The Empty Chair by Roger Keen
Photo specially taken by myself a few days ago during an uncharacteristic sabbatical from reviewing…
PART TWO OF THIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEW AS CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/29/the-empty-chair-roger-keen/
DARKNESS VISIBLE 2021
My previous review of Roger Keen and this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/literary-stalker/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
25
“…a Synclavier to create corresponding audio trippiness.”
A sort of Morse code for this tranche of Steve’s life, his relationship with a new ambitious actress totty called Olivia, his life and career now ever on the up toward envisaged perfection, but like his dabbling in Shares and Skis during this period, with future downs built in, I guess. A ‘cocktail of bliss’. Beautifully conveyed and novelistic at the top regions of novelistic, I would objectively say. And with believable glimpses of the times and its TV programmes and the arts world and celebrity circles that sat behind such a wonderland world. Plus Lewis Carroll vis à vis macropsia and micropsia. And “…a new dimension, almost a spiritual extension, to the whole meaning of winter.” And comparing Steve’s own parents with Olivia’s. Alliances and plots.
Yet, later, Steve’s Jake maverick shrink is a “relentless experimenter”, and I wonder if Jake’s Arm Fling method described is just a ‘brainstem’ brainstorming premonition for Durrell’s jerk of death? And the brush with Bowie: an inevitable immediate precursor to looking daggers at Annabel and Olivia’s brandishing of a carving knife? And an opportune typo in the text being just a concomitant of a dose of bad E: “and Steve was so exited he felt like a kid again.” (Sic) An ecstasy thwarted. An Exit preordained.
“Kylie Minogue started off in Neighbours, remember.”
A day or so later, by coincidence? —
HERE
The Bad E now becomes a potential Extra among Extras with Spliffs as Exits if not complete Splits…
and my propensity recurs to let slip spoilers become “ultra acute” after a period of relatively benign risk…
.
26 & 27
“The dope hit Steve in a massive rush, like a ten-thousand-strong round of applause in an echoey concert hall…”
Except all the chairs were empty?
Goodfellas dudes banter killer weed awful churn Bristol Yardies Beethoven Oxford …
I feel my own head expanding unduly, ready to burst, as I readily read the motley ingredients of Steve’s world as split open again for us, good with bad, black with white. Skis seriously off piste. Once Bullish Shares now in a Bear-pit.
“…three quarters of an infinity symbol.”
From that symbol of Olivia to the Fra Angelico within Steve’s new therapist called Emily. Her cognitive or spiritual methods of therapy and her looks are evoked with Keen skills via Steve.
All this amidst “circles of hell” now alongside any celebrity ones. As well as a renewed “psycho-chemical vicious circle” for Steve as ignited by those Extras for prestigious filming as we embark on his version of Morse with a touchy Thaw.
Unfinished business with his father still simmering.
Anxiety syndrome seething.
“…the dreadful eschatological terror at learning that an Angel with a fiery sword was waiting to cut him down when he entered the next world.”
28 – 30
“; you can act it all out Gestalt-fashion with the Empty Chair standing in and resolve things that way.”
Indeed, the Mark 1 and Mark 2 Full-Chair head to heads (Confront! Confront! Confront!) planned by Steve with his father … as helped by the backdrop pincer-movement cahoots of his sister, about the trigger of his hang ups — one-sided confrontations sharply, if somehow sprawlingly, depicted across the once blank pages of this archetypal empty book (filled by its author for future multi-readerly triangulations), such a trigger radiating from their 1963 garden trauma and now becoming, with a sense of ironic wordplay perhaps, a “progressive thawing” : anti-climactic but seemingly reconciliatory and Steve-healing — all as generated by an almost unbelievable side of his father that evokes my own sense of an ever-dawning gestalt, “an ethereal uplift […] something ineffable going on beneath the surface of worldly affairs”.
