"Children don't pretend, the way most adults do, that they're in one world only, the world of laws and daylight and mapped dimensions. They oblige you to enter their worlds, straddle the abysses, and enjoy with them the colored lights that spark below."
Maybe it's because I'm near the cusp of a plus-1 in the household that I decided to reread this slim, dense work that resided in my bathroom for a solid three-months back when it was released through the potent Black Sun Lit imprint. Back then I was trying to assemble a pompous pamphlet of triviality, and turned to Gnome during my extended bladdery contemplations, highlighting and marginalizing brief-but-obese aphorisms that dragged me back down to earth.
Lunday leads us through a gnomic, nomadic, no-man'd-land of cranial geodesy. His rhetorical cartography paints a path of colored lights and stomach-minds and two-headed children, defects and perversions and fasciabaubles, those parasites of physiognomy that a compound-eye of vanity mirrors would miss. He excavates the battlefields of Gombrowicz and the Greeks and comes up Blossoms. He relates the fits and starts of of civilization to the complexion of our collective mask. Rilkean stuff.
"Lifting the faces like layers: shaped as a cinematic, not a surgical gesture. Movies always lift faces, put masks of generality on the viewer: a mirror-worm, tunneling fantasy into vision. But the mirror collapses back into sand."
Gnome is an exegesis of the richest poetic subject to which reveries have swooned from Mimnermus to MF DOOM. The crags and burrows of expression are excavated, and Lunday takes us deeper than any into those endless depths. Chew on this like wine, like your chapped lip, like oxygen after being rescued.
"Her perfume was the sense of something just the other side of dying. Beautiful poison, beautiful to the deeper brain beneath seeing, where only an odor of the world gets in: nostalgia, the way home, the past with a thatched roof."
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