end. The bathroom’s ultimate unCORDiality begins to show. The interior “re-drapes” itself, the fold origamis into another pit-stop within a series of differences and repetitions. Or perhaps the purely monadic upper floor is reclaiming its territory, unabashedly conquered by the ontology of a different metaphysical “flavor” beforehand? The piercing with which the Bathroom was able to unfold, if only for a brief, fleeting passing of time, a tacky tic tac toe of ticklish tick-tocking, just like G.H.’s passionate revelation, wasn’t MEANT to last forever, just as our impressions on a feeling-spectrum aren’t. Among the pulses liquefying and coagulating, throngs of creases crescendoing, throes of the fold transubstantiating, we look around, half-astounded, half-enthralled, for an exit. We reach for the door and open it. Nothing in there, just more fabrics of the upper floor flapping around, fluttering as if to flee from the ever so fallible fantasm. The only way out is to flush ourselves out. With the bathroom walls folding onto us, we take a deep breath and jump headfirst into the toilet, just in time to pull the cord, mid-air, dangling from the elevated cistern right above the bowl. The thunderous roar of whirlpool within a whirl within a vortex of pure passion towards the litera(p)ture drowns out our heartbeat…

Amonne Purity

The milieus are open [in the/to] chaos which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.

Deleuze and Guattari

Intrusion – a recurring concept which haunts and tempts me at the same time. My simultaneous nemesis and salvation. My imperishable confirmation and, synchronously, the unscrupulous pitfall within which I ensnare myself all too often. I had to put my 6-part farewell review on hold due to its unfathomable and unpredictable machinations. Yet, somehow miraculously – miraculously as if I had once again gone back in time to unintentionally exploit my past serendipity towards literature which moves and dances – I have put my hands on a novel which not only grants you insight into how different and multifaceted nothingness of the 21^st Century appears to be, but also shows the other concept mentioned in the opening quote – exhaustion. And its puckishly splendorous consequences.

The Panda Theory by Pascal Garnier, is one of these novels which you can only read once, just like Iain Reid’s I’m thinking of ending things, yet it perches on the opposite side of the concept-inducing spectrum. So closely does the Frenchman’s novel resemble a beautiful inevitability of not being able to resist a new dimension of meaninglessness associated with life itself, it takes a courageous mind not to crumble under its sentences. ‘Courageous’ here meaning being able to withstand the stares, with which uncharted types of abysses – ‘granddaughters’ and ‘grandsons’ of Nietzschean Abyss – so gladly and eagerly x-ray us each and every day. Provided the novel ‘accepts’ you. Contrary to the Canadian’s book which retains the accessibility of a mystery novel, The Panda Theory, with its post-existential vibe, is highly exclusionary. How so? It’s time to meet our Protagonist.

It’s fairly safe to assume, the only precise method of defining things is by way of showing. Pointing your grubby finger, your not-so-square chin, your presupposedly round head. Not only is this ostensive brazenness required to demonstrate who Gabriel – The Panda Theory protagonist – is, but there simply is no other way to depict what remains of everything a human being constitutes after nothingness has overthrown it all. That’s why I would like you to imagine my words are fingers, chins and heads. At least, until the following paragraph ends.

Gabriel appears in a small Breton town where the devil says goodnight. At first, he seems like a regular type of guy, although a bit introverted one. He knows how to get by and has some money. What he has more, though, is a somewhat penetrative ability to get into the orbit of other people’s lives. Yet, this penetrative passiveness of his – that’s what my crooked finger would point at – somehow escapes the clear definition. As if it were peppered with something unnamable which enriches it with frank dejection, a bold, stout, self-evident refusal to become fully attached to something and/or someone. Or to anything and everyone in general. A presence without being, an unfounded appearance, a banshee of the state-of-the-art Nothingness, Gabriel is an intrusion, a ‘grandson’ of Nietzschean Abyss, whose eyes neither reject nor approve, neither judge nor do they cut anybody any slack. He is an active man – he wanders around the town, talks to people, befriends them and – first and foremost – cooks for them. Just like any other open-hearted fellow would do. However, there is something irrevocable about him, something which separates him from everything and everyone, existentially, almost metaphysically. As if he were molded from a different type of clay, a more exhausted one. From the second, also pretty intrusive, narrative we get to know why is that so, and suddenly the slow-paced yet lucid goings-on accelerate through the build-up and twist phase… and we are struck by sensations which escape well-trodden paths of description.

What strikes the most in The Panda Theory, though, is the straightforward delicacy of language. I like to call it “The French Subtlety”. Name-wise, a slightly questionable trait, especially for authors of different nationalities who also possess it, nevertheless, it fits like a glove. Garnier himself oftentimes claimed that he kept his narratives plain and simple due to his insufficient education. A gross exaggeration bordering on self-flagellation, especially when the instantly perceptible intensity of his writing style hits us like a bludgeon. The book reads smoothly, surprisingly, considering the weight it carries on its back. Garnier’s pen ‘strokes’ (apparently, the Frenchman was also a painter), distinctively calm, with unpretentiously poetic touches here and there, are as far from numbing your thoughts and making your heart yawn as a fingerless vet is from becoming an origami master. The brilliance of Garnier’s writing lies in his honesty. He is one of those authors who write not with their blood, but the blood of their spirits, blood of their hearts, blood of their souls. This “trisomy” of blood springs warrants there is no beating about the bush, every sentence is like a finely oiled cog and sprocket, fitting seamlessly into the true-to-life machinery of narrative, being only one step removed from the natural flow of events. The memorable mimetic prowess of Garnier’s prose is almost unmatched and resembles a harmonious melody of necessities. Perhaps that’s why we have no objections believing Gabriel is an intrusion, or, rather, inTRUEsion…

Juxtaposing Garnier’s main character with protagonists of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep, we witness another type of outsider-ish alienation. It is less of a post-skeptical metaphysical somersault of Kate’s “no-other-wayness” than obtuse obfuscations experienced by the nameless hero penned in the 2^nd person by the OuLiPean Prince himself, however, by way of sheer tangibility of silent disgruntlement with reality, Gabriel is on a par with them both. He retains the firmest grip on it, though. The reality exhausted him thoroughly, sucked him dry, true, thus he resorts to the last thing remaining – becoming an intrusion, turning “antiseptic” to all identifiable internal human affects and afflictions. Yet, he rides the more subordinate wave of oddity, dejectedness and inexpressibility than Markson’s and Perec’s protagonist do. He is less philosophically flamboyant and oblivious than Kate from Wittgenstein’s…, as well as less language-bound and separated from externality than Perec’s ‘sleepwalker’ is. He may be patted on the back, smiled at, talked to, yet he is absent, his internal qualities are abject, depleted, nonexistent. He is a shadow of a shell, a none – if I may transform this indefinite pronoun into a regular noun – a none which is so used to its own exhaustion, it strips him down to the bare necessity of continuing to be without everything. If every facet of reality is laced with illusions, then Gabriel has to be what he is – a dis-illusioned none, a harbinger of unassuming nothingness. A nothingness which might be approached, even high-fived, yet it remains untouched. And will carry on doing so, from the bleak beginning on a grim train station to… well, I am not going to spoil the wide grin of Panda.

Amonne Purity

I don’t mind the slight disorder.

Talking Heads

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Dance first, think later. That’s the natural order.

Samuel Beckett

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Limerence

The intermission has ended. We are back inside the Mansion of Litera(p)ture and our tour continues. So far we have sauntered around the enchanting Vestibule, the desirable Kitchen/Home Cinema and the obsessive Crawlspace. Where are we headed now? Are we going to snoop around on the first floor a little bit more or should we better go upstairs? Fact of the matter is, we don’t have much choice. The Mansion has decided for us. Or perhaps we, having been slurped back by its voracious interior, simply hit the newel post with our knee. Upon finding the banister, we begin to wonder: what kind of stairs have we just bumped into? Or better yet, stairs leading where?

Why three dates in the title and who the hell was Vaslav Nijinsky you may ask. Well, answering the second question first, Nijinsky was a ballet dancer and choreographer active in the second half of the 1900s and 1910s who revolutionized the ballet and made huge impact on its modern form. Hailed back in the day as “The God of Dance”, he was a principal dancer for the Ballets Russes founded in 1907 by Sergei Diaghilev, a then world-famous Russian impresario. Moving on to the first question, the first date tells us when the diary was actually written, the second – when heavily abridged version (although the more precise term here would be “completely butchered”) was released by Nijinsky’s Hungarian wife Romola de Pulszky. The third one is the year the unabridged version was finally published. But enough of this biographical mumbo jumbo. For Nijinsky’s diary, the result of a six-week outburst of writing, at first glance grants us once in a lifetime opportunity to witness a descent into madness of a genuinely brilliant mind. At second, though, allows us to construct something truly extraordinary and remarkable – a staircase leading to the upper floor of our Mansion of Litera(p)ture.

