Norman Lock – Narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass, alert to every signal from the unseen

Norman Lock, Grim Tales, Mud Luscious Press, 2011.

"Lock allows us to see the world through an Other’s eyes in such a way that by the end the difference between us… seems little more than a thin sheet of paper, if even that. — Brian Evenson

"Wise up and get all you can of Lock. His writing was written by a writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this “genius”) of his utterance." — Gordon Lish

"This is book as turbulence disrupting the smooth sea, as anti-matter breaking bonds that had never before been broken. Throughout, the book defies the physics and metaphysics of our known world even as it pretends to a reaching backward, to drawing forth these tales from some shared past, dissembling not to deceive but to aggress us anew. See the quotation marks which suggest some unavailable subtext but which quote nothing but Lock’s own imagination, or else that of his arranging characters, his possible narrator, and you see the layers of interpretation he is willing to risk so as to prevent any easy explanation, any trite truth too cleverly left unconcealed. Better always that the work be mysterious, that the mystery be allowed to work upon us." – Matt Bell

"I knew after I’d read Matt Bell’s effusive and extraordinary introduction to Norman Lock’s Grim Tales that I was in for a treat, and indeed, the book I read was like nothing else I’d ever read before, as the characters in these very short stories or fables or maybe anecdotes deal with almost nothing but the dangers of being alive–the danger not only from mundane, everyday objects suddenly in revolt, but most of all the dangers of loving, of being a wife or a husband or a lover and living on the knife’s edge of being the most important person, for better or for worse, in someone else’s life–and what that might mean for your own; the book was such a quick read yet for days afterward I couldn’t stop shivering, and also marveling at the craft, the tight structure, the perfect sentences, and most of all the small moments of grace, of quiet beauty that Lock allows us amidst the carnage and the wreckage." - Vouched

"With book sales supposedly on the whimper and countless people “borrowing” their media sources online, more and more often there comes the question: what’s next? New media are constantly being reworked to evolve the way information is delivered to its audiences, and in the wake of this hyperdistribution, we’ve seen a massive spawning of electronic literary journals: DIAGRAM, Juked, Failbetter, Bear Parade, and so on. With these free-anytime nodes of words and images being more immediate than their print-based brothers, the popularity of shorter, streamlined fiction has grown.
Among these dot-com journals, elimae remains one of the longest standing and most revered. Founded in 1996, it has published work from authors such as Brian Evenson, Diane Williams, and Gary Lutz, and continues to showcase slews of new and well-known voices. It also offers a series of free web-based electronic books, including two works by Norman Lock, an incredibly prolific author, performance artist, and writer whose output includes titles from FC2, Calamari Press, and elimae’s own print leg, Ravenna Press.
Norman Lock’s Grim Tales, in particular, is a wicked little beast, consisting of thirteen thousand words in 157 short, divided sections delivered in fine-tuned bursts. Somewhat like a prose-poem edition of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for adults, Grim Tales is a mythological catalog of the peculiar, a string of strange, often murderous urban myths. The book’s slim paragraphs and tendency to divide itself into tiny snippets make it perfect for online consumption. It comes on fast and dirty, wasting no time in lunging at your throat: “When he was struck down by his wife’s lover, the scythe moaned in the wheat. In the kitchen, cutting open a loaf, she dropped her knife as the blood spilled out the bread’s fresh wounds.”
With a tip of the hat to Russell Edson and the “miniature gothics” of Enrique Anderson Imbert, Grim Tales is populated end to end with the magical and the bizarre: shape-shifting, witchery, underwater cities, indoor rain, beds that contain oceans, murderous objects, all manner of disappearance. Men lose their faces to mirrors, women are smothered by their hair, clouds settle over cities and suck them up. “Each night before going into his house, he was compelled to drive around the block nine times; not one time more or less than nine—every night the same. One night, however, he willed himself to ‘break the iron bond of habit’ and stopped the car after the eighth circling. The house was gone; his wife and children were never seen by him again.” In another story, a woman becomes transfixed by a tree in her yard until it reaches through the window and crushes her.
In the midst of all this looming, Lock has an incredible ability to render compelling imagery and demeanor in minute, supercompressed bursts. Single lines resound in the mind: “He was turned into a revolver so that, one day, he might feel his cold mouth against hers—the woman he had destroyed—when, in despair, she shot herself.” In the same way that it’s hard to stop staring at the Internet’s seemingly endless array of weird memes and video databases, Lock’s words are both engrossing and slightly haunted. One could spend forever worming through these magicked words, their worlds." — Blake Butler

"Norman Lock is a writer of terrifying ambition. In Grim Tales, his slim collection of fairy tales, Lock tells what appear to be campfire stories of mysterious disappearances, haunted mirrors, and grotesque transformations—stories that will make you shiver in the night or check your back in a dark woods. Lock’s apparent aim is to remind his readers of the thorniest of metaphysical truths: karma (universal moral law); the pathetic limits of the human perspective; and, most grimly, the inexorably cruel irony that pervades our lives. To achieve these lofty illuminations, Lock allows himself, on average, about a hundred words per cryptic miniature.
Reading Lock’s tales—there are about a hundred and fifty of them collected here—I was reminded of Einstein’s famous phrase describing how electrons, separated by a vast distance, communicated with each other. Einstein called this faster-than-the speed-of-light instant messaging “spooky action at a distance.” (For the record, Einstein did not think such communication was possible.) In its essence, Lock’s novella is a meditation on this difficult-to-explain phenomenon. How does one seemingly unrelated event cause another? How does the mind affect matter? How do our dreams seep into our waking lives? Indeed, Lock’s stories persistently reveal this curious and complex interconnectedness of the entirety of existence. Take this tale for example:
'That it was only in his dreams he behaved violently to her made it no less culpable: the bruises to her face and arms were always new as she brought him his breakfast.'
These miniatures are full of brutality: beatings, murders, suicides, drownings, stranglings, and death galore. Like a good theologian, Lock endeavors to explain the world’s violence, and an undercurrent of a kind of cosmic law offers a subtle consolation. Lock’s playful exploration of the theory of reincarnation, for example, suggests a world of absolute, if imperceptible, justice.
'He was turned into a bed so that he might lie beneath a woman night after night and burn with unappeasable desire—this philanderer, who had broken the hearts of so many women.'
Using the poet’s principal of pithiness and the dramatist’s sense of irony, Lock distills the world down into a set of universal axioms in his narratives: all violence is domestic violence; everyday objects, too, like wives and husbands, seek their revenge; all matter is subject to metamorphosis; and normal human perception is woefully circumscribed. This last theme appears in my single favorite tale in which a woman’s magician friend explains to her how his illusions are accomplished “outside the ‘sight lines.’” This woman, who had already believed that “her real life lay just out of sight,” one day hears the noise of an animal “fastening onto the body of its prey.” Then:
'Turning with surprising celerity, she saw at last the beast that had all her days kept well out of sight. The last thing the woman saw on earth was this beast, this monster, flying at her.'
A grim tale, indeed. Lock uses several rhetorical devices to give the text its air of authority. His astute use of atmospheric detail, e.g., subway posters “advertising the season’s new plays,” gives the book’s bizarro world a concrete and relatable reality. More subversively, Lock, posing as a kind of cultural anthropologist, often provides alternate endings to the tales, as if these legends were already woven into our collective, canonical mythology. Lock’s most cunning trick is his use of quotation marks throughout the text. Notice how the quotation marks in the following story reference a source of authority, perhaps an eyewitness or a Book of Record. While the source of the voice is ambiguous (maybe the husband himself), its authority is clear:
She was about to step into the bathtub when the wall opened and a hand—large and grotesquely misshapen—reached out and pulled her inside. Her husband hurried to her; but the crack had, in an instant, closed “like a wound that has healed.”
Above all, Grim Tales is a collection of mysteries. While I have shared some of my interpretations here, the mystery will work on you in its own way. For those of you reading this now who remain unconvinced of Lock’s surreal, mind-bending, and cruelly calculating vision, keep in mind that the worst of fates is reserved for the unbelievers. In other words, you might at least keep an open mind. Because, according to Norman Lock, our finest modern fabulist, “the hedgehog, dead by the side of the road, was once a man who refused to believe in fairy tales.” - Paul Griffin

"The Brothers Grimm get a nod in the first of Norman Lock's Grim Tales.
Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order - no matter how hard he tried to resist it.
It's the Shoemaker and the Elves. But by the end of the paragraph -Lock's grim tales range from a paragraph to a single sentence in length - the protagonist commits suicide rather than allow his life to be taken over by his unseen helpers. This sets the tone for the 150 tales that follow.
I have read two other books by Norman Lock, and this is my least favorite. Perhaps I did not know how to read it. It is only sixty-eight pages long, and my first thought was to spend a couple of hours with it one afternoon. That didn't work. I got burnt out by the suicides, murders, and disappearances that average two per page. I read it over three days, but the notion grew that perhaps one should read a tale per night just before bedtime.
What happens in these tales? People disappear up staircases or more often into the earth and those left behind can hear their screams. Murders occur regularly and spouses are especially lethal. A sooty cloud drifts down from the sky and erases the part of town it lights on. In one story a man dreams each night that he must deflect a comet headed for earth. The last sentence of his story encapsulates much of Lock's vision
So that he would no suffer this most mortal dream, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died without waking,
Everything there is to admire about Lock's prose is here, unfortunately mentioning them makes all those admirable traits sound like cliches -- it's merciless, lapidary, he wields syntax like a scalpel. The ideal way to encounter this book, like the protagonist in the first tale, would be to find a story or two somewhere in your home each morning when you first got out of bed." - Charles Dee Mitchell

Grim Tales (complete text)

Norman Lock, Shadowplay, Ellipsis Press, 2010.

"In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess-by his art-a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations."

"Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock’s teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening." —R.M. Berry

"In the Dickensian tradition, Lock is adept at writing about places he has never been. He develops exotic lexicons of objects to stage his dramas. Pure objects, the words for them as portrayed in other books & art, unencumbered by the reality of the objects themselves… this is the brilliance of Lock — he mines the unknown or underknown for gems whose value is not relevant to the soil they were dug up from, for no other reason othen than in the name of art." —Derek White

"Storytellers remind us that data retrieval is really a kind of betrayal, that truth and meaning are elusive, and that we see our selves, our relationships, our surroundings, as if through curtains. Norman Lock's Shadowplay penetrates these diaphanous folds by casting light on the folly of irreconcilable love, the melancholic ache of nostalgia, and the burning yearning of art, of making something out of nothing. The art practiced here is wayang kulit: one form of the Javanese shadow-puppet theater. Wayang literally means "shadow" or "imagination," but can also mean “ghost” or “spirit.” Kulit means “skin” and refers to the chiseled leather from which the puppets are made. It's from this marriage of skin and spirit, of body and soul, that Shadowplay comes to life. It’s the story of master puppeteer Guntur’s “impossible love, which overrules reason,” for Candra, a village girl. Not unlike Death in Venice’s creepy obsessive, Guntur’s infatuation leads to wild, wistful exaggerations of the beloved, in this case, the young girl’s perfunctory retellings of her past. Lock’s story is as much about a puppeteer’s power to bring things to life, how this unravels and ruins him, as it is a reverie on storytelling where Guntur steps out “over an abyss with nothing to sustain him but an unwinding sentence engendering—by his skillful invention— another which, in turn, lengthened into its successor.” Stories, for him “were only congeries of sentences, and the world . . . was a congeries of stories.” Swathed in darkness, Lock traverses liminal realms with glassine sentences reminiscent in form and substance of the like found in Gene Wolfe’s and Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction, sentences you may be tempted to set off into line-broken verse. Shadowplay is another of the master locksmith’s nested boxes whose evocative, ensorcelling prose will withstand multiple readings, especially if read aloud." - John Madera

"When Guntur, the main character of Norman Lock’s Shadowplay, commits himself to the life of a dalang, a Javanese shadow-puppeteer, the narrator spells out his future: "Guntur would be . . . a shadow—a ghost—a teller of stories about shadows and ghosts to people who will be shadows and ghosts for him always." Guntur, perhaps like all storytellers, is bound to tell his story from behind a screen, separating himself from the world even as he aims to represent it. Just as a dalang retells ancient and iconic stories in his puppet-theatre, Shadowplay is itself a fable that stages the storyteller's struggle between imagination and reality, experience and its record.
The basic plot of Shadowplay reworks the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: Guntur falls in love with Candra, a batik-dyer from a neighboring town; Candra dies, and Guntur retrieves her from the underworld with the help of his primary puppet, Arjuna. The plot is hardly straightforward, however, because the narration makes it unclear whether this is a story Guntur is experiencing or simply telling in his role as a dalang. The novel's prose—incantatory and circular—sounds as if it could have issued from Guntur himself, embellishing an invented myth from behind the puppet-screen. The narration is further complicated late in the novel when a first-person perspective breaks in, explaining that he read Guntur's story in an "Utrecht newspaper" and was prompted to relate the story because of a "women I had left long before in Amsterdam, who had died there of fever." Besides the uncertain teller, italicized questions interrupt the action, as if from an audience asking for clarification.
The dense layering of these devices is clearly intended to reflect on the act of storytelling itself, yet Lock's most interesting commentary appears not through these formal inventions but through the development of Guntur's obsession with Candra. When Guntur initially meets her, his interest has nothing to do with her looks, as he only speaks to her from behind a screen: "What Guntur desired was her words." He wants her story, not her body, and forces her to repeat her life history as a fisherman's daughter in exchange for walang—discarded puppets used for batik patterns. Lock seems to be commenting on the distancing effects of life as a storyteller, the tendency to assess the potential "retell" value of an experience even as it is occurring.
Guntur's interaction with Candra involves nothing more than hearing her story, but he is bereft when she dies. Lock offers fresh insight on the peculiar grief of losing someone who exists only as an idea, only in story:
A bereaved husband will press against him his dead wife's dress... In the end he will give the dress away or burn it, so that his mind can be relieved of its habit of sorrow. Guntur had nothing to burn, nothing to give away—nothing, therefore, with which to discharge his feeling of desolation.
The danger of stories, Lock implies, is that their very unreality can compound rather than make sense of loss. Storytelling is necessarily reductive, smoothing over inconsistencies and mystery to maintain a clear narrative line. Rather than aiming to know Candra in all her likely complexity, Guntur is more interested in the pared-away essence of her life; the problem is that he is left with nothing real with which to anchor, or even justify, his grief. Mistaking the story for the woman, the shadow for the object from which it is cast, he illustrates the fact that the narratives we use to make sense of the world sometimes do so at the expense of our experience of it." - Monica McFawn

"With his short novel Shadowplay, Norman Lock makes no attempt to hide his inspirations or intentions; an epigraph states, “In Java during the reign of King Senapati, a master of the shadow-puppet theater heard, by chance from a Portuguese sailor, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.” The novel is, at its most basic level, a reworking of this classic story: the protagonist, Guntur—the master puppeteer—falls deeply in love with a girl, Candra, who dies just a few days after he meets her. Ten years after her death, Guntur uses his storytelling prowess to make his way into the afterlife, carrying back his lost love.
This seems straightforward enough, if uninventive. Lock twists the myth, though, and therein lies the novel’s success: Candra resents Guntur from the moment she meets him, and more so after he brings her back. In this way Guntur is no longer the noble, tragic hero of his own story—instead he takes on the role of abductor. Lock updates the myth by setting it in post-colonial Java, but only to an extent; these islanders, though informed by their interactions with the Dutch and Portuguese, have as yet retained their culture and traditions. By referring to both Greek myth and traditional Hindu stories (specifically The Abduction of Sinta, which Shadowplay mirrors in several key ways), Lock draws the reader away from Western culture and into something more exotic, but he does so without leaving those Western roots entirely. We are uncomfortable in this new place, but we have enough to hold onto, and Lock explains the Javanese traditions well enough that we don’t have to read the book with Wikipedia’s help.
Lock’s intention with this revisited and revised myth is to explore the power and danger of telling stories; as the back cover blurb states, the novel is “a meditation on storytelling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations.” Moreover, Lock blatantly acknowledges that his novel is about storytelling; the focal story is related by a first-person narrator, who in turn knows the story from seeing a shadow-puppet production of it, a story that itself takes the form of the story that Guntur tells to himself.
This layering technique mimics the oral tradition; since the story of Guntur and Candra has become a myth before we even approach it, it moves beyond the realm of magic realism. We doubt their actions because they are never presented as actualities, as they might have been in, say, a Marquez story. Lock’s language reflects the fabulous nature of the myth, intricate in description but never hard to understand, full of repeated images that, however simple, resonate deeply within the story. Candra’s wooden bangles, which appear before we even meet the actual character, are one such image:
The rough music of her bangles heard whenever she raised or lowered her arm became the musical accompaniment of his love’s story. He did not know that the sound her bangles made signified her annoyance at this old man who tried to seduce her.
From here on, the soft clinking signifies Candra’s contempt for Guntur in a way that even the most obvious narration would fail to capture.
Ultimately the novel comes off as somewhat cautionary; as in a fable, we learn a lesson at the end. This makes sense. The story, and even the story about the story, is arranged like a fable, an oral narrative designed to examine and explain—to a degree—human nature. As a fable, as a revisionist myth, as a story about stories, Shadowplay succeeds. As a novel, however, there are some tensions.
Shadowplay is very short, covering only 137 pages in fairly large print. That brevity is a strength in some ways, as this story could not have been extended much further. (Indeed, it often seems overextended.) The plot does not progress, really, beyond the second chapter, and we instead return again and again to the same vital scenes and images, approaching them from the supposed viewpoints of different characters in the author’s attempt to reveal more, more, more—not so much about the characters as about the act of storytelling. The language follows the same circular path as the story, repeating certain images and phrases; though this is poetic—even beautiful—the ornate language becomes sugary in its repetition.
The mythical structure of the story suits Lock’s intended focus, but it distances the reader from the characters—not beyond sympathy, but perhaps beyond any deeper emotional connection. Their story is tragic, but it loses some of its emotive heft from being filtered through multiple storytellers. Lock’s first-person narrator seems to be an attempt to establish a character closer to the reader, but this narrator’s intermittent presence—his identity isn’t really established until halfway through the book—does not give the reader much purchase.
Lock has written a novel that accomplishes its goal convincingly and quite skillfully. To this end, we can call it a success. Like Guntur’s stories, though, Shadowplay sacrifices some of its potential individualism and connectivity in the interest of furthering the goals that Lock set forth. These goals are intriguing and even captivating in their course, but they restrict the story to little else. At its end, the story leaves us with its lesson and the themes it discusses, but takes with it the characters and their personal tragedy." - Mark Wadley

"One of the toughest challenges facing an innovative writer is avoiding the trap of one’s un-conventions. That quirk of syntax or of thought can quickly become ossified, making each successive book more polished—and less compelling. Not so with the under-recognized Norman Lock (The Long Rowing Unto Morning, A History of the Imagination), whose work seems to emanate less from any cultivated strategy than from an essential strangeness, an estrangement from easily agreed-upon psychologies, from popular culture, from anything resembling a zeitgeist. It is marked by an eerie tonality and an intense, unsettled intellectual curiosity—a Lock novel might take place during any time period, anywhere in the world.
His latest, Shadowplay, centers on Guntur, a Javanese master of a kind of sacred puppet show in which the audience sees only the puppets’ shadows through a screen. It’s no plot-spoiler to reveal that Guntur’s attempts to use art to manipulate not only people and their affections, but also death, don’t end well.
In the novel, “storyline” is subordinate to the intricate play between layers of mythology, religion, and emotion.This is a cerebral work, and Lock is a heady writer, yet he evokes a deeply sensual world in which the smell of cinnamon all but sings in the breeze and the sea beckons like a lover. At times the reader is carried as if on a redolent current, then roused by a demandingly crisp observation (“It is a paradox of identity that those most absorbed in themselves are most readily transformed”; “The ancient stories are like towering trees in whose shadows only small things can take hold”) suggesting that any piece of writing is a transgressive act of hubris.
Shadowplay is informed by so many stories of the kind Lock sees as towering trees that I initially feared I’d need to haul out my old Bullfinch’s Mythology and a dozen other reference works. But I didn’t. The novel stands on its own and does its tricky work unaided, like the afterlife of a dream. I suspect Lock is less interested in the reader catching everything than in catching the reader. He does." —Dawn Raffel

