The Material Is Always Right: A Review of Alnilam by James Dickey – Rainer Codas
November 14, 2025
No living person can explain how or why Alnilam was published.
Alnilam is a novel by James Dickey.
The easy answer is money, as it followed Deliverance, but Alnilam is just too long and strange.
Alnilam is about navigation and movement. Construction and deconstruction. Unveiling and disappearance. Sugar and hominy. Physical and informational context. Written in third person.
How does a handy surly man of the American south, blinded by diabetes and obsessed with the fake snake he left in the last funhouse he built while sighted, how does this man traverse the physical world, as well as the past, in that the past is only ever a present simulation?
How does he learn about the son he abandoned, other than investigating his death at the airbase where the son was both training as a pilot and building a mystical order centered on flight? The blind man goes there and makes a mess, but charms people, undoubtedly. He is earth animal. His son, lithe angel. Earth and air. Physical and mental. Soul and spirit.
How and why do we fly? How accurate are our internal maps and external wallcharts? Typical map/territory stuff.
How and why do we disappear?
Alnilam is literature at its most harrowing. Everything that it should and should not be and do. That its thousand pages are somehow readable is a mystery greater than air.
James Dickey was first known as a poet. Poets build the world through the information it gives them, the information they receive, what rises, what makes itself noticed. They sift through impressions, translate them into words, or are they words exempt from all translation. Poetry rearranges and recombines elements: color, sound, name.
Poetry survives because it is most true. The mental is always fused with the physical. You think-see-remember wintergreen parallelograms while admiring the sight of a magenta flower whose name you do not know while smelling something like cinnamon which makes you think of your mother’s snickerdoodles.
Context is the kingdom of memory. Poetry is the immediate. Prose is time. Poetry is the time magician.
The blind man gropes for physical context, counts steps and remembers the number. This makes me think of the historical and situational man, groping for context. Remembering facts. Story making and story forgetting. Memory can go blind. My demented aunt once hit on me.
Blind people use senses other than sight. We all draw upon memory for navigation. Memory is the primary threshold that allows all subsequent action and knowledge. The Rosicrucians have a saying: “In the beginning was the memory.”
Is Eden surrounded by The Kingdom of Memory?
Escaping The Kingdom of Memory is not glorifying amnesia, dementia, etc. It’s more permanent flow state… The Kingdom of Memory is calcified world, frozen imagination.
What is more real? The content of the book you are reading or the fact you are reading a book. The core meaning of every conversation is “We are currently having a conversation. We remember-speak information through the language we remember.”
I could not read Helen Keller’s autobiography once I found out she had a memory of the world visual: she was not born blind. This made her story completely uninteresting.
The blind man is protected by a monstrous hound, his externalized dogged spirit. The dog makes everyone nervous. The man makes everyone nervous. Men who know how to build things, men who know how to fly, are threatening, as they tame the material and the elemental. And yet they lose, sooner or later. They are “absorbed” by the material.
Reminds me of the Portuguese woman who told me “The material is always right.” I couldn’t latch the gas tank to the heater’s cable. I was freezing in the December room. It was rather simple in the end. I came to love the process of latching.
Greatness, capability, and singularity are threatening. Authority cannot tolerate these things unless it can use them for their own aims. The son and the father run afoul of military authorities.
All the men and all the cadets are fucking the same local girl. The blind father fucks the girl his son fucked.
Of course the son may not really be dead. Of course he may have been killed by an authority figure threatened by the son’s beguiling abilities and natural magnetism.
The blind father cannot stop drinking even though sweetness made him blind.
The spaces are those of military hierarchy. Dry and functional. Cafeteria and office and hangar. Or smalltown southern hospitality zones. Crowded restaurant. Chatty hotel owner. Sudden friends. Soul food. So much fucking dialogue.
Dialogue has really begun to irk me as I age. And yet dialogue is necessary for somewhat linear tales. It’s a propellant and reprieve from physical description and rhetoric. Dialogue helps a story bloom. Whereas more nonlinear works, books about the act of remembering through writing, are not as reliant on dialogue. Remembering is the uncomfortable triumph of montage.
Dickey moves to the first person in his next book, To the White Sea, which is uncut “narrator as God of His kingdom” voice, the register of epic and legend. I think the only dialogue is in the beginning, that general describing the firebombing of Japan.