The Metaphysical Shift

The unavoidable feature of any series of texts with a “common denominator” if you will, is the necessity to contextualize by repetitions. Making sour faces about this unfortunate prospect, I promise to encapsulate and recap the following repetition as tightly and lightly as possible. In my last text before the Intermission, I interpreted the two main characters from Crash – Ballard and Vaughan – as demonadized obsessed conjurers of reality full of lascivious technological desires, mainly intermingling sex with physical deformities sustained from car accidents. The said reality was so separate that it prevented anyone form stepping in to participate, unless you yourself were obsessed (with the same or at least similar objects of your dark desire). The two men succumbed to their minute and dark perceptions and shut themselves off from the rest of the world as thoroughly as it was virtually possible. Or so it seemed, for Nijinsky pushes it even further, totally unintentionally of course. Allow me to quote monsieur Deleuze:

(…)we have seen that the world was a unique, infinitely infinite, converging series, and that each monad expressed it in its entirety, even though it clearly expressed only one portion of the series. But, rightly, the clear region of a monad is extended in the clear portion of another, and in a same monad the clear portion is prolonged infinitely into the obscure zones, since each monad expresses the entire world. (…) That is the very condition of “compossibility,” in a manner of reconstituting over and again one and the same, infinitely infinite, converging series, The World, made of all series, its curvature having a unique variable.

This “reconstitution” or, rather, its alternative – remodeling – is our key concept here. For Nijinsky’s “clear region” is not only far from being extended “in the clear portion of another monad” (turning compossibility into incompossibility or even impossibility in the process), but is most definitely withering away, coiling upon itself, getting minuscule with every second going by. The darkness prevails, canceling the converging series down to the last infinitesimal. The rambling style of Nijinsky’s diary – with its short, barren, almost primer-like syntax, loaded with repetitions and contradictions (some of them utterly brilliant, full of insightful sensitivity, only pretend to be paradoxical by nature) regarding his life, wife and her relatives, key politicians of his era (Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George), his turbulent relationship with Diaghilev and several other members of artistic society – seems like a passage leading towards something beyond incompossibility. Where else should one go, when everything that remains is nothing? And what about this whole alternative remodeling?

The dance-in Staircase leading…where?

As a kid a had this recurring dream. I was playing in front of my block of flats on a see-saw or swing when out of the sudden a stentorian voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time announced if I don’t get back to my apartment, something bad will happen. Then, a 10 to 0 countdown commenced, and the time was dethroned in favor of his slower bullet “nephew”, Matrix or Max Payne style. Most of the times, I managed to be back in my apartment on time (which caused me to wake up). However, on four or five occasions I didn’t. In hindsight, these were one of the most off-the-rocker experiences I have ever had in my life. All the geometry was altered (the squares were round and the triangles had trapezoidal shapes (please don’t ask how it was even possible, because I don’t know), gravity had different properties (it repelled and its repetitiveness was inconsistent), as well as all the ontological notions about me as a particular human being, with such and such personal records, history, etc., were completely erased. It seemed as though I was not only thrown into a different mode of reality, but also the feral countdown has eradicated me as a particular human being and substituted with someone else (simultaneously, I didn’t feel as a swapped individual, everything seemed unchanged). To this day I can vividly remember Escher-like situations, during which going upstairs lead you downstairs, or better yet – sidestairs (don’t ask, just imagine!), jumping didn’t result in landing (although it didn’t resemble short-term weightlessness either), and entering various apartments (including my own) ended in handling a disgruntlement among baffled neighbors who were fuming over some estranged strange kid, most likely a youngster thief, who didn’t think twice about breaking and entering. When I finally reached my apartment, my parents didn’t recognize me. Then, at one point, after a bout of vivid adventures which had taken place on the staircase (a different one each time – a teleportation to Venice where an ominous cloud of pigeons loomed over the city, a confrontation with a slightly shorter cousin of the Slender Man, etc.), I simply succumbed to a sinking feeling and burst out of the dream back into the wake.

Why am I boring you with this lengthy reminiscence? Because Nijinsky’s state seems almost as if he has gone somewhere sidestairs. Literally. Yet, due to some unknown or indefinable factor, which escapes particular as well as general metaphysical credibility, he seems perfectly OK with himself and his perception of the world. He seems engaged in its being with whole of his might, ability and feeling. Illustrating his everyday life as a somewhat sidetracked dancer/choreographer (the diary begins on a day of his last public performance), husband and father with his crude yet honest style, he expresses irritation, disappointment, excitement, which are not that all too different from those of a so-called rational and mentally healthy human being. Surprisingly, his relation to the world (let alone his relationship with God!) seems more affectionate and heart-warming than majority of his peers would ever express. So what God orders him to go lay in the snow until he cannot feel his arm. So what a couple of sentences later he calls himself God. So what his writing seems abject of him as an individual who should be somehow (being-somehow – here regarded in a purely metaphysical sense), who should follow some somehow (‘somehow’ taken as a noun here) thanks to which, under normal circumstances (never mind the term ‘normal’; it is too questionable to define it here…), not only would he be compliant with the prevailing and widespread notions of social human behavior, but also would curtail his own exquisite penchant for sheer brilliance as an individual entity. For Nijinsky is the entity which rejected every possible should (again, ‘should’ as a noun), therefore is able to feel limerence towards the world. His stairs of infatuation, Escher-like, unfold before him. And he is trying out his new dance moves. He might be rehearsing his new mode of being without repetitions. Does it have any folds? Is it going to withstand Nijinsky’s explosion of writing? And where would it lead him, ultimately, with us, hitchhikers and voyeurs, jumping on the bandwagon of his non-negative disunity with the whole world? Well, it definitely leads somewhere. Where? Why should I be the one to ascertain where exactly? All I have is this unsure premonition that every limerence might turn into passion. But let’s not put a cart before the horse, shall we?…

Amonne Purity

The Intermission before the Third Act

The Second Act of my Swan Opera has come to an end. So why don’t we take five, shall we?

We are leaving the Mansion of Litera(p)ture to have a quick smoke. We slip outside through the back door. The night is young, starless and chilly. On the stairs – a discarded book. We pick it up. There’s a crescent-shaped stain of the front cover and several pages suffer from dog ears. Upon seeing author’s name, we raise our eyebrows in brief disbelief, then squint our eyes out of suspenseful suspicion. Robert Bresson was a movie director, not a writer. But then again, how can we be sure. After all, the world is a permanent surprise, isn’t it?

I admitted two weeks ago that I am a movie buff light. So it’s pretty obvious how my light movie buffness became awestruck, completely ineffable as a matter of fact, when I turned over the last page of Notes on Cinematography. Or Notes on the Cinematograph, or Notes on the Cinematographer. Why three slightly alternate titles? I don’t know. And, frankly, I don’t care. Because no one should care about the title when they have the book of such firepower in front of them. And what a book this is, indeed!

Written in a vein of curt aphorisms, it presents Bresson’s philosophy of movie making. The book not only covers Frenchman’s thoughts and ideas about various aspects of cinematography (NOT cinema – Bresson clarifies and distinguishes the difference between these two terms – the former having rather specific meaning, far from the one commonly associated with it) such as music, models (again, Bresson’s own terminology here), automatism, truth and falsity of images, etc., but also illustrates, albeit very intuitively, how they all might have been formed. At least my imagination rocked really hard with mental images of Bresson implementing his own take on cinematography while orchestrating a movie set, shooting on location, or simply stooping in front of his desk over yet another entry in his notebook. All in all, it is truly a fast break read, ending with not one but many stupendous slam dunks of thought. Also, never have I ever called something “philosophy” with less doubt than Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography. If you love movies, it is a must, just like Hitchcock/Truffaut or Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky.

That’s all I am willing to give you away. They are chiming for the Third act, anyway…

Amonne Purity

How could a pain follow a pleasure if a thousand tiny pains or, rather, half-pains were not already dispersed in pleasure, which will then be united in conscious pain?

Gilles Deleuze

My fantasies
Have turned to madness
And all my goodness
Has turned to badness
My need to possess you
has consumed my soul
My life is trembling
I have no control

Animotion

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Obsession

Here we are, delving deeper into the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, alcoves accelerating, its interior intermingling with the possible intrinsic dimensionality. So far we have checked out its enchanting Vestibule as well as Kitchen/Home Cinema full of dreamy desires. We shrug off the grogginess, the aftermath of potential overstimulation, for it’s no time for a break yet. The corridors are getting darker, they are almost pitch-black now. Where do they lead? Intuitively, we outstretch our arms, resembling tentative tentacles of a blind octopus, groping around for a remote determinant of direction or our whereabouts. Let’s hope we find a light switch fast and don’t crash into anything along the treacherous way. Or perhaps we should crash, after all?

Some novels are extremely approachable yet highly uncooperative. They welcome you with open arms only to dodge, duck, and finally flee from your reading embrace afterwards, snapping their vicious jaws of avoidance, simpering slyly. J. G. Ballard’s Crash is one of them. In the first half of the 70’s, when it first came out, its bizarre, perverse, electrifying charge must have been absolutely gnarly. I can see pulverized imaginations and overheated emotions of then readers left behind to rot in awe. But does the novel hold its own today? And, more importantly, what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture does it constitute?

