Guilty Sleep wake to find they’ve spent the night — to my delight, if not theirs — in a garden. Questions open up like nascent leaves, like thin cotyledons. Whose garden? How many nights exactly? How long have they been laying there?
They rub their eyes and look around. Vegetation sprouts up between their legs. An ivy has worked its way through their hair. A tree, lush with leaves, hides them, shields them from the light that dances across their face. It is as if they were planted there. As if someone kneeled down in the dirt, trowel in hand, dug a small hole in the cool soil, fresh and earthy, and placed their body — their delicate roots neatly tucked in under them — in the ground, as gently as if they were a baby in a basinet.
Their memory, like the music, is indistinct, hazy, nebulous. What were they before the garden? What are they now? Had they died and, like Lazarus, been brought back from death? From the big sleep? No, they’d passed out. From… what was it…
A tangle of forgetfulness keeps them from understanding. Like the hedge wall of a maze, it is thick and disorienting. Which direction is out? Which direction is north? The garden, although a caring, nursing being, shields them from this — it coos softly in the wind. Shhhhh. Sleep now. Rest. But still they stir.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
Through The Garden by Guilty Sleep
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
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