The latest title from The Artel Press is a work of the broadest, wildest ‘artefictual extelligence’, a ‘sublime allegory’, of and against its time.
‘Seeing is Beveiling’ (sic) by Michael John Gerard Higgins incorporates music, drawings, photography and a series of delicately wrought, metaphysically oriented vignettes, created over a thirty year career of creative endeavour.
Written, for the most part in the second person, in an imaginary tradition conflating the streams of Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and O’Brien’s The Third Policeman Higgins’ book, subtitled ‘a study in obliterapture’, invites the reader onto a strangely modified golf-course, from where they will proceed, through 9 countries – to encounter a surrealist panoply of uncanny personages.
Stuffed full of macaronic texts and neologisms, the book is further illumined by the author’s curious black and white photography, arcane illustrations and hundreds of pieces of specially composed music, accessible through the author’s SoundCloud profile and – should the reader wish to perform it – at Universal Edition.
If you’re concerned by contemporary writing’s lack of engagement with the eerie and its conflation both with the absurd and the delightfully inconceivable, then this is the book for you.
Michael John Gerard Higgins was born on the Wirral in 1971 and lives in Norwich. He studied Music at the University of East Anglia and now teaches as a Steiner Waldorf educator. As a composer he has published over 200 works with Universal Edition. This is his fourth title with The Artel Press.
Publication Date: 2nd February 2024
ISBN 9781739900342
610pp paperback
£15
Fiction/Poetry/Spirituality