A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION AND THE ART OF THE PRETERNATURAL: Fiction Book Reviewing
The Flowering Hedgerow – Quentin S. Crisp
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/quentin-s-crisp/ and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/snuggly-books/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
A nature diary (?) that starts on Candlemass a few months before ‘Brexit’ and ‘Trump’ became branches upon our lives together…
2 February 2016
“They also gave a sense of depth and accumulation—branches upon branches upon branches.”
Such depth and accumulation that hold arteries within my own mind and body search for a perhaps impossible gestalt…
Meanwhile, this entry’s initial word-fragrant quest to define a breeze of Spring is certainly a leap of fate for me.
Bowie had only just died, by the way.
Paving a way … but whither that way?
6th February 2016
I often discover my own ‘cabin in the woods’ in the texts I tease towards an eventual holy holism. Some of these discoveries are quieter than others, but all handled hopefully with humility.
9.2.16 to 22.2.16
Charming observations of a personal life’s details as well as of passing natural minutiae. Sigh, I wish I could share in that feeling of “sweet emptiness.” It’s a different world today since February 2016. A new noumenon.
23.2.16
Life itself gradually vanishing like a finite supply of innumerable incense sticks being used up till all of them are gone.
26.2.16
“More and more, I seem to need to mine details of the quotidian for a sense of mystical meaning—“
Me, too. My own quotidian-to-mystique often includes daily books I read, and my ‘mine’, I dub ‘hawl’.
As to this process with regard to places, I recommend –
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/this-wounded-island-j-w-bohm/
1.3.16
An entry on time, its deceptive propeller’s spinning, a nonagenarian on the eve of his death. I just felt the same chill even as a septuagenarian. The loneliness from which we cannot escape, even if we want to do so.
The July of my own entries above has seemed the polar opposite of February. Glad we have by now reached March! The March of Time.
2.3.16
“But cancer is part of nature, too. If I had cancer and were dying, why shouldn’t I wander in the landscape of my cancer as if it were the Lake District.”
You’d need a sidewise District line to get inside your own body, I guess.
8.3.16
Is it a surprise if someone from Mexico has a fever?
15 & 19 March 2016
“We take it for granted, as if the world has always been this way.”
Two evocative examples here – the smell outside, while walking, of new hot cross buns when distanced from houses, and the surprise of retained heat in a switched off domestic heating system.
Somehow, there are more truths available when disarming oneself of them, I guess.
Up to page 50, end of 1.4.16.
“So I see God everywhere in such daily things, though some see God nowhere.”
I see God’s work as He channels Himself through the literature that He chooses for my gestalt real-time reviewing, thus ironically including this very book whereby I now make this confession. I have read a lot more than usual of this book today, as if entranced somehow or hypnotised by overhearing those youths on a train and later meeting Q’s father in Swansea Car Park. I wonder whether he is about my age and whether I am overdue my own stroke? I feel that I know Bee-chan although I have never met her. I have hardly met Q, come to think of it. Although his work – like this book – has a naive but sophisticated meticulousness that calms me down. Changes the configuration of the brain inside the head….
Up to page 59…
“Eventually something does, some tantalising titbit—just enough to keep me pressing the pedals.
I realised the internet would ruin yet another day if I allowed it.”
I hope this review is tantalising titbit enough!
Meanwhile, I wonder about the nature of the Richmond office that Q visits so lackadaisically in the rain…?
Today many people seem to work from home via that very internet and its various memory devices, an internet blighted or not!
“Could I, possibly, be walking by the very edge of the raincloud?”
Up to page 66
“I wanted, then, to able to relate this small incident to someone, so touched was I by it. But I knew there was barely anyone I could relate it to.”
…till now? And I am somehow endowed with the concept of the flowering hedgerow vis à vis some co-vivid dream about a 1950s black and white film, except for me, that film would have been in the cinema where I could have seen its first performance! But how can you take off gloves when you are not already wearing them, I ask? The concept of ‘lank’ rain, too. Sharing a church service without having been inducted properly into its communions of believing, co-vivid or not. I only hope, as a mere appreciative reader of this book, I may be a humble answer to the prayer embodied in the quotation above (if prayer is the right low-key enough word for it.) Appreciative, as I am, of this book’s naive but sophisticated synaesthesia of considered, but unsolved, motive and of ‘ordinary’ visions become near epiphanal.
Up to page 76
I looked up ‘Bursted Wood’ on the internet, and I could only find one reference to it as an actual wood: “quiet and peaceful” (Steve Huntley)
I think I was getting it muddled up with Macbeth’s Birnam Wood!
“If we are concerned with eternity, the gateway to eternity is always now, never in the future.”
That makes a lot of sense to me and seems to fit in later with the Dao De Jing’s “Great vessels are never completed.”
I, too, feel quiet and peaceful in relation to my ignorance. I am not sure what the Dao is, so it is perhaps just that?
Meanwhile, I have never seen an elegant-eared dog.
A brief flowering and fading of this review?
Up to page 82
“My lunch/breakfast has come. I’ll try and eat it.
. . . I’ve eaten as much as I can now, I think.”