—As a dream-film, Long Day’s Journey into Night invites comparison to films like Beau is Afraid (2023), Holy Motors (2012), and Brazil (1985). That is, works typically lumped into the non-genres of “experimental” and “non-narrative,” place-holder concepts for what seems partial, broken, or altogether unsuited to the process of categorization. This may be accurate enough, but one should not take this to mean that Bi Gan’s work doesn’t make sense. Like all the films mentioned above, there is a story, but the logic utilized in the telling of the story is explicitly the logic of dreams as opposed to the classical strictures of narrative.

—In one sense, these films are undeveloped films. They cannot be taken as final articulations on anything whatsoever: They are not about life or love or place, but merely the dreamed experience of them, a fleeting personal memory colored with the textures of being-there and simultaneously, as must always be the case for memory to occur, being-elsewhere.

—Also inevitable is the case of being-inside-the-body. In film, this aspect is transposed into being-inside-the-camera. We shouldn’t forget that the film has its physical space of being as well, a fact never neglected in Long Day’s Journey, or Bi Gan’s work generally. His infatuation with the long take is always an inhabitation of the film’s hardware. In this sense the minor jolts and jars—in Long Day’s case, for instance, as the live camera is being loaded (presumably) into a carrier attached to a drone in order to “fly” during the film’s final continuous shot–-are just another aspect of another being’s dream, the camera’s dream imposed upon the human (or vice versa). There is the protagonist’s dream, which occurs after he falls asleep in a movie theater, and the dream of film itself, the dream of the non-human, the only vehicle by which the protagonist’s infatuation with a long-lost woman can reach its conclusion.

—Absence chasing absence: this is an apt description of the dream, as well as a description, particularly in the alluring idiom of Maurice Blanchot, of literature.

—This film is (possibly) about a man who is saved by a dream.

—This is not to suggest that dreams are a superior alternative to waking life. It is easy, in an infatuation with dreaming, to fall into such classic escapism. Rather, it is the case that waking life is a manner of dreaming. The salvific element entails awakening to the fact that one is dreaming, not escaping the dream.

—The Kingdom of Heaven is not some eternal, physical realm beyond the immanent and brutal facticity of existence. It is life realized in the fluidity of its dream-nature, while Hell is the dream mistaken for reality.

—This is borne out in the act and practice of lucid dreaming.

—In lucid dreaming texts, one is instructed to face one’s enemies without fear. I frequently remember one story: the suddenly lucid dreamer, instead of running from the shadow form of his killer, turns to embrace him. The dream shadow levels a gun at the dreamer’s head. He pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. “Just kidding,” the shadow-form says, and the industrial dream-space transforms into a vibrant, unending realm of peace.

—In Long Day’s Journey, there are nevertheless scenes I find viscerally unappealing. I am thinking, particularly and angrily, of the occasions when characters eat an entire apple (“core and all”) in order to signify emotional turmoil.

—The unappealing aspect is the sudden return of reality. I am jolted awake by the contrivance. He we are again, in the witty realm of the signifier.

—One is reminded of the clumsy allegorical interpretations of Freud, where the dream object merely “substitutes” another. The dream is too fluid for this.

—I will venture to say—doubtlessly prematurely—that the dream rhymes and resonates more than it substitutes. Its motion is that of refraction and reflection. Its surface is like the surface of water, or like the surface of a mirror that suddenly becomes the surface of water; the water-mirror off-screen, casting oscillations of lights onto the set’s surfaces.

—This is certainly incorrect; or rather, the previous postulate sits uncomfortably here, since I was previously so careful not to divide life from dreaming. One solution to this would be to suggest that they are two co-existing registers—perhaps registers of consciousness, perhaps of something else.

—I do not savor the flagrantly “cute” element—the sense of watching oneself, admiringly—in Bi Gan’s work, an element partially inherent in all fascinations with extremely long takes. It is less pronounced in Long Day’s Journey, however, than in Resurrection (2025). In the latter, the final half of Long Day’s Journey is almost taken up once again, this time in order to lengthen the extended take and amplify certain visual and narrative motifs. It is apparent that Bi Gan was not finished with the dream.

—Does the repetition mar Resurrection? Without deciding on an answer, I choose instead to ask myself whether repetition isn’t an aspect of dreaming.

And the city night is merely a kind of blindness 

How quickly this world has changed

And given up coherence 

The freeze settles across two hundred thousand miles

Or is there some redeeming counterweight

You use to mark love?

Time endures by repeating 

Almost soundlessly from the black edges of the room 

And still you palmed the Pearl of Great Value 

Steaming from before the freeze 

I glance up from a book 

Torpor and exhaustion of the workday

By what objects do you remember your love?

The sea is too old for that 

Out the window, a patch of empty ice in stray light  

Quick, elusive, night-hungered

His father beckoned him over to the table where the bottle stood like a black lighthouse at its center. His sour breath reached him from across the room. “Come here James,” he said before repeating himself, more quietly the second time. “Come here son.”

James pulled himself onto the bench in an easy motion, the opposite of the slow, unsteady movements by which his father positioned the sealed jar on the table before him. In the jar was a tiny human figure, a mannequin, seemingly made of perfectly black wood. James watched as it pressed the inarticulate ends of its arms against the glass. The dining room was empty and silent except for the boy, his father, and the small ticking against the glass.

§

Later, James, not a believer, would realize that if there was a God, a puppet would seem to God like a flower.

A flower is a gap in formal continuity, a surprise. The bloom breaks the assurance of the stem, erupting into a new possibility both monstrous and beautiful.

§

Objects James found on the beach include a variegated multitude of seashells, the overturned corpse of a stingray, reminding him, except for its dead smile, of his mother’s handbag, a once-colorful parasol bleached white by the sun, the torn remains of various fish, mounds of organic material that even the birds avoided and which filled the beach with the smell of rot for weeks on end. No one mentioned the mounds in conversation, not even the fishermen in their endless store of idioms that seemed to James like a strange language all on its own, insulating them from the larger flow of life rushed along by the vacationing crowds of the city. Gradually, having not a soul to tell him otherwise, James cultivated the conviction that the anonymous mounds on the beach existed for him alone.

§

A human being is a kind of recording device, shaped by the blunt impressions of its surroundings. James, like anyone else, was familiar with this process of recording. As the crowds thinned in the streets, he faced the school, a long wooden structure over which the low gray clouds closed like a steel lid. He felt acutely the impetus of transformation, a colorless hand, perhaps very the hand of Ostend, kneading him with its blunt instruments of equations and books into an unfamiliar version of himself.

But he also found the assumption that recording worked one way to be a deception, a sleight of hand like the roses pulled from the sleeves of the masked clowns at Ostend’s carnival. He felt that some part of him struck back into the world, penetrating blindly even the austere landscape of the cobwebbed classrooms. It was a resistance, but subtle, unproud, rather like Christ’s, whom James imagined in his final moments, in the very teeth of condemnation, that last frontier when in the center of the hand of Ostend opened into a mouth, ready to chew him to pieces the more he refused to dissolve. It was because of this destiny that the infant Christ was adored by the Shepherds, James understood, an opposition against the indifferent brutality that replaces the human when they dissolve into a wall of masks. And when the human presses back onto its surroundings, it is merely with the mirror image of the self, a mask lending its features to an empty room.

§

Whenever the atmosphere of collective somnolence descended, white-winged and without warning, onto the shop, James began sketching the sleeping faces of his family. In this way he taught himself the human form, its contours and natural points of tension, but also its propensity for suffering, its resistance and its aches, its inherent failure before the wall of masks. In the moribund postures of his aunt, in the jawless head of his mother, shockingly emptied now that their puppet strings had slackened, he found a capacity for pain that often brought him to the brink of laughter.

And when the scratch of the pencil or the stifled breath caused a sleeping eye to flutter, James retreated into the illusory safety of shadows, listening to their half-conscious groaning. If he recognized in their protestations a bitterness at the prospect of awakening, it remained beyond his capacities to understand, having found little means to distinguish between one darkness from the next.

§

Especially in the fall, darkness turns relentlessly upon darkness like dogs chasing their own tails, or like an oarsman churning the waters with a single oar.

§

Quite nearly a full century later, Emil Cioran would write “If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.” In a way this was true for James, since all his life he was followed by some diminishing echo of his first glimpse of himself in the mirror. He couldn’t remember when this occurred, only that it happened in the shop, on a day when the sun shining across the ocean filled the streets with an unusually ardent radiance. The silver light reached even corners of the shop, and in one of these James found the mirror, its dark wood elaborately embellished with the twisting bodies of exotic animals, tigers, serpents, and antlered beasts he didn’t recognize. There, through the clouded glass, he beheld his own face, reserved but intricate, even at such a young age.

Rather than inaugurating an ill-defined longing for maternal continuity, the wooden mask in the mirror whispered the first of many doubts in his belief of individual autonomy. It could be said that James was replaced, not vanished, by the view from outside. For him, window glass continued to hold the echoing voice of masks.

§

Among his earliest memories was a sleepless night after which he never again doubted that all objects, to some degree, are alive.

§

His father kept drinking. He would drink until his eyes became weightless and floated up to the unappealing paradise of naked purlins catching the diffuse lamplight of the shop. James had heard of heavenly radiance, and, watching his father, imagined stars congealing within the darkest bands of shadows, accumulating and condensing into beams of light along which vague figures of saints and spirits crossed back and forth, like tourists strolling down Torhoutsesteenweg.

But this was merely an exercise for James, who turned his powers of projection onto all surfaces, imagining there the long-nosed masks kept on three shelves in the corner of the shop. If there was indeed an endless stream of bipedal forms locked in commerce with God—figures whose faces he couldn’t see across the prodigious distance—their features were indistinguishable from these masks, and as if in a moment of prophetic revelation, he heard their harsh, cacophonous clanging across the desolate white sand, where black towers of gulls erected themselves over heaps of sea-bleached carrion.

§

By the time he left for the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, James had forgotten the mannequin trapped by his father under the jar.

§

For much of its existence, the mask senses nothing. It persists in the deepest corners of nonbeing, the lowest crevices of darkness opening over incalculable lengths along the bedrock of hell. When finally it is infused with the living soul, an image arises—faint, a mere whisper of light, like water reflecting a swallowed moon. Does the mask recognize that it is in the presence of the living soul? That is, is there consciousness in the dim awakenings that occasion the steady deterioration of the inanimate?

In moments of feverish disorientation, James felt that the stirrings of incipient mind, in opposition to the Ptolemaic schema of ascending spheres in which the inmost spirit was threaded to cosmic heights, came from below. This designation was not in the sense that the familiar patrons of Saint Peter and Saint Paul would take it. For James, below did not mean from Hell, but from the ticking of insects, spiders made of hair and dust drifting across the wooden floor, gray shells in the sand, corners in which the infamously desolate nights of Ostend unfolded on their own. . .

