The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers is a follow up to his 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard, a point worth making since it is not mentioned anywhere on the dust jacket. The novel could stand on its own, but references or allusions to previous events would be lost, and the reader might suffer from a vague feeling that there’s a narrative abyss from whose ragged edge the story they’re being told begins. This is not the first time that Powers has gone back to stories which originally stood as single, self-contained novels. Earthquake Weather, from 1997, drew together the fantasies Last Call (1992) and Expiration Date (1995) into a grand, synthesising mythologisation of the history and landscapes of California and Las Vegas, combining their modern re-interpretations of Fisher King allegories and ghost stories into a complex whole. This revisiting of earlier material is indicative of Powers’ compulsive creation of grand mythological systems which incorporate historical events, rich and realistic depictions of place, rationalised manifestations of the supernatural and real-life characters lent appropriately legendary characteristics (Last Call features the ghost of Thomas Edison and Expiration Date the gangster Bugsy Siegel as the inheritor of the Fisher King’s crown).

The Stress of Her Regard (its title taken from lines in a Clark Ashton Smith poem, Sphinx and Medusa) weaves its intricate and complex mythological schema around the lives, travels and artistic vision of the English Romantic poets. At the granitic core of his invented, or recast mythology is the notion of a stony race of supernatural beings which predate organic life. They are the nephilim of Biblical legend, the ‘giants in the earth’ who were the pre-Adamic descendants of Lilith. Formed from the rocks of the earth, they can take the shape of inhuman mineral behemoths, ambulatory boulder masses, or even sentient mountains; when sluggish or sleeping, they can appear as statues (with shades of Steven Moffat’s weeping angels in Doctor Who); or they can splinter off and ‘marry’ a selected human being, becoming their doppelganger twin. They also take the form of semi-serpentine lamiae, and exert a mesmeric, transfixing influence over their spouses akin to the opiated addiction to a vivid dream world. This bewitching link is sustained by blood, and a lineage furthered by the rebirth of infected hosts as nephilitic ‘revenants’, variants on the classic vampire. Powers moulds his mythology to reflect, adumbrate and comment upon the various aspects of the Romantic worldview (and its Gothic offshoots), and to incorporate various of its artistic creations. The nephilim are partly comprised of Keats’ lamiae, partly of Polidori and Byron’s vampires, and numerous fragments of Romantic poetry and journal entries are quoted at the head of chapters, recast to make reference to the stony tribe. The notion of the Romantic sublime, found in its ultimate aspect in the inhuman scale of the Alpine peaks and crevasses, is given a new slant of awe and terror with the notion that those mineral masses might in some sense be sentient and exerting an influence on the overwhelmed observer.

Powers also provides a rationale for the air of tragic mortality which seemed to surround the Romantic poets. The nephilitic lamiae act as muses, bringing with them the incidental gift of transcendant artistic vision, an insight into an extra-human realm. But there is a terrible cost to pay. Whilst there is a genuine love between muse and often willing ‘victim’, the nephilim are jealous lovers, and wreak terrible, murderous violence upon any others who come too close to the affections of their chosen ones. He also incorporates rationalised variants of a whole panoply of Gothic devices. Indeed, the formative evening for modern Gothic horror, that storm-wracked night of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Geneva during which Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Lord Byron, John Polidori and Percy Shelley decided to tell each other tales of terror congruent with the turbulent darkness beyond the walls, is included as a scene-setting preface to the book. Splintered wooden stakes fired from rifles are effective against the stone creatures, as are iron spikes and silver bullets. Those who fall under the spell of the nephilim, and who open their veins for them, return as revenants themselves after death, no longer human but hybrid beings. They light on victims of their own, but must be invited in first, as with classic vampire lore. Polidori becomes one such, thus becoming the Vampyre of his own nephilim-fuelled imagination. Powers also manages to incorporate fragments of Norse and Greek mythology, hinting at some grand underlying synthesis. Allusion is made to the Greek tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the sole survivors of a great flood who repopulate the earth by casting stones behind them which sprout into human beings. The use of wooden stakes to slow the stone beast which emerges from the Swiss mountainside leads to a comparison with Balder the Beautiful in Norse mythology, killed with a dart made from mistletoe, with Byron likened to Loki, his assassin. This leads Byron to fumingly wonder ‘do all our most affecting legends, as well as our literature, derive from these devils?’ The Graiae, or Fates, also play a central role, taking on the form of the statures atop the pillars in St Michael’s Square in Venice (with the third lying below in the waters of the canal). The notion of their omniscient vision, which encompasses all time, conjures up modern notions of chance and quantum mechanical uncertainty. The attempts of Byron, Shelley and our protagonist (the unfortunately named, for the English reader, Michael Crawford) to prevent the re-awakening of the Graiae becomes a battle over the ontological status of reality, and of the theological state of free will, as well as a metaphor for the Romantic Poets’ opposition to dynastic tyranny (the occupation of Venice by the Hapsburg Empire in this case).

