The Haven of Inertia

I was not planning a post for Valentine’s Day. Once in a while, I have done a Valentine art project, and I think they have all been expressions of irony and/or ambivalence. It is not that I am unromantic. I consider myself, at times, when appropriate, to be a hopelessly romantic person. For example, I have lost all hope that the manufactured traditions of Valentine’s Day will result in any kind of romance. I will admit that today I will enjoy expensive chocolate and extravagant coffee, but I do that almost every day.

If today is truly a holiday, that means I can freely choose to do nothing at all about it. Today is also Monday, and when I lost my job at the bookstore because of the pandemic, I promised myself that I would take every Monday as a holiday, until that time I no longer felt a twinge of the Monday dreads. You know that feeling: the fear of forced labor that we learned to endure since we were young. It started for me at five years old, with the ruthless organization of activities in kindergarten. Suddenly I had to play, nap, paint, learn to spell my name, at appointed times, five days a week, within a large group of children, who were strangers, judged and graded by the authority of adult strangers, who never really became my friends.

The loss of the messy bliss of my early life’s freedom was too large a grief for my very young mind to grasp, especially since it was a loss that was never, ever acknowledged by anyone. Nobody even guessed I was terrified and heartbroken in the face of this prodigious thing, the first in a long progression of shocks and surprises that I had to accept as normal childhood, a weird trauma that was supposed to be beneficial to me. There was no escape from the inexorable process of being socialized into a productive and responsible member of the labor force, except for the occasional holiday and a few scant hours in precious weekends.

It seems to me there is nothing that can relieve the Monday dreads, no matter how generous the wage or how powerful the union or how much you might like your job. It is too deeply carved into your worker’s psyche.

I still feel the strain after years of Monday idleness.

The Labyrinth of Taleva is the third labyrinth in the Poppy Garden series. This particular labyrinth provides an antidote to the powers of War, aka Joe of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Joe is a Man of Action, a Man of Steel, of Iron, of Speed, of Loud Noises and St. Elmo’s Fire. A Man in Motion with little judgment and only a rudimentary sense of strategy, which makes him a near-perfect match to his current career as one of the Four Horsemen. War is the sad, wasteful option of men when their better, more efficient strategies have not produced the result they desire. Why men consider war an option when it is so evidently a failure (nobody wins a war) is one of the great and stupid mysteries of male psychology.

The third labyrinth is also called the Haven of Inertia, in which Joe the Man of Action is forced to slow down to a practical standstill. All he is able to do is stop and smell the roses. Winter is coming fast, and most of the roses in Taleva have died, but the smell of dead roses is more intense than the scent of living roses, since they have lost all the complex and delicate notes that are part of life. Joe is sickened by the smell and quite overcome with nausea, but he cannot puke because he is paralyzed with inaction. Jack Loki leads his horse out of the labyrinth and kindly helps Joe dismount, and steadies him as he throws up his lunch.

In fiction, there is nothing quite like a guy helping, without judgment, another guy puke his brains out, for beginning a lifelong friendship.

Espíritu de Naranja Amarga

It is during the Unexpected Adventure of the Seville Orange (originally published in the first three months of 1987) that Jack Loki first meets Dezda, aka Nadezda Pushkina, the Marchioness of Ticahlidant. Dezda becomes a re-occurring character who is, at first, the typical madcap heiress – sassy, eccentric, reckless – an exasperating colleague who becomes embroiled in Jack’s foolhardiest (and silliest) escapades. During the course of her subsequent appearances in GLP, she evolves into a more complex person, eventually becoming a good friend to Jack and a skillful accomplice.

In their last adventure together (which was published in GLP at the end of 1994), Dezda is mortally wounded by Mike in the fourth labyrinth of the Poppy Garden, the labyrinth called Elämän Tunti, “An Hour of Life”. She does not die. The labyrinth has the power to delay her death by an hour, an hour that will never end as long as she remains within the borders of the labyrinth. She seems fairly content when we last see her, setting up her household in a small town that occupies a bustling corner of the labyrinth. Mike decides to stay with her, giving up his role as Death in the Four Horsemen.

The Other Three Horsemen are a little sad to lose Mike, he had been a good Death, but there is always a long line of applicants for the job. They hire a pale, skinny guy named Lew, who has a dry sense of humor and a penchant for making puns. They all groan when he makes them, but secretly the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse love puns.

