Two years ago, we published an excerpt from Steven Seidenberg’s Plain Sight. Now, Seidenberg has returned with a new book, titled Anon, released by Omnidawn and in audiobook form. This new book utilizes confessional devices towards lyric ends, and it’s resulted in a literary work in the vein of Clarice Lispector and Samuel Beckett. Read on for a segment of Anon.

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Such pleasant office have I long pursued, incumbent o’er the surface of past time with like accord, nor have appeared shapes fairer or less doubtfully discerned than these to which this treatise would direct its fleeting enterprise, a swarm of heady schemes withheld to ease the empty promise of each tutelary barge into the distance. While vowing to provision some beneficent adventure, I have as yet to speak as though there ever were a was to fell that querulous imperil, and in the throes of such malfeasance can’t presently decipher the tense of my recounting, so that what’s past should be described as passing, while practicing the foresight of what has long since finished. For then as now, I thought it then, how could this brigand’s blather measure up against the passage, that allegedly described must of itself be passing in description all the while? If I am now and so I was as I were soon to be, then even the empty pandering of the aesthete would seem to me descriptions to describe describing, nothing more—and as such nothing more…

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And that is what I thought just then, an inadvertent paean to the runnels of my vocative composures, when clattering up ladders of concocted genealogies I entertained the passage of imaginary comrades into equally phantasmal and suggestive undertakings, each dissolving into the next, an engorgement of narrative contrivances to put to shame the most bathetic almanac of rune or reminiscence. From such suspect consanguinity birthed this simple plan before all other ends received, till the first of all the talking apes did supplicate before me, both hostile and withdrawn, pleading for a chance to launch that doomed and fateful species, the produce of which, I feel reasonably certain, I am just as I was. Imagine the mark of that descent, to think that any life, however innocent and addled, could be worth the hapless prattle of such plenary offense against this cosmic globule of detritus—an insult I’m as sure to carry out by merely breathing. If they could only know; might they beg, might they plead for an ending I alone can aptly render, addressing that ingenuous suppliance to those who serve to mock the fretful form of their descendants, in hopes that they might heretofore be blocked from dipping their limp oars into this insufferable lacuna of declensions by the promise of a consequence their own participation in those prescient transmutations can alone ensure, a whetted stump obliged to split such muling wit from its shuttle of a stour, head rolling off in the shit, blood pooling at the sides of the cave…

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And so just then I thought what I was thinking, what now I thought of thinking then, inhumed within a mercy I have not shared with anyone, nor anyone with me, imagining then—as now another apparition speaks—that someday I would put to pad that imagining then, a fabled fold of apes and hunts and shadows. As though for naught I could describe what I have seen and what I’ve been, but only if the seeing has come first, assuming if I were to spend a simple discipline on anything as rote and understated, I would find the shallow mooring of this mawkish stimulation in its description only, and hastily alight upon what all who are made subject to such tropism assure—that somewhere is that place I will describe, unmediated in its presence, indescribable by nature. So there I stood, thinking that I stood, and that I stood was only stance by a depiction neither willingly nor wittingly preferred, knowing if I should describe it at some next belated landing I would only have described the last description of the posture, such that is as only was and nothing more. And as that future present must adduce this speculation, I don’t know what could prove I’m not describing the description, always formerly described by the admission that it could be yet described again, and as it could be, thus it must have been…

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So great a paradox of structural pretensions I severally arrayed—and did then find I had long since construed—that even now I seem to represent a new assemblage of constituents and fetters, shunt across the brutish divagations of the germ. If I could take up once again that first encumbrance of form, then as a recollection of myself I would not have been stricken with this regress of discrepancies, and could—if only fleetingly—allow that the intransigence from which I here arise should equally surrender its conscripted mendicant upon the altar of the figure I can’t help but to abide. If I might somehow differ every what-I-am from that-I-was then this peculiar discourse would not have since begun at all, and I would remain free, with neither record nor remorse, to stride the brumous mirror of the seas…

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All that understood, I am reluctant to regale with feats of gloomy self-deception, and would eagerly return to some thought otherwise contrived—some thought, that is, begun by having ended in its turn. Could I forget the as-it-were I was—and chronically as only just—then surely I would start anew, and therewith just the same, described and thus describing the description I’ve described, describing in description what in substance must have always been described at least one time—always at the very least one unremembered time—anterior to this that ever-presently presents it. Should I take it on myself as I am now to willfully forget the all-I-was before…before I came to be it, then in the now I would still find myself as I was then—but now—to strike once again against the simulacrum of the as-I-was since then. How could one be anything but lost in such reflection…

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Might I straightaway forget what I have since recalled recalling then I would have no reason to recall it in some future passing—passing as if passed—when I should find myself compelled to recollect the recollection now, but in the now that then will be, that culls the fitful pleasures of this unabashed cacophony. It seems so clear—so inescapably simple—I wonder how any other stricken with an indecision equal to my own could take up pen as sword and still expect to navigate the taunts and parries of these quandaries unscathed. Such witless youths and simpering savants, whose penning is but reflex to a seizure of the temporal lobe, have preceded me and will as likely trammel in the near, despite all imprecations against intrigues still to come…

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What lyric protestations trilled through missive marginalia can adduce the leaky cofferdams of substitute avowals? What drowsy spells and wreathless brows draw nectar in a sieve but think the vessel of creation never full for its immeasurable volume? All this sheathe of windless sail I gather to unveil a lazy paradise of hollows, and for all those who await some stalwart ending to contrive a novel accouchement into that fallen standard, I say I can do nothing to detail the lusus naturae at rest within its creature, a redolence sublated by the gilding of the bloom. I wish that I could exercise some sway on those inclined to such indelicate demeanor, commissioning the simplest of fainting cerebrations to prove a sluggish beetle in the brain the only chance of mastering the techné of expression. So many have done so much less and called it genius, one would think they’d flock like lemmings to the cliff, a place in that lost history of kindness and gentility assured…

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If only I could convince them; the comforting arms of sleep must certainly await; a life in god, for country and for faith, is drawing near, yeah, for all eternity is nigh. A transubstantiation not to lion nor to dove is certain for the same in you that takes you to your end, your glinting and eternal Soul, and wandering the skies from distal verge to apogee, you will be a godlike squall to helixes of twitching froth, vivified to scrutinize thy dreamed peregrinations; neither earth bound, nor as bound to air or water, not of sea nor dirt nor ether will your countenance be made, but cut across the heavens you will fill the cosmic coffer, eternal and decisive, omnipresent and—daring to be brutal in the dauntless course of Nature—without remorse. Go to it, my lovelies, your deliverance awaits—and so shall we be spared another boorish Bildungsroman, with verses stretched like sickly leaves to block from all below the nourishment of light and star. Should this discipline seem cruel to some who would account themselves the object of such bellicose harangue—fair enough, I say, what is that to me. For while I may discharge the unapportioned semblance of a means contrived as measure, sizing up the grand collation of that first mephitic capital as mine and mine alone, in doing so I spare each wistful dullard the bleak knowledge of a fate that only I may suffer, for having somehow brought it on myself…

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