%title Reviews

## ARC

### Rob MacWolf

In the second, and largest, of the stories in A Wildness of the Heart, a therapist in therapy muses to themselves about using writing as a tool to categorize and cartograph to facets of the self. And that's a good metaphor for what his collection feels like: different facets of an identity, cut and polished by metaphor, genre, and characterization to show at a distance what might be missed if they were looked in their original context, too close, too versimilitudinous, to see the details.

In reading Limerent Object, the aforementioned story, I'm knocked off into a tangent about how it's a shame that "ritual" isn't really thought of as an art form. It would solve a lot of problems if it was: my own immediate family might not be now so radically bigoted if they'd been able to express their problems with liberal Catholicism in terms of "I find the way they are doing the ritual art form we participate in distasteful" and not "there's got be some doctrinal difference between the liturgy we like and the liturgy we don't like, so, guess there's no alternate but to pass on wildly homophobic propaganda and vote for literal fascists."

Moreover, regarding ritual as an art form would give an over-category into which to place two long-contentious smaller art forms: Video Games and Performance art. If both can be classified as ritual, then that clarifies both "the point" of performance art and also settles the "yes, this is in fact art, and it doesn't have to be fun to be worth doing or 'real'" debate.

Now, I'm under no illusions that the majority of the arguments I'm talking about, both on the religious matter and in the art matter, are fully bad faith. I don't doubt my parents would have found another justification for the homophobia they wanted to excuse. But bad faith arguments start as good faith uncertainties. Having better vocabulary of classification can head doubts off before they become prejudices.

And now because I have to bring this back to the book somehow, I'm struck by how, after finishing the collection, it feels like I've witnessed a ritual. Limerent Object talks a lot about discernment, and I can see ways in which this book, these stories, could be thought of a ritual of discernment. An identity is separated out into other identities, abstract artifacts made in the image of a small part of their creator, who have before them trials. Each a neoplatonic reflective emanation of some portion of the over-identity. The purpose is not, perhaps, to see whether the stories fail or succeed, but rather to ritualize the struggle. To make archetypes not out of the need to magnify portions of life, but to diminish them, simplify them, distill them into themselves and only themselves, where they can be confronted and defeated without crossing over with and complicating one another.

And maybe the same could be said of all fiction. I wouldn't disagree, if you were to say it.

And since this does seem to have turned into a review: A Wildness of the Heart, by Madison Scott Clary, is available at [THE PLACES WHERE IT IS AVAILABLE WHEN THAT HAPPENS] and more of her writing can be found at www.makyo.ink.


