A fascinating paradox is that most transcendent experiences are completely ego-free. In the moment, we lose track of time and space, we lose track of our bodies, we lose track of our selves. We dissolve. And yet, as I suggest, spirituality emerges from consciousness and the material brain. And the paramount signature of consciousness is a sense of self, an “I-ness” distinct from the rest of the cosmos. Thus, curiously, a thing centered on self creates a thing absent of self.
With a PhD in theoretical physics and as “the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities”, Alan Lightman is well poised to think and write about the intersection of science and spirituality (and his writing has often addressed this intersection, as proven by his backlist). The Transcendent Brain reads like a final synthesis of this lifetime of thinking and writing — for a shortish book, it has countless references to the scientists, psychologists, and philosophers who have influenced Lightman’s thinking — but as interesting as I found the material, I don’t know if it really answered his own questions around whether the scientific method necessarily precludes a belief in God (or anything “spiritual” beyond the material world of what can be tested). Still a very interesting read that gave me much to think about. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The driving forces for the emergence of spirituality are both biological and psychological: a primal affinity for nature, a fundamental need for cooperation, and a means of coping with the knowledge of our impending death. Some of these forces can be found in nonhuman animals, of course, but the full experience of spirituality may require the higher intelligence of Homo sapiens.
Over the course of The Transcendent Brain, Lightman shares several transcendent experiences he has had throughout his life; so even though he identifies as an atheist, he understands what others mean by a religious or spiritual experience. He satisfactorily proves a material basis for consciousness (I enjoyed the bits about emergentism — just as you couldn’t predict the characteristics of water by examining its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen, there’s no need for Divine Intervention to explain how our minds are the natural result of the billions of synaptic connections in our brains) and he also shows the ways in which a sense of spirituality (and its fellowship-building) would have been an evolutionary advantage for early humans. One of the most intriguing passages I noted, about “the creative transcendent”, was:
Practitioners and philosophers disagree on whether mathematical truth exists out there in the world, independent of the human mind — in which case mathematicians discover what is already there, like coming upon a new ocean — or whether mathematical ideas, theorems, and functions are invented out of the mind of the mathematician.
It’s interesting to think that it’s no easier to prove the existence of math outside the human mind than to prove the existence of God; so what does that mean for his thesis?
Science can never disprove the existence of God, since God might exist outside the physical universe. Nor can religion prove the existence of God, since any phenomenon or experience attributed to God might, in principle, find explanation in some nontheist cause. What I suggest here is that we can accept a scientific view of the world while at the same time embracing certain experiences that cannot be fully captured or understood by the material underpinnings of the world.
And that’s a bit of Lightman having his cake and eating it too, which has apparently long put the author in the crosshairs of other, more strident, thinkers. Lightman writes about sharing his transcendent experiences during a debate with Richard Dawkins who mocked the author, dismissing people of faith as “nonthinkers” and labelling religion as “nonsense” (classic Dawkins). On a different occasion (as referenced in the Notes at the end), Lightman shared the stage with distinguished Islamic scholar Osman Bakar who, “strongly disagreed with me that we cannot prove the existence of God, stating that ‘revelation’, in both the sacred books and in personal experience, shows that we know God exists.” Acknowledging thusly that he can publicly represent either the pro-spiritual or anti-spiritual point-of-view, The Transcendent Brain reflects this squishy middleground (despite the author stating throughout that he is an affirmed atheist), and I don’t know if this non-resolution was entirely satisfying to me. And yet: I thoroughly enjoyed everything that Lightman shared and the internal musings they led to. Totally worthwhile read.
For an idea of Lightman’s thinking (and some backlash it has elicited), here’s a link to an article in Salon from 2011: Does God exist?
So many cars parked along the gravel driveway. So many guests, already here. It was all happening. Alex made her way to the entrance of the walled property. Her body carrying her along with the fluid quality of a dream. Did she expect some resistance? There was none. The big wooden door was wide open. As if everything was working in concert to allow for Alex’s arrival. To urge her forward. Already she had forgotten the walk there: couldn’t say how long it had taken, what roads she’d passed. The slate was wiped clean.
Having previously loved Emma Cline’s The Girls, I was really looking forward to The Guest; and it did not disappoint. I think that what they have most in common — and what works the best for me — is a tone of disturbing uncanniness; things aren’t quite right, but you recognise the truth of them all the same. With an unlikeable (and pretty much unknowable) main character who drifts and grifts her way through life (surviving on transactional sex and petty theft, dulling her senses and reactions with stolen prescription drugs), as the past threatens to catch up with Alex and we watch tensely as she uses a string of unsuspectingly useful fools to meet her needs in the moment, the reader (this reader) couldn’t help but care for her and want things to work out in the end. Like a mashup of Patrica Highsmith and Ottessa Moshfegh — set in a Gatsbyesque summer playground of the rich on private Long Island beaches — The Guest appealed to a sense in me beyond the heart and mind, as though Cline plucked some deep chord that resonated on an infrasonic level; I felt this more than I can explain it and will acknowledge that might be an entirely personalised reaction. Absolutely worked for me; slight spoilers beyond. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
This thing with Simon. She leaned into Simon and he kept talking but dropped a hand to her low back. On the ride home, he’d tell her about his friends. Their private lives, their hidden problems. And Alex would ask questions and egg him on and he’d flash her a smile, his pleasure suddenly so boyish. This was real, her and Simon. Or it could be.
