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Brazen Head
The Brazen Head
348 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1956
4 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
John Cowper Powys
163 books175 followersPowys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar. His mother was descended from the poet William Cowper, hence his middle name. His two younger brothers, Llewelyn Powys and Theodore Francis Powys, also became well-known writers. Other brothers and sisters also became prominent in the arts.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
John studied at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and became a teacher and lecturer; as lecturer, he worked first in England, then in continental Europe and finally in the USA, where he lived in the years 1904-1934. While in the United States, his work was championed by author Theodore Dreiser. He engaged in public debate with Bertrand Russell and the philosopher and historian Will Durant: he was called for the defence in the first obscenity trial for the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, and was mentioned with approval in the autobiography of US feminist and anarchist, Emma Goldman.
He made his name as a poet and essayist, moving on to produce a series of acclaimed novels distinguished by their uniquely detailed and intensely sensual recreation of time, place and character. They also describe heightened states of awareness resulting from mystic revelation, or from the experience of extreme pleasure or pain. The best known of these distinctive novels are A Glastonbury Romance and Wolf Solent. He also wrote some works of philosophy and literary criticism, including a pioneering tribute to Dorothy Richardson.
Having returned to the UK, he lived in England for a brief time, then moved to Corwen in Wales, where he wrote historical romances (including two set in Wales) and magical fantasies. He later moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he remained until his death in 1963.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 8, 2012
After Porius, John Cowper Powys wrote three late novels, when he was aged 78-84 and had found a sympathetic publisher who exerted no control. The Inmates, set in a lunatic asylum; Atlantis, on Odysseus' voyage west in old age, but more about an insurrection against the Olympian order by a Chaos of individual life and the older divinities of giants, animals, women. Powys was always engaged in a fight against the scientific view of life - a prophet on behalf of what he called the magical view. This left him 'so alien to the temper of the age as to be impossible for people to take seriously' (a quote from Wiki). What serious novelist has the First Cause, away in the universe, interact with the organism of his hero – in the first paragraph? - A Glastonbury Romance. Attributes thoughts to stray leaves that float into the human action of a scene? Posits the care and the vain attempts at emotional emanation of an old oak towards a frightened lamb bleating in its shelter?
These latter examples are from The Brazen Head, the last of his late novels. Its plot obviously tackles questions of science and religion; but strangely at first glance, the sanest people in the book are the scientists – Friar Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus – who furthermore think of themselves as conventional Christians still. The most insane is a guy who walks about with a phallic lodestone down his pants, in contact with his sex organs – he's always got a hand on it, too – with which he conducts experiments in magnetism upon people. Roger Bacon has invented a brass human head that has the rudiments of thought and can utter oracles. The head too is baptised by a sexual magic, a woman's this time.
What is this brazen head about? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure that out next time. And what's the point of the horse that wanders through the story – a “superintelligent” horse who has silent communications with people – with a deformation in its neck that everybody takes to be a human head about to burst out, that everybody is drawn to and obsesses over, to the horse's sad patience? I don't know that either. I'm a bit defeated by what I must feel to be the irresolution of the plot, at the end. Though I hesitate to declare the plotting faulty, since I might not be getting it.
I also felt as a fault that he descends into comedy: I say descends because he comes across as satirising himself. He's perfectly allowed to satirise himself at the age of 84, so I don't know why I have a quarrel. A couple of techniques I do like: his convoluted or crazily fantastic similes; and speech that at times is not naturalistic but better-than, as if the writer gives you what they meant, what they tried to say, or even a rendition of unformulated thoughts (I found this effective in M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories; and why does a novelist have to decline this trick, that old poets had up their sleeves?)
I am attracted to these late, weird, fantastical works – when he had a friend he knew was going to publish whatever he wrote; when the prophet in him didn't have much time left to get his message out. For those who wonder whether they want to read a writer known for mysticism, can I quote this, that I suspect to be his own beliefs at this stage of his life? I'll quote extensively because it's what I'd want to know before I touched a mystical novelist with a bargepole. You can skip the passage if that word doesn't scare you. Sir Mort Abyssum's wife reports on his philosophy:
Sir Mort's theory was – and though he would swear to her and to the children that it was based on his own experience, she never could see, however excited he got about it, that it was possible for one man's experience to cover such an immense field – that there was what he was pleased to describe as an invisible Dimension that existed over the whole surface of land and sea; and that into this Dimension rushed all the thoughts and feelings and passions and even sensations of everything that was subject to these things. His theory culminated in the amazing dogma that everything that existed had such feelings, not even excluding rocks and stones and earth-mould... In fact he insisted that this invisible Dimension, or atmospheric sounding-board, of the planet upon which we live, while predominant in it are the feelings of all living men, women and children, includes also the feelings of all beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects and worms as well as of trees, plants, mosses, funguses, grasses and all vegetation. And when we thus speak of the projected thoughts and feelings and emotions of all things, it must be remembered that we are not suggesting the existence of any actual souls that can survive the death of their bodily presence. When we are dead, Sir Mort maintained, we are absolutely dead. But while we live we are all, including the myriads of sub-human lives in air, on land, and in water, from whales to earth-worms and the tiniest gnats, in constant contact with an invisible overshadowing atmospheric mist, crowded with feelings and dreams and emotions and what might be called sense-emanations and thought-eidola issuing from all that exists, whether superhuman, human, or sub-human, whether organic or inorganic. This atmospheric dimension does not, Sir Mort argued, contain the sort of entities we are in the habit of thinking of as souls; for these perish when we perish, but it contains the thoughts and feelings and intimations and sensations which, though they grow fainter with time, do not cease to exist when the body and soul which projected them have both come to an end.
If you haven't run away, you can see what a canvas he has to paint on, or what a cast he has available; why an ancient pine nearby can comment on human goings-on; why the story can follow the fate of a leaf that happens to waft through a conversation – with concern for that leaf. He’s a novelist of psychic processes, or physical-psychic processes – way way way beyond ‘he thought this, she thought that.’ He delves into sub-thoughts, quasi-thoughts and a hell of a lot of other experiences. Certainly I've never seen 'psyche, psychic' used so frequently. It's his sphere.