§

Following the sleepless night of living objects, James noticed that, in quiet intervals like moments of awakening, nails had come loose from the baseboards all throughout the shop.

§

The shop, the beach, the crowds filling the street during tourist seasons—there he would remain, since childhood is a dream that lingers after having been dreamed only once.

§

In his history lessons, James discovered the wide and well-trampled road of human suffering. How recklessly had people ground each other under their own procession of hooves and wheels, how eager to pave the way with the rent flesh of stumblers. What history had abstracted was an illimitable cruelty in the wall of masks, the same cold quartering James saw in the expressionless eyes of the urchins of the street, boys and girls his age or younger blunted by suffering into shambling allegories on a puppet stage. Like some alternate Christ entering Jerusalem unnoticed, they were skeletons performing to an empty theater.

Only in this weightless state could caricature approach the grace and beauty James found in the quiet respiration of the sea.

§

In a dream, the roof vanished, replaced by a starless depth from which masks dropped to the floor like sick birds. There were masks of peacock feathers and masks of emeralds, some limned with the dull luster of fish scales and others the sparkling texture of a windswept autumn snow. Masks of every shape and color floated down from the darkness overhead, and every grotesque face wore a different expression, a smile, a scowl, laughter, or a scream. He watched the darkness above him for the giant hand releasing the masks, but it was hidden, perceptible only by the vast displacement of air as it dashed massively over the room.

§

James watched his father’s stooped back as he left the shop. He carried his jacket over his shoulder, for the evening air carried the sea’s heaviness, trapping the heat of the sun. A pound of flour, of sugar—James couldn’t remember which his father intended to purchase. His mother watched too, face pinched in bitterness, waiting for the lank, drooping figure to turn down the street before giving way to complaint. “A man is only as good as his God-given hands,” she said. James tried to imagine God’s hands and discovered them to be unnaturally elongated and thin, filled with a restless movement like the tangled mass of long-legged spiders he had seen once in the dark corner of a garden shed.

§

The first challenge to his faith came in the form of a sudden thought that preoccupied James for several days. All at once, in the thick of a busy evening in the shop, he saw a man he didn’t recognize. This wasn’t unusual in itself, for vacationers to Ostend came there often, but alongside the image of the middle-aged man in his mind arose an imagined history that he couldn’t bring himself to doubt. James believed that the man had, in his youth, consulted a diviner, perhaps a palmists hidden away in the less-frequented corners of an unknown city, and that the slender, dark-haired woman had told him that his final words would be “Across the sands of Scythia.” James wanted to ask the man the meaning of the phrase, but he saw right away that the man wouldn’t be able to answer. The man was visibly shaken as he left the palmist, absentmindedly making wrong turns that would wind him further into the unknown city, just as James had sometimes watched his father lose his way in the shop.

Despite his foreboding, the man didn’t quite believe the woman. He had consulted her on a whim, one he wouldn’t be able to account for had his intentions been subjected to interrogation. He had simply allowed the dreary morning to run away with him. Rain had fallen for a second day in a row, and his business wasn’t well. These elements had combined to infuse his vague and drifting regrets with the cold aspect of fate, for in a life’s unravelling, as much as its joys, as James was to discover for himself in later years, existence always unfolds to definite ends. But the sun had returned, along with the long strand of forgettable days in which one’s actions are repeated without care, and the phrase rang empty and meaningless, Across the sands of Scythia.

The man, once or twice bringing the phrase to the very point of utterance, if only to prove its harmlessness, found that he couldn’t say the words. He’d turn from the brink, heart pounding in his ears. Death, if not the delusion of the diviner, was certainly real enough, and required no tempting. The phrase became an unwelcome intruder who, for several years, met each term of its banishment with renewed resistance. At night, it kept the man awake, and he watched the moon draped in rags of clouds out his window, circulating someone else’s words in his mind, for surely such a phrase didn’t belong to him. In these worst moments, they exceeded even their origin in the diviner, like a phrase drawn from outside of time, too immense for the purposes of human discourse. In this magnification—these were moments of true madness, the man concluded—the phrase, no longer bounded by formal linguistic properties, constituted the underlying fabric of all Life, a key to the forces that undergird created reality. It was an utterance in the Holy Tongue, the Lashon Hakodesh beyond the Hebrew of the Jews, the Holy of Holies that no one, hardly even the diviner herself, had any right to articulate.

Over the years, the man certainly returned to this obsession until it had finally exhausted itself. Purged from his torment, the man could finally emerge from his solitude and resume his life in the streets of Ostend. This is the man in his convalescence, James decided, watching from the shadows the figure carrying out his happy business. James wondered how many of the shop’s patrons had been gripped by equivalent ecstasies. Was every living being harboring an insistent attraction, like a toy spring wound tightly, towards an utterance set to unravel it? One day there would be an injury and illness, and the man, in the delirium of pain or medicine, might mutter the phrase, “Across the sands of Scythia.”

§

God, therefore, is not necessary for the mechanics of fate. The only role God could play is that of a poet.

§

The day after carnival, under the weight of an evening that seemed to struggle for an unnaturally long life, James eased the small leather satchel in the sand. Impressions from the crowded voices intermingled with the gentle sloughing of the sea, and he realized then that humanity was no more predictable than the white squalls that scream occasionally from the clear blue sky.

The cirrocumulus clouds seemed to him a gibbering wall of faces, reveling in the sun’s stolen redness. Long pillars of bloody light dipped into the gray mist of the horizon. James unbuckled the satchel. It was full of masks from the shop. One by one, he released them into the sea.

Initially, they huddled timidly against the shore, but with time the rhythm of the waves urged them incrementally into the spell of deeper currents. When the masks were at last like small black islands in the distance, James felt the urge to swim out and gather them again. He imagined arranging them on the sand to dry, waiting as the water warped the wood, further distorting their strange proportions. Far away, gulls spiraled low against the horizon, circling something large he couldn’t make out in the falling darkness.

§

A winged creature rose from the sea. The light from the two moons across its back reflected dully across the dream and onto the intricate flourishes of the shop’s furniture, which seemed to him like structures of bone in the half-light, piles of ribs, skulls, leering and vacuous.

In the morning, his father was missing. James cowered beneath his mother’s dark silence. They did not know that father had been found unconscious in the middle of the street by a constable, soaked through with the rain.

§

“What does it do?” James asked.

Looking down at the mannequin jar, his father nearly smiled.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

§

As far as James was concerned, nothing living could be born in the streets of Ostend, which were overcrowded during the day but fell into desolation at night. Only the beach, that unsleeping borderland between life and death, and the sea, surpassing both in its mystery, as the Eucharist once did for him, only in those realms did fecundity find expression. And from there, what was born gathered in corners of shops full of dust and crumbs, under cabinets that never moved, in the crooks of shadows behind shelves the customers never paused to peer into. It was here that Life, if it existed at all in the absolute sense, found its radiant nodes of darkest intensity.

§

“The artist refuses the world,” his father said, steadying his drunken bulk against the freshly dusted shop counter, “but the world does not recognize this. It demands just as much from the artist as anyone else.”

For the remainder of that day, he favored the company of his aunt and mother, an uncharacteristic preference that nevertheless went unnoticed amidst the stir of daily business.

§

One evening, James found his father sitting perfectly still at the dinner table. No one could say how such a thing had happened, but James’s mother took immediate joy in the situation

“See here, the old man has finally got what he deserves,” she said.

To James he looked like a corpse. He sat bolt upright, unmoving, his face pallid and eyes closed. He didn’t seem to breathe. James couldn’t bear to look at him, but looking at his mother’s smile was worse.

“Just look at him,” she said, as the servants brought in the evening meal.

At first, no one seemed to understand her enthusiasm. They were wary, as was James, that the old man had fallen into some sort of dangerous paralysis, perhaps brought on by his drinking. What a horrible end, James thought, to be trapped in the half-light of such a state, a hypnagogia between life and death. But the more James followed this fearful line of thought, the more unlikely it seemed. He was dead, surely. There were no signs of life in his dark, sunken face, the skin of which reminded James of oysters. It was now a face that seemed to have collapsed upon itself, an organic fold naturally closing itself off, no longer open to the suggestions of the world. There was no essence of light or warmth in the inert matter that had once been James’s father.

Nevertheless, mother’s ribaldry soon proved infections. At first James’s aunt joined in, then, less and less timidly, the servants. Soon, there was a small crowd playing games with the old man.

“How handsome you are,” James’s aunt would say to a general uproar of laughter. “How you have proven yourself, finally, to be respectable presence.”

Someone brought him a glass of wine from the kitchen, which he was of course powerless to enjoy. It occurred to James later that someone must’ve tried to give his father a drink, since there were smears and dark stains around his collar and nightshirt. James found such a possibility too terrible to contemplate.

“Why sir, you certainly have a way with the ladies,” someone said. It must’ve been one of the servants, since James’s mother grew suddenly vicious.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she’d say, bringing her fist down upon the table. But once she had brought the evening’s ribaldry to life, its strange energy flowed through the room like the small, independent currents stirring the glimmering shell fragments in the small pools left behind by the sea’s receding tide.

James’s aunt laughed at her, increasing her lewdness. “He’s always had eyes for me,” she said, “especially in his cups. You don’t know the way he looks at me. You’re too busy seducing every old fisherman who happens to wander in.”

James’s aunt relished in mother’s impotent indignation. The servants tittered, and when they passed his end of the table, they’d place an affectionate hand on father’s stiff mannequin shoulder. They’d whisper in his ears, while mother brooded, full of regret, drinking more than usual herself and staring at her tormenters with eyes pinched nearly shut, as if she were half-asleep and watching the nightmarish scene from the familiarity of her own dreams. It seemed to James like it would never stop, this procession of indignity and humiliation. The women crowded around his father, pretending to feed meat into his lifeless mouth, and the crumbs of their games dusted the front of his jacket, tumbled into his lap, specks spreading across the brown of his mealtime dress.

Eventually, however, it did stop. The novelty wore off and the women returned to their quarters, leaving mother to continue her conversation with father in private, which James overheard from the guilty safety his own room. Only when her voice rose in volume could James make out the bitter, half-shouted words.

“You who pretend to have given everything. . . leaving me with the mess of this. . . a grown man with the soul of an animal.”

A great crashing occasionally sounded, and James feared deeply for his father, for although he was clearly dead, James could not let him go. He imagined his father to be conscious, trapped in the darkness of the filthy kitchen, utterly defenseless before the woman who hated him. How had he lost the power to control his own body? James wondered if he would be there the next morning or if she would undertake to destroy him, perhaps burying him alive, or dragging him through the early morning streets all the way to the sea.

