It's about time, because I'm in a state where I'm blithely staring over errors as it's become an inextricable mass of information for me now. It's become too close, and I'm unsure whether I've said enough, though it certainly feels that way. Which means it's very much overwrought in some places and woefully inadequate in others but, well, right now I just need an exit from it.
Doubtless there will be some revision in the future, possible clarifications and so on. But for the most part, the big ideas are done.
It's doubly ironic then that the ideas that started the write-up are nowhere to be found.
Very clear and definite spoilers for Weaveworld.
Interview, The Ritual and Gardens
I've been checking some interviews with Clive Barker, one of which where he gets
As a result, the atmosphere is positively hostile, and it's surprising how calmly responsive Barker stays, slapping down most attacks/arguments easily and eloquently, even though he might have evaded one or two here and there, while patiently reiterating and clarifying his stances, even in the face of what are almost exclusively leading questions. I would've blown up at one point, but then I don't have any business being in front of 2 people, never mind a whole crowd of self-righteous little armholes😊.
There's a reason for both the audience and (to a lesser extent) the host's self-righteous aggressiveness towards Barker of course; mainly that society of thirty years ago certainly wasn't as desensitized like we are to some things. And Hellraiser might've been responsible for some of that, though I honestly don't profess to know, as I'm not a horror movie expert. Hellraiser the movie IS a very good adaptation of the novella though, I know that much.
Anyway. What I took away from that segment was how Barker states he almost exclusively tries to use supernatural themes as a metaphor to broach certain themes and ideas he wants to address.
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And don't you 'duh' me on this one; this is the age of escapism, it is rare to find this level of thought in contemporary fantasy authors. and either way, it's the 'exclusively' that bothered me a bit. There should be room for escapism and entertainment, both for author and reader. But with the grilling he receives in that clip he can be forgiven for reining some of his views in. Reduce the food for the fire, as the fire has got its blinds on, and all that.
Shortly after writing this I was re-reading the introduction to the novel again, and I read the part where Barker specifically addresses this sometime-attitude to his own work. So eh, yeah, this bit wasn't superfluous at all... Maybe I just wanted to show off I've been doing my background for this thing.
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Just as a little aside because that other horror movie is still prowling around in my head. I was looking at the interview because I had some trouble in starting the Weaveworld write-up, as I often do with the ones where I want to talk about a lot. And when I reflected on The Ritual, it becomes clear, a little on the nose even, that is also does this thing where it uses horror and supernatural elements to get to the heart of a matter.
The beast as metaphor and, also, as literal incentive to combat cowardice and for pushing past that cowardice, so when that same beast demands you to sink low, in terror and obeisance, you stand up and fight. Barker would like the film I'm thinking.
And so would you.
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And with Weaveworld Barker explicitly stated that he wanted to explore the idea of an ideal paradise at the heart of most creation myths, a garden of peace and plenty, and as Christianity informs many of his fictions: that garden is Eden.Now, in the novel, you obviously have your Weaveworld itself; The Fugue, the collection of magical places and the individuals who populate them. There's magic around every corner, underneath every blade of grass and when the reader is first introduced to it, the overwhelming impression is one of ribald peace and plenty (yes, that is exactly what I mean), harmony and wonder. The Weaveworld itself is an overtly, explosively, magical shade of Eden.
But there's also another part in the book where we are treated to another garden entirely.
And maybe it is even the original garden itself, but there's deliberately no way to know for certain. And those parts of the book are genuinely spellbinding. I didn't set out to find a story with Biblical themes this time, it just happened. But when I realized what was being put on display I really was quite taken with it.
It's here where Barker introduces the book's hidden mythology, supplying enough elements that you can fabricate a number of possible scenarios to have given rise to this 'Paradise garden' myth.
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There's an element to this scenario that I absolutely loved; something that seems to sit engraven as one of the basic 'given truths' in this world: Uriel's situation, his alone-ness. Among the things it infers and the most interesting to me is that it implies an absence of supervision. Coupled with Immacolata's comments, likely inspired by hidden 'true knowledge', which is supplied by the Menstruum or from knowledge gained behind the veil or as an oral legend from the Kind, points to a Creator absent and forgetful, wilful or not, or if not forgetful; one who is not omniscient. Absence can imply many things, but the consequence of it for those not in the know is that it can only be felt as abandonment.
So then; the issue of divine abandonment rears its head again. It's a theme more explicitly touched in Barker and Miller's Next Testament.
Loved seeing it here, even if it wasn't the heart of the matter.
The Mythology
On the Arab Peninsula, there's a place so inhospitable and empty, it has remained to this day unmapped. This place is called the Empty Quarter. And in its very heart, closed in by a seamless wall of smooth rock, lies the Garden.
