David Barton is at it again. Regular readers of the Taipei Times may remember him from a clutch of reviews over 10 years ago, of Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan (reviewed Oct. 28, 2007) and Saskatchewan (reviewed Nov. 25, 2007), plus an interview “Professor with a fighting chance” (Nov. 25, 2007).
Barton is a professor in the English department at the National Central University in Jhongli City, Taoyuan County (“the armpit of Taiwan” in his view). But he’s perhaps better known for the sheer zaniness of his writing, a zaniness that in fact takes many forms.
Then, more recently, there was Lazar and Leper: The Book of Time Barton (reviewed June 15, 2017). I called that, among other things, an “intellectual comic strip,” but it was only the beginning. He has now re-issued it, together with two more items, to make a trilogy, or perhaps we should say a triptych. It now contains music, as do the two new volumes, and so is currently only available on YouTube. The three “books” are entitled Deck of Cards, Search for Lost Causes and Endgame.
This may sound strange, but the material is even stranger once you get to grips with it.
As for the first volume, the addition of Javanese gamelan music is a huge improvement, making you think that this Nietzsche-like contemplation of the cycles of time and messiahs has the philosophical reach the music embraces, putting the action of the rational mind into a trance-like suspension. Any echoes of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot become very disorienting with this added oriental dimension.
The same applies to this new, second book, where the music features one of those low-toned Tibetan flutes, producing a drone-like effect. None of these three books, incidentally, is now available without the music, such as via the link we gave in the original Lazar and Leper: The Book of Time review last year.
I have to admit to being almost totally flummoxed by Barton’s text this time. Not that the first episode was any clearer, but at least initial contact gave rise to some thoughts. Now it’s as if I’m in the world of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, surrounded by phrases that are potent enough but don’t carry any very coherent meaning, at least on a first encounter.
There are recurring images such as collapsing galaxies, eggs, time, space, red dwarfs, viruses, ICBMs, a universe of pain and there are unexpected elements — Humpty Dumpty, the Second law of Thermodynamics, Star Wars, plus many more. The cultural contexts are wide-ranging too — Blake’s “forests of the night” gets a mention, as do Milton’s “brooding on the vast abyss” and Shakespeare’s “something rich and strange.”
“We are the fragments of a conscious catastrophe” made me think of Brexit (but then Barton is Canadian, not British). But what the “argument” of the whole might be is, I would think, pretty much anybody’s guess.
“The systole and diastole of the universe”, perhaps, combined with a way of looking at the politics of war?
So, what is the imagined situation? Two male figures, Lazar and Leper, are playing cards and talking, and have been for several thousand years, as was the case in part one. Their remarks are laconic and cryptic, as after that length of time they are likely to be.
Then there are echoes of nursery rhymes, CS Lewis, the Beatles’ octopus’s garden, The Bells of St Mary’s, not to mention dark matter and private matters.
This may sound unduly eclectic. Nevertheless, I do have the insistent feeling that something of no small importance is being created out at Jhongli. I was left, too, with the thought that it’s important, in our brief spell here on earth, to spawn if at all possible something original, a first in the universe (which, of course, this is). Who knows what will come of it after we’re gone? Finnegans Wake recently became a best-seller in Chinese, and I can see a progressive pop-group, say, one day taking up Barton and his Lazar and Leper sequence in a big way.
Furthermore, David Barton is at least looking at the galaxies, thinking about intercontinental ballistic missiles, speculating, or having his duo of Lazar and Leper speculate, on where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Few other literature professors in Taiwan, I suspect, are doing anything similar.
Search for Lost Causes may not present a coherent argument, but it’s undoubtedly haunting. It may be that the excellent and very colorful graphics plus the music are totally satisfying on their own. Yet the more you watch it the more you become convinced that it’s the words, obscure though they may be, that lock the whole thing together. It’s also the kind of thing that could easily become a cult.
I’ve examined the numbers of “pages” and illustrations but can’t find any pattern. But if they are cards in a pack, then there’s no doubt David Barton is the joker.
Long ago I wrote of Barton’s Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan that it was “a brave book, hell-bent on destroying its own chances of finding a conventional publisher.” Search for Lost Causes is similarly uncompromising. Barton is one of a kind, and he’s certainly not going to water down his creations for the sake of easy intelligibility. Someone who strongly dislikes this kind of thing, however, could easily make a case for it being the crazed doodles of a mind that has long ago lost touch with ordinary sanity. But they said the same of William Blake.
So, haunting, uncompromising, possible cult-material — all in all this isn’t a product to be ignored. It’s also available everywhere and to everyone for free.
Search for Lost Causes can be seen and heard here. We’ll review the final volume, Endgame, next month.
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