Here’s a sequence that I thought captured a few reasons why I read him – that might convey what is typical of him. Two gentle and decent people, Roger Bacon and Friar Tuck the priory cook, are having a sensible conversation, in the midst of which the novelist decides to tell us, in total non-sequitur: what a moment this would have been for a perfect proof as to how the most unorthodox, improper, shameless, outrageous thoughts flit through the heads of upright, honest, and thoroughly good men busy with entirely blameless activities! For Brother Tuck wondered how soon Prior Bog would detect something amiss if he, Tuck of Abbotsbury, fried his own excrement for the Priory supper; and Roger of Ilchester wondered whether it would be possible for a female yellow-hammer to lay eggs if she were impregnated by a dead mate who had been galvanised into momentary sexual excitement by a thunderstorm. Roger Bacon has picked up a yellow-hammer that dashed itself to death in the room. He keeps it in lap or hand through the conversation, and being under house-arrest, asks Tuck to attend to its last rites: he was suddenly seized with a pang of remorse for not having already thrown the bird's little feathered corpse out of the window so that the first-born of the innumerable little worms that were bound to be engendered out of the putrefying corpse beneath those tender feathers might not perish in being thus separated from the elements... “O please take this, will you, Tuck, and bury it somewhere? Bury it just underground, not more than an inch or two deep – you can make a hole with a stick, or anything you find under your hand: it needn't be deep down – but I want it to be quickly and properly eaten by worms, not flown away with by carrion-crows, or lugged off down a rat-hole! See what I mean, Tuck, my old friend?”
Which called to mind Hamlet's 'If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog –' – only here’s a version with true religiosity, that line converted into a hymn. Next I thought of St Francis and the birds - founder of these friars’ order, patron saint of animals. John Cowper Powys felt so strongly about cruel animal experimentation he wrote a novel in protest – that's Morwyn. Cruelty and power are his evils, from what I've gathered so far: I think he had anarchic leanings, and there's a spokesperson for the serf oppressed in this novel, a revolutionary old granddad.
A very strange writer, nothing if not original, who has me utterly intrigued. I'm off to explore Atlantis next. I four-star only because I think both Atlantis and Porius are going to be better.
These latter examples are from The Brazen Head, the last of his late novels. Its plot obviously tackles questions of science and religion; but strangely at first glance, the sanest people in the book are the scientists – Friar Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus – who furthermore think of themselves as conventional Christians still. The most insane is a guy who walks about with a phallic lodestone down his pants, in contact with his sex organs – he's always got a hand on it, too – with which he conducts experiments in magnetism upon people. Roger Bacon has invented a brass human head that has the rudiments of thought and can utter oracles. The head too is baptised by a sexual magic, a woman's this time.
What is this brazen head about? I don't know. Maybe I'll figure that out next time. And what's the point of the horse that wanders through the story – a “superintelligent” horse who has silent communications with people – with a deformation in its neck that everybody takes to be a human head about to burst out, that everybody is drawn to and obsesses over, to the horse's sad patience? I don't know that either. I'm a bit defeated by what I must feel to be the irresolution of the plot, at the end. Though I hesitate to declare the plotting faulty, since I might not be getting it.
I also felt as a fault that he descends into comedy: I say descends because he comes across as satirising himself. He's perfectly allowed to satirise himself at the age of 84, so I don't know why I have a quarrel. A couple of techniques I do like: his convoluted or crazily fantastic similes; and speech that at times is not naturalistic but better-than, as if the writer gives you what they meant, what they tried to say, or even a rendition of unformulated thoughts (I found this effective in M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories; and why does a novelist have to decline this trick, that old poets had up their sleeves?)
I am attracted to these late, weird, fantastical works – when he had a friend he knew was going to publish whatever he wrote; when the prophet in him didn't have much time left to get his message out. For those who wonder whether they want to read a writer known for mysticism, can I quote this, that I suspect to be his own beliefs at this stage of his life? I'll quote extensively because it's what I'd want to know before I touched a mystical novelist with a bargepole. You can skip the passage if that word doesn't scare you. Sir Mort Abyssum's wife reports on his philosophy:
Sir Mort's theory was – and though he would swear to her and to the children that it was based on his own experience, she never could see, however excited he got about it, that it was possible for one man's experience to cover such an immense field – that there was what he was pleased to describe as an invisible Dimension that existed over the whole surface of land and sea; and that into this Dimension rushed all the thoughts and feelings and passions and even sensations of everything that was subject to these things. His theory culminated in the amazing dogma that everything that existed had such feelings, not even excluding rocks and stones and earth-mould... In fact he insisted that this invisible Dimension, or atmospheric sounding-board, of the planet upon which we live, while predominant in it are the feelings of all living men, women and children, includes also the feelings of all beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, insects and worms as well as of trees, plants, mosses, funguses, grasses and all vegetation. And when we thus speak of the projected thoughts and feelings and emotions of all things, it must be remembered that we are not suggesting the existence of any actual souls that can survive the death of their bodily presence. When we are dead, Sir Mort maintained, we are absolutely dead. But while we live we are all, including the myriads of sub-human lives in air, on land, and in water, from whales to earth-worms and the tiniest gnats, in constant contact with an invisible overshadowing atmospheric mist, crowded with feelings and dreams and emotions and what might be called sense-emanations and thought-eidola issuing from all that exists, whether superhuman, human, or sub-human, whether organic or inorganic. This atmospheric dimension does not, Sir Mort argued, contain the sort of entities we are in the habit of thinking of as souls; for these perish when we perish, but it contains the thoughts and feelings and intimations and sensations which, though they grow fainter with time, do not cease to exist when the body and soul which projected them have both come to an end.
If you haven't run away, you can see what a canvas he has to paint on, or what a cast he has available; why an ancient pine nearby can comment on human goings-on; why the story can follow the fate of a leaf that happens to waft through a conversation – with concern for that leaf. He’s a novelist of psychic processes, or physical-psychic processes – way way way beyond ‘he thought this, she thought that.’ He delves into sub-thoughts, quasi-thoughts and a hell of a lot of other experiences. Certainly I've never seen 'psyche, psychic' used so frequently. It's his sphere.
