The Demon Tracts

The Demon Tracts is a faithful reproduction of the loggbok of Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet, Kristján Norge who vanished from the Outer Hebridean Eilean a’ Bháis (Isle of the Dead) in 1961. Part diary, part collage, its collaged contents betray a figure profoundly disturbed by the vicissitudes of island life. The loggbok entries are aligned with the lunar cycles of the new moon and full moon of 1961, beginning on July 11th (which opens this ’dorchar taibhse’ or ’dark vision’) and ending with the full moon on the 22nd of December. The loggbok concludes with a long, unedited poem: The Demon’s Progress, which is surely a nod to The Rake’s Progress and antithetical to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Crudely attached inserts include: a black and white plate of the Palatine Graffito depicting Christ as a crucified donkey; a fortune-telling card illustrated with a man wrestling a lion from the Grand jeu de Mlle Lenormand deck, Grimaud, France; a reconstructed cella using an Egyptian postcard of the Temple of Edfu; numerous typescripts and a 1950s image of wolves in a wood, possibly at Whipsnade zoo. Norge’s handwritten scrawl is meticulously transcribed to reveal an arcane theatre of paranoia and self-betrayal akin to Nijinsky and Strindberg’s own diaristic breakdowns. The Demon Tracts manifests out of Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire as microcosmic evidence of charred thinking and reduced selfhood via the invented ventriloquism of the ’Sluagh nam Marbh’, a malign Highland tempest wind that seemingly drew Norge toward his death.