Under the sun, it is an empty waste. And nothing is visible other than vague avenues and patterns in the sand and dust, with meaning seemingly present but indecipherable. But during the night the garden gains another dimension. One of seeming life, made manifest through dust. But of course; the dust, the sand, being reared into a simulacrum of teeming, blooming life, is a simulacrum only. It is white and sterile, reduced to crumbling dust at the lightest touch. The structure and patterns are proved meaningless, they are merely an echo of what once was.
The garden is inhabited by a being of geometries, eyes and wheels of fire. It calls itself Uriel. It is the one that raises the garden of dust every night, in memory of what once was and maybe, also as a signal, to broadcast to whatever or whoever might be listening, that it is still doing its job.
At the time of the story it is a being that, a hundred years earlier had looked into the minds of men who'd read the Bible, either correctly understood who he was by the given context, or who misappropriated the Garden's mythology for himself.
Barker leaves it up for interpretation which is the correct one here.
I choose to take this at face value, as an extension of the Biblical myth.
Barker, in Uriel's initial meeting with Shadwell and in Suzanna's conversation with Immacolata in the Shrine of the Mortalities, of course offers up something else, something wilder; hints of the absolute base truth informing, giving rise to Biblical mythology.
But, again, as this is all the information we have, and there's nothing but fruitless speculation down that particular road, I choose to approach it my preferred way.
Uriel, only arriving at the garden after Adam and Eve's banishment from earthly Paradise, as the angel with swords of fire, is left behind to bar entry to any who would enter its idyllic premises.
But over the course of some time, new life begins to grow there. It is unplanned, wild and rampant, varied and completely against normalcy as it was established up to that point, in a word: inhuman.
As this is an unknown, uncalculated for 'miracle', or that at the very least Uriel was given no orders for, he can do naught but watch them grow. And as it his duty is to prevent entry, he does not mind letting the Curious Seerkind leave to find the world outside.
But then, after their leaving, the ages pass and the once-clear angel slowly starts to succumb to the madness of loneliness, and forgets all of what it was, until a group of travelers break its isolation.
From their minds it pieces together the Biblical mythology and, reading of the angel of fire placed at Eden's gates, is reminded, but not shown (very important), of what it once was.
It abandons guardian duty for that of executioner, and strides into the world to hunt the Kind that once had left the garden.
Years pass as the Kind are hunted and killed in violent conflagration where ever they are found. In the end the survivors secrete themselves in the Fugue, the carpet that hides them from the eyes of their "Scourge", to wait for the day that they'd be safe again.
I hate the world, I was there once before.
Finding no more Kind to extinguish, and, as a being of utter purity, repelled by the grubby world outside of the garden, the being that calls itself Uriel returns to it and again takes up its guardian duty to the now-dead, absent the angel's power, Paradise.
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It is an assumption that the angel's leaving causes the garden to wilt.
It's not gone into in the novel, I think.
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It continues watching over a garden of dust every night, forgetting everything but the thing in front of it. Nightly building empty meaning out of a jungle of dust, an imitation-echo of once-teeming vibrancy, and as an empty gesture, a sign to the heavens: Hineni. Here I am, God. But enacted, expressed, to a God, unwilling or unable to witness, One who maybe, through the endless ages, has become just as forgetful of Himself as this one wayward angel.
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There is comfort in oblivion.
Though able to go anywhere, Uriel, this being of immense God-like power remains in the garden, clinging to derelict duty, because, having forgotten itself, and basing itself on the inaccurate depiction as glimpsed in the minds of those who had read the Bible, this depiction of itself, with all the duties that that entails, are all that it knows.
Though able to go anywhere, Uriel, this being of immense God-like power remains in the garden, clinging to derelict duty, because, having forgotten itself, and basing itself on the inaccurate depiction as glimpsed in the minds of those who had read the Bible, this depiction of itself, with all the duties that that entails, are all that it knows.
Furthermore: It verbatim states that it does not like the outside world. It remains in the dead garden, conjuring the vanished Paradise from dust, because unlike the outside world; dust is safe, dust is peace, as in; dust proclaiming, being the symbol of oblivion. To bring back the plants, colour and life as they were, must have been within this creature's possibilities, but it keeps instead the white and sterile garden of dust, crumbling into nothingness at the slightest disturbance. Because emptiness can not be tainted, it is pure unless something is added. Safe and void, ever always predictable.
Later on in the story Uriel also continues on with this, when it voices the desire to scorch the entire world into dust and ash, void it of life.
The Persecution of Imagination
There is something obvious I have not yet addressed. It is the question of why Uriel leaves the garden. Why he goes after the Kind, to burn them wherever they are found.