We don’t end up learning much about Alex’s background — she is circumspect with the people she encounters; likewise circumspect with the reader — but we know she is twenty-two, has worked as an escort in NYC (after moving there for a failed modelling career), and after burning her bridges with friends, clients, and a certain ex-boyfriend that she ripped off, Alex was literally saved from homelessness by a rich middle-aged art dealer she met in a bar. This Simon impulsively installed Alex in his Long Island beach house, and after spending the summer buying her designer clothes, showing her off at parties, and allowing her to spend lazy days swimming in the pool or ocean, a misstep on Alex’s part sees Simon buying her a train ticket back to the city. But with no home or prospects to go back to (and that angry ex-boyfriend apparently looking for her everywhere), Alex convinces herself that if she can only find a place to stay for the six days until Simon’s famous end-of-summer Labour Day party, he will have cooled off and be relieved to see her walking back into his life.
The tension comes from this ticking clock: Will Alex find shelter for the six days? Will Dom track her down? Would Simon even want to see her at the party if she makes it that far? And the details are painted in grippingly and with pathos: Alex uses everyone she meets — some of them fragile and all deserving of better — but I never thought of her as a sociopath; Alex was focussed on survival and I understood that she was going to do whatever it took to survive.
So many nights she remembered only as a sour feeling, a bartender’s cold look, strangers trying not to stare as a man squeezed her knee. The men always wanted people to be aware that they were with Alex, wanted eyes to follow them as they headed toward the elevators. Did they imagine that they looked like anything other than what they were? As if anyone would have done the math and come up with a different explanation.
Maybe it’s because we never learn anything about Alex’s background or childhood, but I never felt sorry for her path to sex work — with youth, beauty, and an ability to “read” people and transform into what they need her to be, Alex is simply using her strengths to make her way; there isn’t a big difference between advertising as an escort and being a rich man’s permanent sugar baby and she always seemed to be in control of her choices; but would someone finally choose her? Again: beyond plot and character, it was the vibe that really worked for me here; Cline’s writing just speaks to me and I am all ears.
I think of the conversation I had with Rachel about the space station and the zoos. Maybe some of the animals might have got out, but I know that most, if not all of the lab octopuses won’t have been so lucky. And I begin to list the animals I can think of that live in aquariums: the sea urchins, and rays, and the starfish, and on and on until I make myself stop, and I think instead about what Rachel asked me. I can’t take her with me if I do decide to go. I can’t save her; I can barely save myself.
Set against the backdrop of a global pandemic, The Memory of Animals asks pertinent questions about freedom and responsibility: examining not only how we treat one another but how we treat the other creatures of the Earth. Weaving together three narrative threads (one in the present day and two from the past), author Claire Fuller maintains tension by dangling mysteries that don’t get untangled until the very end, and I was glued to the page — both wanting those answers and savouring the ride. This is more than a COVID novel — even if many of the situations will feel familiar to the reader — and like all good fiction, it drills down on what it means to be human; what it means to be humane. Spoilerish from here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
How will they keep us in, I wonder, if we threaten to leave? Will they lock us in, and how ethical would that be? I will have both the vaccine and the virus, and I will stay. I could kid myself that I’m doing it to save the human race, but honestly? I’m doing it for the money.
Neffy is a twenty-seven-year-old marine biologist, and out of a job and deeply in debt, she makes the desperate decision to volunteer for a vaccine trial as the Dropsy virus (much more contagious and lethal than COVID) spreads across the globe. Ten healthy young people have been sequestered in a lab with the understanding that they will be given an otherwise untested-on-humans vaccine followed by the virus itself, and if they survive, they’ll be given a huge (unspecified to the reader) payday. Neffy is made very sick by the injections, and when she comes out of her fever a week later, she discovers that the London outside the lab has not weathered the pandemic well, and as the four other test subjects still locked in with her were never given the vaccine or the virus before the lab staff ran away, they have to wonder if she is the only immune person in the world. And what would that fact mean for them as a group? Or the world?
As they agree to wait out the quarantine period that they had signed on for (maybe there still is someone in charge out there who will come to rescue them), Neffy learns that one of the others has brought the prototype of a device (The Revisitor) that allows a person to become deeply immersed in their own memories. Much of the novel is made up of her trips to the past, and as we witness long scenes from Neffy’s childhood and later family life, we eventually learn the real impulse behind her volunteering for the trial.