And this book and the developing worldly affairs take on a synergy of sprawling wisdom, a plateau of Steve’s career moves, his ladder into BBC costume drama and hopefully cinema, half-preternatural moves that are mostly successful, a synergy with various new means of therapy (Emily and the spirit guide, Ho Ho Ho) and another dawning in the shape of a woman called Dawn, alongside another plateau of John Major and Norman Lamont as Laurel and Hardy (but not as funny, I say!) when even the ERM crisis is not sufficient ‘primal scream’ to creatively disrupt the plateau of these chapters. Reservoir Dogs and Steve’s renewed ‘hedonism swing’ and showy ‘showreel’ notwithstanding. And, oh yes, the Cockney Rhyming slang analogy within psychotherapy was a remarkable side-issue that will stay with me as a landmark upon this creative plateau’s planet of sown ideas….a jobbing, jabbing casualty of parry and lunge. “…the stuff of great movies that keep audiences pinned to their seats.”
“…you refused to walk through a stone archway because you said there was something funny about it.”
PART FOUR – THE MOVIE
31
“Somehow his feeling was that The Empty Chair had dragged on for too long,…”
Not mine, though!
It simply ever-expands with a Zeno’s feast — obviously directly experienced narratively at some uncertain level of the freehold/ leasehold ladder or relay of truth — of powerful readerly vicariousness in the tv/film world of the period, with a seemingly endless treasure of recognisable references, in contiguity with the convulsively Movie-moving ‘headspace’ of its main protagonist, the director-to-be, we hope, of Die Gefangene Von Mystika (The Prisoner of Mystika), a movie to watch and be moved by.
That aforementioned headspace here is — in its therapeutible areas — in at least temporary healing remission. But still awaiting catharsis, no doubt. Now also full of, well, please forgive me quoting this passage as just one example of ingredients in this multi-shared headspace: “Steve had learned the importance of ‘sound design’, and now he wanted to take that to a whole new level. As for the visuals, he was going for a Goya-like gothic-noir look, and would play about further with visual effects in post, aiming for Man Ray-like solarisations in some places, without over-egging the whole ambience.” This book, too, is full of its own powerful ingredients. Black and white can be as rich as or even richer than colour. And words are generally black and white.
That aforementioned tv/film world is Europe-richly pre-Brexit.
Meanwhile, it’s one of Steve’s jobs to “complement” (a word beautifully SICnificant) an actress called Clémence!
32
“Directing, my friend… it’s not all about where you put the camera.”
A well-oiled, and, for all I know, classic, romcom chapter with a “jester’s hat”, almost bordering on carry-on. With somewhat caricatural character-studies amid the embryonic me-toos of the 1990s. Yet with elements of literarinesses to which I could cling on in order to carry on! The evoked European genius loci of the filming of the movie, a scenario as a cross between The Prisoner and The Wickerman, but I would add Midsommar. The need for sexual duties to maintain the gestalt of this project and all who seek to cohere within it, a gestalt here called “collective mind”, with an additional nod back to Steve’s experience of ‘group therapy.’ The conceit, too, of transatlantic views of the day upon Europudding projects such as this one. And, within these shenanigans, the concept of ‘free will’ as somehow gathered yesterday from the absurdist, almost farcical, sexual politics in ‘A Choice of Weapons’ by Aickman HERE. An amazingly inadvertent synergy!
“You were a victim, completely without choice or freewill…”
I understand this book was written before knowledge of Midsommar.
33
“There was a light and jolly atmosphere, with a lot of sparkling banter, especially when everybody went outside to inspect the new sleek shiny black sports car with its sensuous curves, huge bulbous back windows and prominent spoiler.”
No secret that Steve is on a rising wave of professional success at the start of this chapter, including a new love actually in Katie, and a swanky sports car. Yet, indeed it would be a ‘prominent spoiler’ on my part to divulge the particular nature of one of what I shall call something I myself suffer from — a serendipity syndrome. A confirmation bias. Including primal revelations. But this example (“an encoded family pattern, like a genetic matrix”) following a meeting with his sister Anne, is significant as an evolving pattern or gestalt, if perhaps contrived in the sense that any filmic version of The Empty Chair based on this sprawling narrative mass of a novel’s template would be contrived — a novel creatively experimental in its own right, a twirling series of ‘meta-‘ sails to be tilted against, and thus immune against the flaying or flensing by editorial work to make it arguably more digestible or ludicrously mutated into a soap opera based on the backstories of those who attended Daniel’s group therapy sessions! Here I sense a potential imminent dramatic downward path built in for Steve, down from such swanky highs within the terms of this novel if not within its projected adaptation?
“The therapy and all the rest of it should be fashioned into a neat topiary that supported this climax of beauty.”
