A Perfect Vacuum

 

A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is, admittedly, the first time I have read a work by Stanislaw Lem. I'll be reading more, after this. Much more, in all likelihood. Of course, Lem has been lauded for decades by critics and colleagues alike, so he was always on my list of authors I ought to read. But, stubbornness being what it is, it wasn't until I listened to an episode featuring Lem's work on Weird Studies a couple years ago that I felt I needed to read his work. As usual, Weird Studies pushed me again into uncharted territories. More on that later.

I've been a fan of Science Fiction for many decades now, a habit I picked up from my father, who also read a lot of Science Fiction (I have to note that one of my proudest moments as a son was when I was able to call Dad up and let him know I had been published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine). I don't recall seeing a Lem book on his shelf or his bedside stand, but then again he worked for the US military, so I'm not sure how it would look for him to read Lem's work, given the Cold War and all that rot. All that aside, I have to credit Lem with causing me to question, yet again, the definition of Science Fiction. These are not works of spaceships and laser-blasters. It's not even about aliens, per se, though there are times where the humans in these pages act or at least think in truly alien ways. These stories are, first off, not stories: They are imaginary reviews of imaginary pieces of literature. Fictional reviews of fictional books. The "science" comes in through the imaginary books themselves, in large part, and one might even say that the science involved is actually the philosophy of science and the philosophical implications of science itself.

We start, though, with a purely literary focus. Well, not purely literary, I suppose, if you view comedy as "unliterary". If you're seeking a laugh-out-loud (at times) story rife with self-deprecation and a surprising depth of philosophical thinking, you want to read "Les Robinsonades". It is absolutely brilliant. Right from the get-go of this collection, I could why so many people love (and hate) Lem. He has a cutting wit, which he combines with a sometimes laser-focused logic to create a sardonic, but philosophically-sound critique of a variety of "sciences" that may or may not live up to their "scientific" claims.

One of the funnier notions of "Les Robinsonades" (or the critique thereof) is that the titular Robinson has dismissed his servant Snibbins, a corollary to "Friday" of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, only to find his thoughts haunted by the servant and completely unable to escape the need to avoid Snibbins at all costs.

Poor Robinson, who wanted so to avoid shoddiness, who intended to surround himself with chosen ones, has befouled his nest, for he has ensnibbined the entire island.

Later, upon encountering Snibbins again (unavoidable on the island, one supposes):

Why does Snibbins, who previously only spat at the whales, turn out to be their ardent admirer, even to the point of requesting metamorphosis (Robinson says of him, to Wendy May, "He wants whaling")?

"Gigamesh," which Lem opines in the first introductory essay of this book "was to the least of my taste," is a labyrinthine chain of literary analytic drivel so abstruse as to drive even the most seasoned of academics mad. Reading it drove me through a safari of emotion, from respect to fascination to skepticism to anger to fury to hilarity. It felt a lot like being in graduate school again. In the end, it's so intentionally bad as to be comical. "So bad it's good"!

"Sexplosion" is, as the title implies, a view of what society might become if all the stops were pulled on the intersection of capitalism and sex. Want all the sex you can have? Be careful what you wish for. And what happens if a catastrophic event suddenly makes sex not only undesirable, but downright anathema to happy living? Well, let me tell you about the intersection of rampant capital and the vice of food . . .

"Gruppenführer Louis XVI" is every bit as crazy as it sounds: a cadre of SS officers flee to South America after WW II and create a kingdom based on bad third-hand history. Yes, the whole story is a fake review of a book never written, but I would read it, for sure. The premise is a fascinating social train-wreck and I can't peel my eyes away. Calvino and Sarban smashing into each other, face-to-face at 100 MPH!

Lem tries to out-beckett Beckett by taking the central conceit of the Irishman's imploding narrative in his famous trilogy and pushing it (or pulling it like a black hole) even further. "Rein du tout, ou la Conséquence" is a review of a book that not only was not written, but indeed cannot be written: a literary perpetual negation machine in which language itself utterly collapses.

"Pericalypsis" is science-fictional prophecy at its worst. Lem essentially foresees the proliferation of bad information that buries all good, meaningful information by its sheer mass (internet and A.I., I'm looking at you) along with the mountains of trash choking the landscape and seas. The solution presented by the fictional narrator is the worst possible solution. I'd leave it to your imagination. But you can't imagine just how bad it is.

"Idiota" is a side-wise examination of Dostoevsky's similarly-titled work. It is at times a condemnation of the Russian's work, and at times laudatory; Lem, tell me you're trying to critique The Idiot without critiquing The Idiot.

What happens when the "sanctity" of classics is besmirched by a tool that allows the easy disassembly and reassembly of great pieces of literature into penny-dreadful, even pornographic content? Ladies and gentlemen, I present "U-Write-It". Lem lambasts the uneducated and the academic elite all in one fell swoop! My, oh my, would he have hated US politics in the 21st-century.

"Odysseus of Ithaca" follows dungeoneers of the trash stratum (note another Weird Studies reference) in a quest for hidden genius, the type of intellect so profound that it is completely unrecognized by geniuses of the second order. You can probably see where this is going . . . or isn't going. Come read a tale of genius eternally undiscovered.

"Toi" outlines the logical impossibility of writing a book about the reader and an author's (failed) attempt to write the impossible. It is the weakest piece in this collection and yet, compelling.

"Being, Inc." presents the impossibility of each person on Earth selecting their fate, down to the fine details, from a catalog administered by corporations that arrange events such that everyone, eventually, has their desires arranged for and met. Of course, things get complicated when one considers capitalist competition in such an economy. One wonders where Lem, who lived through communism and the Solidarity movement in Poland, might fall in his preferences of economic systems. I suspect it was a bit of a sliding scale for him.

I think, in "Die Kultur als Fehler," the critic convinces himself, over the course of the review, that the author of the book is completely correct, which is the exact opposite of what the reviewer implies at the beginning. We see what seems to start as the opening of a Hegelian dialectic, but straightaway jumps to the opposite conclusion, leaving Hegel (and all supporters of "Civilization") behind. I'm reminded of a skeptic on youtube recently flipping his opinion about whether or not the moon was . . . brace for it . . . an artificially-constructed celestial object.

Right at the crossroads of philosophy and physics, "De Impossibilitate Vitae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi" examines the intersection and collision of probability theory and existentialism. What is the likelihood that you, as an individual different from all other individuals, exist at all? It's a rich question and Lem tackles it with a great deal of understated humor. You really are amazing!

. . . and so, but for the diarrhea of the mammoths, Professor Benedykt Kouska also would have not come into the world.

I can't understand why people were giving me weird looks for laughing out loud while I was reading this.

In "Non Serviam" Lem asks "the big questions" about life, morality, faith, existence, and God. He does this by positing what would happen, in terms of philosophical discourse, among virtual beings created by humans wielding computers with sufficient programming ability that the programmers become, effectively, gods. It's a compelling read, to say the least. I strongly suspect that the Brothers Quay were influenced by this story (they began their careers in Lem's native Poland, after all), and one cannot avoid comparing this work with the works of Philip K. Dick.

As for the concluding review/story, "The New Cosmogeny," I'll leave you to the Weird Studies examination of the same story. They explore it in much more depth and with more erudite insights than I can provide. Hopefully their analysis will also drive you to read A Perfect Vacuum.

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Waiting for the Dog to Sleep

 

Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It should come as no surprise that Jerzy Ficowski is possibly the world's leading biographer of the great Bruno Schulz. Not only did Ficowski write the definitive Schulz biography, Regions of the Great Heresy, but one can hear echoes of Schulz's distinctive voice bordering the edges of Ficowski's short fiction, collected here in Waiting for the Dog to Sleep. Throughout my reading of the 28(!) stories in this volume, I found myself drawing frequent comparisons to Schulz, Kafka, and Calvino, and some of these stories should be spoken in the same breath as these greats.

