On Listening to the Call: From “A Shadow in Yucatan” to “Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God”

Brian George

“I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in creation’s dawn.”—John Muir
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Philippa Rees has recently published a new edition of her book A Shadow in Yucatan. Many reviewers have already taken note of the near-hallucinatory verbal richness of this free verse novella, whose style contains echoes of such writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas, while, at the same time, remaining very vividly the author’s own. “The monocle of light, now focused, flames her hair,/ it lifts, it falls, it curves, it conceals…/ Her open nectar-mouth, now shaded, breathes.” Among her other activities, Philippa is a cellist, and this play of echoes within echoes is what you will often find in a piece of classical music, so that, in listening to Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony, for example, you can hear Haydn—the disjunctive trickster!—on one side and Stravinsky on the other, in what you had first assumed to be a kind of new and improved Mendelssohn. Yucatan could productively be read, several times over, with only such formal concerns in mind. I am coming somewhat belatedly to the book, however, after wrestling with Philippa’s magisterial opus Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God, and so I am going to approach it from a different angle. I hope to show how the challenges faced by Stephanie, the protagonist of A Shadow in Yucatan, recapitulate, on an intimate scale, the more supernatural ones faced by Philippa on a beach on the southernmost tip of Florida; at the same time, they prefigure Philippa’s decades-long struggle to give form to her vision. In one moment, prompted by an accident, the whole of a person’s life can change. If a question is posed, does this mean that one has to answer?

Pale Emperor In The Mirror

First, a confession. I feel uncomfortable reviewing Marilyn Manson's "The Pale Emperor." I mean, I'm thirty six, for christ's sake. Haven't we outgrown the shock rocker of the 90s, and the androgynous king of self indulgence that followed in the 00s, finally bottoming out in almost overnight, Robert Smithesque debauch that spurned on memes like:

Well. Haven't we all outgrown it? I think that's precisely the point. You get the sense throughout this album of a kind of dawning, bleary eyed sobriety. The album gets more raw as it goes. Seven days? Imagine waking up from a twenty year long binge. And your alter ego once took control of the airwaves, it took over your personal life, and only when that was smoking wreckage did you manage to take a look backward and see the alter ego staring back at you. And on the other hand is the ever immanent grave. Not the Halloween dress-up grave, but the one your friends bodies are starting to OD their way into.

"My dagger and swagger are useless in the face of the mirror when the mirror is made of my face."

I'm not saying that is Brian Warner's day to day life. I couldn't know, because I never met the guy. I'm reading into the narrative I've been given. That's also kind of the point. The "person" I have known over the years was the persona, "Marilyn Manson," not him. The schtick even got tired of itself. So boring, so predictable. The only option left was to try to come clean.

"Don't know if I cannot open up I been opened too much Double-crossed and glossed over in my pathos"

And that dawning self awareness is the conflict that seems to lurk beneath Pale Emperor, giving both the album's "sound", as well as the persona it presents, a serious identity complex. If you think I'm reading a bit too much into what is, even at its better moments, "still a Manson album for chrissakes," graveyard cliche and all... Well, maybe. But it isn't entirely baseless. The dichotomy has between Mr. Bates and Marilyn Manson have created some downright confusing and bizarre articles, such as the following from the New York Times, where he talks a bit about the difference between them,

"They began meeting in Mr. Bates’s home studio, even during daylight hours — a new experience for Marilyn Manson. “Because around 3 a.m. is when my brain starts going really” crazy, he said, using filthier language, “I used to think that that was the time that was best to record at. But I realized that I don’t have that anymore, if I get it out of me early. Daytime is more effective for me to function as a — ah, I wouldn’t say as a normal human being. I would just say as a more effective villain; a more effective, destroying, chaos element in the world. I think that’s what I’m here for.” Left untethered, Marilyn Manson will go on like this, proclaiming himself chaos incarnate and T.M.I.-ing his way through his life story. (“I tangent a lot,” he said, understating broadly.) “He circles the drain of an idea for quite a while,” Mr. Bates said. “But if you have the patience, you’ll see that he is making a point, that he is pretty funny and pretty smart at the same time. Sometimes he doesn’t make a point, but I found him to be interesting.” He also made it clear that there would be no wasting of studio time. “He realized that him walking in the room and being Marilyn Manson didn’t matter to me,” said Mr. Bates, a married father of two daughters, whose email auto-signature is “kindest regards.” For Marilyn Manson, the collaboration felt less like work than a conversation, he said. “I’ve never really had that sort of musical brotherhood in the same way,” he said. Mr. Bates also provided lyrical direction. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do this with you if it’s an angry manifesto,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘The only thing you have left is to inspire people with your words.’ ”" New York Times.

That's what middle age is these days, isn't it? The raging monster of your youth has hit a wall, but you're not quite ready to hang up the gloves yet, either. Maybe that's why I felt this album was worth reviewing, and the ironic way Manson has, at least for the passing moment, managed to make himself relevant again.

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Party At The World's End 2nd Edition

 "She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. She had Marilyn's enchanting haze, Hendrix's cool, Morrison's smoldering insanity, but the grave was still surely bare. Not that it mattered. Her face was burned into all our minds, forever young, the mantra of every generation's counter-culture. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.

They say, when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written."

Party At The World's End2nd Edition is Available NOW. 

(Print only, $11. eBook available but is 1st edition until next week.)

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