Nemonymous
Grimscribe
DREAM OF A MANIKIN
"And just what are the boundaries of the self? Is there a secret communion of seemingly separate things?"
Well, Proust's narrator had those questions sussed in that massive novel. Meanwhile, this work's narrator is unreliable inasmuch as we do not know whether this is a letter to a woman doctor or psychologist trying to trap the narrator (or letter-writer if taken as read), trapped by the narrator's own patient, Miss Locher, or is it a genuine stream of epiphanies as a monologue to self about the narrator's own game of ontologies? The narrator explores various aspects of dreaming interconnected with death, dolls, manikins, business rivalry, shopping locales, and much else that truly draws the reader into its web. The apotheosis of what I said elsewhere yesterday: a Ligotti story a day lets the Doctor stay.
I am trying to remember how this work would have stunned me all those years ago when I first read it, but today I am myself a new self stunned anew, but differently, while still "firing up my sense of strange revelation."
But I feel more in control, I guess, less susceptible to its wiles, and that's maybe because the world itself has become more like this story. But is this cause and effect, from this story to today's world? Or are they 'the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction' (my phrase, not this story's) that I have seen playing within fiction in the years since reading this work.
I note that Miss Locher, in 'real life', is a Loan Processor while she is a Manikin Dresser in her supposed dream or dream within a dream. A sense of one lending reality to the other? This remarkably echoes my comments on Olan and Loan in my erstwhile review of 'The Spectral Link' HERE. The implications of this are more than just frightening. Or, as this story has it, is this "transcendent nonsense"? The truly New Nonsense that was yet to materialise when I first read it.
"Life and lies and 'this dream of flesh'"? Or "The mystical conspiracy of a treacherous universe"? Or insidious "dream telepathy" generated by my own Proustian self?
"And just what are the boundaries of the self? Is there a secret communion of seemingly separate things?"
Well, Proust's narrator had those questions sussed in that massive novel. Meanwhile, this work's narrator is unreliable inasmuch as we do not know whether this is a letter to a woman doctor or psychologist trying to trap the narrator (or letter-writer if taken as read), trapped by the narrator's own patient, Miss Locher, or is it a genuine stream of epiphanies as a monologue to self about the narrator's own game of ontologies? The narrator explores various aspects of dreaming interconnected with death, dolls, manikins, business rivalry, shopping locales, and much else that truly draws the reader into its web. The apotheosis of what I said elsewhere yesterday: a Ligotti story a day lets the Doctor stay.
I am trying to remember how this work would have stunned me all those years ago when I first read it, but today I am myself a new self stunned anew, but differently, while still "firing up my sense of strange revelation."
But I feel more in control, I guess, less susceptible to its wiles, and that's maybe because the world itself has become more like this story. But is this cause and effect, from this story to today's world? Or are they 'the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction' (my phrase, not this story's) that I have seen playing within fiction in the years since reading this work.
I note that Miss Locher, in 'real life', is a Loan Processor while she is a Manikin Dresser in her supposed dream or dream within a dream. A sense of one lending reality to the other? This remarkably echoes my comments on Olan and Loan in my erstwhile review of 'The Spectral Link' HERE. The implications of this are more than just frightening. Or, as this story has it, is this "transcendent nonsense"? The truly New Nonsense that was yet to materialise when I first read it.
"Life and lies and 'this dream of flesh'"? Or "The mystical conspiracy of a treacherous universe"? Or insidious "dream telepathy" generated by my own Proustian self?