In the third narrative strand, Neffy writes a series of letters to “My Dear H” while in quarantine. These tell the story of her career as a marine biologist, and as she describes the lifelong connection she has felt to octopuses, it becomes clear how often she was uncomfortable performing experiments on them or even keeping them (bored and depressed) in captivity. These bits not only point out the irony of her own confinement (and the irony of her having access to a memory machine during a pandemic that erases memory), but will eventually answer the question of where her debt came from.
“But don’t you think we can learn from the past? See things differently, or let it help us decide what we do in the future?”
“Humans are useless at learning from their mistakes. We just have to keep making new plans,” Piper says.
Neffy is a complex character, but the more we learn about her past, the more understandable her behaviour becomes; Fuller’s use of this three strand narrative works really well to maintain interest and organically answer questions the reader has about Neffy from the beginning — character, plot, and format get full marks. Although the debate about freedom and responsibility has been stirred up by the pandemic we all recently went through, I don’t know if The Memory of Animals truly brings anything new to the table. On the other hand, this was a very believable account of one young woman’s journey, well told, and I’m looking forward to reading more reviews from readers who are more familiar with Fuller’s work.
Morning. A newly birthing sun cracks through the trees and lances straight into his blazing red eyes. Baxter is a sleeping car porter. A sleepy car porter. A sleepy porter he is car. Car sleepy. Porter. Sleeping. He giggles.
Winner of Canada’s richest literary award, the Giller Prize, The Sleeping Car Porter took me a while to warm up to. Part historical fiction, part social commentary — all told in a hallucinatory blur of visions and sexual longing and sci-fi fantasy — at first, it didn’t seem real enough to feel true. But as the stakes ramped up for the main character — a young gay Black man working in one of the few (potentially) well-paying fields open to him in 1929 Canada — I finally forged an emotional connection to the material, and by the end, the hallucinatory blur felt like the only way that author Suzette Mayr could have possibly allowed me to truly feel inside this character’s absurd existence. Happy to have read this and delighted it won the big prize.
Hands reach toward him, grab at him for a lift up, grab his coat pocket, wave in his face. A sea swell of passengers, spilling toward his car; a maelstrom of departure-time panic. R. T. Baxter, a dentist-to-be, man who longs to lance gums and extract pathological third molars, standing, here, next to this train, caught in this hurricane. Drowsy already.
From the first passage we’re told that Baxter — a Caribbean transplant to Canada, in search of a better life — has been saving his money for years to go to Dentistry school, and with less than a hundred dollars left to earn, he can’t wait to end his days as a sleeping car porter. We learn that this position entails being on-call twenty-four hours a day to well-off white folks who treat the Black porters like servants or worse (calling them all “boy” or "George", leaving awful messes for them to clean, demanding water or babysitting services in the middle of the night when one might catch a short nap), and a porter like Baxter must smile and obey every piddling order: not only does he earn the majority of his money through tips, but any complaint from a passenger (deserved or not) leads to demerits and too many demerits leads to firing. As Baxter prepares to leave on a run from Montreal to Vancouver — on the “fastest train on the continent” — he’s assigned a bunch of hard-to-please-looking passengers, and as he can only earn ten more demerits before he’s let go (and he’s oh so close with his savings!) it’s a mounting disaster for him when the train is stopped in the Rocky Mountains by a mudslide and the passengers want to hold him personally responsible for the delay.
Layered onto this increasingly tense plot, Baxter’s sleep deprivation (made worse by the delay) leads to hallucinations that usually include teeth (based on some studying he’s already done with a found dental textbook), fairly graphic sexual (in language, not acts) memories/longings, and scenes right out of the science fiction novels he loves to read:
Baxter read and reread his books and magazines about the deep sea and Martians and outer space and time travel and immortal beings and phantoms. He ate alone. He ironed his shirts. He shined his shoes so that they glittered like stars when he walked. He circled the planet Earth in his spaceship, he flew up high on the back of giant scarabs from Jupiter, he travelled the oceans in submarines. He rested in the cellar of his castle in his box of dirt, friends with vermin. He sat on his chair in the speeding train, his back perfectly straight, and he slept with his eyes open, hallucinations draping his face, a tittering insect instead of a heart.
The dehumanising manner in which Baxter is treated by the passengers (and the railroad employing him) is both horrible and believable and I welcome historical fiction that asks us to confront such an ugly chapter from our past. And while at first I wasn’t sure if the sexual content fit in with the bigger picture — memories of cruising in parks and alleys, money slyly offered in a public washroom, pornography that demands to be examined again and again: is this what the grey-haired ladies who pick up every Giller winner are hoping to find between these covers? — I have to admit that being a gay Black immigrant in 1929 Canada is a big, challenging package that deserves to be examined in its entirety; just how was one expected to find love when it was against the law? Each facet of Baxter’s existence seems to be working against the fulfilment of his dreams and desires, and as the hours and days at a standstill drag on — as the passengers become angrier and Baxter becomes ever more delusional from sleep deprivation — I truly did feel empathy for his struggles; perhaps literally placing us in a fantasy world was the only way for Mayr to demonstrate how surreal our actual world can be. I’m glad I stuck with this after feeling lukewarm in the beginning, and again, I am pleased that Mayr has been celebrated for what she created here.
