The Darkening of the Light

Tessa B. Dick The Darkening of the Light (2012)
Philip K. Dick's final novel would, in theory, have been The Owl in Daylight. I've read that it was the novel he was working on at the time of his death, back in 1982, although in the Exegesis he describes it as the book he found himself unable to write, the novel which broke him. His widow, Tessa, published her own version of The Owl in Daylight some years after his death, reputedly utilising some of what he had written, although I could be wrong about that detail. The book was criticised for diverging from what is known of Phil's original outline, and was in any case withdrawn from publication in response to objections made by the estate of the author.

The Darkening of the Light introduces itself as an expanded version of an earlier work by the same author, and clearly makes use of certain themes attributed to her version of The Owl in Daylight, and no third party has yet tried to have it withdrawn from publication so far as I'm aware, so let's just try to enjoy the fact of its existence and current availability without getting too bogged down in whether or not it should count as the completion of his last great work; because the answer to that one is probably yes and no. If we're treating it as a forensic reconstruction of Phil's last book as it would have been, then we're doomed to disappointment, because yes, of course it diverges and strays from the outline. Most authors diverge and stray from their own outlines, or they do if they're any good; and this was never Kevin J. Anderson expanding something A.E. van Vogt scribbled on the back of a fag packet to full novel length.

To answer a different but arguably more pertinent question, The Darkening of the Light really is a great book. Possibly excepting Frida Kahlo, our culture conditions us to a certain degree of squinting whenever a woman steps out from the shadow of her better publicised husband, but we really need to get over it and judge the work on its own merit rather than by our assumptions.

The Darkening of the Light isn't a Philip K. Dick novel, although it's built upon much of that which preoccupied him in later years, and not because his ex-wife is presenting a mere impersonation, but because she spent time with the guy, understood what made him tick, and has plenty to say on the subject. Her tone actually reminds me a little of Richard Brautigan, if anything, which is well suited to analysis of the nature of reality, and - most refreshingly - she writes with a gentle sense of humour, and a wonderfully understated pleasure taken in the absurd.

When Teddy arrived home on Friday afternoon, wistfully daydreaming about Lorelei, instead of a little stucco house he found himself standing in front of a stone temple with statues of grotesque gargoyles standing on either side of the entrance, a double door made of iron that refused to open when he pushed and pulled on it. This turn of events did not surprise him, since he had found that some sort of punishment was always imposed upon him whenever he made an unethical choice.

This pleases me greatly because this is the detail of Philip K. Dick's writing which everyone misses, hence all those groaning po-faced blue and orange movies with handsome young men questioning the reality of their own photogenic existences within what usually looks like a Nine Inch Nails video.

The Darkening of the Light is significantly more playful than we might expect, and is about - as you might anticipate - our relationship with reality, death, and I suspect represents Tessa B. Dick coming to terms with the passing of a husband. Without having known the man, I've always wondered about his attitude to women, specifically the repeating cycle of partners who age into reputedly stifling harridans from which the only relief is some newer, younger model; so it's nice to get something from the perspective of a better half, and a perspective which balances boldly honest reportage of his failings with a warm regard which I personally found both moving and something of a relief - he may have been hard work at times, but I guess it wasn't all uphill.

In terms of mood, the novel additionally reminds me a little of the immersive and autobiographical A War of Witches in which anthropologist T.J. Knab describes his life amongst the curanderas of rural Mexico. Knab's book runs with the idea that we each lead a post-mortem existence in Talokan, the realm beneath the Earth, and that this is also the place we visit when we dream. The Darkening of the Light feels very much like a communication of similar spirit, and without doing anything particularly spectacular or flashy, is one of the best novels I've read in a while. Whether or not this is the closest we'll come to reading Phil's Owl in Daylight probably doesn't matter.

Mountainhead

New Juche Mountainhead (2016)
I had a feeling this one would be worth a look based on my already having been bowled over by Stupid Baby, but I've a hunch Mountainhead may even be the best thing I've ever read, if that can be considered a meaningful statement. New Juche is a man who likes big tits and masturbation. I like big tits and masturbation, but this guy really likes big tits and masturbation. He lives and works in south-east Asia, so you've probably already done the math even before we've reached the end of the sentence, and you would almost certainly be wrong.