That is not to say that Ficowski does not have his own voice; he does. But in order to entice readers to this book, I can't avoid the comparison. This work will sit comfortably - on its own - amidst works by the authors heretofore mentioned. Alas, this comprises all of the short fiction Ficowski ever wrote. He is much more well-known as a poet, and his poetic stance is reflected quite strongly in a few of these stories. At other times, his work is extremely straightforward and unadorned, which suits the stories in which ornamentation was not only un-necessary, but inimical to the goals of the narrative. Ficowski allows the form to follow the story, not allowing his own predilections to smother the necessary work that his words perform.

There is a wide variety here ("Something for everyone to hate," as Stepan Chapman used to say), and a lot to love. These pieces are all short and easily digestible, but some of them leave a long-lasting aftereffect, a lingering literary flavor that "sits well on the tongue," as they say. Here are my thoughts on each of the morsels:

The first story, "The Artificial Hen, or the Gravedigger's Lover" hovers somewhere between magic realism and surrealism. It's a strange, uncomfortable space. Most of the stories in this volume, I've found, fall into this strange liminal space between strange liminal spaces. Sometimes hewing toward more stark surrealism and at other times toward a warm magic realism a'la Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"The Passing Settlement" is about what's right there in the title. But what's there is not quite what you think. A charming little bit about one of those "blink and you'll miss it" places in the middle of nowhere (which may well be the middle of everywhere).

"Old-World Entomology" is a short, concise gut-punch about moths, ancestors, memory, and futility. A three page long existential masterstroke.

Daydream? Ghost story? Liminal magic realism? It doesn't matter. "Recreation with the Paralytics" is a numinous tale, in any case. It will lull you into its own sacral reality, chestnuts, wheelchairs, and all.

"Proof of the Existence of Saint Eulalia" is, as the academics are wont to say "transgressive". Equal parts wicked and clever, this tiny tale packs a lot. Almost a prose poem, though without so much filigree. The sort of story about which a writer (this writer in particular) would say "I wish I had written it myself". And I do.

"The Pink House, or the Desert Sentries" is the sort of story that sends literature majors scrambling for hidden meanings and symbolism when maybe, just maybe, the author was simply telling a story with no meaning . . . which, of course, carries hidden meanings. It is, in this way, a tricksterish story. Ficowski channels Kafka herein, and the academics start sprinting for their podiums . . .

It's funny, when I read the next tale, I had just had a conversation with my wife about the traces we do and don't leave behind when we die. This story, "Chorzeluk," is about making a memory mountain out of a molehill and the proposition that it's sometimes best to let silence speak for itself.

"Before the Wall Collapses" is a small slice of a small slice of the world, an urban trap, of sorts, as much psychological as physical, inhabited by the narrator's grandfather.

Ever wonder what it might feel like to be a victim of the Dungeons & Dragons spell "Otto's Irresistible Dance"? I have. The answer might be found in "Tango Milonga," a tale of magic realism that evokes Italy Calvino in all the best ways. That really is the highest praise I can give to a story. I am hoping there are more like this in Ficowski's collection, but this could carry the whole book! The price of admission is worth it for this story alone.

"Window to the World" is a window on frozen hope and the helplessness one faces in the face of cold, strong winters, and the inevitability of death. This could easily be a short Brothers Quay film. I might add that the Quays (my favorite directors) are, not surprisingly, mentioned in the translator's notes.

"The Sweet Smell of Wild Animals" is magical realism par excellence. This story would rank up among Millhauser and Calvino's best. A fantastic fantastical story (replete with obligatory clown) of an unexpected train ride to a zone of liminality between city and circus, mechanics and magic. An amazing tale of tails.

I keep using referents to magic realists most readers know. It can't be helped. "An Escape" brushes against Kafka's territory or that of a very, very restrained Solzhenitsyn. I wasn't as enamored of this story as others, but it is still well-realized, with a Rod Serling-esque cliffhanger ending.

Existentialism by way of an attempt to fade into non-existence is the theme of "Mimesis". Where best to hide? Or, rather, best to hide as what? What happens when one disappears into . . . a piece of architecture, for example? And what of the pull of such an act on others. One must be strong or dissolve.

"An Attempt at a Dialogue" is a psychogeographical dreamscape of a story with a strange hauntological twist that teases the edges of time-travel, questioning both past and present and the (false?) notion of selfhood. It leaves philosophical quandaries far beyond the limits of the ink on the page and even beyond the strangeness that the story infers.

To call "The Joy of Dead Things" a "nice" story gives the wrong connotation. Maybe "comfortable" is the word I'm looking for, but only to those of us who love to walk through sleepy, dilapidated towns, unkempt ruins, dirty side streets, and ancient overgrown cemeteries, physically-realized dreamscapes. If that's you, then you, like me, will feel comfortable with this story, "soothed" even.

In "Outskirts on the Sands," we find a narrator who constantly, stubbornly, thrusts himself into the past, intentionally avoiding the present until a girl, an amalgam of all his pasts, gently compels him into the present. But the pull of nostalgia is too powerful, and he loses his present, ironically, to a new future. Another strongly psychogeographic work.

A weirdly- beautiful story, the imagery of "My Forest" is going to stay in my head for a long, long time, particularly the fantastically gorgeous apocalyptic closing scene. I would love to quote it, but I don't want to spoil the dark beauty of it all, one of the most simultaneously moving and disturbing images I've seen painted with words. So many hints and implications . . . I can't get over how "ripe" this little tale is. I think I'm in love with it.

"Aunt Fruzia" can be killed off by a salacious story involving a nun, we learn. A domestic dinner story gone wrong (because the narrator just can't help himself from provoking his aunt). The analogies of dinner were so good, I'd prefer to take them literally. But that's cannibalism, and cannibalism is a no-no, kids.

The one disappointing story in the collection for me was "An Alliance". Is the alliance in "An Alliance" really an alliance at all? Or is it just spousal spitefulness? There's probably an analogy in this story, but I'm not seeing it.

"Gorissia" (as the Romans named it) is a village in which the people embrace the final embrace, that of the grave. It's a story as old as time, as discovered by the narrator, an archeologist noted for his previous Neolithic discoveries. And the story will continue on in perpetuity. The archeologist is, in essence, robbed of the fruits of his profession.

"Intermission" is a story of war, during which the line demarcation living and dead is all but erased and only fear can save you. It is an autobiographical tale of Ficowski's participation in the Warsaw uprising.

By the end of "They Don't Ring at the Bernadines'," Ficowski slips into, or rather ascends into full surrealist mode. This story of religious figures versus their adherents approaches, but doesn't quite cross the threshold into all-out absurdity. The restraint is apropos, given the story itself.

I was waiting for a story that would touch directly on the holocaust, and in "'Cause He's Stupid and 'Cause He's Abram," I begrudgingly found it. As you can imagine, it doesn't end well. In this sad case, ignorance truly is bliss. The story begins with the following paragraph, just to give you a taste of Ficowski's writing ability:

He had a molting beard the color of hempen harl, his frayed canvas clothes were made up of holes and cracks painstakingly sewn together. Niemira from Lesne claimed that Abram had stolen those rags from his field scarecrow and was now parading about in them. Possible, but if so, Stupid Abram hadn't taken them to make himself frightening only so that he would have something to wear: without them he was already fairly frightening, though more naked.

You can probably gather that Ficowski shows a wry humor, even in his portrayal of the most horrific of circumstances. I thought of the masks of comedy and tragedy strapped to each other often as I read this book. Sometimes the wires get crossed, and it makes for a heady mixture of emotions.

"Post-patrimony" is a deep dive into psychogeography, how the inhabitant is tied to the habitation and the fragile relationship between the two. When one dies, the other decays, and yet there is something irreducable at the heart of place, a kernel of immortal being that persists, a Genius loci that may take a familiar form.

"Stumps" is one of those strange stories whose strangeness resides, coiled up like a snake waiting to strike, in its utter banality. An ordinary day with one out of the ordinary element (in this case a beggar) that sends everything sideways, forcing the narrator to look at the world in an even more strange way: loaded with meaning amidst the ordinariness of living.

