Spirits of the Flea Market: Sincere Poems & Light Satire (SFM) is a selection of poems and narratives from Bricolage: Spiritual Poems & Light Satire.
The background story of Bricolage is that a certain Reverend Snolly Goster authored the work, or most of it, sometime in the early twenty-first century, a time of cultural decline and economic inequity. Goster never published the work, but he did put its materials in a physical binder, which he then lost or tossed aside amid what The Finders of the binder will call, a hundred years later, their postapocalyptic pickle. The binder is damaged and has missing parts due to pilferers and time and nature's fury. The Finders write a foreword and prologue, change the index, and reconstruct parts of the opus. They write the peculiarly learned Special Note on Tribunal for Writing, the subject of which is Goster's lengthy play about an odd court proceeding with a weighty mission. After the Special Note, The Finders disappear from the work except for traces here and there, until they return in Afterword (Book 3 of Bricolage) where we learn, amid the farcical turmoil of a new bookshop in Paris, a little about what happened to Goster's work. At this point, the time of the background story is early in the twenty-second century, which is just before the time of the Preface authored by "The Heraldic Holder in Due Course." What we learn is chiefly that Snolly Goster's work passed through many hands that added, subtracted, or changed its parts over a long period, including the hands of the ones called DGVU who, like The Finders, can be detected by the traces they leave in some parts of Bricolage. Key themes are as follows: 1. Christianity is best when it has universalist sympathies: "Gates must stay open high, low, and abroad; attend varied portals to introduce God." 2. Regarding the sacred feminine: Recovery of elements of the sacred feminine from the deep past is key to revitalizing religious feelings. Though this theme is alluded to and prefigured throughout, it culminates in the "Hymn of the Amarant Christians" which appears toward the end of both Bricolage and Spirits of the Flea Market. 3. Language forms and spirituality: "Mysterium tremendum raineth great powers; the more when caught by words' older flowers." For example, when the objective is to create a feeling of the fullness of time embracing past, present, and future, the verse form sometimes turns to Early Modern English. 4. Language diversity is a treasure, not a burden, and light humor is integral to spirituality and serious thinking: "The best part of the best satire is when the reader's transported to that exclusive place where it is most difficult, ideally impossible, for sane minds to discern when satire is happening, and when truly it is not, so long as it's always clear the one or its opposite must ever be afoot." 5. Science and belief: "The scientific mind journeys far from the primitive world of spirit-infused nature, seeking to find empirically the ultimate materialist machine that controls the flow of the world. But the important forces and powers it finds are not physical objects. What it finds, though not exactly volatile spirits as in Ovid's Metamorphoses, are still intangibles-ideas, representations, and models, but not hard objects. It finds entities that must be inferred more often than exactly seen." 6. History: The past, personal, linguistic, and world-historical, is relevant to the present and future. 7. Content Mix: Chapters Remembrance and Spritely Antique Shopping include autobiographical items, but overall SFM and its parent Bricolage are a mix of sincere and light-hearted fictional and poetic forays into basic questions of human and spiritual experience in the context of history, myths, and ideas.
