This Dream Called Death - A review

A Review 

By Michael Willis

Peculiar....it seems as if I had it figured.

Having read just one-fifth of Stephen S. Janis', This Dream Called Death I actually thought I had comprehended the entire book a prior.

Yes, the story was well crafted, thoughtful, and unique. The plot too, was smart and complex.

But just a couple of dozen pages in it appeared the psychological issues that emerged to propel the narrative forward would ultimately be the author's  undoing.

This was heady material.

A story which presumes to incorporate and expose the natural flaws of a overbearing prison system, institutionalization, systemic marginalization, racism, classicism and corruption, all filtered through the metaphorical axiom of a city afraid to dream?

Seriously?

This was the reason I had This Dream... figured so early.  Because I have personally experienced all of these ills. And although I was impressed by the ease with which Janis formulated his characters and built the separate worlds of Balaise that would eventually collide, just one-fifth through This Dream Called Death and I began to wonder if Janis was up to the heavier challenge inherent to such powerful issues. I began to believe there was nothing new to offer here. Or was there?

One fifth-through This Dream....and I figured it to be just another white-liberal closeted superhero wet dream story in which the white knight does for the black community that which the black community cannot, is unable, or is unwilling to do for themselves. A story where the "pale savor" solves the immediate issue of the black community and, as if by magic, salvages the fading hope and faith of the blue collar peoples of a once great and soon it shall be again city. And to think, no one other than a white man could contribute to the cause. No one other than a white man possessed the necessary impetus, opportunity, strength of character, combined with spiritual and political acumen to the successful where the black community had been so terminally unsuccessful.

Truly, on fifth through, This Dream... and I was certain that I was reading another literary offering which embodied the White Knight Syndrome. You know, the antiquated psychological perspective that white is right...that while it better...tat it takes the white man to do what others cannot. Conversely and just as dangerous, "The White Knight" syndrome also subtly implies that black men, brown men, red men, and yellow men are weaker, less intelligent, and mostly secondary.

It's an offensive viewpoint, and any work exploring this perspective is inherently flawed from its inception. indeed just one-fifth through "This Dream..." and I was getting the feeling Janis had bitten off more than he could chew. I was beginning to believe there would be nothing contained in these pages which might add to the conversation surrounding the valid issues that this work was attempting to lend voice.

Just one-fifth through This Dream Called Death and I was both confused and offended.

There had to be something more here, something buried beyond the text and tone. What was I missing? What was Janis attempting to convey?

I wanted to know, so I set- aside my prejudice and cleared my mind. I allowed myself to become lost in the subtle, succinct flow of Janis' prose. I suspended my disbelief and warmed to the story. I opened myself to the plot and it was there, between the clam of mind and Janis' sleek, minimalist brush strokes that I found what had been missing. It was then, I was finally able to recognize the author's understated ability to deftly reveal situational complexities and emotional intensities with a single observation or an extended metaphor, that all of Janis' sparkling literary jewels came rising to the fore.

What emerged then was the ambitious imperative that was pushing Janis' pen. What emerged were the questions this book was intended to raise but not answer.

A journalist by trade, Janis stuck to the role of a reporter here in the most effective sense, by simply posing questions as a means to an uncertain end.  To shed light on that which is hidden, and to lend form to that which is obscured so that the reader can decide which side on which side of the line they reside.

It's done well here, with obvious respect for the reader's intelligence. And as I proceeded to read on, the metaphors of mind and subconscious as the real divide between rich and poor, black and white, the disenfranchised and dutiful shed light on what the main character, the seeming white knight was all about.  What came to light was the fact that he was an amalgamation of them all. I realized that the main character is the hero simply because he is the focus, the unpalatable lens through which all the psychic disquiet of the book flows naturally.

It is through him, not his skin color, that the story moves.  What gives the entire narrative credence is the fact that Janis chose a prism filled with flaws.  A character who is weaker than expected, and a character who is driven by self- preservation and little else to help save the day. The main is more Clark Kent than Superman and it is because of this that his successes and failures, his feelings of powerlessness and his ability to churn his way through the twist and turns of the story give the book a surprisingly universal appeal.

There were moments, despite my misgivings, where I felt true concern for the main during his journey of rude awakening.  As he grasps his own role in the subjugation of errant dreamers, in the mass incarceration of entire race of people, he experiences the consequences of institutional prejudice consummate with his cause.

This natural desperation and futility made This Dream more than just vaguely appealing to me. The flawed passage of the main made the novel compelling not simply because the main was broken in, getting a taste of what it's like to be on the so-called 'other side.'  No, it was appealing because in those moments, The Main was experiencing one of the most resonant fictive depictions of how it truly feels it be marginalized that I have ever read.  In this sense Janis was able to delineate how power really works, how the urban black male is actually parsed into something less than a whole,  how the moving parts of our excessive criminal justice system have coalesced into a contemporary 'final solution,' for the black male and his seemingly self-constructed social isolation.