"Signs of the Times, or Diction" is too slight. While I can appreciate stories that only hint and infer, I'd like at least a thread to follow. Yes, this narrator has no thread, that's the point of it all. So, while clever, this story only pans out as average because it's too brief to take full hold.

"Spinning Circles" may be close to perfect, the fabled perfect circle sought after by the Greeks. A wanderer who hopes to reach The City, despite the entries awaiting him, follows his spinning hoop, the last holdover from his distant childhood, only to learn that the circle, which has a mind of its own, will never take him back to where he wants to go. Or will it? Where does the circle end, if it ends at all?

And here the collection ends. I must note that Twisted Spoon Press is starting to impress me. I only have two data points at this time, but what I see is very promising, indeed. I strongly recommend picking up this collection as a start, especially if you are partial to Central and Eastern European authors in translation. I am becoming more and more enamored of this niche, and Ficowski's collection is a very strong example of the sort of writing I've been finding from that corner of the world. Go get yourself a copy!



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The Trickster Goddess of Family Cervidae

[Trigger Warning: Dead animal mention and photo]

 I'm going to get a little personal here. Don't like it? Go somewhere else. Take me as I am, as they say. Here I am:

Back in 2019, the company I worked for was bought out. Now, one of the companies I had worked for previous to that job went through three different buy-outs in five years. Yeah, not a great track record. I left that company before it sank, and oh, did it sink. It's gone. Dead to the business world. A has-been. Even the IP has been flushed down the toilet. I watched as the investors made mistake after mistake, had the heartbreaking task of handing out nearly 40 pink slips to people, some of them good friends, because the investors made some really poor business decisions, and when the third buyout happened and I saw the company culture that was being imposed there, I took off. On my last day, when I walked out (and I literally walked home the five or so miles, because I knew I'd need that long walk to clear my head), I felt like I was sitting on a cliffside overlooking the ocean, and seeing a cruise ship, on fire, slowly sinking beneath the waves. I was right. That's about how it went down. So fast-forward a few years, and I find I'm in the middle of yet another buy-out. Only with this one, I was assured that my job was not in any danger, that while there were now two buyers, where there had been one previously, that my position was safe as houses, as they say. 

They lied.

I found myself, at fifty years old, unemployed for the first time in my life. I diligently looked for, and found, a good job doing purchasing for a major player in the food industry (why not? I had just been "let go" by the water industry). This was in late 2019. Covid happened, and I found myself working from home, which was a good thing, because unlike many of my friends who were out of work, I found myself waking up at around 7, rolling out of bed to get started at 7:30, working through to 5:00 or so (I may or may not have taken a 15 minute lunch during that time - some days I did so, most I didn't), eating dinner, then getting back on for another 2-4 hours, depending on how crazy the day was. This went on for many months. Every day, I checked in with my boss for a call, maybe 20 minutes or so, to report on what I was doing. This was fine, as we needed to communicate regularly, given how absolutely insane the food industry was during Covid. People discovered they could actually cook burgers at home, and our customer base (the meat industry) went stark raving mad with production. One of our customers, also the world's single largest producer of beef, was running at 400% capacity. So anything that required preventative maintenance, like motors, for example, which I bought, was wearing out four times more quickly than usual. And I'm here to tell you that the meat industry doesn't like the idea of buying spares until their machines are down and they are suddenly losing $10K an hour - then, and only then, they'd think "we should have bought a spare". Duh. 

Covid came and went. But the stressors didn't. Long story short, I found myself, last winter, burned out and extremely sensitive to criticism. I was putting in "all the hours". I was pushing to get everything done that needed to get done. I made some mistakes, as one does when one is over-worked and burned out, but nothing critical. In fact, in the last year, I saved my company upwards of three times my yearly salary in one year of purchasing negotiations. I paid for myself and then a lot more. The numbers were clear as day. I received praise from the plant manager and international director of sourcing for my work. And yet, the pressure never let up. 

It was in the midst of this pressure cooker that I was driving home from work one night on a stretch of country road, and I saw a deer jump out onto the county highway. I was going at about the speed limit when I slammed the brakes and the deer jumped off the road, but I thought - and I was right - there's got to be other deer nearby.

Then, there she was. She bounded out and in a split second, I knew I was going to hit here. I knew also, that when hitting a deer, it's a bad idea to have your brakes clamped down, as the deer is then more likely to go under your car and tear up everything on the underside. So, I let off the brake and hit her at about 40 MPH.

As I saw her body fly up over my hood and fill my windshield, I thought "this is it, I'm going to die". Then, miraculously (for me, at least), she kept going up. I think my car met her rump just as she was bounding upward, as deer do, and she simply flew over the top of my car - completely over the top - and landed in a ditch behind me. 

I didn't have the wherewithal to do anything but glance back. I didn't see her. I had no idea if she had survived or not. My car was crumpled and I was shaking like a leaf. My airbags did not go off, for which I am very grateful, and any whiplash I suffered was minimal. After a panicked call to my wife ("I just hit a deer. I have no idea what to do. I've never hit a deer before.") and my wife's calming response that I should call the insurance company, I did that. Then I called 911. The Walworth County Sheriff's department arrived, and the deputies were awesome. They checked on how I was doing, asked what happened, of course asked if I had my seat belt on at the time of the accident ("I was raised in the military. You ALWAYS have your seatbelt on when you're raised in the military!" - they laughed at that), then checked my car. It was munched on the front, but drivable, and there weren't any fluids leaking. 

The police gave me a card with a case number and told me "if you get pulled over for only having one headlight, just give them this card and you'll be fine". Then they got in their SUV and backed up behind me, maybe fifty feet or so, shone their spotlight into the field to check for the deer, I presume, then drove off. I made it home, of course, took the car in and eventually it was totalled.

To say this was a stressor I didn't need is an understatement. But I kept coming back, in my mind, to that moment that deer rose up and filled my windshield. I was strangely calm when I thought "I'm going to die". I wasn't panicked at all. Endorphines are wonderful gifts! But I kept coming back to that thought. "I'm going to die."

Of course, I've thought that before. My deepest philosophical explorations (if they can be called "deep" at all) have been my delves into Existentialism. I've faced the possibility of death a couple of times before (once having narrowly avoided being in a fatal airplane accident - the plane taxiing behind me ended up being hit by a microburst on the tail of the plane on takeoff, flipping upside down, and killing all 16 people on board, I learned upon landing at my destination - and I've been shot at at close range once, as well). But this one was weird. I was so calm. Almost like I was just receiving a message: "I'm going to die".

Needless to say, this got me thinking a LOT (and driving much more slowly and cautiously at night in the country - yeah, I've become "that guy" at night. So, go around me if you're in such a hurry) about my then-current situation with work. I was not happy. In fact, I was much more unhappy and not mentally-well than I could have admitted to myself before the accident. And I had been putting up with a lot of stress and what in a later conversation I figured out was extreme micro-managing, and I had had enough. So I started sending out job applications. I had been approached by head-hunters before, but had told them I wasn't interested at that time. Now I was interested. I needed a change and I needed it bad. After sending out eight applications, I had two offers. in comparison, when I was "let go" at the job previous to my last, I sent out 65 applications and ended up with two offers.

Since I left my job and took the current job I am in, I've spoken with a few employees at the place I left and have discovered that others felt the same way about their experience there. I won't go into details, but the culture there is . . . languishing, shall we say? Two nights ago, I was sitting on the couch just staring at the closet door, feeling at peace. My wife asked what I was thinking about, and I said "I'm thinking about how I'm not panicked about going back to work after this long weekend. And how I didn't have to work on my days off, like the last job." I realized that, for the first time in a long time, I was at peace. No, this job isn't perfect - no job is. But it's much better than my last place, MUCH less stressful, and, frankly, just as rewarding. A side note - this job is a ten minute drive from my house. We're now a one-car family, which, while it requires some juggling, actually makes life feel a lot simpler, in some ways. And I'm close enough that I've been able to walk home a couple of times, when my wife needed the car. It's actually helping me be more fit. Four mile walks will do that for you. 

