"Pearl Man" by David Russell

Pearlman by david Russell

This was inspired by a passage in the Spanish epic poem La Araucana, which I have translated. In the original story, a Spanish soldier, after a battle, is accosted by an Indian woman who asks him to lead her to her husband's body, to pay her last respects. In the original story, she disappears. In Pearlman the hero is contemporary, but he does time and space travel to those legendary times, and the woman turns out to be Auchimalgen, the Araucanian Moon Goddess. She seduces and enlightens him. There is a backdrop of Chile, with its incredibly volatile ecosphere and long history of protracted conflict. This story combines romance with sci-fi and time travel.

Pearlman by David Russell

Bio:

David Russell is a writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. He was born in 1940 in Wolverhampton, UK and has long been based in London. His Main paperback poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints was published by Deadline Books in 1998; several of his poems have appeared online in International Times. A further paperback collection, An Ever River, is due for publication by Palewell Press in March 2018. His main speculative fiction works are High Wired On (2002) Rock Bottom (2005). David has translated the 16th Century Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. He has written several Romances, now published by Bella Tulip Publishing, including Self’s Blossom (now in 5th edition; Explorations (3rd Edition); Further Explorations (2nd Edition); Dreamtime Sensuality (2nd Edition); he has also Self-published a collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. Another side of his activities is that of Singer-songwriter/guitarist: his vinyl album, Bricolage, was recorded in 1992 by Billy Childish for Hangman Records; his main CD albums are Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many of his tracks are featured on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell’. 

Pearlman Comments

Pearlman is both very deep, architecturally, both figurative and literally. It also has a kind of unfinished quality, something of the character of an archaeological dig that is still in progress, or somehow unfinished, because so much material has been bought up, from the quarry, and more could also be excavated. What is excavated, in love and conquest, in various stages of formation and development, in the history of the cosmos and human and non-human civilizations. It also relates the journey of a cosmic time traveller who gets embedded in human history, and who observes and becomes part of the history of primal forces of nature, and of the chemical elements themselves. This gives the narrator tremendous range, which you acknowledge and express in the very last sentence, in your own words: “The newborn and the dying look each other in the face, complementing the vision of love. It’s great to have something to write about. I read, I write, I live, forever warmed by the eternal flame.

Few works could bring together material of such scope and thematic depth, certainly no “mere” erotic short story or novella. It would like comparing Freud’s own writing to the artifacts that he collected, and saying that his own work, (or Jung’s, for that matter), wasn’t as rich or deep as the field of archaeology. Similarly, human sexuality, the subject of “Blossom Reburgeoning” is necessarily more “diminutive” in context of cosmic forces of attraction and repulsion, in nature as sexual forces.

Turning to your expansion of Blossom Reburgeoning, I think it was altogether well done, and a fine development and improvement on the earlier version, as well. Selene has a deliciously self-aware and
self-mocking quality. She takes herself both seriously and not seriously, as when you write, “She was convinced she had boosted his ego and fired his ambition, with the equivalent of a one-off with a celebrity.”
There is a spirallic whirl of fantasy and reality that is breathtaking. They tease each other, and then reveal themselves before the other. So, the ménage a trois among Selene, Janice and Dr. Jamieson occurs on the level of mind, and stops just short of a six-some hookup of three persons who operate on the two levels of
thought and reality. You introduced that possibility unexpectedly, but very effectively.

By way of contrast, the love-making between Selene and Meville occurs in reality, and not just in their minds. For you, the description was detailed and did not leave the reader feeling lacking, I would say. The consummation occurs as each shows the other their “bare white spot,” when their mutual disrobing is completed – it’s as if consummation occurs only when the sexual organs are properly chastened. Having been kept in their place by clothing, they reveal themselves in what you call clear white bands, which are their private parts untouched by the sun, which seems to generate its own light, as well as heat. This is the power of bondage and bondage erotica, whatever its nature. Bondage would be a kind of flagrante delecto between consummation and sublimation, as psycho-physical forces, mediated by the fetishized objects of bondage. There is disrobing and
sexual consummation too, in Pearlman, between the Narrator-Time Traveller-Conquistador-Scientist-Mythologist and Tegualda a female archetype. Human erotica becomes transposed onto the vision of volcano
and earthquake as sexualized primal elements of nature.

Dave, your work is certainly marketable as “erotica,” and it’s been attracting a following, on its own. Pearlman is a fantasy genre work. Works like it, certainly can also attract a following, literary folks,  as from Internationaltimes.it, for instance. Your heart seems to be into writing erotica a la Selene rather than of the Pearlman type, even though the erotica of the latter has so much more breadth and  scope than the best conventional erotica.

