Lodestar Snicker from the Void: a Bulletin

One morning after Sunday Mass my dad carried me up to meet the priest. The sheen of his gold leaf Bible lured me in. Talking with him I got the idea that God had written it. I just about lost it. You mean the man who lives up in the sky and made everything… wrote a book?! I have to learn to read IMMEDIATELY! But my parents shrugged me off. I was only two years old at the time so unless I wanted to wait a literal lifetime and a half for school, I’d have to teach myself. Duty-bound, I grabbed my Speak & Spell and set out alone to learn to read on pilgrimage.

Today for lodestar fiction I use The Nova Trilogy. It resists being understood in the typical sense and yet still cuts straight to the quick. In intriguing, unknowable ways it raises just the questions I like. The story chronicles an ongoing struggle between the Nova Heat and the Nova Mob. The Nova Heat are a hapless group of pervert artists trying to spread the word that infinite consumption on a finite planet might not be such a bright idea. They’re up against the Nova Mob, a gang of apocalyptic forces trying to suck the world dry before they blow it up. Their main thing is snatching bodies at will; seducing everyone with all the most depraved, exciting vices. In the end the author, William S. Burroughs, doesn’t declare a winner. The struggle persists as it must.

Maybe my favorite thing about it is the way it uses the stuff of dreams: word salad, repetition, psychological refuse etc. Through these literary discards, to the patient reader The Nova Trilogy reveals itself to be a paraliterature—a literature designed to go beyond itself and take the reader along. But when it succeeds, where does art that goes “beyond” actually go? Publishers Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer must’ve had an idea when they snagged Ulysses, the chaotic novel that brought Random House to prominence. What did they see? Why were they right? Where does the march of the avant-garde, art’s front lines, lead?

At its best, the page can provide neutral grounds where we might encounter the sublime. Like the space that holds both the yin and yang (“the wuji”), readers can potentially meet both the terrors and miracles of life and self simultaneously. If the piece works, it does a demi-transubstantiation in its reader. It changes into something that stirs its reader’s world, even if only subtly. Hopefully, through this encounter the reader is compensated for their time with at-least slightly improved skills toward the ends of having really lived before dying. From Ulysses to The Nova Trilogy to Lincoln in the Bardo, the march of the avant-garde proves itself a heartbeat of sorts, beckoning audiences to know the world beyond the confines of themselves. In this way the avant-garde shows itself as being on its own pilgrimage, shadowing the death-defying call of life itself.