I am presently surprisingly bored, unfortunately broke, and deliriously tired.  Believe it or not, but Vegas becomes stale quite quickly.

On a better note…

I re-read You Can’t Go Home Again  by Thomas Wolfe this weekend.

“Some things will never change.  Some things will always be the same.  Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.” 

I have for many years been in awe of Wolfe and his epic-time-description.  And to put my sentiments quaintly… nothing changes.  His words impress more deeply upon me each time I lift his pages.  With each passing moment of my life, his literal life seems to become a greater mirror of mine.  Even if you have never missed and longed for someplace so violently that even in your unconscious dreams it brings a blunt and wakeful pain to your heart… his words are worth your while. 

“You found the earth too great for your one life… But it has been this way with all men… You have faltered, you have missed the way… And now, because you have known madness and despair… We who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us—we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

The man knew how to pull a pen across a page- and make it last, make it momentous.  It is all very real, very true.  He does not mimic… for there are mortal recollections and emotions more memorable than pure sadness that only those who have left their true and beloved home—left it against their better judgement—have felt.  It is a unique pain, a different yearning.  A desperation unknown before that first foolish, weary step.

“…it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place. 

But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?”

It’s not depressing; though I know it may seem tiresome.  It is rather, a companion to lonesome wanderers.  A textual beacon from the past that has ceased to fade.  Will never fade so long as there are restless fools such as myself who act with stubborn insistence upon a sporadic and momentary urge to move.  A mistaken epiphany leads dreamers and wanderers much further into solitude with such unceremonious brevity that it is years before one can even begin to notice they are no longer home; that they have left, and kept moving.  It is quite a time before one realizes that the faces surrounding are not the same, the streets have changed their course, the music sings of foreign loves; Time has passed, the past is now your future. 

“…and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.”

Ironically, the restless wanderer has kept stagnant while the immovable past has fled.  As long as there are those who once believed that love was something that one could do without, as long as we— the simply ridiculous and clearly delusional—continue to flee, his Homeric lamp will burn.

“…Must the beggar on horseback forever reel?”

“All he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”

 

*

 

 

 

So, as I’m working on recreating the shelves of my surroundings in digital form I came upon this book and I was once again reminded of my disappointment.  Clive Barker has for a very long time been one of my favorite authors but this last novel left me yearning for the pages of his previous titles.  Though this would be a masterpiece for the majority of writers that attempt to be authors these days, spawning from the genius hand of Barker it is more than lacking.   

I had expected to find myself once again happily drowning in pages that created vast worlds, vivid atrocities and gnawing emotion with mere words.  Barker has this unreal and unnatural ability to summon unimaginable things from his imagination, a feat in and of itself just to harness and comprehend these thoughts; To be able to convey these across a blank page, with the most intricate details to a point that a reader can actually invision the very cells that make them, is heroic.  He had always done this fluently and painlessly, no matter how tourturous the events; making him almost mythic.  My eager expectations were far from sated. 

It’s just not the Clive Barker of old, to put it simply.  Yes, the grotesque creatures, mayhem and truly original plots are all there, but it’s as if he provided half of everything and let someone else add the rest.  He put forth ‘Dev-’ and some other pen wrote ‘-il’ and left it at that.  The Barker of,the past would have seen ‘De-’ and created Devinity in his Devil.

Though I’m saddly let down by this addition to his works, he remains one of my favorites.  I can, and probably will at some point, go on for ages about the brilliance of his earlier books.  It would take miracles to destroy the monuments he created previously.

I’d like to know how others feel about this.  Perhaps it’s only me.