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Abraxas

by Adam Daly

There is more literary talent around than can be commercially processed. Recently Abraxas was overwhelmed by a hefty package containing the shorter pieces of Adam Daly from which we have selected extracts and, in order to set the context, added a summary of the author’s achievements and intentions. Adam, who presently works as a London tour-guide, is an exciting stylist, an evangelist of the apocalypse, a courier who will lead you into the darkness laughing. His terminally sane writings mix mayhem and metaphysics, absinthe and angst. In them the chaotic virility of the Great Fire blends with the putrescent magnanimity of the plague year. Their alluring scent of freshly stoked brimstone should prove irresistible to all mystical incendiarists and students of the void. Like Sartre, he is obsessed with ‘writing against, and for anyone desirous to acquire or publish his coercively persuasive, splendidly antagonistic prose, he can be contacted at 33 Farrans Court, Harrow, HA3 OAT, Middlesex – 0208 – 909 – 3894.

Adam Daly was born in London (1954) and an obsession with the city pervades nearly all of his writings. Most of his education took place in London and his experience of the city fed into his first novel The Nameless Revolutionary (700 pages) about a man who single-handedly takes on the whole of modern civilization and goes on the rampage throughout Europe and the rest of the world, returning to London and Hampstead in dialectical mode at the end.  In another early work The Outcast’s Burden, a group of crazed, supernaturally endowed outcasts converge on the City on Millenium Eve to stage “a somewhat more dramatic, not to say terminal, alternative to the damp squib of the River of Fire.” Presently he is trying to sell The Grimoires of Ham’stede in which Hampstead “is the setting for a magical metamorphosis at the hands of an anonymous Satanist who delivers himself to the Undead and then joins forces with the avatar of a black witch to replot the place’s spiritual essence.”

Future plans include two lengthy books, the first of which The Resurrection Men explores the basic contention “that the past and present are controlled from the future, the end of science being time-technology or the mechanics of re-directing time as the means of manipulating life and death, the implications for human destiny and identity being my principal concern within the context of a dystopian nightmare scenario in which the dead are resurrected and become indistinguishable from the living.” His second project will be Eye of the Abyss, a marathon prose-poem “exploring the nuances and resonances of Nietzsche’s saying about the Abyss staring back at those who stare into it.”

Adam aims to incorporate as much material as he can in his books, however diverse: “I am continually groping – and sometimes striving – across numerous territories to arrive at a statement which might never in the very nature of my projects ultimately become clear. I have no religious or moral or political axes to grind and much of what I write is literally off the top of my head. I believe in seizing the moment, creativity dictating craft.”

An Author in Search of a Voice

There is said to be this phenomenon called an authorial voice. Now if this is true, then I am not at all certain that I am able to recognise my own voice at all – be it fledgling or fashioned – in the process of creating or trying to create what I am sometimes arrogant enough, if only in a quiet way, to regard as literature. There are – I must admit – odd moments when I think that a certain sardonic or exuberant or wistful or zany or melancholic tone is in some way essentially or definitively characteristic of my style, and that style is substance, not some mere adornment of substance. And whereas I sometimes seem to hear echoes of an overwhelmingly grand, even Olympian voice in another author besides myself, which speaks volumes of true refinement and courage – nevertheless the ego of the author in question is still to a certain extent getting in the way of truth in its starkest, most awesome aspect. And I am torn between admiration for the apparently impregnable, impervious ego, standing nobly in defiance of the world, while issuing its fantastical fabrications and insurrectionary insights, and the existentially stripped, anonymous conduit of the deepest, darkest currents of intractable metaphysics coursing through the great Chain of Being. All the combined conundra of Philosophy and Psychology meet in this sinuous dialectical dichotomy – presaging the complete cessation of every last thread of continuing identity.

Get a Life

GET A LIFE. Get a life! What is it about this expression precisely that grabs my Capricorn so irresistibly. GET REAL exhausted my power of bilious invective long ago. I always dreamt of being a lord of the earth, but without title deeds or minions to serve my needs. I may have indulged a pipe-dream – but what a pipe, what a dream! Now it appears I must get the religion of getting real before I can get a life! Presuming to question the reality of the world – and the life of the world, which increasingly incorporates one’s own life as such – has now become the distinguishing mark of the irredeemably insane insurrectionists in the eyes of all agents operating in the realm of policed fantasy. In what then can the LIFE I am supposed to be in need of  GETTING consist? What is the wonderful landscape of missed opportunities and unmixed blessings rolling away out of sight – beyond the heathen hinterlands of eviscerated economies and strangled societies – that I am supposed to have wilfully blinded myself to from some unfathomable perversion? 

