On “Cursed Images” by Reuben Dendinger
By Tamas Panitz
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Dendinger’s contemporary gothic/supernatural/apocalyptic/horror stories share in the spirit of the great ones––especially those concerned with the occult and its secret agenda of permanence and immortality. He shares their spirit in a Lurianic sense––these great spirits must pass through many lives, burning calories until they’re ready for retirement. In every generation, we get a new G.R.S. Meade (this time, it’s Joscelyn Godwin), who might have been something of an Elias Ashmole himself, and a Moses. You get the idea. The old notion of influence in literary criticism is a sad hobby for those who love measuring sticks as if there were anything objectively observable in our welkin of groans. To say Dendinger is to such a degree like Balzac and to such a degree like Meyrink would be mere derision. What are we, Ben Franklin? The Enlightenment was for sterile reactionaries; let’s talk seriously, about what we know.
I could write about Dendinger as Gustav Meyrink, George Macdonald, Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, J.H. Huysmans, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Walpole, Beckford, Mary Shelley––the supreme original gothic novelists––feel present but at a greater distance. However, I wish to limit this study of Dendinger to Honré de Balzac, though Balzac’s usually less horrifying and less occult than those aforementioned.
The majority of these authors were adepts, some part of the Golden Corral or whatever they called it, while others were Freemasons. Mary Shelley was a necromancer. Since the beginning, fiction has been an avenue for sorcery. I happen to know that Dendinger is involved in one or more magical organizations.
Dendinger and Balzac meet at two points. The first is metaphysical: a written narrative creates a doom upon the characters. Writing that has been employed in description must inevitably create a commentary, a level of remove in which the wills that might appear in a story are subservient to the trajectory of the writing, even if that writing describes a historical event. What’s more, all history is fiction following the primacy of the word. Thanks to writing, we have viewed ourselves as actors in the doom of our world. Kings will jealously observe the literary pronouncements of an oracle.
In the Phaedrus of Plato (274c-275b), when Thoth gave pharaoh Thamus the gifts of “number and calculation, draughts and dice, geometry and astronomy, and furthermore, letters,” he said of letters, “this invention, oh king, will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. For I have discovered a stimulant (pharmakon) of both memory and wisdom.” But Thamus replied, “Oh most crafty Theuth, one man has the lot of being able to give birth to technologies (ta tekhnēs), but another to assess both the harm and benefit to those who would make use of them. Even you, at present, being the father of letters, through good intentions, spoke the opposite of its potential. For this, by the neglect of memory, will produce forgetfulness (lēthēn) in the souls of those who learn it, since through their faith in writing they recollect things externally by means of another’s etchings, and not internally from within themselves.”
The Yezidis feel perhaps even more mistrust than the Egyptians and Greeks did, and still, today keep themselves illiterate, free from the curse of language, reserving it as a dangerous chore for their priesthood. While these days it is considered to have been good of the Greeks when they created the first popular non-liturgical language in which people might openly observe the vowels; one could, in the light of these arguments, see the popularization of literacy as a hallmark tactic of authoritarian government.
Be that as it may, language in the hands of someone like Dendinger can be used for its own undoing, and returns us to actual wisdom. Now that we’ve been cursed with this damn stuff, there’s only one way out, and that’s through.
In Dendinger, the doom of description extends to the narrative itself –– and this is where he goes beyond Balzac. Whereas Balzac’s is a project of infinite proliferation, Dendinger’s stories implode into circuitous mystery. It’s here that I’d better supply some actual source material. I’ve chosen to excerpt one of Dendinger’s shorter stories out of an unfortunate necessity, and while it has little of the commentary aspect of his narratives, it does show perfectly the writing’s undoing of itself, the horrifying return to wisdom through a diabolical (some might say Plutonian) twist. Even in Dendinger’s most modern forms, one feels the Gothic impulse at work:
I Am Looking For a Very Specific Video
I am looking for a very specific video. I say these words, and sometimes someone’s ears will perk up. They bristle, the hair standing up on their arms and the back of their neck, their spine suddenly stiffening. What have I done to them? What memories have I provoked? What video, real or imagined, is now playing out in their mind’s eye? Could it be the same one I’m looking for? I’d like to think so, but the truth is, this is highly unlikely. Sure enough, when I examine their reaction closely, it becomes clear they are thinking of something else entirely.
Though the video I am looking for is difficult to describe, that is not because it is a vague concept, open category, genre, or kind of video. I am not looking for something similar. I am looking for a very specific video. But though I cannot describe it, it is nevertheless possible to determine what video someone is thinking of by talking with them.
In the expression on their face, in the duration and distance of their haunted gaze, the fidgeting of their fingers, the twitching of their smile and of their eyes—here is where the video is described. If one reads these signs carefully enough, it becomes possible to determine whether or not someone is thinking of the same, specific video. Invariably, and unsurprisingly, they are not.1
Dendinger’s second connection with Balzac is his care for his character’s finances. Money is the great predeterminant throughout our lives. It is the deeply complex cousin of language. Dendinger’s Lovecraftian fish-man is a struggling and then successful writer of weird fiction; he has impoverished painters; rich party kids who are bored and boring at the fringes of the art world; losers who rob graves for a living; corporate jobbers, and so on. Just as I’ve argued concerning language, the finances of Dendinger’s characters are doomed. Dendinger goes so far as to give money-matters their own paragraphs, stripped of most other information, which in retrospect have an almost tongue-in-cheek quiescence about them, as if perhaps they weren’t of much importance at all, not unlike the way one discusses their horoscope:
“Misha and I rented the top floor of a brownstone in Bushwick. With both parents dead, I got my full inheritance as soon as I turned 18. I allowed myself six thousand a month, and typically spent all of it—much of it on the lavish parties I threw in the apartment. It should come as no surprise that I had acquired a lot of friends, the most fashionable I could find, though now I barely remember their faces. The fact is that most of them were completely uninteresting, just like me.”
–– The Brooms of Carlack
“Like I said, money was short in those days. After high school, I worked at the cannery until it shut down. Then it was odd jobs, restaurants, a bit of this and that. Sometimes on the margin of legal, but nothing heavy. I considered myself lucky to wind up living where I could keep a low profile and not worry about a pain-in-the-ass landlord. A handful of punks and eccentrics lived in trailers and cottages on a stretch of land outside of town. It wasn’t a commune, just a living situation—convenient for the time.”
–– The Necromancer’s Driver
A character’s means here represents the fare to the apotheosis of their story: obols, sort of. Through the mundane matters of life, language, and money, Dendinger addresses the true self, the doomed part: for only when facing this doom can the self claim any verity. That’s the cost that must be paid. We feel tenderness and pain for all that, like us, is subject to time. We’re attracted to liminal spaces, “the fried bats they sell there,” as if to a mirror. Dendinger’s fiction is engaged in a kind of sorcery usually reserved for poetry: reporting on discrete and vanishing worlds, ontological one-offs never before recorded. Dendinger is no stooge for the world as it is. The gothic, after all, is a meeting of fiction and magic. His work is a reminder that literature is a conjurer’s trick, besides being real.
1: Here’s a link to the story in its entirety.
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Tamas Panitz is the author of several poetry books, including The Country Passing By (Model City 2022), and Toad’s Sanctuary (Ornithopter Press: 2021). Other books include Conversazione, interviews with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia: 2022), and The Selected Poems of Charles Tomás; trans. w/Carlos Lara (Schism: 2022). He now co-edits the journal NEW, which he co-founded. He is also the author of a pornographic novella, Mercury in Lemonade (New Smut Series: 2023). His paintings and stray poems can be found on Instagram, @tamaspanitz.
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