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A Review of Norman Lock's Marco Knauff's Universe |
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"I do not hope to explain it, or attempt to explain it. It is enough
for me that it is
true." So remarks Marco Knauff, toward the close of his "Notes to 'The
Book
of Supplemental Diagrams' for Marco Knauff's Universe, Vol. 1: Principal
Features," rendered (from the Dutch) into vividly cosmological English
by
Norman Lock. The truth, of course, is that the opus-producing Knauff of
the
title (a pigeon fancier, dreamer, and infatuate of hats who flourished
during the
occupation of the Netherlands in the second world war) never existed,
and the
translation has been spirited onto the page direct from Lock's
imagination. But
this is no postmodernist stunt. The slender volume is a compact set of
lyrical
declarations, metaphysical in ambition and sublime in their effects,
about the
interpenetrations of the seeable and the unseeable, the mechanical and
the
unearthly, in a universe graced by randomness and the "slippage and
instability
of essences." Knauff's universe is one in which an "invisible
Zoo" -- animal
noises are divulged from "seams in the air" -- may or may not exist, and
in which
a woman might be "deduced" from a "camisole dropped carelessly on the
bed."
available from Ravenna Press |
1996 © 2004 |
There is a musical design to these meditations--they proceed in
gladdening runs of
image and aphorism. The prose is melodial, and alert to every signal
from the
unseen. Desire, we learn, "has the shape of a French Curve"; Space is
"pinked
with vexed states." The ruminations, arrayed in forty-eight brief
chapters, range
elegantly over The Machinery, the Shadow Universe, the Zone of
Perversity, the
Occluding Chamber, the Particle Bath, and other involvements of the
uncanny.
Knauff's universe proves to be resistant to ratiocination but
susceptible to
schematicizing, though the diagrams have been wisely withheld from us
here.