#elucipher

[fred gambino]

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I miss you dearly. It has been some time since you left this sphere of the internet, and I was only one of your many fans/readers, but I just wanted you to know how much your posts meant to me, and that I still think of you often. Thank you for all that you imparted with us; I always felt reading your work was like having a bell clang clearly in my head, a sudden clarity that I have found seldom elsewhere.

This mornings lunar eclipse from East Peoria overlooking downtown. :: [Jake Schultz]

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There’s an idea in many space stories, that the cosmos is a place of transformation, a crucible in which things burn, and if humans venture out deep enough they also burn, and become more fully who they are—that even in the wildest reaches of space, there we are, most pure and dark and bright and realised, somehow coming home. Our bodies come from stars and we find in space all that we are—terror, strangeness, beauty, hope.

elucipher:

Apollo, Apollo! Leader of journeys, my destroyer! All this way you have led me, to destroy me again?

— Cassandra, Agamemnon.

i.

This story is not kind.

ix.

The queen Clytemnestra stands before the doors of Argos’ tall royal slaughterhouse. Her hands stink red.

Cassandra stumbles forward, to that woman who is false honey and full-nerved hate, and an image of her death rears up before her: smile of axe-edge, crack and blood-bloom. There is no swerving from it—the sight unstoppers her throat and she retches gouts of prophecy, and knows she is not heard.

The killing queen calls her in. To the east the sky is on fire, and fate is the silver tremor of her heart.

ii.

In her seventh year, the king and queen take their godstruck daughter to the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo. At dawn she is found sleeping in the coils of snakes, her ears licked clean to hear the voice of the god.

iii.

No woman was ever so young a priestess. She kneels at prayer in his temple, O Apollo Apollo, and the god climbs down from the sky. He is glory; he draws her face up with hot hands.

He says, I will give you fate’s far-seeing eyes.

Yes, she says, rising. Yes.

She is sun-struck, brimming with radical light that pours down her backbone and through all the deep of her. But when the bright god presses his body to her and his fingers scorch at the hollow of her throat, she drives him back. Then darkly he draws himself up, prideful and savage, and he spits in her mouth.

Treacherous woman. A hissing like wildfire. Yours will be a lunatic tongue.

Cassandra runs, across the plain that will swell with nameless graves. For a moment she sees flames as tall as sails, feeding on the walls of Troy.

iv.

She dreams of white ships on the horizon’s knife. A girl gowned for a wedding is hoisted up for slaughter. Soldiers clash in octaves of havoc. Sun-sucked streets run black with gore.

She tells of this ruin but no one heeds her. She rages—why are you not afraid—and begs her family to listen, but they hear only shriller delirium. She shouts in the streets and the people whisper fool, fanatic; they call her mad and devil-stolen.

When she will not be consoled she is shut in a house like a tomb. Apollo has made her a monster, an exile of the grey place that is called to apeiron—the unbounded, the place of wolves.

v.

Her brother Paris comes to her bedchamber where she weaves. Bound for Achaea, he is fair and strong in light-licked armour, and calamity lies like a shadow on his shoulders. He stoops to kiss her brow. There is a knife hidden in her sleeve, but she cannot bear to cut that fateful horizon into his throat.

His ship sets sail. Cassandra dreams of a horse with a bellyful of iron maggots, and her brother’s eyes when he is dead.

From her window she hears the covenants of duskbirds, the golden city in soft repose. It all burns.

vi.

She warned until her voice gave way. She took axe and torch and set upon the great horse, to kill what lurked there. The king’s men prisoned her in the dark with Apollo’s laughter and the city was slaughtered as it slept.  

In the years of siege she saw augury’s shadows come again as sound and flesh: Andromache, dull-staring, dragged away by her hair; Hector, faceless, his funeral shroud dust and clotted blood; Paris, so fair, with an arrow through his throat; her father, slumped over a shattered altar; her mother, a slave for Odysseus; her youngest sister, bled like an animal on the grave of Achilles.

Now she goes foot by foot through the streets of ash and fume and sword-shriek, treading over carcasses.

The conquerors find her, and she will not be silent. A foreign soldier, death-drunk, sprawls her on the floor of Athena’s temple and lurches over her, and she roars out his fate—for this, the goddess will swell a storm and crack his ship and his bones on the rocks of Euboea.

Her body is hefted away by soldiers. At the brink of her hearing—thunder.

vii.

Agamemnon, king, keeps her chained in his tent as he gloats over the spoils of felled and gutted Troy. He calls for prophecy and laughs at her raving.

She sees pyres of bodies unseamed by swords, Dardanian captives crying in and out of speech. The sky is deaf to prayers—it sends only carrion birds, who bear no missives and squabble among the butchered. She is a witness, hollowed but for her rage.

