Atonal Apocalypse: On Milk Sickness by David Greenspan
By D.W. Baker
David Greenspan’s new experimental novella is a collection of strange sentences that relies on indeterminate imagery and recursive evocation to render a diseased world in collapse. “O mother, let me invent language for your surgery,” requests a child, identified simply as “the youngest” (39). The narrator returns to this point about invented language, but only after ten pages of lyrical prose fragments featuring a surreal variety of interlocutors: from the oldest child, who “celebrates when rain falls and everywhere lungs sprout” (47); to the field itself, which “steps from its skin” and “puts the oldest child to its ear” (48); to the living knives, “searching for blood they cannot find” (43). After this parade of images, the narrator states, “the children have hundreds of words for their hearts disappearing inside a porcelain orchard,” inviting another cascade of dark symbolism that recasts previous references to fruit sprinkled throughout the text (49). Readers can expect this level of challenge and reward from the chapterless prose of Milk Sickness (Querencia Press: 2025). Themes of embodiment, technology, and nature are used to investigate illness as both a social and biological experience, echoing the real-world dissonances of alienated labor, factory farms, and pandemics.
Greenspan’s use of indeterminacy in language may be best understood via analogy to tonal harmony. The vast majority of music is tonal, using recognizable contours and relationships—including, in the western tradition, a whole nomenclature of terms such as “root,” “dominant,” “key signature,” and more—to create desired effects such as tension, progression, recognition, and resolution. Atonal music is carefully structured to avoid these determinate relationships, instead producing a musical text that is coherent, yet dissonant; eventful, yet without resolution; all the while carefully calibrated, yet apparently chaotic. In literature, if normative devices such as character, plot, and genre are like the shared language of tonal harmony, then Milk Sickness is the atonal exception. The book’s language operates with a concerted effort to avoid typical ordering mechanisms: there are multiple unnamed figures, but no lucid characters; many impactful events and chains of cause-and-effect, but no clearly defined linear plot; countless synchronicities, but no framework for understanding their logic.
In literature, if normative devices such as character, plot, and genre are like the shared language of tonal harmony, then Milk Sickness is the atonal exception.
There are also no proper nouns in this book, let alone properly named characters. Greenspan scrupulously avoids precise definition and framing, favoring instead a recursive morass of common nouns. The closest thing to main characters are “the boy” and “the girl,” prominent figures during the first two-thirds of the text, and then their three offspring, “the oldest a girl, the youngest a boy, the middle a knife” (35). Greenspan’s third person omniscient narrator does deploy some interior access, but often in figurative or opaque terms. When readers learn that the girl “does not think or say noose. She thinks only holy, says only birdbath” or that “the boy is today thinking of throats, their skin and fat,” more questions than answers arise (13-14). What, in this desolate landscape, is considered holy? Whose throats are so tenderly imagined? The choice to recycle nominative terms (the many different “children,” “boys,” and “girls” that populate the book) further deconstructs the individual in favor of a collective gestalt. Surrealist explications are also plentiful, such as when readers are shown that “the boy replaces his teeth with cardinal feathers,” or “in the back of the girl’s mouth is a hole. Inside is a child on its knees, breaking its fingers and chanting” (11, 22). Like the atonal composer whose music never quite conforms to a key, Greenspan’s language never quite establishes such norms, instead leaving clusters and fragments for the reader to interpret. From start to finish, the flood of allegorical possibilities neither recedes nor stagnates, but instead remains a constant undertow throughout the text, inviting contemplation of the ways society defines and treats categories of illness.
The book’s sequence of events resists the order and clarity that a traditional plot typically offers. A mixture of implicit and explicit detail does make certain events legible, such as social unrest after the onset of disease:
The town’s children are struck by illness. Citizens light torches and demand a hospital. Heal our children or we will bend backwards each of your fingernails, they chant at the girl and boy. She raises funds for the hospital through a citywide yard sale. Horse hooves, wire, blood, noise. The hospital is built from piano keys. Only the best doctors are employed, their coats the whitest, their stethoscopes the most intricate. (24)
From start to finish, the flood of allegorical possibilities neither recedes nor stagnates, but instead remains a constant undertow throughout the text, inviting contemplation of the ways society defines and treats categories of illness.