“the cheapest commodity was ideas, which couldn’t be protected in their own right.”
“….wasn’t special enough to be writ large in cinema.” — maybe, but this novel IS special enough … as an experimental novel that seems to be working better than any envisaged more digestible adaption of it in print let alone on screen. And the windmill I noticed earlier in its text but failed to mention in my review, because I forgot to do so (!), has now possibly turned up as a mighty avatar of its future success? All factored into by astute references to real writers and directors of the time interacting with its plot. Making the latter real, too. Sartre, notwithstanding.
Pingback – The Empty Chair Paradox
34 & 35
“The fairy dust is non-transferable. Each work exists in its own hermetic universe… And Potter was a genius, and I’m a… journeyman.”
Truly inspiring chapters. With the backdrop of the continued success of his career projects and of his relationship with Katie, followed by his father’s physically and mentally debilitating illness (“a jolting reminder of the vulnerabilities of ageing”) leading to more build up of potential confrontation between father and son —
A graphic description of “Douaumont Ossuary on the site of the Battle of Verdun, where over two hundred thousand had been killed in 1916” obliquely aligned by thematic arch — if not connected by something more insidious than ‘fairy dust’ or ‘dry bones’ directly with a description of Steve suffering chicken pox after a sleigh ride, an illness that leads to graphic visions of Potter’s Singing Detective, and Steve revisiting this work and its dramatic counterpointing techniques and music, and when coupled with a flashpoint of other inspirations such as Space Oddity and other musical and literary mutual-synergies on the edge of pastiche. And a whole new Empty Chair film production possibility crystallised almost as a “multiple orgasm”!
My whole gestalt real-time reviewing project has been instinctively linked to this preternatural leaking ‘edge’ of semi-plagiarism and natural or occult cross-currents within an overarching Jungian gestalt. Filters working both ways. That fairy dust not hermetically sealed after all, and indeed imbued with outside real life and events happening by happenstance as you read inspirational ‘fiction’ books likes this one. In fact, a certain person (in the last few days as I read this book) made a speech featuring Kermit the Frog, one where he also peered at his own projection of The Empty Chair as a therapeutic or confessional device or at least as a temporary parking-space for his guilt-ridden self, as he effectively described his own personality disorder within that very speech! — viz. “We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality. We believe that someone else will clear up the mess, because that is what someone else has always done”. Check it out. He became a version of Steve’s own self-visitor from Porlock!
“…the fault lines would be clearly visible and the ending a looming inevitability.”
Pingback – The Self-Visitor from Porlock
36 & 37
“‘Firstly I’d like Ewan McGregor to play Chris Dowlais, and Bernard Hill to play his dad…’ Steve said,”
“…prepared to take risks, driven by artistic instincts more than commercial ones.”
Bravo! to this book and what utter belief of its realities it conveys so realistically within it, whether it is Steve at last joining his bridge together as he ‘walks through the mirror’ with his Potter-vamped Empty Chair, as he indeed walks into Channel 4’s expressionist architecture together with all the name checking of famous actors and potential notable film-crew members (each on their own bridge building paths etc) – including Steve’s brush with Jack Nicholson in a posh pub with Steve’s future SHINING from Jack’s eyes — all of this bridge-finalising by chance counterpointed by Steve’s father approaching frailty including when playing Bridge or acting his own version of an unanimated Zombie… Any CGI animation of Stone Age men, notwithstanding.
Definitely Steve is on an upward curve, an eternal shining, with no evidential sign of even slight ominous vibes of a potential downward curve again, but I did have a personal frisson of a shudder now that we are entering, with this exponentially ever-shining book, the ever-shining Blair period. Yet, Steve’s involvement with Morse did give birth to Lewis, did it not!
Meanwhile I hope it was not too late to warn Brad Pitt about Clémence!
“‘Yes, we’re like Morecambe and Wise,’ Katie said. ‘More like Laurel and Hardy,’ Steve added to fall-about laughter.”
“‘Absolutely…’ said Steve, though this was the first time he’d become aware of that connection.”
Please continue to beware spoilers below and longish quotations from the text that may pre-empt your reading of this book, but this is intended to help create this book’s deserved readership, a book that is now re-setting itself in a word-projected real-alternate world by deploying many moving images and music within itself!
A novel that creates its own mighty lip-synch musical Potter.
