Extraits de mon deuxième roman

John Russell Herbert

Where the desert met the ocean there were thousands of tiny whirlwinds, sand-dust devils, columns of light tornado that were peculiar but did no harm.

It was said by natives that the strange wind columns were spirits of mourning. Some of our pilgrims laughed, and only noticed that some columns looked like sharp columns indeed and that others looked tornadoes of the classic tornado shape.

As we walked through them to the water, however, the whirl-whistle made sounded like Arab-Semitic wailing indeed, and, as with a trick of the eye, hooded faces and forms were manifest in some, or in all, of the whirlwinds.

The faces were gorgeous, oldish or very young, all female, tragically endearing looks of anguish and lamentation, so that we were grimly enchanted and only slowly made our way to the salt sea.

He dreamt he was in the family's old blue Grand Prix, on some non-existent Interstate.

Occasionally the car turned into a motorcycle (an the dream was semi-lucid, so he thought about the bike's design, and gave it a very elaborate ferring, which wrapped around the front of his body, protecting his knees, etc., and the bike was forward-leaning and all controls were done by hand).

It turned back into a car, however, and he had no more lucid control over the dream

He thought he'd seen a sign for 695, but instead turned off onto 77, which became a smallish rural-suburban road. He drove behind a shopping center, next to some apartments, and he let Queeny out to run. She also shat.

She ran away but came back and was excited to get into the car.

For some reason he drove off of 77, left down a low driveway which curved to the right, then to the left.

He stopped, to see a magnificent sight, and because to the lane's right was a deep ravine, and the lane was impossibly, immpassibly, narrow, and to its left the terrain went up steeply.

The magnificent sight was that of an up-jutting rock. From the car's vantage point it was narrow, like a rod, and from the side it was more of a plane, a wall, reaching back some twenty-five yards, there in that ravine, in that forest that had only modest light.

Some local youngsters walked up. He asked for advice on backing the car out and made curious talk about the strange-jutting slab. Looking more at the other side of the ravine he noticed other rocks, etc., and statues, many, varying from Native American totem figures to statues of Classical Europe.

Noting again the forest's strange light, he realized that he'd actually driven into a vast interior, a huge museum, of Natural History, and of History, per se, of Cultural History, of The Sublime in general, more or less.

The ravine was gone and he walked through the statues into more structured galleries, and libraries, and decadent parlors.

The dream's plot dissolved into the familial strife implicit in Jack's soul; there was nothing to match the sienna light that played on those diverse statues as the ravine and forest transmuted into that interior exquisite and grand.

Though the Church and street were Classically designed, the Wind and Sun were strong, and they too spoke of Nature that is not Man.

Baroque tendrils burn through the fire and ice that are insanity, and through the freedom that is insanity and reason.

He dreamt that there were two males between whom no love was lost. He was sometimes the underdog, and he was sometimes a film-watcher, viewing that beautiful and endearing underdog.

The alpha wanted to demonstrate some store product, something that was not in fact a javelin but which could be thrown like one, and there were many of these.

Ianto volunteered, and got into a right-handed Tae Kwon Do stance, ready to sweep the light javelins away with his left arm.

He did reasonably well at this, and the egomaniac-hero-asshole-of-society was angry.

Ianto also had legal (?) and family troubles, by the way.

He dreamt of some Neo-Victorian (or Alter-Victorian) society, in which Northern or English belles strolled along the sidewalks of great aqueducts.

Fecal matter was found in this water.

Ianto had nothing to do with that, of course, and I don't think he was even so accused, but, on a tan horse, he fled.

He had taken finite note of something like The Pony Express (but this was not The Old West, and neither was it the Khanate of Genghis, though, as always, The Steppe was near).

The low land was the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland, and it was urban modernity, and it was some alternative to the Victorian Era, and . . . The Steppe was ever near.

Ianto saw a messenger, on that Steppe, trade his mottled white horse for another, and he, Ianto, thought that the route, and those stations of fresh horses, would play a later role in his escape.

However, he rode low on his tan horse, not up to The Steppe, but round-about back to town, to tie loose ends that needed to be tied.

Turning left, away from the rising Steppe, he saw the dead trees of late autumn that surrounded and were behind the old Charles Hall (of St. Mary's College). Behind that building was the path that led to the great city and its aqueducts and the store that contained those javelin things, and his family home, all the places of loose ends to be tied, of honors to be paid and collected, of reconciliations to be made.

For his loving sister, and for some less loving relative, he played a tape he'd made. He played it as a means of soul communication, but that tape with its mad layers of organist frills, interwoven with claps of recorded thunder, of course did nothing to bridge the gaps between any souls.

Iantos returned from the Farther Shore, but he brought nothing especially precise back along with him.

From Subjective Experience Back To Truth Itself

(I hereby cleave philosophical benefit from the context of socio-existential labeling.)

(This is flat stream existentialism.)

Flat Stream Theory Existentialism

In the night, groomed and clean, reflecting on past commentaries of flat existence and on the extrapolative assertions of beauty,

He saw all the brilliant matter there before him, streamlined into objects of pure, isolated, elements, of one element each,

Strong the clear,

pure;

Silver and iron,

Copper and gold,

Brilliant jade,

cut clean and half-translucent,

with traffic noise echoing in./

Avec un contusion, encore, a la nuit, he laid low. Being conscious, however, going to the ER had been out of the question*, so he painted, and he organized. He organized all things, all archives, all things; he painted.

