Adventures In Immediate Irreality Read Online Free

alive, ineffably alive.”
    One rainy day the vagabond hero wanders to the edge of town, where he succumbs to the
glistening mire of the wasteland. He steps into the slime, plunges his hands into
the muck, smears mud in his hair, on his face, with no care for his clothes. It’s an
intoxicating rush but that soon becomes a bitter disgrace when the glistening dries
on his body as mere cold filth. The usual disgrace when, after the act of incest,
the things quit the body so abruptly and return to themselves. “Such is what I had
to struggle with, what implacably opposed me: the ordinary look of things.” And “the
world was so limited by its petty passion for precision.”
    In Blecher’s book the word
KNOWLEDGE

appears in italics. And this
KNOWLEDGE
is not achieved by reason, but by
SENSATION
. It is
thought by means of the flesh. For Blecher,
KNOWLEDGE

is a trace
left by the body. What’s astounding about Blecher’s language is the mixture of words
laden with feelings and phrases so technical they sound like machines. Every
sequence is infected by a form of mechanization. The emotional upheavals are
stretched across a geometric frame. Reading the book we get the impression that
Blecher’s words don’t merely describe the objects—they dig their talons into
the things and hoist them high, straight into the sentences. About the suitability
of a particular word, Blecher has his protagonist say: “It would have to contain
something of the stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following
his gestures in a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my
dreams and the subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal
chord, or of the transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I
have known.”
    There are three times in this book where relationships to women are compared with the
effect of words. With Clara from the sewing machine shop the act of vice “involves a
complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication.” The second
woman is the dead woman mentioned above, lying in the glass coffin of the wax figure
gallery, whose image “remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished
to recall.” And the third woman is Edda. Newly married to the Webers’ rakish son,
she moves into the family’s house. Because the narrator has been visiting there for
years, and knows every nook and cranny, Edda becomes “one more object, a simple
object whose existence beleaguered and tormented me like a word repeated many
times.” The sexual arousal that she stirs inside the narrator intimidates him, while
on the outside it petrifies his body like wood.
    Precisely because words are elevated to the rank of love for women, the dialogues in
this book are so tight they couldn’t be any shorter. The tone is gruff. All the
conversations have a hint of reluctance, because the talking comes too late. Either
the words sat too long on the tongue, or else they were swallowed too often. Speech
comes as a last resort, long after the reason for speaking in the first place has
passed. For every person in the book, sentences shrink whenever feelings take the
upper hand. Communication follows this rule: the more feverish the feeling, the
colder the word. This reduction condenses the dialogues to their most rudimentary,
giving them the pithiness of sayings, aphorisms that pepper the entire text. The
author can leave out the dialogues because they are repeated unwritten throughout
the text, and constantly enter the mind of the reader.
    Blecher’s question “Who am I” leads to a world eroticized by inner chafing.
Adventures in Immediate Irreality
is a study in observation. And it
takes the reader where one generally arrives when one looks at things
impartially—to a place of calm and composed resignation. In his words: “All
things and all men were hemmed in by their petty, pathetic obligation to be precise,
nothing more than precise.”