The Slaughter of Infinities

A warm-up question: how come it’s so easy to discard countless factors of a given phenomenon just to deem it “graspable” by naming it? Why is it almost obligatory to hack through the halo of infinities radiating from any given thing in the world? An economy of thought? A safety mechanism preventing our brains from charring like a skin of an overdone pig on a roast? A necessity of being able to function in a hyperactive everyday environment? This slaughter of infinities always seemed to me as far too zealous. As if unintentional mindless eagerness, with which it has been perpetrated, took shape of a superfluous layer, as if addition meant subtracting not adding things together. Surprisingly, it is almost always the underlying reason for every obsession – we add by subtracting. For the sake of object of our infatuation, for which we are able to create unimaginable wonders, we loose touch with everything else. The constituents of our perceptions seem altered. The images are superimposed, the patterns of behavior – iterated, and, last but not least, our moral judgments – overlaid with doubtless self-assuredness, contradictory only to our previous assessments. We are literally someone else.

This is exactly the case with the protagonist and the antagonist of Crash – the obsessed duo of novel’s Great Attractors, if I may borrow the term from a more stellar domain. The former is James Ballard (I guess no disguises were used in the making of the narrator) – a producer of TV commercials – who miraculously survives a head-on collision, killing a man in the process. In spite of the fact that he has totaled his car, he gets out of it relatively unscathed – smashed kneecaps, a gargantuan bruise on the abdomen from impacting a steering wheel and a deep laceration on the scalp are the only injuries he sustains. On the other hand, the antagonist – Robert Vaughan, PhD. – an ex-computer scientist whose area of expertise comprised the implementation of computerized processes to administer all international traffic systems – is a walking map of car crash injuries. But it’s not his scarred body what fascinates the most – it’s who he has become: automobile accidents fetishist, to put it mildly. I don’t want to reveal too much plot. Let me just say, that Vaughan is totally consumed by his obsession to die in a car crash with a famous movie star Elizabeth Taylor. And Ballard becomes more and more obsessed with Vaughan…

The Crawlspace with Translucent Walls

The most fascinating thing about obsession is its creative part. As both Ballard and Vaughan are spiraling down into the bloated world of perverse, the latter serving as a mentor to the former, the ceiling of their worldview gets lower and lower. The height of the first floor of their own baroque houses is being set. It consists solely of an overbearing crawlspace – stuffy, crummy and dusty, yet transfixing, absorbing and bewitching. With their minds altered and hell-bent on making their exploratory visions come true, they begin to add. Just as the not-so-innocent trinity of protagonists from The Dreamers reduced themselves to the minute and dark perceptions, their modus operandi being debauchery in their own triangular circle (now, that’s one resplendent imaginary competition to squaring the circle!), Ballard and Vaughan push the limits of darkness and minuteness even further. They shut themselves off so thoroughly form other infinities offered by the outside world, they are bound to engage in it on their own alternate terms. After all, the nature of things hates vacuum; its folds are – surprise, surprise! – infinite. Ballard and Vaughan’s excesses are sparking new infinities, but due to the fact they are born by obsession, their “geometry” is different. I don’t want to say flat, but it is the first adjective that comes to mind. For example, when Ballard’s wife Catherine ends up having sex on the backseat of Vaughan’s Lincoln Continental (the same generation in which Kennedy was shot) with its scarified owner, and Ballard is peeping them in the rear-view mirror, the latter’s sensations and perceptions of Vaughan’s scars in geometrical relation to the various instruments of the car interior, which allegedly create new possible designs of pleasure, don’t seem too convincing. Then again, I am not obsessed with car crashes, so what do I know, right? Lucky for me, the walls of their crawlspace are diaphanous, so at least I can sense what it may seem to mean.

So what’s with this murky idea of translucency of walls of their crawlspace, of their technosexually motorized obsession? It’s as simple as it gets. Obsession doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore. It’s as blatantly evident as two plus two equals four. It never resorts to any social masquerades, isn’t subjugated to some fanciful behavioral smokescreens. One wears it on one’s sleeve. However, the walls might be translucent, but are not permeable. You cannot (and almost always simply don’t want to) join this flat universe of extreme extravagance. Unless you fall for obsession of your own, whose premises are identical to those which founded the circle of infatuation you are, by then, bound to join. For obsessed individuals find each other unwillingly, almost miraculously, just like artists who leave a lasting impact on culture do. That’s all there is to it, really.

The Obsession of the Outside

Deleuze writes:

For Leibniz, to the contrary, monads exclude only universes that are incompossible with their world, and all those that exist express the same world without exclusion. As this world does not exist outside of the monads that express it, the latter are not in contact and have no horizontal relations among them, no intraworldly connections, but only an indirect harmonic contact to the extent they share the same expression: they express one another without harnessing each other.

But what about the “revenge” of incompossible worlds? Are obsessed individuals free to do whatever they will, all conveniently nestled within the realm of their flat infinities? Near the end of Crash, Ballard and Vaughan are very far from not harnessing each other. As if something outside of the monads is to have the last laugh. Now, that sentence is something which would make Leibniz tear his wig out. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that Ballard and Vaughan, just as Isabelle, Théo and Matthew, are not monads anymore. They are demonadized modes of obsessive expression, wayward explorers of the frantic flat infinities of future technological desires. Their obsessions add so much, by subtracting all there has ever been, that their minute and dark perceptions project new configuration of separate reality. Their crawlspace breaks free from them and suddenly expands, self-sustained and imponderable, looming large, totally out of spatial control, incompossible with its postmonadic origin of convoluted obsessions. Nevertheless, thanks to its transparent walls, we, who aren’t obsessed (or whose own private infatuations lie elsewhere), may witness the tingling sensations Ballard and Vaughan are conjuring up before our very eyes. Their obsessive crawlspace is situated perfectly outside of us, yet we are able to remain within its apparition – the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture.

Spanking in Tongues?

All thanks to Ballard’s (the author, not the protagonist this time) literary style. The narration consists of descriptive dryness, terse and virtually nonexistent dialogues and an overwhelming sensation of inexplicable, alienating, foreboding oddity. Everything seems singular in Crash, visually eviscerated, metaphysically separated. The impending drives of technosexuality are a jarring, jagged premonition of postmodern landscape. Traffic congestion, overpasses, hard shoulders, perimeter fences, flyovers, median strips are all too material to become truly substantial and, thus, unable to convey any meaning, to constitute palpable surroundings other than a gruesome dehumanized stage for horrific roll-over or fatal pile-up collisions. No wonder one of the most convenient books used as an interpreting tool on Crash is Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. However insightful Baudrillard’s work may be, I am going to skip it. One Frenchman at a time. Especially, when the one I have been quoting all along, heartily refers to individuals from other countries:

For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation? The best of all worlds had no other meaning: it was neither the least abominable nor the least ugly, but the one whose All granted a production of novelty, a liberation of true quanta of “private”subjectivity (…).The best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity.

Ballard (again, the author, not the protagonist), by sheer coincidence, hits the bullseye with narration. However, its novelty doesn’t lie within itself. Crash doesn’t strut with a gait of bombastic form. There are no narrative loops, nor double or triple twist endings. The characters are groomed with conventional literary utensils of moderation and plot utilitarianism (excluding their obsession, that is). The novelty lies outside Crash. In sensations which the book ignites within the reader. Naturally, not in every reader, just as not everyone is prone to obsession. But those of you who are, brace yourselves, should you choose to hitch a ride with Ballard and Vaughan. The expressways meandering through the Crawlspace of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture – robust and vast, twisted and irresistible, infatuating and fateful – await! Just don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts.

Amonne Purity

You were the baby of the class you know
You were so young and so uncertain
Suffer little children
Oh what a poor soul

Erasure

Hey now, hey now
Don’t dream, it’s over.

Crowded House

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Desire

Or should I have written The Holy Innocents (1988) Redux, perhaps? For when Gilbert Adair’s agent was approached by Jeremy Thomas – a British movie producer of such memorable flicks like Oscar-ridden The Last Emperor, totally whacky Naked Lunch, or Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – one of only six movies in which David Bowie starred as a male lead – and acknowledged that Bernardo Bertolucci himself was not only whetting his appetite for the movie adaptation of the novel, but also wished Adair wrote a screenplay, the British author immediately gave in, tempted by the occasion to rewrite and re-entitle or – as he himself put it – “overwrite” The Holy Innocents with which he had grown strangely dissatisfied. That’s pretty much how The Dreamers came to life.

