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

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

Two is the beginning of the /beginning/.

James Matthew Barrie /slightly purified/

Yes, the publication date in parentheses is correct. I have dared to leave the safe zone of our beloved 80’s for the conceptual sake of presenting you two texts about two books which are radiant manifestations of yet another double concept – the immobilization inside and outside of time. At first glance, it may look as if our good old Amonne is about to spill yet another bucket of pretentious balderdash onto our shoes or, more likely, eyes, thus divesting us of our already rare everyday “commodity” – time. I am going to contradict this assertion by showing that due to magnificently random occurrences, one is bound to experience new combinations, fuses and concoctions of sensations (the term “sensations” has been used here for lack of a better word; perhaps a portmanteau of the following: “swarming”, “exhilarating”, “contrivance” and “internal” would serve a better purpose, however I do not have time – how ironic! – to come up with portmanteaus left and right). Sensations of time reversals which would make Benjamin Button green with envy, eternities frozen in timelessness so immovable and stationary, that thermal fluctuations at temperatures nearing absolute zero would look like some mosh pit madness at a death metal concert. But enough with these exaggerated disposable comparisons.

Kensington Gardens is this particular type of book which not only falls under the “exclamation marks” category without much effort (the abundance of quotable profundity found in it is absolutely staggering and would easily serve as a so-called “brilliance content” for at least three or four other novels – we draw exclamation marks next to the dazzling passages almost on every page!), but also courts us with its multilayeredness in a flawlessly natural fashion. Rodrigo Fresán’s work takes us on a truly wondrous trip to the late Victorian/Edwardian London as well as to its LSD-driven Swinging Sixties incarnation whose freshly regained poshness of a global city, which has just got up off its knees from the post-World War II era of food rationing and blandness, helped to set standards for how the modern world would look for the remainder of the 20^th century. Poking the issue with a stick would quickly reveal that it involves a consolidation of questions regarding “mechanics” of a certain kind of day-to-day aesthetics: in what ways things would be perceptible, how would they expose themselves in front of us, what would their meaning sound like for us, etc. But all of these are just some generalized yet very marginal notions, almost unworthy to mention, which might pop up inside our heads as we glide along the pages. Besides, we do not want to put the cart before the horse, do we?

One of the main threads of the book is the life of a Scottish writer James Matthew Barrie – the creator of Peter Pan character which was first introduced in a 1902 novel entitled The Little White Bird and immortalized in a play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up two years later. Barrie’s life is recounted in a highly detailed and simultaneously unusual way biographies-wise, for it mysteriously intertwines with recollections of a man who narrates it. The reminiscences of this man, whose name or occupation I shall not reveal (taking into account the new “feelings” Kensington Gardens generates, that would be quite a spoiler), evoke his childhood memories as the Swinging Sixties kid who, almost as if under influence of some sort of magical powder (no innuendos!), had the occasion to experience firsthand the crème de la crème of the delirious 60’s ambience. His parents played in a rock band and therefore all sorts of big names orbited around in his immediate vicinity (David Hemmings, Dennis Hopper, Stanley Kubrick, Catherine Deneuve, Jimi Hendrix, Jean Shrimpton, Dean Martin, Peter O’ Toole, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol, Vidal Sassoon, Jimmy Page [solo, no Led Zeppelin then], Peter Sellers, Phil Spector [way before his gun and hairstyle frenzy], Philip Larkin, Brian Jones [without The Rolling Stones], The Rolling Stones [without Brian Jones], Michael Caine, Kray twins, Timothy Leary, to name but a few). These remembrances, which far too many times have been peppered with a sour and tragic seasoning of unfortunate events, constitute the second thread of the novel and – married in an effervescent mixture of awe and stellar warmheartedness with Barrie’s unorthodox biography – play first fiddle in Rodrigo Fresán’s “thread trio”. What plays the second one?

Second fiddle and, by the way, the third thread of Kensington Gardens – a bit undercurrent-ish and, frankly, quite pivotal one – turns out to be purely psychological. Now, as you may or may not know, I loathe psychological novels with every fiber of my being. They are one of the most, if not the ultimately dreadful, hopeless, dragging-down boredom generators ever contrived by humanity. Do you want to experience the utter disappointment of internal ruminations which lead from never to nowhere? Just take a good look at yourself in the mirror after you have rinsed your mouth during the morning session of teeth brushing. Why read about somebody else’s monsters when you can look at yours any time you like? To empathize? To feel catharsis? I have never understood that, just as I have never been able to comprehend, how on earth talking to an allegedly smart bearded stranger with grizzly hair, who wears a black jacket over dark burgundy turtleneck and a pair of brown corduroy trousers (I am being awfully stereotypical, but I guess I could be excused – my licentia poetica is my Savior and only She can judge me…) would help cast the demons out. But I am getting self-sidetracked… There are, of course, exceptions, e.g. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos or The Diary of a Seducer by Kierkegaard (the latter could be found in the first volume of his Either/Or) whose psychological facet is always cut unintentionally, plays the part of a byproduct which is never assessed as the main reason for a novel to appear, or is smuggled subtly from an area where the fuzziness found between the lines meets the murkiness of silence (like brackets within parentheses). The same goes with Fresán’s wonder – the psychological wanderings of his protagonist are somewhat of a result of the idea which exists behind the novel, perfectly ingenuous, deprived of this unmistakable, toxic, regular psychological ingredient which pulverizes your soul mercilessly and turns you into a drowsy creature which yaws wider than hippo’s obtuse snout could possibly open. If you want to throw in some stuff form the brown leather couch, you had better make it innocuously inconspicuous – like Fresán has done. And this, My Fellow Readers, is the highest possible form of compliment from someone who fights like cat and dog with…ahem…psycho novels.