The point at which I realised I didn't ever want to have conversations with western travellers again came months later, shortly before I moved to the mountain, when I told a female tourist in a bar about the experience with the Burmese woman. I was trying to be honest both for her benefit and perhaps to solicit some casual therapy, but she found me offensive, to a dangerous degree, and I immediately realised that all conversation was hopeless and deceitful. There is experience outside of language and ideas that you assume and allow for, if you're not a cunt.

Mountainhead communicates that experience, and if the words are familiar, the patterns they form may not be. The experience communicated might justifiably be termed shamanic and could certainly be reduced to getting in touch with nature, which is sort of funny given that those who traditionally respond to such tie-dyed phrases would probably be horrified by Mountainhead, and specifically they would be horrified by its honesty. In Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood, William Shaw wrote:

All music is about geography, in a way. It's either about the place in which it's made, or the place where the maker wants to be.

I'd extend this observation to art in general, and it's demonstrably true of Mountainhead which is at core an account of the author becoming part of his environment, something existing within the fabric rather than upon its surface.

I feel I'm being slowly gathered up by the fibres and essences of the forest, beckoned and cajoled by the leaves and scents, and chased by plagues sent to precede me and to show me the way. My own face looks down on me from the trunks of these dark trees, the moist branches I grab are my own sweaty cock and the fluids that splash on me are my own issue.

The qualities which distinguish this novel - mostly autobiographical so far as I'm able to tell, but allowing for visionary interludes - from all that other crap about finding oneself through shunning Hostess products in favour of some delicious nourishing kale and how we met this really amazing old guy half way up a mountain in Baja California, are the facts of it being more about losing oneself in merging with an environment, and the unflinching honesty by which all elements of that environment are described. All the sexual effluvia of spunk, saliva, blood, sweat, bacteria, all the smells fermenting within unsightly wrinkles are celebrated as part of the forest mulch from which everything here is grown, including even the misery, grinding poverty, and casual cruelty.

Sex, like religion and drinking and smoking, is tied profoundly to ideas about place. Sick animals who graduate to Asia for sex graduate at their own pace through a succession of categories and locations, with a very defensive certainty as to their current, particular category and location. There is cruelty in it from wherever you stand, I absolutely believe that.

As a whole, and particularly as one approaches the end, Mountainhead has an almost biblical rhythm, human sacrifice yielding an encounter with God - here manifest as a life size biro rendering of Hitler drawn in a toilet cubicle at a children's school, and you can tell he's a sacred Hitler due to the halo of dobbers around his head - leading to apotheosis either with or as the mountain, which is arguably the main character of the novel; and like all of the best writing, it manages to keep hold of its sense of humour without digging you in the ribs and grinning every five seconds like Douglas fucking Adams.

Of all the books I've read, Mountainhead most closely compares to T.J. Knab's similarly sweat drenched A War of Witches, which represents the same sort of environmental immersion but amongst rural Mexican witches rather than Thai prostitutes; and like Knab's book it leaves the reader subtly changed by an improved understanding of human existence. It probably isn't the best thing I've ever read, realistically speaking, but right now I'm having trouble thinking of anything which impressed me more.

My Education

William S. Burroughs My Education (1995)
This was Burrough's last book to be published whilst he was alive, and as with 1987's Western Lands you can kind of tell he was cramming for his finals, so to speak. The text comprises descriptions of dreams Burroughs' set down immediately upon waking - presumably over a long period given the quantity - worked into something which is at least as much a novel as any of the others, if more obviously autobiographical due to the general composition of many of the dreams.

For the last couple of decades I've tended to regard dreams as excursions to an actual place, namely the Precolombian Mexican underworld as described in T.J. Knab's autobiographical and ethnological A War of Witches. Knab describes indigenous Nahua belief in our entire world existing in replica down there, and how we visit this land of the dead in dreams, even meeting other dreamers as well as those who have passed on. Here I suppose I should stress that I don't subscribe to this idea as something literal so much as a useful understanding, one which lends our dreams a more interesting narrative than the traditional combination of cheese before bedtime revealing stereotypical desires to shag your own mother or whatever.