"Shadowplay by Norman Lock, is the 2010 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award recipient. Lock’s novella is a dense fable, mixing magic realism with self-reflexivity. The entire story is given to us in miniature at the beginning, such that the novella itself is really a constant retelling–a folding and refolding–rather than an unfolding. A shadow puppet master named Guntur falls in love with Candra, who comes into his theater one day to buy puppets. When she dies of typhoid fever six days later, he falls into despair for many years, until finally he understands how to enter the world of the dead, through his shadow art, to abduct her shadow, bringing her back to the theater where she becomes his prisoner for many months. Desiring to return to her “unsayable dreams,” Candra decides one day to step outside the theater, dying again instantly. Although Guntur wants to go and get her back yet again, this time the gods will not allow it, and he dies as his theater is set ablaze by the oil lamp that had cast the shadows on the story-screen. This plot unfurls slowly: it starts, stops, returns and starts again, usually with a new detail, or sometimes less detail, sometimes abstracted, sometimes enlarged. The effect is of narrative feathering, one moment being layered on top of another until the whole body is finally covered.
Guntur’s life as puppet master is filled with but few ornaments, which are brought out to decorate the narrative again and again, creating a feeling of ritual. When the puppet master, or the dalang, is not speaking the theater is quiet, except for the sound of a wasp (always there was a wasp) rattling among the dry rafters; Guntur falls in love when he hears one wooden bangle on Candra’s arm fall against another; Candra comes to visit the dalang only because she wants money to buy blue cloth to make herself a dress; Candra’s hands are blue because she works for a cloth maker, stirring a vat of indigo, lime and molasses; Candra remembers her childhood when, with her father the fisherman, she would let out the sail and steer toward the horizon of the Java sea; In a fever, Candra dreams of drowning in shadow; The wind carries the scent of the cinnamon grove and memory of Candra to Guntur. These are some of the main images that repeat and which, for the better part of the story, we cannot go beyond, as with the horizon. And because of the repetition, we can say that there is only beauty until about three-quarters of the way through the book. Nothing new happens until then.
The denouement occurs in Guntur’s dream when he finally realizes he can go beyond the empty forms of traditional narratives (having learned them to supernatural extent) and now can imagine a new story. This is hubris, nevertheless, and he will pay for it. In the six days that Candra had known Guntur, she had told him her story as the child, sailing ever toward the horizon (beyond which, legend held, lay the island of the dead). Guntur takes her story and makes it his. It is impossible to cross the horizon, but Guntur imagines how when he dreams the story of her death:
And the boat sped toward the horizon even as the sun began to pull itself up…. The black sea lightened, turned gray, then blue. The horizon trembled, and the sea round the boat now resembled a vast indigo cloth, which a wind’s rough handling had creased.
The horizon trembled as if in nervous expectation, for the girl was steering a course for it that no power on earth could deflect. Implacably, she was making for the horizon; and contrary to all mortal experience, it did not recede. The horizon line to which she steered remained as if fixed to the spot on the earth’s watery bulge where first her eyes had detected it—black against the night’s lesser back, with here and there a lingering star. The horizon did not fall back in order to keep between it and the approaching boat a constant distance. Instead, the boat closed on it…
Guntur dreamed that the sea at last stopped its ceaseless motion; the waves lay down and the wind, which had been blowing from every corner at once uncreased the indigo cloth before returning to its caves at the ends of the earth.
Here we have a spectacular moment in the narrative when the pace, that had been all jammed up like a paper accordion, takes off as does the small craft with a full sail. Having dreamt how to get to the island of the dead, Guntur then invents the story that will actually take him there.
That night Guntur traveled to the edge of the Java Sea and built a boat there just as he had seen it in his dream of Candra’s island. When he had finished, he and Arjuna [a puppet through which Guntur acts] dragged the boat into the water and, pushing it beyond the waves, climbed aboard. Guntur rigged a sail cut from the white cotton story-screen, and the boat leaped over the stiff-backed sea toward the horizon. Although they were accompanied by singing fish and the odor of cinnamon, Guntur could not cross the unmoving horizon; the boat shied like a horse from a hurdle. The boat tacked against contrary winds and came at it again and again, but always the boat gave way and could not hold its course…
[Later, he] remembered that the sea in his dream had seemed an intricately patterned cloth, dyed indigo… Guntur recited these words,
‘The sea resembled an indigo cloth, which a wind’s round handling has creased.’
And the air softened… the horizon trembled and let them pass.
These passages are pure prose poetry, and the longer narrative, in which these moments occur, serves the purpose of providing the context in which these moments can be understood fully as poetry, as being interwoven in a pattern that simultaneously gives meaning and makes all meaning into shadows. Lock’s Shadowplay is a masterful rendering of the life of one story teller, trying desperately to fit within the intricate pattern of tradition, daring to transcend it by embracing it too much, until he is finally becomes a shadow in the story of “The Woman With Blue Hands.” Lock’s novella is an enchanting ritual of forms whose beauty will linger in the memory for a very long time." –Tori Alexander

Excerpt
Norman Lock, King of Sweden, The, Ravenna Press, 2009.

"A new novel about a shimmering Walker Evans woman lost inside herself. Lock’s language is like “pepper shook out” – pungent and minutely particular." – Terese Svoboda

"Like his gorgeous Long Rowing Unto Morning, The King of Sweden centers on a woman who is simply misunderstood by a world where innocents are fooled into a myriad of seductions that lead to the unraveling of the most human of human hearts. It is Lock’s great artistry to make such suffering beautiful and necessary and to make out of this language an artifact that forces us to feel the inner turbulence of the characters who inhabit this masterful book." – Peter Markus
"This novel’s a metaphor and a charm. Its story has the greyest, most lovely precision. All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass." – Kate Bernheimer

"Just as short stories came with the advent of the newspaper, so comes flash fiction, with what appears to be the permanence of internet publications. As in the past, this new genre comes with its stars, among them is Norman Lock. His oeuvre includes a series of imaginary operas written in prose, as they might have been composed by eccentric American composer Joseph Cornell, a book of metaphysical calculations that in a few sentences try to capture the universe’s totality, even a minimalist rendering of the Grimm Tales, each tale condensed to just a few sentences (available for free download as an eBook).
His most recent novel, The King of Sweden, however, relies on a much simpler plot. Somewhere in the rural United States a young girl, traumatized by the death of her mother, confused with the abandonment of her father, shortly thereafter, and is sent to an insane asylum thanks to her boyfriend, Jake, who she lovingly calls the King of Sweden. The female protagonist, a rustic with a peculiar innocence, could easily fall into the Faulknerian idiot man-child mould, but doesn’t. Rather than being dumbfounded, she’s invigorated by the natural world around her. And thanks to Lock’s poetry, so are we. Snow is “peppered” in sewers. The sun is only a “nickel in the sky.” The protagonist’s breasts are little birds. Lamps “wiggle like water when the sun is standing straight in the sky.” Lock demonstrates a keenness for bringing the inanimate to life, that can be, at its best, reminiscent of Rilke. The fresh language that Lock employs makes reading it more akin to lyric poetry than novel.
Although the plights of American rural poor have been described a thousand times over again, the cadences and descriptions of this rural America feel new. Her lover, Jake, the “King of Sweden,” tells her that her naked back “is like a river.” Even the title’s obscure allusion to a Cab Calloway’s song, that should place us somewhere in the forties, instead denies us any real certainty. We wonder, is Jake really from Sweden? He knows things about Sweden that someone from the rural poor in the 1940s wouldn’t. He has blonde hair. Like a tempered Beckett, Lock avoids the usual markers of time and place, while concentrating on the universality of detail: “crickets make a rusty noise in the grass” or “the sun is white and small in their empty branches.” Only towards the end of the novel does the story reveal the protagonists’ age and the year. She’s thirty-six and it’s 1958 when the story ends. Six of her last years have been spent in an insane asylum, after she murdered her baby, and there are few signs of the once charming “King of Sweden.” It seems that the displacement of time and place keeps the novel from petering off into melodrama.
Unfortunately, as with many of the minimalist pioneers like Amy Hepel, Gordon Lish, and Diane Williams, Lock’s prose occasionally stifles the reader with intended monotony (as is life, we’re to think). Lock writes: “Whiskey’s pretty when the light shines through. I slosh it round inside the bottle and see the yard flood beneath a golden wave. I twist the cork out and swallow some. It burns.” This sort of stop and go can be tiring, but the idiosyncratic narration gives the novel enough dynamic momentum to avoid dullness.
In many ways, this is a bildungsroman. The dovish country bumpkin, that had imagined her fling a king, kills her baby, becomes the murderer of her own child. Despite her naïve natural observations, reality infects her, perhaps starting with her mother who ambiguously tells her “It wasn’t to be,” just before dying. Then she paints the pain and frustration onto her own child, wondering, “Does he see God burnt black as mud in a singed coat?” before performing infanticide. Once in the insane asylum her delightful observations, her dark musing and post coitus cozies are traded for “the man with the crooked teeth” who brutally bathes her, and optimistic fantasies filtered through a cell window.
As with his other works, Lock’s delivers flashy slices of thought that one can scroll through. His poetic punch line-narratives read perfectly on screen. This could in part due to the author’s playwright background (he had a play in the Edinburgh Theater Festival in 1996). Words move action and vice versa, while still maintaining enough stillness to do nothing, to use Auden’s famous description of poetry. However, unlike Lock’s other works this novel is being sold only in paperback version. This may have to do with the writer’s distaste for electronic publishing, having once said, “Electricity is evanescent; paper and ink give to the thing made permanence, which is, I am aware, illusory." Still, one wonders given recent trends, how permanent paper will really be, even more so with the presence of brilliant miniaturist authors, like this one." – Jesse Tangen-Mills

Excerpt

Norman Lock, The Long Rowing Unto Morning, Ravenna Press, 2007.

"Quietly, simply, elegantly, Norman Lock channels, through his “Plain Jane” narrator, our gorgeous desolation, our longing for connection, both earthly and divine. The Long Rowing Unto Morning spirits the reader into richly emotional and primal realms; it’s a book to return to again and again." – Dawn Raffel

"Norman Lock’s The Long Rowing Unto Morning captures the life of a wounded and hampered individual whom we normally wouldn’t glance at twice, but does so so deftly and so masterfully that by the end we feel that she’s someone we’ve always been close to. Like Eva Figes, Lock is interested in exploring the complexities of memory and perception, in how age and an uncertain arrangement of the mind changes the world. Lock allows us to see the world through an Other’s eyes in such a way that by the end the difference between us and her seems little more than a thin sheet of paper, if even that." – Brian Evenson

"Suffice it to say that while Lock and [Noy] Holland share the same deliberately slow (but by no means methodical) rhythm… the restless gestures towards a point outside the frame of the picture have, in Lock, been collapsed until they occupy not gestures, but pulses rippling through the protagonist’s mind like rain." – Miles Clark

"Lock is interested in one of the most important questions we can encounter: what it means to be in the world. His metaphors of inaccessibility and containment are powerful and often devastating forces throughout the novel... It is a voice unlike any other." – Catherine Spangler

