Zack Ford

I must write this review of Marc Vincenz’s new book irønclad, lest this book get overlooked for what it is; because this effervescently odd, square-shaped volume, at every sinuous turn strives and even insists to appear as something other than it is. And this is by Vincenz’s careful design. 

The conceit of irønclad is an exploration of the wreckage of an ancient society through a fragmentary log of dispatches from a future archeology. These dispatches come in myriad forms: unearthed psalms and maxims from dead prophets, sketches of exhumed artifacts such as scraps of scrolls wrapped around human bones and parts of frescos that once decorated the walls of brothels, dissertations from the archeologists themselves – and poems which defy contextual placement with postmodern aplomb, the way a Basquiat speaks more about the act of painting and painting’s role in society than actually being a painting itself, as compared to other paintings, though it also is a painting. 

It is these poems that comprise the bulk of the book, though Vincenz takes pains to assert that this is not a book of poetry. And I could enumerate a list of such paradoxes Vincenz has sewn into this objet d’art. The book, as I said, is square in shape and uses circular mandala-like iconography and is thus easy to liken to Ram Dass’s Be Here Now; though Vincenz would surely insist irønclad is not a religious or spiritual text. And most obvious, the book is about us, about our entire society, though it’s ostensibly about another society. There’s even a bibliography at the end – of books that do not actually exist.

But the most central paradox is the title itself, and it goes further than irønclad being an ironic title for a work of literature whose main premise purports that life is not fixed, but esemplastic, and what we make of it. If you’ve noticed, the “o” is slashed, a clever nod to an “empty set” in mathematics. Though some might find this satirical twist pessimistic, I found it hopeful: Vincenz is a sage admonishing us against looking outward for answers, instead of probing our own souls. Vincenz believes our lives are what we make of them, and emptiness is only space for creation.

The text is almost a riddle, coyly asking one to decode meaning through associative logic. But it’s also a Joycean stream of consciousness with rivulets branching off through various points of view, and it is bracingly kaleidoscopic. One moment, we are made privy to the metaphysics of the Iron Plier Society, apparently the government of the long-lost society in question, and given clues, or secrets, such as their pliers were used to both extract teeth and taxes. Is this a joke, in which we find similarities to our own culture, because paying taxes is like pulling teeth? Or is it a clue to some sacred ceremony, or simply a dream an archeologist on the dig had one night? And does it matter at all, if we are able to form meaning about it ourselves?

Vincenz leads us through surreality like a shaman, reminding us of the importance of play even in serious endeavors. One moment we are following him down the wormweed trails of the ancient society we strive to understand; we are there when they have lost their religion and struggle to regain it through infusions and “root solutions”; we arc from their early days of prophets, to perhaps their ages of technology in which strange creatures appear, such as “lizards in mammalian form”. The book can read at times like pulp sci-fi, which is only Vincenz’s sly way of using spoonfuls of sugar to slip in hard truths. 

So, what is Vincenz’s point? He’s built an impossible object, like a Penrose triangle, or a Schroeder staircase, for the purpose of never letting our vision rest in one spot. Because this is Vincenz’s paradoxical thesis – that looking directly at something is the best way to not see it. Vincenz compels us to use averted gaze, like sailors or astronomers who look off to the side of an object to see it more clearly. And this is why broken archaic fragments are the perfect metaphor for Vincenz’s cause – we are taken with the fragments themselves for only an instant, before the shards of their broken edges seduce us into obsession with the mysterious unknown and perhaps unknowable.

Still though, like the future archeologists, we dig for clues too, which might flint-strike some transcendent eureka us humans always hope for. And that is part of the meta-satire, that the human brain wants meaning, wants vectorization, yet perhaps it is this striving for knowledge that destroys us in the end. I particularly found meaning in the text shard “so time is the ignition”, and at that moment for me irønclad morphed into something of a memento mori, and felt like Horatio’s skull in my hands. But irønclad might be something completely different to another reader, another searcher, or might be something completely different to me if I read it at another time in my life, and that’s a great deal of its charm. Like life, the book is about juxtapositions; like life, the book only becomes what it is through our point of view. The book functions to torch dogma, then asks us to sift through the fecund ash of what remains.