A Feast of Abundance

Here we have three more episodes from the Poppy Garden series. The narrative now takes place in the second of four labyrinths, the Labyrinth of Nunsauder Ju-challa, which I choose to translate as “A Feast of Abundance”.

Some people (namely Michael Veerduer and Benedict Thorarinsson) would translate it as “A Carnival of Excess”.

Jack Loki and his friends encounter the Poppy Garden while fleeing from four ominous horsemen. At first, the horsemen are unnamed, but it is fairly obvious to the reader that they are the classic Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, Famine, War and Death. Later in the series, they introduce themselves as Jim, Bob, Joe and Mike, but these identities convince nobody that they are anything but fearsome entities of archetypical lethality.

Each of the four labyrinths nullify the powers of one of the horsemen, rendering him into a small boy mounted on a stout pony. The Labyrinth of Suoja protects against Pestilence (aka Jim). The Labyrinth of Nunsauder Ju-challa works its magic against Famine (aka Bob). I think a feast is a more appropriate remedy to famine than a carnival.

6EQUJ5

In the Land of the Uppermost Moon

This is the second in a series known as the Poppy Garden, or the Poppy Fields. Yost did not name the series, the title was adopted by an eventual consensus among GLP fans. Whether you call it fields or a garden is a matter for an argument that can only be resolved by tolerating each other’s personal preferences. I prefer to call it a garden.

After his disappearance, four of Yost’s journals were found (along with his collection of vintage printed table linens and handkerchiefs) in an antique Indestructo steamer trunk, which dominated the space in his tiny dining room. In the Paisley Notebook (the other three journals are known as the Black Oxford Notebook, the Peter Max Notebook, and the Green Vinyl Bound Sketchbook) is a section titled Four Labyrinths. The labyrinths are located in a landscape that was once domesticated but now has grown wild from years of neglect. The landscape becomes a maze in which Jack Loki and his companions wander for a time. Yost’s notes about this landscape include references to the Land of Oz, the Garden of Eden and Kunlun. The descriptions of the hallucinogenic features of the garden and its inhabitants are characteristic of Jack Loki’s dream-quests.

The Labyrinth of Suoja

At the entrance to the Labyrinth of Suoja is a granite plinth engraved with a quote from the fifth chapter of The Conservation of Static by Kuoleman Vanderhau*:

“The proverb of the double-edged sword is very much misused. Most of the time, the perception is that if you reach for it, whatever “it” is–fame, love, security, power, truth–you will cut yourself grievously. Because a double-edged sword when used as a metaphor must cut “both ways”, thus you will cut yourself as you use it. This can only make a weapons master laugh, or weep, that so many idiots do not understand that you grasp the hilt, not the blade, when you wield a sword. Double-edged or single-edged, the blade will be sharp. It will be your own carelessness or stupidity, not the sword, that causes damage to yourself.”

The Conservation of Static is a novel that Yost first read when he was 15 years old. It is one of a limited number of books he read again and again, until he lost count of how many times he had read it. Today’s quote comes from a conversation between Ajay (the brother of the novel’s protagonist) and his girlfriend, Elinaika. We learn some basic facts about Ajay in the first paragraphs of the novel: he was born in Barcelona, his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 8 years old, he was 23 years old and a student of history and political economy at Charles University in Prague when he disappeared. The mystery of his sudden disappearance at the Prague–Ruzyne Airport (now called the Václav Havel Airport Prague) is the central device of the novel, but the mystery is never solved and it serves as the pivot around which the story revolves. The novel is written in first-person from the point-of-view of five characters: Ajay’s brother, Ajay’s best friend, one of Ajay’s teachers, Elinaika’s sister, and a stranger. Except for the stranger, we never learn the names of our narrators, since they all refer to themselves as “I”. This makes the story confusing at first, but the reader learns to identify the narrators according to epithets used by other characters, and by their relationships to Elinaika. The stranger’s name is Dr. Michel.

*In an appendix to The Boy in the Yellow Leatherette Pormanteau, Gralie Bohe provides us with a bibliography of “significant books” in Yost’s life. The information about The Conservation of Static in today’s post comes from that bibliography and from Yost’s own notes about the four labyrinths of the poppy garden.