"In this, his fifth full-length book, Norman Lock paints the portrait of a lonely everywoman, a plain Jane who spends days pushing a mop and nights drinking tea, sitting her sadness on her elbow "by the window looking out. Out, where all is hurrying over the rainy streets." Lock paints the portrait of an "old woman with a cracked face" who, as a child, was teased to tears. Now, years later, in the last phase of her life, she is preparing for her own long rowing into death.
Chances are you have never heard of writer Norman Lock, though he's been publishing his peculiar fiction in literary magazines and various small presses since the late 1970s. He was awarded the prestigious Aga Kahn prize in 1979 for the best piece of fiction to appear that year in The Paris Review. And since then, Lock has gone on to publish four full-length books. Trio is three collections of short prose. Notes to the Book of Supplemental Diagrams for Marco Knauf's Universe is a faux non-fiction novella that claims to only be "translated" by Lock. In Land of the Snow Men, written and published under the pseudonym George Belden, Lock wants us to believe that he discovered and rescued the manuscript from a box stored in the basement of a private sanatorium in the Green Mountains of Vermont. And The History of the Imagination, a wildly inventive novel set in an imaginary Africa right before World War I, conjures up a fantastic, metaphorical landscape populated by Einstein, Freud, Houdini, Stravinsky and H.G. Wells, among others.
In his diverse body of work, Lock has established himself to be an inventive literary ventriloquist. Standing at the center of his limitless universe, he summons worlds that spin in their own orbits. His latest fictional offering, The Long Rowing Unto Morning, is his most impressive and straightforward work to date. It's a simple novel told in a voice that's lyrical yet unadulterated by adornment.
Jane lives alone in a room that she calls "mine and locked." She tells us a secret about "the boy who put his hand on me, then went away never to come back." She returns to the image of this moment in recollected tranquility, again and again, and it becomes increasingly menacing the more often the refrain is used. But her world wasn't always so dark and alienating. It could also be quite poetic. This passage from her childhood, the happy part of it, stands on its own as a poem-in-prose:
After supper we went outside to watch the night. We walked to where the sun went behind the hill. We watched the shadows spill, the birds fly. We felt the night fall. It was a cold shadow falling. It made us quiet. Behind us I saw the windows all on fire, the windows of our house. Suppose some day the house burns down? I thought. What will happen to me then without a house to live in when it's cold? Without a roof when it rains? No beds to sleep in, no table for our plates? Every night I thought of that. Then the sun sank — it always did — and the fire in the windows went out. The shadows disappeared, the windows died and nothing shone in them until we went back home and lit the lights.
The Long Rowing Unto Morning is a story, not unlike Gertrude Stein's novel Ida. In Lock's deft hands, we see the interior landscape of someone waiting to be transformed, to be delivered. A woman who has, as she says, "put away the sky. I have put away the boy who took me behind the hedge. I have put away outside."
It was Whitman who made the most human of invitations: "Whoever you are holding me now in hand... if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing, where I may feel the throbs of your heart... thus touching you would I... be carried eternally." The Long Rowing Unto Morning lives up to Whitman's words; no other book, no other writer, in recent memory, dares the reader to believe there is a hand reaching out to be held, a hand to hold onto us."- Peter Markus

Norman Lock, A History of the Imagination, Fiction Collective 2, 2004.

"A History of the Imagination is a postmodern tale of adventure that reshapes the parameters of time and space, thought and action. In a metaphorical Africa, replete with nostalgia (but no dimensions), anything can happen and usually does. The narrator defends his magical departures, saying his is a history of possibilities, where fiction is "no less real for [it's] being so." But when Darwin's corpse begins to lust after Colette and the African porters go on strike because the author hasn't acknowledged the important role they play, we are left to wonder: just how far is reality from dreams?
Norman Lock juxtaposes remote times and places, historical facts and literary fictions, to create an absurdist collage reminiscent of Guy Davenport and Donald Barthelme. In this world it is not impossible to sail from Mombasa to Cinncinati, or to set out from the City of Radiant Objects, where "things are free of the obligation to signify," or to go hunting icebergs in a quest to avenge the Titanic at last. Borne aloft by Wilbur Wright, Jules Verne, Ziegfield, and Houdini, we find ourselves lost again in a "seam in the world... between History and Imagination."

"This book may be called a novel, but a more correct designation might be narrative-as-heaped-mirror-shards… Everywhere lurk stiletto asides, snappy puns, buried quotations… the fickle dalliances of this History make for a skillful and distinctly unnerving funhouse reflection of our own ‘present action.’– American Book Review

Lock has quite successfully woven together the two contradictory impulses of human biology and psychology – the impulse into the future and the yearning to be done with it – in a most remarkable way…. the richness of Lock’s language and tonal control, creating a voice that pulls the reader forward both because what he says is so intriguing and even oddball and because he says it so vividly. When these strengths are intertwined with the profound emotion undergirding the story – N’s deep sadness at man’s inhumanity to man – the work which emerges is not simply engaging but also satisfying: a patent fiction which feels true. It is possible that Norman Lock in A History of the Imagination has created the first important English language debut of the twenty-first century, a book that may in decades to come resonate of our time as The Waste Land embodies its own." – Cooper Renner

"Lock’s language, though basically sleek and minimal, combines the high gloss and perspicuity of the Edwardian age with the robustness and vigor of American inventiveness, leavened by a facility for maximizing – to marvelous effect – the dichotomy between the sign and its object." – John Olson

"Norman Lock's A History of the Imagination is a delightful and sometimes transporting book built of perversely ridiculous ideas made to work in practice.
The facts aren't flattering: most of History takes place in a blithely invented colonial Africa, bearing only accidental relation to the actual continent. Our narrator is known solely as "N." Franz Kafka himself shows up in the story, one of several dozen celebrity cameos - Edison, Einstein, Eiffel - jam-packing the pages. In the first chapter, a giant cigar-smoking gorilla, in the livery of a lawn jockey, emerges from the jungle to ravish and sexually satisfy a wealthy white woman who unconsciously desires him.
Still there? It all works in practice, unlikely as that seems. One thing rendering all this over-the-top nonsense not only palatable but pleasant is the charming narrative voice, which has the silly pomposity of Anthology-era Neal Pollack. The writing is engaging, sly and frequently hilarious, and Lock provides passages of genuine beauty all the more enjoyable for having emerged from farce. Too many writers have lately attempted fiction in a similar vein; call it magical unrealism. Lock is distinguished by success, having written an elaborate whimsy grounded in human emotion and worth sitting still for. To paraphrase a great poet: it's not Barthelme, but it's not bad.
If "A History of the Imagination" doesn't quite hang together as a novel, it's forgivable; as long as we're having this much fun, who cares? Only the last few chapters stumble, beginning to feel like more of the same. Lock, a professional ad man, is perhaps too enthusiastic with his freedom from the constraints of the thirty- or sixty-second bite, and "History" overstays its welcome. By the time readers finish A History of the Imagination they will have had a little more than enough, but if History is too much, at least it is too much of a good thing." - Damien Weaver

"Against the backdrop of a metaphorical and fantastic Dark Continent, the narrator (named N) of Norman Lock’s novel entertains visits from Freud, Einstein, Prince Kong (before the whole Fay Wray episode), Edison, Darwin, Melies, Houdini, Curie, Wells, Woolworth, Ziegfield, Stravinsky, and the Wright brothers. Among others. All, N included, come to Africa with sorted purposes, but most are feeling the anxiety and fear of the era, right before World War I, when dramatic possibilities are everywhere and drastic change is inevitable.
Time and space and other annoyances of reality go out the window as Lock bends and stretches objective interpretations of historical events and figures for the sake of more imaginative and entertaining possibilities. A vast endeavor, certainly, but the ease and consistency with which he creates the chaos makes for a wonderful analysis of reality or history, without overwhelming the reader with feelings of manipulation. Instead, this book is fun, and funny.
Thematically, of course, we can see that the individuals who show up in Mombasa are innovators/challengers of certain laws of reality around them, whether they regard flight or commerce or physics or science; all test the status quo and open up new perceptions. And the conversations and interactions of these individuals are what give the book its humor: Albert Einstein tries to teach the natives math when they only want to know the “sorrowing” (the sadness that comes from his violin playing), Freud meets Teddy Roosevelt at the Mombasa bar where they square off about fresh air to cure hysteria, Dale Carnegie shows up seeking to give the gift of his enthusiasm. N himself plays a combination ringleader and devil’s advocate, as seen when he argues with H.G. Wells about fiction:
“I, too, am writing a history: A History of the Imagination.”
“What’s in it?” he asked.
“Everything that’s not in yours,” I taunted him.
“Then it’s a lie!” he said with a vehemence I thought extreme.
I retaliated: “Mine is a history of possibilities . . .”
“I do not understand you.”
I pointed to the steamer which by now had entered the bay.
“The boat will sink, or not—depending,” I said. “You write the history that lies in its wake while I write of its possible encounters with the unknown. In this, mine is a history of the future. Like your Time Machine or War of the Worlds.”
Wells stopped his pacing of the narrow enclosure to shout his indignation at me: “They are fictions!”
“But no less real for their being so.”
“You’re a lunatic!”
“Time is richer than you suppose,” I said. “You imagine it as a succession of singular moments like a string of pearls. I see it as . . .”—I hunted for a suitable image with which to convey the dizzying complexity of time and settled on the firmament—“as the night sky with its countless stars.”
He beat the air with his fists in a perfect fury.
Certain references might be tough for some readers: Raymond Roussel, for example, who is exasperated that it will be another hundred years before “they” will learn to read him (it’s 1910). Stated, this is not the type of book your random reader might pick up (if only!), but with the right openness to the liquid borders of time and space and reasoning, anyone can get into the literal happenings. Lock’s wit is outstanding; he’s created conversations with historical figures and made them better than reality could offer, but resists acting like he’s going for the laughs. Part of the success may be due to the fact that while there is a wide parameter of flexibility required of the reader, there is never an imposition of heavy-handedness.
In addition, the history of A History of the Imagination itself replicates themes of the text; parts of it have already appeared in 40 journals and each part exists as a complete story on its own. In an interview on the FC2 (publisher) website, Lock refers to the origin of the pieces as an experiment with the Roosevelt’s African Game Trails with the influence of Roussel’s Impressions of Africa. Indeed his work shows influence from a range of other writers (Ionesco, Cortazar, Borges,) and different types of art as well, yet manages to come out wholly original and with a voice all its own.
Like other of the better “experimental” fictions, this novel forces the reader to negotiate between reading the text and reading around, in between, and under the text, analyzing what Lock’s translating along with what he’s leaving open. Lock, however, plays even upon this presumption; toward the middle of the novel, we are transported to the City of Radiant Objects, where “things are free of the obligation to signify.” Funny, yes, and the reader’s reaction to reading this is even funnier (excellent, what a relief, now I can just read and enjoy the fun). Lock’s writing begs us to join in on the game, becoming a part of these strange possibilities, and lighten the heavy load a little, or at least shift it around. And like the innovations referred to in the text, A History of the Imagination may be proof that new and outlandish perceptions are not only possible these days, but necessary, inside and outside of fiction." - Amy Havel