Spectacular paint, godless, flat-material-pure, slid by way of brilliant elegantines into and through all that is narrative and all that is representation and all that is the human world of spiritual and psycho-sensual association, lifeless matter that is flat on canvas.

He dreamt that he had a wife, and that they'd been on some kind of tv gameshow. Then they'd been ushered into some complex of halls that opened onto and convoluted into streets. There'd been some issue of keeping the players protected from the masses outside, in the dead of night, in some expressionistically unpleasant city.

Iantos and pretend wife walked down one of the dark halls, and were quickly approached by a fat guy, another player, and they had a hard time shaking him. He also had a wife, but he didn't love her; he loved the pretend wife of Iantos.

Things got more tense, escalating to the point of his declaring that he wouldn't veer off until he got Iantos' wife's cellphone number.

That was the last straw. Now it seemed that Iantos had cadre of N.O.I. thugs in his service. He was on the verge of telling them to swat the guy ten times in the gut, and no more, with a nightstick, and he was thinking of whether they should also swat him ten times on the ass, when he drunk and semi-feverish ego woke,

then segued into another dream, of being on a walk, with a person or two, and with an obnoxious dog. They walked across great lawns, of the collegiate and-or office park variety, and into a house. The dog was not aggressive, but it was extremely pushy, and followed them into house. Iantos hated it as he'd never hated any dog in waking life. It took all manner of mistreatment, but he couldn't seem to push it out the door. It was as if there were hundreds and hundreds of pounds compressed into its sturdy and midsize form.

He wondered what it would be like if it ceased to be merely stubborn, in the extreme, and sprung into strong and fangy ferocity, there by that doorway, there in that unlit kitchenette.

He woke, slept, and dreamt that he was in some great facility, composed of smallish rooms. It was academic, yet it was also familial. It's interiors opened into wide exterior spaces, of rich and varied geographical types. (The deep cold of his apartment seeped into the dream and he found his dreaming self toying with insulating shelters, small and snug, authentic to some past nomadic tribe.)

There was fear and mourning, about various things, in those families, or in that one big family. The people, passionate, seemed . . . Mediterranean.

Iantos was other, yet he was somehow involved, involved in the struggles for life and death.

There were people, and there were birds, and there was a kite that resembled a bird, and that had volition, and feeling, and that was . . . much beloved, perhaps it was . . . the most beloved.

However, it was erratic, flying to the other side of some troubling river, twice. It was damaged, increasingly, by all of its actions, and it suffered terribly, and it evoked terrible pity, sympathy, love.

Iantos semi-repaired it, several times, and he knew that it was alive, though it was made of light wood, and of artificial feathers, and of delicate stringwork, etc.

He retrieved it, the last time, for . . . it had reached a state of tattered deconstruction that would preclude any decisive movement, sentience or no.

He hooked its pieces back together, or merely laid it components overlapping in some semblance of their past and functional configuration, but he knew that it was dying, that its soul was an infinite well of melancholy, that the thousand Mediterraneans who loved it were mad with mourning, that laying its pars together in a semblance of life was like . . . Lambert's Tarzan putting his ape father's dead, and his human grandfather's dead hand, for that matter, on his own head, to simulate the head-petting that the loved ones had done in life*. It was like Chaka Zulu loading his dead mother's scalp with rich black hair dye, which he'd always mistaken as conveying actual youth*. These things made educated Europeans drop their heads inn tragic love and embarrassment*.

As the Virgin Mary, the “exquisite”, the “pure”, “” . . is the highest female incarnation in a brooding and poetic, thoroughly masculine, religion, she is fallen as/into . . . mythology, sentiment, structure, “objectivity”, “universality”, “bias”, the . . . medium, “paint on canvas”*, und . . . “Leiben eist Leiben*”, but She is the vessel of that which is divine and pure, the Sublime Vessel By Which The Word Is Made Flesh.

He laid into an old painting, one that was only halfway decent, with a blue-brown-black swath of atmosphere, and with a tiny Crucifix, white, iconic, there in the illusionary space that hadn't yet come to fruition. Narrative upon meta-narrative, rich and baroque, for there is no such thing as a pure science of paint and canvas, material, referential to itself. Phantasms would spring up around the tiny icon, building a gestalt far more important than the contradictions of faith and irony, and this gestalt would account for all things ranging from dead and mindless matter to the deepest wanderings of the human psyche.

. . .

There was a painting, and all that shimmers and is brilliant is in the heart, art, art, of a man's neck and chest.

In the chest, in the place of a red and beating heart, there were the bright green stalks of an insensate plant, and the painting was in a landfill, and the landfill was in and of the world.

Le Monde, l'existence soi-meme, est une pastorale tombe;

Ainsi, maintenant, il y a seulement le Classicisme, le Romantisme, et . . . le Futurisme.

He regretted weakness,

And he regretted accidents,

And he regretted moments without grace,

And he regretted “fate”, or a seemingly/

infinite complex of chain reactions/

in the world and in hearts/

that weren't his,

But he did not regret sacrifice.

The End