Here’s a sequence that I thought captured a few reasons why I read him – that might convey what is typical of him. Two gentle and decent people, Roger Bacon and Friar Tuck the priory cook, are having a sensible conversation, in the midst of which the novelist decides to tell us, in total non-sequitur: what a moment this would have been for a perfect proof as to how the most unorthodox, improper, shameless, outrageous thoughts flit through the heads of upright, honest, and thoroughly good men busy with entirely blameless activities! For Brother Tuck wondered how soon Prior Bog would detect something amiss if he, Tuck of Abbotsbury, fried his own excrement for the Priory supper; and Roger of Ilchester wondered whether it would be possible for a female yellow-hammer to lay eggs if she were impregnated by a dead mate who had been galvanised into momentary sexual excitement by a thunderstorm. Roger Bacon has picked up a yellow-hammer that dashed itself to death in the room. He keeps it in lap or hand through the conversation, and being under house-arrest, asks Tuck to attend to its last rites: he was suddenly seized with a pang of remorse for not having already thrown the bird's little feathered corpse out of the window so that the first-born of the innumerable little worms that were bound to be engendered out of the putrefying corpse beneath those tender feathers might not perish in being thus separated from the elements... “O please take this, will you, Tuck, and bury it somewhere? Bury it just underground, not more than an inch or two deep – you can make a hole with a stick, or anything you find under your hand: it needn't be deep down – but I want it to be quickly and properly eaten by worms, not flown away with by carrion-crows, or lugged off down a rat-hole! See what I mean, Tuck, my old friend?”
Which called to mind Hamlet's 'If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog –' – only here’s a version with true religiosity, that line converted into a hymn. Next I thought of St Francis and the birds - founder of these friars’ order, patron saint of animals. John Cowper Powys felt so strongly about cruel animal experimentation he wrote a novel in protest – that's Morwyn. Cruelty and power are his evils, from what I've gathered so far: I think he had anarchic leanings, and there's a spokesperson for the serf oppressed in this novel, a revolutionary old granddad.
A very strange writer, nothing if not original, who has me utterly intrigued. I'm off to explore Atlantis next. I four-star only because I think both Atlantis and Porius are going to be better.
April 24, 2025
4.03 stars on average? This shit is unreadable. Who are you people?
November 8, 2025
I won't pretend that JCP is an easy read, it requires full attention and focus and it certainly isn't something you can read at great speed - more easily digested chapter by chapter.
However I do enjoy his imagery and bizarre grotesque characters and his general weirdness.
Apparently this was his last novel so probably not the best one to start with.
However I do enjoy his imagery and bizarre grotesque characters and his general weirdness.
Apparently this was his last novel so probably not the best one to start with.
December 8, 2014
I'm aware of the status that John Cowper Powys holds among some readers, and it may be that they would tell me I started with the wrong book. I found this hard to read, and though I hoped that by the end I would have found it rewarding, I didn't.
I had enjoyed a few years ago 'Mr Weston's Good Wine' by JCP's brother, and remember reading a few chapters of 'Wolf Solent' a very long time ago, and thought that this £1.75 bargain purchase would be a good place to start a beautiful relationship with JCP. It wasn't: but I have a copy of 'Weymouth Sands', and I will give that a go.
My difficulties with 'The Brazen Head' were essentially twofold: obscurity of narrative function and obscurity of style.
If I try to describe what I mean by 'obscurity of narrative function' - there was no blend between the story and the philosophical purpose of the novel. Sometimes I felt as if I were reading a medieval romance; sometimes I felt it was simply a story about a simmering discontent between two good barons and a bizarrely obviously bad one; and sometimes it seemed to be an allegory in which the characters and what they did and what happened to them all had a greater meaning, as a result of which they were not interesting for what they were so much as for what they represented - and that, I find, is dull, especially if you can't work out what it is they represent. (I think, broadly, there are 'The Good' and 'The Bad' represented by Friar Bacon and his friends and supporters on the one hand and Friar Bonaventura, Lost Towers and Petrus Peregrinus on the other. I also think these two sides, contradictorily, represent heresy as good and orthodoxy as bad. But the novel was not a simple church-bashing story, so that analysis is inadequate.)
And I could attribute no significance to most events. What's the point of mentioning a dead yellowhammer in Friar Bacon's cell? What exactly is the power in Petrus Peregrinus' phallic-ish lodestone, and why is there any power in it, or is the power in fact in Petrus himself? Why do Peleg and Ghosta accommodate themselves in a Welsh tinker's cave? Why does the novel open with Lil-Umbra and Peleg in a stone circle watching the sun rise? Why is Baron Maldung depicted as a scarcely articulate mad child with an irrational violent streak and a daughter named after Adam's demonic(?) first wife? Why are Lord Mort's children named Tilton (odd), John (normal), and Lil-Umbra (bizarre and not recognisably English)? And what significance is that horse, Cheiron, with a deformity suggesting a human head growing out of its neck?
I understand JCP to have been interested in the occult and the mystical, and I picked up frequent references to different characters trying to find their way to the heart of things or the mystery behind the universe. I couldn't, however, see how the brazen head itself fitted into the picture. I was put off by phrases such as “galvanic forces that constitute the motions of the universe”, “spiritual atmosphere”, “psychic gulf”, “atmospheric arena of the invisible Dimension”, “magnetic receptivity”. What did they really mean? Were they trying to define the ineffable? If so, they did not work for me. Better, in my view, to have composed a narrative that would have allowed me to feel the ineffable without dulling the thrill of it with obscure phrases. I was perhaps more au fait with references to some sort of heretical pantheism, but they didn't lead anywhere that I could make out.
My second difficulty was JCP's style. I'm not averse to periodic sentences or hypertaxis: you can't afford to be if you want to enjoy Dickens, for example, and I've recently read 'Villette' which is pretty hard going grammatically from time to time. Nevertheless, Dickens and Bronte have their more accessible rewards: narratives that are easier to understand the purpose of, themes that are easier to discern, and characters that are more believable. It is very easy to ridicule a writer unfairly by quoting what might be an excerpt that is exceptionally difficult while the rest of the text is at least moderately manageable, but I think the following is not untypical, and picked at random simply by opening the text and reading a paragraph or two:
"Thus there was always something, in spite of his admiration for Pierre of Picardy, that frightened him about his friend's attitude, for it struck him as reducing not only his own life, as he knew it himself, but the lives of all other entities as they knew them themselves, the lives of insects, such as midges and moths, the lives of plants and trees, the lives of worms and serpents, the lives of fish in the sea, birds in the air, the lives of the beasts of forest and field; reducing in fact all these lives to the level of lonely, desperate lost souls, clinging to each other in boundless, godless, cavernous nothingness, in fact to what he had heard a travelling Welsh tinker call Diddym, 'the ultimate Void'."