The king lies beside her in glutted beast-sleep and she whispers his death: the queen with red hands, the lioness crouched in long shadows.

viii.

The king’s longships set sail. She leans over the edge, with her loosed hair and her mouth salt-limned, and watches the billowing and glister of waves, the shadows beneath mosaic light.

Her belly is swollen. She knows them, her sons: crooked laugh; steady and devoted hands. She gives birth to them on the deck, the sun sweltering on her body. With every agony she curses Apollo.

Later, under mute stars, her children lie stirring in the vigil of her arms and she sings to them of a city no longer alive. They do not hear madness, only the soft and breaking swell of her voice.

When the ship lands on Argos, the children are torn from her. She thought herself iron-proofed against pain, but the sounds from her throat are not human.

Agamemnon hails his queen, and in her smile there is the shadow of her smile, the bladed gleam Cassandra dreamt. In her hands there is death.

x.

Cassandra wakes in the dim place at the rim of the earth. Around her thronging dead glimmer up, their mouths ajar. They are gentle.

Apollo trespasses there, too bright to bear. He kneels before her. He is violent glory and his eyes shine, void.

I loved you ever, he says.

She is yet his prophet: in an awful voice she tells him of the mortals he will love till they are burned inside-out, and his deathless grief. Shaken, he leads her out of that dark.

The sun, slanted in hazy carnival, laps at the hem of her dress. Her god offers her the sky but she does not heed him—she has already turned away.

He lets her go, a wolf beyond light’s coveting hands.

Cassandra walks in the ungolden ruins of Troy, and sings of the world to come.

His Dark Materials is one of those very imperfect but formative books that, if it strikes you right, permeates your sense of the world and never quite fades. I have a lot of thoughts about it and they’re all strung between enchantment and criticism, it’s complicated—

(spoilers for the entire trilogy)

The universe is so rich and strange: daemons and a sinister blood-steeped church and zeppelins and anbaromagnetism and experimental theology and dark matter and the soundless blazing of the aurora. Every character’s stitched out of stories—like Asriel, who’s Lucifer waging war in Heaven, Milton’s vain and prideful Satan, Antichrist, rebel archangel Ariel, the rabbinical angel of death (“Azrael”), Blakean revolutionary, Byronic anti-hero, a man half-monstrous with ambition that tears great rifts in the universe.

The wild imagination of it is startling on every page. The proud secretive matriarchal clans of witches, and the witch-queen who stands unashamed and unafraid before angels. The arctic kingdom of the bears and their sky-armour and the brutal death-fight for the throne which ends with Iorek tearing off the jaw of the pretender-king and eating his heart. Cittàgazze, the desolate glittering city of children by the sea. The love between the rebellious angels Balthamos and Baruch—Baruch who was once a man, whose name is the Hebrew for “blessed”, who dies for Asriel’s merciless cause—and Balthamos’ sulking sarcasm and disdain and terrible furious grief. The crucial role of a woman particle physicist. Marisa Coulter, machiavel and mother and godkiller, cruel and clever and ruthless beyond measure, caged by her gender in a patriarchal theocracy but rising swiftly and inexorably through the ranks of the Magisterium by sheer guile, exploiting men’s guilty desires, her inquisitor’s mind as sharp as the blade which cuts child from daemon, a revolutionary who’s perilous and merciless and vicious in love. The humane depiction of mental illness as a spectre you can’t see gnawing upon the person you love, and Will’s gentleness and protectiveness and love for his mother. The strange but reverent materialism: humans are matter that’s become conscious of itself; sensual experience isn’t sinful but desireable and meaningful and a grasping of wholeness; this world is all we have, and when you die your atoms drift apart and pour out into the wide universe. Lyra and Will, soft-eyed and golden with Dust, feeding each other fruits. (U.S. readers might know that The Amber Spyglass was censored there, removing a passage about Lyra’s sexual awakening—as if to prove the book’s argument about fetishisation of innocence & fear of female sexuality.) The wrenching, bittersweet separation at the end.

It’s ambitious: it transforms a foundational Western myth into something like the ancient Gnostic heresy—the Fall of Man in Genesis 3, the origin of sin and shame, is rewritten as an ascension and seizing of morality and sexuality and wakefulness. And at the heart of it there’s Lyra, not virtuous but wild and disobedient and brave and fierce in her love and loyalty and hate, whose gift is lying—storytelling as deceit—and whose great prophesied rebellion takes the form of small and unconscious but cosmic-reaching acts of love and grace which repair the sundered universe.