The above lightweight “forewordy” anecdote straight from the cinema world was a bit telltale, as you will see for yourselves in a minute or two. But now, let’s face the slight inconvenience with continuity… Each and every time, a flawless attention to detail is needed to deject the possibility of stirring up the atmosphere of the scene, the vibe of the plot, the general ambience of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture. Ah, yesss… The Baroque House buffed up, unfolded, the premises (here, the double meaning in full bloom) of its geometry based upon smoldering glances of the Silver Screen starlets… We leave its enchanting foreground of Frothy Vestibule and, with our hearts pounding wildly, as if a hummingbird on coke desired to outflutter its ever-eager wings, enter another room. What is it?

The Kitchen-sink (Ir)realism

The common knowledge says most accidents occur at home. Leaving the statistics for more justified and rational circumstances, what room seems to be the most dangerous, then? Garage? Nah. Not everyone likes tinkering with their cars, motorcycles, lawnmowers, etc. until the wee hours of the morning. Besides, not everybody even has one. Bathroom? Sounds pretty tempting. Mop the floor and you’ll end up having splendidly unassuming, leg-breaking, concussion-inducing trap (yellow Slippery When Wet signs are good for public places and names for Bon Jovi LP’s). Blow dry your hair while having a bath and chances are you’ll turn into a piece of toast. But still, my best bet is kitchen. You hang out in there a lot, not only during dinner time, but also casually, without any particular reason, popping in for a sandwich, for a sip of milk, for a few grapes from a fruit tray, and so on. It is a store for various potentially harmful utensils (knives, cleavers, graters, potato peelers, can openers, meat forks and tenderizers, ice picks [Sharon, calm down and keep your legs crossed!], pizza cutters, rolling pins, seafood shears, etc.), appliances (pressure cookers, meat and coffee grinders, blenders, microwaves, deep fryers) as well as hazardous elements of the interior “landscape” (scalding hot oil, boiling water, preheated ovens, baking pans with apple pies inside them, cooling down on windowsills). A dangerous place, indeed. Just like desire could be…

The Dreamers takes place in Paris in a turbulent spring of 1968. Ahhh, the late 60’s – the last epoch of human naivety, its last caprice of innocence. The innocence of a belief that the status quo of existential habits and the rules of the game called Civilization are correctable, ready to alter on a whim. That the new ensuing set of meta-practices and post-values implemented in place of the old ones – trashed and heaped up mercilessly at the junkyard of obsolete customs and overwrought thoughts – would suffice. That the Jungian collective unconsciousness will not fall victim to the brute, boorish, myopic impotence of the revolution. That the unus mundus – one world – hypothesis and other “uncharted territories” of reality are going to stand still or lie dormant while that highfalutin hullabaloo hurls around and wreaks havoc in the name of not that well thought out progress, without any consequences. That the revolutionaries themselves are courageous and prodigious enough not to become cowardly prodigal sons of unforeseen twists of fate, and persistent enough not to get pranked by the good old chaos. For it takes infinite strength of will to bear in mind (let alone handling it in reality!) the raving intricacies of contingency, the embodiment of haphazard turn of events lying ahead as a consequence of each and every conceivable, radical deed. One false move – hell, one right move, too! – and all goes down the drain, to which the instigators, perpetrators, agent provocateurs would react with boohoohoo faces of a brainwashed clockwork Alex. But all of the above is rather an irrelevant, second-rate dimension, like a texture of the tiles on the kitchen floor. The real desire of The Dreamers lies somewhere else – among the trio of protagonists. What happens between them is the ontological constituent of the Mansion’s Kitchen.

Isabelle, Théo and Matthew. The first two are 17-year-old nonidentical twins, a progeny of an exceptionally rare breed of artist – a materialistically successful poet. The third one – a student from San Diego, one year older than the siblings, rather namby-pamby, definitely bashful and psychologically timorous – is of a bourgeoisie or, in terms of the wild wild West, middle class origin. All three of them are movie buffs of the kind which not only flabbergast people with their extensive knowledge of cinema, but also ignite fierce pangs of jealousy among other movie maniacs (all right, all right, I admit I inferred that conclusion from my own envy – I consider myself “movie buff light”…). The amateur gang of celluloid fetishists frequent the most famous of all film archives in the world – Cinémathèque Française – where other cinephiles roam as wild horses did back in the day. After the spontaneous reenactment of one of the most memorable scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Band of Outsiders – speed-visiting Louvre – our fidgety trio, under unexpectedly favorable conditions (the poet dad and subservient mom need to take refuge in their summer house outside Paris, for he has to put finishing touches to his latest work, undisturbed by the clinking clanking collection of caliginous distractions the capital of France provides bountifully), obfuscate itself to form a half-incestuous ménage à trois.

The Dark Decor of Desire

Deleuze writes:

Now we can return to perception. All monads express the whole world darkly, even if not in the same order. Each one encloses in itself the infinity of minute perceptions. They cannot be distinguished by weakness or strength. What distinguishes them is their zone of clear, remarkable, or privileged expression. Ultimately, “totally naked monads” (lacking this zone of light) might be conceived. They would live in darkness or near-darkness, in the vertigo and giddiness of minute and dark perceptions. No differential mechanism of reciprocal determination would come to select a few of these tiny perceptions in order to extract a clear perception. They would have nothing remarkable about them.

How kind and thoughtful of Gilles – helping me out like that! For our very naughty trio descends into or, rather, strips itself down exactly to the dimension of “minute and dark perceptions”. The teenagers “(de)monadize” themselves by virtue of fancy game Isabelle names Home Movies. The rules are pretty simple: each of the profligate participants reenacts – without fixed turns, while going about their daily routine – a movie scene spurred by tiny associations, petite recollections, negligible gestures they once observed on the silver screen and, out of the blue, recalled. If a challenged player, handpicked by the “actor” to guess the movie the reenacted scene comes from, fails to do so, he or she forfeits. It is precisely the nature of said forfeits that illustrates another trait of the Kitchen, ever more randy, lewd and debauched with every game of Home Movies going on – the metamorphosis into a Home Cinema with a bar in the back.

For nobody has claimed The Mansion of Litera(p)ture is insusceptible to shape shifting. Just as our Vestibule (via Vian’s Froth on the Daydream) revolved around enchantment and the silver screen smoldering glances (what a premonition, by the way!), as an underlying metaphysical rule on how should we try to imagine the geometry of the Mansion, here, in the Kitchen/Home Cinema, the rules are different. The sensations, “minute and dark perceptions”, now taken not as a monadic seeming-in-the-world, “trembling” of “concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities”, but as metaphysical, nonhuman “bricks” with which our Mansion has been constructed, begin to oscillate, attract each other, dance and breed yet another wants and cravings for new rules to push the (r?)evolution of the Mansion further.

The Baroque solution is the following: we shall multiply principles – we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs – and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that “perplexing case.” Principles as such will be put to a reflective use. A case being given, we shall invent its principle. It is a transformation from Law to universal Jurisprudence.

The letters which seduce with their nauseating nocuous nocturnes of wet dreams. The sentences like femmes fatales, irresistibly tempting, yet tempestuous and pesky – the unhinged sources of unending temptation and trepidation. Paragraphs resembling whores in skimpy thongs giving throbbing throngs of incessant excitement, leaving you senseless or “senseful”, depending on whether you gave or received. Chapters, a double-crossing, conniving chaperones, Marquises de Merteuils of intrigues, cold-hearted malevolent succubi of emotional scumbaggery, donned in an elaborate and eloquent elegance of linguistic exuberance. Look! The lights have just dimmed down! The séance is about to begin. What is it going to be? A movie Travis Bickle took Betsy to watch on their date? Whose hand is going to land on your knee and slowly creep upwards in a spidery, sliding manner, in a vein the Engineer chased Kristy in The Hellraiser?…

Cooling off a bit, no wonder Isabelle, Théo and Matthew – our ever less innocent, or shall we simply say “nocent”, cherubs of bawdy, lascivious activities – were bound to fall for the metamorphosis of the Mansion’s Kitchen. They now serve a double purpose as multipliers of new rules – the bawdy brood of “minute and dark perceptions” – as well as – on the other hand, eliding their monadic qualities, quantities and convergent singularities – metaphysical “architects”, who erect the rapturous, luscious edifice of Home Cinema. Unfortunately, this spectacular feat occurs WITHIN the enclosed reality of Isabelle and Théo’s parents roomy apartment. The minute our exmonadic rule makers and raunchy terraformers step outside their finite alternative world, they clash with more spacious, more capricious and more unforgiving revolutionary reality. They are willing to comply, they try to conform (Oh, Sweetest Irony! Why are you not my one and only love!?). Alas, in the end, with their jaws (r/de?)evolved into mere mechanical valves of pleasure, they bite more than they could chew. With their (In)nocence lost, the dream is over…

Yet, our séance continues. The Mansion hollers ontological piquancy and purrs literary terms of endearment, with a sultry murmur. They nestle into our earlobes. There are corridors to stride, other rooms to explore. We get up from the chaise lounge of the in-house Silver Screen. We come over to the bar in the back and pour ourselves a shot of whiskey, to gather up. Where would the exit of Home Cinema lead us to? Just you wait and see…