38 & 39
“…and, of course, the obsessive checking: the endless staring at empty plug sockets and non-dripping taps.”
No need for such neurotic angst with regard to this novel. I know I might risk allegations of serially overpraising it, but with regard to this huge unending tap of a book, it seems to be the actual great novel I predicted coming out of this author’s earlier novel. Huge and unending as with the sensation one has of Robert Aickman’s gluey Zenoism in Residents Only etc. and particularly in yesterday’s review that I happened by chance to make in real-time of his ominous Never Visit Venice story…..
Then I had a shuddering halt of a frisson when I realised that, in these chapters just read today, Keen has Steve and Katie actually visiting Venice!
Thankfully masked by the later triumphant scenes in Cannes!
Whatever the case, with regard to that gluey Zenoism, I hope I will be forgiven liberally quoting these two passages from The Empty Chair…
“For Steve it was creepily magical to recreate this scene, to go back to the start of the whole Empty Chair phenomenon and begin again, as if he were inhabiting some cosmic Möbius strip treadmill of Nietzschean eternal return. […]
Unlike movies, real life doesn’t have the luxury of buffers – beginnings and endings – it keeps carrying on, and that’s why movies will always beat real life in any contest – because of that facility to create the perfect ending, to freeze frame or fade out at just the right moment, when all the tumblers have clicked into place to yield the fugitive jackpot.”
This is seminal stuff for me.
There is also the paradox of the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome in ourselves. The cutting-room of life. Regression techniques like refreshing a screen. A real-alternate world where famous people we have known all our lives believably live again as characters within it, as influencers as well as participants. All rounded off in these chapters with the ‘Hamlet moment’ when Steve’s father sees the The Empty Chair film with himself depicted within it!
But what of The Man? Like the earlier windmill avatar, I do recall this (Jack Nicholson?) Joker emblem from earlier in this novel, but forgot to mention it. So, does each reader have their own bespoke airbrushing of what happens in this book so as to help triangulate the final gestalt? Like fitting real pieces into exact carved empty apertures, as in the act of fine carpentry? …As with each critic who is quoted here (e.g. “Ewan McGregor’s Chris inhabits a chimerical David Lynch-style netherworld…”), critics of the movie quoted liberally within the book itself about the actual Empty Chair production that is carpentered or pottered for us as a whole but also as part of itself!
But what of the danger of bathos that the Empty Chair movie arguably avoids by the skin of its teeth? I just leave that thought hanging…
40
“‘Here we are, darling,’ Steve said. ‘Welcome to the future!’”
Another great chapter to put in the bank, because one day it all ends, I guess, either at the end of this book or even at the end of this chapter, with all the endless pages seeming yet to be read just a mirage of pages?
That bank is a readerly sump I’ve fed for years, a growing gestalt till the finality that awaits us all, by a successful Titanic launch or a Squadron Leader’s crash… propellers are a sort of windmill? Just me rambling.
Aickman’s fictional wine-dark siren queens a few days ago, now in the Keen Ubersphere. And Madonna, for real, today.
La La Land of all places and who does Steve pitch his next absolutely mental project – none other than Howard Silberman! And the A List actors Steve mingles with are even more A List, perhaps. Even another award for The Empty Chair. Even beyond any omniscience of wishful thinking… ‘where a sci-fi type of transformative layering is applied to the quotidian world… with dreamlike, surreal undertones… And that’s only the half of it…’
Vonnegut next? Indeed, whatever next? Beyond his father’s ship slipping down the slipway… or his bi-plane dipping groundward. Halfway there, ever halfway there again. Like me today, awaiting my own crucial meeting… Slipping on the cobbles as one’s own self-accident from Porlock?
Steve is now 43 just tipped over from the answer to life, the universe, everything! — and it looks as if he himself will soon be a father in that great slipway of destiny that was once exemplified in that 1963 garden, and when I am reminded of his ex-wife Cathy, it really feels like a distant past to me. This book’s hinterland is seriously Zeno as well as Cone Zero.
Cone Zero or Null Immortalis. That ZenKôr.
And compare the Madonna reference to that in the incredible Steve Duffy LIVES OF THE SAINTS a day or so ago.
That other windmill I once posted in this review and somehow lost?
PART FIVE
41 & 42
“What do you think?”
