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Praise For "I have finished a second reading of The Mummery Book and find it even more remarkable and moving. It is obviously a book with many levels: an apparently naïve level of narrative and poetic invention concerning Raymond, Quandra and his friends, inventions, followers and betrayers; an allegorical level that concerning coincidence of opposites, gender, and romantic love; a confessional level that seems to some extent private or esoteric, that concerns the education of a soul through a kind of platonic anamnesis; and a revelatory level (subsuming all other levels) concerning the nature of consciousness and how it is continually lost in the ongoing "mummery" of ego-constructed existence. This comprehensive level begins and ends as a confession of divine identification. "I cannot pretend to understand it all. The richness of thought and the play of fictions within fictions makes it difficult or impossible to establish a ground of the "real" and the "metaphorical." This seems intended to show us that there is no way of clinging to The Mummery Book: it is rather "like a Sea-shell, Left, by Me, for you to Find and Keep". It should be used as a means of realization—according to its metaphoric seashell whorls and challenges to the mummery-consciousness of narcissus. It is in this sense that I see the parable as "postmodern"—it undermines the mimetic or representational authority that western tradition has granted to linear "realism" and its co-artifact, the ego. "The whole of postmodernist thought and practice knows nothing of what this book is concerned with. Still stuck in existential and absurdist interpretations of the "death of God" and the "transcendental signifier," postmodernists look lugubrious as they detail the various "mummeries": reality, history, the self, gender, because they have no idea that seeing through, if only in theory, the "constructions" of language and desire, could become an ecstatic realization, cosmic consciousness, bodhi. Indeed, I would say that many would look upon these things as suspiciously "apolitical" diversions. Postmodern narratives tend to feature either steely ironies in response to the loss of faith in society (the mummer's world) or to pick up political agendas for the redistribution of the mummer's costumes and routines. "I mentioned Stein and Cummings as stylistic parallels to The Mummery Book. Now it seems more Joycean to me: the story of Raymond Darling, in its lucid colors and fabulous imagery, reminds me of the short episodes in Finnegan's Wake where Joyce demonstrates, in every way possible, the interpenetration of opposites, and the cyclical manifestations of "selves" throughout human history. The Joycean link is furthered when one considers the ways in which the text works with dreams, plays, music, poetry, stories within stories, plays on words, etc. Indeed, the central stylistic achievement of The Mummery Book seems to be its undoing of the mummery of words: words ordinarily are deployed in books as serious and loyal ants, carrying their load of sense to their destinations. Adi Da's poetic inventions make words crackle and swoon, pound and soothe with suggestion and insistence." —PHILIP KUBERSKI, PH.D. |
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