Amonne Purity

First, a couple of explanatory sentences. Every now and then comes a time when one simply knows the end is near. The curtain falls. But before it does, there need to be something left behind. It is an obligation which rejects any doubt as to the necessity of its happening. The last chef d’oeuvre, the swan song – no, wait! – the swan opera. The following text is the first “installment” or – if we follow the trail commenced by the crucial term above – the “overture” of my farewell. So buckle up or sprawl on your couch, if you like. The ugly duckling has finally metamorphosed. And it sings…

Angel made in heaven
All I want is your love
Gimme some of the action, reaction

Erasure

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Enchantment

In 1988, my favorite philosopher of late – Gilles Deleuze – published one of the most intellectually enthralling books I have ever read: The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. This brilliant lecture not only on notions of Baroque traits and characteristics as an epoch in general, not only on marvelous audacity and holistic tenacity of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought, but also a splendid example of Deleuze’s own interpreting prowess, with a prominent allegory of the Baroque House at the forefront – an ample approximation of how human being functions as a Monad – the key concept of Leibniz’s philosophy. This and many more scintillating profundities left me in a state of titillating rapture. I, being a bookworm par excellence, smitten by explosiveness of ruminations, with which The Fold… filled me to the brim, suddenly felt the inexplicable surge in infatuation towards literature, which was even more intense than my usual outbursts of tenderness towards it. So strong was the said affinity it resembled almost some kind of premonition. I just knew something was in store for me. All I had to do was keep my eyes open. So I kept them open. And then it hit me like a stray, flamboyant meteorite, propelled by Deleuze’s high-octane book and my ongoing rapture. The litera(p)ture…

Taking a simultaneous ride on the Ferris wheel of pondering and the roller coaster of excitation, I began mulling over the imaginary endeavor – to take Deleuzian allegory and “redecorate” it with the newly coined term as a heavenly guideline. The problem was I didn’t have any “materials”. Nevertheless, being a firm believer in serendipity, I wasn’t to be left at the mercy of chance. I quickly recalled I had had spectacular (mis)adventures with Nabokov’s Pale Fire which I happened to mention back in the day on one occasion, which have recently been somehow rejuvenated by yet another novel. Both of them, on a completely compossible plain or, rather, fold of perception, escorted me to a path, which in turn led me to the right confluence, allowing me to pick up the best novels along the way and compose my grandest literary ornament so far. The first of the books in question – the “overture” of my farewell opera – is Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream.

Entering the Baroque House

I have never shunned from my irrational fascination for metaphysics. The surreal depth of thought it offers, when favorable mental conditions meet appropriate stimuli of questions, always bedazzles, befuddles and bamboozles me thoroughly. Because of it, oftentimes I am hot under the collar, have ants in my pants. I exude overeagerness to ask further questions, to speculate boldly and without an ounce of hesitation, and extend my chain of thoughts via the wild new variety of unpredictable associations. However, the best, the icing-on-a-cake type of sensation I get out of metaphysics is during those rare moments when I see something completely unexpected somewhere where there was no telling in doing so whatsoever. When all the ensuing jumble of jubilation makes me jump out of my bed, for I always read in horizontal position. That was the case with The Fold… It cast a spell on me. It teleported me before the Baroque House itself. I stood in front of it, among the shrubs sheared with pious pruning passion of Edward Scissorhands. I regarded the edifice of the House. Its first floor wide, spacious, with several windows up front, some of them claustrophobically tiny, others gargantuan in size. The second floor, strangely soaring, skyscraper-ish, windowless. It resembled a body of an old overgrown smock mill without the sails. I was enchanted. Breaking off from the mesmerizing stupor, though only slightly, I set my eyes on the main door. The double rectangle of old oak wood pulsed and breathed. Videodrome style. It summoned me. And I stepped inside…

The best and most vivid representation of this rather anthropomorphic yet, on the other hand, simple entrance to the Baroque House of Litera(p)ture is Froth on the Daydream. Vian’s best known work is the finest example of what does it mean for a novel to confirm that something exists without neither material nor spiritual proof (let alone diligently discarding necessity to justify a “taking-it-for-granted” mode of existence). The book doesn’t have to do anything. It just is. Its qualities are pure. The story the Frenchman subjects us to (here, without the nasty connotation the “subject someone to” expression entails by default) is even purer, yet it makes us wander among thoughts and wonder on the fringes of imagination. The Lewis Carroll-ish language conjures up the Wonderland-like world with remarkable ease and without much ado (eels living in sewers being caught using pineapples, ice rink commuters stretching out due to velocities attained on ice, pianocktail concocting fancy cocktails out of fine tunes and even finer spirits, junctiquitarian forced to overbid due to customer’s munificence when bargaining, snow-moles with marmalade furs and noisy dispositions snooping around, rozza-erasers being pulled on rozzers, etc.) – as well as paints hearty, honest, oftentimes absurd exchanges between characters. But this is only the beginning.

There is this oldie with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak entitled Strangers When We Meet which tells a story of a love affair between two married neighbors. And… that’s it. There’s nothing more. The movie consists only of the said fornication. Of course, there are some additional events within the story which lead to its melodramatic end, some qualities (like wooden acting on Novak’s part) constituting the “meat” of the movie, however they somehow disappear, as if gobbled up by the wholeness and simplicity of the main idea – the love affair in itself. In the same vein, Froth on the Daydream is the story of falling in love and nothing else (notwithstanding the fact, that, in truth, there is more to it than meets the eye). This paradox of having and not having anything else is the main latch on the entrance door to the enchantment. It is, in turn, the first of the openings to our redecorated Baroque House.

The Litera(p)turous interior

The unfolding of love in Froth on the Daydream composes the vestibule of our inflected lathery den. It is reciprocated, the love, free from the deathly torments of its murky, gloomy, unrequited opposite. Wholeheartedness, honesty, exultation, elation, delight – these are the words that come to mind when we recall the suave and chic fondling of reality procured by Colin and Chick – our two main male characters. The willingness, eagerness, the sheer hankering for love exhibited by the former, and the ongoing double limerence of the latter toward Lisa – his girlfriend – and Jean Pulse Hearte’s (sic! [if I may throw in a multi-faceted pun – almost noseating 😉 ) literary and philosophical output – are not only as straight as an arrow, but also surprisingly tender. Suddenly, we are beginning to pine for something similar for us to happen. Colin’s conjugation of the verb “to wish” at the beginning of the chapter X seems almost like a prayer or a chant, which is only one vowel and consonant away from our crucial verb “to enchant”… Not too many pages later do we realize we have already fallen under the spell of the novel, lithely, along a new fold…

Long story short, the characters are purely positive. Even when they do questionable or outright malevolent deeds, they are momentarily and miraculously excused. Vian achieved something truly remarkable – he created dramatis personae lacking in qualitative spectrum yet being able to shine bright with integrity exempt from the one-dimensional naivety and symbolism of fable heroes and heroines. Colin, Chick, Chloe, Nicolas, Lisa and Isis neither fumble with nor fume at themselves, neither forbid themselves, nor resort to pretentious altercations within confines of their psyche, yet they are solidified, far from paper-thin, trite literary machinations a certified bungler would pen. They invoke one charming association – a soft focus photography. The colors of sensations Froth on the Daydream invokes are pastel-like, bland, almost bleached, yet their atmosphere is dreamy, slightly shifted, as if expectant. Why is it so?

The geometry within the Mansion of Litera(p)ture

The end (taken literally here) justifies the means. Thus, I am going to quote Deleuze verbatim in order to show you the “point of departure” of my redecoration of the Baroque House:

Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul. Below, matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and then organized according to a second type, to the extent its part constitutes organs that are “differently folded and more or less developed.'” Above, the soul sings of the glory of God inasmuch as it follows its own folds, but without succeeding in entirely developing them, since “this communication stretches out indefinitely”.

All we need to do is shift the allegory, push and shove it into something more… seductive. The Baroque House ceases to be the allegory of monadic human being. With all of its intricacies and generalizations, nuances and totalities, fluxes and influxes, flexibility and rigidity, redundancies and quintessences, modes of repetitiveness and one-time ingenuity, etc., ad infinitum, the Baroque House turns into a Mansion of Litera(p)ture. Our senses do not unfurl to infinities, swirling and swinging along right to the top room of the soul floor, do not occupy the interior of the first floor. Their motion of riding the wave, trailing along the ever-infinite folds, is overtaken by the geometry of literary intensity.

