The Voice of the Silence
“Adam Weishaupt’s ultimate secret was that the secret that there was no secret has served to conceal the secret.”
With “Wax candles spread their golden light” and “teachers who have been busy lighting candles”, the ‘Illuminatus!’ of this accretion-cage of meanings grows with both political contraptivity and mystical glowing: here a 19th century scenario hinting at a great female Theosophical thinker who also seems embroiled with this book’s ‘co-spiricy’ of or with Angels and Demons. Despite some false starts in my gathering leitmotifs from this Classical Weird of symphonic proportions towards a gestalt, I am now much more confident about my own abilities to ‘bottom-fish’ fundamentals (as well as trawling any ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’) from the ‘decks’ of the literary vessel that is the Box. [Any faulty gaps between the book's own seams are taken as read particularly in the light cast by the still ribboned pack of loose-leaf yellow journal notes yet to be investigated after finishing the book. Meanwhile, still no sign of those apparently missing items I mentioned at the beginning of this review.] (30 Dec 11 – another 90 minutes later)
The Law of Unintended Consequences
“In his long experience the unexpected arrival of an expensively dressed, arrogant looking civilian in the heart of a military operation heralds nothing good.”
…like a presumptuous real-time reviewer seeking the heart of a book but trampling – as well as stumbling on – precious vessels and veins as a result like a bull in a china-shop? Meanwhile, this story has a neat equinish conceit involving the Veterinary Surgeon being presented by the civilian to “the unstoppable future of our Nation’s Cavalry.” Causing, end-interpolatively, many real horses to act like lemmings. Sad, yet stirring. Rhys Hughes-ian. The law of averages is not an average law, I say. One wonders whether the Eastern-looking tent or pavilion was more of a ‘contraption’ in keeping with this book’s dutiful thread? (30 Dec 11 – another hour later)
[I quoted "the anatomy of the whale" earlier. I'm sure - in the light of my review techniques - I misread this as "the anatomy of the whole"...] (30 Dec 11 – another 30 minutes later)
The Lion Serpent Begets Gods
“The music, by the way, was superb. I congratulate you, Scriabin.”
If this book previously went into ‘overdrive’, it is now in overdrive’s overdrive! Gorgeous things (both decadent and undecadent depending on your point of view) embodied in sumptuous, Galean prose: depicting a new Bayreuth or Rutland Boughton Glastonbury (my inferences, not the book’s) – while tying up the book’s ’dutiful thread’ with Classical Music and other previous theosophical and “qliphothic” matters, Historical, (here) Russianised, Engravured, Empyrean, Close-Closeted or Universal. [I brought this real-time review to my surrounding 'Classical Horror' website before I realised the book was here to extrapolate on Classical Music at all. My family actually discovered Scriabin for BBC Radio 3 in the 1970s, by requesting his music.] A Panoply of Human Gods. Listed, like buildings. [I wish this book would get its internal hyphens sorted out as in 'frost- etched' and "white - veiled".] Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrickian, too, by inference of wide-eyed deliverance of the Reader to these ‘secret’ scenes (albeit non-sexual, so far). (31 Dec 11)
On the Side of the Angels
“In fifteen sixty six, when Suleiman’s Sorceror called up demons to fight alongside the Ottoman army, an Angelic Host led by the Archangel Gabriel was summoned to oppose them.”
Felicitously, amid the book’s dutifulness towards its own Angelic thread, there is much synergy not only with my own long-term definition of ‘magic fiction’ as a real power in human affairs but also with the use made of it in warfare as described by the masterpiece ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ in the name of Susanna Clarke. Also, arguably, a textual hint here of the internet as part of these processes, which my real-time reviewing also taps into, I suggest. “I take it you are not well read in the works of the master, Edgar Allan Poe? I thought not. It was his belief that if you wish to hide something, the best place is in full view.” This book is fast becoming, in full public view, an important part of my life, retrocausally as well as linearly forward in time. Remarkably, it mentions in this section today “Marston Moor” as one of the battles where “Beings” were sent, i.e. a battle which, synchronously, only yesterday was mentioned independently to me on a semi-public internet forum (here) as being a battle that (with right or wrong on my side, angels or demons?) I am currently fighting on behalf of real books against ebooks. (31 Dec 11 – four hours later)
Control
“…and flickering firelight, full of the smells of old books…”
A scholarly meeting in tune with M.R. James but, refreshingly (with scholars worth their salt), leading not to a plot-sized populist ghost story but to implications of more ‘musical’ interactions of Fine Art (fine as well as foul?) and Philosophy within the book’s Angels & Demons thread / Rationalisation and Magic / Control and Totalitariansim - and how each of us – however firm we are in our beliefs and in our own hard-won goodness – teeters in the grey area between such pairs of ‘similar opposites’, such Ewers-Spider symbioses or host/parasite-uncertainties-of-which-is-which — {Swedenborg or Blake?} [The paragraphing and speech-marks at one point in this section made it difficult to differentiate speakers]. (31 Dec 11 – another 90 minutes later)
Satyrs Gathering
“…the magic that could be wrought by the decoration of books.”
A short telling Coda to the previous story, regarding Chaos Theory (butterfly effect between earthly things and Angels) and much else contained within its Tardis of words. Serendipitously, Blake figures here (Hitler again, too): and the cats and other creatures from the VanderMeers’ massive ‘The WEIRD’, and the London Stone ley-lines from Ackroyd – and the oxymorons within salvation… And it also reminds me that Caruso’s decorations are suffused with Blake’s, in a good original way. Another symbiosis. (31 Dec 11 – another hour later)
THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED IN 2012: HERE
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