Imagery in Ink | Piece #2: “The Unfinished Business of René Daumal” by Julie Lunde

For my series, I chose to focus on striking or impactful imagery, both present in the work and imagined, in three of the fiction pieces selected for this issue of Windmill.

Piece #2: “The Unfinished Business of René Daumal” by Julie Lunde

“The Unfinished Business of René Daumal” was another early favorite within the fiction listing. Borgesian and surreal, I found new details within the piece on each reread. The story creates new imagery, finishing the last sentence of Daumal’s Mount Analogue, in each new line, eventually forming a larger story about a breakup and estranged relationship between the personified plants and wasps. The created modernity of the wasps texting the plants stuck out to me as a very fun image, so to embrace the surrealism of the piece, I drew a person with plants instead of a head and the texts they may have received from the wasps. There’s no ability to read the plants’ reaction to the text messages: you have to work a little harder to imagine it yourself, as you also have to work within the story itself to understand the through line connecting the imagined last sentences.