The narrative offers a grand tour of Romantic locales via Crawford’s fate-driven travels across Europe. Spanning the years 1816 t o1822, with a short epilogue in 1851, it moves from London to the Swiss Alps, Venice to Rome, Livorno to Portovenere on the North West coast of Italy. Along the way he meets Keats and Shelley (both of whose deaths he witnesses), Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, Dr Polidori, Byron, and his friend and companion in adventure Edward Trelawny. Powers clearly has extensive knowledge and understanding of the Romantic poets, and enjoys assimilating the events and legends of their lives into his story. He and his friend and fellow Californian writer have indeed co-created their own Romantic poet, William Ashbless, who first featured in Powers’ Victorian London-set novel The Anubis Gates. They have since written numerous Ashbless poems which lovingly pastiche the Romantic and Victorian styles. Ashbless even gets a mention in Hide Me Among the Graves, his name casually thrown in amongst a list of the great poets of the age with a modest acknowledgement of its lesser status. Algernon Swinburne is told that if he loses his connection with his bloody muse, he will no longer write with the visionary intensity he has lately been enjoying, at least ‘not like Byron and Shelley and Keats, who shared the affliction you’re now free to shed. But – like Tennyson or Ashbless, probably’.

Powers characters tend to be sorely tried, and to suffer injury and symbolic disfigurement or lameness in the course of their adventures. They also go through mental agonies, frequently suffering from anguish and guilt at some past failure or moral dereliction, whether real or perceived. In The Stress of Her Regard, Crawford loses his middle finger, and ages prematurely, and he is tortured by the sense that the death by drowning of his brother and of his wife in a fire were somehow brought about by his neglect or inaction. Josephine, initially his antagonist but later his companion, his lover and finally his wife, loses an eye (torn out in an echo of Biblical imprecations and Greek tales – the Fates again) and suffers throughout from tormented mental states and schizoid shifts in personality. There are elements of the precepts of Christian sacrifice here, and of the Fisher King mythos of the would which will not heal, and which is symbolically associated with the ruination of the land. The quest of the hero is thus not only a search for personal salvation, for the erasure of guilt or curse, but for the restoration of the broken world, of a lost wholeness.