The phrases are nicely balanced, and the congeries is not unattractive - but what does it all mean? Well, after reading it a couple of times, it becomes clearer - Pierre of Picardy has the ability to make the whole of creation feel desperate. At least, I think that's it. But I did not want to be continually re-reading in the way I have found I have to re-read Henry James, which is why I have never finished a Henry James novel. And the style, generally, is long-winded, so I often felt I was being asked to admire the writer's grammatical competence in controlling a long sentence, rather than being allowed to enjoy and assimilate what was taking place in the story.
I note that 'The Brazen Head' was JCP's last novel - I think that's right. Perhaps the JCP fan will recognise in it themes and preoccupations and symbols that have been well explored in earlier works, and which have acquired meaning in the JCP literary universe. In which case, I started with the wrong novel. Nevertheless, I'd suggest that a novelist who is not able (or willing?) to make the world of his imagination more immediately accessible to a reader, does not have the reader sufficiently in mind. And that's why I've gone for two stars.
If anyone can help me find a way into the world of JCP, I'd be very grateful, because I can't believe he's a nutcase, and I don't think I'm an insensitive reader!
I had enjoyed a few years ago 'Mr Weston's Good Wine' by JCP's brother, and remember reading a few chapters of 'Wolf Solent' a very long time ago, and thought that this £1.75 bargain purchase would be a good place to start a beautiful relationship with JCP. It wasn't: but I have a copy of 'Weymouth Sands', and I will give that a go.
My difficulties with 'The Brazen Head' were essentially twofold: obscurity of narrative function and obscurity of style.
If I try to describe what I mean by 'obscurity of narrative function' - there was no blend between the story and the philosophical purpose of the novel. Sometimes I felt as if I were reading a medieval romance; sometimes I felt it was simply a story about a simmering discontent between two good barons and a bizarrely obviously bad one; and sometimes it seemed to be an allegory in which the characters and what they did and what happened to them all had a greater meaning, as a result of which they were not interesting for what they were so much as for what they represented - and that, I find, is dull, especially if you can't work out what it is they represent. (I think, broadly, there are 'The Good' and 'The Bad' represented by Friar Bacon and his friends and supporters on the one hand and Friar Bonaventura, Lost Towers and Petrus Peregrinus on the other. I also think these two sides, contradictorily, represent heresy as good and orthodoxy as bad. But the novel was not a simple church-bashing story, so that analysis is inadequate.)
And I could attribute no significance to most events. What's the point of mentioning a dead yellowhammer in Friar Bacon's cell? What exactly is the power in Petrus Peregrinus' phallic-ish lodestone, and why is there any power in it, or is the power in fact in Petrus himself? Why do Peleg and Ghosta accommodate themselves in a Welsh tinker's cave? Why does the novel open with Lil-Umbra and Peleg in a stone circle watching the sun rise? Why is Baron Maldung depicted as a scarcely articulate mad child with an irrational violent streak and a daughter named after Adam's demonic(?) first wife? Why are Lord Mort's children named Tilton (odd), John (normal), and Lil-Umbra (bizarre and not recognisably English)? And what significance is that horse, Cheiron, with a deformity suggesting a human head growing out of its neck?
I understand JCP to have been interested in the occult and the mystical, and I picked up frequent references to different characters trying to find their way to the heart of things or the mystery behind the universe. I couldn't, however, see how the brazen head itself fitted into the picture. I was put off by phrases such as “galvanic forces that constitute the motions of the universe”, “spiritual atmosphere”, “psychic gulf”, “atmospheric arena of the invisible Dimension”, “magnetic receptivity”. What did they really mean? Were they trying to define the ineffable? If so, they did not work for me. Better, in my view, to have composed a narrative that would have allowed me to feel the ineffable without dulling the thrill of it with obscure phrases. I was perhaps more au fait with references to some sort of heretical pantheism, but they didn't lead anywhere that I could make out.
My second difficulty was JCP's style. I'm not averse to periodic sentences or hypertaxis: you can't afford to be if you want to enjoy Dickens, for example, and I've recently read 'Villette' which is pretty hard going grammatically from time to time. Nevertheless, Dickens and Bronte have their more accessible rewards: narratives that are easier to understand the purpose of, themes that are easier to discern, and characters that are more believable. It is very easy to ridicule a writer unfairly by quoting what might be an excerpt that is exceptionally difficult while the rest of the text is at least moderately manageable, but I think the following is not untypical, and picked at random simply by opening the text and reading a paragraph or two:
"Thus there was always something, in spite of his admiration for Pierre of Picardy, that frightened him about his friend's attitude, for it struck him as reducing not only his own life, as he knew it himself, but the lives of all other entities as they knew them themselves, the lives of insects, such as midges and moths, the lives of plants and trees, the lives of worms and serpents, the lives of fish in the sea, birds in the air, the lives of the beasts of forest and field; reducing in fact all these lives to the level of lonely, desperate lost souls, clinging to each other in boundless, godless, cavernous nothingness, in fact to what he had heard a travelling Welsh tinker call Diddym, 'the ultimate Void'."
The phrases are nicely balanced, and the congeries is not unattractive - but what does it all mean? Well, after reading it a couple of times, it becomes clearer - Pierre of Picardy has the ability to make the whole of creation feel desperate. At least, I think that's it. But I did not want to be continually re-reading in the way I have found I have to re-read Henry James, which is why I have never finished a Henry James novel. And the style, generally, is long-winded, so I often felt I was being asked to admire the writer's grammatical competence in controlling a long sentence, rather than being allowed to enjoy and assimilate what was taking place in the story.
