Daniel Carden Nemo is a writer, translator, and photographer. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Amsterdam Review. His work has been long-listed for the Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum) and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Common, Atlanta Review, Magma Poetry, RHINO, Full Stop, Sontag Mag, and elsewhere.
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Hataalii Notes"Carden Nemo writes from the unconscious, for the unconscious—that great mind architect that, like Nolan’s films or Cartarescu’s fiction, builds whole worlds we can only access once we break down the barriers of the immediate, the known, the safe. He gives in to the overwhelming force of the unconscious to recreate this architecture of the mind through language that has the power to reach us and reshape our own inner world, provided we let go and find our way through the labyrinth. What’s in it for us as readers is not what we find on the other side, once the exit (or the last page) is in sight, but what we find buried deep inside—ourselves." - Pryscilla Hebel, Managing Editor, Amsterdam Review
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The Quartet
There is nothing the conscious mind can think up that meets the needs of the unconscious. The Quartet is a project that, like the works of the 20th-century Surrealists, draws its material from the unconscious. The main difference is that the immersion into the unconscious isn’t experimental, partial, or temporary, but comprises a new realm with a complete and distinct mode of being.
Given the enormous challenges it presents, however, the immersion process can only be sustained for a limited time. Over the years, I have developed various methods of extracting data from the unconscious, such as visual-linguistic forms of free association and deep meditation techniques using alpha brainwaves from drift states between sleep and wakefulness, as well as gamma brainwaves from peak perceptivity and connectivity states. (The heights achieved using these techniques are, at their pinnacle, comparable to non-ordinary states induced by the consumption of substances such as psilocybin, THC, or LSD.) Consistently using these methods for a period of over five years, in 4-8hr daily sessions, the material for The Quartet was in the end extracted successfully. All the pieces in the book are essentially lightly reworked unconscious extractions, meaning that, unlike most forms of common writing, which tend to glance off the surface of the mind, their power lies in their very real possibility of reaching deep into the reader’s own unconscious. By blurring the lines between the written, the aural, and the visual, the extraction recreates the mechanics of the unconscious cinematographically, through language. We know from Lacan and Fink that the unconscious isn’t only structured like a language but that it is language, insofar as it is language that makes up the unconscious, a signifying process that involves coding and decoding. We also know that consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown, which isn’t evident, plain, instantly appealing, yet the beauty and chaos of the unconscious make up consciousness itself. In this book, the writer’s own unconscious production, their mind cinema, infiltrates the reader’s psyche as soon as it bypasses their conscious mind.
As the sole way to resolve traumatic unconscious memory is to bring it into consciousness, The Quartet sets out to take the reader on a circuitous self-regenerative journey where the limits of experience are challenged and ultimately rearranged. Although respectful of the fact that it occupies a literary space, the main focus of the project is on gaining access to a place that remains largely hidden from human scrutiny, on how far or deep it can test its limits, and on what can be retrieved from it. The work yields fully to this process, perhaps at the expense of a formal sense of security that more traditional literary constructs may confer. The Quartet, as the polar opposite of the fast-foodification of life and art, may offer some resistance at first, but in time succeeds in connecting the illusion of direct access to the real to a genuine possibility. - DCN
*If you are a publisher or editor who is interested in radically different work, please feel free to contact me about a sample/volume of The Quartet.
There is nothing the conscious mind can think up that meets the needs of the unconscious. The Quartet is a project that, like the works of the 20th-century Surrealists, draws its material from the unconscious. The main difference is that the immersion into the unconscious isn’t experimental, partial, or temporary, but comprises a new realm with a complete and distinct mode of being.
Given the enormous challenges it presents, however, the immersion process can only be sustained for a limited time. Over the years, I have developed various methods of extracting data from the unconscious, such as visual-linguistic forms of free association and deep meditation techniques using alpha brainwaves from drift states between sleep and wakefulness, as well as gamma brainwaves from peak perceptivity and connectivity states. (The heights achieved using these techniques are, at their pinnacle, comparable to non-ordinary states induced by the consumption of substances such as psilocybin, THC, or LSD.) Consistently using these methods for a period of over five years, in 4-8hr daily sessions, the material for The Quartet was in the end extracted successfully. All the pieces in the book are essentially lightly reworked unconscious extractions, meaning that, unlike most forms of common writing, which tend to glance off the surface of the mind, their power lies in their very real possibility of reaching deep into the reader’s own unconscious. By blurring the lines between the written, the aural, and the visual, the extraction recreates the mechanics of the unconscious cinematographically, through language. We know from Lacan and Fink that the unconscious isn’t only structured like a language but that it is language, insofar as it is language that makes up the unconscious, a signifying process that involves coding and decoding. We also know that consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown, which isn’t evident, plain, instantly appealing, yet the beauty and chaos of the unconscious make up consciousness itself. In this book, the writer’s own unconscious production, their mind cinema, infiltrates the reader’s psyche as soon as it bypasses their conscious mind.
As the sole way to resolve traumatic unconscious memory is to bring it into consciousness, The Quartet sets out to take the reader on a circuitous self-regenerative journey where the limits of experience are challenged and ultimately rearranged. Although respectful of the fact that it occupies a literary space, the main focus of the project is on gaining access to a place that remains largely hidden from human scrutiny, on how far or deep it can test its limits, and on what can be retrieved from it. The work yields fully to this process, perhaps at the expense of a formal sense of security that more traditional literary constructs may confer. The Quartet, as the polar opposite of the fast-foodification of life and art, may offer some resistance at first, but in time succeeds in connecting the illusion of direct access to the real to a genuine possibility. - DCN
*If you are a publisher or editor who is interested in radically different work, please feel free to contact me about a sample/volume of The Quartet.
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A member of The Hague Association of Artists
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© 2026 Daniel Carden Nemo. All rights reserved.
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