Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero
Beast: The Lost Chronicles
by Paul Stubbs
Broken Sleep Books
£13.99, ISBN: 978-1-916938-64-9, December 2024, 130 pp.
At times, it seems as if the nineteenth century never ended. It was a century in which the disenchantment of the world that began in earnest with the Enlightenment reached its logical culmination in the materialism and scientism animating much of the upper strata of thought in the newly industrialized West; it was then that Nietzsche, a diagnostician of his time and a harbinger of ours, looked around him and saw a world whose purported transcendental foundations—religious and philosophical—were cracking. Despite the sometimes drastic technological, social, and political changes since then, we’ve inherited that world and are living out its implications. And finding ourselves face-to-face with the existential unease it brought into sharp focus.
It’s an unease that poet Paul Stubbs addresses with Beast–The Lost Chronicles. Stubbs’ book contains an epic, book-length poetic sequence that imagines an alternative, phantasmagoric world in which our own is recognizable. Over the course of the sixty-seven related poems making up the sequence, Stubbs traces the wanderings and acts of the title character, whom he borrows from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” (To give us an idea of what the beast might look like, Stubbs includes several illustrations of fantastic semi-human creatures taken from a seventeenth century bestiary.) In Stubbs’ telling, voiced through a fictional chronicler, the beast, now lost and abandoned after Yeats’ death, continues slouching toward Bethlehem, leaving behind him the wreckage of religious and philosophical schools and arguments. With its apocalyptic tone and sharply drawn, often unsettling imagery, much of it adapted from biblical sources as well as from Yeats, Beast reads like a heterodox Book of Revelation, one that traces the creeping encroachment of nihilism as the beast makes his way across a metaphysical wasteland.
Stubbs’ beast is a complex creature. He is “an interloper…meant never to exist” and “a blunt and/ impractical end to Historical theology.” He is literally an anti-Christ, a pretender leaving a void where the Nazarene was or was supposed to be, and more than that:
A now rapacious primate, the beast, driving
the Taoist, the Christian, the Hindu and
the Muslim back onto all fours, and forcing
a new plague of people
to re-remove
and display case the rib…
Until when at least a hundred evolutionary
mutations up ahead, and a billion cold years along…
(onto an eschatological and lunar terrain)
You, the beast,
you’ll rise up again, freed
finally of the
microbiology of religions, and
coterminous continents of sin.
Philosophy fares no better than theology against the beast’s nihilism. Over the course of the sequence he confronts Kant, becomes Wittgenstein’s fly caught in the bottle, feasts “on titbits of Dasein/ out of Heidegger’s own palm.” And defeats them all. As the beast’s chronicler concludes, “not one philosophy in the world is for you”:
you an antinomy because unable still to find a philosopher
capable of untangling it, your truth; until when you, finally,
in your final lesson, you decide that there is no epistemologist
(not even Kant) who might,
potentially, release you from that
thought-caul in Yeats’ head.
Out of the ruins of theology and the detritus of philosophy, the beast builds—nothing. And in (not) doing so, reveals his nature. Because the beast is a being that cannot be, but somehow must be. As I read him, he embodies the predicament of someone thrown into a demystified and nihilistic world. That predicament in its simplest form consists of having to choose the meaning of one’s existence in the absence of belief in transcendental foundations, whether epistemological, teleological, divine, or metaphysical. The beast’s world is the world haunted by the death of God—a Nietzschean world in which there are no facts, only interpretations. (And even the death of God isn’t a fact but instead is an interpretive event, an accident arising within the history of Western metaphysics.) Existence in such a world entails a paradox in which pure contingency is the necessary ground of being and goallessness the telos underwriting its meaning. It’s a state of ontological contradiction with no way out. As the embodiment of this situation the beast is, to quote Sartre’s brush-off at the end of Being and Nothingness, a useless passion.
And yet we see him, pure thrownness and purposelessness, hubristically attempting to secure the necessity of his existence:
You, today, refusing to become nothing,
forcing Berkeley (via the Heimlich manoeuvre)
to spit out his idea of you,
you exist
wrinkling and unwrinkling:
a hiatus in the resurrection,
you exist
finding a print of your face
hidden on the Turin shroud,
you exist
even when substituted for the thing-in-itself,
you exist
managing to disembowel God
(only your own guts spill out)
you exist
looking and then not looking at the world,
(annihilating external objects
in-between, except yourself)
His is a hubris that claims the right to a kind of cosmological solipsism:
The day arrives when you, the beast, you assert
your right to be the biological, anatomical, theological and
cosmological architect
of the entire universe.
Thus, you begin to redesign, reorder and re-quantify all of
the still extant truths
of human cognition
The beast’s claim seems to show that metaphysics abhors a vacuum as much as nature does. Something must take the place of the old guarantees of existential legitimacy, even if what takes their place—like Stubbs’ beast—in the end can guarantee nothing.
If it seems that the 19th century never ended it’s because the deepest questions it raised either haven’t been answered, or have been answered in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In Beast—The Lost Chronicles Stubbs shows that he understands this, and doesn’t shy away from allowing his sequence to provoke the metaphysical discomfort it reflects and challenges. Poetry of substance has that kind of power, and there’s no question that, difficult as it can be, what Stubbs has written is just that: poetry of substance.
About the reviewer: Daniel Barbiero is a Washington, DC area writer focusing on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press); his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.