The Fin-de-Siecle Man

Decadence was the pure – or impure – by-product of the intoxicated imaginations of a handful of humanity. But this recognition does not simply dissolve the phenomenon. It was made real by acts of imagination whose lustre hung in high atmospheric pools like a densely dispersed purple cloud. There were vast riches and visionary depths in those luminously lugubrious pools - as well as all the velvety affectations and arcadian artifices. And there were firm classical foundations lying beneath all the aesthetic posturing and the spiritualization of the senses, signifying that the pre-eminent thrust of the entire movement was a profound reaction against modernity and emphatically not an abandoned embrace of modernity’s dawning recesses.  

The Man with Half a Head

Today a man with half a head passed me in a fleeting space. I only half saw him in the half-light in a half-instant, hurrying through some deserted courtyard off an alleyway leading to a minor road parallel to a major road, in this city of London where I have always lived. I am certain he wasn’t a ghost. He looked altogether too purposive and strangely substantial – in spite of the grey velocity of his shadow and the viper’s nest of spirits tailing him like a comet streaming from his neck. Everything about him was grey – like a carboniferous spectre. As I approached the courtyard, my head was turned briefly by his apparition in transit – flying from the rectum of one alley into the mouth of another. The back of his head had shelved away like the incline of a quarried hill, or the sliced plane of a steel shaft. He was manifestly human in profile, albeit vaguely grotesque like an etiolated version of Grendel. He was not present long enough for me to discover if I either possessed or required the courage of Beowulf. He had a cloudy indistinctness, on the verge of melting into the textures, contours and consistencies of the cosmos shaping his space. He was completely soundless, yet indicative of density and friction – the candle of a stricken consciousness burning his body down to a grisly, ashen form.

Coffinement

Some mistake was made unless I am truly a freak of nature. I awake to find myself trapped in a coffin – my coffin, no doubt. At least I assume I was not buried in somebody else’s. Clearly I wasn’t dead when I was buried. My recollection is cloudy due to the traumatizing effect of being cooped up in this small but thankfully unshrinking rectangular boxed space for God knows how long. I don’t recall having been ill or having suffered any fatal accident. I don’t imagine I would have taken my own life either. Nor can I have been murdered, for I have no enemies as such. I know it is possible to misdiagnose clinical death, but that is exceptionally rare. So – unless I have risen from the dead in a manner not envisaged by the authors of the four gospels - I have surely to conclude that I am confined as a result of some grotesque conspiracy perpetrated against me.

A Nice Class of Person

Arrogance is regarded with the greatest suspicion and contempt nowadays. It is considered the mark of a Fascist Dictator to manifest such a quality among people en masse. And yet it is completely misunderstood by all those who affect such hysteria concerning it. At one time arrogance was considered a sort of virtue, a mark of a person who was able to speak with authority on almost anything. Arrogant persons were looked up to by their more humble counterparts as being worthy of high regard and personal emulation. Arrogant persons ARROGATED to themselves the authority to pronounce on subjects by virtue of their superior intellect and erudition. They were not pompous - on the contrary, they scintillated with wit and sailed with the wind of their fearless pride. Everybody should have the chance of being arrogant, but unfortunately nobody is educated to become arrogant today – quite the reverse. I find this state of affairs increasingly intolerable, as if one has to keep silent for fear of breaking other people’s ear-drums with the frequency of one’s voice. Thus I have withdrawn into my tower without the ivory, my crumbling plaster garret – there to nurture and nourish my visions and diatribes, far away from the crude rejoinders of an over-populated Sartrean Hell.  

The Print Psychopath

Print was no longer an array of written words conveyed in some shape assimilable by the mind-categories of habitual reading. Print was a trace-signature embedded in phenomenal surfaces, snaking its passage through the elements bequeathing a trail of phantom-stigmata like ciphers of unknowable provenance. Words had become with him the marks left behind on the body of matter by energies moving it toward their own releasement into something else lying forever beyond it.

The Censor’s Ordeal

The Projector casts its final play of light and shadow on the sordid undercarriage of civilization as a room reveals itself entirely bare save for a bed on which a man and woman are indulging in what appears to be the most innocuous of all natural acts, a statement of simplicity itself, in which the mind alone supplies the significance and the dirt. Gradually the normal human features of the sexual pair undergo a subtle metamorphosis into satyr-like streaks of bestiality. Kirlean auras dislodge and dance above their heads like pseudopods or ectoplasmic sheets in a slick of soul-spillage. Their bodies twitch and heave with feline elasticity – glistening with gauze-like sweat, sprouting electrified hair. Their sounds acquire an animal urgency, erupting like pumice-daggers from volcanic bellies. The coital congress is neither purely natural, nor purely unnatural, a disturbing paradox for our friend. Beast, Man and God form a perplexing Trinity in which every species slithers in and out of its skin in realms where the secular-religious divide has long been synthesized and superceded. All the Ages of Man have been crunched up into one, like Einstein’s train crashing the barrier in a scrambled fugue of space-time. Censor that, if you can!