Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz is a fabulous, Orphean song of desire and longing -- gritty, moody, erotic, intelligent, sublimely spiritual.

The book starts with Blue Jean's perspective (the girl) before moving on to her on-again-off-again boyfriend Zirque's perspective and then others. She is beautiful, sensuous, etc. They remind me of one of Georgia O'Keefe's flowers. O'Keefe said, "Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not". This book makes you stop and look. Like one of O'Keefe's flowers, Blue Jean floods my mind with vivid colors that almost obliterate the background. Lacan wrote, "Light may travel in a straight line, but it is refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills--the eye is a sort of bowl--it flows over". We see Blue Jean in the flooding of a twilight that is never still, but overflows.

Like viewing an O'Keefe flower, in reading this book, the eye (mind) is in constant movement, understanding instinctively that the picture consists of the dynamic relationships between its parts. While we might expect the focus to be on the center of canvas, which is also the center of the flower, or, in this case, the first narrator – Blue Jean. But, just as the focus does not remain on her, like an O'Keefe flower, there isn’t just one possible center but many: Is the center the pistil? A drop of dew? The swell of a folded petal (whose angle deflects the gaze)? Derrida taught that the center of anything is defined and created by what is outside of that center. This is very much the case in this book which starts with Blue Jean who loves a man who is mostly not there.

Lacan would probably say that this makes her clearer, because every picture has something whose absence can be observed – not literally on the canvas, but implicitly in the act of observing. Every painting invites us to lay down our gaze. For example, looking at another point of light: "If you wish to see a star of the fifth or sixth size, do not look straight at it. .... You will be able to see it only if you fix your eye to one side". It’s jarring to move from the first chapter told from Blue Jean’s perspective, with all its absences, to the second which is told from Zirque’s perspective, with all its absences. Both of their stories chime within the reader who is forced to simultaneously release one character while at the same time gaining a clearer perspective.

Adrift in a Vanishing City’s beautiful, poetic prose piles one observation on top another and another. Reading it reminds me of the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the sublime in which the sublime is a hostile vast, rugged, inhospitable wilderness that threatens physical annihilation. The wilderness is psychologically annihilating because our minds can't contain all the vast scenes within the boundaries of human imagination. Our imagination gets a check that Kant says is "followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful" that is a realization about our own nature. Kant says the sublime "concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does not admit of sensuous presentation". Any object (like O’Keeffe’s flowers) is monstrous according to Kant if "by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept". O’Keeffe’s flowery sublime checks the mind’s preconceived idea of a ‘flower’ as an object it has formed for its own ends.

As Blue Jean longs for her continuously vanishing and returning boyfriend Zirque and lives with his almost constant absence, she drifts and sees things like the path of the Milky Way in a path she has worn into the linoleum of her kitchen floor walking from the door to the counter where she prepares food he is seldom present to eat.

Zirque makes promises he never keeps and goes where is momentary desire takes him. Is he monstrous? Perhaps, from some perspectives. Definitely in danger of physical annihilation. But more than that, the experience of reading this beautiful and intense prose poetry is amazing and speaks to the longings for God and connectedness that we all share. ( )