I note that 'The Brazen Head' was JCP's last novel - I think that's right. Perhaps the JCP fan will recognise in it themes and preoccupations and symbols that have been well explored in earlier works, and which have acquired meaning in the JCP literary universe. In which case, I started with the wrong novel. Nevertheless, I'd suggest that a novelist who is not able (or willing?) to make the world of his imagination more immediately accessible to a reader, does not have the reader sufficiently in mind. And that's why I've gone for two stars.
If anyone can help me find a way into the world of JCP, I'd be very grateful, because I can't believe he's a nutcase, and I don't think I'm an insensitive reader!
July 3, 2024
This one's a lot more Rabelais-ian than the likes of Wolf Solent or the incredible A Glastonbury Romance, reminding me in some parts of Alfred Jarry. Definitely a lesser work in JCP's massive and recondite catalogue, but worth reading for those who enjoy prose that proudly darts from beautiful to baffling with ease.
July 8, 2024
Goodreads is increasingly a playground of distracted and distracting bots. Coy presences that tiptoe their way into attention trying not to get banned or 'exposed'.
Most of the interactions I get on adding/reading certain books could be classified as unreal or 'gamed' interactions (forms of spam). It took some time to get used to it, but now I feel at home. There's a false sense (on my part) of existential monotypy - just the person or that particular kind of reader or person. Does this mean that I'm actually fooled, still scared by 'generated', mimetic readers, real & 'fake' persons, displaced photo pics and pseudo- friends. This pseudo borderline works both ways. It remains undecided if it's persons acting like bots or personalized bots acting like persons of humanoid acting automated accounts in search of monetary opportunities. All have some measure or manner (apud Souriau) of existence. While I find incredible this complete nonchalance and Internetique parasitism allowed by Goodreads and other platform- capitalist institutions, maybe it points out to a larger impossibility.
This is a metaphysical impossibility with a pedigree that has baffled the whole Western thought tradition (empiricism or critical philosophy/Kantianism) from Aristotle to Locke to Hume to Kant. One that A. N. Whitehead has termed the subject-predicate inheritance of Aristotelian logic as transmitted by scholasticism, thereafter in modern times monist "solitary substances" tended to populate philosophical accounts of the universe and mental (sensationalist) activity was just something specific to the thinking rational subject. The Brazen Head argues against this Aristotelian desertification and reductive mentalism of singular experience and uncovers everywhere a pluralist ontology. There are not just isolated contents of the minds, not just desolate extended substances, according to the way John Cowper Powys ascribes attributes and feelings to his objects of care. Attributes (otherwise considered secondary) win the day. A consequence of this is that attributes give the tonality. One could also say that his obsessions, of discerning particularities and ambiguities, quirks and cvasi existences ensures that various primary data (from descriptions of particular lichens or a certain quality, need or feeling a particular carrion-eating worm on a particular dead bird to a wind that blows in a particular time of the day in a particular stone tower) act as universals, and do not get stuck into substances. These particulars follow their own entirely mischievous mishaps.
The Brazen Head is my introduction to John Cowper Powys and what a hell of an introduction it was. His world makes sure that our world is as bizarre as it is. There is rarely a written book that ascertains or ensures that we get its metaphysics progressively right. Suffice to say, it made me rethink the role of literature or of writing as something that can be both poor (yet conceptually and formally seamless) or be totally enjoyable, animated by intimately philosophical notions (in Powys). Mark my words, this is a truly wonderful & unsuspected little perverse book. What is perverse here? It is if we still hold onto those predicate-subject habits of thought and language after we read it. The effective fractal perversity that Sade endorses & feeds to his readership is another thing. This is an effective, directed attack on all stale categoreal schemes. There is no object/subject, there is no definite inner/outer realm or cartesian body/mind divisions. (I feel I should have kept a close track to the reading in notes somehow, otherwise everything I write will sound hopelessly scattered-brained and all over the place).
Needless to say I have sent around (to friends) numerous screenshots of Brazen Head pages, few notes, atoo excited by everything I read or thought I understood for the first time.
At first it's a bizarre 'scholastic' sounding book written in the 1950s, tackling problems of inorganicity of the organic and the organicity and vivacity of the inorganic. Reading trough it might feel like indulging into an unruly animistic or metaphysical exercise. Powys is not a neo-Celtic
neo-pagan vaguely pernnialist philosopher. Yet he is a sort of 'bard' that never read his own writings twice.
What is actual in this book?
Sure this is not the High Middle Ages we read in high school or the elitist debates of scholastic friar-orders, insulated in their seats of knowledge, Thomist dogma, teaching at Oxbridge, Sorbonne, Bologna, etc. Brazen Head promotes a sort of plebeian democracy of feelings, theories, daring speculations and thoughts buzzing all over the place. Powys writes in a modern vernacular manner about historical examples, of runaway ancient doctrinal and scientific disputes. Old names such as Doctor Mirabilis Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20 – c. 1292) act as contemporaries. This Franciscan friar supposedly built an artificial mechanical predictive mechanism in the form of a head (The Brazen Head in the title of the book). Even after reading this book I cannot say what this head is supposed to trigger? Nevertheless, it's not a 'solutionist' device as Evgeny Morozov The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom insists in the case of whole Silicon Valley tech fix mania. The Brazen Head almost works by implication - of would it could lead one or what it might preclude.
It includes stealing of the Head and accusation of it being some tool of the devil, but why it is so is not clear, other than being some strange scientific demonstration of parthenogenesis ( asexual reproduction or budding). This head (goes the legend) is supposed to have foretold the future, so we can assume it was some sort of Mechanical Turk or some early predictive device cum automaton, that abounded during the middle agesThe Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Various other figures such as Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste or Peter Peregrinus (aka Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt) and their inner lives get ample treatement. Yet these are only one side (the historical) of story that does not even matter so much. There is other incredible and unforgettable creatures that seem so extreme as to explode any identitarian bounds - the giant Peleg, a Mongolian Jewish warrior and philosopher and wise Ghosta, his Mesopotamian love - also philosopher, a sort of proto-feminist.
There is an incredible trail of other characters - that defy any description: Baron Boncor, Lady Val, Baron Maldung, Raymond de Laon, Lil-Umbra and many more. Consciousness does not appear to be the primary inhabitant of this universe since there is a lot of goings on that only briefly make it into the cognitive focus, sentient stirrings that are amply distributed in a wasteful manner that belies all exclusivity to animal faith (as per Santayana) or privileged human heads (as per Kant).
