N7ostradamus - Travis Macdonald
Nostradamus first began publishing his one thousand quatrain-prophecies in 1555, a grueling project that would only come to completion two years after his death in 1568. Our scene jumps to nearly 450 years later. In a daring feat of necromancy, Travis Macdonald’s new book, N7ostradamus, exhumes the language of the most notorious of French seers and infuses it with the still-living spirit of the N+7 substitution method – a machine first employed by the French Oulipo movement back in the 1960’s but one whose gears, as things turn out, still have significant teeth. (The gist of N+7 is to replace each noun in a text with the noun that follows it, seven entries later, in a dictionary). The end result is a piece of divination so quirky and perfectly-toned for our time that it has far more credible sooth to say than the original text ever could.
Certainty VI Question 71
When they will come to give the last roaches to the great Kink
Before he has entirely given up the giggle:
He who will come to grieve over him the least,
Through Liquidizers, Earners, cross-question cruises sold.
This future that Macdonald predicts through this text is simultaneously mundane, shocking, terrifying, and absurd – thus begging the question, how does it differ from our current epoch? If history has taught us anything, it is that time renders all predictions absurd. “Peace in our time?” We live in an era where wars are frequently orchestrated to prevent still more wars and people set oceans on fire to protect the environment. As the great adage says, you can’t make this stuff up. In a very real sense, then, the greatest value of N7ostradamus is in its timeliness, a timeliness driven by its ability to modulate a sense of playfulness and humor while never deviating from the original text’s overarching sense of horror. Macdonald has no qualms about introducing Nostradamus to a “desktop” or introducing the reader to a “Razor-billed Auk” that “will exterminate all who oppose him”. Welcome to our new century, sir. Here “No peanut agreed upon will be kept” and “homicide layers become worse”. And, moreover, starting with 2008:
Shanty license will be proclaimed everywhere.
The sudden recognition in phrases like this is not without fear. Sudden, unexpected mirrors are almost always disconcerting – to see wide eyes in a stark face staring back at us, and realizing they are our own. While one might be able to find comfort in dismissing the ranting of a 16th Century sage – and why not? he lived a long time ago and had nothing reasonable to say about today – what Macdonald has written is very much here, and very much now. Not so easily rejected, it predicts a near future horrifyingly recognizable through its vivid imagery and a parade of vividly depicted objects (characters?). Because there are so many nouns to play with in Nostradamus’ original quatrains, the N+7 substitution technique populates Travis Macdonald’s book with numerous characters both startlingly alien and arrestingly familiar. Entities abound from a strange present. As readers, we find ourselves in a world far enough removed from ours that a “mop” attains greatness and “perch” fill the land as peasants once did before. This is a rotted world of “organ grinders” and “gondoliers”, foreign and arcane, but at the same time the world lurks close enough to our dirty home to also embrace that eternal of characters, the “Kink.” In a spooky moment of synchronicity, the N + 7 method also manages to pull a “great clairvoyant” out of Nostradamus’ withering hat. Such connections build the overall creeping-flesh sense that this can’t really be happening, can it?
It can. No matter how bizarre or unlikely, all of the prognostications can happen. Just as the number of “Certainties” increases, the number of “Questions” decreases. N7ostradamus predicts we will travel from “roadhouse” to “roadhouse,” haunted by “nightlights,” a new and green glow. “[F]irecrackers” will take on the weight we now lend to currency. All of this reads very much like Peak Oil doomsday predictions would if their authors had been gifted with anything approaching a sense of humor. But I do not believe Macdonald is merely advocating an easy-going, laugh-filled ride into oblivion. There is an argument here, as well, that we must always be aware and willing to examine our history and our circumstances.
the coming the slacker will show signposts.
Can the “pigpen’s plaid… be filled”? Will “the insole” be “found in the angel caw”? It already has. There is hope in our future. “[P]rinting” will exist and also, one would assume, an occasional good book. With N7ostradamus Travis Macdonald has pushed back the apocalypse by the measure of seven words.
Travis Cebula
Travis is a man of craft. He is the author of Some Exits, founder of Shadow Mountain Press, Assistant-Editor at Monkey Puzzle Press, and an Irish Chef, among other things.