I genuinely think that this is becoming an experimentally groundbreaking yet accessible and entertaining novel.
But do I necessarily believe any of its claimants as narrator or author, and the unchanging names that become unnamed, and the others that arise in their guise? Are these its final yet still endless pages (“‘No way, Jose! The Empty Chair is finished, put to bed… I don’t want to go there again. I could keep writing it forever!’”) a mirage after all? — my vision of a Zeno’s Paradox within which, in its own words, “bit by bit the components of perception and memory, past and present, become a melange and what islands of normality that remain are further dissected into smaller and more isolated outposts of the embattled former self.”?
The name Felicity is surely used to match a character in the 1960s’ Insufficient Answer to Life (as reviewed by happenstance yesterday HERE), a work that generated Adams’ no. 42 and reaching this actual numbered chapter here with the narrator’s wife also now 42. Can there be a publisher actually called Vulvaria!? — other than as a preternatural reference to Vulnavia in the concurrent Duffy real-time review, she being an automaton character to match Keen’s ‘old man dentures dance as automaton’ (cf Dry Bones), and the circus or stage play zimmer race Samuel Beckett Trilogy parallels and real-life celebrities’ names used as characters in fiction with consequent risks and dangers?
“each successive episode with Dad got to be like the development of some weird ongoing performance art work, ascending to higher levels in some Escher-like fractal spiral, governed by Salvador Dali logic.”
Dad’s “fully delusional narrative” as part of a narrative by whom? Incontinence etc, Dad as Jekyll, Hyde and now Gaga, too.
‘The sign’ “has a one-way ticket to oblivion, and the only questions left are the details of the journey,” — and mention of the Hamlet moment recurs. Can there really be a proposed work of fiction called Shagger’s Wood? — a title or name, like the windmill and Jed Dark’s Man I forgot to mention in earlier chapters. Now coming home to roost. Nightmares of Dad constructed within one’s free-Will jumps in life’s journey over dangerous rifts…
Yes, I say, despite all that above, but, rather because of all that, ‘I genuinely believe that this is becoming an experimentally groundbreaking yet accessible and entertaining novel.’ Possibly a truly great novel derived from its own ‘playpen brain’.
43 & 44
‘Oh, lets face it, ——, The Empty Chair is just a piece of flimflam…’
If not a film’s film, as here we pitch one alternate world of fiction with another alternate world of fiction within the same fiction! — making them both true?
One novel versus another novel within a single novel as I have delved in my own nemonymous nights, too. Somehow!
Yet one tries to distinguish the truths between these different worlds as we see the backdrop of one in the other – Jocelynland versus Veronicaland, for example.
“The maelstrom effect increased, sucking away my willpower, but I vowed to myself that I would not be the one to make the first move.”
Note the word ‘maelstrom’ there and these scenes are attritional, testing the reader’s ability to appreciate them, but one does somehow appreciate their over-the-topness because they are setting false misprints of fabricated archetypal romcom to make you misbelieve truth itself, the truth that they often lead to tragedy. Me rambling again.
That train that comes again along the same track and smashes you to smithereens again, even if it smashes an imaginary brother whom you never had?
“…sooner or later the Joker will flash up again to laugh in your face.”
And now back to the beginning of these two chapters, that serial father syndrome — what is it within me compares the effects of more youthful drug use described evocatively in the hinterland of this book, this being a life experience I never had, and now comparing it with the later onset of involuntary dementia in old age? I wonder whether my big-headed self will soon bear on my neck that Dome of seats above, with every chair inside it empty?
“a daisy chain of one crisis after another, an exercise in serial firefighting, so it was simply more of the same…?”
The Man Ray v. The Bad E?
Amazingly, straight after writing above review entry, I started reading my next due, already listed, Aickman story of the day (MARK INGESTRE), which has this paragraph on its first page —
Now see my eventual review of Mark Ingestre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/30717-2/
45 & 46
“Maybe we’re living inside a novel now…”
Perhaps by dint of this novel, the truth comes out that it is not even a ‘maybe’. An atonement for all our sins, as we all head towards our own version of Ward B, a B that I assume stands for Beckett.
“Momentarily he may sound coherent, but really he’s just busking it, and it works better some times than others.”
Like father, like son… like me. Inspired to a wisdom of truth as well as creativity by dint of our own dementia! With suppressed memories allowed to resurface. As we now enter the 9/11 period, not that it was called 9/11 then.
