The Origin of Manias--Craig Podmore--Reviewed by David McLean

 

Craig Podmore
The Origin of Manias
Oneiros Books 2013 162 pp
novel review by David McLean

This book by Craig Podmore is a novel that charts the career in perversion of a man called Anton. As in the novella that preceded it called The Symmetries of Pain, life here is a sort of sexual cannibalism and the book acquires its effect and natural tone where it lists the epitomes of human depravity. Eating, fucking, torturing, raping and killing are all basically the same thing, the same function, the expression of the self.

Anton is brought up as an orphan in a religious environment which he naturally rejects and he instead embraces what he perceives as the opposite of the religious, sadomasochism and “evil”, the latter being seen as something very generalized. Of course, if evil is very general and widespread it stops being meaningful to categorize it as evil.

As with the novella, which is the conclusion here, the cruelty of Anton is “resolved” by standard romantic love. However, love in the Sartrean analysis is just as much as the sadistic solution a victim of the inevitable dialectic of the relationship with the other. But love is just to want to be loved, to want to be loved is to have them want you to love them, ad nauseam. The only love that Sartre seems to agree to was love as an enterprise, part of a concrete project towards my own ends, not involved completely in loving the other. That gets to be basically like Anton’s project, but without so much fun. As the victim of torture winds up as just meat, looking at you, so the lover is just another body there to challenge your place as master of your world. There is nothing to save you and make you whole in any of it.

Maybe the solution is no more than the primitive Hobbesian contract: “Kill all these victims and the state will probably come, sooner or later, and fuck you up”. Or the solution may be desire as multiplicity, not desire as courtly love, even though in courtly love one may only have been, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, playing Taoism and masochism and scampering after the BwO. (Though they explicitly state that the equation of courtly love with those things is meaningless). If there is desire everywhere, not power, then getting the desiring machines working right is (part of) the answer.

As said, the text here is at its best when it is engaged in grossing the reader out, challenging his/her boring conventions and moral debility:

Some are eaten, some are fucked, an intestine nailed into a wall,

“Sieg Heil for vagina”, a madman protests, the crucifix now severed into parts, the feel of violence is tactile, it’s beginning to exist as a, “something”, a being, it’s growing like a living organism, it’s there, I see it, I feel it, inside the vulvas, inside the mouths, inside my own genitalia!

I can strongly recommend you read this, whether or not you think love is the answer, that there is an answer, that an answer is even needed. Get it here:

http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/oneirosbooks/the-origin-of-manias/

 

 

Excerpts from 'The Origin of Manias' by Craig Podmore (Oneiros Books)

 

A mortal weakness overwhelms, the searing, scolding sun, suckling the energy, the sinister silence of the horizon pushes Blake into a mere insanity, one of which that derives from survival; the urge to scream with a monstrous effect, that of a primal desperation. A despondent baby, twitching, a ubiquitous cold sweat, shades of dirge filled skies roam the sphere, repressing the rays of the unbearable sun, mammoth mountains drowning in a darkness, the heat dying, evaporating, a deathly cold dispersing in the atmosphere, amidst the view of the never-ending road are the licks of credulous lightening strikes, their rage flickering in a haunting mute ballet of angry gods. Salvation starts to slim, Blake is faltering as dear nature and its affects, takes its toll on him. Anton is near dead, still and ghost-like, his lips are of an azure colour, Blake observes the brambles and bushes on the road side, his thoughts are of a morbid decision to perhaps leave dying little Anton behind. He ceases to walk any longer and falls to his knees, a melancholy shudder pervasively overtakes his will, a single tear descends, his dead wife’s carcass rots in an automobile tomb, alone, in a bloodied mess, tangled in scraps of metal and man-made machinery, Blake negates his tears and ascends from the warm camphor of the concrete.

 

--

 

After the drivel of morning prayers, we perform the sign of the cross and tend to our breakfast. I begin to feel sick. The intense visions that I often invoke eat my nerves, the chomping of hungry jaws on their cereals exacerbate audible chaos, the visions are often like clusters of blurred colours yet the shades take form of figures, figures so vulgar, so vast and frightening. I turn dizzy, light headed and cannot adjust to a state of normalcy:

A rage of voids raping each darker soul(s), rummaging reds in a vomit coloured orange, figment of brain in cold purples and neon stabs of aluminous stains forming the beauty of eyes angst in a mortem of a frenzy ferociously cascading in a reign of fire, sparks of cries, vessels of flesh bruised in an environment of a violent happening conjuring an organism of something vigorous albeit furious and confused. A rigour mortis convulsion of feeling; an awakening of existence, a realisation – a sharp pain in my guts as if my stomach morphed into a mouth of a hyena, an indigestion of bemusement, Jesus on the cheap cross looks like nothing disembodied from its primary meaning, my cereal feels like a torpid obligation, people are splinters left behind of a failed design like the zebras in the field and the building we are in is the crocodile hunting under the surface of a muddy, diseased water.

 

--

 

Violent azures, seizures of genital red hues and headless saints, protests of messiahs scream in distortions of invocations of the sun, dead ash, dawn eyes slit open by blade of a reality in stasis, mother’s voice like that of a monk’s, praying, flaying skin, rosemary beads in the flesh of ass, sweat and piss, their cloth shed, naked, vile beasts, a godless god born in nothing, sexual acts, car crash of piety, deity murder and cremation of virtue. Pain like electricity from my backside, the making of blood elicits a hunger; Christ watches this freakish fair, applauses on cue, 28 hits down, Eros lives in my cerebellum, plucking the nerves in conjunction with my penis and subconscious, not a tear, not one, shadows of necromancy inhabit the vision, ululating, dancing round a fire that is the violence of my true nature. 34 hits, I see mother, she bathes my feet in the urine of my excitement, this transgression, this carnal manifestation wholly due to the flagellation of my torturers, I cry but not of discomfort but of desire, an awakening, a summoning of a belief found in the abyss of my spleen. Ennui crucifies with each blow, 38, 39, 40, Erebus ejaculates…

 

--

 

I awake and find myself strapped into a chair. My vision is blurry, a great comprehensive confusion distils me, a table in front of me, full of dirt, torn fingernails, a jaw bone, the odd human finger, portraits of Himmler on the walls, tarot cards strewn throughout the room, ripped pages of porn; their sexual parts scribbled out with a fierce biro, there is a pervasive smell of death here and even though one finds comfort in that, I am afraid, it’s what appears before me, a silhouette, large, brooding and disgustingly visceral. Light shines on him, I see him, he looks as if he’s the inner me: the turmoil, the violence, the lust, the perplexity, the colossus menace that consumes me.

“Anton. Idiotic name. Weak and unhuman. How did such a stubborn mess come into this world?” Blake converses with words of condescension.

“I guess I wasn’t invited to this world. It’s unfortunate that I have derived from your sickening seeds.”

“It’s unfortunate that I did bring you into this world…”

“Only because you think that this world has only room for one omnipresent being?”

“Omnipresent? Gods are for children’s books my dear child. You strip away all of that philosophical afterbirth and we are nothing. Just evolved animals bound in flesh and blood. Do you really think that the ape thought of Gods and monsters before the inauguration of the intellect? No. We’re only as real as the blood on our hands, the victims we create are stains of our existence, that’s truth.”

“Yes, you are an animal. That is indeed truth, personally, I am not of man, I am devoid of that. I stand beyond every single one of you.”

Blake laughs, belittling I.

“So, you’re a God? Son, you lived in an orphanage all of your childhood, you began the age of adolescence with Newton which is, suffice to say, a fine introduction to psychopathy.”

 

'The Origin of Manias' is available here