A cavalcade of immediate questions comes tumbling down on us. What does this new geometry look like? What is it based on? Does it have preferable shapes? What kind of topology of the ontology of letters is permissible here, on the premises? Is it dual? Does the Mansion retain two storys? Why is it based on intensity? Imagine a flicker in the eye casting a smoldering glance, just like the one in the Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Love Letter, or the other, half-coyly half-blatantly peering from behind a slit in a wavy blonde curtain of a peekaboo hair of Hollywood’s Golden Age star Veronica Lake. Imagine the alluring light of its sparks, the immediacy of shadows permeating your retinas, flirting with an opacity of their possible reciprocation, and their raucous triumph, thundering silently somewhere else, where prepositions give birth to the next generation of word allocations – a grand yet straightforward spaces of sentences to be, to denote, to invoke, to delineate, to subvert, to encrypt, to celebrate, to joke, to multiply, etc. Imagine the geometry of longing for the plausible beginnings of whatever you wished them to begin, as enchanted as Colin was when he danced with Chloe for the first time, as enchanted as I was “enliteraptured” while reading Froth on the Daydream, as enchanted as I wish you truly were at least once in a lifetime. I know you can sense what it all looks like, but are unable to describe it using mere hackneyed words of old. Lucky for us, the true enchantment hates descriptions and loves turning into mutual desire. It craves, covets, yearns to do so with every fiber, every fold of its post-infinity. So keep your eyes open. The Vestibule, the Overture ends here, but the desire that follows is nearer than you think…

Amonne Purity

Disasters do not exist, they are elsewhere.

Georges Perec

There exists a jarring paradox: silence is at daggers drawn with language, yet it breeds – in a gemmating fashion, thus with hardly any fuss or gidding – a demand to justify itself WITHIN boundaries of the latter. Therefore, it concocts a cumbersome cocktail of common courtesy, whipped with a whiff of whimsical whining: “Mr. Language, why are you being so strict? Are you trying to puzzle my well-being, sending me mixed signals? Why wouldn’t you let me have my own mode of expression, a means to communicate without your enforced necessities? Oh, Mr. Language, would it be too much to ask if you keep an eye on my previous duties, while I am going to try and be beside myself?”…

“Beside oneself” – taken as literally as possible here – is perhaps the key phrase which you may attribute to Georges Perec’s novel A Man Asleep. It has lodged on the same plane of mis-ontologized referentiality, sprouted up in the same kingdom of metaphysical stiff-upper-lipness, just as Wittgenstein’s Mistress and I’m Thinking of Ending Things had, the latter two simply occupying different hmm… “marches” of monstrous calamities, presiding over other “fiefdoms” of fiendish dread. Ensnared while crossing the impossible space between two sides of the looking glass (bizarre-wise, I suppose I don’t have to remind you which looking glass is it, do I…), the book neither pays heed to your reading comfort, nor makes any excuses for itself. It isn’t illegible, unapproachable, yet is inexorable, ineluctable to those who are just as beside themselves as protagonist of Perec’s second novel is.

A nameless 25-year-old sociology student – you – for the Frenchman uses 2^nd person narrative throughout the whole odyssey of how to make oneself scarce – not figuratively, but metaphysically speaking – realizes he is unable to cope with blatantly pointless mechanisms of life itself anymore. How does he feel? Disillusioned? With what? Rejected? By whom? Dejected? Why? Extricated? From what? Forget about questions. They are the most loyal lackeys of language anyway. You, on the other hand, are more, or less…or…well, “beside”. You have slipped through the crack in reality, into the crevasse of self-revelation so brutal, yet so numbing it cannot make anything more nor anything less than etherize and cut you off from this paradoxical notion, reduce you to shards of silence, turn you into mechanical wretch of a human shadow, becoming flatter and flatter on the ever less insignificant surface of reality.

For, in contrast to Kate – maltreated by no-other-wayness in Wittgenstein’s Mistress – and Jake – the Arctic wolf of ultimate loneliness in I’m Thinking of Ending Things – you accommodated yourself on the thin line of retaining your sanity (you wish you had lost it; would make life easier, wouldn’t it?…) while not being necessitated to perform a counterstroke against the vapid void of ever the same days and nights of walking and looking. Days made of verbs and nouns. You have turned into Verbman, a Noun monster. No qualities – just doing, listing, discerning without acknowledging. Lacking flair, bland, squalid seconds of sore scrapes, splinters of previous habits, now meaningless and, thus, at the verge of being nonexistent. Dis-endowed deeds of derring-do without any dare. You have become so homogeneously tautological you are no longer able to belong in general. Full stop. You are the end of a sentence nobody wishes to utter, yet, out of linguistic spite, vile bile or other despicable phenomenon, has been phrased. You still retain your consciousness, your sense of reasoning. You are an invisible slime at the threshold of proper, self-inflicted basket case conditioning you would love to fall for irrevocably, irreversibly, which, nevertheless, flees from your incapacitated mentality, existential inconsistency. You possess neither will to live nor will to death. You cannot continue and cannot cease to carry on. You are a nightmare of every classical logician. You are so beside yourself you are turning into a dream of becoming something else than a human being. What would you like to become? I bet my bottom dollar you would reject your human form in favor of the whole new reality, with an alternative set of pristine premises. Or, perhaps, you would not. All in all, keep dreaming, sleepless boy, keep dreaming…

What is so riveting in A Man Asleep? Is it the language, curt and mundane, full of enumerations, with verbs as main building blocks of narration (nouns coming a close second)? Does reality of a man who has been slashed with the “neither/nor” exclusion genuinely succumbs to verbal abuse (here, again, in a literal meaning) that badly? Is it the assertion you are prone to bestow: of all senses, sight is spatially the most passive one? Hearing almost always entails some sort of movement (finger drumming, leg bouncing, full-blown dancing routine, etc.), smell and taste – the underrated duo comprising hedonistic holism, with touch as their sidekick or, rather, the power behind the throne of sensuality – are, too, in complete cooperation with the body and its fidgeting around. But sight is different. You may just sit and keep your eyes open, perfectly motionless, be still and still be able to observe as many things as your pupils would allow you to. There is nothing that should convince your sight to give way for anything but its own self-centered continuation. Thank god you have eyelids. You would have been unbearable without them. But I digress, as usual.

Getting back on track with unquenchable charms of A Man Asleep, should the external nightmare of senseless activities, futile deeds, lackadaisical actions – bread and butter of Perec’s protagonist – be treated as a sign of general bankruptcy of the idea of personal identity? More than once, you are being exposed as someone whose life is something which cannot be equated with yourself. A perfect specimen of homo sapiens with stumps for qualities, a man curtailed. Not a single bad word may be said about you, the same goes for their opposites. You are Aristotelian golden mean incarnate. You are a perfectly balanced nothingness which evoke a sole connotation only – a drab individual with self-regurgitated life, having no strings attached to it whatsoever. You remain here and your existence went away. Better deal with it. Or, perhaps, don’t…

Perec’s novel – not yet subjugated to the literary rigor of OuLiPo – is another evidence of how unpredictable a flirt with skepticism (no matter whether inflicted by sheer chance or accosted deliberately) could be. In spite of not being in full bloom, and without ontological horror vacui, whose dire consequences might be witnessed in Wittgenstein’s Mistress and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, A Man Asleep remains their next of kin. It may be loaded with less conceptual “cargo”, with far less “ideas behind ideas”, nevertheless you are more than eager to forgive its literary faux pas. All thanks to the memorable, one-of-a-kind narration (the only other book I know of, which implements second-person point of view, is Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney and – partially – Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler) and for the underlying sense of inexpressibility – a blaring notion that behind being exempt from will to live and will to death, beside being beside oneself, there is simply something more, simmering underneath the rampant muzzle of words and many other oxymoronic expressions which are doomed to de-scribe you. What exactly is it? Why don’t you fall asleep and tell me. I am willing to prepare a glass of warm milk for you…

Amonne Purity

I like this particular feeling of solitary tears trickling sideways toward my ears, when the trail of delicate moisture gradually dries out, leaving a distinctive, ever so slightly existent line. I never wipe these. Never rub them out. I leave them be. They are those special lines that appear only when I read something truly remarkable. Something which stirs up the very core of my being, something which corresponds with me, something which harmonizes with my possible selves and their state of being submerged in an unrealized realm of impossibility. I like to lie, then, on my bed for a while (I always read in any kind of horizontal position), motionless, as those tears, this rarest type of tears, make an estuary out of the conchs of my ears. They always flow in there. I don’t know what those tears designate. Frankly, I don’t want to know. All I know is I want more of them to happen. More of them to flow. Yet, I am perfectly aware were they to occur more often, they wouldn’t be the same. They would weaken, water down themselves, resolve into some other liquid less noble. Less honest. Less “ever-so-slightly”. And I wouldn’t like that at all. What I would like instead is take your hand and walk you around the recent “spring” of my tears – Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere – for the next couple of paragraphs.

