A fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes

Yet once they halted in their relentless cataloguing, recording, reporting … wasn't there so much to give them pause? Hadn't one, in the wet slurp and roll of a glinting dark body glimpsed for just a moment in a natural canal, had to impose a species name on what could not, could never, be intuited from such a glimpse? Wasn't the prickle of unease crawling up the back of their necks tied to some actual shadow in the night? Some distant muttering while they slept?

Drunk Boat called it, roughly in the same month, in a different context, "the null effect — to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time." This directed with a nudge at Man Boy Slim, of "the way the human imagination fills in the gaps."

The "sample" material, however, is actively defying the idea that it might to be catalogued — whether it is the evolutionary result of environmental or artificial factors on indigenous species, or something invasive from somewhere that will not stand for our paltry human attempts at identification, let alone understanding. "Manifestation of the foreign entity."

[I have been wanting to catalogue the plant life in the ruelle, the vegetation beyond the fence of my terrace, under my bedroom window. I feel compelled to document it, preserve it, nurture it. The grape vine is choking out the wild flowers. The raspberry bushes have little fruit this year, perhaps because of the dust and trauma of the construction next door, or maybe the workers are eating them all. So many leafy stalks I'd like to identify, I want them all to thrive. I want to replicate them in clay and display them so that the interior wall reflects the exterior and preserves the record of its evolution.]

Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution is wild. I'm not sure I understand what happens in this book, but it doesn't much matter. This is dense reading that moves from general uneasiness and a creeping eeriness to intense dread. Shades of Solaris with its doppelgangers who mimic, but also fulfill an expectation, filling in a gap in the humans' perception or understanding, and also the zone of Roadside Picnic, where different rules apply.

The first section of Absolution is a prequel occurring some 20 years before the three other Southern Reach books to date, recounting a mission to the Forgotten Coast. Skip ahead 18 years to Old Jim's cover story managing the village bar while reviewing that old mission and keeping an eye on the Séance & Science Brigade. And then a fresh perspective on the First Expedition.

[My rue plant, the one keeping the squirrels at bay, was for a day home to four black swallowtail caterpillars; one fat caterpillar cannibalized the others.]

Area X has its own physics of space and, seemingly, other dimensions — "past, present, and future collapsed into each other." Absolution casts the events of the original trilogy in a new context regarding what is or was known, and what can possibly be known.

All Old Jim could be sure of is that the biologists' sense of time and reality had been obliterated and put back together differently — and that this had harmed them beyond repair.

I had a hard time getting into this novel. I gave up on it once months ago, but now I was determined to soldier through, despite recalling next to no detail from the other books, except the feeling, the existential horror. But I have already circled back to reread Absolution, before revisiting the rest of the series.

[The hydro workers meanwhile are chopping branches of lilac and serviceberry. The birds don't visit the way they used to; I don't blame them. Yesterday a sparrow flew into the airspace of my covered terrace and hovered, homed in on a spider hanging by a thread before snatching it.]

Is anyone absolved? The biologists are absolved of their duty. Old Jim is absolved of his guilt, from living with guilt. Lowry is absolved of humanity. 

Undulating waves of wolves, but made of black liquid and slurping their way across like liquid lava fire, and no that wasn't it but the sight defeated the eye like an eye defeated an ear and a tongue because he needed to see the enemy, not taste or smell them.

By then, Lowry has snorted and swallowed a lot more drugs from Landry, thank the gods. So maybe he was shouting at the liquid things that seemed so joyous in how they could dissipate and re-form and why couldn't all in life be like that? Why did anyone have to commit to just one fucking shape. It was a fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes and what if he just wanted to be a circle or an oval with no end and no beginning?