Powers is, perhaps not incidentally, Christian himself (Catholic, to be specific, putting him in the noble lineage of writers of the fantastic such as GK Chesterton, Walter M Miller and Gene Wolfe). He and Blaylock were friends with Philip K Dick in his later years, with regular discussion circles held at his house. He turns up as a character named David in Dick’s late, pseudo-autobiographical tale of madness and the re-building of a fragile sanity, Valis. Valis, and the lengthy Exegesis which underlay it, was Dick’s own attempt at the construction of a universal mythological system (analogous in his case to a Gnostic religious variant) to give meaning to his chaotic and damaged life and the violence and tyranny in the world around him. At this point it’s not clear to what extent he believed in the actuality of what he was writing, an ambiguity which he addresses by splitting his autobiographical persona into two characters, Phil Dick and Horselover Fat, who turn out to be the schizoid halves of the same person. Powers, in the guise of David, offers the fractured Dick protagonists a kindly perspective on the universe, which he sees as essentially benevolent despite its apparent cruelties, guided by a compassionate underlying presence which manifests itself through the generosity of human spirit. The protagonists of Powers’ novels, for all their anguish and suffering (and perhaps partially through them), generally find this to be true, and the author shows the same generosity towards them as he did towards the ailing and sometimes unbalanced Dick. There’s an essentially kindness at the heart of his work which transcends the travails he puts his characters through. The punishments they endure are often exacerbated by their strong sense of moral purpose, their refusal to give up their quest or mission despite all the temptations laid in their path, or to abandon their companions, or even apparent enemies, to their fate. Indeed, it is a characteristic of Powers’ novels that enemies can become allies, or even friends, joining forces to stand against inhuman or demonic powers.

Hide Me Among the Graves (the title deriving from one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal’s little known poems, At Last) takes place some forty years after the events of The Stress of Her Regard, and features John Crawford, the son of Michael and Josephine, whom they named after John Keats. We briefly met him as a thirty year old man in that novel’s coda, as his aging parents told him their remarkable tale in the place where it all began. He has followed in his father’s medical footsteps, although choosing rather to minister to animals as a veterinarian. Where The Stress of Her Regard moved between a succession of colourful continental locales, the later novel remains firmly rooted in a vividly imagined Victorian London, whose geography is expertly laid out. The three main sections take place in the years 1862, 1869 and 1877, with a prologue taking us back to 1845, and an epilogue forward to 1882. The Romantic poets have now been replaced by Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetics, with a cast centred around the Rossetti family: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, and their siblings Maria and William; and Dante’s friend and sometime housemate, the wild-haired and hearted poet and rakehell Algernon Swinburne. The nephilim are reawakened through Christine’s christening of the diminished stone statuette which Polidori has become, and which her father has brought back from Europe, with blood. Trelawny returns, grizzled with his adventures in Italy and Greece with the late Lord Byron, and reported piratical escapades. He has had his own brushes with the nephilim, and now has one of their dormant ‘eggs’ lodged as a growth in his neck (Powers had used the idea of gallstones as nephilim eggs in The Stress of Her Regard). He also carries part of Shelley’s jawbone as a talisman, having been present at his shoreline cremation following his drowning in the seas of Livorno (drowning being one way of escaping from the attentions of the stone lamiae and avoiding a terrible rebirth).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - self-portrait 1870

A difficult and oft-thwarted romance between damaged and initially ill-suited protagonists is once more at the heart of the story. John Crawford overcomes his initial Victorian gentleman’s shock at the forthrightness of Adelaide McKee (to whom he refers with a businesslike ‘McKee’ for most of the novel), the ‘fallen woman’ who enters his life on Blackfriars Bridge, and with whom he takes a plunge into the Thames after a plummeting ‘meteor’ (a jealous nephilim in pure mineral form) roars down on them from the London skies. Powers introduces further mythological lore and local legend to his Romantic portrayal of a Dickensian, gaslit city. There is the paying of coins to the road sweeper at the Seven Dials junction, who hands them back and replaces his broom to allow for a ‘blind’ passage, free of the supernatural vision of nearby watchers. The Thames is re-imagined as a fogbound medium for ghosts caught in an afterlife limbo, flopping about as devolved, fishlike blobs. There is a thriving ‘hail Mary’ trade, in which Adelaide is involved, involving the use of ‘aves’, or birds to catch the souls of the recently departed and allow for a limited form of communication. And the nursery rhyme vocalisation of the sounds of London’s church bells (oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements etc.) are revealed as mnemonics for the ancient Latin passwords (oranges and lemons representing Origo lemurum) required to pass safely down neighbouring wells and into London’s labyrinthine underworld. This underworld, a city beneath the city, is depicted with chill imaginative detail, and we gain the sense that the subterraenean territories which John and Adelaide stumble into are just the edge of a vast, lightless subworld. Powers’ London is a layered city, whose historical strata are still open to the excavations of the adventurous or foolhardy archaeological adventurer. The gateways to the labyrinths of hidden London can be found in the most unprepossessing of places, such as the basement of the ramshackle spit and sawdust Spotted Dog pub. Powers brings the mythological matter of Britain into play, casting Gog and Magog as giants of the stone race, Albion personified, with Boadicea as their nephilitic offspring, intent on making England shake and razing London to the ground once more, as she did in revenge for the defilement of herself and her daughters by the Roman invader.