Neverwhere is many things. A peculiarly camouflaged, lightweight parable, Holden-Caulfield-like, memorable characters, a book which provokes your thoughts to flex on the very nature of what does it really mean to narrate, etc. It may be even more than you and I think it is. However, first and foremost, it is a story. Pardon my slip of the keyboard – a Story, with a capital ‘S’. To compare effortlessness of Gaiman’s language to concoct a well-defined and separate reality, with which he operates upon a reader, to a spry wizard waving his wand to summon up some kind of wanton wonder, would be the greatest underestimattion of the century. The Englishman’s sentences, paragraphs and chapters are crafted with solicitous nonchalance of someone who has topped the highest level of narrative prowess ages ago, without being subjugated to a nasty aftertaste of highfalutin style. Its candid simplicity prevents it splendidly. The linguistic viscosity of Neverwhere resembles that of a fine bread spread. It covers the porous, pumice-like surface of a slice smoothly, soothing its unevenness with a mouthwatering stickiness of its thawing-fudge consistency, yet retaining its down-to-earth incapability of adorning itself with borrowed plumes of Beluga caviar or Kobe beef. What are its ingredients, you ask? Well, let’s dip our fingers in this marvelous jar of balmy prose together, shall we?

Not many a time have I been eager to admit why I am not particularly keen on the story side of novels in general. Regrettably, the day has finally come to pour my heart out a little: I suffer form a rare literary disease called Astorexia Repetitivae. Its symptoms are pretty simple: every time I hear or read a story, I cannot help but deem it repeatable. “Oops, sorry, buddy, this one has already been told/written etc. Better luck next time”! Allegedly, every logically and linguistically cohesive piece of narrative prose could be assigned to one of seven general, let’s say, Story “Archetypes”: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and, last but not least, Rebirth. Quite a disenchanting assertion, isn’t it, fellow avantgarde literature freaks? Fortunately for you and me, I won’t delve into the subject, as the malady and the ensuing bias prevents me from doing so rather effectively. I possess, however, some blurry recollection of an encyclopedic entry, which would definitely enlighten you on why is it that we should not lose hope for an eighth story archetype to appear in the future. What I am able to distinguish clearly though is the fact that Gaiman’s gem is built upon at least three out of seven story archetypes, just like The Neverending Story is. That mere fact is enough to keep our spirits up and not succumb to the repeatable compartmentalization of not so “Magnificent Seven”. I know it may be a cutthroat business of cruel self-delusions, but there always are Stories like Neverwhere, in which you may find a misplaced ounce of solace. Or a vial full of potion which temporarily suspends the devastating effects of catching Astorexia Repetitivae.

All right, enough beating about the bush – The Story. One evening, Richard Mayhew – a typical 90’s Londoner, consciously entangled in and subconsciously mangled by heartless, soulless, mind-your-own-business, standardized, contemporary conditioning of the Western world (selfish, bossy, hoity-toity fiancée, mind-numbing, Office-Space-ish corporate job, one-dimensional, almost paper-cut acquaintances and colleagues, etc.) – decides to help a wounded, skid row girl with elvish face and odd-colored eyes, while accompanying his significant other to a dinner with her mogul boss. Soon after, his decision turns his whole life upside down, or shall I say upside BELOW, as he finds himself utterly out of his depth in a murky and mysterious London Below, which is teeming with lush alternative lives, real-deal-no-joke biographies and other fascinating existential continuities. There awaits an adventure, intrigue, fear, loss, pain and many other meanings tangible enough to be completely fictitious in London Above, yet ultimately desirable and even more destined for Richard to happen in its cracked, split and splintered mirror-image Below.

As almost always, I have resorted to certain vagueness about the plot. This time I am excused from not revealing more only by the tears I mentioned in the first paragraph. What do we have so far, then, as far as Neverwhere is concerned? 1. a tasty style of prose, compensation for the imprisonment behind the bars of the Seven Story Archetypes. 2. characters more real than the most vivid person you have ever met in your life. 3. a quite rare, three-ingredient cocktail of the said Archetypes. Is there number 4? I am afraid I am going to have to meander in the river Digression once again and barge into the novel through the back door of ruminations we are being left with, after the final page of the novel has been turned. Scope-wise, the ruminations are exceptionally narrow, though deep as an oceanic trench, and regard the following question: ‘How and why is it possible to construct the world out of letters?’. As an entity which isn’t particularly enchanted by a penchant for over-philosophizing as well as blatant theoretical beard-stroking, let alone impertinent drag of interpretations, I am going to use my favorite Hemingway quote, even though I do not fully agree with it:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Personally, in order to spice up the quote a little, making it a felicitous summary of Neverwhere in the process, I would modify only two words and specify the exact place you bleed from. Hemingway’s curtness here is very well-put, yet, to my mind, a bit too general for the hmm… modus vivendi of a 90’s novel. Swapping “typewriter” with “computer” is more than obvious (though e.g. Cormac McCarthy – an avid user of Olivetti Lettera 32 – would immediately object), “nothing” with “everything” in turn hits the sweet spot between grammatical error and wordplay show-off. But the paramount upgrade of the quote comes with the realization that you don’t just bleed, but you bleed from the life of your soul. When a writer draws “ink” from this special circulatory system, the resulting prose radiates one of the most immaculate flows of honesty, benevolence, almost a literary providence. This is the case with Neverwhere. Its bread-spread smoothness mentioned earlier manifests itself so painlessly, simply because it is written with this rare type of permanent ink. It is truly invulnerable, unshakable, indestructible, not only to those who are more or less akin to Richard Mayhew, the weak-willed wimp from the beginning, but also those who 372 pages later give a misty-eyed nod of wild satisfaction to how Richard Mayhew, the iron-willed Warrior now, realizes where his true destiny lies.

Then comes the tempest of questions. What constitutes the expressive nature of narration? Why is it so, that narration per se doesn’t have the immediacy of images and is therefore bound to rely on a specific yet inexplicable kind of delay in conveyability of sense? How may truth, half-truth, half-lie and lie affect the creation of potentially new literary tropes? To what extent are descriptions necessary in worldbuilding? Where does the form begin and where does the content end (and is it the same “place” vice versa?)? Why some narrations are more universal than others? How often does the shift of such universality in literature occur? I can go on and on with these forever, believe you me! I can but I won’t. Instead, I want you to go on on your own. For of all the superbly genius things literature has brought us throughout the centuries, this is probably the most fascinating one so far: the spark of will to explore. It never ceases to make me appreciate the sheer simplicity, with which literature incinerate the said spark of exploratory will and propagate the ensuing flame within readers. Those are the real impenetrable mysteries of reality! Those that are innately lined with positively puzzling phenomena. We all shall don as many layers of garments tailored with these as possible. We may look hobo-like and bulky – as if we raided the wardrobe of an eccentric 60’s psychedelic rock star – just like Door did when she fell down on a pavement in front of Richard and Jessica on that fateful evening. But what candor, what possibilities, what fortune before us! And, to top it all, with what ease do we open our own Doors of our own Belows in our own Neverwheres…

Amonne Purity

Somewhere there is someplace

One million eyes can’t see

And somewhere there is someone

Who can see what I can see.

Simple Minds

Long time no write. That’s right. I’ve been… outside for a while, somewhere else. Where elsewhere tempts. Yet, to quote Michael Jordan, AD 1995 – I’m back. I feel an unspecified necessity to be again… You name an ending the ellipsis should turn into. Period. Enough confessions.

The God of Literature has been alarmingly generous towards me in the last two years. Among many of his/her/its blessings was Iain Reid’s debut novel – I’m Thinking of Ending Things. You might have watched its film adaptation or at least mehed at it while picking another Netflix show to binge on. That’s all right. The movie is a separate unassuming masterclass of its own. We are going to leave it alone, though. After all, firing reviews akimbo results in many words that miss or even missing word holes, doesn’t it?

Woven into a straightforward braid of sentences, ornamented with occasional barrettes of enchanting dictionary diamonds like cruciverbalist as well as amusing expressions such as compressed Uma Thurman, the novel saunters on at a slow pace. Its form? A well-balanced blend of highly introspective soliloquy and a regular ‘still-getting-to-know-each-other’ dialog between two self-aware individuals who have recently begun going out together. The above mixture gets interposed by short narrative intrusions which imply some unknown tragedy. What is the couple up to? Meeting his parents who live on a somewhat middle-of-nowhere-ish farm. What happens next? When Jake and his new girlfriend reach their destination, a bizarre, eldritch, suspenseful creepiness kicks in. And? And as it steadily grows, like an untreated cancerous excrescence, we are doomed to succumb to its shattering, malevolent rupture at the very end.

