Mariano Grossi: "La Stella Nera di Mu. Antiromanzo anarco-surrealista " di Mary Blindflowers (Black-Wolf editions) Recensione *English Version
by Mariano Grossi©
Who is acquainted with Mary Blindflowers as an essayist and a poetess, who dealt with her distinct aptitudes as a detailed researcher and texts' collater sounding autonomous reworkings of authors' and historical-literary phenomenologies' explanatory theses or her language and conceptual experimentations in lyrical creation, maybe will be wondering at discovering a further faceting of this many-sided writer reading "Mu's Black Star", a story where shines all the pyrrhonism permeating the global conception of human fate by such a skilful contemporary composer. Her essays' analytical rigour and cogent adherent synthetic reworking make room for a fanciful paper where, yet, one foresees at brightest lights writer's "creed's" philosophical underlayer, wisely cloaked by plot's characters' historical symbology, constantly catchy and highly mimetic despite its diegetical sections physiologically taking turns.
Everything is originated in an effluvium of semantic brightness in Great Mothers' mythical world, the longed forbear of the phallic gang which ruled over human history, and the reader little by little perceives, in the link of dark and warlike onomastics and consanguinities of such a glow, that story's connective tissue is a clever oxymorical and antithetical game Mary Blindflowers runs after during the entire narration whose akmé arrives just on darkness' acquaintance, Chaos' mythological fruit and Night's blood-relation, in a counterpoint, in my opinion, deliberately pursued to mimic St John's passage "and men loved darkness rather than light" (John, III, 19) reflecting etymologically the contrast between the two worlds the text speaks about, divided by a sort of chasm, a kind of depth, the so-called Unknowable Beyond (that is Chaos' original meaning: precipice), when from brightness will come off shadiness, signified by the godhead of indecision, slipperiness and mystery. And mystery is all the ritual sealing the witchlike entrance into Great Mothers' world, in an evocation of dates and names which semantically stamp as power's orgy's zenith Italian Republic's historical events a careful reader is going to pick out unexpectedly.
Highly symbolic is the image of the unique way for pouring off the two worlds: the mere brain rationality of some men free from human mass' throbbing burden: those who want to possess phallocratically Mu must use the feature of a guardian angel.
Likewise also the describing chapter of Mu's graveyards, where light stands out antithetically to the darkness characterizing the conceptual halo of human decease, vibrates with notes which are creatively antinomical to the ordinary templates of the human idea of mourning and death: "Melody spreads destabilizing reality, absence's hypnotic drawing. The sound holes day's indifferent instinct, chops time's arteries": these are passages a shrewd reader is bound to judge soothingly and statically lyrical, poietical isles in tale's highly mimetic tissue; in them the author carries out a crafty rhythmical pause, always playing on contraries' balance which makes up her performance's firm yarn. Melody, hypnosis, reality, absence, indifference, haematicalness. As a token of a not indifferent versatility in composing always adherent to the narrative task, to text's basic inspiring idea.
Everything is liaison des opposés in "Mu's Black Star", starting from the town-planning couplings which obstinately look for contraries' constant harmony. Even the highly semantic passage in main character's generation from the deep darkness to the dazzling light takes bodily shape in her kinship's onomastics, as everything is sema and symbolon in this literary work with a polyvalent capillarily studied hermeneutical resilience, since the author leaves to chance nothing in names' choice. And identically changing and open to many interpretations is the word which shows Great Mothers' world's capital (whose inhabitants are so different and far away from humans that an inversion in the incipit of the term indicating them is enough to put them in antithesis): Dailorg, in which it looks traceable the English root of Daily Organization, but in anagram makes discoverable a name (Gradoli) which is bound to bring immediately to readers' mind ill-omened extra-sensory memories extremely representative of the so-called "Republic's night", or terms as Dialogue and Ordeal, the former so rational and the latter so mystery. Mu is in anemosteresis, it is not acquainted with the wind, the typical earthly disarranging element does not exist, as if it fears human life's characteristic and customary dynamics. Every character of the book has got a meaningful and winking onomastics, starting from the classical mythological personifications of the rebel and incoercible determination to the ones of middle-American mythology of forgetfulness.
Yet, in Mu's libertarian and autarkical world, ruled by Great Mother's antiphallic positive power, there is room for scepsis: why condemning a murderer before weighing self-defence's hypothesis? And maybe the search of such answers, pyrrhonism's creak, is going to cause the disaster and the mixture with human counterweight, a thirst for knowledge which cyclically could mean perdition, becoming incarnate in the responsorial talk with power's victims' anarchical emblem: there the doubt makes its way and the corrosion of the Socratic hammering of "knowing not to know" is going to upset the main character raising to the umpteenth power her uncertainties when the second symbol of the rebellion to human customs' hypocrite caryatids appears.
The author searches wisely the semantic correspondence in the acts of the two worlds and their respective leading men, so that the plot paving main character's doubt bases itself on identical and opposite percussions, knocks which antithetically dispel and evoke again the sceptical shadow of the major figure, her irresolute, secluded, mysterious shadiness.
But when the writer defines as an anti-novel her work, she gives the idea of a clear message between the lines to her readers: the story, as we have already told, starting from a notion of essential refusal of the phallocratic logic which the male power seeded into the world, hugs, by its allegories and figurae impletae spread into the plot, all the political-religious history characterizing the country, so that the narration, in the eyes of the weaver of its plot and tissue, does not look absolutely novelistic, but a clear transfigured reading of the events and a suggestion to change the course painting a previous world antinomical to power's orgy. In my opinion there is neither fanciful (despite setting's looks), nor sentimental, nor historical, nor political, nor satirical valence in the story seemingly, very seemingly invented by Mary Blindflowers; there is instead a strong meditation (typical of an essayist) on the aetiogenesis of the diachronic drift of the male-tailored world definitely deprived of the anxiety of research and inquiry about the reasons of things and their origins.
Sanding fancy's chrysalis the story wraps itself up, the reader discovers a valence much more essayistic and preceptive than what the reading suggests at first sight. And I would tell that just this seemingly hidden nature of Mary Blindflowers' book is the clinched seal of the originality of this author.
Info
https://www.amazon.it/Stella-Nera-Mu-Antiromanzo-Anarco-Surrealista/dp/191142422X