— My aunt Arimenta, says Baxter, carefully — always used to say, Baxter, she’d say, hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
What happens when we feel that something — or someone — is present to us, and yet we can’t say how? A silent figure. A visitor. An indefinable change in feeling of a room. Something is there, unmistakably so. And try as we might, if someone asks how we know, we cannot explain it. We just know it. We just feel it. This is a felt presence.
Author Ben Alderson-Day is a British research psychologist with an interest in auditory verbal hallucinations; and while the phenomenon of “hearing voices” can be linked to schizophrenia and other pathologies, not all those who have this experience (or who otherwise sense invisible presences) suffer from a diagnosable condition — Alderson-Day simply refers to his core research subjects as “voice-hearers”. Starting with those who report hearing disembodied voices, the author cast his net wider to interview and collect research on those who report seeing or feeling the physical presence of someone who is invisible to others, and this net is cast so widely that Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other includes the stories of everyone from epileptics and ultramarathoners to mediums and Bronies; and I was pretty much fascinated by all of it. Sections where Alderson-Day shares other’s research and theory can be a little dry, but this was more than made up for by the sections where the author engagingly reports his own thoughts and conversations. This was not exactly the book that I expected it to be, but I am not a bit disappointed by what it is. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
If you go looking for feelings of presence, the first stories you come across almost always involve snow. Lots and lots of snow. Blank expanses, extreme conditions, the enormity of nature — all seem to combine to conjure silent figures, as if some spaces appear tailor made for feelings of presence.
It was an abiding interest in polar exploration stories that led me to picking up this book, and Alderson-Day does discuss Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous experience of having been led by a mysterious “other” across South Georgia Island in search of rescue for his beleaguered crew (and as that interest had previously led me to reading John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor, I was unsurprised to see that Alderson-Day shares a few stories from that collection). But this isn’t just an amalgam of stories of guardian angels: from the theory that Robin Williams’ suicide could be attributed to hallucinations tied to his Lewy Body Dementia, to sleep paralysis with menacing presences (or Exploding Head Syndrome!) and seeing scary ghosts (or SED: sensory experience of the dead), an encounter with a sensed presence isn’t necessarily benevolent. On the other hand, from meditating monks to tulpamancers to novelists, there are those who are able to use their minds to conjure wanted presences:
At Durham, we have worked with a wide range of remarkable people, reporting some of the most unusual experiences you could put into words. Voices, visions, presences; psychosis, dissociation, trauma; spirits, telepathy, and demons. But we have never had to try to work with data as slippery as what we got from the Edinburgh writers. Appropriately enough, it wasn’t hard to feel like you were being spun a yarn sometimes.
As a researcher, Alderson-Day uses these stories to try and understand the genesis of the broadly defined phenomenon of felt presence, and besides some general theories (it’s a body-based experience [a few different areas of the brain are referenced], it’s influenced by the process of mirroring and “coloured in” by expectation), but the most interesting thing to me was that the research is all so recent. We all get the feeling sometimes that we’re being watched when there’s no one there, we all hear our name whispered on the breeze — indeed, Alderson-Day writes that “we all occupy a space somewhere on a continuum of psychosis and we could in theory move up and down it” — yet we’re mostly uncomfortable admitting to hearing voices or feeling presences. It would seem that researchers are often surprised by how widespread these phenomena are because they tend to ask specific questions instead of allowing research subjects to freely describe their lived experiences; the most fascinating experiences come out when the subjects go off script ("Ooooh, I just left my body and floated above the table") and there’s a new research project, Psychosis Outside the Box, that’s attempting to elicit these types of responses. If nothing else, "felt presences" would seem to represent a common human experience that comes in a wide variety of forms:
In trying to understand felt presence, I have heard about the visceral visitors of psychosis, the harbinger of ill health among Parkinson’s sufferers, the doppelgänger of an intoxicated playwright, and a robot that can conjure a ghost. I have listened to stories of saviors but also pursuers, a stormy voice that only visited in the calm, and fellow travelers who aren’t always expected. I have been told about evil personified, heard of animal confidantes, and even been offered a theory on how to create such presences myself.
Again: I enjoyed the stories more than the theory (and perhaps mostly because Alderson-Day doesn’t have a settled theory to share), but I enjoyed the whole of this and am glad I picked it up.