Feeling-wise, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is like a sarcophagus. Stupefying and overbearing, it entombs you in the enthralling entirety of execrable emotions sprouting from existential anguish and regret. With its extremely innate exclusiveness, only true Steppenwolves of the 21st century are chosen to experience its thunderously devastating charm and charring aftereffects. Those who had stared into Nietzschean abyss for so long it became their mirror which does not cast reflections, nor does it stare back any more – it devours alive instead. Those who had been literally thinking of ending things so many times they were forced to reject the very idea itself because, metaphysically, it turned out to be the same in-world event as everything else and there would be no escape whatsoever. Those who eat Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground for breakfast, Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz for lunch and call it a day having a rare steak of Camus’ The Fall and Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary as sides for dinner. Those who dance on a razor’s edge of derangement, a full-blown derailment, complete and thorough detachment from common sense. Those who play ontological hooky. Those who fall uncomfortably silent when Marlon Brando delivers his famous ‘I coulda been a contender’ lament on the back seat of a cab in the movie On the Waterfront. Those who long for inability to reminisce and strive for forgetfulness but do not resort to banal resolutions like drugs or alcohol. Those and only those can see… Hmm, the list of ‘thoses’ grew suspiciously long. Perhaps old Amonne was wrong and the book is inconspicuously inclusive, after all. And we are all howling in our own private unforgiving taigas like there’s no tomorrow, having thoughts that cannot be faked, being stuck in places one million eyes can’t see…

Countless sheets of paper have been printed about an idea of singularity of things. The oneness, undeniably tempting as a phenomenon since time immemorial, may be the only known approximation of eternity immobilized or shall I say immortalized in a ‘snapshot’ of metaphysical unrepeatability which our limited human perception is able to grasp. Temporal and spatial infinity captured, squeezed into a finite ‘package’, tangible enough to be perceived. Sounds pretty neat, doesn’t it? Well, the reverse is even better. Imagine something incredulously infinite, stemming from something totally manageable, within reach of our senses, something we encounter everyday, a common, ordinary thing. A saucepan, a flowerbed, sleeping pills, stuff like that. Reid’s debut is a perfect example of a novel which embodies the very idea. From the lame, almost trite motif he extracts a gateway to immeasurableness which does not lose its palpable dimensions, does not disperse into obtuse abstract lack of referentiality WITHIN the reader. This passage clings on to you, mercilessly. The more have you been tormented by things from the list I mentioned in the paragraph above, the stronger their grip. And the said unrepeatability is one of the most soul-wrenching irreversibilities I have ever come across in literature. Surely, you may find loads of other examples, just go grab the nearest crime fiction you can lay your hands on. You cannot reread it in a way you read it the first time – you know who the killer is. Frankly, all books fall under this category. However, the irreversible nature of I’m Thinking of Ending Things seems to harmonize with a particular resonance of human ability to feel emotions. Not the obvious ones like gratitude, worry or shame but those which would give you hard time putting your finger on them, i.e., almost solipsistic case of loneliness, a prolonged bile which morphs into utter desolation, a state of being metaphysically hounded by wasted opportunities, etc. This is the place where Reid’s novel takes us to. New, unnameable emotions begotten by simple ordinary words. Hats off, Mr. Reid, hats off! You have found eternal ally not only in every Steppenwolf, but also in their far more elusive, almost phantom-like cousins – Desert wolf and Arctic wolf – who are chained into the confines of this barren reality as thoroughly as their HESSEtantly two-faced peer. You have certainly made their night howls a little less haunting, a little less self-annihilating. Maybe even a little less wolfish…

Amonne Purity

The story of Dig 2 Graves takes place during two timelines – One being Southeast Asia during 1973 and follows Lan a young Laotian boy that has to make ends meet and navigate the hostile environment around him by any means necessary; more often than not, involving violence.
The other timeline takes place in 1988 and follows the hard-nosed, take-no-nonsense, bail-bondsman named Luke as he follows leads and tracks down clients.

Both timelines are distinguished from each other and could be the core of their own individual stories however, as you read Dig2Graves you’ll discover that there is a point where the two will intersect with each other.

Andrew Davie has weaved a yarn that takes no prisoners and wastes no time with fatty excess. The pacing strings you along with the right amount of suspense, staying just ahead of the readers expectations. Dig 2 Graves isn’t your average story. This is a total page turner. The way it’s put together, jumping back n forth from decade to decade keeps things fresh and interesting. Like channel surfing in someone else’s dreams; within the theater of the mind, strapped into your seat watching the tension and drama build up before the inevitable release of violence that grips you from final paragraph to final word and leaving you feeling satiated with the aftermath of all things that lead to the climax.
A bloody good time indeed.

Dig 2 Graves is available online in both print and kindle formats
@ https://www.amazon.com/Dig-Two-Graves-Andrew-Davie/dp/B08JJJLXPQ/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1601030286&sr=8-1

About the author: Andrew Davie is originally from New York City. His crime novella Pavement is available from All Due Respect Books. The sequel, Ouroboros, is scheduled to be released by All Due Respect Books in December 2020. He has worked as a recruiter for software programmers, an office manager at a theater company, and an institutional sales/options trader in finance. He has taught English and writing in New York, Virginia, Macau (on a Fulbright Grant), and Hong Kong. In 2018, he survived a ruptured brain aneurysm and subarachnoid hemorrhage. Currently, he hosts the podcast A Fistful of Faceful, and you can usually find him on Twitter @adavieauthor
Website: http://asdavie.wordpress.com

About the Publisher: Publishing the best stories since 2011, Close To The Bone is dedicated to helping authors achieve their dreams of publication. Quality paperback, quality kindle books and online fiction.

Stay Safe. Stay cool. Talk Hard and keep your finger on that REWIND button.

Alternate history allows a reader not only to contemplate the past. It also makes one think upon the current culture and contrast its positives and negatives. This is what Kingsley Amis’s novel The Alteration does. It, however, comments on much more: the nature of freedom, dogma, and creativity, and how they interact. This winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award contrasts from the writer’s normally comic literary output. However, even though it’s not as well-known as Lucky Jim and The Old Devils, it’s one of his most thought-provoking novels.

It’s 1976, but the world of The Alteration is very different from the then-contemporary time of our world’s 1976. The Roman Catholic Church powerfully holds sway over the realm of Christendom, often dictating to the nationalistically-weak temporal powers. Technology is less developed, and Europe is in a tense cold war with the Islamic Turks.

How did this world come to be? Two pivotal incidents in our history led to this strange world: Martin Luther, the instigator of the Reformation, became reconciled to the Catholic Church, eventually becoming Pope Germanian I, and Arthur Tudor’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon ended up being fruitful, leading to a papal crusade to fight against Henry of York (Henry VIII in our world), who tried to usurp his nephew’s throne. The Church’s triumph leads to the near extinguishing of incipient Protestantism (Protestantism later flees and establishes itself in North America). This causes the arresting of further revolutions in scientific and political thought that would’ve followed.

This is the world that the novel’s protagonist Hubert Anvil is born in. He’s a ten-year-old boy who possesses a beautiful gift for music, both in singing and in composing. The Church appreciates his beautiful soprano voice, but wants to preserve it past maturity. The only option for this is castration, or as they call it in this world, alteration. Hence, one of the meanings of the novel’s title. As the time approaches for Hubert’s alteration approaches, will he submit to the authority of those desiring this operation? Or will the intrigues within the Church as well as concerns from Protestant representatives from the Republic of New England cause Hubert to change what seems to be his destiny as a castrato in service to Rome?

The narrative’s POV is third-person omniscient, but the focus is on Hubert. It’s quite a change for Amis to have such a young character as the principal character, but he does well in fleshing him out. Hubert is portrayed as innocent as a young boy would likely be, especially under the strictures of his society. However, he is not naïve, as time shows him to be perceptive and inquiring as story’s progresses. He knows that the alteration will nullify a future amorous existence and the prospect of family life even though he has limited knowledge of carnal matters. He realizes that this will lead to his living such a different life as a male after the operation, that by the time of his decision, he contemplates on his potential otherness, and how he would view himself and others would view him.

Amis populates the story with a variety of characters, whose personalities and motives this world’s history and culture has molded. Not all clerics have the same view about what they should do to Hubert. Charity motivates some, ego motivates others, while the rest see him just as a pawn in the struggle for authority within the Church. However, the characters are not cardboard cutout heroes and villains. Even the father of Hubert, who comes across as authoritarian in the beginning, comes out as sympathetic. He, just like the other characters, are who they are because of circumstances. They still though have the choice of making moral decisions despite what the unreasoning authorities may proclaim.

Is this a story of clerical authority run amok? Yes, but it’s much more. As mentioned earlier, the value of creativity when it’s submitted to dogma is another theme. Throughout the novel, there are references to many known creative figures, such as Mozart and Beethoven. We know that in our world that many of their creations were religious pieces, but the authorities did not force these works out of them. However, it’s likely that in the world of The Alteration, the creators do not produce out of religious joy coming from the heart. Instead, it comes from pressure from a Church that wants to control through fear.

Another interesting aspect is that Amis subtly disguises real 20th century political figures by as members of the Church’s hierarchy. These are men who in our world supported socialist, communist, fascist, and Nazi ideologies. What Amis is likely saying is that the desire to control people’s lives goes beyond dogma for those with totalitarian tendencies. It doesn’t matter what the cause or belief is, some just want to stamp down individuality. In a time when there is a creeping “soft” totalitarianism of PC or good-thought dogma, especially in the arts/entertainment field, this novel especially rings true.

Some may hesitate to read the novel because they feel that they lack enough of a historical background.  Or they believe that they’ll fail to understand the sprinkling throughout of Ecclesiastical Latin and religious terminology. Having such knowledge will help the novel come more alive. However, just taking your time to immerse yourself in the narrative will enrich by taking you to a speculative world that is strange but somewhat familiar.