+++

OMG!! Scary!: Review de-con-struc of Skylark Motel Logan Berry’s Casket Flare (Inside the Castle, 2023)

In fluid red ink inside my copy of Logan Berry’s Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press, 2021) he’s written as part of the inscription “Are we serving the same master?” 

“Construction requires destruction.”

“Any act of creation is simultaneously an act of annihilation, relentless.”

Yes, Lo. It appears we are.

“RUN!!!! DO NOT STAY HERE!!”

–FRONT MATTER–

The first thing I see is Corrao. Get out of here with yr uncanny immaculate crooked elongated lettering comforting the reptilian quadrant of my cerebellum, ghostbrightened in goldenrod echo (yellow has a hue angle of 60 degrees, a saturation of 100% and a lightness of 50%). Get out of here with yr digital cloudtopographyultrasoundimage. Get out of here with yr faintoverlaytextspiritmirrors. Get out of here with yr “The text is typeset in Ac437 IBM Model3x Alt1, a recreation of the IBM PS/2’s 16-bit typeface from 1987, with brief appearances by Walter Tiemann’s Orpheus Pro from the 1920s.” Get thee to a font foundry. 

If you let him, if you make an offering of ample materials, Mike Corrao will fully imagine your visions into something fuckable and killable. Something alive. Lo understands and respects this better than most, and the projects they work on together are/were/will be fractal, labyrinthine terrordream masterpieces. 

–END FRONT MATTER–

Lo, I’m on the first page. I admire the repeated dreams, the sleepmask, the ways you make burgeoning plantlife a murder shroud, neon agents, anti-erasure. You capture how structure chokes on itself. 

Lo, are you casting a time chasm? In revisiting the Skylark Motel, in exposing its bones, are you resurrecting it? What’s sewn in? Is it hungry?

There are ghost currents in the Xerox machine. 

What happens to a text when you strike it through? Voidness.

As I’m reading Casket Flare, I’m also reading Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree, a Buddhist text on voidness. Voidness is distinct from nothingness, nonexistence, zero. “Voidness…is a particular absence. It can’t be void of everything. We take voidness to be conditional or referential, that is, we must stipulate void of what.” (Editor’s note p. xxx). 

Casket Flare is a seance. It’s a summoning into/through the void. Lo is pulling material from/of it for you.

When one makes oneself a medium. “I’m going to listen to your lungs now.”

“Can you take a deep breath? And then another?”

Lo, who are you talking to? Don’t give them your email address. Shadow entities love email. 

“Should I become one with the flame.” The answer is always yes, Lo. Yes. 

Like, yes I held the text up to a mirror to read it. 

When reading Casket Flare, I recommend becoming one with the flame. Let the spirit move you. 

“Does the entity suffuse a structure like consciousness: :

(dis-)embodied, viral”

Shit, Lo. I don’t know. 

“We reveal ourselves to each other in synchronic flashes of discrete time-flesh, in glitches-” [insert shape I can’t mimic] “-to see each other I have to create a ‘total simulation of (myself)’: : A counterfeit: : Inhuman (or inhumane?)”

Shit, Lo. I know. Ann, a playwright, director, butch lesbian, and classically trained clown whose home I stayed in once said to me, about clowning, “none of the emotions belong to you” (by “you,” Ann means the clown). Ann was describing to me how a clown completely embodies emotions. How emotions flash across the clown in time-flesh. In the guidebook to her Wild Unknown Archetypes deck, Kim Krans describes the archetype of The Mask as follows: “We often think of a mask as something that conceals our identity. Yet contemplate the possibility The Mask permits our true identity to be revealed. It allows.” The mask / black mass / blaspheme / phoneme / phantasm is, perhaps, the sheerest window in. 