And the weird thing is, I have this dead deer to thank for these, dare I say it? Blessings. This might sound morbid and perhaps a touch cruel, but I feel like she sacrificed herself for me, in some ways. Yes, I feel badly about hitting her and killing her. I'm not mad at her, though. In fact, I'm extremely grateful, truly, honestly thankful. I think of the old myths of trickster gods that would sometimes lead people to the edge of danger, where they then found some sort of reward for their endangerment, narrowly escaping the potential for that Final failure. I've seen the pit of doom, and picked up a gold coin on its edge.

The next day, after the accident, I drove my wife's vehicle in to work. On my way home, I made sure I drove home that SAME way I drove when I hit the deer. I considered it a sort of banishing ritual, undoing what had been done the night before, closing the circle. Besides, I needed to get some confidence back about driving at night! In fact, I drove past there many times, as I drove home to tune up my resume, get applications in, and do phone interviews. 

I looked for the deer each time, but didn't see her carcass. We had had some nasty snowstorms, and if the deer was indeed killed, it was in a steep-ish ditch off the side of the road, covered in snow. 

Strange that late on February 18th, I submitted my application to the place I eventually ended up working for. On February 21st I was called by them and had my first phone interview. On February 22nd, the snow had temporarily melted, and on my way home I saw something I had been looking for since January 4th, the night of the accident. I took the following picture:

Coincidence? I don't think so. The older I get, the less I think there is such a thing as coincidence. Meaning is where it's at. And maybe it's all we've got.

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Being and Time

 

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Did I learn?" This is the only possible question I can ask about my reading experience with Martin Heidegger's notoriously difficult tome Being and Time. I would be lying if I said I clearly understood more than 25% of this work. Warning: unless you are a trained philosopher or a genius autodidact, you will find within these pages a long stretch of imposter syndrome waiting for you. I cannot rightfully or accurately assess whether I "got" this book. Some of it, sure, but I don't know enough here to assess what I really, really know about Heidegger's philosophy.

But did I learn? Let's find out. Below, I've cut and pasted the notes I've taken along the way. Immediately following each self-quotation, I will assess whether, at the end of it all, I learned anything in relation to these initial impressions. Let's go:

Well, the foreword and translator's notes successfully put me to sleep. Hoping that the actual text is a little more engaging.

This did get better. As I crawled along and picked up an occasional idea here and there, along with bolstering my knowledge by watching very specific youtube videos on particularly difficult passages, I found myself more and more engaged because I understood more of the previous groundwork as I went along.

Heideggering is hard work. I'm glad I know some German or the footnotes here would be mostly nonsensical. Or at least misleading.

Yes, Heideggering is hard work. That did not change. Knowing German helped quite a bit, but sometimes my knowledge of German actually got in the way because of the way that Heidegger uses the German language. Some of his wordplay is incredibly subtle and I suspect that even native speakers with a high level of academic training need to use the footnotes as a crutch to help understand the precise way in which he uses specific words with specific nuances. The footnotes, along with having German "at hand," so to speak, were extremely helpful.

My brain hurts.

This was true throughout.

That Philosophy 101 course I had 27 years ago isn't helping me much here, for some reason. I want a refund on that portion of my tuition!

It actually came in handy later, when Hegel and Aquinas came up I had a comparative framework to diff off of Heideger's ideas, which gave me an unexpected and needed context. But I still want that refund!

I cheated and watched a youtube video or five to get some grounding. Glad I did that.

Essentially, Heidegger is rewriting Philosophy 101 as it relates to ontology.

I'm still glad I "cheated". That helped things immensely. And I STILL want that refund!

Hmm. About 10% of the way through the book and I understand about 25% of what I've read.

This proportion of understanding proved true from the beginning to the end. I understood things well about a quarter of the time. Truth be told, I *somewhat* understood other things maybe another 15-20% of the time. Not bad for an imposter.

Page 65 . . . and I'm just at the beginning of Part 1?

Yes, I was. But that preamble was necessary not to set the stage, but to strip the stage down to it's loose wooden planks and rebuild philosophy. Heidegger was a philosophical marine drill sergeant. He destroys you, then builds you up again.

We're going on a cruise in a couple of weeks. I strongly suspect this will NOT be a book I take with me. Sorry, Heide.

Well, that cruise didn't happen. My wife got a blood clot the week before we were supposed to leave, and with here then-recent cancer scare, we couldn't take a chance. Good thing, too, as we would have likely ended up in a hospital somewhere in Anchorage. We still plan on taking the cruise, but it's probably going to be a year or two. 2022 was pretty brutal.

"Linguistic gymnastics" is the phrase that comes to mind when trying to describe what my brain is doing now. And I've fallen off the balance beams more than once here.

See my comments about German above. Lots of linguistic gymnastics in this work.

I'm glad I don't *have* to read this. It's one thing to discipline myself to read something inscrutable; it's quite another to have it assigned to you.

In the end, I'm glad I read it. But I could easily see a huge number of philosophy majors going to the counselor's office to change their majors after this. Easily.

Every two pages I spend on Heidegger is a hard-won battle. Most of the time, I lose, but I'll hold onto my feeble victories and improve upon them. Slow and steady wins the race.

It wasn't *always* torture, just most of the time. Slow and steady did win the race, incidentally. Or at least I finished the marathon.

This text can feel so mechanical at times that one forgets it is about human beings. Then, occasionally, one slips past the strictness of the language and realizes that not only is Heidegger not philosophizing about an "ideal" human being, but that he is sympathetic to humans in their weaknesses, even when they don't reach their full potential.

This was a surprising revelation that became more and more clear the more I read. Heidegger's primary concern was the inner life of an individual human being, replete with its faults and foibles.

Any review I do for this book can only scratch the surface.

c.f., this pithy review.

Back to the philosophical salt mines . . .

Looking back on this phrase, it was definitely ill-advised and I didn't even think about the implications at that point, given Heidegger's overly-problematic political leanings. It was not intentional, but I suppose it might have been subconscious. My apologies for the "bad optics". I suppose I could redact this note altogether, but that wouldn't be intellectually honest.

I'm not sure if Being and Time is considered "analytical philosophy," or if I'm even using the right term, but this sort of Definitional work seems like definition for the sake of definition. It's academically interesting, but emotionally flat and intellectually tedious. But I will press on and finish. I'm learning things, but it's not particularly enjoyable.

Obviously, from my earlier comments, this feeling came and went. But when it came on, it came on strong. Reading more slowly helped me to cut through this academic wall and get to the actual "soul" behind it. I do believe the book has "soul," but it takes some digging to get to it.

The whole notion of death in this book is utterly fascinating. While acknowledging the cessation of being in this world, and thus no longer being a Dasein, Heidegger hints that there is a sort of existence of one, even as that one has ceased being in the worls as Dasein here. But the Being of that being is unknowable by Dasein.

This actually helped me connect with this work in a way I hadn't up to this point. This probably has to do with my admiration for Existential philosophy in general. The seeming paradoxical nature of Heidegger's statements in relation of Dasein to death actually tied things together quite nicely for me. Your mileage may vary.

Death enters the picture and suddenly all that came before in this tome makes much more sense. Existentialism instantiates clarity!

As I just said . . .

317 pages in, I feel like I'm beginning to grasp what Heidegger is on about. Call me ignorant. But I am starting to put two and two together.

Mmmmmaybe I was learning something?

There is something fundamental about the call of conscience, an irreducible something that is at the core of Dasein's Being. There is no good answer to "where does it come from?", it is intrinsic to Being. So far as I can tell, this is the closest Heidegger gets to some notion of "spirit," "soul," or "essence". But what do I know?

This, I think, is where Heiddeger's view of some sort of "soul" became more clear. I went back and scanned throughout the book, and one can find ghostly whispers, very faint, of this feeling, here and there throughout. Perhaps this is inevitable when one is talking about the inner life of a human?

There's something a bit Ayn-Randian about the concept of conscience here, but it seems less mercenary. Self-serving? Yes, more a focus on authenticity, to being true to one's self, than just snubbing every other human being around you without mercy for the sake of the argument.