And that’s the cornerstone of the trilogy’s critique of authoritarianism, which is good and important and valid until it lapses clumsily into dogmatism—when it comes to God, HDM suddenly ceases to be democratic. In the beginning it’s a broad argument against oppression and domination and ignorance and hubris and hypocrisy, and institutions too vast and powerful to be questioned. The Magisterium is partly the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, contorted until it’s equal parts theocracy & secular fascism—but more evil are the scientists performing secret experiments and Mrs Coulter and the hieratical councils, all using religion to mask their grasping for other kinds of power. Yet in the end, when the Magisterium becomes consumed with suppressing and torturing and killing in a war against “sin”—one priest wishes aloud that there’d been an assassin present in the Garden of Eden—the book’s sense of its enemy narrows: it’s “organised religion” against reason or secularism or humanism—and this enemy includes any belief in God, however individual and reasoned.

(And yet the God who dies in HDM is like the God who dies in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: Zarathustra pronounces the death of a God who paralyses human will and buries us in fear of sin—a monarchical god, blind and narcissistic and fragile. The Authority in HDM has disseminated a great lie about creating the universe and when Lyra and Will find him shut in the silver cage that deception has worn him frail and thin as paper. Instead, the books offer up another kind of divinity: Dust—i.e. spiritual-matter which exists in mutuality with the universe and requires relationships of love for its very survival. HDM isn’t atheist, it’s panentheist—the universe itself is God in the process of becoming. Yet the book itself seems not to realise how much its vision overlaps with existing theologies.)

i saw gone girl at a preview screening. scattered thoughts inside.

(n.b: if you’ve read the novel this contains no spoilers unless you want to be in the dark about how certain scenes are executed. if you haven’t read the novel this contains major spoilers.)

gone girl is pulp of the most hypnotic kind. there’s neurosis and deceit in every inch of it. america’s midwest as suburban hellscape, breeding canny devils. and it’s funny: it’s a grotesque comedy, the blackest kind of gallows-humour. a shot of nick kissing amy after he proposes to her fades into nick having his mouth swabbed for DNA by the police. when amy and nick walk through the cloud of powdered sugar and nick presses her against a wall, the pallid dusting of it on her face makes it look as if he’s kissing a corpse. tanner bolt’s comment as they marvel at the web amy’s spun around nick: “you two are the most fucked up people i ever met, and i specialise in fucked up people.”

if desire is about lack, the commodification of desire makes love a void, in which hollow people absent from their own lives slowly kill one another with desire for what was never there. there’s an emblematic shot of nick pressing amy against a mirror as they have sex—feigned intimacy between reflected (unreal) images; fake upon fake. everyone is gone. this is love as a crimescene, marriage as murder. intimacy’s interior spaces hollowed out and replaced with smashed glass and spatters of blood and concealed evidence and absence, surrounded on all sides by film-cameras. every frame is full of negative space where something substantial, something real capital r, should be. 

somehow, it feels like gone girl was meant to be filmed. as a film the medium becomes the message: a story about the unreality and voyeuristic greed and prepackaged narratives and hypocrisy of our twenty-four-hour visual media culture plays out on a screen as you watch actors play fictional roles and speak words that aren’t theirs. the novel’s timelines are interwoven: you hear amy’s false narrative as her planted evidence is uncovered and you’re that rapt TV audience, transfixed and poring over both performances, dissecting every word and gesture for signs of virtue and vice and innocence and guilt and emotion and duplicity, weighing up which narrative is more palatable and then eating yourself sick. 

the meta-casting of affleck is perfect: deconstructing his public image and persona, trading on the rotting effect of media scrutiny to make you see a glib self-satisfaction in his charm, something smug and sinister and predatory in his chiselled jaw and chin (pivotal in his casting as a superhero), a plastered hollow-eyed leer in his winning all-american fratboy smile. what gives him back a part of his soul is his exchanges with his twin margo, who’s canny and droll and funny and frank. her last scene with him is her best: when nick tells her that he has to stay with amy, she sobs and rages and speaks the ugly truth—he doesn’t want to leave amy. he’s addicted. the horror in her voice is nauseating.

the casting is uniformly great, actually: amy’s mother and father, complacent and entitled and oblivious to how they’ve made their daughter a pretender to her own life; tanner bolt (tyler perry), suave and savvy and making a fortune out of misery; kim dickens as detective rhonda boney, weary and smart, lifted right from a neo-noir thriller. 

but rosamund pike is fucking extraordinary. in the beginning she is inhumanly beautiful, her face held like a mask, her smile carved and bright, her movement through every frame like a soignée ghost that’s only visible as long as it’s looked at. amazing amy, an assemblage of mimicked behaviours and words calculated to be most desirable, self-creating, self-objectifying, self-scrutinising, internally and externally a hall of mirrors. her voiceover diary-entries are so honey-sweet and wholesome, but if you’re listening for it there’s venom and irony biting beneath.