A typical fragment characterizing the mood and direction of the book:
"It had been from the start his daily habit to tell himself exciting stories; and the essence of these stories, the burden and the secret of their enchantment, was the fact that young Roger was always imagining himself, of better say discovering himself, to be surrounded by a motley of multiplicity of objects, belonging to the four levels of existence, namely of human beings, of sub-human beings, of vegetable beings, and of mineral substances.
And as Roger Bacon grew older and began his studies at the University of Oxford and Paris, this intense consciousness of the various existences, whether animate, or inanimate, that surrounded him at any given moment, including his own self-consciousness, came to be the supreme interest of his whole life. His temperament and general nervous sensibility were such that he could not help feeling a special and quite personal "rapport" with each of these various existences: and for good and ill each of them affected him profoundly."
What matters is a kind of ceaseless vivacity and agency of fabulation. Fabulation is infusing everything. It is so diffused and detached and reattached to the minds of people or horses. Everything seems prone to invade and influence or stimulate into existence. Everything is ontologically unstable, that is ontology itself ceases to be this indefinite ground of being. It remains impossible to permanently establish a certain order of things even if there is a certain chain of causality. Yet this causality is always something else and always enters under the skin of things.
Maybe mind processes are originating things, or lively thoughts animate thirsty brains, yet this is not important - since action is eminently carried on by interpenetration of this vague influences. Ideas in a sense are not what we think ideas are, since they are not abstract or fully abstract. They are also half concrete, runaway, eloping under the tug of certain contingent happenings. Everything has the obnoxious tendency to live its life elsewhere, outside or inside the head, haunting and infesting other (brazen) heads. Yet we do not deal here with the mythical, with a literature that tries to force-feed me with mythical proportions and portion of things, uncovering the so-called vivacy of a buried ancient, mythical past. In my youth I devoured lots of mythical or saga literature so I have a heightened sensitivity to sold-out neo-pagan ahistorical drivel but also got to appreciate than you cannot be dismissive or a purist in terms of the modern pre-modern brake. There's various modernitaties and very modern things anticipated (what Ernst Bloch called 'Vorschein') the future shining through. Powys honed this amalgam of modernist and decidedly pre modern style to perfection. In contrast with a lot of contemporary (undigestable for me) fantasy, Powys manages to avoid fairies, elves, magic etc. He's interested in the heads of prelate Bonaventura or in carrion worms.
J Copwer Powys might exercise well earned attraction because it equal parts modernist skepticism, equal part history of science backlogs, including those impossibly sounding neo-celtic Briton or Welsh place names. Menhirs appear on and off, but I do not get any regressive nostalgia nor vitalist theories. As Jessica Riskin has shown in her study about intentionality, autopoesis & concepts of the living, there was always a counter-current in Western philosophy that tried to evoke the agency of matter, thus refusing to banish it outside of creatures (outsourcing it to God or Natural Selection). Powys mobilizes a genuine vibrant (new) materialist approach, and he does not dwell on the chthonic. He enjoys chronically 'restless' substrates. His humoral worldview (if one might call it that) is free-falling and unruly, not grafted onto mythical axiologies.
He is also a genuinely rare example - a good contrast to the Lovecraftian chthonic abject, the unhuman (not for us) elements, the indifference of the universe (his main theme) or the fear of racial misgenation and heterogeneity (equally relevant for the Lovecrafian corpus).
Nothing is indifferent, the "great outdoors" in Meillassoux terms is disconcertingly conventional yet impure, here and there, scattered, btw something & nothing, with apparent anthropomorphisms shoulder to shoulder (or head to head) with places and parts. It is a world where a flint head can sometimes exhibit thoughts, feelings, purposes, even a certain moodiness that seems to infect its great human 'other'.
A general, universal state of arousal tends to animate all matter and materials. From the smallest things, from minor unsuspected encounters and banal happenings.
It is not just thought that runs feral, but small phenomena, atmospheric, impressions and sounds of those phenomena, inner sensations tend to objectify everything, wander around almost like gusts of air, wreaking havoc to established order, unsettling and mixing things. Out of this hard to reconstruct ontologic and teratologically feral world, certain favorite passages stand out:
-those with the horse Cheiron - a horse with a deformity that looks like a double head. In fact heads tend to grow, bud either on horses side or on magnets. This deformity acts like a magnet itself, a form of magnetism, and whoever meets the horse falls under the spell and cannot but keep fixated on this apparent second head of the animal.
-another is Bonaventura's orgy of self-righteousness, charismatic onanism, an almost unbearable avalanche of Godly egoism and delusional fervor of feeling the chosen or becoming Pope, while at the same time enjoying the denial of flesh while mentally entertaining the most blasphemous carnal thoughts.
-all the fragments and experiments of Petrus of Maricourt and his "Magnet of Satan", practically one of the first magnetic compass, a sort of algorithmic doomsday device to influence and deride everyone (even Cambridge Analytica comes short to that). He uses this secondary phalus in the cruelest and most destructive ways. Or course this magnet also has a sort of humanoid face.
-an entire delirious fragment where Master of Roque Sir Mort and his 'spiritual' spear - a hieroglyph of himself - boundless Pantagruelic disproportions, this insanely perspicacious flint-headed object that feels/touches/speaks and while speaking touches the bottom end of viscous reality. An example:
"He (Sir Mort) forced himself to touch, to smell, and to taste, all these animal, vegetable and mineral entities into whose dwelling he was descending; and finally, so that his spiritual pilgrimage should miss nothing, he imagined himself listening, as he headed downwards, to the intercourse, in some sort of earth-mould language, which these roots and cracks and crevices, these worms in their subterranean dwellings indulged in among themselves, so that he could compare their mental reactions to life with his own. But this was only the first "move", so to speak, in Sir Mort's intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air!".