There is a geologic diagram of stratification at the beginning of the book that shows the terrain the archeologists are boring into – yet as they dig down, Vincenz approaches higher truths. It’s heady stuff, but also, it isn’t. The book is so fun to read and chock-full of tantalizing tidbits (I found the passage about strange beings called “cryptofingers” delightfully eerie), that I didn’t at first notice the urgency of doom underpinning the text, and Vincenz’s humor is so wry, I almost didn’t notice myself laughing through the tragedy.

This is because Vincenz is a provocateur incognito – he clandestinely attacks the tenets of our beliefs and assumptions without us, at least at first, realizing what he’s doing. An unlikely analog to Vincenz could be comedian Tim Robinson, who challenges our normalcy without reverting to anger or polemics, but by maintaining a slight and shimmering uncanny valley between our world and the world he creates. We might not realize either man is a critic, if we’re looking right at them; yet they busily deconstruct everything we might take for granted before we even realize they’ve picked the locks to the gearboxes of our minds. 

Thereto, irønclad deals truths in the way a court jester cuts to the bone, dressing up its stark, paradigm-shifting revelations in silly, bell-jangling clothes so that an audience might more easily reckon with the weight of what is revealed.

And only once we become party to the fun does Vincenz go for the jugular. “Why, I ask you, are we so unfamiliar with our own past,” he asks in one passage. And by the time he declares, “Those who returned never quite possessed their own souls again,” we’re already too far into the trip to deny he’s talking about us. After Vincenz ensnares us in his hall of mirrors, what he calls “the subtext within the subtext”, we are left to remake our meanings. And then we find, from the time we’ve spent venturing in the liminal, perhaps we’re equipped to do so. Plus, reading this book honestly is more convenient than an acid trip.

I enjoyed the strangeness of the world Vincenz creates – or rather, the lost world Vincenz limns out, as if he’s forewarning us to save our own. The book reminded me of Borges’s Fictions, in its meditations on defining gestalt, and Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in its veiled lampoons. By the time the “All Unseeing Eye moves further behind the Derailed Curtain”, I found myself rooting for this ruined society, and ours by proxy, which filled me with a dreadful hope.

The core idea of irønclad is the paradox that the more differences we unearth about each other, the more alike we realize we are. But there is no tidy moral here, and Vincenz puts no pretty bow on top. Instead, he seems to ask us why it’s so difficult for us as human beings to rejoice living in the questions, in the grey zones full of potentiality, when this kind of living is perhaps what might make us most human. And though it might be easy to compare the gist of irønclad to Joseph Cambell’s search for the monomyth, Vincenz seems to go further and ask a terrifying and awesome question: what would we do if we found the damn thing?

Perhaps irønclad suggests we simply open ourselves to reverent awe, instead of trying to figure it all out. In a passage later in the book titled “Zero Oh Zero”, Vincenz reckons with the ouroboric symbol at the heart of the work. The symbol is an “empty exasperation”, and a “sigh at most” – a glyph that stands for creation out of the “nothingness of the furthest cosmos”. Is Vincenz satirizing us, and perhaps himself too, in our oh-so-human egos bemoaning our insignificance, when being alive to search is the greatest gift of all? It’s a question I suppose I will just have to live with.  

Though Vincenz is studied in world culture, he is an anti-pedantic. His work reminds me of the storied philosophy student who answered “Why?” to every question on the test and somehow walked away with an A+. At times, this rather short book might seem wryly cheeky; at others, dizzying mysteries swirl through its pages. Sometimes I wondered if Vincenz was critiquing the vectorization of AI deep learning, or warning against fascism – or simply having fun dreaming up a strange new world. But the questions are the point. “As culture proliferated, attention spans waned,” Vincenz writes, perhaps admonishing us to take time to meditate on what makes us ourselves, so that we don’t lose ourselves completely. And perhaps the best way to approach such towering inquiries is to imagine the end of it all, and what we want to leave behind. That is to ask, what would some future alien society say about us, if they dug up our rubble? And in these doomsday times, what greater philosophical question could a book ask?