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A review by jimmylorunning
The Secret Service by Wendy Walker
3.0
Consider. This body of work, at first, like any other between cold covers where I can almost hear the "whoomp" of its years-ago shutting, or the creak of its arthritic grand-opening again. It has been dormant too long, uncracked in that learned institution where it lay limb over limb in hibernation until... --'CHAPTER ONE' and I wake my left arm still asleep, numb. That arm now lifted to my face, skin touches skin but odd that my finger feels rubbery, not my own. I wallow in this feeling a bit, as one inevitably does when one has the luxury of knowing a condition will not last, taunting it. Is this how others experience my touch, as other? But no, the arm is dead, a stiff form, the blood from the fingers drained through the colander of the heart, this is how it feels to be a corpse--an exquisite one, at that!
And so I sprawl out in the first few pages, sensing only so far as my eyes can see in this volume, and as in that game of the corpse, ready to change directions (and consciousnesses) at a moment's notice. First, I sense Daumal's presence lightly playing the pataphysician in his labcoat, showing me his paradams under the microscope, but recast as pure ether! Instead of leading up to any Mt. of transcendence, it goes straight down, embedding me in musty earth, of being and of bodies in their messiness, where perhaps something might grow, a rose say, might creep up the walls at night. All is appearance at play, but then this pin-prick, and blood! This lowly art of objectification slowly relates to goblets in velvet lined ivory coffins, becomes a stifling one of identification. Surely the next stop for fetishistic dandyism in fine form. Or forms.
Now a set of characters, intrigue, the hushed breathing of conspiracy, the convoluted sentences from a past of honor matching up with a certain genre exactly. It's unmistakable in the rush of travel, incognito in cognition only--another garden wherein carnations bloom. Within those manicured hedges I am lost in a certain human order, sinking into humus, posthumous, veering into disorder if it weren't for the left left right second left right right left opening upon a vista of unending dream (more than 100 pages of my central nervous heft is lost in this semi-floating state). This coma-dream of intense interiority after so much fussing about on the outskirts, so much plotty plot, is both refreshing and stressful. Sensations and scenes give way and give way without any time for expectation to do its thing. But soon I see the same forms rising up, randomness giving way to order, as if in a past life, those obsessions, the one in the tank where the axolotl entrances me with his stare which is my stare.
Then how to go on? Only bit by bit, but imperceptibly. Even in a coma the human body exchanges cell for cell. Old cells die off and new ones take their place. Within a few years, the body is unrecognizable to itself, at least on the microscopic scale where babies wail interminably. But perception starts here, in the bones, so to speak, and form congeals where thinking has not yet started to think and only a strong whiff of patchouli can be detected overcoming all my senses.
And so I sprawl out in the first few pages, sensing only so far as my eyes can see in this volume, and as in that game of the corpse, ready to change directions (and consciousnesses) at a moment's notice. First, I sense Daumal's presence lightly playing the pataphysician in his labcoat, showing me his paradams under the microscope, but recast as pure ether! Instead of leading up to any Mt. of transcendence, it goes straight down, embedding me in musty earth, of being and of bodies in their messiness, where perhaps something might grow, a rose say, might creep up the walls at night. All is appearance at play, but then this pin-prick, and blood! This lowly art of objectification slowly relates to goblets in velvet lined ivory coffins, becomes a stifling one of identification. Surely the next stop for fetishistic dandyism in fine form. Or forms.
Now a set of characters, intrigue, the hushed breathing of conspiracy, the convoluted sentences from a past of honor matching up with a certain genre exactly. It's unmistakable in the rush of travel, incognito in cognition only--another garden wherein carnations bloom. Within those manicured hedges I am lost in a certain human order, sinking into humus, posthumous, veering into disorder if it weren't for the left left right second left right right left opening upon a vista of unending dream (more than 100 pages of my central nervous heft is lost in this semi-floating state). This coma-dream of intense interiority after so much fussing about on the outskirts, so much plotty plot, is both refreshing and stressful. Sensations and scenes give way and give way without any time for expectation to do its thing. But soon I see the same forms rising up, randomness giving way to order, as if in a past life, those obsessions, the one in the tank where the axolotl entrances me with his stare which is my stare.
Then how to go on? Only bit by bit, but imperceptibly. Even in a coma the human body exchanges cell for cell. Old cells die off and new ones take their place. Within a few years, the body is unrecognizable to itself, at least on the microscopic scale where babies wail interminably. But perception starts here, in the bones, so to speak, and form congeals where thinking has not yet started to think and only a strong whiff of patchouli can be detected overcoming all my senses.