Who is telling the detective father the truth? Who is consciously lying? Who is unconsciously lying? When did we start using these terms of conscious / unconscious? Are the original terms something like enlightened / enshadowed? Light / dark? Sight and blindness? And why do I think I’m part of The We?
It may be better to treat every artwork as successful. Alnilam is a success. But it is not for the masses. Or even for the few. It may just be for me and Dickey. Brothers of the air. Brothers of sweetness.
When an artwork fails what do we use as a rubric? We measure the work against the perfect version of what we think it tried to be, which says more about us than the artwork. Or, we measure it against better artworks in its genre or family of aesthetics. What we are always saying is “This work failed me.” Why not “I failed this work?”
When asked about the secret to everything, didn’t Grothendieck ask back, “What is a ruler?” Instruments and tools of measurement make a false world, or merely the world wherein they rule. Is there a “true ruler” somewhere, which all rulers are measured against?
A man should not confuse himself with his tools or instruments. Ten is implied with his digits. A length by hand, arm, foot, and leg.
A terrifying thought, that gives me real fear, is reading Alnilam again. Whereas I read To the White Sea twice, and loved it both times. Deliverance I read shortly after Mom died in 2017, after seeing the solar eclipse in North Carolina. When I first saw the Deliverance film, and of course the anal rape scene, I was working on a leaf project at the dining room table. My father watched this from the recliner. The leaf project was my first conscious encounter with the gingko leaf, which remains my favorite leaf. It is perfect, to my eye. I collected gingko leaves recently. I kept them in my jacket pocket to feel their power.
The climax of Alnilam is such a mess, an eschatology of blades and propellers. It could be no other way. The blind man magically moves through it. The dog does not. The other night I dreamed the phrase: “Are you into eschatology, kid?”
It feels like Dickey wanted to vanish into the air. He seemed to discover this as he went along. From anal rape to a vanished pilot to a killer who has maybe become a bird. It was easier to disappear into sugar. He remained earthbound until the end.
The blind father has persistent memories of swimming in a pool.
The killergod in To the White Sea tries to become a bird while revering earth mammals and especially the fisher marten, a kind of weasel ferret cat. There are fishers and there are martens but I think he spoke of a fisher marten.
Whenever I spend time outside of human-dominated nature I remember how nature is a trickster: porous, camouflaged, shifting, ethereal, watery, mutable, line-resistant. Nature is transition, becoming, and changing, as opposed to fixed state and clean category.
Human-dominated nature is perfectly natural.
The sight of a seemingly straight water/sky horizon line must have a deep effect on the heartsight of man. I would often look up from Alnilam to see the horizon line of the Río de la Plata, which I kept thinking was the ocean.
In fact the Río de la Plata has been called a “river, an estuary, a gulf, or a marginal sea.” According to Wikipedia.
Ever since I quit drinking honey has become an obscene and intoxicating drug. A full of spoon of it is too much. I imagine honey in different colors. Blue honey would make me crazy. There was that delicious green stuff in Serbia that was kind of like grass and honey.
Man must see himself as the being who changes. All true poetry is about change, according to Robert Graves. If you are not writing about the changing of the seasons you are not writing poetry. If you do not prioritize The White Goddess, she will leave you. Sometimes I think this is hard for modern people to bear. It is easier to serve sweetness.
A father is expected to prioritize his family. I remember that one History of Art class I took and the teacher pointing out that Joseph, Mary’s husband, is usually portrayed as a kind of sleepy dimwit. The terrestrial father is a tragic figure.
Is it possible for an absent father to parent through his apparent disappearance? To communicate, to remain present, through other material and medium. To speak through the air. To remain through memories that become charged with power.
Helen Keller was able to build vision from early impressions. Why haven’t I read The Miracle Worker yet?
In human-dominated nature I often think The Reflection is the key element, which is an imperfect doubled image. But where does the perfect doubled image, or perfect source image, lie? In imagination or memory? Is there a difference between these two?
I also think of reflected light versus direct light. I also think of The Mirror, which may be a more important element.
Yesterday I saw a hawk or falcon. These sightings are always auspicious.
There is a longing to know the territory of the disappeared state. What it feels like to vanish from the earth, from the air, and even from memory. In this we maybe intuit true freedom. We want to be remembered. We want to be forgotten.
