Sky

Sky! memoirs---is part IV of Blaise Cendrars lyrical autobiography in which he vents his fascinations with the mystic art of levitation mixing in with his beatific poetic-prose the accounts of various case accounts, mostly centuries old, of some remarkable levitators. It opens with his carting some several hundred caged birds back to france from his miraculous travels gathering such colorful specimens armed with butterfly nets and dreams to give as a gift to a special little girl. Cendrars then goes into the details of what it is to fly, as humankind has striven to reach the skies from time immemorial. It is the latter half of the book that Cendrars unleashes his magic as opposed and/or complimentary to the first halfs mystic trends. And what magic does he make! Writing is compared with mining subterranean caverns, as a miner descends unto the abyss armed not only with the essentials of graveyard diggers but with a bird on his shoulder as miners use to do for caution regarding the dangerous and sometimes poisonous air within the earth's crust; if it reaches intolerable levels the little bird will quietly, without complaint, suffocate first. As the air down below is vaporous and the writer's descent: "visiting the secret interiors of the Earth to discover the philosopher's stone"= the formula of V.I.T.R.I.O.L. expounded by the alchemists in quest of the absolute. Cendrars previous three volumes, along with this one are extremely difficult to find, and it is a literary crime and testament that only a very few peole today have any true idea of the magical possibilities inherent in literature. As "Writing is successful only when it makes things happen"; and the prose of Blaise Cendrars, the one-armed ww1 veteran of modernism, replete always with a thick russian cigarette burning under squinted eyes, is a high ranking underground leader in the linguiststic legions who storms the sky in this last book of memoirs, riddling the air with verbiage and ammunition and followed by squadrons of eagles and falcons and hawks and when he sleeps floats approximately 3 inches off the ground for he is a writer of holy things worthy of the most sumptuous religious texts. One is transported while reading Sky Memoirs to a state not unlike that of the phenonemon of levitation, in which one's thoughts tend to hover, in a state of suspended animation and remains so until Cendrars decides to set you down upon a soft pillow, that you may truly take flight in the similitude of dreams.