A Leak In The Safe

Recently, I’ve been intrigued by this idea of torsion, as evidenced by the poem and story bearing that title which may be profitably perused in previous entries. I got onto the idea from a weird Feral House book (like there are any un-weird Feral House books) entitled The Philosophers’ Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter by Joseph P. Farrell. It’s a crypto-paranoid alternate science type thing that stresses the likeness between the alchemy of the past and cutting edge physics of today. Like most books of its ilk it’s a wild mixture of arcane facts, dubious speculations and no real conclusion – this kind of inquiry is never certain of anything and it all just leads inevitably to the receding horizon of the next book and the next and the next. I don’t necessarily believe this stuff, but I do admire it as creative thought, and books like this always seem to particularly stimulate my own imagination. One insight I brought with me as I was in the midst of following my own workings was that what the alchemist does with beakers and furnaces and the physicist does with lasers and cyclotrons in an attempt to understand and thereby alter and transform reality, the poet or artist does with symbols and the lover uses the most available technology of all – the human body. Don’t tell me that the beloved can’t alter the whole universe of space and time by the simple act of crossing their legs, and by simple motions turn everything into fraught gold.

Anyway, here’s a few passages from the book that interested me, first from Farrell and then a couple direct quotes from Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev, the czar of torsion:

If the basic idea of torsion is that it is related to a rotating system, then it will be apparent that the universe is composed of rotating systems within other rotating systems, producing a continuously changing system with a changing flow of time. And if in addition those spinning systems are in turn emitting energy, such as a star pouring out its electromagnetic radiation from the fusion reactions from within it, then that dynamic changes yet again, and with the constantly changing “spiraling and pleated” field of time, time itself takes on dynamic properties.

Such complex, interlocked systems of rotation may be though of as “knots” of space-time that are so intensely concentrated that they form the objects observed in the physical universe.

The torsion field of a given spatial configuration can be recorded upon any physical object.

– Joseph P. Farrell

Near the motor there occurs a thinning (rarefaction) of time, while near the energy receiver its compaction takes place. The impression is gained that time is extended by a cause, and contrariwise, it becomes more advanced in that place where the effect is located.

In this manner, in principle, it proves possible to have a momentary relationship and a momentary transmission of information.

– Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev

What is noir? It’s such an overused and amorphous term that I’m tempted to answer, as Louie Armstrong did when asked a similar question about jazz, if you don’t know by now, don’t mess with it. But when I think about noir in the same way as other modernist movements like, say, Impressionism or Bebop, there appears the glimmer of an answer. Since the French critics coined the term after the fact, in the beginning for movies and then for the hard-boiled literary work which inspired many of them, the people who originated noir had no idea they were doing so, followed no rules, wrote no manifestoes and joined no professional organizations. Still, it can be associated with a specific time frame shaped by historical influences, starting with the materialism and nervous, jittery doomed gaiety of the twenties, continuing with the grim thirties and finding full flower in the disillusionment of post World War Two America. Add to this psychological background the massive rise in literacy, and the profusion of cheap “pulp” magazines consumed by guys with a taste for short, brutal fiction and the time to indulge that taste because they were out of work or in the downtime of war. Anybody who could crank out such fiction fast enough could make a precarious living out of it, and in fact their fiction gained immediacy and power by emerging so immediately from the subconscious. The historical movement died with the pulps, it’s vitality withering, as is the case with many other things, at the moment it was named and codified. To me you can’t really speak of contemporary writers as being noir, but only of having noir tendencies in their work.

Which brings me to an anthology that has the temerity to call itself The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, two individuals who have more than enough chutzpah to make such pronouncements. The first obvious thing about the book is how weighted it is to the present day. Even though in his introduction Penzler locates the “golden age” of noir in the forties and fifties, there are only three stories from the former and six from the latter while the nineties and two thousands produce ten each. Perhaps he intends other books he’s edited like the just published The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories to pick up the slack on the old guys, but any book claiming to be the best noir and not include Lester Dent’s “Sail,” doesn’t really live up to the title, and I’m sure there are many more vintage gems that deserve to be included more than some of the contemporary, presumably more commercial, offerings. Noir may literally mean black, but just because a story is dark, or has a downbeat ending, it ain’t necessarily noir. In my opinion the only two contemporary writers who approach true noir status are Ellroy and Megan Abbot, and Abbot isn’t even represented here. Instead for some unaccountable reason the reader is subjected to Harlan Ellison’s tedious not even close to noir “Mefisto In Onyx,” and, as in so many mystery anthologies, the inappropriate Joyce Carol Oates is trotted out like a desiccated but aristocratic maiden aunt presumed to class up the proceedings.

Noir has become the talismanic force it has because it is visionary.  In the world of the noir holy trinity of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich there it isn’t just the good guys versus the bad guys, but an almost Gnostic view of nature, humanity and society itself as inherently malevolent. In the best stories in this collection “Spurs” by Tom Robbins, “For the Rest of Her Life” by  Woolrich and “When the Women Come Out to Dance” by Elmore Leonard the conclusion of the story brings the epiphany that the protagonist is in hell right here right now, and the torment threatens to be pretty close to eternal. Not enough of these stories live up to them, at least not enough to be called the best, particularly the more high toned literary gents at the end.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that I didn’t read or reread all of the stories in this volume and enjoy most of them. In truth, it’s a pretty darn good collection of creepy, perverse dark fiction. If only it weren’t called The Best American Noir of the Century.