Heidegger's ties to nazism are fairly clear, from what I understand. Though Ayn Rand wasn't a nazi, per se, her individualism-to-the-point-of-extreme-selfishness rings with some of the same echos, albeit on a personal, rather than national scale. I find Heidegger much more kind (if that's the right word) than Rand, but still adamant about the individual need to be oneself, despite what society as a whole thinks. Of course, if you get a whole bunch of people who think they are being individualistic, while they are merely all following one person's individualistic personality, well, you get facism.

I'd love to be able to state that I understood thus and such percentage of this book. But that would imply a continuous "block" of understanding, and that's just not true. It's more like a journey where certain points were more lucid and memorable than others, like pearls unevenly distributed along a string.

This notion also held through, especially in hindsight. And this is the most corect summation of my reading experience with Being and Time. Will I read it again in full? Probably not. But I will dip into sections from time to time in order to both build my understanding of this work and to provide context when other philosophers refer to Heidegger.

So I feel that I did learn from the book. And i will keep on learning. Some of the ideas herein and some of the structures have provided glimpses for me into the workings of philosophy, even if uneven and obfuscated by my own ignorange. Gradually, though, I'm hoping the light seeps in and grows and I can use this as a springboard into other, perhaps equally difficult, works. My intellectual muscles have been strengthened, though I have yet to understand how to integrate the whole body of work into my philosophical routine. That, I think, is a lifelong pursuit.






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The Ballet of Dr Caligari and Madder Mysteries

 

The Ballet of Dr Caligari and Madder Mysteries by Reggie Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With few exceptions, I have come to love the work of Reggie Oliver. While I was lukewarm about Flowers of the Sea , I was head-over-heels about The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler and Other Stories and Mrs. Midnight and Other Stories . I had heard mixed reviews from readers I respect and admire, so I was curious where this volume would fall.

I began with misgivings. While the opening story, "A Donkey at the Mysteries," had some great moments, the ending fell a bit flat for me. I loved the subtext of unknowingly participating in rites one does not understand, but I was hoping for a moment of anagnorises that never materialized. The story had momentum, a series of setups, then . . . nothing. If this was authorial intent, the potential was under-utilized. Perhaps this is because I had read and quite enjoyed Brian C. Murarescu's investigation into ancient Greek and Roman cults of psychedelia(?), The Immortality Key . I had been (pardon the pun - but I am a dad) keyed up for the read, but was disappointed. Not upset. Just disappointed. Have I mentioned I'm a dad?

The second story was a touch better. "The Head" is a double entendre laced with Oliver's bleak humor. It's a strange admixture of sitcom and dread horror that devolves into an absurdist experimentalism. I really do like the two main characters (as much as one can like a madman and a disembodied head), and, as with other works by Oliver, his characters really shine. A worthy story, not his best, but a good read nonetheless.

When I started to figure out the subject matter of the third tale, I was prepared to be really, really disappointed. As a rule, I hate werewolf stories. But I might have to make an exception for "Tawny". I didn't love it, but this English social comedy with a lycanthropic twist was an amusing read.

Then, suddenly, the collection hit its stride. "The Devils Funeral" is peak Oliver. Clergy, madness, corruption, decay, and the near simultaneous death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Darwin as a sideshow that leaves lingering questions. The question that keeps being posed is "who is the enemy"? It's a seemingly simple question with a dastardly labyrinth of possible answers and meanings, most of it unanswerable and meaningless. Existentialism reigns above. And, as above, so below.

A sinister comedy, or a comedic tale of horror? "Baskerville's Midgets" displays Oliver's insider's insight into the actor's life beyond the stage. This (and other stories about the intersection of horror and theater) is a story that only Oliver could have written. His background as an actor, playwright, and fiction author find a fitting culmination in this story, which will have you checking under your bed for (?).

Oliver next completes an M.R. James fragment "The Game of Bear". The transition, though carefully documented, would be fairly seamless without the indicator, which only serves to sever the tale in two. Oliver does an admirable job of mimicking James' voice, particularly in the climax of the story. Of course, James did put a strong personal stamp on the structure and tone of the English ghost story, so no surprises here.

"The Final Stage" is an existential tale that only one who has acted onstage can fully appreciate; not only because of the settings and situations, but because of the attitude that one must take to truly become immersed in their characters, not just the willful suspension of disbelieve, but the willful deceit which one must not merely engage in, but wallow in, if one is to be "a brilliant actor". There is a price to pay. But how are the funds exchanged? Does the character take from the actor, or the actor from the character? The economies of "real" life and faux-life are powerfully in play here.

With the introduction of a certain trope about mid-way through the story, I was ready to write off "The Endless Corridor" as just another vampire story. It is not just another vampire story. It is, in fact, much more nuanced and much more sinister than that trope led me to believe. Oliver, with considerable panache, twists the old trope into something entirely new and more horrifying. My trepidation was allayed, but my frisson was piqued.

Oliver continues to unveil the "back" of the theater in his mystery "The Vampyre Trap," an excellent, if old-fashioned tale of jealousy and ambition behind the curtain. One wonders who the actors are and who the characters are, as these roles become muddled. What better place for a murder or three in a place whose sole purpose is deceit and drama? There are strong resonances between this story and "The Final Stage" earlier in the volume, not because of direct subject matter, but because both hint at a certain sinister something taking place behind the masks of the masks of the masks.

The title story is the most brilliant story in the volume, but only those who have watched Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari will fully appreciate its impact. If I were to teach a class on the "O'Henry ending" I would show the movie, then have students read this. Textbook. And fantastically well-crafted. This is a Reggie Oliver masterpiece; one of his best stories ever.

How can I resist a story about one of my favorite eras of painting, that of the Pre-Raphaelites? I can't. Nor can the protagonist and victim(s) of "Love and Death" resist the alluring illusion of beauty, over-shrouded by the absolute victory of decay and death. Everyone in this tale is caught in this trap. Perhaps only the reader can escape. Perhaps not. But the allure remains.

"Porson's Piece" is as solid of an English ghost story as I've ever read. The village in which most of the action takes place shares half a name with <a href="https://forrestaguirre.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-day-hike-in-cotswolds.html>a village in the Cotswolds that my wife and I hiked through in 2019</a>, and I think I might know some of the "fictional" spots described. One path in particular (a photo of which is at my blog) was described in such a way that I cannot shake the feeling that this very path was the one Oliver here described. This added to the verisimilitude for me, but maybe I am just hallucinating, like the main character. Or maybe not.

Oliver begins "Lady With A Rose" with an ekphrasis of a Titian painting. The story is erudite and the characters colorful (pun intended), but not as startling as many of his other works. The final "twist" was to be expected and sort of just . . . ends there.

This collection has some real gems in it, but the opening and closing stories were unspectacular. An odd way to construct a collection.

The great in this collection carries the less-spectacular tales. Perhaps I've read too much of Oliver and am a bit jaded? I don't think so. He still astounds me, at times. I would hate to discourage anyone from reading "Porson's Piece," "The Ballet of Dr. Caligari," "Baskerville's Midgets," or "The Devil's Funeral," all of which were outstanding stories. But I can't give it a perfect five. Nor can I drop it to an "average" rating of three stars. I'm firmly in the four camp with this one.

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Descended Suns Resuscitate

 

Descended Suns Resuscitate by Avalon Brantley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had heard rumors about Brantley, but only read a couple of short stories before getting my hands on Descended Suns Resuscitate thanks to Zagava Books' publication of the collection in paperback. As others have pointed out, she sprang on the scene with 2013's Aornos to immediate acclaim. As one other reviewer states, Avalon seemed to spring forth onto the scene like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully-formed and at the height of her powers . This volume is a testament to the breadth of her writing prowess and a sad vision of what might have been, as she passed away at the age of 36. I have a (again, paperback) copy of The House of Silence, which I am definitely looking forward to reading after having enjoyed this volume so greatly. My only wish is that she had lived longer and that we could have seen the full growth of her substantial talent.

