John Crowley's Endless Things1, the final book in the AEgypt series was also released by Small Beer Press, and advertised in Conjunctions. Characters and times and places move in and out through each other fluidly. It considers questions about how worlds are made, whether stories about history can actually change history and our thoughts can influence reality. The world is alive, and we see ourselves in the mirror of it and it sees itself in the mirror of us. Within everything is the same soul, manifesting in different forms. The Archons created the world by dividing themselves up into it. The book includes historical characters like John Dee, thus dipping even further into the realms of Lucidity.
Interfiction: A Journal of Interstitial Writing2, edited by Delia Sherman and Therdora Goss is published by the Interstitial Arts Foundation and distributed by Small Beer Press. These are stories that are at least subtly outside of any literary conventions; unique anthologies playing in between genres consistently have been the home for Lucid Fiction. This one has some stories that strongly epitomize Lucid Fiction as writing that explores the very nature of consciousness and reality and humanity, looking at the illusions people normally take for granted as truth. The stories acknowledge the interconnectedness of all things in all times, and the fact that things themselves are ephemeral dreams.
"Black Feather" (page 66 of Interfiction) by K. Tempest Bradford plays with time and causality, signs from nature such as ravens dropping their feathers in response to questions, the importance of communications from the dream world, Druidic initiation rituals, hypnotic regressions, and the subconscious effects of the past on our present behavior. The story takes psychic abilities seriously, as well as the magical communications through Tarot decks. It includes the completely different perspectives on one event which come from every direction of thought. It remains a piece of postmodernist literary experimentation rather than being in the fantasy genre, the different perspectives talking back and forth to each other.
"Emblemata (reciting the Heart Sutra)," by Lea Silhol, takes place in Afganhistan of 1931. The narrator climbs a Buddhist statue in the midst of the land of the Muslims who tend to tar and feather them and begins drawing them. A wise, mysterious man appears and leads him into the depths of consciousness. The man says, within his story, ""I never had anything. Not even myself. No eye, no ear, no nose or tongue. No body. No self. No form. He told me that to travel to emptiness, one must start out from form." (page 228). He shows the narrator plaster medallions that are commonly found in the dirt there, which are images of Dionysus and other deities. One conqueror after another has come into that land and effected it. The mystery man addresses the issue of the narrator's drawings: "You're uselessly trying to immortalize a particular form. You want to seize it, comprehend it. But form doesn't exist and you can't draw emptiness. . . Those who experience its truth suffer, because it's terrible to accept that everything around us, everything that causes all our joys and sorrows, is illusion." (page 230) He lectures about how everything is really void, and our lives are made of impermanence.
"When It Rains, You'd Better Get Out of Ulga," by Adrian Ferrero, begins by describing how any action we do anywhere affects other things in the continuum. Small movements such as honey swirling in a glass can also predict the future. A stranger shows up in the watery land of Ulga. The sentences of the story often are contradictory of themselves, manifesting and non-manifesting within the recitation. "Everything that runs towards someplace and comes from someplace else: this murmuring has something to say." (page 243). And the stranger listens to its messages. The water that formed Ulga contains within it all that it has passed through and carries with it, and it comes and goes in waves upon itself, hails back to the past and to the future, and along it run trails with no beginning or ending.
FC2, a publisher of innovative fiction books, also advertises in Conjunctions. The Bruise3, by Magdalena Zurawski, won their last award, the 2006 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. This novel delves into the complex, interwoven, and indeterminate relationship of the dream and waking. Writing about dreams seems and their complex relationship to waking seems to be the most common theme in the Lucid Fiction I found in these new releases. From The Bruise:
"Though I thought that I was awake, thought that I was not asleep, I had, in actuality, I think, at least part of the time, been asleep, and in my sleep she visited me. She must have visited me. She must have been the dream. But you see, I could not know as I slept that I was actually sleeping because as I slept, I dreamt that I was awake."
FC2's new Like Blood in Water4, by Yuriy Tarnawsky, is Lucid Fiction in that it delves deeply into the subconscious, and dreams and reality are really indistinguishable. It is almost a joke that some sections are labels dreams, as the events that occur outside of the dreams are just as dreamlike.
The work I'm most interested in promoting with my series of Lucid Fiction essays is experimental in its use of structures and motifs to push beyond the foundations that hold the traditional way of looking at the world in place. I would particularly like to see more fiction that breaks apart the stranglehold of the ruthless insistence on characters that adhere to ordinary ideas of what people are, and especially, the formulaic requirement for plot based on conflict, duality, problems that must be solved by the end. I want to see literature keep up with the new paradigm based on quantum physics and developments in biology that show that we are indeed exchanging consciousness with even plants and cells and water even beyond our immediate contact. I like to see neo-Tantric influenced literature that explores the exchanges through the nodal points and vortices.5
I'd like to see literature that rushes through the liminal boundaries between parts of the self, between everything in the world, and goes beyond the Maya, or the illusion that the world is made of discrete entities. It tends to extend to the brain wave frequencies beyond the beta, which holds within it the more separatist viewpoint, compared to the more dreamlike and visionary lower brainwave frequencies which are cultivated or described more within Lucid Fiction. Those controlling the illusions that hold mainstream society in place may find the clarity of those slower brainwave levels a bit threatening, as it is so revealing. So Lucid Fiction is a kind of exposure, a revolution, a wake up call.
Notes:
1 Endless Things, by John Crowley, Small Beer Press, Easthampton, MA, 2007
2 Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, Interstitial Arts Foundation, Boston, 2007
3 The Bruise, by Magdalena Zurawski, FC2, The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 2007
4 Like Blood in Water, FC2, The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, 2007
5 See http://www.positivehealth.com/article-view.php?articleid=230, http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/sound/U11L4c.html, and http://www.adishakti.org/subtle_system/nadis.htm
Tantra is a widely published artist, and writer, and is sometimes featured as both, such as in Southern Hum Magazine, Mannequin Envy, and Global Inner Visions. Her art show, "Reality Burn!", has been touring Spain for years. She is the Art Director of www.madhattersreview.com. She lives in San Francisco. She has many art sites, such as LucidPlay and http://lucidvision.mosaicglobe.com/, and a writing site, www.freewebs.com/tantrabensko.