It's not because of Shadwell's suggestion of going after them, he was merely the reminder, because Shadwell was not the cause for Uriel's first leaving of the garden.
So why? What makes this being leave his duty? What enforces this malign, destructive course of action, prompting him to go out and renew its hunt? And more than that, when taken to its extremity, the path that begs the end to life itself?
It is the Bible, of course.
As Immacolata states: "That's what it believes, having read the Bible."
Or rather; The origin of it comes from the stance offered, demanded by the Bible.
Implicit message of strict adherence. Do one, not the other.
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On top of, of course, the Bible's 'Kill the sorcerer wherever he is found', which would be an easy but boring explanation and thankfully it isn't mentioned in the novel.
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The Seerkind in their wild multiplicity of life, with all their magic, all their differences, their colours, their everything that isn't fixed, represent everything imagination can possibly summon. They are representative of Barker himself too, the irrepressible creative.
Destroying the Seerkind is to destroy life itself in all its unending imagination and creativity. Because Creativity is life, and life is creativity. It is thought, it is hope. It is the constant momentum forward.
Creativity is anathema to lines of constraint. Guidelines are abandoned again and again in the face of passion and experimentation.
The Bible goes opposite to that.
It demands us to adhere to a strict sets of rules, in order to be without sin, to be pure. Failing that: Believe, submit, follow and be saved, or burn; there is no alternative. And in the mind of Uriel, it is this path, when followed to its extreme conclusion leads to only one place, and this is where we find it by the last stretch of the novel. These beings are impure and can not be redeemed. And the world itself is too far gone.
I hate the world, I was there once before.
By Uriel's reasoning, purity can only be regained, be made certain by the absence of life; an absolute sterility. Judge Death, but Biblical.
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Barker himself claims that this is not about the message, forgiveness, submission or commands themselves, that this is about the voices on earth, all those demagogues and figures of power who demand all their followers to bow down to them, who claim to speak for Heaven and the sinless purity it demands, who take that divine message, regurgitate it, mold it in a shape to suit it to their own profane ends.
That in truth, this is about those who interpret and who claim 'this path to follow': The organized religions.
But it can not be denied that all what these people do is follow the rules as as they are laid out in the Bible. For their own ends to be sure, edited maybe and altered, but from the same restricted heart, inimical to unruly, errant humanity.
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But.
Resolution, and Flawed Man
All of this reasoning is gleaned from the minds of man, and their assumption that the Bible gives the be all, end all knowledge and answer to these things.
Uriel takes this entire reasoning and subsequently solely acts from that premise, but can not KNOW that it's true. So: there is still doubt.
So when at the end, when Uriel is offered its heart's desire, which is to see itself, to finally again know itself as it truly is, it gazes into the jacket and draws forth from it the thing it wants most; itself. As mirror and more than mirror.
And in that moment it understands, is reminded, and knows what to do. And immediately it shoots away from Earth, leaving behind misguided humanity and all its flawed texts. Not a word given, not a backward look. The end.
There is no clarity for us, no final reveal. Only the baffled gaze of the outsider. The being Uriel knows, finally knows, when it is reintroduced to its own knowledge, its own truth, and then it leaves, immediately upon remembering only it knows what. The only deducible truth from this, is that neither humanity, or the Seerkind, in Uriel's ultimate comprehension, matter to it.
Anything we've held true is void because of this. We don't matter in the truth of this creature.
Our relevance to this thing of divine origin, is nonexistent.
Half of this is projection, tainted by an unwillingness to acquiesce to what Barker hints at, and me sticking to the Biblical lens. But also, because, if we base ourselves solely on what Barker presents, there clearly can be no clean answer, because what little he's hinting at has an inconceivable amount of possibilities behind it. Think of whenever the angel speaks, that it offers only seemingly coherent sentences, but it is unclear if they indeed always belong together. There is a possibility of disjointedness here as its mind, stimulated for the first time in a hundred years, jumps around from one thing to the next without pause, abandoning one idea ceaselessly for the next. There is body language, but that is interpretation, as are the visions we are shown; passing windows offering up words and scenes without context; blooming gardens, higher spirits, dripping matter of pure creation, and worlds of fire, cloud and rock.
In the end, Barker delivers on what he set out to do; he makes it clear that something bigger than mankind has touched it. And that Man, in response, created legends and myth in an effort to understand it. And that then, that thing, in all its unknowability, left. From ourselves there can be no answers to this, as everything is tainted by our own myth-making, our bias and ever-present self-importance. We're inside and, as such, can not see the whole picture. And there is no-one else to offer up a solution.
Meaning, but no answers.
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