As much as James wanted to know the fate of his father, he could not bring himself to enter the kitchen in the morning. He had his modest meal of toast in the sunlight, trying desperately to think of anything but his father. It wasn’t until dinner that he saw that he was still there, bolt upright in his chair, the same as before. His expression had changed, although this had nothing to do with emotion. The face conveyed nothing anyone had ever seen when the old man was alive. An involuntary contraction of muscles left it looking more pinched than before, even more drawn in upon itself, as if the old man was in the slow process of swallowing himself. The crumbs remained on his clothes, and mother, who had also avoided the kitchen that morning, upon seeing James, said “What a slovenly being you are,” and slapped him directly alongside the head.

§

When the seasons slumped into dejection and the water became flat and the beaches emptied of tourists; when thin birds flecked the cold air, too black and angular to be gulls and the shop’s silence lengthened and the beams of sunlight were no longer pathways to heaven but spikes of glass and the streets were cleaned with less regularity and the smell of rot began to persist beneath the nullifying snow, James found his father playing cards in an old fisherman’s bar.

“What game is that?” he asked, full of relief at seeing the old man alive and well.

“The Fool in the Fields,” his father said, smiling widely as he showed James his hand. They were cards he had never seen before, a deck that appeared to be of extreme antiquity. Some of them appeared to depict images from the Stations of the Cross in unusually brilliant colors.

“The fool changes with every hand,” his father said, selecting a card that he quickly hid from James. His tablemates watched father impassively, smelling strongly of smoke and of the sea. Father placed the hidden card faced down on the table. Every surface in the old bar was blackened with age and deeply scarred.

§

Once turned to stone, James realized, you must chisel your way into the world, creating it anew, in your own image, fitting it to your own contours. Only then do you see that all the world has been hardened by death.

A bell falls into the stairwell of rising water  

Where can he sleep?

One dreams of sleep in a fragrant city below the oil smoke 

Alireza Fazeli Monfared

I see they remember and yet your brother will kill you ever again 

Cain’s red lights of judgment 

In the fractures of standing highway water  

At the antebellum beer hall—

On paper there is something sharper:

The flaming, tumbling tower 

Like that from which Yeats watched 

Soldiers of the Revolution foaming through the mist. 

A fine disorder. Refined, respected. 

While you and that post-war drink 

Spin a strand of deconstructed days, 

Time that has taken apart the human at the hips

True, but without the ideal map 

Bubbling tauntingly over the battleground. 

Salman Rushdie’s essay on The Wizard of Oz (1939), as presented in the recognizable British Film Institute’s “Film Classics” edition, offers far more than what I imagined upon my initial thumb-through. Most obvious are the improperly scaled photo spreads of stills from the film—most unfortunate, given that this film, of all films, is permanently seared in most American childhood memories for vivid comparison. For it’s true, what Amy Nicholson says in the first chapter of Lynch/Oz (2022) (because yes, this little book did spark a sort of Oz conflagration in my imagination that has not finished running its course): The Wizard of Oz is undoubtedly the film that says, to most children, “Hello you are a child. Welcome to the world of movies.”

It certainly did for me, as it did for Rushdie. In fact, that is what turns the tides in favor of this little book, despite its abominable formatting (BFI, hire me) is the impression of a lasting presence this film had in the author’s life. I don’t mean nostalgia, that all-too-low-hanging and rotten of fruits, but duration; this is a film Rushdie has lived through, both in his work and in the private and generally unacknowledged conundrums of fatherhood. There’s a personal dimension at work here, along with the unreasonable idiosyncrasies and preferences (the hatred of Toto) that are the textures of a prolonged inhabitation, anti-structural debris not assimilable to any (falsely) presumed state of objectivity. But there is more here, even beyond the gossipy tidbits of this movie’s injustices and dangers, it’s very real and insidious underbelly that only makes it more the “quintessential American fairytale” that Nicholson says it is. Rushdie also examines the film’s inherent contradiction, which seems to have escaped many commentaries: the fairytale of colorful escape that suddenly shifts to a didactic injunction to content oneself with reality. In Rushdie’s words, “Hold it. Hold it.”

There’s even an interesting piece of short fiction after the essay titled “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” a bit of speculative fantasy about the unacknowledged (real) magic of commodities, good enough to inspire me to dig out my copy of The Satanic Verses for much-deferred reading after I finish the equally Oz-inflected Gravity’s Rainbow.

It takes, of course, some time to write about a film in the way that Rushdie has—perhaps even a lifetime. It cannot be done on a whim, and it won’t be done here. The conjunction of Oz and Rushdie has, however, returned me to another film from my childhood, one perhaps even equally rife with mingled images of early horror and fascination, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973).

This is the second of three films released by Columbia Pictures based on the adventures of Sinbad from The Arabian Nights. Most importantly, each film of the trilogy showcased the creature creations of Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion animator of unparalleled style and imagination. The Golden Voyage is not generally considered the best of these films. That distinction goes to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), with Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) widely considered the weakest. The Golden Voyage, however, is full of the monsters that found their way to my dreams. I still find John Philip Law’s bearded and trickster-spirited depiction of Sinbad more endearing than Kerwin Mathews’s duty-bound and baldly European iteration.

Harryhausen was an uncontested master of his craft. Returning to the film, I noticed how often his stop-motion monsters felt more real than the actors themselves. When the feminine figurehead on the front of Sinbad’s ship comes alive due to the conjuring of the film’s principal villain, Koura, it struggles convincingly against the hull, finally breaking away with much effort and cracking of wood. The figurehead, newly alive, seems to incrementally take in its surroundings. It regards with mild curiosity the crew’s attempts to subdue it before easily pulling the spears right from their hands. Its awareness is dawning and childlike; a spark arising in the depths of inert matter, emphasized by a background of pure, unconscious night-sea. Against the flat melodrama and hilarity of the film’s human cast, a child might reasonably feel, as I did, that the dimension of “unreality” is in fact a heightened mode of being; intimations of Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” long before learning any formal distinction between animate and inanimate.

Kleist’s story, by the way, is a discussion between two friends on a “vulgar species of an art form,” namely, the marionette theater. Aren’t we in similarly denigrated cultural territory with The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the realm of pulp? What does it mean to watch the Columbia Sinbad trilogy—or, for that matter, The Wizard of Oz—as adults? The temptation is to argue, along with Kleist, for an inherent quality of grace we can no longer recognize: “We see in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively.” Kleist is talking about a kinetic grace like that of the animated creations of Harryhausen. But Rushdie also identifies a kind of grace directly tied to thought, a grace that can almost be called, in both Kleist and Rushdie, a kind of “innocence.” For Rushdie, this is innocence we are doomed to lose: “In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurors, with only our simple humanity to get us through.” We can now see through the trickery of these films, Rushdie suggests. We are not fooled by the blatantly normative (and implicitly capitalist) “lesson” of conformity in The Wizard of Oz, nor the rampant “orientalism” of the Sinbad films (reminding me of the many accusations of orientalism leveled at Rushdie himself, throughout his career). Can there be any return to pure infatuation from this fallen state?

My current enjoyment of Sinbad says there can. The countless hours I have spent imagining Harryhausen’s creations, as well as those spent with Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights, say there can. Rushdie, perhaps a little cynically, may claim we can’t, but then his exceptionally attentive essay and, above all, the imaginative work of fiction he closes the book with, indicate otherwise. Kleist provides the most mystifying, and perhaps the most winning, answer of all. “Grace,” he writes, “appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the God.” There is, it seems, a kind of mysterium coniunctionis between emptiness and divinity for Kleist—exactly the sort of lesson we might glean from Harryhausen’s inanimate creatures, or from the magical aura of the many “hollow” characters that fill The Wizard of Oz. In this duality of lowest and highest we find the trickster figure (like Sinbad himself, whose quest, incidentally, in The Golden Voyage is for the fountain of youth), a liminal being of magical inclination. Grace, Kleist implies, requires magic, and our enjoyment of these films, no matter how dimmed, must indicate a presence of magic—real magic—that surely we may strive to enhance. This can be done, I feel, with the very qualities Rushdie brings to his writing about Oz: attention, imagination, and a tolerance for sustained contradiction. Yes, we have our knowledge, but there may also be grace.

Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theater.” On Dolls. Edited by Kenneth Gross, Notting Hill Editions, 2018.

Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. The British Film Institute, 2024.

Wry runs the winter wire, the leaves at prayer 

One sunset after another come to rest at last 

Under a steaming pearl. The grass 

No longer trodden, nor pressed from above 

Into the shapes of shining hands. 

The verdure has the space, in the shock of stillness, to tell

Where the wind-hands touched it, fine memories of fevers. 

The steam from the earth spreads enduring light 

Across gold-skinned stems, leaves ornamented with incense— 

Each must hurry to its nadir of perfection 

Before the wry wind-hand 

Turns once more the heavenly pearl. 

The screaming that comes across the sky is anything but expected. It is one hell of a beginning, not in the least because it is no beginning at all. The screaming is no constitutive utterance. It is not a word. It is altogether different than the endless and uncontrollable drive of the Logos, no bereshit (“In the beginning”) rolling from the mouth of God to fall into the brief contraction of Himself. Here, in the insane, sky-long scream, we find no easy correlation to the concentrated dark spark of creation. And yet the beginning of a book is always its own creation myth. It presents the rationale for its continuation: Tracing the elemental shifts and equilibriums of a continued conversation, or recording the out-of-the-ordinary, the stranger-in-the-strange. Even simply for the sake of being there, like Beckett’s Molloy, producing pages in his mother’s room like an avatar for Sanskrit mantra, so’ham: That (is) I. There is the drive to record our brief time alive, the weird wilderness of being as a verb, and even the incomprehensible problem of needing to record is itself folded up messily in the record, a book that continues along the cover and spine and up into the bookholding arm like some living intaglio. Being always is—an eternal duration that nevertheless requires a beginning, entailing, in turn, an ending.

The screaming announces the end. That is why we find it disorienting, here at the beginning of a novel. That is why it must be hatched inside the nest of a dream—Capt. Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice’s, to be exact—although a nest is not a permanent container. It is no prison, as Peter Sloterdijk writes, objecting to Heidegger’s hurry to throw all of humanity shivering into the ontological cold. The bird transcends the nest as we transcend the crib; the same way The End grows up and staggers out of the-bombed out wastes of wartime London that, in the pages (late in this section) dedicated to describing the blissful affair of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake (nests again), take on a particularly sinister far-future dystopianism that we should easily recognize from old Ace and DAW MMPs. THE END is there where the beginning should be, in a way far more concrete than that ouroboric formulation about beginnings entailing ends. The screaming announces the need to flee the city, but Pirate Prentice finds himself caught in “a progressive knotting into” (3). Is the carriage they (the oneiric inhabitants of the city) ride built specifically with this occasion in mind? Is the carriage death itself, the shadow-version of the Merkabah in Ezekiel’s vision, the same Ezekiel abducted into heaven, bypassing death? The Phil Dickean Black-Iron-Prison-ized chariot of God, clanking with rusted gears and puffing steam into an intricately decayed metropolitan hell, a regular Rapture that has become our own time’s contribution to the archetypes, a City of the Dead in the sense that the citizens are poised to kill themselves along with the world entire, captive bolt pistol armed and aimed. . . Pirate’s dream labyrinth ends at some internal point, like the old mazes in medieval churches in which one couldn’t get lost, not really, since they were unicursal, intricate only in an allegorical sense and delivering each maze-walker to the same, inevitable end.

