The Shadow, the Darkness

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection:- THE SHADOW, THE DARKNESS "Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race..." Where does one start with this large work? With my own take on the TSALAL earlier in these Ligotti reviews HERE ('La La La La La, I’m not going to listen to you. La La La La…Until the LAST LA')? The crucial sculptures by the 'devious ' or 'dubious' "artistic visionary Reiner Grossvogel" - sculptures synchronously illuminatory of the very recent HPL bust WFA Award controversial Aesthetic war of political (in)correctness - were all entitled TSALAL. But that is only one aside among many asides I could summon up regarding this major fiction-philosophical work, a work that ranges from hypnotically obsessive repetitions of its stock phrases (in tune with minimalist Morton Feldman music) to what I see as the Dada or Zeroist happening embodied in gallery shows, embodied by words about death, human ambition / despair and scatological (results of belly illness) / eschatological conspiracies, bodily ailments as intellectual property...and much more. Grossvogel's reluctant disciples (more reluctant than those of Severini) gather in an unsatisfactory diner ("intestinal discomfort which might have been attributed to the poor quality of the coffee and donuts") in a mutated and decaying Twin Peaks township called Crampton. They await the artist and we readers are word-swaddled in thoughts about his original storefront gallery exhibit showings, his own self-contradictions as to failure and success, his stays in an unsatisfactory hospital with his intestinal trouble, all in interface with the actual writer of the still unwritten CATHR as one of this story's characters. "A metaphysical swindle", "metamorphic recovery", "pervasive shadow", "all-moving-darkness", "a fog of delirious and sometimes lurid gossip and speculation", a traveller on buslines, not so much "the artist who has failed" but "a body that has succeeded", listening to his all pervasive "lecture or fantasy monologue"... But who is the "one man artistic and philosophical freakshow"? Grossvogel himself or the then would-be CATHR writer or the real-time dreamcatcher? Reading this story does make the reader paradoxically feel more self-important than is warranted. This is by having transcended the word-nihilism in actually buying the book within which it is expressed! The 'pulling and tugging' of triggers that are either tangled puppet-strings or ultimately imaginary internal synapses of nothing but "nonsense and dreams". La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la... (I shall now read my 2008 review of this story at the start of this thread.)

Rationale: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...007#post123007

	CATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race