Beatific Vermin — D.P. Watt
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/d-p-watt/ and of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/egaeus-press/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
There may be a delay in commencing this review.
I reviewed the first story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/07/09/the-conspirator-a-borgesian-tribute/#comment-16430, as follows…
=========================================
THESE, HIS OTHER WORLDS
“It was weird to be moving through something that looked so viscous, like hot tar, and yet feel nothing.”
A genuine weird classic, I deem. But more than just weird. There should be a new word for it. Here, I sense the ficto-religious for perhaps the first time, the exudations of creativity-flow actually being shared with the reader from Him to Me and then the tutelary Them. A seedy Parisian apartment of a head that needs a pest controller one moment, and visionary Gods in robes the next. All described with the Wattian style at the top of its game. Each reader will have his or her own synchronicities with this work, I feel. My synchronicities include the fact that I studied Calderon’s Life is a Dream for A Level, and it has never left me, and in past weeks I have been steeped in literary versions of Paris here and here. And only yesterday I wrote of ‘fairy footsteps’ here and so does this text speak of them today. And perhaps other synchronicities I have not yet noticed. What are Your synchronicities, as You enter earth’s such slimy flows of Our Gestalt here on the brink of airy illumination beyond the pest of all other worlds? Watt is just one of Us. Our conspiracy now in the open,
NOUMENON
Chasing the Noumenon, as I often do, I am afraid I did not really find it here. A readable enough story of a man’s routine existence shopping, and office work under new management, and his eventual downfall, as reflected by a recurring shadow show on a canvas in a closed-down shop. But ultimately, unsatisfying.
I reviewed the next story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/05/05/drowning-in-beauty-the-neo-decadent-anthology/#comment-12520, as follows…
===========================================
JACK by D.P. Watt
“all reds and blues and purples and oranges and yellows;”
In today’s otherwise near-monochrome pub, Jack expletively and colloquially plays poker with fictional money as counters in this otherwise near-fiction, playing with two old male friends and one of their upstart girl friends, his pint spiked, he suspects, spiked, as it were, with those earlier Colours of Pflug, becoming a startling panorama of some colourful mediaeval battle and carnage, with Jack then literally and meaningfully becoming the “bloody bastard” that the suspected spiker calls him! Jack back in the poker game, now with whisky that “looked like dark, morning piss”. Some striking visionary material as born from pub talk. Overlapping realities, too, I infer. A story itself spiked.
DISTILLATE OF SIN
“It’s appalling what the mind can do to the body — how the sleeping brain can alter our experiences even when we are awake.”
…something we are are fast learning today, during our co-vivid dreaming that we are all now suffering or even enjoying today, ‘co-‘ being the operative there —
A medical conference in Singapore, whereby the narrator and his oncologist wife are accosted by an old colleague acquaintance of them both, a man who is now a psychiatry professor, and who rather aberrantly tells them, over dinner in the hotel restaurant, of a patient they all once knew, a teenage boy having nightmares, and, yes, he is dared into telling them of one of the nightmares in particular that dogged this young lad, in the latter’s own words, a nightmare within semantic reach of an earlier reference to the oncologist wife’s perfume, now, and as it turns out, later, upon a different woman, to stave off perhaps the vintage terroir of such gratuitous decanting of the nightmare! But who has come back to haunt this author, to plant such an unlikely sexual nightmare in his story, as a sort of blight or an equally unlikely ongoing curse? Whether to suffer or to enjoy, most of us still manage to chase the noumenon as well as the distillate. Beatific vermin, indeed.
I reviewed the next story ‘Your Bodies, Where We Dwell’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/09/04/crystal-castles-invitations-to-the-voyage/#comment-16894, as follows…
==========================================
YOUR BODIES WHERE WE DWELL by D.P. Watt
“—a collapse into the miracle of your infinite becoming.”
That seems to summarise this whole book so far. This is indeed, for me, a major work, one that almost does – in fact DOES – what few other works of fiction do, if ever. It creates a new faith. A new transcendence. An epiphany. I will let you read it, without any intervening descriptions from me, as we travel from this woman’s bereavement with the vast window view left by her husband, towards crossing some brook of existence whereby WE are now in YOU. A study in ennui and glitch akin to and mutually complementing another book I happen to be simultaneously reading here.
Ps: The ‘we’ in the dwell.
