Astonishing, unique, endlessly fascinating.
In a Fahrenheit 451 world, The Age of Wire and String is my book.
Oh, how I relish every single sentence. Here's how Marcus the Ben begins:
"This book is a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and beyond, into the arrangements of states, sites, and cities and, further, within the small houses that have been granted erection or temporary placement on the perimeters of districts and river colonies."
Welcome to an alternate reality. Welcome to language hallucinating as magic theater. Welcome to an entire culture performing flips on a high wire without a net.
Wire and String - a catalog produced by a narrator I’ll call Marco. Marco appears to be a slightly confused recent arrival to this astounding age and culture where all is new to him, thus much of his descriptions tend to not only to be a tad jumbled but the age’s life and culture are filtered through the alembic of his own highly original, personalized language.
Wire and String contains a prologue and eight chapters with such headings as Sleep, God, Food, Animal. Since so much of the beauty of Marcus the Ben's book revolves around the exactitude of language, I'll zero in on one entry, Air Trance 16, by linking my comments to the five sentences that constitute this piece:
"If the motion of wind were to be slowed, as weather is slowed briefly when an animal is born, we would notice a man building and destroying his own house."
That's curious logic, Marco. Are you telling us in this land of strings and wires, an animal's birth causes a change in the weather, specifically a slowing of the wind? And such a slowing of the wind causes, in turn, a man to build a house only to destroy it? If so, we must drop our usual categories of reason and logic and open up to this stringy wire age following its own bizarre-o laws. By extension, applied to this novel, sounds like Marcus the Ben is asking us as readers to shift gears from our routine perceptions, to take seriously Marco's words in the prologue (Argument), where he notes "the outer gaze alters the inner thing, that by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire, that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed." In other words, gang, hang easy, dangle loose and let alternate reality take over.
"If we speak to the man through a dense rain, our speech is menaced by the DROWNING METHOD, and we appear to him to be people that are angry and shouting."
Ha! Ten years after Marcus the Ben wrote these words, he fired off his Harper's essay, a reply to Jonathan Franzen and other stiff, uptight self-appointed guardians of the conventional. Hey, Franzen, you're creating a dense rain, a DROWNING METHOD, so dense my books are reduced to little more than anger and shouting. No you don't buddy! Rather than running after popularity and fame, literary writers should be free to be inspired and enriched by the depth and texture of language and write in ways that expand a reader's horizons.
"If my father is the man we are looking at, he will shout back at me, protecting the house with his hand, and his voice will blend with whatever weather he has decided to create in the sky between us to form a small, hard animal, which, once inside me, will take slow measured strategic bites."
Sounds like a dose of the oedipal inserted into the mix. Beware the father power capable of changing the weather so a small, hard animal can form inside Marco (his skull? heart? gut? balls?), the critter methodically chomping away. Ouch!
“The animal’s eating project will produce in others the impression that I am kneeling, lying, or fading in an area of total rain, taking shelter behind my upraised hand.”
Not only does father cause the destruction of Marco but Marco is totally dehumanized, one pathetic, powerless dude in the eyes of others.
“Since they will be standing above me, the people will need to request special powers of vision, which will be immediately granted, in order that I appear in slow, original colors, viewed from any possible perspective, chewing with great care at my own body while the house gets smashed behind me.”
Echoes of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery transformed via alternate reality into a kaleidoscope of slow motion death complete with background of structures shattering and splintering pancake flat. Where's the wire and string when they're needed most?
Does this mean Mortality Marco? Fortunately not. After all, Air Trance 16 is catalogued under Sleep, as in sleep perchance to dream, even if his sleep takes place during the age of wiry string. Marco the fresh foreigner moves on to his next adventure and then composes a glossary of terms for the Sleep section (Marco provides a glossary for each of the eight sections). An example of one of the terms for Sleep:
JENNIFER The inability to see. Partial blindness in regard to hands. To jennifer is to feign blindness. The diseases resulting from these acts are called jennies.
In all, should we say The Age of Wire and String plays with satire, parody, dry humor, black humor, lampoonery, mockery, absurdity, insanity, foolery, all mixed together and served up as Saturday morning cartoon capers? We could but we will not.
More important to say The Age of Wire and String counts as a breathtaking tour de force of language and imagination. For, after all, as Marco Marcus Ben puts it: "I'll clean out the bird and put the hair in it so Monk, the dog, and the others who were smashed and put behind it can dress up again, and we can be on the hill and pour the weather bottle on one another."
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