Interview at Bibliophage

Alcebiades Diniz has kindly posted an interview with me regarding my writing on his website, Bibliophage. The interview questions here are absolutely top rate (as always), he's managed to penetrate deep into the heart of the stories and has inspired me to respond at length on several topics.

http://bibliophagus.weebly.com/blog/interview-damian-murphy

A Distillate of Heresy

I'm ecstatic to relate that a book of four stories which I've written, titled 'A Distillate of Heresy', has been released by Zagava/Ex Occidente Press. Dan Ghetu and Jonas Plöger have created an absolutely stunning package for my esoteric narratives, I'm quite humbled by the degree of care and artistry which has been put into the design and am honored to be published on their press.

I'm especially excited to have my contribution appear in the Les Éditions de L’Oubli series, so named after a publishing house which was briefly maintained by the Romanian Surrealist group in the tumultuous years of the second world war. Every one of the books in the series is outstanding, both in terms of design and content. They're like talismanic objects evoking the spirits of lost volumes. I've been an enthusiast since the inception of the series.

A Distillate of Heresy can be ordered from Zagava Books. Shipping is set to begin (from Germany) in mid-December. 

"A document is missing from a chamber hidden deep within the heart of the embassy. We cannot hope to find it, but must seek it all the same. In our search for the unattainable, we come across a book containing 4 stories, keys for which there are no locks, unfathomable oracles beneath the icy stars.

The stories reveal images as perplexing as they are illuminating. A woman gains illicit access to a penthouse in the depth of winter and finds within its hidden recesses the keys to unspeakable mysteries. A ceremonial initiation is brutally interrupted, plunging the initiate into uncharted waters. The subtle alteration of a map affects a shift of boundaries, revealing forbidden permutations in the architecture of the invisible. A relic which resides in an impossible place finds expression in the dreams and memories of an enthusiast.

Our investigations will take us beneath the royal star in the heart of the scorpion, deep into occupied territory, and into the inexplicable topology of an old hotel. The narratives, like drops of poison, will threaten to corrupt the soul. But in corruption is found new life. In putrefaction, we hope to germinate a seed: the concentrated distillate of heresy."

The book is limited to 85 numbered exemplars only, lithographically printed, hand-sewn binding, illustrated dustjacket, silk bookmark, illustrated endpapers, frontispiece. 60.00 Euro (including international, recorded shipping, which will start in mid of December)

Dreams of Ourselves: An Appreciation of Pessoa

I am quite excited to announce that a piece of mine will be included in the upcoming Zagava/Ex Occidente homage volume Dreams of Ourselves: An Appreciation of Pessoa. The book contains 11 stories, each one attributed to one of the heteronyms of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, as chosen by the author. The true attribution of author to story remains veiled, though the keys will be provided in a sealed envelope included with the book.

The authors are as follows: Quentin S. Crisp, Jonathan Wood, Mark Valentine, Adam S. Cantwell, Colin Insole, John Howard, Avalon Brantley, Rhys Hughes, Andrew Condous, D.P. Watt, and myself.

The stories (along with their heteronyms):
That Nothing Human Scorn by Raphael Baldaya
Petseta by Sebastian Knight
We Are All Words by Burton Donald-Wickham Hallam
The Apostatical Ascetic by Alexander Search
A Body of Nostalgia with a Soul of Foam by Unknown
Le Panopticon de le Chevalier de Pas by Chevalier de Pas
Mr. S and Doctor S. by Horace James Faber
The Man We All Imagined I Might Have Been by Emmanuel Golding
A Sea Sorrow in Triptych by A.A. Crosse
The Sublime Voyage of Ariana Aragão by Efbeedee Pasha
Under Different Stars by Navas

The pieces with which my work share space in this book are among the finest which I've read all year. It is quite an honor to be included in such a fantastic project.

The book may be ordered from the Zagava website. Shipping begins toward the end of November.

Infra Noir

I am very fortunate to have a short novella of mine included in Infra Noir, a multi-author compendium released this month by Ex Occidente / Zagava Books.

The contents are as follows:

SMOKE by Mark Valentine

FLAMMABLE MATERIALS by Thomas Stromsholt

THE UNFOLDING MAP by John Howard

SOOT by Dan Watt, illustrated by Andrzej Welminski

THE SALAMANDER ANGEL by myself

THE SLAVES OF PARADISE by Colin Insole

Having read the pieces (besides my own) in the proof, I'm quite excited about this book to say the least. The new work by Valentine, Stromsholt, Howard, Watt, and Insole is fantastic, easily among their best. Each section is wholly unique, yet tied together by subtle threads of influence like pearls on a string of aether. 

Infra Noir can be pre-ordered (shipping begins in mid-July) from Zagava Books in Germany:

http://www.zagava.de/

There is a place where philosophy, psychology, mysticism, and materialism converge. The most fabulous churches and cathedrals harbor small and impossibly obscure doors within their depths that lead into this place. These doors, if you can find them, are securely locked, but there is a key. 

On Aimless Wandering

Let us wander without aim. We’ll wander long and deep into the night and we’ll find many wondrous things therein.