Readers are asked to discern not only between surrealist and literal detail, but also—at times—between self-falsifying narrative statements, such as, “children enter the hospital with whooping cough and the shakes. They enter with bulges under their skin. They enter with small animals where their teeth should be. Children enter the hospital normal in all respects but for recurring dreams” (25). After the first three sentences present an escalating series of ailments, the fourth describes them as “normal,” crystallizing dissonance between language and lived experience. Readers accustomed to a world of politicized healthcare and controlled narratives may recognize commonalities with the reaction to 2020’s global pandemic. Just as one begins to question what constitutes “normal in all respects,” Greenspan shifts to realism—an extended passage about knives, meat, and the preferences of a butcher’s customers—that refracts such questions back onto the real world and its catalogue of dissonances. Defamiliarizing the slaughter, desire, and consumption of flesh offers readers a reminder of the sick truths behind clean surfaces—of the repeated labors of death that facilitate packaged meat on the shelf.
Echoes of reality similarly intrude as Greenspan establishes the setting: a doppelgänger world, perhaps a near future, ravaged by disease and disaster. Readers are shown a ruined world of “water and rubble stretching far in all directions,” in which the oldest still remembers “when the sky was a light bulb, naked and violent,” offering ripe opportunities for engagement with ecopoetics and criticism (16, 41). It is a depleted and confused place, in which “there is not one horse left to graze in the field, so the girl populates it with cardboard horses. No one can tell the difference and everyone cheers for hours” (19). There evidently has been some sort of social breakdown, for in this timeline, “even the kindest, after some weeks living in their pantry, will imagine the soft noise of the boy’s stomach opening. They will imagine him scattered among debris, a feast for the rats and their tails” (12). Like everything else in the book, Greenspan leaves key details undefined and unresolved. There is no origin story, no scientific explanation, no unifying morality tale; there is no sum of the parts. Instead, readers must reckon with surfaces and constellations that trace an eerie resemblance to real problems. If museum audiences during the sixth mass extinction event cheer when they see replicas of lost species on display, is that really so different from the girl’s field of cardboard horses?
Greenspan leaves key details undefined and unresolved. There is no origin story, no scientific explanation, no unifying morality tale; there is no sum of the parts. Instead, readers must reckon with surfaces and constellations […]
That is the simple genius of Greenspan’s work, and the trick that makes the book successful: form fits content. Milk Sickness is a collection of disjointed, partially defined, grotesquely odd parts, somehow operating together—not unlike the distributed, alienated, and exploited relationships that comprise the capitalist-imperialist machine driving real-world extinction. In the midst of clearly fabulist description (“The girl as ghost stands in a field and opens her mouth. Mashed cherries pour out and everywhere it rains bird bone”), Greenspan includes indeterminate sentences that also apply to industrial society (“let them dance with machines of meat and blood. Let them crown a field in rust”) repeatedly prompting readers towards a reckoning (25, 14). How different is reality from the dark visions in this book? The first atonal composer, Arnold Schoenberg, reportedly said, “great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener.” Audiences willing to grapple with the atonal language of Milk Sickness will have no shortage of fruitful opportunities to consider this question, provided they bring an active reading approach. In perhaps the deepest parallel between Greenspan’s composition and reality, the reckoning is not received or given by the text, but must be the result of action. There is no happy ending to the apocalypse in sight—unless, and until, it is created.
Milk Sickness is now available from Querencia Press.
D.W. Baker is a poet and editor from St. Petersburg, Florida, where he writes about place, bodies, belonging, and the end of the world. His work appears in Identity Theory, Feral Poetry, horror senryu journal, and Black Glass Pages, among others, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He reads for several mastheads including Variant Lit and Divinations Magazine, and recently edited GOD/CORPSE: writing on the bipolar body for The Circus Collective. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com