by Leila Philip
Speculative Book Reviews
Writers are sometimes advised to write the book they'd most like to read. We invite you to write the book review of a book of speculative nonfiction you wish was out there, or a book that was never written but could have been, or a lost book of which there is scant evidence, or a book to be written in a hundred years. We invite you to consider the aesthetic qualities of this book and to use the opportunity of your review to push, adhere to, or reconsider the boundaries of speculation in nonfiction, as you see them. We see these reviews as furthering the conversation this journal seeks to encourage. We invite you to have fun. The limit is the limit of your speculation. Traditional reviews of nonfiction books that utilize speculation are also welcome.
We hope to publish several each issue. Typically, we imagine these reviews to be no longer than 1000 words. We'll be accepting reviews starting with our next submission period.
I can only speculate as to the title of this book, but I can assure you it is spectacular.[1] Specere, from the Latin, means to look and this book looks in ways that surprise, disrupt and disarm even the most begrudging of readers. The experience is like hang gliding, which I have never done, but sometimes speculate about doing. Last month when hiking up a cliff above the Oregon coast, I looked out and saw two flying things almost intersecting no more than fifteen feet out from the edge of the cliff; a bald eagle and a woman in a harness strapped like a cocoon beneath a wide green sail. She was hang gliding as easy as you please with her rippling canopy holding her in the wind. Below were jagged teeth of rock, the deadly surf roiling in, but she made graceful swoops so close to the mountain’s edge that If I had held a long pole, I could have touched her. The eagle, whose wingspan was dizzyingly wide, almost as long as the hang glider, was hunting. I could seen the keen pointed head as it lifted and fell, then the great wings also turning as easy as you please in the currents of wind. Below the waves crashed and swelled, crashed and swelled. The person I was hiking with remarked that on land you can only see 10 miles out into open ocean even on the clearest day due to the curving of the earth. He was an experienced sailor. But where we stood, almost at the crest of the cliff, he figured we were looking out a good fifty miles. Nothing but silver sheen, as if all the energy of the world was swirling in a snow globe to which someone had given a grand shake.
That feeling of being at the edge of the world, above a crashing ocean, watching a human sailing by, held by invisible rhythms of wind while a bald eagle turns in widening gyres -- that is how I would describe the experience of reading this book.
Stylistically, this book is indebted to Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who believed six impossible things before breakfast[2]. We can speculate all day about what Lewis Carroll meant by this (and of course the hookah pipe), but this aesthetic applied to literature is wonderful to consider. My book takes a White Queen approach to language, with imaginings that leap so high they take flight. While it is not comfortable to even speculate about the White Queen, grown obese with her own authority, flying anywhere, take her approach into language and the results are marvelous. The language in this book is made up of sentences that again and again do impossible things before breakfast. Yes!
In terms of literary genres, this book relies quite surprisingly upon the dynamics of a drab and little remarked upon genre, the parable. Specifically it makes use of the tale of the Blind Men and An Elephant, drawing upon our expectations only to turn them quite wonderfully upside down. By the time we finish we know we are in a version of Alice’s wonderland where no means yes and yes means no, and size is a matter of timing and perspective. In the classic tale of the Blind Men and An Elephant, a group of blind men encounter an elephant for the first time and attempt to describe what they see.[3] The first one, touching only the ears, says an elephant is a waving fan. The second one, touching only the trunk, (tickled as a matter of fact during his encounter by the elephant conducting his own investigation) says it is a snake. The third one, grasping only the bristly tail says it is a rope, while the fourth, feeling the hard legs announces it must be a pillar. The fifth, who feels the tusk, says the thing called an elephant is hard and smooth like a spear. The conventional lesson of this tale is about our human tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited experience. Because we can only take in the world through our own circumscribed lens, we cannot see the whole picture.
This book asks us to reconsider this tale in light of speculation. How wonderfully inventive and unhindered each blind man is in his perception, how deeply and completely he trusts the idiosyncratic way he views the elephant. And finally, how definitively he creates an entirely new being through his individual act of speculation. Through the power of his speculations, an ordinary elephant (of course there is no such thing as an ordinary elephant, but never mind) becomes a fan, a snake, a pillar, a rope, a spear. There is no limit to the fabulous here and each version of speculation works because it is grounded in the real. No lazy slouches in this story, the men touch and feel with precision the little bit of elephant they have to work with. Their failure is not in their flawed perceptions, but in the limitations of their access. They work hard at observing through their hands, poking that elephant with their pinky finger, the lightest touch, only to come away stating that they have encountered a watermelon. These men engage the elephant with senses open and deduce through their senses, mostly touch, but also sound, smell and taste, the grit of empirical fact. Then, the moment of wonder, each runs those perceptions through the whirligig of his imagination. Voila, a rope, a fan, a rock a snake, a spear where before there was only elephant.
//
[1] Hands off. I am working on this book. I speculate as to when it will be finished.
[2] "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." – Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
[3] The parable of the Blind Men and An Elephant originated in the ancient Indian Subcontinent. In contemporary physics it is considered an apt analogy for wave-particle duality.