Zephyrian Spools by Dalia Neis
This extraordinary work will transform how you see the element in which we live, which surrounds us, and enters us – as agency, as magical entity, as mode of transport to other dimensions; the ‘eternal, axiomatic, cosmic wind.’ Zephyrian Spools is a wind-vision: part poem, part novel, part feminist Bildungsroman, part virtual film-script, part essay, tracing a young filmmaker called Lydia’s obsession with the haunting cinematic dream of filming the wind. Her quest leads her to the enigmatic and sensual scholar-mystic Dr Lizzie Zephyrah with whom she undergoes a species of apprenticeship: ‘we are making a film. It just doesn’t involve a camera.’ This beguiling, unclassifiable text re-humanises our new materialism and fashions a lens for yet further, far-seeing enquiry: ‘realising you are wind filming wind.’
– Scott Thurston
Zephyrian Spools mixes autobiography, psychogeography, film history, phenomenology and mysticism in a tumultuous essay on the wind and cinema. Neis’ queer gaze on witchcraft, healing and rabbinical knowledge pits Spinoza against Descartes in a lesbian love story full of quirky scholarship, anecdotal riffs, science and folklore. Towards the end of this eclectic essay/poem/study it segues into kabbalah and concrete poetry, a text as wild as the wind.
– Ruth Novaczek
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