There’s also a scene in which John and Adelaide gain entrance into what appears to be the interior of a giant stone skull (the inside of Gog or Magog’s skull?) by inching their way along a narrow crawl space beneath a tomb in Highgate Cemetery, with no possible of turning around. It’s a passage which rivals Colin and Susan’s crawl through the constricting cave tunnel beneath Alderley Edge in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Bringamen for clammy, airless claustrophobia. Highgate Cemetery, the locus of Victorian gothic in London, is a natural locale for the novel to spend time in. Powers cleverly incorporates Rossetti’s disinterment of his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s body from the cemetery into his narrative, giving him a better purpose for such desecration. According to legend, Rossetti had buried his notebook with all his poems in it with Lizzie’s body. He later came to regret this, and managed, some seven years later, to again permission to dig up the coffin and retrieve them. Lizzie was reported to be perfectly preserved, a strand of her red hair coming away with the book. Here, that preservation is explained by the immortality granted by marriage to the nephilim (she is not dead, but merely sleepeth), and the disinterment is an attempt to prevent the birth of an unnatural offspring, conceived before her death. Rossetti’s determination to recover his notebook is also rationalised, his foreswearing of his own destructive ‘muse’ resulting in a dying down of the fever of artistic inspiration in his blood, and the subsequent need to find the words he’d written while it still raged. Powers plays games with autobiographical detail, reflecting on Rossetti’s concentration on poetry rather than art for a period in his life. He similarly offers a metaphorical depiction of the waning of Christina Rossetti’s creative powers, or of her will to write further in later years, a melancholy acknowledgement of the diminishing of the sense of burning, youthful purpose.

Quiet heroism - William Rossetti

As in The Stress of her Regard, the stone muses are shown to be harsh mistresses or masters, the creation of visionary poetry or art through their aegis an exacting and spirit-sapping calling, inviting an attendant train of tragic event which can in its turn be transformed into artistic expression. William Rossetti, the more stable and staid male member of the clan, who tirelessly promoted the work of his brother and his fellow artists, and who ended up chronicling their lives (in the mid-century PRB Journal and in his 1906 volume Some Reminiscences), is offered a vision of the library of great poetic works he could create if he opened himself up to a nephilitic lover (thus allowing the Polidori creature to re-establish itself). But he knows the price he and others would have to pay, a resists this heady temptation, sadly resigning himself to an acceptance of his lesser literary talents. This refusal is an oddly heroic moment, a sacrifice of a secretly held dream, and an unseen act of will which saves others by retreating to the shadows of insignificant obscurity. Once more, Powers allows his characters such moments of quiet heroism, choices made which result in sacrificial suffering for the sake of others whom they may not even know that well. Such gestures are eventually repaid, though. There is a sentimental but touching and quite beautiful scene in which John, having been infected by a nephilim bite, and knowing that his will shall shortly be affected, throws himself into the Thames once more to cast off the malign influence with his dying breath. But having reached that final moment, he finds himself being gently nudged to the surface by many furry forms – they are the blind and lame cats which he has cared for in his house over the years, which have joined the river of ghosts. Later, lost in the underworld and pursued by hungry ghosts, he is again aided by animal spirits, this time of the horses he has treated in his surgery. These scenes extend the generosity of Powers’ world view beyond the human, and typify his benevolent take on the universe. It’s a hard path which his characters are forced to take, but in the end, love sees them through.