The words in this book are embers from the tribal fires that used to burn in our villages. They are embers from the spiritual fires burning in the hearts, minds and souls of great writers on healing and love. They are embers from every story I have ever heard. They are embers from all the relationships that have sustained and defined me. They are heart songs. They are spirit songs. And, shared with you, they become honour songs for the ritual ways that spawned them. Bring these words into your life. Feel them. Sit with them. Use them. For this is the morning, excellent and fair…
As dawn broke every morning, the late Ojibway author Richard Wagamese would light a candle, burn the four medicines (sage, cedar, sweetgrass, and tobacco), read widely from global spiritual traditions, and take some solitary time to meditate upon those readings; eventually journaling his learnings before getting down to the work of writing that was his “life and passion and career”. Collected here as Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations, the learnings are grouped into several categories (Stillness, Harmony, Trust, etc.), with just one or two passages per page and many beautiful (stock) photographs. There is identifiable truth on every page of this collection — these are writings that speak soul to soul — and if I had one small complaint, it would be that grouping the meditations by category had the slightest feeling of repetition, but ultimately, truths glimpsed by slightly different angles are still truths and a gift to the reader. This is a collection I will return to again and again and my soul cannot give fewer than five stars. I could have shared something from every page, but here are a few samples:
Stillness
In this waking world, I am awakened. In this easing of shadow, I reclaim the light. I am not alone here. I sit with my ancestors, singing this day into being — and I am made more.
Harmony
It is love that brings us all together. This human family we are part of, this singular voice that is the accumulation of all voices raised together in praise of all Creation, this one heartbeat, this one drum, this one immaculate love that put us here together so that we could learn its primary teaching — that love is the energy of Creation, that it takes love to create love.
Reverence
There are times in your life you are flung into an undiscovered country of being, a place beyond time and tide and detail, the full magical breath of you heaving with the indescribable joy of being, and you realize then that parts of you exist in exile and completeness is journeying to bring them home.
Joy
I’m not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I’m here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times. I’m here to pray and chant and meditate and sing and find Creator in a blues riff, a sunrise, a touch or the laughter of children. I’m here to discover ME in all of that. I’m here to add clunky, chunky and funky bits of me to the swirls and swagger and churn of life and living. It demands I be authentic. So when you look out at the world, that’s me dancing in the fields…
From sharing his processes to reaching out a hand in shared humanity to even those who have hurt him and his people, Wagamese was a writer of uncommon generosity. My soul wants to be dancing in the fields by his side — Dance, dang it, that's what feet are for! — unreservedly the highest recommendation.
The North doesn’t play favourites.
Welcome back to the North.
According to author Tom Stewart, he hadn’t intended to write a sequel to Immortal North, “Yet, here we are. The tale felt unfinished.” Immortal North Two begins within the heart-thumping final moments of the previous novel, and in chapters that alternate between the town and the woods, between the present and the past, following the tortured inner thoughts of a backwoods man who has apparently lost everything, we get a deeper understanding of “the trapper” and a deeper understanding of how loss and grief are navigated and processed. I didn’t know that I needed a sequel to this story, but I’m glad it exists and can whole-heartedly recommend the duology to any reader. (My thanks to the author for an Advanced Reading Copy; passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When the trapper was young he was told a story of a mythical arrow shot from a mythical bow. For that arrow to reach its target, it had to cross half the distance. Then it had to halve that distance again. Then again, and so on. Of course that particular arrow never reaches its target because it never crosses all those infinite halves. How could it? That still made some sense to him. Turns out this arrow is not that arrow. A part of him was surprised.
After a brief scene-setting bit of nature writing, we rejoin the trapper as an arrow — the broadhead so pretty and dazzling in its flight as it sliced through that spectrum of morning light — is coursing through the air towards him. Acts and their consequences propel the plot from there, but as ever, plot isn’t the most interesting part of a novel to me (although I will say that for those who enjoy a cracking good yarn, this one has plenty of snap; for those who enjoy a more emotional read, this has plenty of pull). The sections in the present day — following the trapper as he struggles to carry on — were compelling and believable; interwoven organically with ideas from philosophers ranging from Zeno to Frankl. I loved the concept of the big trapper and little trapper disagreeing within his mind, as well as the role that nature takes in his healing process. There are also some wonderful scenes set in the past: I particularly liked an epic poker game that once affected the fortunes of the trapper’s family and the tale of the trapper’s grandparents meeting at a country dance:
Love was in the air and couples danced within it. Her thin hand in his. And from that clasp would come other life. Unbeknownst to them, where their palms met, roots sprouted. Small vines already curling out between their fingers.
Stewart’s writing is filled with savoury metaphor and allusion and bits of wisdom, and I’ll share here a few tasty bits:
• His eyes on the curled grey ashes in the stove, like the fire had eaten the bones but left the feathers.
• The legend of the trapper grew — people like to talk and they poured those truths some drinks.
