Surfer of the Flux

Review of Bark On by Mason Boyles
(Driftwood Press, 2023)

Young triathletes are stretched to breaking point by a coach trying to escape himself in this immersive novel set in the North Carolina beach town of Kure.

 *

Submit, submit, submit to the cadences, the novel told me, to the neologisms that open up new perspectives on character and action, then dissolve yourself into the text: ‘Your sense of self has to dissipate, disappearing into the chorus of the Everywhen.’ Feel yourself thread in and around and through the narrative-incantations of Ezra, Casper, Benji, Ma. Feel yourself become the order and the flux.

The night before I wrote this, I dreamt I was in the book. Casper and Ezra were there, and we were all waiting for Ma. I don’t remember if she was still at Doro’s retreat in the north, or whether she was on her way back to us, but we were trapped in Benji’s world where we swam until we drowned, cycled until our legs fell off and ran until our minds left our bodies.

I like to disperse into a novel, to move around between the sentences and take my time to merge with the ideas, to reconstruct myself as a multidimensional network of threads, a kind of mycelial web. In Bark On, a coach’s hum ‘broadens and reaches. It has tendrils in it – a texture and a grip’. As hyphae I can be everywhere, threading through letters to join them in infinite combinations and build infinite other worlds. I like to journey and become a new kind of being, guided by a transformative novel.

Ironman triathlon, coyotes as embodied chaos, and Adam the Atom Man: I entered the book to explore another mind in motion. Once, on the finishing straight of a sprint triathlon, I wobbled on jellied legs, distracted by the wheezing of the athlete on my shoulder. Only when I crossed the line did I realise that person was me. I don’t know whether I’d been in my own body or not, but there were two of us and one of us was dying.

Where does the drive to seek extreme pain come from? In Bark On, Mason Boyles’s shamanic world of Ironman competition, there’s a logic of convergence and emergence. First, second and third person viewpoints weave a mesh that, as it folds and unfolds, ripples with the effects of trying to escape oneself through pain. ‘But what’s worse than any workout,’ – Ezra reflects – ‘is the clarity that comes without training, how his brain chafes with days when it’s not dulled by fatigue.’ Is it the attachment to or avoidance of pain that drives Ma to drive Ezra to pursue elite triathlon? Is it coach Benji’s belief in himself as a curse, a ‘Shadefoot’, that drives him to compel the already-broken ‘kid’ Casper to break Ezra, in whom they might all find fulfilment, or at least culmination? Or is the almost mythical Unc knotting the four into a manifestation of his own mind, the Tulpa of Tibetan tradition which ‘forms when a body’s too small to hold its own feeling.’

The clues are integral. Verbs muscle-melt people and other apparent entities into processes, suggesting a kind of felt-thinking. By coincidence I’d just read Leroy Little Bear’s 2004 preface to David Bohm’s On Creativity, in which he explains: ‘…many Native American languages stress morphology…a language like Blackfoot is all about process and action, mirroring the notion of constant flux.’ Even Ezra’s home town of Kure is in continual motion. The sea devours the beach, while Ezra and Casper chase Benji’s truck along Bromine Avenue during training designed to dissolve their ‘cocoon’. Benji has bound the volatile Casper to Ezra, as bromine must form bonds in pairs, being too reactive to stand alone in single atoms. Casper’s earlier affair with Adam the Atom Man had threatened to disperse his manic energy into ‘the butter-slide of the easy life’, from which he escaped, only to be leashed by Benji to ‘bark on brainlessly, [to] hold the pain.’

Through the focus on the upcoming Chapel Hill Ironman there’s a universe of chaos to contain. In Kure, where ‘Tootsies’ Ezra and Casper train until the ‘hurt heatens’, the coyotes are multiplying. They appear to be hounding Benji, or perhaps he’s summoning them in his incarnation as a Shadefoot: ‘ “I have to push Tootsies ahead so I can flood into their footsteps. But I’ll drown them if they stop moving.” ’

When Ma first appears, she feels a little like a structural bond – to explain the destructive set-up of Ezra, Casper and Benji, and to provide a female lens. But she soon settles into herself, particularly during her earlier travels in Nepal and then Peru, where the worship of the goddess Pachamama catalyses her deeper journey with Ezra. The mountain of trash dedicated to the goddess, who is on the verge of waking, sparked me to wonder about other ways to order chaos; in my waking visions, the detritus of our demented digital activity has already coalesced into tendrils.

The bodymind experience of Bark On helped me with the agitation of the puppet-dance, when through it I could reach the ‘Everywhen’ and rest in the ocean that connects. Ideas, characters, setting and prose form bonds with each other to stabilise the text, to build an emergent whole that bridges the ordinary world of triathlon and the non-ordinary world of Benji and his coyote curse. In Native American stories of creation, the coyote trickster figure embodies the chaos of the cosmic flux, which the human mind couldn’t otherwise absorb. ‘If one were to imagine,’ says Little Bear, ‘this flux at a cosmic scale or at a mental level consisting of energy waves, one can imagine him- or herself as a surfer.’ Mason Boyles is a gardener of energy, a surfer of the flux.

*

First published in Bridge Eight Press, 2023