Pain to the max today. Sometimes you wonder how you can endure it, but you do because what else can you do?
My next book is a huge sprawly thing. Kenneth Patchen's "The Journal Of Albion Moonlight".
To the beat generation this book comes close to an updating of the bible but told with a rage that makes even the old testament seem tolerant.
It espouses love but it's not a simpering love: it's the sacred love between two people that enables them to perform miracles, for each other and for the world.
Thus it is a savage love.
I have a signed first edition that I bought from a book antiquarian. Shame on me.
This is a living work that can be constantly re-read. The words change. Not just our interpretation of them the actual words reshape themselves on the page.
Like his primary influence, William Blake, Patchen illuminates his manuscript. This was published by New Directions. James Laughlin was a publisher without much interest in the bottom line. In many ways his tiny publishing house has done more to change the world than a war.
Laughlin endured the fights with the typesetters, as in just one Carrollian example the words on the page descend into tinier and tinier fragments until they are just a string of letters that encircle themselves around a man's throat and hang him unto death.
This is not the kind of stuff Random House asked from it's press guys.
But it shows the power of this book and defines the essence of a masterwork. From the writer, to the publisher, to the printing press to the craftsman who set up the linotype that would grace and illuminate Patchen's fine etchings.
Owning this book is to own a piece of art and what better art can there be when you can shove it in your back pocket and read it on the bus, appreciate it on the toilet?
Moonlight is a novel . . . well, it starts out as one.
It's a journal but it's a journal of the months of summer of 1943, the midst of WWII. It relives and re-sees these 4 months over and over, always through the same eyes.
Sometimes as a precursor to that physical theory, you know the SciFi one where every time a human makes a decision a new universe is created that reflects the effect of a yes decision to compliment the universe created by the no decision. It's a comforting thought, I suppose that enables us to imagine that all the good things we deserve will come to us if only in another universe. (But why only human decisions?)
In Patchen's world there are no good decisions when war and murder are involved.
The framework ramshackle plot is this: Albion Moonlight and his buds are crossing No Mans land in search of God, a real guy who calls himself Roivas (comic book fans get that right away). they are hampered in their quest by a massive pack of wild dogs that harries their trail. They live in fear of the time when the dogs will grow great enough in confidence to attack and overwhelm them.
As they make their way on the quest they deal with death and murder and the murder we call war. they meet Christ and Hitler and beautiful women.
It's Moonlights journal so it all has this personal slant but as they progress he forgets to date things and then when we hit August we snap back to May and the first step of the journey. It's the first step only with full knowledge of everything that happened before.
But we don't learn much, even recreating. We just get more confused. We're human and even the worst of us has principals or morals or anti-principals that force us to take the same choices.
Because it's Patchen we get a lot of beauty, sometimes so beautiful it makes our own life seem barren.
Because it's Patchen we get insights into the modern world as well as the past. He explains mass murder and serial killers with a frightening ease of logic.
And because it's Patchen it has moments of mind breaking hilarity.
It's a hopeless book. Patchen believed that art could recreate mankind. World War II made him doubt the force of his own work. Moonlight is a blunt instrument reshaping his own ethos and dragging us along.
He holds the world up and makes us see it, re-inspect it, acknowledge it's reality. This is a sure path to madness. He knows it.
In the end Albion Moonlight isn't much of a story. It's a song, an art show and a light show. It's intended to worm it's way into you and make you a person.

Bad day today. Ended up taking an hour nap in a place and time I wasn't expecting to. Good thing I had a doctor dog with me.