But what’s in there? And perhaps the question that splits me most is: what if the audience focuses more on the medium than on the current that runs through it? Follow me through this tangent: I’m deeply enthralled by the art/mask of comedian Eric André. The absurdity of the mask + the performance’s placement in chance/time creates an admirable presence that, IMHO, can release a sort energy that unsettles what the fuck we think we know. It’s a manifesting sort of energy that offers the possibility of revelation as defined by Krans. It allows. Part of what it allows is the profane and part of what it allows is the transcendent and part of what it allows is discomfort and part of what it allows is the unknown unfolding before us. 

But Lo, what about the bros who are like “bro they’re chugging ranch dressing!” and/or “oh bro sick  mangina.” When I saw Eric André perform live in early October, well before I began reading your book, this is what I was thinking about. Some of the audience is focusing on the medium rather than the current that runs through it. Does that matter? Does it matter what they focus on? What if the mask is more transparent? What if it’s got apertures that let vulnerability out/in? Do you know what I’m finding, Lo, as I’m asking people to look through a more apertured mask? The audience is maybe even more focused on the medium, on the apertures, in sort of distracting ways, ways that try to look at my actual face. But we wear many faces.

Lo, where are we supposed to put our faces? Can we control where the energy goes? Should we even want to? Are there emotions in/under there? Who do they belong to? This is why clowns wear fake noses, Lo.

(the blue underlining in this image ^ is mine and is not part of the book design. I was really into this page, clearly.)

Lo, as I’m reading about voidness, I begin to understand that the energy in my body has never been mine. 

Lo, when I’m about one-third of the way through Casket Flare, I attend “Hallucinations,” a hybrid sculpture and dance performance envisioned and sculpted by artist, blacksmith, and welder Becca Cerra, performed by dancers Annika Johansson, Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies, and Julie Marie Muskat, and set to music by Brady Custis. The dancers entangle themselves in copper, brass, and steel forged by Cerra. The metal curves, links, constricts, and radiates outward in sharp points, encircling each dancer’s body as it moves with them through the performance. The sculpture, music, and movement are meant to embody experiences of living with mental illness. At the onset of the performance, before the dancers emerge through a diamond-shaped portal forged in copper, I feel a demon’s presence in the room. Regardless of its origin point, by the end of the performance, the demon is a husk soothed back into voidness.

Lo, did enacting a seance dispel your hallucinations? Do embodiment and ritual, vessel and movement, presence and voice act as effigies for burning or as coordinates for marking the “constituent parts of a full perception”? 

What if we take the mask off? What if we take it off and there’s voidness underneath? If the emotions don’t belong to the mask, do they belong to us? Do they belong to the audience? What am I trying to understand about symbols/signs vs. the real? What if we should never take the mask off? Is the mask the sign/symbol? Or is the mask what’s real? 

I understand being swallowed by rooms. I understand being swallowed by many things. And I understand ingesting. I find it difficult to separate skin from suit. This is why I love this Casket Flare and all of Lo’s works. I’m given (a) room(s) to consider insides and outsides as spectral phenomena. When I say spectral I mean ghostly and also along a spectrum. Yes, some of the rooms are spooky and gross (“feces from tear ducts”). But they’re also transcendent and beautiful (“the morning’s mouth/is filled with gold”). And either way, I feel less alone.

Lo, in the middle of reading your book, I stop to make and ingest a sandwich. I slice a tomato and its seeds are beginning to sprout from within.

I love this idea of reader as crypt keeper. I really feel like you’re beating yourself up too much about the muffin. 

I think I’m going to stop de-con-struc-ing partly to leave the specter where it is for others to find it and partly so I can enjoy the rest of your book uninterrupted. But Lo, your sense of space on a page and of pacing (aka spacetime) across pages is exceptional. 

Lo, did you put a *second book* at the end of your book?

Five stars.

+++

Danika Stegeman’s second book, Ablation, was published by 11:11 Press in November 2023.  Her book Pilot (2020) was published by Spork Press. She’s a 2023 recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and recently spent a 2-week residency in Marathon, TX outside Big Bend National Park. Her website is https://www.danikastegemanlemay.com/

+++

You can buy Casket Flare here