nullimmortalis
RAPUNZEL
I find this synergy quite INCREDIBLE, and it perhaps shows how pre-tuned I am with parts of this book even before I have read them! Rapunzel and her dark nest of hair….
For example, in the last day or so, I have happened to propound this about its sister story in Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (see my appended comments to this blog post: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/lady-of-shalott-and-covid/)…
And there are several references to Rapunzel in my real-time reviewing over the years.
This Harper story concentrates on her hair, ALL her body hair as an accretively hirsute pelisse, as it would!! — another absurdist effigy of our unbarbered lockdown times!
For example, in the last day or so, I have happened to propound this about its sister story in Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (see my appended comments to this blog post: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/lady-of-shalott-and-covid/)…
And there are several references to Rapunzel in my real-time reviewing over the years.
This Harper story concentrates on her hair, ALL her body hair as an accretively hirsute pelisse, as it would!! — another absurdist effigy of our unbarbered lockdown times!
- Cross-referenced again with Walking Horatio (Chapter 12): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/walking-horacio-mark-patrick-lynch/#comment-19220Cross-referenced later with the latest Interlude in Armageddon House: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/armageddon-house-michael-griffin/#comment-19222
THE FIELD OF REEDS“It was time for her to begin the second of the Plagues of Egypt. […] She bought them surgical masks to wear.”This is the Famous Fable of Fenella’s Fierce Furloughless regime in the University department that she runs and the revenge of her staff, involving Ancient Egyptian cartouches, natron baths, sharp hooks and Ushbati. And this book’s key to a doorway… woman as mother or mummy with bandaged wound….THE SHAMAN“I’m not judgemental but my current owner would just as soon have MDF as my oak burnish!”Georgie – another in the eye-line of this book’s veneer of female epithets or names – grows her hair long, yet washing her hands less, as she becomes this epiphlet’s eponym: the animism of furniture speaking with their own recriminatory souls and other once cherished househeld items, eventually the animism of natural lissamine outsides, and making themselves ripe for an eventual gestalt’s ‘Repair Shop’. We are all competing shamans, perhaps?
Possible plot spoiler here, one to which becoming accretively acclimatised would be advisable…THE MYSTERIOUS LOVER“, so he kept a respectful distance most of the time.”The finest possible vignette as a portrait of a woman gradually falling in love.
In love with Man as a version of the Miltonic Lucifer.
DENTAL HYGIENE“And Jasper had a fastidious dislike of putting his mouth close to anyone else’s.”A story, probably written yonks ago, but so appositely disorientating to us all today, when do it yourself dentistry has become all the rage. And, on a personal note, the startling concept of finding milk teeth in Clarissa’s mouth made me somehow think obliquely of putting myself under my own pillow, till rescued by a fairy. (Jasper’s eventual round table solution to his own problem, however, at the end, seemed quite far fetched.)- SOFA STORIES“: ‘there are hinges in everyone’s lives,…’”Strangely, it was only yesterday that I heard for the first time someone refer to our current situation as a hinge in time. Meanwhile, this is possibly the most moving and memorable Harper epiphlet yet, as Sarah pulls out miniature versions of herself from the back of the sofa, the would-have-beens one of whom she now becomes Alice-like. Suspiria — the name of the first would-have-been she found in the sofa — is appropriately the Latin word for sighs. Sighs as stories, sofa stories as settees or settles. This book, for me, is today’s ultimate settle, by ironically and creatively often unsettling me!BACKWARDSMuch of my literary life has been based on retrocausality, and here is cream on it — with Augustina reading people’s backs, a sort of dorsaliency to supplement palmistry or phrenology. This Harper work must surely have induced me to create this thread in 2009 entitled ‘Women With Their Backs To Us’; http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=31619#post31619
- About halfway down the first page of that old thread (where many of the images have vanished because of internet entropy), there was a then new brief fiction by myself with Women With Their Backs To Us as its title.Cross-referenced with the Horatio book here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/walking-horacio-mark-patrick-lynch/#comment-19256
CARGO CULT“—its hinges gave a little squeak, as though they wished to conceal what was inside.”This enticing epiphlet — telling of the amenable attic billeted by an epiphyte called Sally, and visions of her life’s cargo of memories as lost objects and lost people gradually turning up in there towards an eventual epiphany of evacuation — somehow reminds me at least obliquely or figuratively of how I started this book in a deep lockdown and now there is at least a prospect of my soon sallying forth again… and, indeed this book has so far been most helpful in getting me through this period with my daily breakfast reading of it.
FIRST BURY YOUR MARTIAN“One day, in the early 1970s, I was walking my dog in a wood.”Jack, not Horatio. And indeed, I don’t think Horatio has so far dug up anything like what Jack dug up here! Although paranoiac conspiracy theories might be common to both dogs’ carers as narrators in their own stories, I guess. This Harper story is wonderfully Harperesque, especially with its burial-swaddled birth of a supposed alien and its implications…“a sort of hinge in my life”- THE MERMAN“A little further off he spied an island with a lighthouse.”To the lighthouse, our eponymous merman with a fishtail spars adaptable sexuality with a shapely woman and her Clarissa nest (here called ‘something’ in italics)…
[It seems incredibly apt, with enormous synchronicity, that a five year memory turned up automatically on my Facebook timeline (as such ‘memories’ do on a daily basis) earlier this morning HERE with this caption that I wrote five years ago on today’s date: ‘My personal Fishtail, now complete. Or almost. Yay!’]
- Sorry, I think I meant shapely woman and her LACK of Clarissa nest!
DARKNESS AT NOON“There were a few of them who had felt the call of the sun and followed it. She joined them. They had broken the law, of course.”Baldly and frankly, this is the most resplendent and brainstorming metaphor for our eventual emergence from lockdown. Whether foolhardy or not, I’ll leave you to decide. And for you to discover the startling nature of this lockdown or Rourkean blackdown.
[Just placed a plinth here for Sue Harper: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/sue-harper/ ]- DAVID BOWIE IN BLACKWELL’S SHOP“The authorities closed Blackwell’s soon after that.”As this morning will be the first time I go out for a socially distanced walk with someone outside my household, I thought I would end this book before doing so. And this is a fine coda to the book’s symphony. Blackstar as a version of spirituality’s, if not Clarissa’s, dark nest. An ironic coming out, as many hold the view that the convulsive death of Bowie was the opening of the gates of evil: Brexit, Trump, Covid… Yet this book says what it says in this coda: “that all people die, but art does not. It is all that remains of us.” What this book thus says, it does. Thanks so much.end
All’s well when Black’s well.
And the first SALT Agreement, I note, was signed on today’s date in 1972.
Another book that somehow seems to have come at its optimum moment!
Keeps record of the trophies won”
Percy Bysshe Shelley