A A Attanasio – Radix (epub)
General:
Name: A A Attanasio – Radix (epub)
Format: epub
Size: 2.11 MB
Book:
Title: Radix
Author: A A Attanasio
Language: English
Year: 2012
Subjects: Fiction, Science Fiction
Publisher: A A Attanasio
ISBN: 9782070648337
Total pages: 58 str.
Description:
My first novel, Radix, originally titled Emblems and Rites, began with an insight from one sentence in a third century biography of Greek thinkers, Lives of Ancient Philosophers: "Diogenes the Cynic lit a lamp in broad daylight and said as he went about, ‘I am looking for a man.’" He says nothing about ‘the man’ being honest.
In Radix, I am looking for a man. To represent our polluted age, this man must be ugly. He must be weak from the ineptitude of his body, as our manufactured world is weak from ecological stupidity. He is a hungry man, as avaricious as our mercantile society.
This man must be a monster in a world of monsters. The rites in Emblems and Rites intend to provoke outrage, not admiration or pleasure, or there is no possibility of transformation.
Looking for the man who can represent us, I knew the emblems too must be grotesque or there is no hope for beauty in the transformation. I resolved to forsake reason, remembering what Goya wrote in his own hand on the forty-third Capricho: "The sleep of reason produces monsters."
The nightmare of reason-the environmental iniquities and calamitous impersonality of civilization-abstracts us from the sensate experience of the universe and secludes us among symbols. These are the flagrant emblems of our concealment from our selves. The philosopher Kenneth Burke identifies homo sapiens as a "symbol using animal."
These soft powers called symbols have taken us far behind the world and stranded us in the darkest precincts of nowhere. As Burke puts it in Language as Symbolic Action, our reality has "been built up for us through nothing but our symbol system."
The name of the darkling man in this novel of self-forgetting has to be as emblematic as his monstrous actions, a name beckoning thought to our thoughtless time, and I chose Kagan-Son of Aodhagáin, the stupendous Thinker in the Black Book of Caermathon, the medieval Welsh classic that introduces the most important hero of our tragic modernity, King Arthur. For a first name, I went with Sumner: ‘one who summons’ … One Who Summons the Thinker.
Between mind and experience, between presence and the long-dreamt, in that middle realm among all the uncanny dark sources of wonder and self-expression that assure our humanity, I wrote Radix to find a man, myself-and these years later, I have found you.
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