Nemonymous
Grimscribe
THE VOICE OF THE DREAMER
THE NIGHT SCHOOL
"Mainly these thoughts were about my desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence before it was my time to die..."
"The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self."
The above two separate quotes exemplify how this story on a certain level is threaded upon one of the melted oxymorons that I have already identified above, the scatological-eschatological one.
The protagonist student, taking a short cut late at night past the school, one coat-button awry, has heard the rumour that Instructor Carniero has returned from sick leave and has resumed his strangely dual-diagramed lessons in what turns out to be an Escherine school building (one that in my own recurrent nightmares, even at my age, embodies my fear of slipping behind lessons as a student) - one that takes on the bonfire smoke and Nature's seasonal fecal material slipping up and down its walls to where he learns the lesson is being taught on an impossibly high storey. He seeks this lesson with the strange Instructor almost desperately, the text having broached the question (without satisfactory answer) of whether there has been an 'assignment' set, a question asked at both the beginning and the end of that text.
This is an intensely nightmarish and effective blending of death with its prior decay of life and vice versa, blending knowledge with sewers. And I now see this 1980s work as also premonitory of the plague of massacres that has since transpired in educational establishments, a form of anti-natalism before it is too late.
It is perhaps that ultimate so-called 'assignment' which our protagonist manages, at least temporarily, to shake off, but not without being fed a reference, for later use, to a "native putridity" which phrase in the context of the passage where it is used (e.g. "the dark compost of those about to be born") makes it obvious that the word 'native' here is just a natural synonym for 'natal', as it is.
The more normal of the Instructor's diagrams being one thing, but the embellishment of other diagrams around them quite another.
"...'a true instructor must share everything, no matter how terrible or lurid it might be.'"
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
THE NIGHT SCHOOL
"Mainly these thoughts were about my desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence before it was my time to die..."
"The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self."
The above two separate quotes exemplify how this story on a certain level is threaded upon one of the melted oxymorons that I have already identified above, the scatological-eschatological one.
The protagonist student, taking a short cut late at night past the school, one coat-button awry, has heard the rumour that Instructor Carniero has returned from sick leave and has resumed his strangely dual-diagramed lessons in what turns out to be an Escherine school building (one that in my own recurrent nightmares, even at my age, embodies my fear of slipping behind lessons as a student) - one that takes on the bonfire smoke and Nature's seasonal fecal material slipping up and down its walls to where he learns the lesson is being taught on an impossibly high storey. He seeks this lesson with the strange Instructor almost desperately, the text having broached the question (without satisfactory answer) of whether there has been an 'assignment' set, a question asked at both the beginning and the end of that text.
This is an intensely nightmarish and effective blending of death with its prior decay of life and vice versa, blending knowledge with sewers. And I now see this 1980s work as also premonitory of the plague of massacres that has since transpired in educational establishments, a form of anti-natalism before it is too late.
It is perhaps that ultimate so-called 'assignment' which our protagonist manages, at least temporarily, to shake off, but not without being fed a reference, for later use, to a "native putridity" which phrase in the context of the passage where it is used (e.g. "the dark compost of those about to be born") makes it obvious that the word 'native' here is just a natural synonym for 'natal', as it is.
The more normal of the Instructor's diagrams being one thing, but the embellishment of other diagrams around them quite another.
"...'a true instructor must share everything, no matter how terrible or lurid it might be.'"
(An extract from my on-going review of the Penguin Classics collection.)