Aimless wandering is a purely intuitive art. There exists a hidden cartography, an orientation of the irrational, by which the wanderer follows the trace of destiny through places both familiar and unknown. All known routes are surrendered at the outset of the journey, the stated objective of which is to attain to flavors as yet untasted by the soul. To the wanderer, every place is the destination, every moment as a wine distilled purely for their indulgence, a wine of a particular fragrance heretofore unknown and never to be known again. The rarest and most hidden treasures are to be found by accident, given only to those without clear aim, who have set out on a route inscrutable. To sin is to miss the mark – but how can one miss is aim is never taken? In wandering, one is wholly without sin. It is the last of the purely innocent arts.

It has been told that if you wander its streets and byways at every hour of the day and night, explore its hidden passageways, allows its secret voice to reverberate deep within your soul as you submerse yourself into its Mysteries, you will at length come to discern the Kabbalistic heart of the city. There you will find the terrible and the sublime. Allow the essence of this hidden heart into your own and you will come to know the heart of every city, from Detroit to Golgonooza.

In ritual, one must orient oneself in accordance with the winds, with the cardinal points, with the rotation of the planet relative the sun and moon and with the stars. Aimless wandering and symbolic orientation are as the Aleph and the Tau of the lost art, while Mem is the tongue of balance between them. Taken all together, we have the word AMeTh – “truth”. This is the word that the golem of Prague bore upon its forehead. If the capacity for aimless wandering is removed, the result is MeTh – “death”. I would suggest that we keep this well in mind. 

Some thoughts on the corresponding art of orientation may be found here. 

Works of Sublimity and Mystery: Incidents in the Night by David B.

David B. - Incidents in the Night

Uncivilized Books (Published originally in French as Les Incidents de la Nuit by L’Association)

Ah, to hold within your hands at last a rare and long sought after book. There are books and periodicals that have been all but forgotten, having attained almost to the status of myth. Is not a myth more exalted than the real thing in some cases? After all, myths endure, while paper decays with time. How many people in our day and age have held within their hands one of the few remaining copies of Giodano Bruno's 'Sapphiro Regia Stellantis', or Lautremant's 'La Paon Infernal'? It is often lamented among collectors of rare books that the internet has destroyed much of the joys of collecting, that any book may now be had by anybody willing to put up the money. Yet this is not entirely true. There still exist certain rare volumes which are spoken of only in hints and rumors, nearly (if not completely) unknown online, not to be found on Ebay at any time. 

Incidents in the Night by David B. is a book-lovers dream in graphic novel form. It is the first of what looks to be two volumes. The fictitious periodical which is its subject and from which it takes its name is an invention worthy of Borges. Perfectly plausible, yet (so far as I can ascertain) entirely mythical. The contents of the first volume of the magazine are described in just enough detail within the narrative to give the phantom a hint of substance, to make us feel as though it might be nearly possible to obtain a copy of one of these elusive treasures for ourselves. 

There is yet another book described within this one. Its text consists simply of the letter ‘N’ repeated over and over across the blinding glare of the otherwise empty page. I am reminded of the story ‘N’ by Arthur Machen, which would seem to partake of a theme related to the context in which this book appears. This single letter, taken alone as a signifier, is of interest in itself. In English, it might be taken to refer to the compass point, affiliating it with the magnetic currents of the earth and allowing it to indicate a clear direction of travel. North has always been the direction of mystery, if not for any other practical reason than the fact that, in times past, the climate of the far north made it largely inaccessible. At the extreme north, far beyond the reach of our corporeal nature, lies the pole star around which the heavens revolve. The mystics of Islam, in their cartography of the soul, associated the north with the darkness at the approach to the pole, the sun at midnight in who's invisible light the aspiring mystic is annihilated in the consciousness of the Divine One. The Hebrew letter N signifies the fish, that which is able to survive within the depths of the sea. The sea may be taken to represent the unmapped regions of the unconscious, void of structure, wherein the rational mind cannot abide. This is the place of pure intuition or knowledge of the soul. The human part of us is drowned in this place; only that part of us which is signified by the glyph of the fish may survive in this environment. Interestingly, this book within a book consisting only of the letter ‘N’ is titled ‘The Desert’, which, as with the depths of the sea and the polar regions, acts as a sort of terra inaccessible to that which is most human in us. There is here an association with the forbidden and the impossible, with death and the transcendence of death.

N is also a negation, a nonentity, a cancellation. It represents the signification of a thing by its absence. This mythical book would seem to stand opposed to the Rosicrucian Book M or Liber Mundi, often taken to represent the whole of manifestation as cosmic book. Liber Mundi bears much in relation to the creation myth presented to us in the Sepher Yetzirah, in which the universe is formed by the engraving of 22 primordial letters on the void, and their subsequent permutation. Perhaps this Liber N, then, takes the form of the shadow of the book of the Rosicrucians: it is the void itself, a book containing no words, pages or letters, no light, no truth, nothing whatsoever.

The appearance of the book 'N' in the present work seems to bear the weight of all of these associations. It is enigmatic, consisting of more than the sum of its parts, and at the same time elusive and omnipresent - perhaps it is better if it is never adequately explained.  

The story presented in this book blends admirably the heights of myth with the depths of pulp fiction and noir. It hints at hidden symmetries and the primacy of the unwritten (and, in this case, the unseen). I eagerly look forward to volume 2.