Jodorowsky's Dune - The Ideal Film

I stepped on to the train last week and travelled along the edge of sea and estuary, skirting the boundaries of moorland and threading through verdant hills until we entered we entered the concrete city. In short, I took a day trip to Plymouth, a place where the weather forecast seems stuck to a permanent prediction that it will be ‘partly cloudy’, as if the all-pervasive greyness of the post-war development is refracted back into the sky. The object of my journey was the exhibition which centred around the production designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s swiftly abandoned Dune project. It was subtitled ‘an exhibition of a film of a book that never was’, a circumlocuitous way of including Frank Herbert’s novel in the equation. Indeed, ther was a shelf upon which the novel was to be found in all the varying colours of its paperback publishing history. The exhibition was displayed in an arts centre housed in a small row of old and rather rickety half-timbered buildings of some vintage at the end of a quiet terraced street which leads you to a very busy road and the rather unlovely surrounds of the bus station. Beyond this is a completely inaccessible traffic island about which a stream of traffic constantly circulates, and on which the ruins of a bombed out church are stranded. It serves as a perfect metaphor for the post-war development of the city. There is a sense that the terraced street into which the arts centre has been inserted marks some sort of frontier, or interzone, between old and new. It’s both on the edge of the new city, and off at an angle from the old Barbican dockside area. It’s a small pocket of the old everyday city which was somehow missed by the Luftwaffe, who otherwise did such a thorough job of levelling everything in their sites. Given their peripheral location, the arts centre is probably doing a good job in preserving these houses, which might otherwise fall to rack and ruin. It’s a rather incongruous setting for an exhibition which offers the dreams of advanced technology and interplanetary travel that are central to space opera.

Jodorowsky talks of his ideas for a film of Dune in terms of his own mystically inclined worldview, which had been expounded with varying degrees of clarity in El Topo and The Holy Mountain. The exhibition notes quote him as saying “there is a Hebraic legend which says: ‘the Messiah will not be a man but a day: the day when all human beings will be illuminated’. Kabbalists speak about a cosmic consciousness, a species of meta-Universe. And this for me was what the Dune project was”. The modern artists in this exhibition follow this mystical interpretation rather than the more conventional Ruritanian tale set against a Lawrence of Arabia backdrop which lies beneath the science fiction exoticism of Herbert’s novel. The three artists who Jodorowsky recruited to work with him, Chris Foss, HR Giger and Moebius, essentially do their own thing.

HR Giger - Harkonnen Castle

HR Giger seems to do little to adapt his style to the material at hand. Perhaps Jodorowsky hired him because he felt that this style would fit in with his own ideas of the look of the planet of Arrakis and its architecture. I’m not sure that Giger’s obsessively reiterated biomorphic forms are appropriate in this context. They are more suited to portraying the dessicated remains of a civilisation (or the husks of its inhabitants) rather than one which is in full, if decadent, flower. They were perfect for Alien, therefore. On the other hand, with a little subsequent redrawing, they could have suggested structures shaped by sandblown centuries, buildings with the bones showing through. Giger’s Harkonnen Castle is essentially a huge statue of its inhabitant, as if it had accreted around his recumbent form. It squats like a huge and bloated Buddha, gaping outlets like the mouths of shells allowing for the expulsion of vast quantities of waste. If this is a rounded and feminine form, for all that it’s moulded around its male inhabitant, then Giger’s staircase is aggressively phallic. Swords thrust out from either side to lend each step of the way a menacing air of threat and impending violence. This is further displayed in his skull fronted train (an odd design choice for a public transport system) which seems made for high speed collisions.

