Foreword
The Numinous Nature of Redemption
by Richard Godwin, Author of Apostle Rising
Jason Michel’s The Death Of Three Colours exists beyond genre and definition like that song which carries its refrain into another realm of hearing. It is at once a piece of lyrical prose, a piece of subversion, a threnody and a religious hymn. Michel is an author who delves into the culture of prevalent times, who explores and excavates the ontology and disintegration of our consciousness, of the discontinuous world hemmed in by border control, political programming and lies. This work is both beautiful and angry, agonised and real. It is as much about a hunt for a lasting sexual experience as it is about the negation of self and alienation as the only way out within a society programmed to obedience.
For those of who are familiar with his Michel’s work, if Totalitarian Drone Groove challenged the cloning of the individual, his latest work is a peon to the results of that success.
It is both religious, in its search for redemption, and a self exploration. The novella exists between an almost metaphysical quest for religious connection and the sense, both articulated and subtextual, of its impossibility in an age of formula and engineering. It may remind you of the religious yearning of a Jean Genet novel, a prisoner seeking chains of roses. Michel shows the prison is now prevalent and he shatters it. He challenges entropy with the hermit’s song, he shows that he understands.
Michel writes it all through his prose, alternating between lyricism and sharp phrasing, between the metaphysical and the everyday absurdity of dialogue and he uses it to illustrate the alienated mind, and need to overcome it, to exist within an anti-environment, as Marshall Mcluhan phrased it. He explores the mind of now, and then. And he offers you this: at once poetry and a religious work. It is religious in the sense of its need for insight, of the need for something beyond the flesh. Michel shows the necessity for more that we are presently given. If you want subversion, read this, is you want a realistic struggle towards religious redemption read this.
TDo3C is outside genre. It is outside now and all its programmed lies, and as such is it a work of the hermeneutic need to excavate culture. Meaning may be semantic.
Truth lies within the lines.