It is through the main's failures that we understand it.  The transformation of his character by experiencing life on the other side that I also came to care about him and the story he was trying to tell.  Janis made the main character matter to me while disproving my first impression of the novel to be as wrong as the 'White Knight Syndrome.'

This Dream Called Death is a fine read.  It is subtle yet intellectually seductive.  It is both implausible and surreal, intricately designed to make a single metaphor evolve in a compelling web of social dysfunction and despair.  Janis has a lot to say in this novel, and much of it is revealed though emotional and psychic misdirection.

Thus my advice is to clear your mind before reading, or you just may miss the ambitious intent of  this book, a novel about the insights gained through failure, and how the power is premised on the misfortunes of the many.

Rent Court - Part One

Rent Court is an unfinished manuscript written by the Urban Surrealist, author of Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist.  The book is the second in a four part series of so-called Novelzines set in the city of Balaise. The third book, This Dream Called Death, has been published. 


By the Urban Surrealist

>>> Unedited transcript, deleted *** digital postmark 2.4 – (organic: rad)  707 BEGIN >>>

00:00:00:00    A singularity, hotly stimulated by the hands of God, explodes creating a deluge in the ongoing project of universes.

15 billion years later, at 7:55 a.m., I wake up late for rent court, in the city of Balaise, on the outskirts of the universe, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. I hit the shower, shave, and wash my hands.    Throw on an olive-drab sweater and check the mirror.  My hair is too long, I look like a drug addict.

At 8:01 a.m, I intercept the bus sneaking up Hillard street like a hypodermic snake.   Balaise looks naked, old and soft boned.  The aftermath of an air raid, every row house scooped out and spindly.  A hot mid-morning sun baked off the ozone. It smelled crisp and electric through the bus window.

An old woman, sitting in the next seat, rotates her flatulent brown eyes.  She is fat with flanks, light skinned peppered with moles.   Speaking out of the side of her mouth, she yells…gimme you’re fuckin transfer boy, or I’ll bust you in the head.  I realize, incidentally, that she is talking to me.

Rising like an animate sofa, she stands up as if to take it from me, looses her balance and falls down on the seat, and then quickly stands up again.   After a minute of heavy breathing, she stuffs a cigarette in her mouth, lights it, then yells…I need your fucking transfer boy, I need a transfer, are you listening to me… are you fucking hearing me boy, gimme you’re fucking transfer…I don’t answer, and after a while, my silence wins a stalemate.

Off the bus, I hit the 8 by 12 for coffee.  Inside the door, I slip on a bullet casing and fall on my ass, the cashier, a squat Arabic man with thalamic sideburns laughs. Looking up from the floor, I notice bullet holes that crisscross the storefront window.  Miniature pin points atop white halos that form a mysterious pattern like helixes woven together with potholes. 

I get up slowly, scanning the store for security cameras. At the coffee station, with a flick of the wrist, the sugar jar is upended, three hundred pounds of white powder flow into my cup.  The cashier says to me as I pay…what can I do, they shoot up my window every night…

At the South Avenue Courthouse: A cop wearing body armor leans against a wall.  Bomb sniffing dogs synchronize like a marching band.  Dropped my spare change in the plastic cup as ordered.  A muscle wrapped Sheriff with a mock crew cut looks me over, fingering the butt end of a Glock attached to his waist. I ask him WHERE’S rent court? He points to the sign:

                        RENT COURT – BASEMENT ROOM 317

Rent Court conviened in a cavernous white room at the end of long windowless hall.  The wide wood doors opened out into a basement chapel, packed like a bus station: screaming babies and toothless mommas sat in rows of plywood pews.

I peeled the recycled index card stapled to the back wall with my name and address written in red ink S. SAVAL, I East Flintier Street.  Stuffing the card in my shirt pocket, I look for a seat.  I spot my landlord sitting in a small coven of white people congregated toward the front of the courtroom. It is all the Landlords GROUPED TOGETHER, I know because they’re tan, bloated, and CALM.

As I situate myself in an empty row near the back of the courtroom, the bailiff calls out All rise. Up and down, our asses barely levitate an inch.   

The clerk of the court calls the case numbers out in rapid succession. If a defendant fails to materialize immediately the judge raises the gavel and declares judgement for plaintiff and repossession of property.

The first dozen or so cases end this way, docket numbers evaporate like clockwork.  The man sitting to my left is sucking on an oxygen tank that sounds like the slingshot wave of an approaching bullet.