"Africa’s been on my mind a lot lately. Maybe it’s because the Bushier this country gets, the riper it is for escapism. Or maybe it’s because I’ve acquired a recent taste for Tanzanian Peaberry and find my mind wandering to know what kind of fertile soil would produce such splendid coffee. Or maybe it’s just because I am virgin to African soil, or at least was, until this past week when I had the privilege of venturing to the Dark Continent of Norman Lock’s imagination.
If we consider visits to Africa in this sense, then I guess you can say I have traveled vicariously to the fantastic Dark Continents of Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe or Fela Kuti, or even to the postindustrial and de-pigmented Africa of William Kentridge—but traveling with Lock was a different experience altogether. For all I know, he’s never been to Africa and lacks black pigmentation like me, but this matter is no obstacle in redefining the object of Africa in the subjective retrospect of an outsider whose continent has drifted in not-so recent history from the motherland of Pangaea. Lock’s Africa is an empty slate to project his primal Id. This in a time where TV and movies (Hotel Rwanda and the Aviator are the current blockbusters) are blurring the boundaries of truth and fiction—undermining our perception of history or influential figures like Howard Hughes. Lock undermines our perception of fiction by infusing history, or at least his history as divined through his dreamtime imagination.
“A History of The Imagination” reads like a collection of short vignettes that are each able to hold water on their own. I have witnessed these fragmented histories here and there in journals and online sites such as Café Irreal, Elimae, Pig Iron Malt, and Barcelona Review but when collected together in such an imaginative faux-historical context, we really see the holistic brilliance of Lock’s mind. The interconnected pieces come perfectly together to form a jigsaw “novel” (as Lock himself calls it on the title page)—a novel novel.
The cast of supporting characters: (Freud, Einstein, Méliès, Ziegfeld, and the Wright Brothers to name a few) are such a far-fetched team of superstars that suspension of disbelief is entirely thrown out the window. Yet, Lock asks you to come along for the ride, and his writing is so convincing and sincere, that you travel with him. To begin with, we are introduced to Prince Kong in “A Treatise on Desire.” Yes, Prince Kong—a juvenile Kong, before he was provoked to become King and turn against humanity—a Kong on the bottom story of the Empire State Building when it was just an idea that had not yet been conceived. Lock’s Kong is a dignified and debonair gorilla that haunts the dreams of the fair maiden, Mrs. Willoughby. The Narrator “N” (or Norman—you decide) is the jealous guardian of Mrs. Willoughby’s dreams, who remains on her threshold to keep Prince Kong at bay. N consults none other than Sigmund Freud (or “Siggy”) for advice on this interesting case of ape visitation that has “fallen on his lap.” This is how Lock’s “A History of the Imagination” falls into your lap, impregnating you with a seed of primal familiarity, and sung with such purity you can’t help yourself to not eavesdrop more.
There’s nothing hidden or subtle about the metaphors and Freudian slips that Lock lets loose, and although his writing at times resonates poetically, Lock puts the prose in prosaic. The metaphors are always un-slipped in their right place and time. On page 19, N disclaims that, "one isn't responsible for acts committed while asleep" and he ends the chapter with the line, "desire begins in sleep." And even though N. Lock spells most everything out, he does so in a non-obtrusive way, so there is no reason to take offense at this apparent insult to our intelligence. There is enough going on in the intricate jungly plot that it’s a relief not to get tangled in the vines of language. He has the uncanny ability to weave and unravel all these histories with the delicate precision of a brain surgeon. There are a few historical characters or esoteric references, that for the not-so-well read as myself, may fly over the head or leave a bit to the imagination (such as Mrs. Willoughby—she is reminiscent of something from a Jane Austen novel that perhaps I was forced to read back in high school, I just can’t put my finger on it).
The opening chapter on the visitation by apes in dreams sets the stage for other surreal visitations by prominent historical characters of the 20th century. One by one, Lock reveals these histories—he pulls them from the recesses of our collective unconscious from a time when this world was malleable. The stars that Lock invites into his stories (or his histories) all share one thing in common: they have all changed our perception of accepted notions or norms. Einstein changed our perception of the universe, Edison shed light on our nocturnal world, Freud altered the understanding of our own unconscious minds and the Wright Brothers changed our perception of travel, time and our geographical place in the world.
Lock takes these influential figures and objectifies and disfigures them into seemingly uncompromising positions to serve his metaphysical needs. If "desire is a projection of one's need upon an object" (page 97), then these characters are merely metaphysical puppets that carry the weight of the comprehensive implications of their discoveries or deeds. And by displacing these figures to the landscape of Africa, N turns Nobel laureates to noble savages within the framework of these warped fish out of water tales. On page 160, Lock continues on this thread, "’We're all creations,’ I asserted. ‘The products of desire. And imagination is a precondition of desire.’" And while all these characters and tangents might seem random, self-serving or downright silly, and perhaps Lock is taking excessive luxuries in the passage of time to piece all this together, it is all calculated to perfection in Lock’s mind and articulated so that it somehow all makes sense.
If you are willing to come along for the ride, you will partake in journeys into space and time that are not even technically feasible but still take place if your mind is open to it. In “Longing for Africa” N travels with Wilbur Wright from Africa to Ohio. They flew “entirely by unscientific means, which cannot be duplicated" (page 106)— just like conventional knowledge of physics and aerodynamics tells us that the bumblebee can’t fly, yet the fact is bumblebees fly. So there is no reason we can’t accept this flight as plausible, even though it was before its time. To Gustave Eiffel, “the aerodynamics of dreams is perfect. The dreamer ascends without wings, without any other means of propulsion other than his own wish to escape earth, which is a grave.” Locks’ Eiffel wants to express this principle of the aerodynamics of dream to the Wright brothers, “so that they can leave history and become myth." In “Hunting Icebergs” the mode of transportation is a submarine that submerges in a lake in the interior of Africa and emerges in the North Atlantic, which is as sublime of an image as the intentions of their journey: to hunt homicidal icebergs. In another story, travel takes place by steamship in the heart of Africa, into the heart of darkness. For N, “travel had become a thought" (page 188). For the reader, the induced thoughts become travel.
The canvas of historical Africa is the underlying firmament that holds it all together. Africa, or Prince Kong, represents that which we came from. Kong is to night, what modern man is to day. Lock’s Africa is to dreams, what the here and now is to the waking hours. Kong is the potent history of possibilities of which the 20th century man is the realization. "Mine is a history of possibilities..." claims N on page 156, to which a fictional H.G. Wells rebuts, "They are fictions!" And N answers, "But no less real for being so." (At which point this distraction in their hunt for icebergs turns into a physical fight over the same Mrs. Willoughby from the first chapter, and N pushes Wells over the side of the ship—demonstrating the power of sheer will over history, or mind over the matter of the Dark Continent.
Even more so, the personified Africa of Kong is the missing link, "Evidence of the species that once stood between man and ape. Mediator between the human and simian world" (page 181). Besides the biological equivalent of Kong being that from which we evolved genetically, if you replace genetic evolution with memetic evolution, Africa is the Kong of primal memes from which our 20th century myths and universal culture evolved from. Africa is a wistful yearning to return to the womb of innocence. As none other than Darwin himself argues on page 185, "the more evolved species yearns nostalgically for its primitive ancestor." And while this reeks of the vicious cycle of academic types critically analyzing the sense in Zen parables, and biologically we all will inevitably die—in reference to Darwin, N reminds us that, "his ideas persist and, with them, the man" (page 179).
Of all the star-sightings in Lock’s imagination, the cameo by Madame Curie is worth mentioning. She is an unsung icon in my mind, not just because she was the first woman in a man’s world to win a Nobel prize, but because she was the first to get Nobel prizes in different fields (since then only Linus Pauling has repeated this feat). Ironically it was her exposure to her own discoveries in radiation that caused her death. In reference to Curie and Einstein on page 140, Lock’s use of language is capable of quantum tunneling through the ageless pages:
"The starry night was an x-ray film showing the sickness of the world. Marie Curie dazzled by radium computed the arithmetic decay on the abacus of her bones. Box cars heavy with wretchedness rolled towards smoking towers. Albert, whom I had once guided through the impossibilities of Africa, covered his bare head under a strange rain. The dead who had died in the century that was to come tugged at my sleeves."
The timelessness of this passage relays the understanding, in convoluted retrospect, of the greatness of their achievements, not only in science, but in the historical importance once the implications of their discoveries became realized.
In “The Sorrow of the Porters,” Lock pays homage to, or at least acknowledges, the existence of, the common man, or porter—the sherpas that brunt the day to day load so the great historical idols of this modern world can plant the flags of their conquest. It would be too predictable and compromising for Lock to be sympathetic to the porters. He is a realist, and what’s more, the porters are not instrumental human beings who will survive in our memories, but are merely figments of Lock’s imagination—common men who are weeping because they “have been too long on the margins” of his story (page 143) and perhaps crop up to appease N’s latent guilt in his weakness for celebrity sightings.
The only character that matters after all is said and done is the narrator N. This is the history of Lock’s imagination—his story. Whether he admits it or not, Africa is a springboard for N to reveal the metaphysical desires that are all in his head. At various points in the book, different characters ask him the question outright: “What is it you do here in Africa?” and the answers he gives reveal the dichotomy between what is spoken and what is thought in the head:
On page 59 he states inwardly (not in quotes): “I came out to hunt, to go on safari.” But then immediately afterwards, he answers out loud to Henri Matisse (in quotes): “'I drink gin and make love to women, when I may.’”
On page 112, he responsds to Houdini, "’Adventurous, outdoor things’.” But inwardly he says to himself, “I was determined to keep silent about the audacious, metaphysical things I did in Africa."
On page 181 he turns the question around to Darwin, to which Darwin responds, “to find the missing link!”
Does N. Lock aim too high? Perhaps. But just like in “A Trip to the Moon,” (the inspiration for the chapter “A History of the Cinema”) the tongue of campy wit doesn’t get too buried in his cheek that he forgets it’s there—he never takes himself too seriously. And if he does aim too high, perhaps this serves to keep him aloof of pretense. In the Borgesesque chapter “The Catalogue,” N solicits the help of Dewey (of Dewey Decimal System fame) to help classify the mounting and daunting catalogue of the unclassifiable and unmanageable phenomena of Africa. "Our taxonomy was stretched to the breaking point,” he admits on page 168. Then, "Saturated, we entered the realm of the purely subjective." N. Lock keeps himself honest and grounded by introducing new characters at will to balance out the arguments or even to mock himself. Later on in this chapter, a renowned naturalist from the Smithsonian with “an aversion to unlicensed imagination,” is “unhappy with our ‘escapism,’ not to mention our use of native pharmaceuticals.”
At the turn of last century, classical physicists thought they had reality pegged and that there was nothing left to say (until the likes of Einstein and Curie came along). Similarly, we now live in a time when it seems every story has been told and rehashed in countless ways. Each new writer, artist or scientist must stand on the shoulders of previous giants to create anything novel. From Lock’s perch atop Mt. Olympus, he is able to deftly manipulate a cast of characters across time and space to spin his ambitious version of “Hearts of Darkness,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Tarzan” all wrapped into one. And to understand these accomplishments, to some extent, we too must have a grasp of this history. Thus, “A History of the Imagination” risks reaching a smaller audience, but for those that it does, the reward is higher. Does it achieve these lofty expectations? The conclusions drawn on page 192 is that “history is a figment" and "All histories lie" and finally, "Maybe nothing can be proved in Africa."
If you spend too much analyzing it, the greatness of Lock’s history can be almost overwhelming—it is a seemingly incomprehensible sum of the compounded interest of histories that we cannot possibly fathom. But as one of his alter-ego’s tells us on page 96, “A sea is vast, cold, and desolate; but it is only thinking that makes it so” and again for emphasis, "The sea in itself is not in the least frightening. It is only the idea of drowning that makes it so."
Where the book really works its magic, much like a fairy tale, is not in the density of rich metaphysical knowledge packed within the pages, but the witty and engaging manner in which it is spun. If you are in no mood to plunge the depths with a grappling hook, then you can skim what you want off the top. It is a perfectly choreographed symphony that even if you can’t comprehend everything it means metaphysically, you can still enjoy the language of the music for what it is.
"There is another history. There is another history that exists side by side with the one you know… You are reading it here: A History of the Imagination” (page 192). Will Lock’s history measure up in the greatness of human history? As Lock has Einstein say on page 78, "Ask me tomorrow after I have re-measured what I measure today." Only time will tell." - Derek White


