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The Time of the Open Tomb"...
One would be hard put to find a more apocryphal, illuminating, and absolutely visceral text than David Gascoyne's "The Sun At Midnight".

Written at the peak of the poet's powers (just before he would collapse into an ahedonic depression which would silence him for 10 years), this slim text reflects a spiritual visionary at the height of his powers.Having read everything David Gascoyne has written, I can say without doubt that this mystical and poetic treatise reveals a man in full power of his capacities.This side of Gascoyne is revealed in nothing written before or after.

Weighing in at 55 pages--not counting the first page with an illustration of a hermetic androgyne and the full title ("Notes on the Story of Civilization Seen as the History of the Great Experimental Work of the Supreme Scientist"), this is a theological, theosophical, spiritual, biographical, bibliographical, and poetic
tour de force which leaves no room for doubt that David Gascoyne had reached a pitch of intensity and concentration few artists of any kind even approach.

Beginning with a a poem addressing the Buddha and St. Francis inspired by Danilo Dolci and a quote by Heidegger in German, the remaining 54 pages are both aphorisms and prose poems which serve as a kind of spiritual diagnosis of Gascoyne's contemporaries and century.

One is at times reminded of Rimbaud in his "savage carnival" of Illuminations and at other times of Friedrich Nietzsche in his "Antichrist" phase, only in reverse: Gascoyne is once and for all affirming his faith in the Christian God and predicting a "World To Come".

Page 6: "The Meaning of God's Human Death."

"Sacrifical suicide, after treachery, isolation, misery and ruin, failure of the life-work and the final loss of hope, precede giving up the Soul into the hands of the Creator.The Resurrection cannot happen before all this has been fulfilled."

Page 49: "The Primal Origins of the Original Ones."

"God is the Greatest of Bi-Sexual Beings, who has two eyes in one, Left, Right and Centre.All vision is an a priori preliminary to synthetic judgment.God saw all things were good when they were first created."

Page 37: "Nietzsche: the last great Unholy Fool."

"Anti-christian, yes.A deceiver of many, yes.A charlatan, not exactly.A rich mind poisoned by Satanic influence and made giddy by overwhelming hubris.A great man gone to the bad because of bisexual indecisiveness.Result, in the later writings: complete divorce of form and content, and the possessed Will to a historic seizure of power.His failure to return is Eternal now."

And so on: if one's mind is not up to the task of really imbibing Gascoyne's message, there's no point picking up the book or buying it (for a ridiculously exorbitant price: maybe if Enitharmon press had set the bar a little lower, he would not be so unjustly obscure.)

Gascoyne as cultural physician (ironically in the tradition of Nietzsche himself from a clearly unorthodox Christian perspective) is omnipresent here, and it works.

Perhaps the only flaw in is his projection of his clearly tortured sexual orientation (bisexual) onto everyone and everything else.

Along with his "Collected Poems", this is probably the most important text Gascoyne ever wrote. I would strongly encourage anyone with even a remote interest in him to get their hands on it, though it isn't very easy these days. ... Read more