Kinsella Feb 13
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
MORPHEUS: A BILDUNGSROMAN A PARTIALLY BACK-ENGINEERED AND RECONSTRUCTED NOVEL MORPHEUS: A BILDUNGSROMAN A PARTIALLY BACK-ENGINEERED AND RECONSTRUCTED NOVEL JOHN KINSELLA B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York Morpheus: a Bildungsroman by John Kinsella Copyright © 2013 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-125-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012950114 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 [email protected] publisher of weird little books BlazeVOX [ books ] blazevox.org 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 B l a z e V O X trip, trip to a dream dragon hide your wings in a ghost tower sails crackling at ev’ry plate we break cracked by scattered needles from Syd Barrett’s “Octopus” Table of Contents Introduction: Forging the Unimaginable: The Paradoxes of Morpheus by Nicholas Birns ........................................................ 11 Author’s Preface to Morpheus: a Bildungsroman ...................................................... 19 Pre-Paradigm .................................................................................................. 27 from Metamorphosis Book XI (lines 592-676); Ovid ......................................... 31 Building, Night ....................................................................................................... 35 Loss ........................................................................................................................... 41 The Hero .................................................................................................................. 47 Nightshift ................................................................................................................. 57 Epiphany .................................................................................................................. 59 The Mind Amorphous ........................................................................................... 68 Notebook 101 — Bloomsday ................................................................................. 68 The Exile ................................................................................................................... 77 Guilt .......................................................................................................................... 80 The Dream ............................................................................................................... 85 The Chimney Sweep .......................................................................................... 85 The Chimney Sweep .......................................................................................... 92 The House of Morpheus ...................................................................................... 110 Hell in Season: a miniature ................................................................................. 116 Chapter 7 ................................................................................................................ 119 Flat by the Sea ....................................................................................................... 132 Paradigm 1 .................................................................................................... 137 Thomas’s Dream of Heritage .............................................................................. 139 The Heritage .......................................................................................................... 140 Prelude .............................................................................................................. 158 Odyssey .................................................................................................................. 161 His Philosophy: Parables and Revelations ....................................................... 175 Feasts and Fate at Gilgamesh .............................................................................. 187 Enkidu Poemuzeek ...................................................................................... 211 Demonography ..................................................................................................... 216 Dead current .......................................................................................................... 218 Ranting: Falling: Paracelsus’ Alchemy .............................................................. 220 From Gold to Lead ............................................................................................... 226 The Coming and Going of “Zec” ....................................................................... 236 Prelude to “The State of Nature” ....................................................................... 237 The State of Nature ............................................................................................... 248 Exodus .................................................................................................................... 252 A Bedtime Story: The Freldibird (not an allegory) .......................................... 257 Paradigm 2 .................................................................................................... 259 The Room .............................................................................................................. 261 Park Notes ............................................................................................................. 262 Black and White ................................................................................................... 270 In a Minor Key ...................................................................................................... 296 Cylindrachetids: the unnecessary details of the time we live in … .................................................................................. 304 Red Hair in the Wheatbelt .................................................................................. 313 Wizbar .................................................................................................................... 317 A Letter to Henry ................................................................................................. 319 Paradigm 3 .................................................................................................... 323 Threshold ..............................................................................................................322 Saline ...................................................................................................................... 329 Uncertainty Parallels Henry’s Death ................................................................. 333 Unicorn. Chimney Sweep. Hauntings. Dragon in the Wheatbelt ..................................................................................... 343 Confessional .......................................................................................................... 346 Intrusions: two plus one plus none ................................................................... 352 Rants Extract from interview with Thomas ................................................................ 372 Ennui ...................................................................................................................... 374 Migraine ................................................................................................................ 385 I'll bring the nightmares Then I stood on the sand … ................................................................................ 410 Coda: The Phrasing of After-Death Images ............................................. 415 MORPHEUS: A BILDUNGSROMAN A PARTIALLY BACK-ENGINEERED AND RECONSTRUCTED NOVEL Introduction: Forging the Unimaginable: The Paradoxes of Morpheus By Nicholas Birns Morpheus has its origins in a novel John Kinsella worked on in his late teens — a time of transition between adolescence and adulthood, but not a time before he had at least glimpsed the contours of the vast, interconnecting literary project that was to be his lifelong pursuit. An amalgam of realism and fantasy, of fiction, poetry, and drama, the project limned the phantasmagoric yet self-questioning and disciplined emotional terrain that has so captivated and intrigued his many current readers worldwide. But the young Kinsella never adequately “completed” Morpheus. This may be no accident, as Morpheus is so protean, so heterogeneous, and so capacious that, conceptually, it may defy completion. Kinsella thus shelved the project as he began to develop his characteristic adult idiom, which has articulated itself largely though not exclusively in lyric poetry. Now in his forties, Kinsella at least decided to bring a version of Morpheus into print. But the original Morpheus was not in adequate shape. Undeterred, Kinsella set out to write the novel he would have written had he been able to complete it twenty-five years before. What is the difference between writing a novel per se, and writing a novel one first thought of a quarter of a century previous? The microtargeting of temporal layers buried deep within the mental past is fascinating because it is inherently untrue: we can remember the past, but we cannot go back to it, and even our memories are conditioned by what Freud called