Before the fall of the Roman empire was its decline. We are thrust headlong into this decline in "The Way of Flames," an incredibly-well researched tale of corruption and, ultimately, collapse. The story is immersive, one feels what it would be like to be on the edge of a civilization that is about to be plunged into utter random chaos and oblivion. I now may have learned everything I need to know about Rome.

I dare not reveal too much about "Hognissaga". Though the subject matter might be a subject of which I have lost interest long ago, Brantley has enjindled a flame in me with this story. I was nearly as surprised as the young prince in the tale. But I can't tell you why, for fear of . . . No, I've already said too much, even if in vagiries. Oh yes, the mis-spelling is intentional.

John Dee meets a demon in "The Dunwich Catharsis," but not the kind of Renaissance demon one might expect. The story is a nested framework of letters, books, and conversations about a heretical Christian sect replete with revelations aplenty, both light and dark. A fabulous tale that gives one pause and sends the reader to the history books to peel away fact from fiction, if such a thing is even possible.

Love meets necromancy meets revenge in "The Regretting Pond". But what is the emotional toll of one who weaves such a web of vengeance. Can satisfaction ever come from justice's answers to tragedy? Or are some festering wounds, no matter how ill-deserved, best left to rot? Moral ambiguity abounds in this tale of love lost. Who is justified in their taking from another? There are more questions than answers here.

"The Last Sheaf" is a folk horror story with all the expected tropes. Not as evocative as the other stories thus far, it is still "effective". Had I not read a fair amount of folk horror lately, I might not be as jaded about it. It's very well-written, with enough twists to set it apart from many stories of its ilk. But nothing spectacular. Still, I'm glad I read it.

"The Window Widows" is a Scottish ghost story par excellence. Perfectly told, when it needed to be, and perfectly untold at just the right moments. Brantley paints with a chiaroscuro-heavy brush here, and it works amazingly well. This is the kind of short story writers of the "weird" should aspire to. A perfect economy of "weird" and "eerie" in a credulous, if sublimely-poetic, voice.

Take, for instance, this description, which sets the absolutely spectral undertone for this chilling tale:

The day that followed was hardly fit to be called so. Heavy clouds blanketed the close tangles of leafbare trees nearest the house, turning the world into vague shapes and textures, and when the wind rose up it seemed to rip shreds of the fog and send them fleeing across the world, like ghaists in flight from a greater ghaist ,or perhaps born therefrom.

Brantley assumes the persona of an avatar of the dread goddess Kali in "Kali Yuga: This Dark and Present Age". It's a piece of social existentialism bordering on despair for modernity and its paramours. The voice is beautiful, with echoes of Beckett and Burroughs, with all the darkness engendered in the same names. But it is clearly Brantley's own apocryphal tale which, like Beckett and Burroughs, no one will heed.

An afterword by Brantley gives the provenience of each story. She lays out the influences for each story and gives some insight into her writerly process. A valuable scrying stone into the work of a writer who was taken from the world far too soon.

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The Rings of Saturn

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.

This sentence encapsulates what The Rings of Saturn is “about”. However, what exactly does that word “about” mean? Is it the meaning of meaning? A circumambulation around a subject? Or a loci-less meandering from subject to subject? “About,” in the context of The Rings of Saturn, is a heady admixture of all of these meanings. It’s a slippery thing – once you think you have it nailed down, it moves, like a fading dream. And this book is much like a fading dream. You know you have been impressed deeply, that feelings have been awoken while you slept, but to pinpoint the details? Impossible.

With that in mind, here are my impressions, scattered, yet tethered together, somehow.

This is a far-reaching, rambling, uncategorizable series of essays. Just the sort of thing I love. The first section, featuring a hospital stay, the physician Thomas Browne, nature shows, curiosity cabinets, and mystical creatures, is . . . really, a treatise on existentialism and attempts to avoid said dread. I sense that W. G. Sebald has drunk deeply from the well of the existential philosophers, but this book is more approachable, less theoretical, and more wrought from the authors experience and, most of all, his keen observations. A sense of . . . grey prevails. For example, section two, mostly about the seaside town of Lowestoft and the recollections of some of its residents, reads like a full-prose rendition of Morrisey's "Every Day is Like Sunday".

I will often judge the quality of writing by its turns of phrase or sentences. I rarely take notes directly from another’s work into my own writing notebook, but this time I did. I was struck by the phrase" . . . the terrible sight of Nature suffocating on its own surfeit,” describing a particularly fulsome harvest of herring. So much was gathered that the village and its environs that, much like the Jews gorging themselves on quail while in their desert exile, the presence of so much bounty was viewed as a curse, rather than a blessing. That phrase has got my writerly mind thinking and thinking and thinking. I'll be running with that theme. Thanks, W.G..

I am enamored of authors who can make convincing transitions from one seemingly unrelated subject to another. Sebald’s leap from Christ to Borges through a couple copulating on the beach is . . . well, a feat: tenuous, but it makes sense, in some senses, but not in others. I like the irreal quality of it all, though, as it causes my brain to break in directions it otherwise wouldn't, which is a feature, not a bug!

I also like to discover, in any given book, something unique that only that specific author could have written about, some piece of the puzzle that is uniquely for to that author. The Rings of Saturn does not disappoint. Here, it is Sebald's use and recounting of the life of his namesake, St. Sebolt that makes that connection. It's done with a deft touch, with insights that only Sebald himself would have, because of his "relation" to the saint. You can I couldn’t write this section of the book and, indeed, much of the book connects to and even hinges upon the good Saint.

I'm not big on biography, usually, unless the subject is unusual. But I do like interesting people. And Sebald seems to know more about eccentric people than any other kind of person. The book is simply swimming with them. Konrad Korzeniowski, aka Joseph Conrad, qualifies!

From Korzeniowski to Casement, the horrors of the Belgian Congo to the tragedy of Casement and his execution, there is a thread of despair throughout, intriguing and disturbing, like Conrad’s own work.

But the story of Vicomte de Chateaubriand shows a side of Sebald, a sensitivity that sometimes overshadows such disturbing accounts. Giving up love for the sake of writing (well, okay, he was already married) is not noble, it's tragic. This story, so full of pathos, is heartbreaking. Sebald is more than just an academic, intellectual writer. He also shows a lot of heart.

Sebald has a gift for reaching out from seemingly banal locations to the exotic in the blink of an eye. Physically, Sebald visits Swinton and Dunwich; spiritually, he visits Peking, relating the saga of the life of Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi, ruminates on Tlön's various theories of reality, and ends with the dreamlike existence of the Pre-Raphaelite poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Amazingly, it all hangs together, largely because of . . . silkworms. Yes, silkworms tie this whole book together. I’ll leave the discovery of how this is so to you, because if I were to try to explain it, I would have to recount almost the entire book.

Sebald's effortless ability to flow from the present to dream to true recollection and back to phantasy again is part of what makes this book so immersive. That and the near-utter lack of attribution (the man must hate quotation marks): the reader must sometimes go back and reread several times to know who is actually speaking at any given time. In this way, Sebald frays the ends of person, time, and setting until it becomes one long fever dream.

The grasp of the author on the threads of history is commendable. The first-person view of the decay of Ireland during The Troubles is burdensome and slow - not the writing, mind you, but the process itself. One is reminded of Gormenghast . . .

Sebald traces the descent from opulence to near-apocalypse of the eastern regions around Orford, where preparations had been made, literally for centuries, for war, both hot and cold. It's a bleak picture of what many consider a bleak region, where the green and pleasant land ends and the wasteland begins, sloughing off, eventually, into the inevitable sea.

This last section had a lot of personal relevance to me. The great hurricane of '87 happened the month before I left England, and given that I was forced to do so (plea bargain for . . . several charges – it was the war on drugs and drugs were not winning then), it struck me with particular poignance. Just as my life seemed to be falling apart and I was in the throes of one of the worst personal struggles of my life, the air heaved and threw the trees down. I remember. And, so does he.