SERENDIPITY
“It speaks of the way that one’s homeland calls to you through the wind,…”
This serendipitously reminds me of the Hiraeth of my father’s fatherland of Wales, whereby with the serendipity of life and death we all eventually reach our own Hiraeth by the eventual inevitable doffing of one’s flesh. Here figuratively prefigured by the doffing of masks and nudity’s covering by whores in a world of cruelty and lust, the empathisable whore with the name of Serendipity and her Vagyrations of Verse as part of her foreplay. Other whores that the Madame called Woe, Sorrow, Malice, Silence et al, amid this genius-loci’s Eel Pits, Grog Houses, Bacca Dens, Picking Slopes, Cutting Houses…. A very moving and evocative tale about which I will give nothing else away from beneath the mask of its own Faceless Guard.
PS: Serendipitously, perhaps, Vagyr is also spelt Vagyn on page 105.
And eke as eek elsewhere in it!
I reviewed the next story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/18/tears-for-europa-d-p-watt/#comment-13297, as follows…
==========================================
HOW TO MAKE A SECRET
Even just one quote from this, will risk unravelling it. A series of meticulous and painstaking options as to secret making or secret keeping. In or out of mind or spirit, secrets are often autonomous creatures it seems, and this exhaustive essay has puckish, poetic prose of the highest order. It is rather special in the canons of literature, I suggest, with at least one secret ingredient that only readers of this book will find being made in it – a secret that needs to be kept in the best way possible for each reader.
HIRAETH
“It is funny that boredom makes one look at things afresh, as though you have never really seen them before.”
A tale of ‘“erasure”, a word that this work uses pointedly in italics, a word that sounds like a near anagram of the title. See my use of this same word about ‘L ndon’ by Royle read, concurrently with this book, a few days ago (here). Timothy, a design consultant in Berlin, returns, after a relationship break-up there with a poorly paid artist called Katia, to his own old boyhood bedroom in Swansea, staying for a while with his Mother whom he had not visited for some years, while trying to keep his business contacts in existence via an old large computer that his mother owns. And there I find myself airbrushing the rest of the story to avoid plot spoilers, a story which, I continue to think it is true to say, is the most effectively disorientating work of self-identity I think I have ever read, and that is saying something, if only I can now nail down that something as I once did. A refugee from my own erstwhile real-time reviewing of it. Better reread it to see for myself.
An erasure of Home and Hearth, if not, today, of the Earth itself.
I reviewed the next story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/02/vastarien-a-literary-journal-vol-2-no-2/#comment-16701, as follows…
========================================
An inchoate colour illustration by Tatiana Garmendia seeming to depict…
CLEMATIS, WHITE AND PURPLE
“; one of those lovely moments of synchronicity.”
‘The Green by Dock Street’ on one poster among many posters advertising events like a circus and wrestling, leading to the narrator watching from a window the benighted comings and goings into a derelict junk yard, a yard that gradually becomes a Green of grafted flowers with docked corpses, and the narrator’s personal connection with one of those comings and goings, and other signs. drawing the narrator there. One page of this darkening work containing a poster as an avant garde / silent garden poem of sparsely spaced words. Evening all, and night night.
“, please contact the Police immediately on 999.”
I reviewed the next story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/12/16/wound-of-wounds-an-ovation-to-emil-cioran/#comment-11378, as follows…
=======================================
PAY NO WORSHIP TO THE GARISH SUN
“Suicide binds you to the world more forcefully than any other death, he explained.”
An effectively attritional drag you down to the bottom with me monologue of a woman who admits to a chequered history, as if in a projected Clarice Lispector mode, or Silvina Ocampo, or Melanie Tem, a monologue addressed to me that I found paradoxically uplifting, as I experienced with her an encroaching blindsiding, and a fundamental undifferentiation of, say, generally well-considered gallery works of art and items of found art, and of the stink of the countryside and the stink of the city. I sensed that even Emil Cioran himself visited me while I read it. It did not seem to matter whether he found my breast or not. Undifferentiated reader and narrator, too?
I reviewed the next story here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/18/tears-for-europa-d-p-watt/#comment-13245, as follows…
===========================================
THE PROCLAMATION
“, a time of restless exhaustion, rather like an unbearable summer, where one is too hot and drained to sleep, and labour in vain for some respite from the unremitting heat and discomfort.”
Reading and reviewing this work this morning, is one such labour on my part during real-time’s unremitting heat, that seems to have lasted forever and still intends to do so. Itself a strong and powerful Proclamation this work about itself? I feel everyone will recognise it around themselves, hearing it perhaps for the first time knowing others are hearing it, too. The ‘end times’ confirmed and thus faced? Or a dread that the Proclamation about itself is worthless, because we hear beyond it!
Silence or our own screaming that the silence reveals?
Essential Wattage.
end