The screaming that comes across the sky is an inverted cosmogenesis. Not the Word that is literally the beginning insofar as it is an enunciation in Holy Tongue, the Lashon Hakodesh, but “a Word spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever” (25). A word that vacates; a powerful banishing. Death. The first sixty pages are drenched in it. Humor as well—I doubt anyone could understand this book without first understanding that it is funny, utterly unserious in its seriousness, or so serious as to seem unserious; serious to the point of tipping that regularly spills the Zen monks of the traditional tales and koans right into the hollow belly of hilarity. What is that term of Pointsman’s, the wicked, sickening Pavlovian looming over the end of this section? Transmarginal leap: “Where ideas of the opposite have come together, and lost their oppositeness” (50). Humor and seriousness. Life and death. Or life-in-death, Roger and Jessica’s little love nest in the country, a renewed sense of being alive stolen from the formless and implacable ubiquity of the V2 (the latest German missile threatening London), the texture of (inevitable) death itself having a way of clearing all delusions. No one, after all, will succumb to that slow and steady labor of the final breaths wishing they had spent more time in the war (any war), just as they won’t wish they had dedicated more of their now-precious waking hours to politics, gossip, and fashion than to love.

On the lighter side, I haven’t mentioned Tyrone Slothrope’s ability to sense the locations of rocket impacts by the occurrence of erections, nor Pirate Prentice’s ability to “take on” the fantasies of others, resulting in an episode that closely resembles The Blob (yet another instance of formlessness—a Deleuzean should have a heyday with this novel, ticking off rhizomes. In fact, I’d wager some already have, and published papers for it.). Scenes are punctuated with songs and dance routines. This is (probably) a book about film, or a book resembling a film—rather, a supercut of films, an overwhelming barrage of “talkies” of the cinematic Golden Age that have always been something of our collective hallucination, a vivid projection in the Gebserian preperspectival space of the theater where dreams and reality haven’t quite gotten a chance to gel and separate. That fever dream of America’s story was always tied to the screen: silver, glass, and plasma. Pointsman worries: “Will Postwar be nothing but ‘events,’ newly created one moment to the next? No links” (56)? He should have said “images on a screen.” And here we are in 1944, where really the whole nightmare begins to take off, Pynchon searching the rubble and muck for survivors into our time (or his, the 70s, where the cultural nimbus practically stopped, or at least slowed down): Death, paranoia, the deeply Protestant horror of both the supernatural and science alike (it has tried like hell but has conquered neither). The impossible, unsolvable problem of freedom in an essentially unfree world; The Gordian Knot that the symbiotic forces of war and money would make of happiness; How to say, with Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.”

We are all better off that Pynchon never asked, like much of his supposed postmodern colleagues, how to say anything at all—a problem he solved by saying it all. We do not get the sense that he refused many impulses or stopped to ponder if this or that met the prevailing standards of digestibility and decorum. Pynchon maintained an openness to the burning writing-drive, and the reading-drive is still warmed by his manic enthusiasm.

My teacher, Mora, was older than any other woman I knew. She might have been ageless, even as old as the tower itself. Her hair was bluer than the marble statuary in father’s archive, and the deep folds around her eyes seemed dry and colder than paper. She was afraid of something in the air around us—we knew this because she wore a large glass shield around her head. Judging by such an extravagance, we knew she could not have been a servant, but someone from above, perhaps the lone visible extension of the elite, one of their tendrils permitted to bend all the way to our level. There was nothing radiant about her, nothing remaining from the realm of supernal glory we all imagined—half hoping, half dreaming—she belonged to. Through the glass, her voice sounded as if it came from far away, a muted groan that might’ve been the shifting of the tower’s upper levels, a moaning of the shuddering of iron beams, vocalizations through a giant larynx of immense metal columns.

Generally, the other girls feared her second only to their fathers, but Mora was gentler with me than she was with them, sensing, perhaps, that the thread that kept me anchored to the servants’ quarters was under strain. She couldn’t have known that I dreamed of father’s old rooms of treasure—our journeys there together were secret and, if not forbidden, unusual—but she could doubtless see that I was pulled by something. By what? An ambition I couldn’t have understood, since the knowledge of ambition was hidden from us. But does any human feeling truly require understanding in order to exist?

“Remember, a woman is a vessel,” she would say, looking directly at me with eyes that were simply two more globes of pale green light among the fixtures illuminating the cluttered darkness of the classroom’s interior, and I would remember the round, grotesque limestone statues of women without faces or hands: yes, much like rounded pots tapering narrowly at the bottom. In the archive, they were kept, like Mora herself, under a sphere of glass. “Why were these statues called Venus?” I would ask my father again in the evening, and he would become sadder as he reminded me that much was lost in the immensity of time: the origin of things, their rationale, even their stories.

Every week, four of my days out of seven belonged to Mora. I would glimpse father in passing as he slid from our private cell, striding alone down a rarely used hallway where I knew the pale green lights on the ceiling grew dimmer and further apart. I learned to watch him vanish down the long, curving corridor without jealousy—I knew I would have my time to join him, and I learned to savor my anticipation, especially when I realized mine was a joy none of the other girls had the privilege to share.

During the week, it was easier to pretend father and the archive never existed. Alongside the other girls, each missing or dreading a father themselves, I listened to Mora’s faraway voice recite the Seven Virtues of Motionlessness, or I allowed myself to be lulled into hypnagogia by the rhythmic cadences of the Stations of Spiritual Lithification. We were not required to memorize the texts, merely to sit, absorbing them into our natural architecture. Verse by verse she would carry us into the afternoon hours until her distant voice fell away into vastness, gradually quickening while we nodded at our desks, as if she aspired to an ascending destination none of us could foresee—back, perhaps, to the Supernal Light of the elite. The words reached a pitch of feverish intensity, and we were thrown into sudden wakefulness by complex, dreamlike descriptions of machines shaped like long chairs upholstered with flowing carpets of orange filaments. These chairs were meant to preserve into extreme longevity the lives of people who remained in them—people we had never seen, people we could only imagine. We, or many of us—at least as far as I came to understand it—were to be the operators and attendants of these machines for the length of our natural lives.

Our days with Mora flowed together without separation. Even us, her students, seemed to meld into a single, formless organism, a complex entanglement like the mycelia secretly connecting the trees beneath the soil of the NEED garden. Unlike in the wider world beyond the tower—a world, as difficult as it is to imagine now, I wasn’t yet aware of—here there were no impulses to form friendships or alliances. Everything Mora taught us encouraged extreme invisibility and dissolution: her voice drew a dark, luxuriant narcosis across the green glowing room, and under the imposition of silence we opened ourselves to each other. The boundaries of our minds and bodies faded, and we shared, instead of friendships, half-sensed terrors: fears of the dark, voices perceived in the empty corridors, visitations in the dead of night from the fathers of the less fortunate girls. We swam through their horror like a seabed of dead coral, but I don’t recall resenting this invasion—if anything, there was hope that sharing their torments brought the unlucky ones some relief, even if such relief inevitably ended when, one by one, we watched each other vanish along the curvature of the many hallways branching from the classroom to our cells. Only then might we shed the rhythmic drone of Mora’s far-away conjuring; only then could we forget the long, life-giving chairs we were forbidden to sit in; only then would the soft-edged, gray oblivion we rode together down the tower’s deepest cracks and crevices adopt the insubstantiality of dreams, allowing us to begin questioning whether any of it truly happened at all.

Over the years, I have come to believe it was I and only I, the daughter of the archivist, who managed to fully escape Mora’s influence. I am certain that Mora sensed this freedom—certainly she resented it, but she was forced to respect it since she could do nothing about it.

What a gift it was, that every week had an ending, and that mine did not end in terror! Father would wait for me on the fourth day, his thin torso bent beneath the domed ceiling of our cell. Already he would have loaded the rough patchwork sack with the few required items: the day’s dehydrated meal, a canteen, and a fine, ancient shawl with knotted tassels at its four corners that we would take turns resting on. “Are you prepared?” he would ask, knowing there was nothing I could possibly need to do to prepare.

In a giddy fever, we’d leave the cell in the opposite direction I took to Mora’s classroom. Cautiously, at first, but due to no real threat, we’d slink on and on into the black hallways, restraining our laughter and making as little noise as possible with our footfalls. We’d continue like this until the dull green lights became sparse along the ceiling, plunging the tunnel into lingering stretches of darkness. Certain then that we were alone, we grew bolder, even to the point of carelessness, pausing only to pound the dark wet walls and the doors to empty chambers with our bare hands. Together, we shouted into the darkness, listening for the lengthening echo of our voices. We laughed, afraid of nothing, daring, in our minds, Mora or one of the other fathers to confront us in our exuberance, for suddenly, we were confident the light of our freedom would swallow them, burning them so deeply into the surrounding gloom that they would remain a stain on the sides of the corridor, another unmoving shadow, much like the shadows Mora wanted to make of us: shadows waiting decades at a time for the lights holding them in place to flicker so that they might pass on, waiting and doomed to perpetual disappointment.

Eventually, rounding a corner we’d meet what was always waiting for us: the smell of the NEED garden. We could taste it in the thickening air; we could nearly knead it like grease between our fingertips, an organic miasma unlike anything else in the tower. The enclosed rot and decay called to us, and we’d follow its traces until, around a corner, the garden itself would suddenly appear. From behind the protection of concave glass, its brightness flooding the black hallway. To enter, we slid aside a white segment of the wall.

Only later in life, only after leaving the tower and its relative comforts, invisible to me at the time, and having seen the hanging gardens and tower top parks did I understand the state of neglect the NEED garden languished in. Every tree was malnourished, diminutive—hardly taller than father himself and clinging to clumps of leaves never quite green. Their trunks were covered with black tendrils of long-dead vines I still cannot identify, although I have made careful study of them from memory. The soil was shallow, and the flowers seemed only rarely to reach maturity after struggling through overlong periods of development. Nevertheless, I recall the exhilaration of stepping beneath the immensity of the blazing dome. I remember with indescribable tenderness the heavy moisture in the air, the momentary struggle for breath as my body adjusted to the sudden change of pressure. I remember the warmth of the dome’s low radiation against my skin, even the yellow words, taller than I and legible even in the searing whiteness:

Natural Education and Entertainment for Domiciles.