• He had always been a slow reader and now he was a slower reader and he considered that progress.
This sequel didn’t affect me quite as hard as the first novel did — probably because everything truly affecting had already occurred before this opens — but as an exploration of the consequences of those *cough* affecting events, this was really well done. And probably necessary. Again: I’m glad Immortal North Two exists and look forward to reading whatever the author comes out with next.
And he was nine-tenths pain, and one-tenth pain, and some impossible fraction of hysterical love, ‘cause for the smallest wild part of him, some piece at once defiant to and accepting of the misery and cruelty of life, and any circumstance or force that would impose on him great suffering which might break his will and then break the man — this felt raw and that felt good. See his resolve in a tiny smile.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12
As hinted at by the title given to this collection of strange stories, Sheridan Le Fanu was interested in writing about the mystical and metaphyiscal; those inexplicable horrors of shade and shadow that may only be fuzzily glimpsed by mortal man as though In a Glass Darkly. First published in 1872, my edition has an Introduction which compellingly explains that Le Fanu (a Dublin-born Protestant journalist with “an interest in Irish Nationalism”) often shaped his stories so that power-abusing upper class characters face some sort of comeuppance. And as a writer influenced by Swedenborg, Le Fanu was open to the idea that this retribution could come at the hands of actual spirits. As these stories unfold, it seems equally as scientifically possible for a middle-of-the-night pain in the chest to have been delivered by indigestion or vampire; the real delight is in following along to see how the cases unfold. I loved every bit of this.
As food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has once been caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve, is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am. ~ Green Tea
Published in 1871, fifteen or so years before the first Sherlock Holmes story, Green Tea shares many of the detectiving characteristics later employed by Holmes: an assistant who compiles his genius mentor’s notes into readable stories for the laypeople; an eye for evaluating a person upon first meeting (here, after a brief conversation with The Rev. Mr. Jennings, Dr. Hesselius asserts that he is a bachelor, he has drunk a good deal of green tea but has since given it up, and that his father has seen a ghost!); and the belief that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for every mysterious circumstance. Coming before Holmes as this did, I couldn’t help but put myself in the mind of a reader in 1871: would that reader have been gobsmacked by Hesselius’ feats of logic? Would that reader have been chilled by the gloomy Gothic setting and, even moreso, horrified by a vicar who is shadowed by a blaspheming demon (a monkey-shaped phantom with glowing red eyes and a penchant for perching on the Good Book in order to block the minister’s readings)? This was a truly surprising delight: I had no idea where this old story would go, nor could I have predicted Hesselius’ solution. Loved this!
"Well, then, Doctor, here is the last of my questions. You will, probably, laugh at it; but it must out nevertheless. Is there any disease, in all the range of human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly contracting the stature and the whole frame — causing the man to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve his exact resemblance to himself in every particular — with the one exception, his height and bulk; any disease, mark — no matter how rare — how little believed in, generally — which could possibly result in producing such an effect?" ~ The Familiar
The Familiar begins with a prologue in which Hesselius writes to his aide that the ensuing case of a retired sea captain who suddenly finds himself pursued by a demon — recorded by a clergyman and forwarded to the doctor for analysis — is interesting, but beyond his abilities to diagnose as he had never met the captain himself. Breaking such cases into three categories — hallucinations, actual demonic possession, or a physical ailment that makes possible one of the other two possibilities — the reader is then primed to analyse Captain Barton’s case as it unfolds. And whether he is actually pursued by a demon, or if the figure is a manifestation stemming from his own guilty conscience, there is no denying that this is a man succumbing to harrowing terrors.
This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet, "A rope for Judge Harbottle!" ~ Mr. Justice Harbottle
In a prologue before presenting another third party manuscript collected by Dr. Hesselius, it is noted that Hasselius has written in the margins that this seemed to be a case of (what we would today call) mass hysteria; that a person suffering from certain cases of “lunacy, of epilepsy, of catalepsy, and of mania” might establish “spirit-action” in one person, which then spreads to others around them. In this case: a haughty and corrupt hanging judge finds himself hauled up before an otherworldly High Court of Appeal. And while Harbottle’s frightening visions might be attributed to gout or guilt, how to explain the visions experienced by others in his household?
It seemed on a sudden, as it came, that the darkness deepened, and a chill stole into the air around me. Suppose I were to disappear finally, like those other men whose stories I had listened to! Had I not been at all the pains that mortal could to obliterate every trace of my real proceedings, and to mislead everyone to whom I spoke as to the direction in which I had gone? This icy, snake-like thought stole through my mind, and was gone. ~ The Room in the Dragon Volant
At 120 pages, this novella-length story of a twisty and complicated con (with the inexplicable disappearances of they who stay in the corner room of the Dragon Volant inn outside Versailles) must have been mind-blowing in the day to readers who hadn’t seen this kind of storyline before; collected here by Dr. Hasselius in an essay on “Drugs of the Dark and the Middle Ages”, this is a story with a rational, rather than supernatural, explanation.
