The Saltcast Adventure

Below the mode of being, not so below you cannot still feel it, a longing hollow from “Years of deprivation” having “pared your body to bone and wire,” lies the recognition of some valiance lovingly imagined of yourself “extended in an eternal gesture of longing … showing only as a hole where interior hollow meets exterior plane.” The central metaphor here, embedded in a magicomechanics hoardedly lored, is a phantasmagoric kaleidoscopia where “whatever phantoms lurk in the half-created space between fantasy and the real world may escape through the mirror”. Desire as a tenuous malleation of reality as “simply an image” which could substantiate, could we only seek ourselves some deeper fundament buried beneath salts of our tossed wayward upon strands, shatters us into a thousand sins, “for we fall short of the Gods and their desires for us”, the tendrills specificity of this sundermust buried heartcore within our howling thisafter lodes the cursed mirror “hidden somewhere within the Host’s body” our communions cannot consecrate.

Do we, deep beneath the surface, discover from the distortions faces? Partially. As we might expect of an uncanny liminality between dangerous presence and exoticating internus, The Saltcast Adventure sustains its fantastic charge in the alternating current of intensity and mundanity. We encounter, in cavernous depths, the cursed spirits haunting the land, and it’s simply a society much like ours, markets and wars and stories refractions of our own. This ambiguity creates a spiritsickness in the heaves of uncertainty, where apparitions undergo apatheia to mere appearance, or so it appears, apperceive in their inreflections a vastness beyond our contained: “The first leap of flame eats a hole in the world, sears through your eyes. A moment afterwards, once you’ve finished blinking, the modest candlelight reveals that the smallish room you’re in is almost entirely bordered in mirrored glass, re-creating the minor crowd of beings around you as a vast throng of duplicates.” In every visagestation of the weird looms the blooms of buriedness, briefly, as we’re harried through, lambents of the spiritual to, suffer it through the blinking need, “stare out into the interior space of the Seeming.”

Until, that is, the current alternates, and we’re onto the next thing. The Saltcast Adventure establishes its rhythm by skipping the first hour of the Fellowship of the Ring, page one at “This is the furthest you’ve ever been from home.” Always we’re hurried onto the next thing, almost by Act III to the point of parody, when Patricia skips in her mother’s footsteps, intuiting immediately “She must have found a Blessing Stone, or something of the kind”, a secret knowledge we’ll graciously attribute to being “a bard, build for aftermaths”, then swiftly encountering Saltcast who swiftly recognize her as Madelaine’s daughter, so that we might expeditiously fastforward her mother’s expedition into the Hydra King’s lair. And then the next thing storytelling sallows out the assortiment of sentiments, suggestions accumulating sedimentation: “You stare blankly ahead of you for a few moments. That was certainly an encounter … You move on as quickly as you can.”

I’ll take it over in the year thirty second of the reign of so and so, but this tendency, when combined with the story’s penchant for sheer incident, leaves us “floating in the dark, and around you swim darting shoals of light and colour and sound. There’s no way to reach out to them, but sometimes their course through the void brings them close enough to perceive clearly. Laughter, soft but cruel. A pale hand pressing on glass until it breaks.” The Saltcast Adventure correctly intuits that a pervasion of mystery is the route by which its proper nouns can parade to the theme, but we must of the mysteries manifest more than the might be or the sublimity it implies softens simply to sensations, a séance of “the nothing in your head—your whole self, your entire sense of reality flattened into a stage for that voice to occupy. You don’t understand the words, but it doesn’t matter. They fill you anyway, swelling inside your skin, beautiful, terrible, indifferent.” I’m not without feeling, though, I can cherish sensations for their sake. Isn’t it lovely, such a turn of phrase: “The circle of wavering light in which you move makes the darkness beyond look like a receding tide of ink, pooling in the depths as you make your way along”. A bit of humor also helps: “You’ve got such a human sort of look on your face. Gormless.” Anyways, in all these mirrors and mystications, sometimes it’s nice just to feel seen: “His fiancé’s spider collection is getting pride of place in their new home when they move in together.”

If the central ambition melts away into world historical strings of fantasy pseudoconsquence, then precisely in its hollows we hallow the unmade, which ever lingers our losstouch to literature: “They believe that we come from the souls of the unmade peoples of the world the Gods discarded … And they believe that the Dead God exists still on the other side of the mirror, and might grant them their memories of what they consider the true world back if they call on her enough.” Who doesn’t yearn a bit of gnostic needing? “Someone should have saved you, but you don’t have a face for the someone.”