Chris Foss - Spice Container

Chris Foss’ Spice Ship is a very feminine form, its great, transparent belly pregnant with the billowing clouds of blue spice. The Emperor’s Artificial Planet and The Emperor’s Palace reflect the symmetrical polygonal forms of the Pythagorean solids, which were held by Pythagoras, Plato and their followers to represent a mathematical purity which provided the underlying structure and ordered harmony of the universe. These geometrical forms stand in opposition to the more natural, rounded forms, and together they embody the forces of order and chaos, the manufactured and the naturally evolved. A geometrical form hewn from stone which falls short of the perfection of the Pythagorean solids features amongst the objects in Albrecht Durer’s print Melancolia. It represents one of the ways in which the mind can become weighed down. Abstract notions of ideal forms don’t necessarily help when struggling with human imperfections in the chaotic flux of the world of coarse matter. The prints of Chris Foss’ characteristic and vividly coloured spaceships, which graced many a Panther SF paperback in the 70s, have sketches in the borders at the bottom which depict technologised landscapes (spaceports and mesas), setting the scene for the interplanetary civilisation whose vehicles he has imagined. Moebius’ costume designs were seen only within a supplement taken from a copy of the French comic, or bands desinees, magazine Metal Hurlant (known over here as Heavy Metal), which was laid out sequentially on a low table, covered with Perspex. My grasp of French is somewhat basic, and certainly insufficient to warrant bending down to read at length. Moebius’ costumes looked colourful and exotic, with a customary liking for the bulbous, and were once again recognisably in his characteristic style. If the film, as Jodorowsky had envisaged it, had kept true to the designs of these three artists, it would have emerged as a strange, hybrid creature, a patchwork cockatrice of a beast.

The works produced by the three artists inspired by Jodorowsky and his collaborators’ ideas for Dune were scattered through three rooms on three levels of the arts centre. In the basement, you come face to face with a silver metallic mask draped, made by American artist Steven Claydon, which has a wild sprouting of raffia-like hair, resembling either the matted locks of a sadhu, or the untamed split ends of a hippie in the Jerry Garcia mould. This disconcerting visage could be the death mask of a prophet, or that of a deranged killer. The uncertainty of its provenance reminds us that the abandonment of rationality in favour of mysticism, which was a marked tendency in the era of the 60s and early 70s, can open the door for charismatic psychopaths (Charles Manson being the emblematic example) whose ravings are accepted as profound insights by minds which have been exhorted to abandon ego and reject ingrained pattern of thinking. In turning away from the established systems of belief and figures of authority, many sought alternative sources, and there were plenty who were happy to take on a messianic mantle and provide them with the wisdom which their instant enlightenment had granted them. Science fiction played its part, providing material which was thrown into the general collage of voguish ideas, alongside ill-digested eastern religions and half-baked occultism. The novels which became cult accoutrements for the counter-culture tended towards the fascistic, Robert A Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land being a good example. Ideas of evolutionary advancement towards higher forms reinforced the idea amongst many that there was something innately special about them, that they were set apart from the wider society, which remained stubbornly unenlightened. Such views were embodied in Jefferson Airplane’s song Crown of Creation, which lifts whole chunks of its lyrics verbatim from John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids.

There are aspects of Jodorowsky’s films which are visually striking and which show evidence of a powerful imagination at work. But they seem to be a product of that self-absorbed mysticism of the time, which turned inwards and became detached from the world and, in that detachment, came to consider itself superior to or beyond its concerns. The films toy with religious iconography and sententious symbolism, but there never seems to be any overall coherence. Although perhaps Jodorowsky would argue that the lack of coherence was a way to jolt the mind from prefixed patterns of thinking and seeing. The enthusiasm with which they were received in some quarters (and Holy Mountain was funded due to the enthusiastic support of John Lennon) may simply be the dope-addled mind’s enjoyment of weirdness for its own sake. To convey mystical insight, clarity is needed above all, but here, any illumination tends to get lost in a mist of obfuscation. Exhibition curator Tom Morton wonders whether Jodorowsky’s film of Dune, had it been realised, would have marked a new direction for cinematic SF. It might rather have appeared as a singular grand folly, marking the last sunset days of a dying era. The failure to get beyond the preliminary sketch stage is in itself an indication that those last days were in fact already gone, the shadows of dusk having crept up unnoticed.