If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire. ~ Carmilla
Written in 1872, fifteen or so years before the first publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this is a spooky tale of a charming young woman who is not as innocent as she would appear. This manuscript was written by a woman who had crossed paths with Carmilla in her youth and was collected by Dr. Hasselius, who noted in the margins that this tale, involves “not improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its intermediates”.
My final thoughts: This was such an interesting collection, and mostly, because I kept wondering how a reader 150 years ago must have reacted to the material: it’s pretty tame — almost cliché — by today’s standards, but I was never unaware that Le Fanu got there first. Also: the appearance in Green Tea of the Holmesian Dr. Hasselius made me think that I was in for a whole collection of his stories, so it was a bit disappointing that he never physically appears again. Still, overall, a cracking good read.
Your moshom never lied to me, but there were Cree legends he told me that I knew weren’t true, that represented something else. Like I know that Canada isn’t actually on the back of a turtle. I know that Wisakedjak didn’t create humans. He didn’t make mud out of dirt and water, mould that mud into a humanoid figure, dry it over fire, and breathe life into it. The theory of crows seemed equally tenuous, but provable, if you were to go to the place where you would be remembered.
Centred on a Winnipeg-dwelling Cree family disconnected from their ancestral lands, The Theory of Crows is a universally relatable domestic drama. When a middle-aged man finds himself suffering with anxiety and depression, and walls himself off from his wife and teenage daughter, a personal tragedy will send the father and daughter on a dangerous trek back to those ancestral lands; seeking the soul medicine that can only be found there, held in the memory of the crows and in the memory stored in the land itself. I found much to like in this story — even if I found the line-by-line writing to be a bit clunky — and as this is the first adult novel released by celebrated children’s author David A. Robertson, it holds out the promise for even greater things ahead. Rounding down to three stars for the clunky bits I didn’t believe.
Your grandfather used to say that you could remember the land, even if you’d never been on the land before. Your grandfather used to say that the land could remember you. It works the same way with crows, Hallelujah. They remembered him, they would remember me, and they remember you. They pass these things down through the generations.
From a young age, Matthew was awe-struck by the enormity of the night sky, and a fear of the void could send him into a panic; a panic only his father — an Elder, an ordained minister, a trained counsellor — could calm. As he grew older, Matt began to rely on Xanax (“as required”, and he required quite a lot), and between the anxiety and the meds, he began to zombie his way through life, ignoring and disappointing his wife and daughter. That sixteen-year-old daughter Holly (named “Hallelujah” at birth for her miraculous existence) is beginning to act out in reaction to her father’s emotional absence, and to make matters worse, she’s beginning to experience panic attacks of her own. Although Matt and Holly are both vehemently non-spiritual — neither believing in God or following Indigenous ceremony — they are forced to rely on the ways and beliefs of the Cree if they hope to complete a fraught trip to their ancestral trapline in northern Manitoba.
Robertson recently released a memoir, Black Water, which revolves around just such a trip he took with his own father, and in this interview with the CBC, he explains how he used learnings from that trip to deal with his own mental health issues that were affecting his relationships with his family (and especially with his eldest daughter). As quoted in the interview, writing The Theory of Crows “was a way for me to continue to heal, because sharing truths through story is healing for me.” I commend Robertson for his bravery and candour in sharing the truth at the heart of this story, but again, it wasn’t an entirely successful novel for me. I’ll include an example of why I felt this way: The scene where Holly and her friends are drinking and decide to test the local urban legend (will running around the church three times make Satan appear?) seemed like an interesting bit, but right from the beginning, I had a credibility issue: Would a Winnipeg-raised kid be thinking that “the snow was deep” if it was “up to her ankle”? And, OK, the snow was deeper around back, and they had been drinking, but would Holly the athlete not actually be able to circle the church more than twice? And even though it states that at least Charmaine did complete three laps, since Holly blacked out (I guess?) at some point, we never learn what Charmaine sees — I don’t think Charmaine appears in the rest of the book — and that made the whole scene pointless to me.
Regret covers everything. It’s like thick fog. It’s hard to see through. Your grandfather says that he doesn’t regret anything because you can’t change what happened. I don’t know if I believe him. I think we all wish that we could go back and do at least one thing over again…We can drown in regret.
The first part of this story — showing the disconnection growing between Matt and his family and Holly’s rebellious reaction — was absolutely relatable and I believed that this was a real family. The second half — a father-daughter canoe trip into the unknown — was undeniably tense and adventuresome, and the fact that Matt and Holly were city-dwellers attempting to regain something of their indigenous heritage also made this half relatable: they had no special skills or knowledge to carry them through and the dangers were real. But because they were from this land, and the land did remember them, they experienced a type of healing — a soul medicine — that wouldn’t be available to the settler population, and there is magic in that. The story arc and many of the specific situations did work for me, but this loses stars for the clunky bits that didn’t.
