ALMOST: Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah
The “Director’s Glut” Version
ALMOST is getting published by Ephesus Press in an edited and more sensible form. Here I will post the “Director’s Glut,” which is to say that this version is the one where I did exactly what I wanted at all times, unrepentant. On the other hand, the text does need to be reined in, and I’m grateful that an official version will appear.
Part I: PRISMATIC WASTELAND
Part II: GIGANTOMACHIA
Part III: TRIBULATIONS!
ALMOST: Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah is a carnivalesque novel narrated by a mega-expressive character who retells the story of his life as a half-genius, half-moron mooning around in a radiant stream of existential hallucinations.
At the story’s center is a familial trinity. There is the master-woodworker father, a self-styled warrior who intends to transform modern décor with his baroque fantasy furniture. There’s the truth-seeking mother, alone at home with her newborn, who tumbles through mystical crises; for her, every day is an opera. And finally there is the narrator, present both as an adult poking the reader in the eye and as a baby in whose hothouse mind every day blooms into a burning fusion of paradise and apocalypse, reality’s walls buckling from the strain, kitchen-sinkish details dissolving into allegorical surrealism as the shapes in his mind take over—all while he talks, talks, talks as hard as he possibly can, trying to say everything that there is to be said.
Something has been lost in that minimalist lit which only ever implies what it means, as if afraid to take up space, and whose invisible, self-effacing rules get presented by the minimalists as the only proper and moral way to tell a story. My tastes could not be more opposed: I love fluent overflowing beauty, I love flourishing and fantastical eloquence and masterful articulation of complex consciousness. I wanted to write a glorious triple-rainbow grimoire screaming with voices, using all my moods, my minds, my most marvelous words. A book where I could max out every paragraph in the most ludicrous way, packing together realness and weirdness into little clockwork pockets of winking words, spring-loaded wobbly machine-sentences that would fire off multicolored urchin-shells of exploding imagery. I wanted comedy, tragedy, horror, fantasy and farce in quick alternation, to range from the exaggerated banal—
His silence left a vacuum into which her imagination rushed, splashing up a cavalcade of darkly cloaked possibilities that galloped the gamut from alarming to catastrophic, from the horsemen of rashes, insomnia, and tantrums, to those of difficulties, disorders, disabilities, diabetes and sudden infant death syndrome. Skulls poured mocking down over the walls and the sky boiled with red smoke and somewhere distant but close the devil guffawed. My mom grayed and pinkened as if stricken by strychnine. Even her aviator glasses inched up her nose, crawling into her face, impressing themselves into the skin. They reflected a view of the room on fire and underwater at the same time. She hesitated on the verge of a gasp. “You aren’t worried… right?”
—to serio-comedic metaphysics at the edge of mental existence—
Ever since the blitz of cateyed images, I had soared from my babyish brain up through higher consciousnesses, bursting through mind after mind after mind, each complexer and self-compliciter than the last, the early minds roughly constructed from motherboard metropoles of gene-wired insanity signed and designed by their iron environments, the later minds so alien and architectonically deluxe that entire universes were the crusted manifestations unrolling as support for their larger thoughts, trillion-year post-cognitions converging and intwining and analytically synthesizing into hyperrealities so advanced that inside them concepts like space and time were nothing more than neon-lit arrows marking the method of assembly, signs meant to guide the greenest and most obtuse of neophytes—for even up in the Ever, against all omniscience, a few transcended fanatics hung on to the concepts of Beginning and Ending, somehow, though such clockish misapprehensions confute their own axes and bases and theses, since a beginning must come after something, and an ending before something else. Nay, neither eternity nor ternity may compleat our chronologies, therefore and therefive and theresix time is a trick our inferior senses are playing upon us, a trick we may never understand, a trick that will kill us—that’s one thing I thought I saw.
—to deep confessions played as operatic parodies—
In my elation I scaled a mahogany mountain range, where a mistral whipped my blond cilia about my paramecian ears. My pelt pelisse billowing out behind me, I shook the tumorous lump of my fist over leagues of fog, in my bejeweled hubris defying the universe that contained me.
—to skin-dissolving end-of-the-world splendor, to painstakingly detailed explosions of imagery, to super-realist rendering of three characters wrapped around one another like some kind of horrific three-stranded DNA of a creature too complex and contradictious to be viable—all of which you’ll have to read to discover.