Missives from the Abyss: Further Details Worth Considering in André Alexis’s Days By Moonlight

Quincunx

Strictly speaking, a quincunx (according to several only mildly alarming websites) is an ancient geometric pattern, most familiar to us moderns as the five dots on a dice. Symbolically, across many traditions, it represents order and sanctity in the universe, and is associated with ideas of personal growth and higher understanding.  Astrologically, it apparently signifies potential which is not easily achieved, and, once achieved, difficult to manage.

While thematic relationships to Days By Moonlight are immediately recognizable, the symbol actually presides over an entire series of five books (either completed or planned) — the quincunx series — an ambitious masterwork which has occupied Alexis since before 2014, when the first installment, Pastoral was published. Each book takes, as its theme, an important aspect of human experience:

1. Pastoral (2014) = faith
2. Fifteen Dogs (2015) = place
3. Ring (to be completed) rumoured to be the one which will tie everything together, and, I suspect, associated with the central dot in the quincunx pattern.
4. The Hidden Keys (2016) = power
5. Days By Moonlight (2019) = love

References to the number five are found scattered throughout Days By Moonlight —

• Alphie has five days to prepare for his trip with the professor
• Alphie names five towns on the itinerary
• Skennen travels with Kit, the Mennonite for five days
• hands (i.e. five fingers) feature prominently
  • indirectly, Oniaten grandiflora, a fictitious plant which references a           magical mummified hand of Iroquois folklore
• the “five flower (Monotropa cinqueflora),” and et cetera.

The Significance of Hands

Beyond their connection to the number five, hands have a notable presence in the story — from farmers with missing fingers, to the mysterious Oniaten plant, which Alphie consumes in the sacred grove. For some reason, while reading Days By Moonlight, I found myself continuously humming the old Sunday school singalong, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”  Professor Bruno’s remark, late in the story, that “hands are a symbol of God, you know,” combined with Alexis’s already noted inclination to examine the nature of the divine/divine in nature, suggests that this association, while indirect,  was not entirely random.

Asclepius onterica

During their travels, Alphie notices a patch of “bat’s delight” (Asclepius onterica) an entirely fanciful plant (and playful detail) whose closest real-life analog, one assumes, is the milkweed (genus Asclepias) (different spelling is significant).  It manages, economically, to evoke witchery and magic portals (having turned up earlier in a tale told by Mr. Henderson) and, the healing arts, through Asclepius, the Greek god of Medicine. Asclepius, in some versions of his story, was thought to be able to raise the dead, and was associated with the ancient Greek site of Epidaurus.  In rituals strikingly similar to those of Feversham’s sacred clearing, those seeking healing performed cleansing rituals, slept overnight and awaited the god’s appearance in dreams, during which remedies would be offered.

Alphie August Homer

Note the references to beginnings (Alpha) to the month of the journey (August) and to great stories of travel, adventure and return (Homer).

Light and Dark

Light is a recurrent motif in the story.  Consider this lighthearted discussion at the outset of the journey, between Professor Bruno and Alphie:

Professor Bruno:  you never know … where you’ll find a detail, the detail                    tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt tthat’ll  illuminate a work.

Alphie:  So we’re looking for light

       Professor Bruno:   Not just any light, my boy … We’re looking for the correct light.

Later, the professor notes that, with the possible exception of artists, ordinary mortals “live for the light,” while the tales of Skennen’s nocturnal travels are associated with angst, loss and despair. Beyond the obvious religious connotations, one is reminded of Shakespeare’s use of light and dark imagery in Macbeth, and the notion that light allows one to see, in a moral sense, correctly. The image of light  returning to the world is given loving attention in the following beautiful passage from Skennen’s story:

If there was any beauty in his despair, it came from this sobering up as the world woke: the way a stealthy vein of light would come, gradually chasing shadows and creating silhouettes, silhouettes first seen against the indigo sky, then against the blue sky with dark clouds, then against the light-blue firmament with white clouds, until the dark silhouettes disappeared, the buildings and landscape reacquainted by sunlight.

And, again, as Alphie and the professor’s journey ends:

All was dark, though in the east the first light of day showed the contours of the land: treetops, jagged cliffs, the roofs of faraway homes.

…

Somewhere around the outskirts of Hamilton, dawn flooded the road. The landscape I knew so well, the dullest part of the ride, was illuminated so that the Queensway — the highway itself, the industrial buildings, the glimpses of the lake’s blue skirt — seemed new”

 

In all of these passages, light can be seen as a unifying element — it dispels the dark, reveals outline and form, and “reacquaints” nature and civilization. Again, making connections, one is reminded of Wordsworth’s beauty of the morning, shining equally on nature and the City, an idea that ties in nicely with Alexis’s writerly preoccupation with the relationship between civilization, wilderness, and the divine.  It is not insignificant, either, that Alphie’s hallucinatory companion/guide/examiner in the sacred grove identified herself as “Clare,” a name associated with brightness and clarity.

Chastely Dreaming of Light

I have learned from experience that when nosing out associative threads in Alexis’s work, intuition is often as helpful as logic. Even so, the following hunch may be stretching things too far, but I offer it for consideration. In the same way that the Sunday school songlet stuck in my head, the description of the “quiet world,” “chastely dreaming of light,” felt, in some way, familiar. A bit of sleuthing brought me to the works of Alexander Maclagan, a 19th century Scottish writer of popular songs, and some poetry, whose work Balmoral: Lays of the Highlands and Other Poems, contains a work titled “Scenes Among the Mountains.” Specifically set at sunrise, and celebrating creation, it contains the following lines:

Mark the tiny silver streak
Of light above the ocean streaming,
Like the blush upon the cheek
Of modest beauty chastely dreaming
When the thought of love’s embrace
Throweth rose-light o’er her face

a tad florid, perhaps, but nicely encapsulating key themes (love, light, nature, and evidence of the divine) found in Days By Moonlight.