Daniel Mills
UNDERTOW PUBLICATIONS 2021
PART TWO of this review, as continued from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/among-the-lilies-daniel-mills/
My previous reviews of Daniel Mills: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/daniel-mills/and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/undertow-publications/
This author had a story in my edited Classical Music Horror Anthology in 2012.
I HOPE TO CONTINUE REAL-TIMING THIS BOOK IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
The Account of David Stonehouse, Exile
PART ONE
“Pages were missing from inside, ripped from the binding so only blank sheets remained,…”
… and this account is writ within these pages, I infer, with no spoilers, a book of pages taken over from someone by the name of August Fitch. So far, a sharp, if wide-gaped, evocation of a place, with its still impassable late-snow at early Spring, with jagged words as well as a jagged terrain itself; to survive is all, especially in the dead pine area, a place of autonomous vicious needs of itself and of whom happens to live there and whereto the narrator had come three years before, unless I misremember, when he was 24. I am going on a bad memory here, of only a few minutes ago when reading it and perhaps that’s where I went wrong five years ago, this narrator (I shall call him David) having taken over a found house (like crude ready-mades of found art?) in these mind-fazing wilds, taking it over from another man and his family who had left bits of themselves there, just as wolves take over a dead moose for its meat, then by crows taking over what the wolves left, then David today taking over what both the wolves and the crows could not take over from the moose, David taking over these last bits to feed his once found, and rescued by digging out, “hound of indeterminate breed” that he tells us he calls Judah.
Read so far up to: “, a lion at ease.”
“The pines were visible on their mossy hummock with their three crowns like green lace spreading, doubled by the roots beneath my feet. How far they stretched. What horrors they compassed.”
David finds a dead man, then a gory burial, but I cannot continue itemising for you this plot, just gather clues, for the time being. Like on the rotted heel of the dead man’s shoe make out “Roman numerals or maybe the man’s initials: what looked like an I, a V.”
Cf Plutarch earlier in this collection.
And memories of when David was passed as a baby to a nine year old girl called Jerusha by his mother near a stone house…
And vague details of his co-vivid dream haunting him that night (“Her voice like soft bells striking”), after we see more of Judah’s ailments.
Read up to: “…passing rooms unused in the years of my exile.”
“Judah is awake, restless, a lion roused.”
An empty room between these two quotes , empty, yes, but with a child’s horse rocking? And David alone, but what of Judah?
“and I am alone in this house and only my own soul to haunt me. See its outline on the wall. See the thorns it wears.”
“I say to you again: it is well. You must first pass through the dark of the cross that you might learn to take it up and follow.”
Memories of listening to Elder Job when he was 12. The passion of Christianity and the light and dark side of Christ’s cross.
Then, David, today, I infer, in cold chiaroscuro, invoking a similar death with those earlier arms outstretched, here in the shape of a moose alongside David’s own redemption from a too early death otherwise? Death and resurrection, man beholding another in the configurations of nature. Survival of the fittest, by dint of a God, but a God of truth or of this fiction?
“…antlers wide as my own arms spread, and I fired.”
“My shot had passed through the moose’s chest, tearing it open in two places before lodging in the trunk of a spruce tree.”
But the moose still lived?
“We were in the workshop adjacent the stone house. Job labored over the forge while I worked the bellows which fired the blast. I was there to help him, to learn his trade, but mostly, we talked. At seventeen, the Gift had not yet come into me, though children half my age had received visions of heaven or heard the spirits singing. I doubted. I told the Elder of my despair and he showed to me his own.”
“…and like Christ he did not struggle but sank like a man already dead or indeed like one who had never lived.”
“…the angels came and went among them and only their songs to show they had been there.”
The ‘Gift’ of prophecy equivalent to that of literary inspiration by gestalt? The reviewing if not the speaking in tongues!
The story of Elder Job’s influence upon a younger David. And that of Eldress Rose. And please forgive my over-quoting; these direct quotes from the text will hopefully diminish with the slowth of Zeno’s Paradox, and the length of actual passages that I read on each occasion will equally grow larger alongside such slowth, especially with any increasing confidence that I gain in reading this long and no doubt inspiring work.
Read up to:
“Ash lach in
bi mor na, o
da rim a, e
o”
Cross-referenced with The Nag Bride here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/a-c-wise/#comment-1357
Thinking aloud and brainstorming: I wonder if we shall eventually find out that this David Stonehouse faked his own death when leaving his erstwhile home before arriving in these wilds. Compare the John Stonehouse, a British politician who famously faked his own death and exile.
“…though I have killed no one: only the soul inside me.”
Words that seem in at least oblique keeping with the previous entry above, words just read hours after writing such an entry.
Tempting me to fake the means to “thus unravel their meaning.”
