“It’s all about geography, until it becomes all about Shakespeare“
Robert Kaplan
I’ve been writing short stories for several years, and I have found my passion in geographical, magical realism. I can’t decide if it’s my fascination with medieval castles, my curious interest in optics in Shakespeare, or my delight in supernatural tales of aquatic cryptids that impels me toward this genre, but whatever it is I’ve been guided through the labyrinth by a smorgasbord of mystagogues like Edgar Allen Poe, G.K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and a splash of M.R. James.
More recently, however, I have fallen under the spell of Slavoj Zizek, a radical Balkan philosopher who believes that since reality is a socially contrived fantasy the only way to seek refuge from inauthenticity is to embrace the absurd. Art, after all, is nothing if it doesn’t question the status quo, strike the heart with terror, and shatter our smug, bourgeois, middle-class self-confidence like a jambiya. It is for this reason that I’ve been experimenting with absurdism, a farrago of the illogic, which has drawn me deeper and deeper into the surreal worlds of Robert Walser, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and the dark, murky waters of OBERIU, a Russian literary genre emplified by the theatricalization of Daniil Kharms—until he went mad.
As a geographer, I revel in wild places. I try to put my characters in exotic locations, and I like to flirt with strange predicaments: time travel, dreams, the double, and rahmenerzählung are some of my my favourite tools; and, as a student of Viktor Shklovsky’s school of Russian Formalism, I find defamiliarization seductive. But I’ve learnt much from Poe—the only impeccable writer—and since the secret of being successful has a lot to do with stealing, I pilfer regularly (didn’t Shakespeare?). In short, I like to put new bristles on old brushes (and sometimes old bristles on new vacuum cleaners), using metaphor, allegory and paradox, along with a sprinkling of wordplay, dressed up in fancy, pun and skaz. But in the end it’s all about paying homage to The Tradition.
Since brevity is the soul of lit, I’ve recently been flirting with something new and even more seductive—poetry. For me Baudelaire, Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot lie on the edge of undiscovered land, and I feel the poem is to the short story what the short story is to the novel— a kind of golden section or a Fibonacci series…I have found inspiration for my poetry on train stations in India, wandering through the ruins of Ephesus, and in films by Ingmar Bergman. As with my short stories, I like to experiment. Mythology, alchemy and religion splash with time and space in what Mercea Eliade likes to call the ‘myth of the eternal return’, and I enjoy conflating my ideas with a modern style of poesy that focuses more on rhythm than conventional rhyme and metre. In short, I like to play with The Tradition in unconventional ways…mostly Borgesian, but occasionally I pay homage to Chekov, and of late I have found myself increasingly drawn towards Kharmsian incidences, the shorter and the more absurd the better…try these five easy pieces:
As the darkness of the polar night gave birth to the sun, it came time for the stranger to leave. To his delight, Umik asked if he might be accepted into the spirit world of the stranger. A great feast was prepared, and in front of the whole village the stranger sprinkled snow on Umik’s forehead, saying “I shall call you Adam, for you are the first man.” As final proof of Umik’s commitment, the stranger asked the village elder to eat a piece of reindeer heart—a food strictly forbidden to the Inuit—as a sign to the entire community that the elder would be forever separated from his former world.
‘A Winter’s Tale’
Journal of Ecosophy
Vol 28 No 1 (2012)
“Free will is an illusion that blinds us to causality: fate on the other hand leaves no room for chance. Today, as you walked up to the castle though the forest, K., you were alone, yes? But that was only because you could not see your circumstances clearly. Let us suppose that the Castellan does exist, and let us suppose he was watching you from the tower; could he not perhaps have seen a man following you along the path in the snow from his high vantage point—the same man you think does not exist? Nothing happens by chance K.—“
‘Homo Ludens’
The New Orphic Review
Vol 17 No 2 (2014)
Imagine the sun as God, the Earth as the Son, and gravity as the Holy Spirit…now imagine Tycho Brahe probing the universe with an infinitely long telescope, discovering another Earth, a mirror of our own, where bicycles ride on water, water turns into wine, and people rise from the dead. Imagine all this…
now forget it:
W4M
Mona (not your average Lisa)
looking for picture with frame;
easel not necessary
will mount.
‘Oberuity’
The Co-Inspirator
Vol 1 (2019)
Poggio Brocciolini knew nothing about Generaloberst Beck’s plan to assassinate Hitler. The Italian mountaineer was recuperating in the foothills of the Himalayas after fate had decreed (as the I Ching often does) that he abandon his alpenstock when he twisted his ankle trying to scale Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world. It was while recuperating in the house of a tea planter in Darjeeling that Brocciolini discovered a lost library. The voices he found in this garden of dreams echoed through the foothills, and the words had such a soothing effect on him that they washed away his melancholia like the Ganges. One of the books Brocciolini found in the library was titled Medieval History by the American professor Carl Stephens.
The alpinista noticed that the professor’s weighty tome had 28 chapters, the same number as his age, and it ended with a genealogical table and a chronological chart. Brocciolini was just about to put the book back on the shelf when he hesitated. The heavy volume fell open at the index, and it was at that moment that he noticed his name. Brocciolini was astonished.
It turns out the Poggio Brocciolini in the book lived in Florence in the fifteenth century and was famous all over Europe for unearthing the ancient writings of Quintilian, Lucretius, and Columella. Stephens, the author of the magnum opus, couldn’t help but add an excursus: “[p]ractically all the Latin writings that are known to us,” he points out on page 324, “were soon brought before the eyes of eager Italians, who often failed to remember that for every treasure which they had brought to light they had to thank some obscure ‘barbarian’ of the previous age.” Closing the book, Poggio Brocciolini couldn’t help but ponder what treasure he might one day bequeath upon the unsuspecting eyes of some future generation…
’The Long Hand of I Ching’
Bewildering Stories
Vol 895 (2021)
“”On the wooden table in front of the transom window I notice some paper—an old parchment:
“ ‘Let me tell you a story,’ it begins, ‘a story so sinister that you will not see it unless you believe it: why here, yes—HERE, on this very mountain, sits the great Ismaili warrior-king himself, the man who sends assassins to stab apostates in the river valleys of Mesopotamia; no Sultan or Caliph is safe from his hidden hand, not even a Crusader brave enough to venture into the Holy Land, ask the Qadi of Isfahan, the prefect of Bayhak or the chief of the Karramiyah…and how, oh how does he dispatch his assassins you ask? why, in the very gardens that he ingeniously prepares for them, of course, Edens flowing with milk and honey, and houris so exquisite they will make your eyes water with their beauty, and tasting such heavenly pleasures, after indulging in the hashish that HE provides, the assassin is convinced that he has entered Paradise, and when at last he awakes from this apparition he realizes that it is only by killing that he can ever hope to return to such ecstasy—verily I say unto you, DEATH is the gate to paradise as YOU will surely learn…’
“The parchment is signed Presbyter Johannus and, most chilling of all, it is written in human blood.”
‘A Smile is Worth a Thousand Pictures’
Forthcoming