There was room to run, and we didn’t resist the temptation. It was like waking from a dream, even for father, who always told me he didn’t linger in the garden quite so long on his days of official duty. Every week we emerged from the cloistered tangle of hallways into a new world, and we ran and tumbled over the thick, weeping grass, leaving a green residue on our clothes never quite eradicated when the laundry was delivered by two other fathers assigned to this duty. We found that this small excess was worth every moment of their stony glowering, just as it was worth the humiliation at the hands of Mora on inspection day. Oh, how utterly we would exhaust ourselves, circling the amaranth shrubs with lavender flowers trapped eternally between wilting and fullness, tripping again and again over the thin tangle of yellow-flowered silverweed emitting a faint smell of mold until, finally, I’d sink to the hard ground, breathless, and father would spread the tasseled cloth, which he called a tallit, and there we’d eat our dehydrated meal, settling into the comfort of our pleasantly wearied bodies, cooled by the occasional mist cycle that descended from the radiant dome, leaving the NEED garden obscured in fog.

It would be incorrect to assume from what I have written that father and I always had the NEED garden to ourselves. Occasionally, another girl would appear in the corners of our revelry, even a father, or, once or twice, a pair of fathers. Silently, they would watch us from the forest of small, frail trees. Never once did a girl approach us, and the wariness of the other fathers regarding my own was well known to me. In every instance, they disappeared entirely as we finished our meal. Father would dab his face with the edge of the tallit, brushing crumbs from his thin beard into the grass. Then, smiling cleverly to himself, as if the next part was a secret I would never understand, he’d begin the story of the form-changing daughter.

Every time, he told the same story, but not in the same way. Sometimes he’d begin somberly, with the description of a vast, hollow chamber connected by uncountable passageways, in the middle of which was a large stone with a surface that flickered with darkness from far, far beyond the tower. In my favorite versions, he’d put his large, spidery hands gently together and turn them this way and that, forming a sphere that imitated the motion of rolling. “In a limitless, spherical chamber filled with the NEED garden,” he’d begin, “there was a girl who took the form of every creature she met.” He’d then describe some of these creatures: four legged beasts with bone structures extending from their heads he called antlers, others covered with dappled scales that walked effortlessly into the air, others carrying hard plates in limitless variety on their back, shells forming spirals, cones, or concentric rows of outward-facing teeth. “These beings carry towers of their own,” he said, “just as the daughter carried thoughts, memories, a history—her own tower, an invisible tower.” At this part, father touched my forehead with the tip of his finger: a rare moment of physical contact. “Only the form-changing daughter, by taking the form of every other creature—a process that was sometimes pleasant, often quite painful—only she could understand what it was like to wield the material form of a twin.”

The misty, satiated evenings before our descent to the archive were filled with the various exploits of the form-changing daughter and her twin: She used her shell to drill into the earth and plant the seeds of trees; her motley scales let her walk out into the sky and escape the chamber by way of passageway hidden by the giddy heights of the garden dome; with her antlers, she tore holes in the fathers who gathered together and tried to take her into another part of the tower, where she was expected to wait in the corner of a room, tending to grotesque, half-sleeping men and women who had decided to live out their lives in dreams while their bodies went to waste. Or, in the worst version, the one that follows me still into my nightmares, the form-changing daughter accidentally confronts her shadow, the one creature she must avoid, and folds into the darkness, becoming nothing but a bend in a hallway, a whisper of cold air along another daughter’s daily journey to the classroom.

When father, with a sharpness like those of the final turns in the tying of a well-practiced knot, finished his story, he stood, brushing crumbs from the ancient tallit, and wordlessly stepped into the fog that had gathered around us. It seemed that father’s strange story, much like Mora’s lessons, always managed to remove me from my sense of place. The NEED garden lost its character of confinement, the dome fell away, massively expanded, a movement I could all but sense by the changing density of the atmosphere, and we would walk for longer than seemed possible, my father’s tall form outlined ahead by darkness cut from the white mist, searching for the sundial.

“Not an actual sundial,” he said, appearing to trace the progression of my thoughts—or perhaps he speaks now, from this heavy emptiness he inhabits in my chest, “but a tenuous resemblance of a sundial.”

We’d find it at least in a clearing of sickly trees—trees that reminded me of my classmates and that I believed must be connected to them, especially the way these stunted figures stood attentively around the dark structure my father approached, the sundial a substitute for Mora, and Mora, in turn, now a substitute or a metaphor for my old life in the tower.

The sundial reached father’s waist, a conical protrusion terminating in a platform on which were arranged a series of concentric circles. It was constructed from unusual material, something dark and metallic but warm to the touch. The concentric circles, or layers, could be turned by hand, and each was engraved with a part of a design that, when arranged correctly, formed a figure. The skill I most adored in my father was his ability to manipulate this puzzle. A few twists, and elaborate, unknown forms would appear before my very eyes. “This is a toad,” he would say, and three moves later, “This is a hare.” Each figure surfaced and sank immediately back into confusion. Although familiar to me from the archive, I could not understand that these beautiful forms were once beings in the world outside. I only knew that I desperately wanted to form them for myself, at my own leisure, slowly turning each circle, sensing them step into new lives beneath my fingers, but immediately father would shift his back to me, and I heard him say with a strange urgency in his voice I found I could never ignore: “Don’t you look now. You recall how the story of the form-changing daughter ends.”

When father finished, there was a chime and the circle of ground surrounding the sundial began to sink, our patch of sticky grass breaking away from the rest as new vistas of darkness opened around us. A concealed lift would take us into the lower passageways where the archive was hidden.

Just as I savored the short descent into the old corridors beneath the NEED garden, I feel the urge to pause here as well, to embark on an aside so that the delightful sensation of tilting might overcome the gravity of the present, sliding me one last time into this childhood I have grown so jealous of.

I’ve learned many things since the time of my life I’m now recalling—far more than I would have wished. I learned what it was like to worry about food, what it was like to protect myself against the ill intentions of others. I learned how to bargain, how to find work among the sand drifts in the mornings and how to hide from the blazing heat in the hours when the sun—imagine my first, unprepared glimpse of this unknown phenomena!—breached the narrow gap between towers. Perhaps more importantly, I learned how to unwind in the evenings, how to entertain, feigning carelessness: how to laugh, sing, and befriend, and, in befriending, I found a way away from the sand and the smell of human waste at ground level, away from the pitiful servant homunculi. I ascended the crumbling buildings still standing beneath a greater tower’s plancher. In the Old City—a place of accumulation, superimposition, a jumble of dreams gone to ruin—I found, thanks to my ability to read, a new form of work: Mora’s work! The work of teaching.

I have just read something by a teacher preceding me by many years; a woman who lived here before, in my modest quarters crammed with decades of lesson material, much of it bound in brittle, yellow-paged books of impressive antiquity. Her name was Indore Cordie (is this, father, what you called the “material form of a twin”?). She wrote on a variety of topics, possibly at this same black table, watching the same band of sunlight sparkling high on the serrated skin of the towers opposite. In addition to a tetralogy of lists bearing her signature of words I mostly have not been able to obtain definitions of—words like callipygian, lechuguilla, and caravanserai—I have found—inserted perpendicularly, as if purposely hidden behind other books on the shelf—several original works by her: a long and unteachable monogram on ancient religion titled The Forgotten Sexual Drama of the Stations of the Cross, as well as a lushly descriptive catalogue in thick pages bound by string under the heading Sienna: The Rise, fall, and Resurrection of a Color. But it is a loose collection of papers that I hold now, The History of Disavowals, from which I quote the following:

“Every change is predicated on a lie, if only because a lie eradicates the conditions of stability upon which rests our reluctance to activity. It reveals a space for movement by razing the grounds on which the past will be made as we leave its conditions behind, for in a universe without empty space, movement is impossible. These grounds, however, linger beneath the violence done to them—they are gardens left behind in childhood, glimpses of verdant or decayed textures we half-remember with longing, a guilt-laden nostalgia for what we have destroyed with our own hands.”

When I read this passage, I think of the NEED garden; I think of father’s sad and distant eyes, radiated with life only on these excursions to the archive; I think, yes, of groaning Mora, that phantom denizen sent to prime little girls for a life of servitude for chair-bound beings I never saw with my own eyes but have heard stories about even here in the Old City. But more than any of these, it is the archive itself that is the true Garden Left Behind in Indore’s description. Only its forgotten rooms and its hallways, its magic play of lights—only these have I betrayed with the lie I conceived on the terrible night of the Propagator, the lie that said: Here I cannot remain, although I do not regret leaving, even now. I have found that regret and heartbreak are not the same.

The lift descended into a cylinder of concrete. All around us the walls were marred by moisture, a texture that became increasingly difficult to admire as the brilliant white light of the dome receded above us, fading from the size of a saucer to a gleaming white coin, then to a button of pure fire. All at once, the darkness surrounding us lifted as the grand entrance to the old hallways rose, unfolding from nothing like the miniature stages used for puppet shows in the Old City. There was a large, rusted gate with a yellow light on the far side—a strange color of lighting, unique to this segment of the tower. The gate was unlocked, but heavy and crooked on its hinges. Father always struggled with its weight.

It is clear that the archive occupied a much older portion of our tower. Here and nowhere else rogue winds rushed through corridors that were not cylindrical, but rectangular. There were segments of floor no longer protected by metal paneling. Father gripped my hand, carefully circumventing the weak areas in the metal grating he knew by heart. In some places, we teetered over a sheer blackness of untold depth. There were corridors where father stooped to pass beneath low ceilings, others where the ceiling fell away entirely and water trickled from the darkness above; rooms where we made our way around great formations of rust, immense pillars painstakingly built by leakage and corrosion. We crossed dizzying expanses suffused with a spectral green light, traversable only by creaking metal bridges; we came to corners slick with blackened ice and burning rooms radiated by overheated winds.

This was a strange journey. Even a dangerous one. From the current confines of my room, it adopts the improbability of a dream, even though I can see the base of the same tower I made this journey through from my window, far to the east, a green, looming erection overrun with vein-like oxygen replenishment lines. Dangerous, but a danger I couldn’t help but love my father for, for at last the corridors would branch into smaller rooms, each housing the contents of the Archive.

Although our legs burned and we were hungry again, the sour smell of the first rooms renewed us. Father’s smile would glow green once more in the light as we surged forward, holding the tallit between us as we covered our noses and mouths with opposite corners.