Claydon’s mask, which could represent Jodorowsky the mad magician, has eyes which are bulging out on spiralling tubular protuberances. They are like the fixtures of screw-top lightbulbs, the bulbs themselves, we can imagine, lodged behind the eye sockets, producing a dazzling flood of inward illumination. The face itself is peppered with pinprick holes, through which this inner light would leak back out into the world in pointillistic beams. On the opposite wall, Claydon has hung a bifurcated print of the writer Somerset Maugham. I have absolutely no idea why he has done this, and it frankly meant nothing to me (I didn’t even realise it was Somerset Maugham at the time). Perhaps Maugham’s supercilious, disdainful gaze is supposed to represent the attitude of the literary (and artistic) establishment towards science fiction. Or it may be a simple facing off on the gallery walls between an aloof and coolly balanced view of art, and the wild-eyed and wholly unbalanced outlook of the mask; The old opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The mask’s three dimensionality, together with the fact Maugham’s portrait has been sliced in half, suggests that the latter is definitely in the ascendant here.

French artist Vidya Gastaldon seems to have chosen, and perhaps wisely, not to read all of Herbert’s novel, but to select passages at random with the use of the I-Ching on which to base her works. The use of the I-Ching would be particularly apposite had she be choosing passages from the novels of Philip K Dick, given his personal use of the oracle and his incorporation of its interweaving of chance and order into the alternate world of The Man in the High Castle. Gastaldon includes the extracts from the book which she has chanced upon (or been guided towards?) in her pictures, etched in pencil, and the words provide a contextual anchor for the swirling watercolour landscapes which surround them. They also provide the titles for the paintings. The quote ‘what senses do we lack that we cannot hear another world around us’ is inscribed to the side of a landscape which is being engulfed in an all-pervasive sandstorm. An ear has formed within the sand clouds and eyes have flowered on stalks below. The desert possesses its own godlike sentience, watching over and listening in to whatever is occurring within its boundaries. Another picture has eyes floating in the sky, an image which has further resonance Philip K Dick’s work, notably his novel Eye In The Sky. Gastaldon paints the desert in psychedelicised colours - bright oranges, yellows and reds (vermillion sands). In The Lasting Conquest of the Night, her sandworms billow like clouds, soft and bulbous forms with large, bassett-hound eyes. They seem more playful than threatening. They are feminine forms, rounded and non-angular, which spew out Pythagorean polygonal solids in their wake. In another picture, these worms, which she manages to make utterly unphallic, become more aggressive, having developed a ring of sharp, bared vagina dentate. The landscapes are semi-animate, the lines of distinction between flora and fauna, sand and sky blurred and indeterminate.

Vidya Gastaldon - I Must Not Fear Death

British artist Matthew Day Jackson’s To Infinity…is found upstairs an makes for an immediately arresting encounter (you can see it at the head of this post). A golden skeleton hangs from the wall, topped with a black ebony-like skull. To the right, a progression of skulls traces an evolutionary sequence, the curve of the brain pan becoming ever more geometrical, its surfaces smoothing out into regular, flat planes until finally the eye sockets, which have transformed into a kind of visor, disappear altogether and we are left with a black pyramid. This is the tetrahedron, the simplest and therefore purest of the Pythagorean polygonal solids. One face is sprinkled with gold paint, which resembles a star field against the black background, and there is a small circle of pearl embedded in its midst, like a milky planet. The skull, now with no doors of perception, contains the mind which is in itself sufficient to encompass the universe. It is a progression which neatly summarises the mystical version of Dune which Jodorowsky envisaged. The skull imagines the development of a perception of the universe in its ideal form, beyond the limited, indirect vision offered by the senses. It is the form in which Jodorowsky’s film remains.