“You Life is a High Gothic Novel” a dream voice asserts, with unassailable authority. Some twenty-five years ago. A life become a narrative, in a somewhat disconcerting genre—High Gothic! Of course my mind went to—life as a work of art; history as autobiography; even an essay exploring soul as historical soul, and also, the connection between soul reality and texts. All these golden threads springing from this dream led me to fresh pastures where I played for years with how language reflects soul reality—soul phenomenology!
But I also knew that I had not served the dream as well as I might. I got a bit giddy with the impetus generated by the dream's astonishing claim about my life and its equally astonishing claim ON my life. But now having read 6 episodes of CCL, I am wondering if a fictive response may serve the dream’s intention more fully. Let’s see …
(5:32 pm to 5:33 pm)
I have to go back and insert another rich offshoot: I also studied Gothic literature based on my joy of discovering Edgar All Poe as a boy and reading all his heart-pounding tales with gripping pleasure…
(5:35 pm to 5:36 pm)
“Narrative thrust.” Just burst in. What an evocative phrase. A narrative thrusting into ordinary reality, upsetting the stability of a Queendom. Memories start flooding in now, got to slow it down a bit. O yes, in one of my books some years ago, I included a scene from a video that fascinated me. (I break off to get the link—now I am back). It starts with “Somewhere in a little Belgian Town”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp5f3NEKiH0), the scent I meant to say “scent” oops I did it again (I meant “scene”) so now I am on the sent (now “scent” became “sent”). Shoaled, (o no I meant to say “should”, so now there is a shoal, of what, and can a shoal be shoaled?) I go back to “scene”for a moment, my intended word, but now disrupted by other emerging narratives, it seems. Too many narratives at once begging to come in and take centre stage. It feels like they are clamouring for attention.
“Some discipline please!!!!!”
Let’s go back to “Somewhere in a little Belgian Town”: the scene proceeds to show the townsfolk invaded by a series of catastrophic events that turn out to be dramatised for an advertisement. In other words, their ordinary lives are totally disrupted by a fiction that thrust into their lives. There I said it! What happened to these folk in the town also just now happened to me as several emerging incipient narratives (scent, sent, shoal shoaled) thrust their way into my life interrupting my intentions and changing the course of my action, my choices in my real life.
Whew! So that’s how a narrative thrust works! Watch out everybody! There is an inconceivably new and powerful narrative on its way and it is already thrusting through, disrupting our lives in so many ways. We must let it in even if it is unintelligible and we therefore sound mad. It’s coming anyway, as you see when I opened the door just a tiny bit here. Clamouring voices….
Very High Gothic!
John,
That’s quite a delightful report about your experiences reading DCL.
Thanks so much for posting this.
Paco