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The Deepest Furrow

The Deepest Furrow by Jonathan Wood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As is always the case with Mount Abraxas Press, this artifact is beautiful. The woodcut cover by Matus Durcik is deceptively quaint and rustic. And while the narrator of The Deepest Furrow seeks solace in a return to the rustic, he finds it anything but quaint. Voluntarily leaving the drudgery of urban office-labor, with its demeaning social structure and seemingly shallow inhabitants, the narrator abandons civilization for the simplicity of life "among the peasants" so to speak. He finds that the simple life isn't so simple (especially when he interacts with the children of the rural folk) and that a return to the soil is, well, precisely that.

This is the second Jonathan Wood book I've read. I found this one a bit more accessible than The Haunted Sleep. Wood's facility with poesis is evident here, with just enough of an experimental edge to add zest, but not so much as to overwhelm. The subject matter kept things down-to-earth (at times, literally), and the narrator's voice, that of a mid-level office-worker, felt correct.

One must note the strong existential streak herein, as noted in my review of The Haunted Sleep. It is a prominent part of the fiction, though this is more of a working-man's existentialism, more Kierkegaard than Nietzsche. In the end, though, does it really even matter? I think Wood would argue "no".

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French Decadent Tales

French Decadent Tales by Stephen Romer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve dabbled in decadence, read some stories here and there and a novel or two by those writers known as “Decadent” writers. By today’s standards, many of these works have been, if not dry, so restrained as to make one wonder what makes the work decadent at all? This presupposes, of course, a certain notion of what decadence should be. Given our upbringing with cinema, our having been inured to violence and transgressive acts from our very birth, I don’t know that we of the current generation have a particular sensitivity to what was and was not historically considered decadent. You might be surprised, for example, at the many references to Greek and Roman classic literature and history found in these works, until you realize that many of the stylistic flourishes of these decadent tales were inspired by later Roman literature, when Roman civilization had passed its zenith and was, well, decaying. Decadence oftentimes does not equate with depravity, though there is plenty of that to be found throughout these tales. Nor is it always synonymous with indulgence and hedonism. In fact, some of these tales portray the very act of strict self-denial, a sort of spartan asceticism, as the ultimate expression of decadence itself! Decadence does not fit neatly into any particular box, except that of writers, generally of the late 19th-century, who held to a certain poetic style (not a strictly-metered style, but works that seethe wish poesis, generally). Many of these were French writers, hence the current volume. The introduction to this volume, which is quite good, lays out the different “flavors” of Decadence, along with some of the commonalities among decadent authors. But I will leave that for your reading.

I will also leave for your own reading and assessment, several of the stories throughout, particularly those that didn’t strike my fancy as well as the others. All of the stories were good at least, most were excellent, and a surprisingly large number were absolutely fantastic. Rather than waste your (okay, my) time on the more hackneyed pieces – which may have not appeared so hackneyed at the time, but which have not held up as well – I would like to concentrate on the best stories in the volume. And there are many!

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's "The Presentiment" is fabulous and fabulist. A nicely chilling tale of death and the sacred where the line between occult and the veneration of holy artifacts is blurred like stitched-on patches on an old coat. A very old coat, indeed. Five dark stars!

"The Desire to be a Man," the second story by Villiers de l'isle-Adam should have been an episode of the Twilight Zone. I would not be surprised to learn that Rod Serling, at some point, read this tale while camping in the woods of the Finger Lakes region of New York and took furious notes. In my own imaginary world, that is exactly what happened. Thematically, Adams examines the emptiness of a man's soul and how his wish to fill his soul with meaning(?) have exactly the opposite effect. Artificiality is a hell that leads one to hell. An insightful, disturbing story that leads one to a lot of self-examination of person vs persona. Just the sort of thing Serling would have tackled!

Villiers’ "Sentimentalism" might as well be a primer for dandies, and not for the veneer of fine clothes and expensive tastes, but for the inner dandy, the emotional landscape and mind of the devotee. It is a strange sort of machismo, feeling deeply, yet not expressing reaction save through poetics. A sad story, both for the antagonist and his lover. Five stars. And I must say, Villier's work is powerful.

The stylistic accents and pacing make Mirbeau's "On a Cure" a very solid story. Existentialism, and the rejection of stark nihilism, is the philosophical current that runs throughout. This is a brooding little tale worth five stars, if you can see them for the height of the black mountains surrounding it.
Mirbeau’s "The First Emotion" is a story of desire, desire so intense it kills. A morbid, but wonderfully quaint story about the awakening of an inner life that leads to . . . Five stars.

The seemingly innocuous title of "The Little Summer-House," Mirbeau’s last story in this collection, is disarming. This is decadence in all its horror and brutality. Not a dainty story, but the narrator proves so, in a most cowardly and practical way. Though it's a story about "rich people problems," it is highly unsettling. An emotionally complex tale, once one gives a little thought to it.

If you ever enjoyed "Spy vs Spy" in mad magazine, you will love Jean Richepin’s "Constant Guignard".

Richepin’s sense of humor (and self-deprecation?) shines brightly in "Deshoulières,” which is simultaneously an outright mockery and perfect summation of dandyism.

Half of Guy de Maupassant’s stories in this collection were amazing. The other half were definitely lesser works. "The Tresses," one of the better ones, is woven through with themes of obsession, longing, unattainable desires, and . . .necrophilia sans corpus? This is a truly decadent tale: hedonistic, possessive, and without shame.

I very much liked Maupassant’s story "Night," but I can already hear the naysayers questioning the validity of the narrator. Some works don't need justification as their cold beauty over-rides the jaded modern desire for pure logic. Screw your logic. Five stars, impossible narrator and all!
Geffroy's "The Statue" is a cautionary tale about getting exactly, precisely what you want when self-centeredness and vanity are at the root of your desires. It is an intriguing bit of fiction, so rooted in realism that it's denouement must, of course, be rooted in poetic fantasy. Five stars for this very clever, but never "cutesy" story.

Lorrain's "An Unsolved Crime" lies, as might be imagined by the title, somewhere on a line between decadence and noir. There's a sort of de-sexualized "Eyes Wide Shut" conspiracy vibe here, replete with masked, robed figures, but this one featuring ether, rather than sex, as the lure. But then, it's not quite so straightforward as all that. Much of the mystery remains obscured. The way I like it!

Lorrain follows with "The Man with the Bracelet". It is truly what most people would call "decadent," forbidden pleasures in a sea of decay, squalor, whores, and cut-throats and the people who try to exploit them, all mixed together in a stew of self-loathing. This story puts the "decay" in decadence.

Both timely and "too soon," in "The Man Who Loved Consumptives" Lorrain’s characters debate whether the subject in question is a near-necrophiliac or a tender elegiac. Of course, given the Decadent's penchant for objectifying women, he is viewed as wise, a person who feels more deeply than the rest of humanity, and is lauded for his cleverness. Though I disagree heartily with the sentiment, this is a convincing story.

Rodenbach's "The Time" is a bit of chaos magic, but rather than sigils and ecstacy, it is time and death that cast the spell for the hapless narrator. Only after he has forgotten the weaving of synchronicities that would realize one desire, but only in the absence of another. Five stars.
"Danaette" is exactly what I signed up for when I picked up this volume. I should have known Remy de Gourmont would deliver such a work of exquisite beauty. After all, I included one of his stories in the Leviathan 3 anthology, so, I suppose I wear my love of de Gourmont on my sleeve. The prose is absolutely stunning. The imagery is jaw-dropping. The co-mingling of sin and innocence is a precise hallmark of decadence, in my mind, at least. This is the gold-standard. Five stars like white snowflakes, if you catch my drift.

Never have I seen Eros and Thanatos so intertwined as in Gourmont's story "Don Juan's Secret". In that little sub-sub-sub-genre of stories about death and sex, this has to top them all. My goodness, what a writer! I already knew that, but this clinches it: Remy de Gourmont has ascended to stand side by side with Marcel Schwob as the decadents' Decadent.

Given my previous experience with Marcel Schwob, I had high expectations going into this section. "The Brothel," a transgressive ghost story, if I ever read one, met those expectations. Five stars.
Schwob delivers the grue in "The Sans-Gueule," a story about two soldiers that have had their faces blown completely off and the woman who takes them home to try to determine which is her husband. This story was disturbing even for Schwob, which is saying something. I felt like I was watching a Tool music-video in my head while reading this. Really off-kilter stuff here. Five stars worth, in fact.

