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Sunrise In Armageddon

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As an American boy growing up in France, we often encountered the great US jazz musicians strolling the boulevards or storming the cafes, and once my father pointed out the august figures of Thelonius Monk and Bud Powell sitting sipping cassis in a tiny patisserie in the French Quarter of Paris, unmolested and laughing to themselves, accompanied by a female journalist wearing a fawn colored riding coat and the oversized sunglasses of the period. Monk was widely respected in the metropolis of my childhood, and when I began reading SUNRISE IN ARMAGEDDON, I flashed back often to the layered interplay he offered in his classic interpretations of "Sweet and Lovely" seguing into "Off Minor." Will Alexander, noted as a surrealist poet, springs into the novel with the same assured, bewildering mountain goat grace his poetry has similarly displayed, and I'm surprised I seem to be the only commentator in all of Amazon-land who has dared take a crack at this unlikely masterpiece.

Perhaps it, his text, is too difficult, too abstruse? Too feminist? Alexander tells the story from the first person point of view of a contemporary American woman, perhaps called "Pandora," who has abandoned her husband and children for an itinerant journey into her own mind, while wandering the alleys and byways of bohemian San Francisco and searching for mystic connections among the wise of all countries and eras. I say "perhaps called Pandora," because she insists over and over that her name is a thing of the past, perhaps a denotation of slavery, or of the deadening feeling of being "property" when she was still married to the controlling, domineering and altogether reactionary Ransom--if that is his name, and not Pandora's allusion first to the notorious "New Critic" John Crowe Ransom, who would explain everything away under a sheen of white science, and then perhaps secondarily to C S Lewis' "hero" Ransom from his rightleaning "space trilogy" (OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET), honored by the Hrossa in outer space but a curiously repellent figure in his/our own world. Perhaps the three part structure of Alexander's novel (this volume is actually three novellas in one) owes something, even in savage re-writing and dismissal, to the Christian ethos of CS Lewis.

As her mind makes more connections, Pandora ignores Ransom and addresses her demon, possibly her own son, "Theophrastus," a spectacularly ugly monster whose father, the mythic giant Ochnotinos, raped her, drawn to her by her "intense ovarian fumes." Although Pandora has left her two daughters Acacia and Malika, to be raised by Ransom, the ugly son still exerts a strange demonic hold over her, one which she struggles to understand in book two. The son is something other than human, and ordinary human eyes can't even register him. Man, is he plain! "Your visage curious, your arms and legs liquescent and proto-human, your skin a sickly hue between albino and green, your pupils nearly red, your hair, faintly greenish in the sunlight." It's not easy trying to figure out how one was cursed with such an offspring, but the resultant "seethign discomfort has taught me to live beyond the repugnant ultimatum of material consuming, beyond its edges, where the human possibilities have been transcended."

Alexander's attractive, nearly gnostic line drawings decorate the text at appropriate turns. His heroine seems Olympian, careless, nearly cavalier, but she is sympathetic and she's no cardboard Ayn Rand superwoman. "If I commit myself," she admits, "to roving about a dialectical faultline, it is centrality that I crave, a form of reference which I seek to ingest." We all yearn for meaning in our lives, even if meaning is paraliterary, preterite. "Outwardly, I exist among the listless, amongst the depleted, but with an inward deciphering advantage, playing dice within a solitary grinding fire." Will Alexander, one of our very best poets, has turned his powers of obvervation, and his great knowledge of human nature, on to a flawed yet heroic leading figure, one about whom we know as much for what she is not, for what she has abjured, as for what she is becoming. "I am not a toneless figurine, sleeping in yellowed polar grasses," she pleads. If she has cancelled manifestation, opting out of dull sublunar reality, it is not because she has "mastered the problem of death . . . . that I've coded its memory to my own unique hesitation. No." That one "no" says it all, doesn't it? Like the larger than life heroines of Doris Lessing's GOLDEN NOTEBOOK and Toni Morrison's BELOVED, Pandora has wrested from a male-dominated hierarchical chemos a golden spar, direction the future. From that quest she will not stand down no matter what distraction.