(no subject)

[proximoception]

Coming to the end of Daemonomania and hence of Crowley's published work to date. Earlier I compared the weirdest Love and Sleep moment to the weirdest Cerebus moment and have now noticed a genuinely uncanny parellel: at about the same point in their absurdly long projects (started around the same time, ending around the same time) both Crowley and Dave Sim send themselves into their works to tell their respective main characters to, like, do something. Crowley's effigy even admits to having trouble pulling the book together--I don't think Sim did that but it was pretty clear at the time. In hindsight there's broadly similar concepts, movements in the first Aegypt volume and the Mothers and Daughters sequence preceding dread #186. Both are astonishing buildups, probably aesthetically superior to the regions they debouch into (a mad sky indeed, in Sim's case). I have something to tell you, something is coming, see as things become unglued before it, find it chase it fly into it until it flies into you: they have it, or think they do which is the same thing. And then lose it.

Crowley at least planned to lose it, but puts an awful lot on the shoulders of his future (current) self by promising to show how to bring and keep it back--in Endless Things. References to Little, Big--nostalgic?--usually wordplayings on its title, have been frequent in these two middle volumes; at times he seems to be almost rewriting sections, then shies away. Little, Big ended rather crazily, it took me a while to make full sense of where it had gone. I have a hunch it will reread quite well. But I'm not sure if that sort of ending will work here, assuming he still knows how to get back to that part of the forest. He knows so much, maybe more than any of the rest of us, certainly more than Sim, but it seems like he knew even more once.

I wonder how Cerebus ended? I dropped off for good around 225/300, Sim's barely tolerable mirror-image Andrea Dworkin phase was dovetailing into his entirely intolerable OT prophet one.

Comments

[ex-commonpl.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to ask you to explain Little, Big to me. I recently finished it and have no idea what to make of it. I liked it, maybe, but I'm just rather puzzled by the whole thing; it felt like spooning up a lot of delicious broth with no meat or noodles or vegetables in it. But perhaps this is unfair. Well, it's the best prose around anyway, one must say that for it.

But that's sort of what it's about, isn't it?--waiting for the solids in the soup, knowing they're there but not finding them. Like I said, I found it mysterious.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'll go the gnomic route rather than explain individual episodes, though I'll try that too if you like. The book's obviously much more than any explanation of mine could ever be so take this with a continent of salt:

First thing to remember is that this is a story about people, people alive; both the day to day parts and the weird ones where we're off in the margins with mice or whatever. Crowley likes to shock and intrigue but his fantastic elements are ultimately as allegorical as Hawthorne's.

Atheists are sometimes so mad at religion they reject it completely, as if it were something entirely made up rather than something usurped, twisted painted knots in the material of shared reality. The idea that you'll live on after death, the idea that there's something in the universe like your own mind, or something in your own mind like the universe, the idea that we're all somehow siblings or even one being, the idea that you and the most distant stars are somehow in meaningful relationship, the idea that love is itself a force or even intelligence...basically every common religious feeling has some basis in reality, has some truth value, describes something real about life, however metaphorically.

Suppose there were a "religion" that stayed free of literalization and dogma, that stuck with these simple feelings and the stories and parables that remind of them, intimate them. Suppose this religion were more or less identical with a family, or at most a linked set of families, and by staying at this level was able to stay sanely unambitious; suppose stories of ancestors and living relatives, their strengths and mistakes and particularities, were the only speakings and rites to this religion, and these universed together into a sense of the ways you, the living family member, might be, and how your own future might go. And as the episodes of your own life pass, they too become stories for yourself and your circle, things to remember as the chases and maintenances of life rebegin.

What would be the perfect way to live? Well, who the hell knows. Once anyone did there would perhaps no longer be knowledge, the knowledge would become habit, then flesh. Those possessed of certainty need never speak of certainty, would have limited if any use for any label or memory (how many certainties, perfections, might our own bodies contain or be right now, by this logic). You wouldn't tell stories, you'd just live them.

This may be true only at the ends of the world, where the heroes live, or the gods, or the people of the distant future, or the beings we imagine. Or it may be that we too find certainty for a while, while wandering: are suddenly a part of something larger and better and single-voiced. And then this leaves, we are abandoned, though perhaps we and the world are fuller, feel larger, than before; our gains spurring us on to explore more stories, more novelties, more ways to be, so as to find ourselves larger still.

The fullness--the growth--comes where you'd expect it to come, from love and work and love and love and discovery. The mind inside the thing called life (the multiplicity called life) is dead, of course, but also wise and old. It knows when to keep us on a leash and when to let us run.

Voltaire has a story called Micromegas where a vast space alien explains to some star travellers that there's no shame in being small, as everything's smaller than an infinite number of other things, larger than infinite others. The sense of being small or large is based on belief or mood, may ultimately be synonymous with degree of connection. Not happiness, mind you. There is a "proper" devastation that leaves you large inside it.

Something like a mistake was made, and long before the Enclosure Movement, which it perhaps resembles. Things that worked in concert were estranged, many hands that shook all day now slap each other. This may all be fixed one day, in one way or another. The hands will change or disappear. Until then life itself is not enough, nor mind itself, we need the tricks and mixtures, need to juggle the odds and ends of Heaven to keep them in the air.

[ex-commonpl.livejournal.com]

Okay, I am with you, and had similar thoughts. Didn't make the Micromegas connection, but seems obvious now that I think of it (I mean, I read that story two months ago, you'd think it would have come to mind!). Also enclosure: I kept thinking that these intimations the characters had were something like memories of the lost commons (and Old Law Farm makes this rather explicit). And the house at Edgewood defies the political idea of a house, of property: it isn't quite rationalized, it doesn't quantify.

But what I found most puzzling was the Eigenblick subplot. It's coming clearer to me. His story exemplifies the mistake that you mention: this desire for a king beneath the hill, the man behind which myth was a tyrant; he sort of stands in for figures of the kind of religion that the main story sets itself up in opposition to. I have to hand it to Crowley: for a book probably finished before the election of Reagan, a plot in which stagnation leads to the rise of a tyrant whose reign is ruinous and dreary but who's later remembered as a mythically benevolent king is devastatingly prescient.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

This was the hardest part for me to digest too, Crowley has a personal obsession with Barbarossa apparently--had it been Arthur or Jesus or whatever we'd have all been on the same page at once. Maybe that would have given too much away?

However Eigenblick's remembered things fall apart enough under him for the "family" to be the surviving authority unit, the level at which it's sane to bother with fathers. Our mythic feelings only help out down here on the ground, they're nightmarishly misleading when applied to the invisible upper stories of civilization. They're what approximately everyone uses when voting though.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Might want to pick up his other two major novels, Engine Summer and Aegypt; triangulation within Crowley's work will probably be a lot more illuminating than what anyone else might find/put there.