Putting threads of Kensington Gardens back into the haberdashery of belletristic knickknacks, let’s talk about magic. For Fresán’s novel surely deserves this noun to be placed in its description. What is so mesmerizing in this delightful book? Apart from Barrie’s life – his daydreamlike and tragic childhood, first steps into the not so adult, yet dull and adulterous world of adolescence, youth and journalism, meeting and turning the Llewellyn Davies brothers into his own, later on – private, pantheon of Muses, unimaginable and splendorous success of the Peter Pan play, divorce with his wife Mary, the revenge of Demons that lived within him, within the only author who remained ageless enough to write about and personify the immobilization and rejection of the growing up, and who suffered fully from the dire consequences of the above deed – apart from the sweet-and-sour critique of Swinging Sixties and the psychological scarring of the protagonist, Kensington Gardens introduces us to something really luscious. The tasty raisins of ruminations (e.g., a marvelous comparison of literature’s development to certain stages of human life – from its innocent birth in 18^th century, via Wonderlandly-Twisted 19^th century childhood and turbulent Caulfieldishly Hazy excesses of its 20^th century pubescence, to… oh, you almost got me! Naughty, naughty!…), mouth-watering custard pie of predictions about humanity, literature, perception of history, and the like, along with some other delectable morsels – for instance the genesis of a name Wendy – all of it creates this highly flammable orgy of unforgettable literary flavors and elicits imaginary opiate and/or LSD trips to somewhere where there is no ticktock of a clock playing an infinite game of Tic-tac-toe with us. Where noughts and crosses do not spawn endless combinations of nevermores. Where everybody does not have to be a lucky loser or just a plain one – beside, outside or – the worst of them all – inside oneself. Where there are no bad monsters living under our beds or hiding behind closed doors of our closets…

Now, what’s with this “immobilization inside time” Kensington Gardens is responsible for bringing along? Does it have anything to do with keeping everything “frozen” in the eternal stupor of metaphysical obligation of something to be? Or maybe of something to pass? When does it start? Why does it have to be so surreptitious? Here we go, hitting a brick wall again… Nonetheless, if I gathered up my courage to set my doubts aside for a while, I would say that Fresán’s novel does not eject us outside of time. Our presence is well within its boundaries, its plane of influence, its realm of conditionality. However, we are not moving anywhere along it. The most accurate and, at the same time, describable phenomenon which could illustrate the above is this extremely rare and comparatively short-lived subjective time dilatation. It happens when you enjoy something so utterly that you are not only totally disconnected from the rest of the world (no, its not the regular immersion à la GTA: nothing-else-matters-when-I-play-it-San Andreas) but, given the circumstances, you do not even conjecture in a mode of: “Holly crap, I feel as if someone’s just activated bullet time!”. It resembles sitting on a moving bus or a train with all of its windows shut tight. You remain perfectly motionless and the interior of the bus/train is something which redefines the term “astonishing”. Personally, I think it can only occur before you are ten years old. After that – sorry buddy, maybe next time (you’d better pray for the reincarnation in human form to be true!). I myself have experienced it only once: when I watched a movie called The Brave Little Toaster. I must have been no more than 8. And I swear to God/Contingency/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Whatever Demiurge at hand, the movie lasted six hours! Now go check out on IMDb how long the movie really (really?!) is if you care to do so. Kensington Gardens gives you the similar “feeling”. The “feeling” of elfin supremacy Stanley Ipkiss possessed while wearing the titular mask. The “feeling” that taking part in somebody else’s dream inside a dream inside a dream, etc. seems like a child’s play. The “feeling” that you have just been metaphysically rewired and you immediately forget about it, like Peter Pan. It is like a crescendo of a big band consisting solely of children’s first laughs seconds before breaking into thousand pieces to form fairies: unbearable in the beginning, nevertheless, after a while, purely (dis)obligatory, indestructibly innocent, irrevocably courageous. The laugh that blurs the line between the promise, sacrifice and fulfillment. The laugh that solidify our innate internal armor which cannot be pierced through. Not even by pointy, razor-sharp teeth of the ticking crocodile which ate our hand once, and has wanted more ever since. Perhaps, he prowls because he is still missing some hands for the clock inside his stomach? Who knows…

This is how extraordinarily unique Kensington Gardens are. But there exists its perfectly pitched counterbalance, orchestrated by the second part of the concept I have focused on in the previous paragraph – the immobilization outside of time. The only thing I am going to disclose now is the fact that in order to present the said opposite I am going to leave the 80’s one more time and head towards some other decade. What decade? What kind of novel is my next trip going to be about? As for now, my lips are sealed, however you had better keep your eyes open, because I do not intend to put a lid on my inkwell just yet.

Amonne Purity