As we age we play with the same handful of obsessions.
The state of the son remains a mystery. Both dead and alive. The blind father eventually just leaves the base and the town. It’s very possible I missed everything.
I can’t remember what Alnilam itself is, other than a star. Stars are of course used for navigation. They help with physical location. They of course have their astrological import, which is time location and time-quality location. They also have their mythological meaning. This locates us within stories. This provides context.
The fact that there is a North Star is somewhat maddening. There’s a whole thing about this in Hamlet’s Mill, in fact it may BE the whole thing, but I just can’t go there. Because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Just that God provided a fixed point in the mutable material.
I’ve been meaning to read about the Polynesians. There’s probably so much about stars but I bet a lot about water, air, and earth qualities. They probably have entire oral-image-sensation dictionaries about different categories of each and where they meet and interpenetrate.
The road to hell is paved with associative thinking.
When I was in Japan I never made it to Hokkaido. I was shocked at how Nagasaki seemed like a completely normal city. If I did not know the story of the atomic bomb I would have never guessed it, but I do know the story, so this is moot.
What will be the astrology of the space age, for beings born in space, offplanet? Sometimes I think this is my true mission. Because if the child is born floating in space the circle of the chart may need to be a sphere. Steve Judd has spoken of 3D astrological charts, much like I think there should be an aspect chart called a “double wheel,” wherein current aspects connect to natal aspects. Not just planets and points, mind you, but entire aspects. The wheels, one above and one below, will need to be connected by a line or a ladder or an axis or an axle or a strike of fixed lightning. These unique configurations will need new names.
For the first time in my life I want to be an astronaut.
My father grew up with a boy who became an astronaut. The astronaut came upon my father when the latter was selling comicbooks in some grimy basement. The astronaut eventually sent me official portraits of himself and even a spacesuit patch. It was circular.
It’s not right to call outer-space air. Do we return to ether? I just heard that the sun may not be made of plasma but liquid metallic hydrogen.
Memories are alive. So are dreams. They are changed by further information, which broadens the associative and informational network.
Floodwater is thought of as an erasure, a forgetting.
I loved the movie Ad Astra, where a missing astronaut father, who is actually hovering around Neptune, communicates with Earth and thus his astronaut son via waves of electricity. The father tries to kill the son because the father does not want to go home.
Terminator 2. The T1000 is made of “liquid metal” and before it dies in the vat of liquid fire it writhes in versions of its previous incarnations, which were accurate yet false doubles of humans, and yet now the doubles are chaotic and mutilated. The T1000 actually does not have a true form. It is destroyed and absorbed by the material.
Maybe Alnilam is about how dogs make better sons than sons.
I kind of want to see that Steven Coogan movie where a man befriends a penguin. I like barn owls, Weimaraners, and blue-eyed Siamese cats. Many of my favorite dreams involve turtles. I have a great love for whales.
In a recent dream I stared into the eyes of a hippopotamus and we meditated together. We seemed to merge. The dream seemed instructive, spiritually.
Nature is associative and relational. God is the fixed point to whom we are connected. A fixed point both absent and present. Present by other means and mediums. Absent through revealing. Communicating through the singular changing material. Is communication. Quite honestly I think if I were to review any book I would reduce it to the same beginning-ending.
I often imagine dying with a view of the sea, on coastal grasslands. But also dying in a snow of cherry blossom petals. But also dying on the Tibetan steppe, or perhaps outside Almaty, under a clear night sky and a ringing full moon.
Only recently have I imagined dying in outer space, which I believe is the infinite core, the very heart of the imagination.
Some believe the heart is not a pump. The role changes but the placement remains somewhat fixed. Man is the ruler? The heartbeat is the only constant? It sounds through silence. Felt by the blind and the deaf alike. Only ignored by the truly blind. Is this too trite? Too saccharine? Or is it merely a spoonful of honey?
Is there a condition that makes one blind to the beating of the heart? Am I heartblind?
When I had my heart incident the other night I was completely ready to die. I preferred death to having an ongoing heart condition. I thought I would beg for more life but I didn’t.
More and more I believe the heart is a communicative sense organ that changes the world, that changes the mind, that changes the material.
It is possible I am wrong about everything.