The stench behind the first doors would knock us back, fill our heads, and set the room spinning. Inside, a formless mass covered the floor and ran up each wall, accumulating in tall slopes in the corners. Room after room was filled with this identical substance, prominently brown and gray, streaked in bands of white and lightly variegated with shimmering touches of blue, green, and yellow. The smell of rot was overwhelming, mind-annihilating. Water dripped continually from the ceilings here, and only when I could bear to linger could I make out the shapes of intact book-covers in the mass. These were the libraries, as father explained. These were the receptacles for ancient knowledge, our only ties to the mind of the distant past, surrendered to neglect, the eating away of time at the peripherals of the tower.

I still have dreams of these rooms: I’ll step into the Archive library, searching for a book mentioned in the teacher’s library—a Don Quixote, a Dhalgren, a Fountain of the Final Maze, any of the hundreds of titles I’ll never find in this life—and there I’ll find it, just below a layer of rancid muck—there’s a loud sucking sound as I tear it free—an impossible rarity in perfect condition, although when I open it, the pages are all blank or written in a language I cannot read. But on occasion, images rise to the surface of the page, each culled from one painting or another of those kept in great stacks in rooms further on: a small girl leaning on a larger one in an expanse of fine grass, a woman and a baby and a crowd of faces beneath a pale blue sky, a dark blue castle with green lights glowing from the window—lights like the green lights of the tower, the castle itself like the clusters of blue mushrooms growing in the corners of the library rooms, their stalks like pale towers, their caps like purple minarets, their gills like black textures of careful stonework.

Father’s knowledge gleamed brightest in the room of bones, a narrow space scarcely wider than a hallway. The water here rushed horizontally from between the walls, wearing deep crevices in the concrete. A major part of his self-delegated duties consisted of keeping the bones elevated from the pooling occurring at floor level. Each skeleton’s armature was propped on platforms made from whatever father could find—crates, slabs of iron fallen from segments of ceiling or pried from the floor, stacks of paintings (ruined ones, he assured me), even piles of marble harvested from the room of statues. Armatures that had long gone to rust along with the loose bones they once held were moved to the back, out of sight, so that father’s presentation was unobscured by clutter as he lifted the protective suede curtain or tattered cotton garment from each skeleton: “this is a camel,” he would say, waving the cloth over his head, winking wildly in the hazy green light while his dancing movements sought the attention of his eternally frozen charges. “A peacock, a fossilized crocodile, the awful Deinosuchus, and here—the remains of homo sapiens sapiens.”

“It’s just like us,” I would say, and a look of pride never failed to shine from him. “Yes,” he said, feigning surprise as if I had happened upon an important detail he hadn’t recognized before. “Yes,” he repeated, looking deeply into the eyeless face of yellowing bone before him: similar enough to his own, beneath the flesh, his living shadow, I thought with a shudder.

If it is difficult to convey in writing a moment as it occurs, how much more difficult a long distant memory! The archive opens before me like a scream, like a mortally threatened eye, like the sharp and involuntary inhalation during the moment of carnal penetration. At this point in our journey, father dissolves into a corner with a few of his papers—his fevered hand comes alive in a rare ray of light cutting through a gap in iron panels. I leave him as I wind further into the archive’s spiral. “A camel, a peacock, a crocodile, homo sapiens sapiens,” I sing in a weightless, rhythmless melody. “And a lily,” I add, although I had only seen the lilies Mora brought when it came time to describe the progenitors—a day she called The Annunciation. I stepped under a low doorway into the painting room, where, atop a stack of faded framed canvases I had secured in the driest corner, I found the image of two girls in the grass. The smaller one with yellow hair leaned on a larger girl whose eyes were closed and who had draped a tattered red cloth over her red hair, her forward-facing expression either peaceful or fiercely controlled while the smaller girl looked away, towards loops of brilliant color in the distance—colors that have remained astonishingly vivid, unlike many of the other paintings, which have blackened like the black-boned crocodile, once alive and now stone. Alive and endlessly hungry: I am the crocodile, the awful long-faced Deinosuchus!—vividly I stand before this enchanting painting, wondering why the girl with the red cloth seals her eyes against the loops of color in the sky.

It is this painting, perhaps, that remains with me most clearly, the creation of a long-dead being whose mark is now an indecipherable smear on the lower right-hand corner. “Hidden in the origins of the word ‘archive,’” my father said on our very last visit, “is the sense of the first place, the point where everything begins.” If this is so, this painting is my beginning as well as my disavowal, a joint along which my entire life has turned: and yet, what is depicted there is indecipherable. All that space! That open greenness, as if the whole world were a bed of warm light and the smell of grass could reach through the air and all the way to the darkened clouds! Everything is there, everything that exists in the painting is precisely what I cannot know. If it is the truth of this world, then truth is hidden in steel and iron layers, walls enfolding me like bands of cloth, or bends in a hallway that twists forever into itself—like a maze, yes, this city of towers, and the painting is a miniature room on the highest floor of the highest tower of the highest mystery. And I know I will never be permitted entry, for before the entryway, the room becomes a mirror—there in the pristine mystery, I am the girl in red, sprouting antlers—I am the girl with the permanently closed eyes.

After the painting, I would pass through the rest as if in a dream: nothing could reach me, not the Venus figurines in mud-spattered glass, not the rooms heaped with fragmented faience pottery, where the malfunctioning light sputtered violently, bringing to life the glazed images. Before my closed eyes, blue hares leap, the slender necks of birds entwine, men and women in strange hats before strange structures murmur to each other, watching me, the blind invader of their little broken universe. Like a shadow I pass through the gallery of iron and marble statues where water has poured in torrents from the ceiling for centuries, blurring ancient forms into a fragile and terrible shapelessness. Water tunnels through a hole in a boy’s head and exits an abdominal void, hands holding a book extend from a shapeless mound of rust, human legs support a melted mass of blue marble that looks like any one of the towers out my window—this ancient world has been forced brutally to the present, for all around there are shapes like these, flowing, mountainous, elegiac, phallic. Only the two painted girls in grass are beyond my grasp–all the lists of words describing the natural world cannot deliver me to the moment when the smell of the grass meets the smell of the dark sky.

The archive ended when father vanished. This is nearly the point when the archive became a lie beyond which I decided to move, but it doesn’t matter any longer—I have already found what I intended to by the writing of this account. Three fathers were waiting for me in the shadows outside my door one evening after Mora’s time. “Your father is gone,” they said, laughing quietly among themselves. When I demanded to know what happened, one of them leaned so close to me that I could smell his breath. “I think he saw his shadow.” The other two fathers roared with mirth, but the one who had leaned toward me held his gaze until a sickness overtook me and I closed the door.

It was impossible, of course, that father got lost on his way to or from the archive, but neither could I imagine why the other fathers would harm him. As far as I knew, he never spoke to them, never fraternized; he was separate from everyone, a drifting denizen of another world, a harmless abstraction no one could recognize.

Of course he came to me again, on the night of the consummation. The progenitor entered the room unannounced, a gigantic being with luminous blue skin like marble. Silently, it appeared to watch me—I do not know if it was conscious in the usual sense—breathing heavily—I had not expected them to breathe! Gradually it lost its androgynous characteristics, its long hair shortened, its full breasts flattened, the smooth empty space began to fill between its legs. A knot of tissue formed then extended, gathering moisture until it was full. The progenitor turned to me, now fully male, eyes burning with pure white light, offering himself. I found that I was afraid and knew that I would decline. Even before I recognized father’s features trapped in that face, the narrow, hungry cheeks, the sadness below the empty eyes, I knew that I would not stay, that I would take my chances with the unguarded hallways, that I could not be this form-changing daughter, but perhaps a different kind, not knowing what I would find, but looking, embarking on the kind of search that seeks only to erase, until later, from the perspective of a different world, one can return to the beginning, the doorway one is not permitted to enter.

It seems to me that ideas are not equal to the task of telling a story. This is because no idea sustains the forces of existence, and a story must always tell the truth about existence. I realized this while remembering Luis Bunel’s The Exterminating Angel, a film about a dinner party that becomes inexplicably trapped within the confines of a room despite the absence of perceptible barriers. The room is not an idea. It is not an analogy, although an “interpretation,” like a plastic bag, is always eager to fit over the head of any unsuspecting work of art. The room is rather a locus of distortion, a drain which interrupts the logical flow of events, thereby providing the impetus for the narrative. The room is a hole.

A hole leading where? Yes, that’s always the difficulty, isn’t it? But haven’t we seen that holes do not lead anywhere at all? A hole that links one space to another is a tunnel. A hole is a hole by virtue of the fact that it appears to lead nowhere. It might as well be a mirror, so impossible is it to imagine what’s inside.

A strong locus of distortion is far more integral to the telling of a story than any idea, since the hole-object or hole-being itself is the gravitational force drawing the story’s characters out of the invisibility of their everyday orbits. There is the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the car full of nitroglycerin in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. In Don Quixote, the hole-object is other works of art, particularly books of chivalric romance. In Shakespeare, it is often a murder or an act of betrayal. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the arc traced by the German V2 rocket…

The hole can be anything, so long as it overturns the rules we expect reality to operate by, so long as it undermines the way our language itself conditions us to interpret events. Language, with its law of the excluded middle, its assumptions of causality, its linearity, its utter conceivability—language does not fully represent reality, but simplifies it, boils it down to its most pragmatic components. It is easy to sense this when you look down into the impossible blackness of a hole, when your nightblind, human eyes fail you completely and your imagination cannot substitute the omission of your senses with probabilities because it is simply screaming danger, danger, do not go down there! This is where your world begins to bend, where the world has always bent, where ancient peoples faced the kingdom of the dead, a world we will follow them into, and less readily, unless we’ve successfully smuggled their religion into our art.

And where do storytellers find these hole-objects? Where else but in dreams? This should not surprise us. To be born is to be a denizen of the hole, for a life is but a worm with holes at both ends.

I take my principal concern here as spatial. This is due to a certain fascination with the representation of space in fiction—particularly sf and horror—and the way our understanding of space informs our understanding of reality. One guiding voice has been Anthony Vidler’s, and I have, throughout my notebooks, articulated many times some approximation of the spatial orientation that opens his essay “Dark Space”:

Space, in contemporary discourse, as in lived experience, has taken on an almost palpable existence. Its contours, boundaries, and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the national to the ethnic; its hollows and voids are occupied by bodies that replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle, and are likewise assumed to stand for, and identify, the sites of such struggle. (168)

This reflection of the social in the spatial is obvious in the classic distinction between wealth and poverty: To some extent, our spaces signify our financial circumstances. If we can afford it, we have a bigger house and more land than those who can’t. This isn’t because the extra space is necessary for living, but because it is classically conceived as a symbol of social status. This particular gap seems only to be widening, and it is repeatedly the basis for representations of “abject” space in horror fiction. Always, the poor are the most intimately acquainted with spaces of horror, since of all the members of society, they live closest to them. We can see this quite easily in the Candyman films, or in Kathe Koja’s novel, The Cipher, which emphasizes an affectual affinity with abject space. In the latter, a black hole (ironically named “the Funhole”) is discovered in a storage closet by Nicholas, a renter in a run-down, poverty-stricken apartment complex. By the end of the novel, Nicholas identifies physically and psychically with the Funhole: “what if it is me?” he asks, “What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching stink of my own emptiness forever?” (216). This identification on a moral, social, and normative level, is quite obvious in most horror, which tends to revolve around abject space in some way. Nearly every horror story seems to have a “hole” that distorts the world around it, like the vortical motion of a drain.

