The Adventures of Norman Finkelstein

Buckle up!

Your next stop will be a Sixth Dimension, not of sight or sound or of mind but of poetry, and yes, it is as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is not The Twilight Zone, however but a stranger and richer place governed by the impersonal board of a shadowy institution called the Immanent Foundation.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

It is a world of Norman Finkelstein’s own making, as is the central genius of the place, a shaman/shrink/professor/poet-doppelganger called Augustus Sprechenbaum (or speaking tree). It is the realm of an ongoing work, a universe only partly contained in a book called Further Adventures, published by Dos Madres Press in a town called Loveland, Ohio.

It is called “further” adventures, because it is, as Finkelstein writes in the collection’s afterword, “the third volume in a long, fragmentary narrative that begins with From the Files of the Immanent Foundation, winds its way through much of In a Broken Star, and now comes to a conclusion in the poems of this book.” In the opening lines of Don Juan, Lord Byron expresses an inner urge that Norman might be responding to in his own narrative:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan

But Finkelstein’s friend is not an ancient one, but a hero/schlemiel  journeying hither and yon from the past to the present to the future, a fellow he has dubbed Pascal Wanderlust, a name plucked from a pair of Dr. Marten’s floral boots purchased by his wife, Alice Finkelstein.

But both names also catch the essence of this character. “Pascal” resonates with the French polymath Blaise Pascal, most famous for his statement that  “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

That is our hero’s problem too, as is indicated by the name Wanderlust. The urge for going, however, provides one of Further Adventures’ prime virtues, a dynamic narrative that moves brightly among various modes and moods and places, from science fiction to science to alchemy to comic books, from wit to astral wonder, from nonsense to high lyricism. And the entire work is embued with an eerie, spell-binding, and yet somehow familiar music:

Do you remember,
my old friend,

how they came upon us unawares
the fortunetellers and jongleurs,

with their cloaks and wide-brimmed hats
their tarot decks and accordions,

tambourines and carts
bearing amphoras of oil and wine? 

Ever the arch-mage, Finkelstein sends his restless hero—and us—into a “deepening, enchanting night,” in Wallace Stevens’s phrase. It is a place of pleasure and mystery, and a delight to visit.