Holism’s Single Eye

A HOLLOW IN THE SKY by Alexander Glass

“But I cannot tell you what it is, other than to be part of the whole. My thoughts are a fragment of the Gathering-mind. My hands are its tools.”

I am over-awed by this fiction, if fiction it is and not a new awareness of a religion that has somehow always existed. A fiction as a real process. An “impossibly vivid”, yet tantalisingly inchoate, process, a process separate from any suspension of disbelief, a process still transpiring as I write this about it. It has granted me the position of a node or stowaway or envoy or reliquary wasp from the vespiary and it feeds me messages, some empty or holy hollow, some teeming full. One may even be a virus hidden now in my head. It ekes out meaning to me, and I sense I have been gestalt real-time reviewing for the past 13 years just to be able scratch the surface of its Gathering, its Borers and Limpets, its wasps that make the paper of these smooth surfaces where the story is printed, and its above/below synchrony. No crude cause and effect. And the sort of sporadic romance of its two central characters. Sacrifice and fulfilment alternating when treading the rarefied paths set out by these words. One character with the Abbot’s psalter as an anchor. And I worry whether my own approaching gestalt with whatever is out there when I otherwise die is one that is ‘subsumed’ or one that is ‘concatenated’ — an eye-opening distinction for me. Whatever the case, at least part of me has genuinely had an epiphany reading this work. “Almost as if the whole thing had been planned.”

Full context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/29/interzone-290-291/