Anyway, with this in mind, My Education is both fascinating and surprisingly touching as autobiography. Whilst there's always a lot of the man in his writing, this time we additionally meet the people and things which I guess must have meant something to Burroughs, at least beyond the more familiar subjects of guns and bumholes. We meet Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and - oddly - Mick Jagger several times, and even Burroughs' parents; and we are taken to the places he lived, over and over, and are left with a feeling that it all adds up to something, even if what that might be eludes conventional description. My Education feels somewhat akin to setting a house in order prior to departure, as I suppose it possibly was, although this could simply be my reading of it. Whatever the case, the narrative reveals a gentle, likeable Burroughs in a way that his previous works have tended not to, without necessarily appearing out of character.

Very good.

A War of Witches

Timothy J. Knab A War of Witches (1993)
A slight shift in emphasis here, A War of Witches being anthropology written as autobiography rather than fiction as such. Back in 2006 when Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox imprint, I recall suggesting on some forum or other that Knab's book might be deemed to inhabit some of the same territory and might thus be of interest to those missing their not particularly regular dose of Factiony goodness; which I still stand by, particularly as A War of Witches had a considerable influence on my own more recent contribution to the mythos with Against Nature.

Timothy J. Knab is, as I understand it, a reasonably big name in the vague field falling somewhere between the anthropology and ethnography of Mesoamerica, and during the 1970s he spent time living amongst the indigenous people of rural Puebla, some miles east of the Valley of Mexico. To be specific, as he relates the tale he does a great deal more than just have a bit of a holiday in someone else's lack of facilities, making close friends with numerous Nahua families and himself becoming a curandero - which seems like pretty good going for a white guy living in a place with limited access to electricity and where it isn't even a given that your neighbour will speak Spanish.

As D.H. Lawrence observed in Apocalypse, written in 1931: In the lowest stratum of society religion remains pretty much the same, throughout the ages, and so it is in Knab's Sierra de Puebla where the pre-Hispanic religion remains pretty much unchanged despite the garnish of a few obscure saints - so obscure as to be unknown outside the region. In other words, whilst the cathedrals of indigenous Mexican faith may have been bulldozed five hundred years ago, there are still places where they never got the memo.

What makes this account potentially so fascinating to those who may not be familiar with the culture for which it gives vivid account, is that it approaches the supernatural Nahua world on its own terms - getting right in there without the lab coat or attendant rationale which would reduce the subject to a sterile itinerary of quaint rural customs; and happily, neither does Knab adopt any approach in common with the new-age types who might mistakenly imagine themselves somehow attuned to the Nahua way of life. Rather, he lets the people and their beliefs speak for themselves, and in terms which no-one should find impenetrable or unfamiliar.

In learning the curandero's art and uncovering the genuinely terrifying history of witchcraft in the Sierra de Puebla, Knab recovers such detail of obscure potions, rites performed in certain caves, methods of killing foes without detection, and dream interpretation as to force the conclusion that calling this stuff mumbo jumbo is missing the point, because it's absolutely real for those involved. There are plenty of great books full of names and dates with regard to indigenous Mexican history, but this one attempts to tell you what it actually felt like as Knab spends afternoons idly sipping coffee or cane alcohol with scary old people who make veiled references to witchcraft murders, what the things under the ground want, and a recent crucifixion that no-one likes to talk about for obvious reasons.

Whilst I have a lot of time for Dicky Dawkins, and tend to agree with his attitude to that which is lazily termed spirituality, A War of Witches highlights the flaw in his somewhat reductionist view of religion. It would be easy to dismiss that which Knab encountered as a combination of suggestion and sleight of hand, except such dismissal presupposes certain conditions which aren't entirely applicable and that there is nothing to be learnt here - which is far from the case. Of all the books I've absorbed on this subject, A War of Witches is one of the most illuminating and makes for genuinely gripping reading.