and then the sucker-punch reveal, when suddenly she comes alive, breaking out of the frozen past-tense, self-resurrected from her own narrative death to narrate in a colder deeper voice how to frame your husband for murder. (reading a magazine, bored, as blood is drawn from her arm so that she can splash it all over the kitchen floor and then badly mop it up.) brittle-sharp and desperate and watchful and calculating and vengeful and delighted, throwing her fluffy pink-ink biros onto the highway, hacking off her hair, lying sprawled on a pool lounger as she eats junk food with vicious relish, spitting in the soda of the woman who dares to call amazing amy an “uppity bitch”, gloating over nick’s ruin like a vulture, waiting, planning, a chameleon before your eyes.  

(when she’s robbed at the motel by two fellow residents, she hunches over on the bed and muffles her scream with a pillow. her fury, when you glimpse it, is unearthly.)

neil patrick harris is deeply unpleasant as desi collings: oblivious and cloying and possessive, using amy’s vulnerability to trap and objectify her. the climactic moment when she gives him what he wants only to destroy him—fucks him and slits his throat and keeps riding him as she’s soaked with spurting arcs of his blood—is an outrageous gruesome orgasmic apotheosis, followed by the giddy perverse physical comedy as she lurches off his corpse and drives home to her husband in her ruined dress. 

the overarching structure of both film and novel conspires with amy: she controls the story from the start. but film makes the characters exterior and opaque, makes them into objects for your gaze, turns the narrative into it’s a sleekly suggestive surface onto which you project your biases and desires. this film about narcissism is itself a mirror, a rorschach blot.

you spend the lion’s share of the film with your eyes on nick, but he tells you little. he’s more opaque than any other character. for me all of gone girl's missteps are to do with nick: the film downplays his violent misogyny: his resentment and scorn toward women, his objectification of them, his relationship with his woman-hating father, and his agression toward amy in the final confrontation. he's more passive and complacent, less intelligent and neurotic and dangerous; he's not of a kind with his wife. in the novel, this is a marriage is between two terrible people; here, nick gets off lightly. still, there wasn't any danger that i'd find him too sympathetic: his opacity and glib charm had a slow corrosive effect, until i relished every sick act amy committed, every time she wrong-foots him. 

i’ve watched so many films in which male anti-heroes are amoral and depraved and brutal, and still we’re urged to root for them, to feel satisfied when they win. i want female anti-heroes who are as ferocious and implacable and demonic as that. who will do anything to get what they want.

it’s her ferocious will that makes amy so compelling and horrifying. her lack of restraint and the depth of her ability to mimic and perform creates some of the film’s most sickening moments. trapped inside desi’s house, amy waits for him to leave. then she tears her lingerie and pours alcohol between her legs. cut to the exterior camera: she hurls herself against one of the doors, screaming and clawing at the glass, clutching at herself, screaming and screaming. there’s no sound. on the monochrome camera the alcohol looks like blood. there’s nothing she won’t do in pursuit of revenge. nothing she can’t do, as she shapeshifts before your eyes. if the first half of the film is amy at her most consumable, palatable, desirable, the second half is amy who refuses all of it, refuses to be that safe and comfortable object, refuses to seek your regard. 

amy is more than human, less than human, an unknowable creature of excess and lack and desire and merciless intellect. this isn’t just “weaponised femininity”, a woman exercising the illusion of power permitted to her by patriarchy to become even more completely inscribed by that ideological trap. this is a woman who sees and exploits every weakness and failing in the people around her, their misogyny and laziness and pettiness and entitlement and narcissism, and ruins them. a woman who uses the trite shallow mass-marketed tales of childhood and femininity and motherhood and victimhood by which she was made to literally get away with murder. amy outwits everyone, effortlessly. 

in the beginning it seems like a game—nick gives his sister mastermind in the very first scene—a puzzle to be solved. it isn’t. when all of the deception has unravelled, all illusions are shed, and they see each other naked and new and terrible, you know that nick’s agency or power was always limited. he cheats and lies and seeks to write his own story (although the film omits both his memoir and amy’s, a change i take issue with) but he’s always within amy’s story, roaming a maze of her design, overwritten by her desires and purposes as she moves and transmutes to trip and trap him. even in the novel, where these two characters are on more even footing, amy is more clever and more ruthless; she is always a half-step ahead. for once, the narrative of a male character is completely subsumed to that of a female character. this is amy’s story; she is the story. the text, like russian nesting dolls, plots within plots, is also amy, a woman-labyrinth of nested personae, selves within selves, endless, fathomless, in her depth of shallows. 

nick and amy’s marriage is a horror story, and she’s the better monster.