Book Review: the spiral consilience — oudeís

Published in December 2016 by gnOme, the spiral consilience inaugurates a cycle of pessimistic poems rendered permanently in understated lowercase.

Reviving the singular nom de plume from a forgotten scarlet-bound novel published in 1897 entitled Hell, underground and without surname, nationality, or portrait, a quintessential word in Greek traced solely from the Homeric webbing of an etymological blurb by Dan Mellamphy “meaning no-one/no-thing”, oudeís emerges bequeathing paradoxical query into the unknowable and the vitally unseen of which none are incapable nor obliged to envision as founded in abnegation:

there is one endless nothingness outside,
there is one palpable, sane fear of void,
there is one darkness waiting at the end
and one intrinsic fear of being destroyed.

Desolation beyond sadness belongs between these pages, indifferent swathes of time without change or rising, uncovered at an instant and without repeal throughout, reminiscent of “a greater blackness” Thomas Ligotti preaches with his guitar from The Unholy City and the feverish point of contention which spawned a lifetime of metaphysical dilemmas E. M. Cioran happened to contain not only within The Trouble with Being Born but his complete oeuvre.

There are few mystical overtones and no phoney esoterics courted here since nothing is left secret. Neither unknown nor knowable. The missive moans ahead of melancholy or sour contradiction. Those familiar with The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe or Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race will be reclamated with the breach of sentience which permits these truths their empty consolation among mankind, flowing tenebrous through the black brain of oudeís’ remains like a bottomless well.

one darkness holds all life in its domains,
its void has neither ending nor beginning;
there is one death that creeps up on your heart
as thoughtless, intervening years are thinning.

Although the trilogy of oudeís—the spiral consilience (2016), Labyrinthophoroi & Glyptogeographies (2018), Amuletic Oubliettes (2021)—has reassured me that such living spectators are poetically privy to the placid spur which Nothingness deducts, nevertheless I ponder the anonymous effect of the spiral consilience’s pitiable yet imperative neglect.

In Anathemas and Admirations, Cioran writes woefully in his essay on Jorge Luis Borges such concerns:

“The misfortune of being recognised has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself. There he was at home.”

There is a blind sadness I fret in the uncreating context and tragedy stately expressed by every poem, as though the poet ought to remain concealed in order to avoid permeating the work with their own incognito bias, as though the poet never existed in the first place.

No one among the mundane sectors of your life was ever going to read this book, let alone bear its final objective. It is a testament of the night that shall not be brandished so openly in the light of day. This book will not be renowned or reprinted. Not a single poem will figure its placement in my lifetime among any traditional anthology or leading philosophy nor reassured beyond this centennial huddle of our readership browsing wherever the outlandish and outré or occult online oscillates. You may romantically plant it in the shelves of a used bookshop or dutifully do away with your curling copy on a table outdoors somewhere—it is most likely going to be trashed or perused by a member of the effete and budding majority whose integral indifference will fail to identify any of its finalised heredity with their conventional collective cause.

For the nucleus of imagination from which this book was composed seems tangible only by those who come to recognise the variable exigencies of death.

then all that darkness brings will fill the senses
as all inhale the void with swelling chests
and come to a resistless understanding
of mysteries concealed within the breast.

I am urged to write to you who are still listening that there are few other contemporary works darker in effectively baroque verse equalling Blake, Melville, and Milton known to me and that the ultimate address of its closing sequence by divided declaratory paragraphs may never be unlearned, by hook or by crook, only progressively dallied on and deluded from its criterion.

“the human species has awoken from the void that precedes all of history into the dream called self-awareness, only to find itself—an abnormality within a larger abnormality—attached to a tiny corner of an immeasurable vastness, condemned to dwell in isolation that precludes it from ever learning anything at all about itself.”