From A HISTORY OF THE IMAGINATION
“In the Time of the Comet”

“Caruso in Mombasa” and “The Book of Casualties”

“The Aerodynamics of Dreams”

“The Anguish of Houdini”

“Flight”

“Longing for Africa”

“Lenin in Love”

“Dreaming Moriarty,” “Darwin in Love” ["The Geology of Love"], “Einstein in Africa,” “Hunting Icebergs,” “The Scourge of Darkness”

“Into the Interior”

“Extreme Cruelty”

“A Discourse on History”

Read it at Google Books

Norman Lock, Notes to 'The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe, Ravenna Press, 2003.

"I do not hope to explain it, or attempt to explain it. It is enough for me that it is true." So remarks Marco Knauff, toward the close of his "Notes to 'The Book of Supplemental Diagrams' for Marco Knauff's Universe, Vol. 1: Principal Features," rendered (from the Dutch) into vividly cosmological English by Norman Lock. The truth, of course, is that the opus-producing Knauff of the title (a pigeon fancier, dreamer, and infatuate of hats who flourished during the occupation of the Netherlands in the second world war) never existed, and the translation has been spirited onto the page direct from Lock's imagination. But this is no postmodernist stunt. The slender volume is a compact set of lyrical declarations, metaphysical in ambition and sublime in their effects, about the interpenetrations of the seeable and the unseeable, the mechanical and the unearthly, in a universe graced by randomness and the "slippage and instability of essences." Knauff's universe is one in which an "invisible Zoo" - animal noises are divulged from "seams in the air" - may or may not exist, and in which a woman might be "deduced" from a "camisole dropped carelessly on the bed."
There is a musical design to these meditations--they proceed in gladdening runs of image and aphorism. The prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen. Desire, we learn, "has the shape of a French Curve"; Space is "pinked with vexed states." The ruminations, arrayed in forty-eight brief chapters, range elegantly over The Machinery, the Shadow Universe, the Zone of Perversity, the Occluding Chamber, the Particle Bath, and other involvements of the uncanny. Knauff's universe proves to be resistant to ratiocination but susceptible to schematicizing, though the diagrams have been wisely withheld from us here.
Lock's "Notes" is a book of gnomic and exquisite sentencecraft, and sly wit that never descends into whimsy. It's a wonderwork in miniature, reperplexing infinitude." – Gary Lutz

"In truth, alack, I, Gordon, am positively nuts for Knauff and nuts for Lock, in whatever guise the waggish Lock (not to mention, Knauff) decides to produce himself. In truth? In truth, Lock writes it, Lish reads it! – which is a damn sight more than Lish will say for Proust." – Gordon Lish

"After so many years of hearing about the great Machinery of Marco Knauff (and having long since come to suspect one labored within it), it is a great satisfaction to read Knauff’s own writings at last. One can only stand in awed astonishment that these Notes, which in truth cannot be said to exist at all, are there in one’s left hand." – R. M. Berry

"Like Wittgentstein’s Tractatus, these Notes are a logical treatise. A treatise on Logos. Thus, also in part a treatise on what must be left out of speaking, even as it strains words.… But this little book is also, and primarily, literary... Like the conclusion of a successful psychoanalysis, the closing pages of Knauff’s Notes offer the reader purgation in the form of a sad yet hopeful acceptance of the necessary sketchiness of human life: “Suffer dreams to come,” Knauff says. Also: “Wait for the end. Banish fear. Love where I may.” – Andrew Wilson

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Norman Lock, Land of the Snow Men (writing as George Belden), Calamari Press, 2005.

"Land of the Snow Men is a collection of visionary stories and renderings taken from the journals of the enigmatic George Belden, who claimed to be on the tragic expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole in 1910-12. From Diagram 5.4: "Norman Lock discovered Belden and his remarkable journal by accident. He had been for some years in Africa, writing a novel, A History of the Imagination. The strain of living in a country as alien as Africa, with little money and little hope of finding a publisher, caused him to have a nervous breakdown. A friend in Mombassa contacted his wife, who arranged for his return and commitment to a private sanitarium in Vermont's Green Mountains. During the final weeks of Lock's recuperation, the institution's chief of staff asked if he would sort through boxes of old files in the sanitarium's basement to determine whether or not any should be kept. In one of those boxes, Lock found Land of the Snow Men."

"Norman Lock discovered Belden and his remarkable journal by accident. He had been for some years in Africa, writing a novel, A History of the Imagination. The strain of living in a country as alien as Africa, with little money and little hope of finding a publisher, caused him to have a nervous breakdown. A friend in Mombassa contacted his wife, who arranged for his return and commitment to a private sanitarium in Vermont's Green Mountains. During the final weeks of Lock's recuperation, the institution's chief of staff asked if he would sort through boxes of old files in the sanitarium's basement to determine whether or not any should be kept. In one of those boxes, Lock found Land of the Snow Men."

From the Editor's Foreword of Land of the Snow Men:
"Little is known about George Belden. One thing is certain, however; he was not in Antarctica at the time of Scott’s 1910-12 expedition to the Pole, but the year after the disaster. His name does not appear on the list of passengers and crew aboard Terra Nova, nor is it mentioned by Scott in his journal or in any other known to have been kept by a member of the tragic enterprise. Belden’s own journal, purporting to be that of a witness to the misadventure, is clearly an invention—one which became increasingly whimsical and hallucinatory. His extraordinary account of having been with Scott, Wilson, and Bowers when they perished on the Barrier Ice and his fantastic depiction of the trolley-car hearse, which transported Scott up into Mt. Terror, must be understood as an attempt by Belden to forge a modern myth of the hero."

"Belden’s [Lock’s] sentences combine the erudition and confidence of the educated man with the emphatic vulnerable tone of a personal diary…. Belden consistently refers to his surroundings as an illusion; the landscape and his perceptions are one and the same, slippery and infinitely variable atmospheres, refusing dominance, univocal interpretation or mediation by reason. He perceives and writes the Antarctic as though an afterworld." –Miranda Mellis

"The journal is a record of the impossibility of removing all ambiguity, all simile and metaphor, from the world. In fact, [Captain] Scott’s failure foreshadows the failure of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s attempts to develop a purely logical, and simply true, language, which only became apparent some two decades after Scott’s expedition. In fact, one of the many remarkable aspects of Belden’s journal is his chronicle of a valiant but failed attempt to realize a philosophy’s precepts so directly in reality…. [Lock] is one of the few writers to succeed in establishing himself in the mainstream of the American literary world without falling into … “the black hole of American realism.”– G. S. Evans

"Norman Lock shows undeniable talent at recreating a world of ice, light and darkness where impossible visions are made credible and resist like ice statues till the melting breath of reality dissolves them." – Paula Grenside

"Lock’s strength is to draw the reader in with his verbal ability, no matter what his content may be. His readers don’t turn to his books and stories because of content, but rather because they know that works will always be written with a linguistic power out of reach of all but a few writers." – Cooper Renner

"George Belden’s Land of the Snow Men makes us go outside. To the raw, newly discovered, blinding drifts of Antarctica, to the external perimeters of conventional art, the mad experimental.
Outsider Art or Art Brut holds as its credence that a reflection of the contemporary is presented in equal doses by the trained artist as by the outsider. Think Adelaide Hall, the Lacemaker, who created physical narrations on fragments of lace while residing in a mental institution in the early 1900’s; think Judith Scott, afflicted with Down’s Syndrome and fastidiously compiling amorphous bundles of bounded fibre; think George Belden, who composed a journal (replete with taped-on drawings) entitled Land of the Snow Men before being admitted to the Waterbury Asylum and diagnosed with a vague insanity. The latter example, however, lends a new meaning to Outsider Art as it takes upon itself an additional exteriority. Land of the Snow Men, of course, is a fiction – “ ‘It is an unreal geography,’ ” writes Belden, “Let them wonder!” (17) – where Norman Lock steps outside the perimeters of authorship and looks/writes back upon his text as another.
We long for the naïve. We long for the moment of raw discovery. As readers, as citizens of a global economy, we are saturated by knowledge, search engines, facile information, archives of answers. We long for an Aha. Perhaps that is the general affect of the contemporary, this longing, and if it is, the writings of George Belden help to satiate it. So we embark on his voyage, we suspend our disbelief, we voyeur.
Norman Lock brings us to the outskirts of the mind of George Belden who brings us to the untreaded outskirt of an Antarctic expedition. The reader is surrounded by a whimsical territory that yields, at times, slivers of actual beauty: hypotheses on physical shadows, the flickering of an aurora borealis, meanderings on poetic principles. There is a translucent nostalgia here, both in the journal and its drawings, for the wor(l)ds of Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, Kurt Schwitters, yet it is a nostalgia complicated by the tangible present: the book itself, published by Calamari Press in 2005, seems freshly spun off a computer screen, the illustrations resemble less a restoration of antique drawings as ostensible scans, and the script of George Belden upon them is unmistakably the work of a modern-day hand. Whether this is the intention of the author or illustrator or not is perhaps irrelevant for it offers to the book an additional layer of naïveté, of giving itself up, showing its face, however obscured.
And perhaps this is where Land of the Snow Men succeeds most perceptibly: in the fact that it is not art brut: it is not a found object: it is not what it seems: and in this it is most exemplary of the ever-changing contemporary. Knowledge giving in to fancy, a longing for first intensity, original creation, primary encounter, an existence outside the screen, a simultaneous shedding and lacquering of metaphor. It is a playful text and – above its philosophies, harsh wilderness, depictions of madness – manages to convey a tone as light as its page count.
(Upon opening the book I half expected to find, against all odds and reason, a six-cornered snowflake pressed accurately amid the pages or rising digitized as a holograph somewhere between Defying Analysis and Beauty of Their Bones. You should go, see for yourself.)" - Sandra Huber