I would swear that the literary seeds that sprouted Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges were planted firmly in Schwob’s story, "Paolo Uccello, Painter". This is a precognizant proto-echo to those two great writers' work, combining the best of both before either was even born. It is an anachronistic miracle. Five transcendental stars.

The strengths of these stories more than make up for the weakest of tales in the book (and, to be fair, they are few). They elevate into something nearing the sublime, especially the works of Lorrain, de Gourmont, Schwob, and my newfound decadent crush, Villiers. Can decadence elevate? Absolutely. But, like the fable hero’s journey, one must pass through the underworld to attain heaven, comprehending existence in all its beauty and ugliness, thrilling and banal. The Decadents open a portal onto the path of this journey. Take a step . . .


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The Justice of the Night

The Justice Of The Night by Glen Cavaliero
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The First Lesson

God has a great round face
like the sun, a dial like the sun,
a sun-dial.

His grin is the daylight.
He tosses the earth in his arms
on a taut line

far up into the night
then over and down to the day
from holly to rose.

We are hurled about,
his sport, his delight, his toy,
sun-up, sun-down:

he never misses a catch,
that good giant God,
tough and sure.

Cling to the ball
as it spins, enjoy the game
if you can, breathless,

bruised; endure the round
of grief and glamour, the theme
all laws obey

safe in the everlasting
thrust and clasp of his arms
at work, in boundless play.

Thus opens Glen Cavaliero's marvelous collection, The Justice of the Night. There is, beginning with this poem and shot throughout the rest, a sense of playfulness and despair, a lining of humor and hope to a dark cloud of existentialism raining down fleeting moments of opportunity, some caught, most lost, slipping through the fingers, but enough drops of Kairos sticking to the skin to impart the feeling of meaning to it all.

Perhaps I am too stuck on my formative time living in England in the mid-80's. Or maybe my recent trip back there made me overly nostalgic again. But Cavaliero seems to capture the very essence of the isle.

For instance, "Hellingley" is a reverse-hauntology, the ghosts of what might have used to be, but were only a distorted reflection of the present, until now. It is a yearning, an anachronistic aching. I feel it when I dream of England. I do. I do.

I thought that "On the March" had a familiar feel to it, despite the strange place names. Then, when I read that it was about eastern Wales, it suddenly made sense: Cavaliero had invoked Hay-on-Wye from within me, drawn Wales out from my memory and impressions. It's summoning magic, raising ghosts in my mind. Necromancy of psychogeography.

Lastly, in my mind, but not in the book, I am entranced by "The Auditors," which is everything i would ever to aspire to write in a poem. It sums Cavaliero's oeuvre up nicely, a bookend (if not chronologically, forgive the timeslip) to the opening poem:

The Auditors

Those clarion mornings on the hill,
the auburn stone of balustrades, celestial
intervals of bells - such stainless recollections
are precarious: very soon

the holy landscape of the visionary
poets, lovers, priests, affording miracles
of stupefying grace too beautiful for sight,
reveals obscenities

to blighted carrion plots
you come across by chance. Uneasiness infests you
as it crawls in hair and skin. Some shed or nettle-patch,
that crumbling privy . . .

Always and everywhere
the grey judicious unimpassioned angels
taking stock will register each violation
of an urge to live

despite all discord,
and they let things be. A coachload on the motorway
goes roaring through the dangerous rain, the tarmac glares,
no intersection

interrupts. The auditors
are not concerned: familiar with fatalities
in underpasses, swamps or lonely woodland,
they administer

oblivion, their heartless love
dispensing coal-black wine to obviate
the plight of every grid-locked suppliant
and to underwrite each debt.

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The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories

The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had previously read two stories (novellas, really) in this volume: "The Great God Pan" and "The White People". I liked those stores and was excited to re-read them. And Machen's reputation among horror aficionados whose opinions I appreciate and respect, especially those who favor a more literary style (as I do), gave me confidence that I might enjoy the remaining stories. I seem to recall that Lovecraft lauded Machen's work, as did Stephen King. Those were good indicators from two pretty good writers, as well.

But as I read The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories, an unanticipated question kept percolating up in my thoughts: When you say "Machen is a great writer," who do you mean? Yes, "Arthur Machen" is the obvious answer. But which one? Which Machen are you referring to? The Arthur Conan Doyle-like page turner of “The Red Hand” (which I wanted to keep calling "The Red Right Hand" - thank you very much, Nick Cave), the writer of “The Monstrance” with powerful echos of M.R. James, the Charles Dickensanian “The Tree of Life,” or the Dunsanian visions of “N”?

Machen is all of these, but with something more, something unique – a subtlety of hand and a careful movement of plot, sweetly lead by his studied use and manipulation of Word and Phrase. I capitalize these, because in Machen’s hands, these elements, these tools, are elevated beyond the banal usage of the terms. They become something special and “new” under his pen (though when one reads his strange mutation of certain terms, one is compelled to say “of course, why did I ever think of this word/phrase in any other way? In any case, I shall never think of it in the same way again!”

For instance, there is this from "The Three Imposters":

". . . I too burned with the lust of the chase, not pausing to consider that I knew not what we were to unshadow."

This is the sort of turn-of-phrase that I love in Machen. And that word: "unshadow," so evocative and full of implication. Given the context of a Russian-doll series of narratives within narratives, the term is especially apropos and lends a certain gravity to the meta-narrative from within the narrative - the meta-narrative "in the shadows" beyond the reader and the explicit words on the page. With one word, Machen pushes us out into the unknown; a sort of literary practical joke aimed at the careful reader.

And these stories do deserve a careful reading. They are not shocking in that Lovecraftian "the entire universe wants to eat us all, oh no, my poor sanity!" way. They are most definitely not the antinatalist murky depths of Thomas Ligotti (though there is a good deal of existentialism throughout these works). They are much more subtle. More careful and deliberate.

But that does not mean they are "straightforward". Far from it! I believe that "The Great God Pan" benefits from what seems like disorganization of thought. Vagaries and jagged connection points lead the reader on a frenetic, dreadful path, allowing each individual to come to their own conclusions, their own "end plot". "The Three Imposters" is mind-blowingly complex. Wheels within wheels, all shot through with decadence and hauntings and rotting bodies and tentacles. It works not because Machen ties off all the ends in a neat little bundle (he does not), but because the readers mind takes the disparate directions and waypoints and makes its own blurred map of what might have happened in the tale. I loved "The White People," but to tell you what it was "about"? Um. No. It's essentially plotless, a labyrinthine meandering through the eyes of a young girl discovering . . . well, she can't tell you all that she's discovered. It's simply not possible. Machen does a wonderful job of using inference and redaction to tease the reader with an intentionally occulted (I use the word exactly) vision of what lies beyond, accessible, but hidden.

You will exit many of these stories in a state of utter confusion, wondering what just hit your brain. But you will feel the impact of something sinister hiding in the veins of the earth or just beyond that hill ahead or in the complex motivations of the seemingly innocent. These stories are insidious!

Even in stories where there is a "traditional" twist ending, there is something in the subtle way that Machen lays his tales out that allows for a "twist" ending that isn't a cheap-shot, like I find in many short stories (especially those written by less-experienced authors). "Ritual," for example, is no exception. It's microfiction, or close to it, so it relies on a twist at the end, but by the time you get there, you're like a frog that's been slowly brought to boil in horror. Your realization comes too late! And even after the twist is revealed, your brain will continue tumbling forward, making suppositions and venturing guesses as to what really happened.

This is what Machen provides, then: a labyrinthine path to uncertainty and, hence, insecurity, where the only thing you are sure of is that you can't trust anything to be what it seems. There is darkness, horror, wonder, and awe, all combined, in this realization; a case study in Schopenhauer's philosophy of Aesthetics and The Sublime. It is a journey worth your while, all the way to the bitter, beautiful end.

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