B. Catling - "The Vorrh" / "Erstwhile" / "The Cloven"

Strange but good story about a mythical forest (where Adam still roams, less and less human like?) that takes people's memories.

The cyclops Ishmael, who is raised by the Kin (unknown what's behind this) and then escapes.

Tsungali, a hunter and killer.

Ghertrude Tulp, originally Ishmael's carer of sorts, and Cyrena, who got her sight back after spending a night with Ishmael.

The Bowman, oneofthewilliams, who made a bow out of (Irrinep)este. The Erstwhile that hunt them. He has forgotten his original travel through the Vorrh and encountered a letter written by himself.

This is only book one of three....

Reminds me a bit of Ægypt by John Crowley in how it uses real people, the photographer Muybridge, the Winchester heiress and her strange Winchester Mystery House...

There are so many things I learned about my world from this book yet it is fiction. Authors should be applauded for that.

-- The Vorrh ---

"It's from the Highlands. The fleyber is the spirit of one that died in childbirth; they say its soul wanders the moors as a ghost light, a will-o'-the-wisp."

"These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents."
    Emotion swept over her again, and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, to thank him silently before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
    He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning.

 

 --- The Erstwhile ---

 

He was unfazed by it, until he realised that it was its binding agent that was so different. The gooey charm that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that held all of Nicholas's contradictions together had saturated into the very meaning of each. So that the hard kernels of consequence and implication had been dissolved like teeth insyrup. But there were hard gums driving his words and Hector had the ghastly image of Nicholas sitting with the older patients, chewing at the pale stringy parts of their being, while they winsomely rambled and drifted away, unaware of his purposeful gnashing.

Ghertrude fainted in a slurred S, as if her string had been cut.

   "What was her message?" asked Cyrena calmly. Ishmael was a rat in a wheel, running hard in the spinning cage of lies.

    The guillotine had existed in mainland Europe and the British Isles for centuries. The sharpened head axe or crushing weight had scuttled downd between its very long verticals to messily separate life in all manner of different forms and variations. Its distictive profiel reached into many dark and gloomy skies long before it obtained the lasting nomenclature of the good Dr. Guillotine, who, seeking a fast and humane method of dispatch, unwittingly signed his name in blood forever to laws allowing the use of an instrument of fearsome horror. Its dramatic simplicity came to represent the revolution's repetitive slaughter, turning it into the dripping icon of the Terror. Germany had a part in the French prototype -a highly skilled harpsichord makernamed Tobias Schmidt crafted the pencilled designs into fundamental reality. Some say the gleaming, oblique, forty-five-degree angle of the blade was his own personal refinement. The speed and efficiency of the new "gin" or engine was infamous. With its endless supply o clients, a new manner of operation was needed. An almost industrial, conveyor belt mentality that kept it overstocked. These earnest labours of the rational matter-opf-fact instigated evengreated performances of bizarre fact and elaborate fiction to dance around the djuddering leaky basket, which Duymas tells us had to be changed or mended every three days because the wicker bottom would be chewed out by tghe growing number of furiously chattering heads that thrashed in their narrow contgainment. Better documented but equally weird accounts tell of numerous  experiments carried out to ascertain the consciousness of the severed minds. The most elaborate being conducted by two young doctors who waited at the foot of the engine, ready to receive the falling head. Once grabbed it was rushed to their nearby carriage and attached via its arteries and gutta-percha pipes to a pump that, in turn, was connected via more tubes to a living dog, strapped to the carriage floor.  The horses were geared up and sped towards their laboratory, the cobbled streets sending loud shock waves through the passengers, who swayed  and steadied themselves while frantically hand-pumping the dog's hot blood into the flushing head. All the while shouting the victim's name aloud and slapping his cheeks over the deafening noise of the hard wheels and the whimpering dog. Some success was recorded, a partial opening of the eyes, a shudder of the lips. Even "some slight agitation" one hour and a fresh dog later, when the head was decanted to an attic laboratory.

 

    "Sometimes you are very childish," said an infuriated Ghertrude.
    "A condition that we have never ourselves experienced," said Luluwa.
    Gertrude listened for sarcasm in the clicking rattle of her speech but realised that none existed.

--------------------------

"The Cloven"

Behind each moment of acute sensing lay solidification, each blind nuzzle dying back into the terse density of colourless fibre, the water squeezed through the now-inert roots and passing upwards. If the mass of the forest that lived in light was alien to humans, then the mass that lived in night was positively hostile in its indifference. Even the burrowing Erstwhile would not be tolerated. Even though their supposed purpose was a form of protecting the forest. When they dug down they never snapped or cut a root. The simply pushed them aside and squirmed in between their languid violence. But as the sleepers hid, the roots turned, often trapping them in fearful embraces. Or sent out more tendril extensions of themselves to penetrate the mothlike bodies, digging into heir ribs and hooking through their faces. Those that eventually awoke often bore the scars of these intrusions, looking like ill-formed knotted arteries wandering under their jaws, cheeks, and eyes. Some no longer had eyes. Teh tips of the roots had found their moisture and sucked it into all the others, sugars to sprite the distant, frivolous leaves that jiggled and danced in the warm sunlit air.

    "This is really difficult for me to understand. Is Blake saying that all of humanity was a mistake?"
    "Not God's mistake in making it. The mistake was that it escaped from the garden and grew abnormal in one direction. Those clever thumbs were given for the tending of plants, not making cities, machines, and endless ideas of how things work, most of which are wrong."