My own dentures do a dance of death as I think of Dick’s Horselover Fat and my own character euphemistically called Dogmucker Lean.
And the sex act’s endgame being a Bosch painting! Well that sort of took the ticket.
This novel gets even better and better. Despite it once being rejected, it says here, by its author’s agent for further representation… but then there there was still so much more mileage of the above ‘found art’ of wisdom, truth and creativity to travel, a ticket for endless travel within its pages.
“Everything is happening so fast,…”
47 – 50, Epilogue
“…windmilling out of the binding and placing all the force of that ejection on my unfortunate right knee.”
Or as the endgame of cricket stumps?
An accident of our man’s windmilling limbs that seems a watershed or snowshed in this book, the point when all seems to go further downhill for our man, an event that I predicted earlier when someone visited Venice (as well as ski slopes elsewhere), unnoticeably so for most readers, I guess. But reading a book is a sort of religion for me. Even its minor details need weighing. And readers of a book should triangulate like a teamwork of gestalt reviews. And this is probably the most remarkable ending to any novel that I have ever read, one I could not put down today. So emotional, so spiritual, so utterly Jungian and Proustian, as our man takes up skiing again in his later age, but no longer windmilling. Which brings me to all varieties of airbrushing, my own blanking of plot spoilers, despite there still likely to remain many spoilers that I missed in this review, hence my earlier warnings. Why did I airbrush Trevor for example, — ‘the grinning malevolent joker in the pack, the rogue vector that is disrupting the equilibrium” — just as this Trevor later seems to our man to be airbrushing our man himself when taking over our man’s wife? “…the brushing away of the puff pastry over New Year;…” Each potentially minor element in a book can become a major one. “Dad’s accelerated ageing effect is more pronounced, as though he’s contained in some science fiction envelope where relative time runs much faster than outside.” And what happens throughout this endgame changes from renewed love for a father to hate and back to love as a keystone in the book’s climax following either a transcendent spiritualism or a telepathic sister who knew about Dustbin Hoffman, and how literally, I thought, Steve’s earlier hobnobbing with luminaries went into a dustbin, but now here a rescuing climax for the whole plot and the rationale of these last pages that are so real or are they a mirage of endlessness beyond even Zeno’s reach as I first thought? A solipsism beyond Ward B(eckett). That circus ring in Heaven. Or maybe Hell. You know, this book has become a group therapy, and even at one point our man addresses us directly in the text: “you and I know that’s not true.” But I do believe it all, I do have a fearless faith in fiction, for example, to believe the French Lieutenant’s Woman scenes at the Cobb, the ‘telestocracy’ if not the teleology. “One thing you can’t do in cyberspace is reach your hand to the back of the shelves and pick out the fresher goods.” Dick versus Pratchett. This endgame’s utter primal scream. Exceeding even 9/11. The viewing of a dead body just the same as I remember it when my own Dad died. Some of this endgame is utterly gut-wrenching, inspiring, too, as we muddle along, as our man does, in later life, picking up the pieces, exploiting one’s meagre strengths as I hope I do with fiction gestalt quests. As our man talks to his dead Dad aptly on a train as a new empty chair therapy, with love as well as hate, blame as well giving credit where it is due. A book review that is like a Joycean stream such as Molly’s monologue. The ice axe. “Well, after he’s shagged you, he can say three Hail Marys and everything will be all right…” Don’t go there! Personal events made into found art exhibits. Not now alternate worlds or each novel versus another novel within it, but alternate co-vivid dreams that are more real each time that they come, but which is the most real? Goodbye dear Father, goodbye still endless book. Deal or No Deal. Well, I watched it often, genuinely one of my favourite programmes at the time, and not only because I know that our man worked on it, I shout, no, I scream – DEAL!
“Have I arrived – like Proust’s narrator ‘Marcel’ eventually does – at the point where the ideal confluence of life and art can at last be rendered…?”
============================================
“From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything’s unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate with the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things – by realising and accommodating death! But we don’t, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?”
from ‘The Avignon Quincunx’ by Lawrence Durrell (‘Constance’ 1982)
“The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.”
— John Fowles 1964 (from ‘The Necessity of Nemo’ in ‘The Aristos’)