But my aim here is to speculate on the future of human spaces, not to rest on the spatial dimension, overlooked though it may be, of horror fiction. Vidler’s fundamentally modern distinction between “dark” spaces (such as the “abject spaces” mentioned above, which, while fictional in my example, clearly have a strong basis in lived—and especially urban—reality) and spaces of “light” (spaces of law and order, the nomos) may not fully describe the current situation. More accurate, I believe, to spatial characterizations of late capitalism is the concept of “Junkspace,” a term from Rem Koolhaas’s fascinating book of two essays, Junkspace with Running Room. Junkspace, according to Koolhaas,

seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing. . . the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books) [. . .]. It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits, it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo). . . (10)

The concerns of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s ideal (and impossible) representations of the Burkean sublime, as well as the open (and equally impossible) “hygienic space” of Le Corbusier (both central figures in Vidler’s essay) do not truly appear to describe the contemporary condition. The crystalline, exposed cells of a universal surveillance society (a-la Foucault) have not materialized—instead we have a rampant proliferation of garbage, nondescript buildings open to the enteral processes of renovation and expansion, spaces connected by the cheapest possible means, a labyrinth of bland and empty hallways that seems never to end, accounting for the heightened popularity of liminal space in today’s aesthetic—isn’t “The Backrooms” the ultimate expression of “Junkspace?” It seems undeniable that “Air-conditioning has launched the endless building.” Where once architects had to consider the building as a discrete object with its own atmospheres and airflows, it is now from inception a node in a wider network of interdependent structures. “If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them” (11). In a sense, this proliferation of cheap material built with no attention to longevity is the spreading of abject space (hence the uncanniness of The Backrooms). Soon, we will learn to speak not of “light” space and “dark” space, but of an endless labyrinth of “gray” space.

This state of affairs seems only to be made tolerable by the parallel proliferation of virtual space. Another world is continually unfolding alongside the collapsing one, and it is here where official efforts of surveillance have found their focus. The failure of the science fiction golden dream of escape to other planets has been replaced by escape to a virtual alternative. The popularity of Hello Games’s No Man’s Sky is no accident, and is only the beginning as more to-scale planets come to resemble a fully inhabitable alternative to the Junk-infested reality we live in. The overeager greed that is rapidly cluttering social media platforms with virtual approximations of junk (in the form of ads and AI-generated content) may only further this flight into gaming worlds.

Furthermore, with spatial homogenization, displays of architectural opulence can only seem more farcical. Take as an example Trump’s recent plans to add an immense ball room to the White House. Such endeavors now fail to convey to the public the significance they intend—indeed, many are themselves instances of Junkspace made to superficially evoke architectural competency, as the inconsistent (or even nonexistent) plans to the Trump Ballroom appear to indicate. In any case, flagrant attempts to flaunt opulence evoke more outrage than admiration. This failure of “light” space to awe the public will deepen as income gaps widen, inching the world ever closer to the dystopian future that has worried sf authors since the fifties—a process that seems obvious so long as capitalism’s dream of infinite expansion dictates the trajectory of commerce and technology. As the population increases, modes of cheap architectural proliferation are further incentivized. The future horizon extending into the instance of unsustainability is a jumble of homogenized Junkspace.

Here, speculation becomes purer and, quite unexpectedly, in the dismal light at the end of civilization, the figure of Boullée returns. It seems clear to me that if humankind is to survive environmental disaster, it will be forced underground. This merely follows the pattern of all biological survivors of major extinction events. In extremis, humans will turn back to their roots—to the caves of our ancestors, to the safety of the earth itself, having strayed further and further into the error of the infinitely malleable. What will be different, however, is that the underworld must contain mass populations if civilization is to survive in any substantial form. It is here that Boullée’s architecture seems feasible, especially in its articulation of dead forms. It is easy in this condition to imagine, in Vidler’s words, that a “building, already half sunken, compressed in its proportion as if by a great weight from above, imitated not a standing figure (as classical Vitruvian theory would have demanded) but a form that was already recumbent, itself depicted on the ground as a negative space” (171). This new, post-extinction civilization would be characterized by massive submerged bunkers, sober domes sunken deep into the earth, monolithic fortresses of indestructible integrity. Amidst a natural landscape reinvigorated with horror and hostility, these echoes of Boullée would stand like headstones to an older world—our world—in which the sublime had been momentarily buried beneath heaps of junk.

Koje, Kathe. The Cipher. Roadswell Editions, 2012.

Koolhaas, Rem. Junkspace and Running Room. Notting Hill Editions, 2013.

Vidler, Anthony. “Dark Space.” The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. The MIT Press, 1992.

Sf is at its best when it’s deeply and uncompromisingly strange, and doesn’t strangeness entail a certain lightness, an immunity to the weight and hard contours of the Black Iron Prison? And yet Inverted World is anything but light. It’s a novel about work—hard and unrelenting manual labor, ingenious engineering, necessity, the inertia of tradition. . . all elements that seem opposed to lightness. This is a novel under the sign of the earth element, emphasis on “world” in the title, and yet it is deeply and uncompromisingly strange.

A clue that I will not elaborate on since spoilers really would take something from the reading experience in this case: this is the only novel I’m aware of that relies almost exclusively on a “geometric” conceit. Readers might not sense it in the prosaic events early pages, but everything revolves around a distorting locus. I’m reminded of a work of visual art I once saw by Oscar Muñoz in which images of faces inked in water were slowly stretched into incomprehensible shapes by a drain at their center.

This novel is another far-future dystopia. An entire city is slowly and laboriously pulled along railroad tracks through an empty landscape. Why is up to Inverted World to answer, but this deliciously bizarre city concept is the least of what’s bizarre here. There are descriptions here that left me deeply disoriented. At some segments I had to reread, puzzle, probe. . . and eventually decide to let the strangeness stand unchallenged, putting Keat’s “negative capability” to practice. And for all that there is something utterly normal about Inverted World. When it’s not facing the distorting locus, it’s sometimes tediously plain (but never for long). I consider this one of the many intriguing contradictions at work in this book. Even the threads left tangled are worth it.

This was my first Brian W. Aldiss, and it’s not considered his best. Accepting the risk in beginning here was an accumulation of circumstances. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon mentioned the artist Robert Smithson reading this book on a Manhattan bus ride (I forget the exact circumstance, and anyway it’s not important). I realized I owned a copy. If not the opening sentence, it was the opening image that did it: “The dead man drifted along in the breeze. He walked upright on his hind legs like a performing nanny goat. . . .” I began wondering if Aldiss could sustain this delirium. I consider these circumstances happy.

Earthworks is a future dystopia (I’ve had a taste for these lately—it’s the dystopian novel I’m writing as much as it’s the unfolding dystopian reality) and it’s quite a good one. There’s a bit of plotwork at the rear that feels a bit tossed together—an African political leader deemed to be a salvation of the desperate world somewhat crashes into things, embroiling the drifting narrator in much high-stakes action I could’ve done without—but Aldiss is easily a good enough writer to keep narrative weaknesses from defining his story.

I love his concepts: penal farms between stilted cities where minor criminals work a poisoned, destroyed landscape; a class of property holders of these farms who never see or worry about the lives they ruin; a hallucinating, traumatized narrator. . . all convincingly horrific, suffocating, and detailed. When he’s patiently painting this hellscape, Aldiss is in his element. He never strays far enough from the human—human cruelty, humor, and fear—to prevent his world’s haunting plausibility. But all is not dim and gray, overcrowded train journeys to mass disinfectant showers notwithstanding. Aldiss has heart, too. And imagination, more than enough to inspire me to want more.

There are more 300-Word reviews on the way shortly, including some on a few films I’ve watched, the massive novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and a classic Sci-Fi story.

In the meantime, I’ve begun reading a book I’ve anticipated for well over a year—I’ve even started learning German in the hopes of translating it myself. It officially releases on September 9th from Deep Vellum press. The novel is Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, a massive, 1000-plus page gargantuan that navigates an otherworldly introspective zone obsessed with art, history, and (one of my favorites) religion, including an emphasis on Kabbalah.

I’ve started a whole new publication to document my reading of this novel, which I’m hoping will eventually turn into a dissertation for my graduate studies. What makes this worthy of a separate blog is that no scholarship (that I’m aware of) exists in English on this book, and this will technically fall into one of my “specialties,” (encyclopedic novels).

Ultimately, I hope some of you will give this new blog a follow. It’s titled Reading Schattenfroh, and the welcome post is already up. Thank you for your support!

With the knowledge (already) that I’ll return for a reread, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave nevertheless has problems.

This is a war book, a lament by an English book reviewer, written between the autumns of 1942 and ‘43, over the sudden inaccessibility of France during the occupation. It is also a hybrid work—works without hope are often reflected in their broken forms—part novel, part commonplace book, part journal. France becomes a symbol for other blocked avenues: romances, past happinesses, the ideological contentment of earlier, less jaded eras of human culture, and what results is a fragmentary, digressive work, highly (and justly) praised by contemporary essayists, like Wayne Koestenbaum and Brian Dillon, who utilize similarly interstitial modes of composition.

Now, the problems: Many quoted passages (mainly from books he is reading, Baudelaire, Pascal, and Charles Sainte-Beuve) remain, even in my 2005 printing, in untranslated French. I found this problem to be minor, thanks to the image function on my smartphone’s Google Translate app, but lacking such technology, a third of this book would be unreadable to those who do not understand French. There are also frequent loose and inaccurate characterizations of world religions, and less forgivably, a penchant for misogyny (at one point, Connolly plainly argues that suffragettes cannot be happy because they resist they resist their natural inclination to submit to men—a piss poor take, even for the times.).

Beyond these shortcomings is a stunning account from the edges of a spiral toward suicide (thankfully unconsummated). There is real despair here—a global despair that is familiar to us, and a personal, thoroughly contemporary despair of the self-saboteur, the misery of laziness and of hollow comforts, the omnipresent vacuity of depression. This makes The Unquiet Grave, unlike so many, a truly hungry work, delightfully Dostoyevskian, desperate to leave its mark.

