iTunes edition
Review by Bill Kirton
I need to start with two necessary
disclosures. The first is that Donnie Ross, the author of !Leonardo Mind for Modern Times, is a good
friend and has been for years. The fact that my review of it is positive and
admiring has nothing whatsoever to do with that friendship. It would do a
disservice to the book as well as question my own integrity if the views I
express were anything but honest. It’s true that the book is at times
intellectually demanding and the knowledge that Donnie’s intellectual curiosity
and honesty surpasses that of anyone else I know may have made me more tolerant
and more careful in my analysis. I hope that’s not the case, but none of us
knows how far subjective elements colour our thinking.
The second disclosure is that this is my
first ever experience and review of a book which uses mixed media to convey its
messages and/or meanings and so it presented me with unfamiliar reviewing
challenges. So it was a new type of reading experience, incorporating flash
fiction, extended narratives and a structural organisation intended to reflect
the themes it explores. Yes, it has characters, relationships, specific
locations, conflicts and the usual ingredients of fiction but they’re shifting
entities, sometimes recurring through the chapters as motifs, changing identity,
even changing from a specific flesh and blood individual to a genetically and
mechanically engineered avatar. The stylistic registers used, too, vary from
the frankly demotic to the uncompromisingly intellectual, even managing to
include a whole section written in an invented language best described as
Norwegianised Scottish. Overall, it’s entertaining, thought-provoking,
sometimes sad, sometimes angry, and often very funny.
As I said, it’s a challenging read. Its
principal narrative elements are music (both in the making and playing of
instruments), art, sculptural methods and artefacts, language, academia,
anaesthetics, surgery, psychiatry, genetics, history and prehistory,
philosophy, autobiography, sex, time and humour. The author himself acknowledges
the potential difficulties and offers as his justification the regrettable fact
that his ‘meditation’ probably won’t be ‘to the benefit of all’ because we’re
all frightened ‘of achieving anything some vacuous cunt might term elitist’.
But the reader is led very gently into
these meditations. The book opens with a video of an installation made by the
author. It’s made of plastic and copper and the hand-held camera zooms in to
the sculpted faces, catches the pulsing effect and poses the question ‘What’s this
got to do with the book?’
There’s then a preface which tells us this
is ‘a semi-interactive novel’, which ‘begins with a series of seemingly
unconnected short stories, interspersed with other materials such as videos,
photographs, audio clips, paintings and drawings’. And, while I may have made
this sound like a trial, these stories are a series of short, very accessible,
self-contained narratives with no pretensions. The sketches, photographs and
other non-verbal elements which separate them continue to challenge our
perceptions and ask similar questions about their place in the narratives as
they force us to bring different perspectives to bear on the ‘reading’
experience.
The stories begin with a satirical,
tongue-in-cheek sketch of an aspect of the commercial world of automobile
design. It mimics the essential absurdity of consumerism and advertising but it
does so using sound, which is to become an important element in later narrative
developments. The next piece of flash fiction conveys very neatly and simply the
impossibility of knowing what’s going on in another person’s mind. Events are
open to multiple, sometimes conflicting interpretations. There’s the melancholy
feeling that something desired is always going to be out of reach. Immediately,
though, the next story brings a contrast as the slight frustration of the
previous relationship, which had seemed largely cerebral, is replaced by a very
funny physicality as a female cellist climaxes as she plays, thereby causing
serious damage to her instrument.
The contrast with the following story, Sky Blue, couldn’t be more stark. Like
many other episodes in the book, this is autobiographical and tells a harrowing
tale about a child in hospital. It’s simply told but it conveys very powerfully
the old dichotomy between inner beauty and outer ugliness and how people’s
intolerance of difference makes them blind to what’s beneath the surface. It’s
also the introduction of the two disciplines of surgery and anaesthetics which,
while inextricably combined in the operating theatre, seem to engender very
distinct attitudes in terms of ethics and compassion. The story’s about
perceptions and our inability to overcome stereotyping. It’s also about the
abuse of power and the rigidity of people’s self-awareness. It asks fundamental
questions and suggests that ‘normal’ people who only love superficial beauty
without valuing the totality of the person could themselves be classified as
disabled.
Sex and music combine again in the fifth
story, a very funny description of sex between obsessive-compulsives which ends
with the words ‘Shortly after the 17th iteration, she screamed the tones of a B
flat minor seventh flat five chord: B flat, D flat, E, A natural. Root position,
half diminished: it was time to sleep’. It’s a surreal piece but its use of physicality,
mental processing and music are strong indicators of the emergence of the book’s
principal themes.
Guess
Who, the sixth of these opening stories, is a
brilliant, self-contained piece of writing which charts, subjectively, all the basic
cellular and other processes from conception to birth and beyond in
meticulously observed physical detail but filtered through the perceptions of
whatever me is coming into being.