"Little is known about George Belden. One thing is certain, however; he was not in Antartica at the time of Scott's 1910-12 expedition to the Pole, but the year after the disaster. His name does not appear on the list of passengers and crew aboard Terra Nova, nor is it mentioned by Scott in his journal or in any other known to have been kept by a member of the tragic enterprise."
The first lines of the Editor's Forward prepare the readers to the entrance of a literary canard, but when you start reading Belden's hallucinated and poetic entries, you forget the fictional creation and share the visions, the humanity of Belden and company as well as Scott's lucid madness.
It's through Belden that we relive the last months of 1912 In Antarctica with Scott, Wilson, Oats, Bowers, members of Scott's crew, and other characters created by Belden's fervid imagination, till the tragic death on the Barrier. Historically, they were found, frozen, in their sleeping bags; Belden gives his personal version of Scott's funeral in the trolley-car hearse with the bell tolling for the last Snow Man.
Norman Lock shows undeniable talent at recreating a world of ice, light and darkness where impossible visions are made credible and resist like ice statues till the melting breath of reality dissolves them. Belden's visionary madness is far more involving and credible than Scott's cold, objective approach:
"I want no poetry here! I came to Antarctica to escape interpretation"...
" A stone is only a stone until it's thrown through a glass house; then it becomes and adage and admonition. Antarctica has no ulterior meaning: There is nothing beneath the ice except more ice."
Scott objects to connotations that cling to reality; Belden and the others need to see and actually see things beyond reality though aware of the cruelty of poetry. There's an episode in the chapter "Defying Analysis" when Pointing and Belden find frozen shadows. The relevance of the episode is the urge, the crave to find a presence, signs testifying they are not alone in the ice desert, that someone else made his way through it. The shadows excite their imagination; the ice is no longer a biting machine but a "gigantic photographic plate".
"Shadows?"
He nodded. " Frozen Shadows!"
They were those of birds mostly. And one that looked as if it had been cast by an iceberg. And one that was unmistakably that of a man. The man's shadow was long, evidently made when the sun had been low in the sky....
Pointing handled them like delicate glassware, afraid they might shatter in his hands."
They even photograph those shadows, place them back in the rubber sack. As weird as it may seem, readers see them and witness their unfortunate melting when Oates opens the sack looking for food, displays the shadows on the table and the shadows of the birds flap their wings and disappear in the dark. Scott promptly dismisses the shadows:
"...We are studying reality in its purest form. I must insist that you do nothing to adulterate it."
Scott disapproves of everything that diverts from the study of first principles, he has an intellectual rigor that is beyond the other explorers' power, is beyond "desire". He disapproves of similes, too, and more of metaphors because disguised as truth. He always considers the heart of the matter as when he defines Antarctica:
"Antarctica is a laboratory," he says. " Here where it is all but extinguished, life is easiest to isolate and observe."
and, later, his concept of beauty:
"As a man I enjoy a woman's beauty. As a scientist I should prefer the beauty of her bones for in them I can see the truth articulated."
Here is when Belden concludes that Scott is the crazy one.
Look is really good at alternating and contrasting the visionary escape of the men with the stubbornness and mad determination of Scott who refuses to admit and face the incumbent catastrophe. Imagination can only lead to disaster, he keeps repeating, but it's imagination that gives the men the strength to go on as when Bower sees his wife in a red silk dress, and Belden feels Elizabeth's warm lips on his.
The whole story appeals to the senses, sight and touch especially. White and cold are everywhere and become an obsession broken only by glimpses of colors and warmth brought by hallucinations or nightmares. White and cold and ice that becomes a symbol of Scott's emotional coldness.
In the end, neither the escape into dreams or the facing of reality will save them, but readers can but side with Belden and Lock who created him.
The "credibility" of the recounting is strengthened by the illustrations created by Derek White, the publisher. The creative reconstruction of diary pages, of maps gives the drawings their aspect of time-worn documents, of authentic material. Lock's book offers an original view on Scott's expedition to the Pole and casts a peculiar light on the hero." - Paula Grenside