Case number #7287, 1 East Flintier Street vs. S. Saval

Hearing my name, I jump up and walk towards the Defendants table.  Set back a few feet from the judge’s rostrum, a silver microphone is placed squarely in the middle. My landlord waddles ahead, trying to cut me off. She is plump-, old, and straight backed. The judge says

Defendants on the right, plaintiffs on the left…

A group of tenants sitting in the front speak; a half a dozen old black men sporting gray sideburns and vanishing hairlines.

Check out the hippie cracker…what’s up with him

Must be dope

Has to be

Gotta be dope

It better be dope…

Give him credit; he looks like he’s doing both…

 Before the Judge speaks, my Landlord starts talking. The old heads continue to speculate.

Must be coke, can’t spend that kind of money on dope

Naw, Crack

If he’ll admit it, I’ll call him a crack head to his face…

…I want my money and I want him out…

The judge, an overweight man with dark skin yawns. 

Your Response Mr. Saval…

(I cough)

I lost my stipend, from the University

(A quick influx of laughter, the judge rolls his eyes)

Well that’s to bad son, join the real world and find yourself a job …

Yes sir

He raised the gavel.  Clack.

Judgment for the plaintiff, $750 and re-possession of property

As I stepped back from the table, the handicappers sing in unison:

Dope, dope, it was dope…

Outside the courthouse, everything was similar and indigestible.  The hollow clicks of high speed parking meter, the men with guns on every corner, and the dense thickening of traffic.

God is a Purely Visual Goal

This essay was discovered among the personal affects of the yet to be identified "Urban Surrealist...author of the manuscript "Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist."  The essay is published on this blog as a virtual annotation of the book itself.  Additional materials selected from the Urban Surrealist's personal collection will be posted here on occasion as they become available. ed.



Virtual annotations from the novel Orange: the Diary of an Urban Surrealist

More information on Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist 


Part One: God is  Purely Visual Goal

God is a purely visual goal.  Meaning God is a purely symbolic idea, our visualization the infinite until now expressed usually in words.  Not unlike the concise expression of the same idea represented by the number eight drawn sideways, this "visual" notion of God permeates human consciousness as we strive to create the visual idea of the self.

The visual self is an abstraction, a picture of ourselves multiplied along the infinite continuum we imagine exists outside the boundaries of our bodies. The visual "God" is in a sense the opposite of this idea, existing in the form of an entire picture, or as the "medium" for exposition of our visualized selves. This visual self exists as a composite of our self-conscious "illustrations."  Memories that project the images and symbols of our visual self backwards, and forward in time.  But the visual God remains untouched by this interior subjectivity, instead existing merely as idea which is best characterized as "pre conceptually known."

In A Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaurd called this the "primitively organized self," what he characterized as our emotional predilection to comprehend without literally "knowing." Similarly in Mircea Eliade's Yoga a Yogin finds "Primordial Unity" as a "source of everything that wants to manifest itself." In I, Thou, Martin Buber explored the "Inborn Thou," that "instinctively expands to the universal."  All examples of an instinctual awareness of the limitless self expressed solely thought language.

Yet substitute the "visual" for literal expressions and this instinctual sense of an infinite other finds form.  The "primitively organized self" becomes a "visually organized self."  "Primordial Unity" is transformed into a "Primordial Vision." Similarly, the "Inborn Thou" is expressed as an "Inborn Picture."  This illustrates in one sense the paradox of language, but also the idea that God is language visualized.  A visual, perhaps holographic aspect of language that reflects the natural recombinant imperative of the human mind.

And as our minds are reconstituted toward the infinite visual goal, progress is measured not simply through ideation, but active construction of contexture...meaning boundaries, apportioning....

Religiosity is a process of forming boundaries on the limitless horizon of the mind, not virtual of course but liturgical. But religion is a different technology of consciousness. The "visualization" of infinity is as much about re-definition of both the boundaries and potential of the self as it is about comprehending the divine.

Arthur Kroker noted in his seminal CTHEORY interview that "the dominant form of consciousness in the world today is television (pg. 64).  Later he introduces the idea of the "televisual self"

"...Technology's great appeal is the fact that it allows you to get rid of your memories, to rid of your minds.  and in exchange it gives you in fact other memories, and many other minds and many other selves - our televisual selves...I view television now as the preliminary phase in preparing the masses of humanity for virtual reality." (pg. 64)

Thus as our visual self is engaged by a variety of technologies of consciousness, we become abstract ideas of which we are cognizant. Our visual self is duplicated and remaindered through mediums which are plausibly infinite...television, the internet...all encumbered by the screen. Thus the visual self find expression of perpetual reiteration in a continuum that is both limitless and bounded, a paradoxical state that assuages our mortal anxieties.