THE SIX-WINGED SERAPH: A NOVELLA
ABSTRACT
Part and parcel of the project “Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture,” the novella traces six months of travel in Europe, in 2013, in pursuit of the alliances and experiences intrinsic to the overall multimedia project (traveling exhibitions/multiple publications) surveying the wreckage of late-modern, neoliberal global culture — or, Capitalist End Times.
Divided into three sections, entitled “Northwest Wales,” “Northwest Croatia,” and “Northwest Greece,” the tale (somewhere in-between a novella and an anti-memoir) involves the peregrinations of Brother X, a self-styled mendicant-scholar in pursuit of what he calls the Immemorial. Derived from his somewhat ad hoc or oblique studies of “Franciscanism” (a study conducted on the fly, discursively and non-discursively, and through the archaeology of modern subjectivity), the novella/anti-memoir ultimately surveys the means to extract the dynamic and signature principles (versus the rules) of late-Medieval monasticism as they reside in forms of present-day individualism (subjective autonomy) in alliance with collective (direct) action — political, cultural, and otherwise.
The three idylls cover both a lyrical and artistic interpretive relationship to Nature and the Real, plus the surrationalist excess given to all encounters with the Immemorial, an ineffable something else that may only be found buried in singular things, and an existential-metaphysical nexus between worlds that can only be experienced through an elaborate game of cat and mouse that also frees the normative subject from the clutches of both mediated subjectivity (cultural programming) and abject egotism (existentialist rebellion).
Written in real time (during the actual journeys and idylls described), with occasional retrospective passages, The Six-winged Seraph, as novella or fictional work, also indulges extensive “internalizing commentaries” of the type used by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace to contextualize and situate the text within a larger critique of cultural proportions, both negating the traditional narrative voice of the novel and doubling the internal generative affects of fiction per se. The middle passage, “Northwest Croatia,” also indulges an excruciating and claustrophobic account of the price (costs) of traveling “on a dime” through countries within or bordering on the crisis-ridden European Union (EU) and the subsequent trials and austerities met en passant. This section documents the individual caught in the throes of negotiating multiple currencies, the fluctuating price of everyday necessities, the vagaries of travel, attempts to foresee and foreclose trouble, the presence of dying economies in the process of being taken over by global capital, and the occasional epiphany (for example, when repressed or seemingly lost things suddenly leap forth in all their glory from the historical debris field of “the Balkans”).
As experimental novel, The Six-winged Seraph is also a vehicle for the production of a form-of-life in/for itself, an aspect of the project the protagonist is engaged in within the novel proper, but also the superlative excess given to all artworks that access a transformational praxis through confronting the paradigmatic (transcendent/universal) in the syntagmatic (contingent/quotidian).
The novella, started and finished in Northwest Wales, lionizes the mostly untamed (wild) or natural landscape of Wales, Croatia, and Greece, with the semi-tarnished and/or broken landscape of contemporary and historic urban systems noted in passing as counterpoint. For example, harbors in Rijeka, Croatia, Trieste, Italy, Ancona, Italy, and Igoumenitsa, Greece, are utilized to describe the shifting terrain of transnational tourism and commerce on the southern borders of the EU. Surveying the state of things in twenty-first-century cities, microcosms of Capital’s assault on the given, the three idylls compress and — at once — elaborate the damage done, the price paid, and the ultimate consequences of mass culture in planetary terms, but with an eye, nonetheless, on the moral and ethical conditions for its salvation. Thus the “Franciscan” solution — or, the form-of-life that asks for little but acknowledges, in praise, the superabundance of things given — acts as a possible corrective for a world spinning madly toward its end in environmental and spiritual degradation.
EPIGRAPHS
“‘Fare forward,’ you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbor
Receding, or those who will disembark.”
–T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” (1941)
“Eternals I hear your call gladly,
Dictate swift winged words, & fear not
To unfold your dark visions of torment.”
–William Blake, The (First) Book of Urizen (1794)
IDYLL ONE: NORTHWEST WALES — MEDITATIONS ON NATURE
PRÉCIS: On a semi-ruined estate in Northwest Wales, leased by an unidentified benefactor, Brother X and his confreres begin the production of intentionally semi-deranged scholarship aimed at “allowing things to speak for themselves.” Such things include: trees, rocks, birds, sheep, mountains, and sea. A type of informal monastic compound, with half-wild, one-hundred-year-old gardens, the brothers and sisters also begin a restoration project for the ruined gardens and crumbling manor house.
Prologue — The Manor House — The Idyll — The War — The Angel — Austerities — Leaving … To Return … — The Machine — Five (Times Two) — The Preparations — Shopping — Decompositions — Two Orders — The Australians
https://medium.com/@agencex/idyll-one-northwest-wales-80f3c1681665
IDYLL TWO: NORTHWEST CROATIA — MEDITATIONS ON DEATH
PRÉCIS: Having left “Paradise” (Northwest Wales), Brother X arrives in Croatia en route to an academic conference in Greece. Arriving sick and virtually penniless, he begins the necessary austerities to survive the ten-day idyll while beginning research on how to cross the Balkans for the least amount of money. While in Croatia, and having arrived with the presentiment that he must face down a particularly trying passage in his years-long global odyssey in pursuit of what he calls the Immemorial, he encounters two altar pieces of St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata and an outdoor sculptural installation of the Stations of the Cross at a hillside church and monastery above Rijeka, Croatia.
Prologue — Insufficient Funds — The Harbor — The Chapel — Dubrovnik or Bari? — Day Seven — Black Tea & Swans — The Cats — Grand Trine — Leaving Rijeka — Rijeka-Ljubljana — Ninth Night — Satur(n)day — Tenth Night — “The Balkans” — Ljubljana-Rijeka — Last Tea — Spectral Ferry — One Place — Exeunt — Trieste — Septentrio, Occidens … — Ancona — Blue Hellas
https://medium.com/@agencex/idyll-two-northwest-croatia-f4ee9b61b429
IDYLL THREE: NORTHWEST GREECE — MEDITATIONS ON PHILOSOPHY
PRÉCIS: Having traveled 27 hours by ferry from Trieste, Italy, to “Hellas” (Igoumenitsa, Greece), Brother X arrives at an apparently abandoned, super-graffitoed campus on the outskirts of Ioannina, Greece, to find only dogs inhabiting the university where the conference “Philosophy and Crisis” is to take place. Slowly the campus comes to life and the conference begins. For three days he dodges most of the conference’s innumerable and interminable parallel sessions and studies, instead, the beautifully derelict university and engages in reconnaissance of the relatively ancient town of Ioannina.
Prologue — Communications — Blue-Blue Hellas — The Conference — Song & Dance — The Citadel — Athens
https://medium.com/@agencex/idyll-three-northwest-greece-ea4920681297
POSTSCRIPT(S): LAST WORDS — MEDITATIONS ON HISTORY
Telos & Logos — One Year Later
https://medium.com/@agencex/postscrypt-s-last-words-9ffb670b2682