When the Greek lesson is over, she walks the dark streets as she has always done. The vehicles on the road speed past daringly as they always do. Motorbikes carrying midnight snacks in red metal boxes weave in and out of the traffic, ignoring both lanes and lights. Past drunks young or old, weary workers in skirt suits or short-sleeved shirts, elderly women staring blankly from the entrance of empty restaurants, she carries on walking.
The first novel I read by Han Kang — International Booker winner The Vegetarian — was pretty much my idea of perfection: weird and affecting, equally engaging my heart and mind, it drew me in and taught me something of what it is to be a woman in modern-day South Korea. But Kang is no one-trick pony, no two of her books are quite alike, and while each of the novels I have read by her since has been undeniably well-written, none of them has quite sparked that original magic for me again. Greek Lessons is something new yet again — poetic and philosophical, it twines the stories of a woman who has unexpectedly lost the ability to speak with that of a man who is slowly losing his sight — and for the most part, I found the plot kind of predictable and bland; the two voices confusing in their interchangeability. I’m not disappointed to have read this — Kang’s sentences are delightful — and I’m rounding down to three stars as a rating against her earlier work. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Spoilerish from here.)
“Are you okay, seonsaengnim?” asked the young woman with the curly hair and sweet eyes who sat at the very front of the class. The woman had tried to force a smile, but all that happened was that her eyelids spasmed for a while. Trembling lips pressed firmly together, she muttered to herself from somewhere deeper than her tongue and throat: It’s come back.
For the second time in her life, “the woman” finds herself suddenly, physically, incapable of speaking; even the noises she makes breathing make her feel tense and nauseous. The first time this happened (as a teenager), she felt the dam burst during a French lesson and she regained the power of speech. This time — after the death of her mother and recently losing a custody battle for her son, then losing her job as a lecturer with the loss of her voice — she decides to take lessons in Ancient Greek at the community college; at least it fills a few of her empty hours even if there’s no quick miracle forthcoming.
Interspersed with the woman’s tortured musings on her life and predicament (presented in an omniscient third-person POV) are scenes from the Greek teacher’s life, told in both first-person and second-person POVs as he intermittently mentally addresses the friend of his youth who had been his first (unrequited) love. Suffering a congenital eye disorder, he has always known that blindness was in his future, but perversely, not only has he refused to learn Braille, but he left his expat family in Germany to return to the Seoul of his childhood and attempt to live his dimming life on his own terms.
There is something interesting in examining Ancient Greek (both the structure of the language itself and the philosophy and literature written in it) to draw metaphors for how meaning is defined and derived in modern life, but honestly, the plot arc of an emotionally needy mute woman and an increasingly helpless blind man stumbling into a relationship of mutual aid wasn’t very satisfying to me. Their stories twin and twine in the fine details, too (in a way that wasn’t to my liking), as when the man finds himself in inexplicable tears:
There are times when my eyes burn and suddenly start to water; when these tears, which are but physiological, fail to stop for some reason, I quietly turn away from the road and wait for the moment to pass.
And the woman finds herself incapable of tears despite her recent losses:
She wipes her cheeks, dry as ever, with the back of her hand. If only she’d made a map of the route her tears used to take. If only she’d used a needle to engrave pinpricks, or even just traces of blood, over the route where the words used to flow. But, she mutters, from a place deeper than tongue and throat, that was too terrible a route.
Rather than try to guess what the author means by all of this, I’ll let Kang herself explain by quoting from an interview found on Korea.net:
In "Greek Lessons," we are introduced to a man gradually losing his sight and a woman who suddenly loses her voice. In the man’s case, it feels as if he is a portrait of the universal everyman. Slowly losing the world of sight and enduring the human condition of the inevitable yet gradual approach of death are one and the same. During the process of mortality, we struggle against death even as our lives are being consumed. This is akin to speech and silence occurring simultaneously. Human consciousness always coexists with darkness, but our voices are heard most clearly in the blackest darkness. During this battle against mortality, our power of speech becomes ragged, and ultimately the female protagonist loses her voice entirely. I think that she could also be a portrait of us all. This opinion reflects my experience of working on Leave Now, the Wind is Blowing for over four years. At that time I became extremely sensitive to language. Rather than conceptual concerns about language, the sensual act of writing itself became unbearable to me. All the words I was using felt like they had become ragged, which pained me. I overcame most of that torment while writing "Greek Lessons."
Reading Greek Lessons, it’s obvious that the author put much thought and craft into every word chosen — and I can see how another reader might gel precisely with this kind of thing — but it wasn’t quite to my own tastes (or, more unfairly, not to my expectations). I still look forward to reading whatever Kang comes up with next.