Ishiguro weaves an admirably strange web of events based on the upcoming performance in a small town of a pianist named Ryder. Very quickly, we are shown that nothing occurs in the expected way. Events are dictated by the logic of association and intensity—Ryder, for instance, recalls an acquaintance mid-conversation. He then turns around to discover the acquaintance in the flesh, despite all improbability. This lends the book an inherent unpredictability. Ryder’s anticipated performance, as the dream continues, becomes overburdened with significance. It looms with growing menace amid some moments of genuine hilarity and others of deep uncanniness. The book really does seem like a dream, which could be the only measure of success in the full abandonment of waking causality.

Of the three novels I’ve mentioned, The Unconsoled is perhaps the most truly dreamlike and the least interesting. A puzzling selection of blurbs to the contrary, not much of note occurs at the level of the novel’s prose. As in dreams, a whimsical emptiness haunts these pages. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time with them.

For his very short drama, “Not I,” notable even among his generally notable works for stage, Samuel Beckett chooses two images: foremost, the mouth, and peripherally, the hooded, unmoving figure of the auditor. I cannot help thinking of collage due to the starkness of these images. They are removed from context, abstracted components of the life machine, and pasted on a black background. But it is not truly the effect of collage that Beckett accomplishes. Visual juxtaposition is not the focus. It is a stark meditation, instead, on the voice. . . No, not the voice. On the buzzing this mouth described, the incessant noise in the background of being alive, the stream from which we draw the cupped handful we call “I.”

In the play, Death, or something like it, reduces the character to her essence, or something like it. In this dim and reduced condition, a purification of perception occurs, revealing. . . well, revealing what really should not be described further, since that is the work of the play. Reduction, purification—of course these are Beckett’s methods, but they reach an intensity here that may shake our conditioning to these aspects loose.

I say conditioning because Beckett is the oldest contemporary of our age. It may be that our nihilists in fiction and philosophy alike have grown too comfortable with nothingness. For them, it is a given, a feature of their worldview. It’s Beckett who truly collapses the distance, taking us all the way to its texture. For Beckett, nothingness is ever a problem to be lived through. Only in Buddhism is the intensity of his investigation paralleled, a discipline possessing the only technical vocabulary I know of explicitly designed to navigate the buzzing stream of no-self (anattā).

“Not I” is, of course, yet another instance of Beckett’s unforgiving brilliance.

8/10

Edition: I read the 2015 DAW Books reissue on Kindle, although I’d much prefer the mass market paperback with Edmund Duke’s cover art—there’s an orange mosque cityscape with large white embellished text in the foreground, a thing that evokes burning deserts and cold mirages. . . True beauty for the shelves. Alas, the price. . .

I wasn’t going to read this book. I was trying, in fact, to begin Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Before I got started, however, I downloaded a few Kindle samples of other fantasy books recommended in a recent Bookpilled YouTube video. I burned through the sample of Night’s Master, moved on to the book proper, and was finished almost before I realized I had gotten off track.

This is my first Lee, and it will not be my last. It’s one of those books that managed to change my perception of an entire genre—fantasy, in this case. Not that I had anything against fantasy. I just didn’t know it could be this intensely seductive, thoughtful, gorgeous. . . unless, of course, Rikki Ducornet counts as fantasy (I’m calling it: she does.).

Night’s Master is the first novel in Lee’s Tales of the Flat Earth series—which, don’t worry, has nothing to do with that flat Earth. Here it’s more of a metaphysical construct in her worldbuilding—or, as I’d rather think of it, an anti-metaphysical construct. I’ll explain what I mean in a second, but first I need to point out that the term “novel” is complicated here by the fact that the book is written as a series of interconnected short stories rather than a single, continuous narrative. This proves a stunningly versatile form in Lee’s hands, and we move across the geography of the flat Earth at ease as the narrative thumbs through the life of multiple characters in various circumstances. The view is panoramic, but also, always principally humane. We aren’t simply taking in sights of an imaginary world (though sights there are—deliciously strange ones) but traveling across a variegated spectrum of human experiences.

This also has something to do with the novel’s anti-metaphysics. Let’s get to that. The flat Earth is built in a tripartite fashion: There is what is simply called the Earth, corresponding to our everyday, phenomenal realm; there is the “underearth,” roughly analogous to Hell, but also related physically to the world of dreams; and of course there must be “overearth,” which is heaven, but a strange, remote, even surreal landscape of frozen gods that oddly reminds me of the album art of Macintosh Plus’ Floral Shoppe. By the way, the brief sequence in heaven is one of my favorite parts of this book.

What Lee gains with this structure is simplicity. An emanationist metaphysics of different levels nested within concentric spheres is ideal for accounting for the fallen state of materiality and mapping states of spiritual ascension, but rather on the sluggish side when it comes to rapid movements from one level to the next. Taking her cue from Dante, the master of the three-realm travelogue, Lee presents a stage rather than a cosmos. All the panels are wide open, easy to imagine, apprehend, and traverse. And there, in the middle of it all is her principal character: Azhrarn, who is Satan, but a Miltonic one. That is, a charmer, a scamp, a Byronic hero, but not a hero to the extent that he is prevented from being truly, tremendously cruel.

It’s easy to overemphasize the importance of form when tracing the movements of a narrative: its exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution—these aspects are visible, intuitive and logical—but of equal importance is formlessness. In a work of art, what gives narrative forms life, or texture, is what I call the “locus of distortion,” that is, an uncontrollable principle or point of attraction that distorts everything that falls into it, like the twisting motion around a drain, or the distortions of time and space around a black hole. This is what gives a work of art its inscrutable logic, its quality of being “based on unknown and hence unquestionable rules,” to quote a character in Pasolini’s film, Teorema (1968). Azhrarm is this locus of distortion, and like the otherworldly “Visitor” in Teorema, he wields a power of seduction that humans find irresistible. This power is so strong that the lives of his lovers are withered and empty when his affections are withdrawn, but Azhrarm uses this power lightly, like a child (and what are gods if not children, in some strange way?) leaving a path of destruction and suffering behind him.

Azhrarm destroys who he is finished with, who spurns him, or simply who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is wholly beyond good and evil—in short, a beautiful machine that reenacts the vagrant destinies of life. As such, prosperity never gets ahead of ruin, but neither does ruin ever fully prevail. What occurs on the three-part stage of Night’s Master is a play of opposites. Much like the traditional folkloric tales that Lee derives considerable inspiration from, the texture of this book is more seasonal than moral—everything is coming-into-being both despite and due to Azhrarm’s trickster-like wiles. That is, this is a book firmly in the realm of true magic—one that might prove a needed antidote for the overwhelming Spirit of the Times, but that’s a whole new dimension of consideration that I’ll end here.

I heartily recommend Night’s Master. An easy read, but often florid, frequently delightful, and very rarely tedious.

Rating: 8/10

Jean-Paul Sartre should’ve stuck to writing fiction. I can’t help but imagine and lament the great novel stolen from us by Being and Nothingness. 

I’m only exaggerating a little. 

I still haven’t gotten around to finishing Being and Nothingness, although I wouldn’t quite say I’ve given up. Sartre’s plays, however, gripped me from the beginning. Later, I read his short novel, Nausea, and began to suspect that this French existentialist philosopher, like Albert Camus, had serious talent as a writer of fiction. Now, having finished The Wall and Other Stories, I have no doubt. 

It’s not at all necessary, particularly in the case of his short stories, to understand Sartre’s existential philosophy. Thankfully, these stories do just fine on their own. 

Better than fine. 

In fact, this is one of the strongest collections of short stories I have ever read. 

Sartre, like any truly great writer of fiction, has a flair for the strange. This strangeness doesn’t arise from a practiced cultivation of the surreal. Sartre is by no means a Freudian, after all. The strangeness here is rather the strangeness of life, the absurdity revealed in the truth when one forces aside the natural and understandable impulse to gloss over the uncomfortable details of being alive. 

In the second story, “The Room,” a woman watches her husband succumb to a psychotic episode. In his delirious mind, flying statues swarm the room. She begins to sense them herself—his madness is contagious, just as it has reverberated subtly through multiple registers of this story’s world: There is a certain insanity in the woman’s parents worry for her, in their desire to have her husband institutionalized, in their own indolence, which they project onto the suffering young couple. 

In a way, this shared hallucination is a climactic moment; something of a resolution is at hand in which some truth, no matter how insane, must be revealed. The mad husband asks if she sees the statues. In the midst of her horror—she imagines them swarming him, bending over him, drowning him in panic—he concludes “I don’t care whether I see them or not [. . .] but I don’t want them to touch me: I’m afraid they’ll give me pimples.” 

Pimples. 

Such an abrupt turn is not a narrative device. It is the unadorned nature of psychosis, this collapsing of horror and humor, this magnification of minor, unrelated details to grotesque dimensions. 

This is but one detail in a book full of many that suggests at once, as great art tends to, life’s raging cruelty and its simple childishness. Its sublime horror and beauty.

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Mike Flannagan’s THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Netflix series): I watched this on the relative strengths of 2021’s MIDNIGHT MASS, and this one’s nowhere close in terms of cohesion and quality. Nothing really ties this series together—no, not even the work of Poe, which is more of a prop than a substantial presence, a mere list of titles and characters to name-check, which proved an extremely fucking painful and tedious process to witness. If I were forced to point to consistent elements, I’d be left with a choice between bad writing and superficial pop culture references. Whatever spark of passion that seems to animate Flannagan’s best work is not even a glimmer, here. What a disappointment.

Nikita Kryukov’s MILK INSIDE A BAG OF MILK INSIDE A BAG OF MILK. . . (game): This very short experimental, text-based game tends to get lumped in with “indie horror,” but it’s not really that. It features a unique visual aesthetic and meta-narrative elements that tend to get indie game freaks really excited, so I’m not shocked that it has gotten so much attention. It’s extremely depressing, atmospheric, a bit of a head-scratcher, and. . . not much else, I’m afraid. A richer story-world is desperately needed, and a tinge of character personality (aside from the relentless self-deprecation) would go a long way. Is it worth 20 minutes and roughly three bucks? I’d say so, but don’t expect to get much more mileage than that.

Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter’s SAVED! (album): Hayter’s gotten a lot of hype in extreme music circles as Lingua Ignotia. The change of name, reflecting a new stage beyond the exceedingly dark themes of her previous work, had me curious and a little worried that her sharper edges would be blunted. Worry was a waste, because SAVED! is completely nuts. What should we even call this? It’s like mallsoft, except replace the sampled faceless corporate pop of a bygone era with source material from an all-but lost southern Protestantism. As far as I can tell, this album features fascinating renditions of classic hymns alongside original compositions. Some of the songs are positively chilling, particularly the sections interspersed with unsettling samples of distorted glossolalia. Others seem perched on the edge of poignantly deep and genuine spiritual longing. Hayter’s singing, in every case, is unique and piercingly authentic, wavering between intense beauty, technical proficiency, and babbling insanity. For all its simplicity (much of this is just voice and piano), there is never a dull moment. This might very well be her best album so far.