"The recently discovered Land of the Snow Men, a journal of Philadelphia architect George Belden's experiences in the Antarctic at the time of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions, is a fascinating and important document. This is not only because it has high literary value, but also because it necessitates a rewriting of the history of the doomed Terra Nova expedition and biographies of its leader, Robert Falcon Scott. The journal was unearthed by the writer Norman Lock (whose work has appeared some number of times in The Cafe Irreal); Lock happened upon it while staying at a private sanatorium in Vermont's Green Mountains, where he was recovering from a nervous breakdown.
That the journal, first published in 2005, hasn't caused more of a public sensation is no doubt a result of Mr. Lock's assertion in his introduction that Belden "was not in Antarctica at the time of Scott's 1910-12 expedition to the Pole, but the year after the disaster," and that, therefore, Belden's journal, "purporting to be that of a witness to the misadventure, is clearly an invention." While we believe that Mr. Lock has done a great service in uncovering this fascinating document and that he is, in addition, absolutely correct in pointing out its considerable literary value, it is also our belief that future scholarship will likely prove his assertion regarding Belden’s absence from the expedition false.
In stating this, we have no desire to question Mr. Lock's scholarship. Especially since we have only the highest opinion of his talents as a writer of fiction. The fact that he is one of the few writers to succeed in establishing himself in the mainstream of the American literary world without falling into what one contributor to The Cafe Irreal once called "the black hole of American realism" is strong enough testimony to his abilities in this area. However, he has not, so far as we know, similarly distinguished himself in the arena of scholarship, and this is where the issue regarding Belden's journals lies. Which is to say: it is difficult for us to believe Mr. Lock's assertion that an otherwise undistinguished Philadelphia architect with no apparent previous writing experience would be able to provide such powerful and cogent descriptions of the Scott expedition and its participants if he hadn't himself been present and witnessed, in some form or the other, the events described. Even Mr. Lock alludes to this difficulty when he writes in his introduction: "How Belden came to compose his strange and luminous texts is one enigma among many surrounding the life of this visionary artist."
A far more reasonable assertion, from our point of view, would be that Belden was, at least for a while and to some degree, present with Scott and his ill-fated expedition. If not at the very end (and, indeed, Belden's final entry covering Scott's death does seem largely hallucinatory and symbolic), then for at least some fair portion of the time. Enough time, indeed, to understand and effectively describe the men, especially Scott, and the torments, both existential and physical, that they experienced in the vast, frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The few pieces of evidence offered by Mr. Lock to try to establish that Belden only arrived in Antarctica in 1913, after the Scott expedition’s tragic end, are easily enough dispensed with--Mr. Lock himself acknowledges that there is no conclusive proof of this. To give legitimacy to our assertion that Belden was indeed present for some part of the expedition, however, it is necessary to explain why all mention of him was expunged from the expedition's records, his journal suppressed, and Belden himself committed to the (as it was then called) Waterbury Asylum in Vermont.
A probable explanation for this might well lie in the extraordinary nature of the journal itself. Especially its depiction of Scott, which contrasts so much with the myth that was built up around him in the aftermath of his death; a myth that made him the ideal prototype of the British soldier; specifically, a practical, stoical sort who gets down to business and doesn't brook any nonsense and who, when it comes, meets catastrophe with the proverbial stiff upper lip. The "Scott of the Antarctic" presented by Belden distinctly cuts across this grain, especially in its descriptions of Scott’s ultimate goals in undertaking the expedition and, therefore, his overriding vision of the world. According to the official accounts, Scott was simply a career British naval officer who took on the Antarctic challenge because the opportunity presented itself; specifically, during a chance encounter on a London street with an acquaintance of his, he "learned for the first time that there was such a thing as a prospective Antarctic Expedition" and, two days later, applied for its command. The reason for this sudden enthusiasm? None is given to us. In fact, Scott's sole comment in this regard was: "I may as well confess that I had no predilection for polar exploration." Indeed, we are left with the sense that Scott undertook this gargantuan expedition for little more reason than because the Antarctic, like Mt. Everest for George Leigh Mallory, "was there." That it was a task to be accomplished, in as matter a fact way as possible, after one has accomplished all the other tasks that he or she had set out to do.
But Belden's journals present us with a Scott who is an almost Christ-like figure, on a single minded pursuit of truth, fighting the ultimate battle against imagination and metaphor along the way. In the journal entry "The Beauty of Poetry" Belden writes of Scott: "We admire Scott. His single-minded determination to study first principles--'life in the raw,' in expedition member Henry Robinson Bowers' words--is worthy of admiration. His is an intellectual rigor beyond our power and--let me confess it--desire. Empty of anything that might give it meaning--history, memory, love--Antarctica serves him well in his pursuit of the ultimate. I should say that life here is like a wire stripped of insulation, and all the more dangerous for it; but Scott disapproves of similes. Similes, he says, are circumvention: they are used by those who would rather step aside than confront a thing. They are reality once removed." And finally, in the entry titled "The Beauty of Their Bones," Scott himself is reported to say: "Antarctica is a laboratory. Here, where it is all but extinguished, life is easiest to isolate and observe...ever since I was a boy, I have hated ambiguity. It's this perhaps more than any other reason that explains my explorations. To eliminate the empty spaces on the map--and in myself. To close them. I'm not troubled so much by an absence of meaning as that there might be more than one."
That Scott, once we understand him to be philosophically inclined, might be so concerned with such questions is not as surprising as it might, at first glance, appear. The early part of the 20th century, after all, was not only a heady time for the British because the sun never set on the their empire. Their intellectual circles were convinced that they too would soon conquer the world thanks to the theory recently propounded by the great philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell that, through the proper analysis of language, it was possible to reduce language to its basic, "atomic" elements. Since, in Russell's view, language also mirrored reality, this analysis would reveal to us the world as it really is, being composed of facts that are utterly simple. Thus it seemed possible that, in the near future, a method would be developed that would strip language, and therefore the world, of all metaphysics and multiple meanings. This would mean, for example, an end to all demagoguery, as it would be possible with this new logic-based language to prove the demagogue wrong as easily as the scientific charlatan who claims that the earth is flat. They did not, however, think it an easy task to achieve this new language. No easier, in fact, than conquering the South Pole. To achieve it would require a rigorous analysis, a journey, if you will, into the murky depths of language to cleanse it of all of its extraneous elements. It is, perhaps, instructive here to point to the rather extraordinary parallel between the Scott presented to us by Belden and Russell's student Ludwig Wittgenstein. Upon discovering Russell's ideas, Wittgenstein realized that his own ability to articulate his ideas in logic was handicapped by how "full of the most hateful and petty thoughts and acts" his own mind was. "How," he asks, "can I be logician if I am not yet a man? Before everything else I must become pure." And how did Wittgenstein do this? By heading toward the other polar region, in his case an isolated cabin in Skjolden, Norway, near the Arctic Circle.
It is not hard, then, to see why these important aspects of Scott’s character and outlook might have made the propagandists of the empire uncomfortable. The iconic R.F. Scott, a career military man matter of factly taking on the task of trying to plant the Union Jack before any other nation's flag at the South Pole, would certainly seem to serve the needs of an imperial empire better than the apparent reality of Scott, who in many respects more closely resembled Goethe's Faust. Nonetheless, it does not seem likely to us that this disparity alone would have sufficed to suppress Belden's journals, especially given the distinctly anglo nature of his philosophical quest. Rather, we believe, it was, additionally, the failure of that philosophy, the failure of Scott's quest to eliminate the "empty space" of ambiguity on the map that made Belden's journal simply too threatening to be tolerated and doomed it to complete obscurity until Mr. Lock stumbled upon it.
For, more than anything else, and for all of Scott's efforts to find truth in its pure form, the journal is a record of the impossibility of removing all ambiguity, all simile and metaphor, from the world. In fact, Scott's failure foreshadows the failure of Russell's and Wittgenstein's attempts to develop a purely logical, and simply true, language, which only became apparent some two decades after Scott's expedition. In fact, one of the many remarkable aspects of Belden's journal is his chronicle of a valiant but failed attempt to realize a philosophy's precepts so directly in reality.
We can see the beginnings of this failure in the third of Belden's ten journal entries ("The Cruelty of Poetry") when Scott, who had earlier proclaimed that the South Pole "is not an object... it's a geographical convenience... with no symbolic weight whatsoever," cries out in anguish, "I'm beginning to see things! Depths of meaning!" Scott is further put on the defensive in the next entry, when expedition member Herbert Ponting brings back a bag full of frozen shadows that he'd collected while out on a glacier (mostly of birds, but also of an iceberg and, most significantly, of a man, presumably from an earlier expedition); Scott forbade any discussion about the shadows, stating, "We're not only racing Amundsen to the Pole; we are studying reality in its purest form. I must insist that you do nothing to adulterate it."
The full extent of the failure of Scott's ambitious philosophical project, however, only becomes apparent with the seventh entry, "Women at the Bottom of the World." In it Belden describes how the men start imagining, and even believing, that their wives have joined them, because, "besieged by constant necessity, each of us was making an outpost of the imagination in order to escape." Though Scott was out on the ice shelf for most of the episode, Belden even finds indications that Scott too had succumbed to this collective delusion. With the eighth entry, "The orders of architecture," the crisis continues as the men, too long "entranced by the snow" which had "seeped in everywhere," find that they had exhausted by overuse "thoughts of Levantine women, or Persian, languid in the molten sun," as well as Ponting's magic lantern slides because, anymore, "not even a garish Amazonian sunset or the pink-and-red-petaled bloomers of the can-can girls could alter the fixity of our inward gaze. A gaze that comprehended nothing, revealed nothing, and nourished not at all." Briefly, but spectacularly, knowledge and the sometimes beguiling nature of a human discipline saves them from this abyss when, spurred on by Bowers, Belden lectures them about architecture: "I spoke then of colonnades, porticos, embrasures, esplanades; of roofs--gabled, hipped, gambrel, and mansard; of window - oriel, Palladian, bay and rose; of arches--Roman, Tucor, Syrian, Moorish, and Gothic; of moldings - the cavetto, cyma recta, cyma reversa, ovolo, sotia, and torus. And as the words tumbled pell-mell from my mouth, there rose up in that narrow hut an edifice, classically proportioned, harmonious in its parts, ingenious in its spatial geometry, and luminous. We, all of us, saw it shining there! All but Scott, who had left during my recitation to take a measurement with the theodolite out on the ice shelf." Inevitably, however, it gets to be late and, after Belden finally exhausts his considerable knowledge of architecture, the men extinguish the lights to go to sleep and are once again plunged into "the terror of the polar night."
Finally, in the next to last entry, "Waltz of the Snow Man", the men begin to openly rebel against Scott. "It was not his body we wanted to annihilate but his naive convictions. We wished for the death of his unswerving belief in enlightenment...". Scott seems powerless to stop his men, "so puissant is irrationality, so seductive are the Lares and Penates of the madhouse," and, sensing the danger, takes his leave. "Without his dour presence to chasten us," Belden writes, "we rioted in unreason," engaging in an orgy of astrology, divination, and communication with the dead. But, in the face of the unrelenting cold and icy nothingness of the Antarctic, this flame soon burns itself out too, after which the men are "possessed by a sadness impossible to describe," which serves as a prelude to their deaths and, in the last entry, Scott's as well.
Thus we can see how Belden's journal would have been a double blow to the British self image of the time: Not only to its view of British soldiers as being (on the eve of World War One) absolutely matter-of-fact and pragmatic, but also to the very core of British philosophy, whose belief in finding an ultimate, analytic truth underlie the Empire's rationale of itself as the great civilizing force of the world. That Scott's great journey of the mind did not wind up reinforcing the prevailing British analytical approach to philosophy but rather the dreaded continental approach--which not only acknowledges but sometimes even emphasizes the need for ambiguity, metaphor, and imagination--must have been even more galling. Indeed, even now, almost a century later, one need not spend much time in Anglo (-American) philosophical circles to learn of their almost virulent antipathy to most manifestations of continental philosophy. According to Belden, Scott would have, "if the imagination could be isolated in a single organ," cut "it out of each and every one of us like a diseased appendix." Perhaps Belden and his journal, having so powerfully shown the inevitability of imagination, were similarly "cut out" from the body politic. And, we might add, it would not have been the first time that a mental institution was used to lock up the embodiment of a dangerous and threatening idea." - G.S. Evans

From LAND OF THE SNOW MEN

“Unreal Geography,” “The Cruelty of Poetry,” “Lath of the World”

“Defying Analysis”

“Out of the Land of the Snow Men”Norman Lock, Trio, Ravenna Press, 2007.

"Norman Lock's "Trio" combines his acclaimed Joseph Cornell's Operas and Émigrés with Grim Tales, his riff on the Brothers Grimm. These masterful works of the imagination demonstrate Lock's innate ability to transform the fanciful into the tactile. He makes new things in exquisite words.
A sample from Émigrés: "A very old émigré, who was each day growing more forgetful, woke up in the dead of night, put on his best suit and tie, shined his shoes, put on his best hat (a rakish borsalino), and went to find the dancehall where - fifty years before, in the distant country of his youth - he had danced the tango, magnificently, with a girl whose silk dress he could still feel against his palms."
From Joseph Cornells' Operas: "Liszt died young and Mad Ludwig drowned himself in the Starnberger and Lola Montes became a circus exhibit, but ah! the impresario answered, they flew, you know, until the end they all of them defied gravity such was the strength of their desire - who, we wondered, who then is Hubble peering at through his telescope, Lola Montes having long ago died? from his opera box Joseph Cornell said: her remnant of light still desiring."

from TRIO
"Joseph Cornell’s Operas" (complete text)

Grim Tales (complete text)
Norman Lock, Two Plays for Radio, Ravenna Press

"Based on an actual event, The Shining Man recounts (using Expressionistic dramatic techniques) the salvaging of a deadly isotope from an abandoned irradiation machine by two junk men. They unknowingly unleash a modern plague on Goiania with fantastic and tragic consequences.
In Beyond Recognition, a chilling fable of ultimate identity theft, the alienated narrator relates his gradual dispossession, internment, death, and dissolution."

From TWO PLAYS FOR RADIO
“Beyond Recognition” (prose adaptation)

Norman Lock, Cirque du Calder

Cirque du Calder is a hand-made, limited-edition. The book was produced using Asian techniques in the shaping of a hand-sewn artifact. The cover is rendered of artisan Canal Paper. The text is laser-printed on twenty-four-pound linen paper constituted of twenty-five percent cotton. Each copy is signed by the author and is numbered in the order in which the volume was produced. Produced and designed by Faruk Ulay. Afterword by Gordon Lish

Find it here


Norman Lock, The House of Correction (stage productions)

"House of Correction keeps a tight lock on the audience’s attention … gradually the shimmer of the words deepens into a more visceral sense of menace. If Ionesco had written an American suspense thriller, it might be something like this." – Los Angeles Times

"Norman Lock’s treatment of the evils of psychotic schizophrenia versus the even more ugly aspects of pretentious armchair liberalism is nothing short of hilarious in this outing. It’s offbeat and loony with a sitcom flare." – Daily Variety

"Lock’s weapon is words and he uses them well… like a nightmare that wakes you up shaking, forcing you to reassess your life." – LA Life

"House of Correction manipulates absurdist humor into an unusual blend of verbal twists and turns." – New Center News


From PIECES FOR SMALL ORCHESTRA

in Harp & Altar

in Guernica

in Unsaid

in 5_Trope

in Cafe Irreal


From THE MONSTER IN WINTER (unpublished)
“The Captain Is Sleeping”
“Ideas of Space”


HYPERTEXTS (with music)
“By the Long Thread of Rancor Does She Drive Him from Her Heart”

from Joseph Cornell’s Operas (with music)


UNCOLLECTED WORK
“In the Tunnels” “She Has Been Put Away Among Thorns” (for voice)

Traveling Light", "Pavlova's Heels" "The Catalogue"


From “An Africa of the Imagination,” an article based on an interview by the publisher of Linnean Street, Andrew Wilson

Interview with Matt Bell

Interview with Blake Butler

Interview with John Olson

Interview with Josh Abril

Interview with Deron Bauman

Norman's web page