Only to go into the total interstellar void embrace - or a sort blunderous, boastful (paradoxical) sort of Buddhist śūnyatā experience a fragment later:
"And then, when he had got clear of all impediments in his aerial flight, he set himself to enjoy the pure touch of nothingness, the ineffable taste of nothingness, the indescribable smell of nothingness, the god-like sight of the immeasurable recess of nothingness, and finally, pervading his pilgrim-soul with the most exquisite pleasure of all, the unutterable symphonies of he music of nothingness".
Most of the interactions I get on adding/reading certain books could be classified as unreal or 'gamed' interactions (forms of spam). It took some time to get used to it, but now I feel at home. There's a false sense (on my part) of existential monotypy - just the person or that particular kind of reader or person. Does this mean that I'm actually fooled, still scared by 'generated', mimetic readers, real & 'fake' persons, displaced photo pics and pseudo- friends. This pseudo borderline works both ways. It remains undecided if it's persons acting like bots or personalized bots acting like persons of humanoid acting automated accounts in search of monetary opportunities. All have some measure or manner (apud Souriau) of existence. While I find incredible this complete nonchalance and Internetique parasitism allowed by Goodreads and other platform- capitalist institutions, maybe it points out to a larger impossibility.
This is a metaphysical impossibility with a pedigree that has baffled the whole Western thought tradition (empiricism or critical philosophy/Kantianism) from Aristotle to Locke to Hume to Kant. One that A. N. Whitehead has termed the subject-predicate inheritance of Aristotelian logic as transmitted by scholasticism, thereafter in modern times monist "solitary substances" tended to populate philosophical accounts of the universe and mental (sensationalist) activity was just something specific to the thinking rational subject. The Brazen Head argues against this Aristotelian desertification and reductive mentalism of singular experience and uncovers everywhere a pluralist ontology. There are not just isolated contents of the minds, not just desolate extended substances, according to the way John Cowper Powys ascribes attributes and feelings to his objects of care. Attributes (otherwise considered secondary) win the day. A consequence of this is that attributes give the tonality. One could also say that his obsessions, of discerning particularities and ambiguities, quirks and cvasi existences ensures that various primary data (from descriptions of particular lichens or a certain quality, need or feeling a particular carrion-eating worm on a particular dead bird to a wind that blows in a particular time of the day in a particular stone tower) act as universals, and do not get stuck into substances. These particulars follow their own entirely mischievous mishaps.
The Brazen Head is my introduction to John Cowper Powys and what a hell of an introduction it was. His world makes sure that our world is as bizarre as it is. There is rarely a written book that ascertains or ensures that we get its metaphysics progressively right. Suffice to say, it made me rethink the role of literature or of writing as something that can be both poor (yet conceptually and formally seamless) or be totally enjoyable, animated by intimately philosophical notions (in Powys). Mark my words, this is a truly wonderful & unsuspected little perverse book. What is perverse here? It is if we still hold onto those predicate-subject habits of thought and language after we read it. The effective fractal perversity that Sade endorses & feeds to his readership is another thing. This is an effective, directed attack on all stale categoreal schemes. There is no object/subject, there is no definite inner/outer realm or cartesian body/mind divisions. (I feel I should have kept a close track to the reading in notes somehow, otherwise everything I write will sound hopelessly scattered-brained and all over the place).
Needless to say I have sent around (to friends) numerous screenshots of Brazen Head pages, few notes, atoo excited by everything I read or thought I understood for the first time.
At first it's a bizarre 'scholastic' sounding book written in the 1950s, tackling problems of inorganicity of the organic and the organicity and vivacity of the inorganic. Reading trough it might feel like indulging into an unruly animistic or metaphysical exercise. Powys is not a neo-Celtic
neo-pagan vaguely pernnialist philosopher. Yet he is a sort of 'bard' that never read his own writings twice.
What is actual in this book?
Sure this is not the High Middle Ages we read in high school or the elitist debates of scholastic friar-orders, insulated in their seats of knowledge, Thomist dogma, teaching at Oxbridge, Sorbonne, Bologna, etc. Brazen Head promotes a sort of plebeian democracy of feelings, theories, daring speculations and thoughts buzzing all over the place. Powys writes in a modern vernacular manner about historical examples, of runaway ancient doctrinal and scientific disputes. Old names such as Doctor Mirabilis Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20 – c. 1292) act as contemporaries. This Franciscan friar supposedly built an artificial mechanical predictive mechanism in the form of a head (The Brazen Head in the title of the book). Even after reading this book I cannot say what this head is supposed to trigger? Nevertheless, it's not a 'solutionist' device as Evgeny Morozov The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom insists in the case of whole Silicon Valley tech fix mania. The Brazen Head almost works by implication - of would it could lead one or what it might preclude.
It includes stealing of the Head and accusation of it being some tool of the devil, but why it is so is not clear, other than being some strange scientific demonstration of parthenogenesis ( asexual reproduction or budding). This head (goes the legend) is supposed to have foretold the future, so we can assume it was some sort of Mechanical Turk or some early predictive device cum automaton, that abounded during the middle agesThe Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick. Various other figures such as Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste or Peter Peregrinus (aka Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt) and their inner lives get ample treatement. Yet these are only one side (the historical) of story that does not even matter so much. There is other incredible and unforgettable creatures that seem so extreme as to explode any identitarian bounds - the giant Peleg, a Mongolian Jewish warrior and philosopher and wise Ghosta, his Mesopotamian love - also philosopher, a sort of proto-feminist.
There is an incredible trail of other characters - that defy any description: Baron Boncor, Lady Val, Baron Maldung, Raymond de Laon, Lil-Umbra and many more. Consciousness does not appear to be the primary inhabitant of this universe since there is a lot of goings on that only briefly make it into the cognitive focus, sentient stirrings that are amply distributed in a wasteful manner that belies all exclusivity to animal faith (as per Santayana) or privileged human heads (as per Kant).
A typical fragment characterizing the mood and direction of the book:
"It had been from the start his daily habit to tell himself exciting stories; and the essence of these stories, the burden and the secret of their enchantment, was the fact that young Roger was always imagining himself, of better say discovering himself, to be surrounded by a motley of multiplicity of objects, belonging to the four levels of existence, namely of human beings, of sub-human beings, of vegetable beings, and of mineral substances.
