Phenomenal review of
Exu and the Quimbanda of Night and Fire by Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold.
Reposted from the ever incendiary Ryan Valentine and can be read in the original context here:
http://burn-victim.blogspot.ca/2013/04/ripe-as-fuck.html
This book. Changed everything, most things, perhaps
nothing. Nothing is the most profound
thing you can change, I think, change nothing and everything falls right into
place. If
Pomba Gira is the fig tree
then
Exu is the fruit of it, low hanging and ripe as fuck. In the corner where the candles burn, where
the resins sizzle on the charcoals, where my book and my old .45 lay an old
pocket watch now lives, threaded on the silver chain upon which old Gede’s
grinning skull is hung. That watch
changed everything, perhaps nothing. An
old preacher left his children weeping in a hallway, left them forever, a
passage that will go almost entirely unnoticed by the world at large but was
marked for those few by an old pocket watch, a pair of boots, a handsome coat
and an elegant old fishing pole. I was
the watch, that old pocket watch that somehow weighed the weight of the world. I hung on that chain like daybreak.
I wrote once that the dead were a
crowd of boko that gathered about the child of the west. It felt that way, untethered as we are from
our past, a hundred thousand ghetto-born not knowing the names of even their
parents every day. All you had to do was
listen to them and they could teach you the secrets, any secrets, they came
from all over and died here without names.
That old watch had a name though; a full name and a secret one and I
knew them both. It was the watch that
changed the mandala of sigils we lay out in cascarilla and the fine pink sugar
left when you evaporate good rum on the floor beneath the book, the gun, the
burning candles and smoking resins.
The whole of the universe as I
understand it is on that floor, you can change my mind, you can make me feel
things, you can haunt my dreams but to have moved a single grain of sugar on
that floor is to have moved the worlds themselves. At least, that is what has happened to me and
it was Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold’s book
"Exu & the Quimbanda of Night and Fire" which illuminated that new shape. I am full of gratitude, a word which falls
short of the feeling I think, that a resource such as this existed for me when
it did.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to
write about when I sat down to do this.
I am certainly not telling any of you fuckers the details of my
blood-secrets. The book is a nexus of
feelings and personal relevance’s and sudden understandings for me, to which my
ramblings about watches and sugar bear witness.
You should read it I think though, while it could be that it is my own
sympathies talking here, I think this particular work (especially in concert
with
Pomba Gira) is his most powerful.
It feels to me like there is something of the man caught up in the
work. I know how it works, these devil’s
bargains. He made you bleed for it I
bet, made you bleed all over it.
Don’t be mad, but I am glad for
it. Makes the whole thing fucking
amazing, closes the loop. A book of
devil’s bargains written as a devil’s bargain.
Untethered as we are, we do
destruction and chaos like nobody else and to love in the midst of all that, to
pursue your desire through that carnage is to love purely, I think. That book is a crowd of devils doing what
they love, doing what they do best. It
is a visceral experience for the reader to be jostled about in that
number. There will be a familiar face in
that crowd for many of us in the untamed America’s, I’ll wager. Some hustler or whore who had only dark seeds,
who sowed them anyway and reaped their weight in gold.
There is lots of lists and
background research into parallels in old world necromancy and animism and
ritual references. I was pretty excited
about that when I first read through the book last winter but all of that
collapsed into a singularity, a watch and a devil and an untethered
spirit. Now that singularity is all I
got, which I imagine is how it should be.
Obviously, I am not going to wax the scholar, too much emotion in this
business already to even attempt it but I will point out that the scholarly
meat of the text in no way isolates or alienates the reader. Rather it stands as a testament to our
disparate beginnings; for they are the reason the world’s legacy currently blossoms
within the Creoles of the New World.
Untethered we may be, loving like
furies and demons amidst the wreckage of the old world but loving
nonetheless. That is the secret of the
world and its legacy, the simple part that most usually escapes the scholars
and their books of god algebra. Death
does not truly separate lovers of any kind; it enshrines them like the dark
gods they are.
So this is my offering of thanks
Nicholaj and it is heartfelt because the sacrifice at the center of this book was
your sacrifice and it moved the worlds.