Here’s thought for you, Dave, please, try this, in your mind, alone, if you’re not motivated to write out even one scene. Take Selene, put her on beach on a moon of Neptune or in a distant galaxy (maybe the one they recently discovered with a large earth-type planet). Make her flesh translucent, put her in a purple sea, where she floats, and attracts the attention of some of the local denizens, wide-eyed multi-tentacle beings who see their own reflections on Selene’s skin, even as they peer inside her body. Well, enough of that, you get the message, you don’t need any help from me in story-telling. You see what I’m trying to say, I think. You could combine the best erotica from Selene and Pearlman, for instance, by taking what you will from the genres of erotica, fantasy, adventure, sword and sorcery (which, don’t forget, Pearlman actually includes), sci fi, and then write the erotica that you will, placing characters like Selene, Blossom, Pearlman or Tegualda into this wider context
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What I just wrote is kind of surprising to me – I was going to end this letter several paragraphs ago, before this idea emerged in my mind.  But I realized how compelling and unique the erotic in Pearlman was, in its own right, and how the work merges human and trans/post-human sexuality into more encompassing themes, as well as other life forms.  Just as I seem unwilling to let Pearlman go, maybe you’re reluctant to let Selene leave her beach and her fantasies. What to do? Here’s my suggestion – let Selene leave the earth for a while, send her on a fantasy journey where she meets …say…. a young male from a Pandora-like planet, with whom she shares mystical experience, and sex magic, joining up with androgynous native spirits who love sex with humans. Maybe add an “experienced” seeming omniscient type of figure, as in Hesse’s Steppenwolf, I forget the name of that character, now.

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So, Dave, could you run with this theme of Selene, traveling the cosmos, looking for pleasure and sexual adventure? Your eroticism, remember, is very refined, it’s R, not X-rated, and so your work could go mainstream into several popular, (and lucrative, if that is important to you) genres – fantasy, romance, adventure, sci fi, all at once, in a single work, if that if what you wish.

What I had read in Pearlman was very interesting – tying geological and archaeological exploration with sexual exploration  -- very Freudian, certainly, but easier said than done, and you were doing a good job of
exploring the psych dimension, in the course of your narrative. Interesting and original combination of obsessive sex and clothing fetishism in a work like Explorations, with gold obsession in La Araucana.

_{A reader can figure it out -- the world view is unified and coherent -- but it can be challenging for readers. You combine so many opposites, including literary forms  -- narration (including  sexual narration with cosmic overtones) passes into scientific essay type cosmic unity of opposites, including those on the levels of the macrocosmic (the earth and volcanoes), and the microcosmic (atomic elements themselves). The narration passes into a kind of revved up scientific study, which jumps back into the cosmic at the end. Shifting back and forth, several times,}

Paul Dolinsky

Comments

The first thing that strikes me is the discursive narrative, a stream of consciousness style that sets the stage for the mythic quality of the piece.  It creates a dream-like aura for the narrator's imagining.  The narrator is never called by name, making him both impersonal and universal; an archetypal figure for the human endeavour to find understanding and meaning.  His movements from one time period to another happen without stage-setting, creating a strong sense of the fluidity of time.  It also leaves the reader confused a bit about where he is, how he got there and why he went there.  Tools and artifacts of one time period appear when he is in another; this reiterates the ‘multilinear’ nature of time. 

Once he encounters Tegualda we are taken into the mythical world of gods and goddesses through her explanations of planetary creations and power struggles among titan beings.  These archetypal forces are counterpoints to forces of nature, volcanoes and earthquakes.  Much beautiful and compelling imagery conveys the reader smoothly through the philosophy embedded in the stories.  Use of words and combinations is often surprising and refreshingly creative, adding to the poetic character of the story.  I really enjoyed her mythic reconstruction of planetary life and the forces of nature that alter it.  It brought in several deities with whom I am not familiar (are they oriental?)

At around 80% into the narrative, there is a distinct switch to a reporter style of writing.  We are told several accounts of volcanic and earthquake activity in Chile; some are quite technical.  The narrator then comes back with references to Tegualda’s alter ego and recent discoveries in physics.  This part seems disjointed to me.  It did not bring the story to a satisfying conclusion; I needed something more to tie it all together.  The poems at the end were lovely and highly symbolic; they upheld the central importance of integrating the feminine, but somehow left me hanging.  My recommendation would be to re-work the ending to bring more closure, and to weave elements together more closely.

Leonide Martin

Pearlman, David Russell’s mythological fantasy and time travel, is a story to be enjoyed on many levels. Pearlman, Russell’s contemporary hero—someone as precious as a jewel, someone in search of a precious jewel—has a fascination for the period of the Spanish conquests and wishes to travel back in time to that era. The story was partly inspired by a passage in the Spanish epic La Araucana, concerning the conflict between the Conquistadores and the Native Chileans, in which the narrator, a Spanish soldier, is approached by Tegualda, a native woman, who asks him to lead her to her husband’s body, so she can pay her last respects. Tegualda, a noblewoman in the original epic, turns into a moon goddess. She and the hero have a physical and metaphysical tryst, and are mutually enlightened.

Russell gives a factual backdrop to a fictional story set in Chile, one of the most unstable places on earth—abounding in earthquakes and volcanoes and political instability. As a romance writer and reader, I recommend this story to romance readers.

_{Marilyn Baron}