glahnstack 8
facing the senses alone
Granted, I am a bizarre reader. I never cared about the politics in novels unless it was explicit that such and such character was in a secret Marxist club. Someone told me that David Herbert Lawrence was a fascist one time to implicate me because I said he was one of my favorites. I could care less if this was true or not, or if it inspired any of Lawrence’s writings. I was completely unaware, and glad to be, but I hope that person’s fascist obsession made him feel ravishing. I hope you are happy, you mole rat ding dong.
An author's political banner doesn't affect me. Nor do I need to be on their "team." Most good writers were into such fringe idiocy politically that I find it slightly humorous (several of them were also suckered by frauds, come to think of it). I consider it a senseless distraction from the finer aspects of reading. Hearing these tidy city rats gnawing at wild mammalian genius isn't pleasant.
I remind you again, I am an unusual reader and this is not about right or wrong. You can be right all you want but I never cared about themes or historical context. I never cared to look at a work under any specific lens or some theory. Plot holes? I would step in one as easy as a femcel's turd. The bourgeoisie? Jesus, please.
The critique can be extremely eloquent, I admit, but every eloquent critique feels like some subject trending on Twitter that everyone seems to have disowned their very mother over. The arguments feel very petty. All seems so ephemeral and lit by fluorescent bulbs. Within two days the life or death controversy is never discussed again to any real degree (besides a few lingering psychopaths who have made the matter an intrusive thought).
I'm prefer to be with those who are aloof. The cultural heretics. The goldfish that prefer not to snap at every object that taps the surface. Each new controversy does not need to be a line in the sand requiring our chivalry. I'll be over there with the abandoned mothers and out of that dead heavenly light. Over with the ones who are not afraid of being wrong.
I’m possibly a literary heathen because I want to free the so-called Devil from its gilded cage. The slippery priests have drank our satyr’s nectar for far too long. It is torture plain and simple. Centuries of outright torture. They've had their fill of Pan’s blackberry blood and now their blood child has escaped its cage and gone back to the prairie. They don’t get to drink that wild juice any longer. They’ve had enough. Now they can take their roseries and go pray.
No longer as readers do we need to be tortured by the healing prayers of sick priests.
Reading Wolf Solent once again.
There's a scene where Wolf goes back to his employer Urquhart to finish a book on local history. The book is Urquhart's passion and concerns the debauchery of the local citizens, all of the “salty little facts” such histories wish to omit.
Outside the air makes itself full, close to the air of dreams, more palpable than usual. It darkens with the personality of a coming rain.
Urquhart holds no ill feeling toward Solent despite his quitting him earlier in the novel. Quite the opposite. He has the prized Malmsey wine brought up for the occasion and both men get toasty on the "purplish umber" as gusts of wind rattle the window casements.
Before Urquhart arrived, Solent had found a book of pornography on the older gentleman's table and his senses were aroused flipping through it prior to becoming toasted on the wine. The images in the book struck every morbid sexual nerve causing his consciousness to glitch and writhe. Wolf opens the window on wobbly legs and the gusts come through by way of a large dark cloud.
The windows begin rattling again as the men are seated before the fire and a "wild gust" enters the chimney and blows ashes out into their inebriated faces and through the room.
Urquhart's prattling on about his dead former secretary easily vanishes from my memory but not the "wild gust" down the chimney. Even as the storm darkens the air to twilight and the rain pours against the windows I am still thinking about the ash whipping down the flue.
I have never seen anyone seriously appreciate scenes like this. It is not political. It doesn't press some current narrative for a particular party. There is an absence of designed metaphor. It is not a witty discourse concerning society. But it moves me. It moves me more than any of those things.
It is an old animal feeling, I suspect. Like a lone bull lifting its head to see heat lightning from the middle of a pasture. White flickering lights filling and vanishing intermittently through the warm dark horizon of the night.
People seemed to be superficially moved by things. They are not really hit beyond the nerves. And when the nerves are hit they try to overwhelm those nerves with slang or metaphor or such propaganda so they don't really feel the trueness of the contact but reiterate someone else's experience. They don’t think their own sensations are good enough.
Feeling something on your own and directly is fun and more honest. That is when things go clear and profound up to the balls. You have to be brave enough to let those things through and not allow them to always strike the shield of another's intellect. That is unless you are happy with another man playing with your wife.
Later that evening Mr Solent is heading home. The rain has started again and coming down heavy and cold. He fears entering his home because he is guilty of meeting another woman who thrills him more than his beautiful wife (he wants to fuck this new girl like a magician so she can be a woman and not an ‘elemental’). But also he is uncomfortable that his wife may be cheating on him already and the man is still in his home "like a maggot in an apple."
Solent makes a detour. He enters the neighbor's pigsty but he cannot get into the house where the pigs were rolling and grunting in the dryness of the hay. He gives up trying to open the latch, puts his brow on the wet lintel, and feels human misery at is coldest and wettest.
A wind blows through the boards of the pigsty sounding like, "Wishaloog!... wishaloog!" The drunkenness of the Malmsey wine has worn off. He no longer feels like a "centaur maddened by juniper-berries."
He feels his consciousness all the way to the bottom. Alone and to the bottom.