Gluey Zenoism

Three gestalt real-time review entries are shown below that happened to happen today in the natural course of my reviewing….

The full contexts of these otherwise separate entries are linked in the first comment in comment stream below….

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THE DEAD VALLEY by Ralph Adams Cram

A tale told by an old yellow-haired Swede to another man over chess, a tale of a journey when he was 12 with another boy into the eponymous valley having bought a little dog but been delayed by “attractive paste-board pigs” used as target practice, and ended up in this valley after dark in underbrush-“tangled” Black Wood trees grown to forest size beneath unLigottian ‘white stars’ — all meaningful in hindsight, but then a perfect, crushing silence, white noise thickened, later into a sea of ashy whiteness, presenting a sheer apotheosis of this Aickman Fontana book series ‘gluey Zenoism’, its nullImmortalis, a stifling stagnancy, a “fever” and “nightmare of madness’ as infected by the previous story’s contiguity, memories airbrushed thereafter by the other boy, but remembered by the yellow-haired Swede: “My feet seemed clogged as in a nightmare […] the writhing mist crept clammily around my ankles, retarding my steps”. Beautifully evoked. With the bony remains of readers of — or listeners to — this story around its central Joyce Marsh tree…
But the dear little dog, what happened to that? Just a chess pawn, or pasteboard spear-carrier, no doubt.

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A MONSTER CALLS by Patrick Ness

“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara.  Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand?  Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’  So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs.  ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute.  I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty.  The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ (1944) by Elizabeth Bowen

AMERICANS DON’T GET MUCH HOLIDAY
THE SECOND TALE
THE REST OF THE SECOND TALE

“But then one day, the person’s daughters fell sick. First the one, and then the other, with an infection that swept the countryside.
(The sky darkened, and Conor could hear the coughing of the daughters within the parsonage, could hear the loud praying of the parson…)”

Conor’s resentment at his father’s apparent attitude fires him up. Time will also tell what destructive forces have been set working by our co-vivid dream’s power of gestalt from each bespoke reader of this book, and from the book’s authors, and perhaps from the other authors that each reader may have read, as fiery Conor tortures a prize pendulum clock. The monster then transliterated here, with its next fabulous tale, conveying the morals of Christian parson and conscientious apothecary. An apocryphal apocalypse or something far more bespoke and targeted for the boy who created it for us by means of the authors who created him?
Each book we read a version of the monster that calls or walks.

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THE MODEL by Robert Aickman

Pages 65 – 70

“The cortège, equine, human, spectral, stumbled endlessly on through the eternal fog.”

….just like Aickman’s “gluey Zenoism” from the Fontana Ghosts series of books that I have arguably established as the main gestalt, if a gestalt can be pluralised and then have a pecking order! But each work of art, such as an opera or a book of literature, needs, as it says in these pages, a “creative genius” to underpin it, and I am taking that role with this Model book I’m thus modelling, I trust. ‘Trust’ is also explicitly mentioned here as a guide to an instinct of understanding something artistic or literary you THINK you don’t otherwise understand at all. For example, is the male-female-faced Lexi so named because he smokes in front of Elena, as if she is a man among men all of whom are smoking? Lexi as the literary lexical equivalent of easy male / female disguises in Opera or Pantomime as well as in, say, some Shakespeare plays…

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