“…inventing meaning for words which had none.”
I notice such words written in this work are sometimes lost by exegesis, or just by plain loss, like light leaving a stain when it departs. Chiaroscuro words not only spoken in different tongues, but written by different hands, too. Visions of being the one to trip up the burdened Christ on the way to Calvary and face His anger. Back and forth to a childhood in clogs at the stone house, temptation sexually (?) by someone called Jerusha, then killing wolves today to save that child who was me, now as David, seen again today. And another song sung by a woman now: “The black became her shadow with its long dress and hair which trailed behind her, whispering, as she passed into the hallway and was gone.” (A sort of Wise horse-whispering?) And later, back then: “The corridor stretches before me, endless with the shadows which fill its end, opening to nowhere.” Whatever guilt feels like, its repercussions allow one to fake travelling quickly over slower times, I guess. Faking an understanding to transcend no understanding at all, whoever wrote the words being read, and whoever wrote these about them.
Read up to end of PART ONE.
PART TWO
“In time, the Eldress said, but the time it passed too slowly.”
This new hand (strangely written on the otherwise remaining blank pages of the same book that David writes in?): I am made to dream as a girl up to her ‘curse’ at 13, with inferentially lustful thoughts (Jerusha?): dreaming at the stone house or within the stone house of being within her pumpkin belly of a dolls house later ploughed into the ground by the Eldress, with Ark creatures, 2 by 2, led by goats, all coupling, too.
So much more in so few pages, like colours and names, and, so, do I, as just one reader without any co-triangulators, have the Gift of Gestalt to match what is described or confessed? —
“The Dreamer’s Gift, he declared, is the Gift of prophecy. But prophecy is such that we must look to God to know the meaning thereof. Few possess the seer’s eyes, the listener’s ears, but there is one among us, perhaps, who might be trusted to interpret. The Gift was slow in its coming to him and now at last we know the reason.”
Such slowness, by decremental halves, absolving me for my documented failures when first reading this book a few years ago? Am I good enough now?
Read up to: [The passage ends abruptly. David Stonehouse’s narration resumes on the reverse side of the page.—ed]
Cross-referenced again today to The Nag Bride: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/a-c-wise/#comment-1359
PART THREE
Judah taken, but then after a page break, returned, a strange, seemingly half-feral animal while David, amid continued words of gorily tactile flaying and flensing the animals he traps in company with Judah, has returned himself, as if he were taken, too, taken over by the previous writer, now back, weather now allowing him to reach the town, gradually emerging with its spire and then general store, David himself a suspect stranger, but one man in the town tells him that someone was glimpsed following David …. was that me, absent from the words of this work till I finally read it properly today?
Read up to: “Exhaustion overcame me: I slept.”
David hacks the following man’s shadow to pieces, a shadow that the man then seems to drag behind him, and so much happens that I cannot understand about this man and what he later does to David, and what he makes David think about his own religion, and the fire pit, the pine grove, and Judah with eyes that met David’s as if the animal’s face belongs to a face that appeared hopeless as a human’s. Till I reach this important reference for me, one that I take to be to Null Immortalis and my current crazy obsession with Zeno’s Paradox vis à vis the magic of – or faith in – literature such as this work, viz. “But if that was the beginning I find I cannot imagine an ending or guess at the fate which awaits us all: the living, the dead, or those halfway between.”
And so, there, I must rest again.
“Even spring is a place halfway,…”
I am still stymied in my progress through this mighty work, but stymied in a good Zeno’s Paradox way. As I ponder David as a naive child with a so-called Gift, when all was Eden and Disciples as in Mellie’s Zoo as unofficial coda to the Wise book (the latter now finished) and, in the light of these very pages here, he was then asked by Elder Job to transcribe and interpret the dreams of Jerusha from her crammed handwriting about them.
And August as the tipping-point of rot and rut…
“Time’s glass was fractured, the grains of it poured out…”
His thoughts on Jerusha’s handwritten diary back when at the stone house past, and his own sexual thoughts then and the colours of red leading to the scarlet of blood in a later battle and “trees like nets parted and closed”, all resonated with the whole captivating but complex prose style of Elizabeth Bowen (whose many stories I am literally re-viewing in the last few weeks and into the future) — a wonderful compliment from me, and this comparison particularly struck me having just re-read and reviewed her THE SECESSION here about an hour ago!
“I swung. The hatchet struck him below the elbow, severing tendons, glancing off bone. He bellowed.”
Elbow, bellowed. ELizabeth BOWen. She writes often of elbows, too.
David’s battle with the man today in his wild side hunting Judah times is evocatively done, almost Conan like. The new letters upon the underside of boot, too.
Read up to: “Red.”
This review will now continue here: https://nullimmortalis2010.wordpress.com/daniel-mills/