The stories continue to open up variations
on the themes which have been established. Then, in chapter 11, they stop to
make way for The Ejsberg Saga, a strange, perhaps self-indulgent diversion in
which the author has lots of fun creating the Norwegian/Scottish linguistic mix
we mentioned earlier. There’s a video of him reading the saga which would have
had more impact if it had been louder but it does give a sense of the
semi-Chaucerian feel of the sort of
language he’s inventing. It’s a very funny version of the story of the Viking
invasion of Scotland ,
a historical aside which anticipates, albeit with its tongue firmly in its
cheek, the historical sweep of the next phase of the book.
And this phase is the one which gives the
book its title and brings together the disparate threads of the preceding
narratives to ‘explain’ some of them but mainly to analyse how creative
thinking works. It’s prefaced by a frankly autobiographical note which
integrates different streams of creativity, more specifically, the creativity
of the author himself. Its general thrust is that creative thinking stretches
the norms, actually reshapes reality or offers an alternative one. ‘The point,’
he writes, ‘is that the human mind is worth more investment in time,
development and interest than we commonly seem to have time, motivation or
education for.’
There are, as the author tells us in the
preface, two versions of this fusion of the book’s themes. This isn’t an
example of the author prevaricating or being indecisive; it’s consistent with
the underlying dynamic that mixes the physical world and its phenomena with the
relationships between mind, the appearances of things and what we call reality.
Everything, from sexual pleasure and loss of self to the world of thinking and
emotions can only be known by the mind. There may well be an objective reality
but it always has to pass through the social, historical and personal filters of our perceptions. And
these perceptions are enhanced, liberated by creativity.
The figure of Memus, whose conception and
birth we followed earlier, takes its name from a Scottish village but the
stress is clearly on the ego as expressed in the Me syllable. Identification of
Memus with the author is difficult to resist and yet his ‘adversary’, Findo
Gask, also shares a name with a village so there’s a conscious depersonalising
of both characters. This is emphasised when Memus is revealed as Memus44 – the subject
of an experiment which fused human DNA with that from a swallow. The move into
a world of time-travel, fantasy and science fiction (the text resists easy
categorisation), allows for extended asides on both broader and specifically
personal themes. For example, there’s a powerful swoop through prehistory from
pre-Neolithic times through the Bronze Age, the Roman invasion of Scotland and forward into a future many millions of years
hence. Alongside that, however, are other accounts of isolated personal
experiences which are obviously seen as formative events in the author’s past. At
one point, there’s even a photograph of a letter written by the author’s
father.
They’re part of a kaleidoscope of
impressions, events, reflections, projections, episodes, imaginings, memories, all
of which the narrative seeks to incorporate into a single, unique texture to
make of them a unified, comprehensible experience. It explores the relationship
between motion and stasis, external indicators and internal states. And it does
so by exploiting such themes as the material practicality of making musical
instruments and the abstract qualities of the sounds they produce.
But it’s the close cooperative co-existence
of surgery and anaesthetics that provides the most powerful direct examples of
the complexities of the relationship between internal and external ‘realities’.
In terms much cruder than those used in the book, the contrast is between the
self-evident physicality of surgery and the apparent alchemy of anaesthetics.
In the minds of most people, the two disciplines are inseparable and yet their
practitioners and their practices are worlds apart. The scalpel divides flesh,
excises actual material. Its effects are clearly visible. But gases are
exchanged at micro-cellular levels and, as well as sustaining the life
processes, can change perceptions, work on brain functions, induce mental
states and feelings. Yes, both are essentially physical but, as metaphorical
instruments, they offer the writer very different possibilities. And, in case
we were in any doubt, the writer reminds us on more than one occasion that he
was (and, of course still is) an anaesthetist.
In the end, most of the threads are drawn
together. The stories of the first part are revisited, inserted unchanged into
a new context which proposes relationships between them. There isn’t a
Damascene, Eureka moment because there is no
such thing as a single meaning. The fragments are drawn together – self-contained,
individual pieces which become reabsorbed into an overall narrative which is a
meditation on the processes of perception, thought and creation. The ultimate
impression is that the writer has enjoyed revisiting some aspects of his past
and is haunted by others, but that all of them have their place in his
conception of creativity. He fuses the infinite and the local, the eternal and
the instantaneous, macro and microcosm, high style and vulgarity – all in the cause
of creativity. The !Leonardo mind doesn’t accept limitations. Make no mistake,
the book is challenging but the challenges are to the reader’s own creativity
and willingness to make choices.
Bill, thanks a million for a wonderful review - and for taking the time to read !LMFMT in penetrating detail. Much appreciated.
ReplyDelete'I can' t wait for my intellectuals to be challenged. Will it hurt? '
ReplyDeleteAn excellently phrased review, which positively encourages engagement with !Leonardo Mind for Modern Times.