And as Roger Bacon grew older and began his studies at the University of Oxford and Paris, this intense consciousness of the various existences, whether animate, or inanimate, that surrounded him at any given moment, including his own self-consciousness, came to be the supreme interest of his whole life. His temperament and general nervous sensibility were such that he could not help feeling a special and quite personal "rapport" with each of these various existences: and for good and ill each of them affected him profoundly."
What matters is a kind of ceaseless vivacity and agency of fabulation. Fabulation is infusing everything. It is so diffused and detached and reattached to the minds of people or horses. Everything seems prone to invade and influence or stimulate into existence. Everything is ontologically unstable, that is ontology itself ceases to be this indefinite ground of being. It remains impossible to permanently establish a certain order of things even if there is a certain chain of causality. Yet this causality is always something else and always enters under the skin of things.
Maybe mind processes are originating things, or lively thoughts animate thirsty brains, yet this is not important - since action is eminently carried on by interpenetration of this vague influences. Ideas in a sense are not what we think ideas are, since they are not abstract or fully abstract. They are also half concrete, runaway, eloping under the tug of certain contingent happenings. Everything has the obnoxious tendency to live its life elsewhere, outside or inside the head, haunting and infesting other (brazen) heads. Yet we do not deal here with the mythical, with a literature that tries to force-feed me with mythical proportions and portion of things, uncovering the so-called vivacy of a buried ancient, mythical past. In my youth I devoured lots of mythical or saga literature so I have a heightened sensitivity to sold-out neo-pagan ahistorical drivel but also got to appreciate than you cannot be dismissive or a purist in terms of the modern pre-modern brake. There's various modernitaties and very modern things anticipated (what Ernst Bloch called 'Vorschein') the future shining through. Powys honed this amalgam of modernist and decidedly pre modern style to perfection. In contrast with a lot of contemporary (undigestable for me) fantasy, Powys manages to avoid fairies, elves, magic etc. He's interested in the heads of prelate Bonaventura or in carrion worms.
J Copwer Powys might exercise well earned attraction because it equal parts modernist skepticism, equal part history of science backlogs, including those impossibly sounding neo-celtic Briton or Welsh place names. Menhirs appear on and off, but I do not get any regressive nostalgia nor vitalist theories. As Jessica Riskin has shown in her study about intentionality, autopoesis & concepts of the living, there was always a counter-current in Western philosophy that tried to evoke the agency of matter, thus refusing to banish it outside of creatures (outsourcing it to God or Natural Selection). Powys mobilizes a genuine vibrant (new) materialist approach, and he does not dwell on the chthonic. He enjoys chronically 'restless' substrates. His humoral worldview (if one might call it that) is free-falling and unruly, not grafted onto mythical axiologies.
He is also a genuinely rare example - a good contrast to the Lovecraftian chthonic abject, the unhuman (not for us) elements, the indifference of the universe (his main theme) or the fear of racial misgenation and heterogeneity (equally relevant for the Lovecrafian corpus).
Nothing is indifferent, the "great outdoors" in Meillassoux terms is disconcertingly conventional yet impure, here and there, scattered, btw something & nothing, with apparent anthropomorphisms shoulder to shoulder (or head to head) with places and parts. It is a world where a flint head can sometimes exhibit thoughts, feelings, purposes, even a certain moodiness that seems to infect its great human 'other'.
A general, universal state of arousal tends to animate all matter and materials. From the smallest things, from minor unsuspected encounters and banal happenings.
It is not just thought that runs feral, but small phenomena, atmospheric, impressions and sounds of those phenomena, inner sensations tend to objectify everything, wander around almost like gusts of air, wreaking havoc to established order, unsettling and mixing things. Out of this hard to reconstruct ontologic and teratologically feral world, certain favorite passages stand out:
-those with the horse Cheiron - a horse with a deformity that looks like a double head. In fact heads tend to grow, bud either on horses side or on magnets. This deformity acts like a magnet itself, a form of magnetism, and whoever meets the horse falls under the spell and cannot but keep fixated on this apparent second head of the animal.
-another is Bonaventura's orgy of self-righteousness, charismatic onanism, an almost unbearable avalanche of Godly egoism and delusional fervor of feeling the chosen or becoming Pope, while at the same time enjoying the denial of flesh while mentally entertaining the most blasphemous carnal thoughts.
-all the fragments and experiments of Petrus of Maricourt and his "Magnet of Satan", practically one of the first magnetic compass, a sort of algorithmic doomsday device to influence and deride everyone (even Cambridge Analytica comes short to that). He uses this secondary phalus in the cruelest and most destructive ways. Or course this magnet also has a sort of humanoid face.
-an entire delirious fragment where Master of Roque Sir Mort and his 'spiritual' spear - a hieroglyph of himself - boundless Pantagruelic disproportions, this insanely perspicacious flint-headed object that feels/touches/speaks and while speaking touches the bottom end of viscous reality. An example:
"He (Sir Mort) forced himself to touch, to smell, and to taste, all these animal, vegetable and mineral entities into whose dwelling he was descending; and finally, so that his spiritual pilgrimage should miss nothing, he imagined himself listening, as he headed downwards, to the intercourse, in some sort of earth-mould language, which these roots and cracks and crevices, these worms in their subterranean dwellings indulged in among themselves, so that he could compare their mental reactions to life with his own. But this was only the first "move", so to speak, in Sir Mort's intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air!".
Only to go into the total interstellar void embrace - or a sort blunderous, boastful (paradoxical) sort of Buddhist śūnyatā experience a fragment later:
"And then, when he had got clear of all impediments in his aerial flight, he set himself to enjoy the pure touch of nothingness, the ineffable taste of nothingness, the indescribable smell of nothingness, the god-like sight of the immeasurable recess of nothingness, and finally, pervading his pilgrim-soul with the most exquisite pleasure of all, the unutterable symphonies of he music of nothingness".
July 28, 2019
not really sure what to make of this one. it has lots of jcp's usual obsessions and tendencies but it almost feels like he's exaggerating them to self parody, or least for humorous effect, which doesn't really work for me since i don't find him that funny. the plot sort of meanders around and it's never quite clear where it's all going, even after the end of the book. probably stay clear of this one unless you really want to read all his books or you're desperate to read a book featuring a horse with a deformation that looks like a human head.
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April 11, 2025one of the novels of all time
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