Then, before the cyclops had time to scream of beat him, the beetles arrived. The first heavy black dot landed on Seth's face like an uncertain inkblot; then the air darkened in a clicking dry thunder of them.

John Crowley - "Endless Things"

Amazing fourth and final book, and I have no clue on how to describe it. Wonderings, musings. Books and the world. His amazing diction and style. Not something to be spread out over months, but to be read, quickly, days and weeks.

* * *

(they are in bed, talking. at some point, a short flashback, then they continue talking.))

The first time they'd shared this bed - after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often - she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking - not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.

((now))

She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.
...
"That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."
"Seems kind of obvious," she said.
It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody know. It had been true all along.
"Because, you know," she said, "You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"
"Nope," he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. "News to me."

* * *

So he had had his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made, as his father's and his mother's lives were made of them. Sometimes laid deep like mines or bombs (he thought you'd have to explain this to young people nowadays, who didn't live such lives, probably) so that you had to proceed with care along your way, not come upon them unexpectedly or at the wrong time, at a juncture, and have them explode.
Homo, viator in bivio, the Latin Church declared, offering to help. man, voyager on forking paths. There's no provision, though, for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shout our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead, as in the silent comedies that Axel loved: no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture, a double infinity, an infinitesimal calculus; you'd never get back to there, and if you could you'd never return again to here where you started from: and why would you need to go back in the first place except to learn how to go on from right here, to go on along the way you have to go?

* * *

A light wind, able to stir the yellow fog but not at first to disperse it. A wind young and inexperienced, learning its uses and its work, but so far aimless; a wind that had been borne along with the world's great slow-marching airs and atmospheres from west to east, from Albion to the Middle Sea and over the Bavarian mountains, wondering, wandering. As it blew more steadily over the White Mountain, the day grew clearer. ot the light of day: what the day was great clearer, though not at once to everyone, and to some not at all.
A little wind. The first wind bears in the time, an angel said to John Dee, and the second bears it away again.
The protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers ranked behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle, to see who or what was coming through from the rear. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing - for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere signs, mere phantasmata, and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.
...
That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size - it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew "far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.

* * *

According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind - Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom - which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the real Without, utterly out of reach, the real of the Fullness and God.
What Kraft had learned, in those first joyous labors of imagination long ago, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.
All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on - our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses - in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughs laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality - the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.
They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?
More, even more: the most precious and only truly real thing within each of the conscious beings who had been made to inhabit Kraft's little world (well, not the hylic mob, the mere names, the spear carriers and extras) was their share of the original undivided consciousness from which they sprang - that is, his own. Into which, when their work is done, they are gathered again at last: when their false world is closed up, and shelved.
...
In subsequent years and subsequent books he had sometimes wondered if he might somehow send them a message, one of them or some of them; awaken them to their own condition, to this peculiar reversal of what we out here, most of us anyway, call reality most of the time. To speak into the ears of one soul at least the commandment, the suggestion, the hope of waking.

Samuel Johnson on marriage

"a second marriage represents the triumph of hope over experience."

We think it's a sort of cynical wisecrack - you couldn't get along with A but you're sure you'll get along great with B. We think it's about divorce. In Johnson' time there was hardly any diverce. But there was a lot of early death. The way you parted from your spouse was, she died. Johnson's did. So that was the experience, love somebody and she dies. The hope was the new one wouldn't die.

[from John Crowley, "Dæmonomania"]

John Crowley - "Love and Sleep"

Second book in the "Ægypt" series. It is taking me a long time to read, but suddenly, this morning, I got back into it again.

Still the amazing cut off sentences, the wandering sentences that do not trail on paper but in your mind.

Finally finished it. The gaps in reading were not out of disinterest, as happened with the first book, but life interrupting. Really want to keep on reading the next volume.

John Crowley - "Ægypt"

"When he was very small he had been told the story of the man who was caught in a rainstorm and sought shelter in an old barn. He fell asleep in the hayloft, and when he woke it was deep midnight. He saw, walking on the rafters of the barn, a clowder of cats; they would walk the rafters and meet, and seem to pass a message. Then two cats met on a rafter very near where he lay hidden, and he heard one say to the other: "Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead." And so they parted. When the man got home that day, he told his wife what had happened, and what he had heard the cats say: "Tell Dildrum that Doldrum is dead." And on hearing that, their old family cat, dozing by the fire, leaped up with a shriek and cried out: "Then I'm to be king of the cats!" And it shot up the chimney, and was never seen again.
That story had made him shiver and wonder, and ponder for days; not the story that had been told, but the secret story within it that had not been told: the story about the cats, the secret story that had been going on all along and that no one knew but they."

Crowley has a manner of interrupting the thoughts of his characters as if he is literally following their thoughts. Also, probably related, he does not fear to repeat words and sentences. Cool technique.

The premise, or one of its premises; how outside our thoughts, our dreams, the layers of our myths, lies the cold, real world. A world bereft of dreams and thoughts. How perhaps these two worlds, ours and the physical world, are not so different after all. The universe: a safe with a combination lock, the combination hidden inside itself. But aren't we part of the universe's dust. Isn't the combination inside us, inside our stories, and the stories hiding underneath our stories?

"Renaissance ... all their scholarship, all their learning, was bent towards re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age."

from the introduction: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." [LP Hartley's novel "The Go-Between"]

"'It seems ... that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives ... is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same idea or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances. ... A hero sets out ... to find a atreasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes - each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. ... Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story's premises - logical completion as a vehicle of meaning - all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like  The Fairy Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisne satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.'"