The Collected Short Fiction
MC: Then perhaps even lighter fare, relatively speaking, is in order. Word recently came down the pipeline about a planned series of comic books based on The Nightmare Factory. This was quite a pleasant surprise. Can you reveal any details?
TL: No, I can't. I know only what everyone knows from reading the publicity releases. Fox Atomic, the movie studio that's doing these comics in conjunction with Harper-Collins, doesn't have to consult me about any products they create that are derived from the stories they optioned in The Nightmare Factory.
MC: Even as we speak, the short film adaptation of your story "The Frolic" has entered postproduction. You're reportedly very happy with what you've seen of it so far. Can you tell us anything more?
TL: The lastest word is from the producer of "The Frolic," Jane Kosek, is that she contacted the head guy at Fox Atomic, and he wants to see the short film as well as an outline for a feature film from Brandon Trenz and me. We did an outline in April 2005, so that's not a problem. The short should be ready in a month or so.
MC: Can you share any new information about the development status of the screenplays for Crampton and The Last Feast of Harlequin?
TL: They were sent out to a lot of production companies by a talent agent, the same one who made the deal for me with Fox Atomic. Some of the companies showed an interest, and Brandon Trenz went to Hollywood. But nothing came of those meetings as far as the two screenplays you mention. They are officially dead.
MC: And that news officially sucks. What a disappointment. Well, then, what about your current writing projects? Do you have anything underway besides TCATHR? And when can we expect to see that one published?
TL: I have no idea when or if TCATHR will be published.
MC: What books and authors are you reading at present, if anything? Awhile back you said you were probably pretty much done with reading, since you had read most of what interested you. How does this stand currently?
TL: These days I read only nonfiction, if I read anything at all. I recently reread all of E. M. Cioran's works. That took a while. I've read a number of works relating to consciousness studies and, of course, mental illness. Those are very technical and hard on the brain, so I often search out video or audio lectures or interviews by the authors of these works on the Web. In the past year I read On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death by Jean Améry and Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michelstaedter. Both of these authors killed themselves, but their books would still be interesting if they hadn't. I still read works by and about Buddhists.
MC: I find your move toward nonfiction to be fascinating for personal reasons, since I moved in that direction myself a few years ago. But it wasn't voluntary. I simply began to notice that I was unable to read fiction a great deal of the time. It was as if some force within me were operating a valve and periodically shutting off my responsiveness to fiction. I encountered a mental fog, a kind of affective and even cognitive blankness, when I tried to make sense of fiction or respond to it in any way. It just seemed meaningless to me. Does this ring a bell with you?
TL: It sure does ring a bell, a tolling bell. I can no longer emotionally respond to fiction or poetry. That's the reason I read nonfiction, and very cerebral nonfiction at that. One doesn't need to respond emotionally to that kind of writing, which is just for the brain and not the emotions or imagination. Strangely, I find that my experience is the same with movies and TV shows. These don't seem to require emotion or imagination on the viewers' part to be diverting. The anhedonic thing could change in a second, literally, and I wouldn't remember the lesson I learned from it. It has let up several times over the past five years. At these times, as I previously mentioned, I go into hypomanic states in which I want to do all kinds of things and have the impetus to do them. But for me these last only a matter of weeks or maybe a month. When these periods are over, however, the depression comes back worse than ever. I take a drug called Lamictal, which is an anti-convulsant that psychiatrist have using instead of lithium on bipolar disorders and treatment-resistant depression. The way this drug works, ideally, is to put a floor on how bad you can feel and a ceiling on how good you can feel. That's the zone I'm now in. The only reason I'm going into detail about any of this is on the chance that someone reading it will know what I'm talking about and perhaps take an interest in it. My apologies to the rest of you.
MC: What about movies? Have you loved any lately? Or hated any?
TL: Some notable movies that I've recently hated have been Spielberg's Munich and Woody Allen's Match Point. Also, Mission Impossible III. To that list you can add the French film Caché, which is the worst movie I've ever seen. I haven't seen Lady in the Water, but I know it sucks because the writer-director is just no good: his best effort, The Sixth Sense, was a cheat from start to finish. Plus there was that scene in which the mother leaves the kitchen where the kid is eating breakfast and returns a few seconds later to find all the cupboards and drawers are open. For some reason, she just takes this in stride, and it doesn't come up again in the story. Usually the movies I like are trashed or ignored, like Man on Fire with Denzel Washington and Don't Say a Word with Michael Douglas. Lately, I've just been renting or taking out of the library movies I've seen a dozen times. Horror movies: Wolf Creek, sucked; Hostel, sucked; The Devil's Rejects, very funny and clever; remake of The Hills Have Eyes, sucked. This may sound stupid to some horror movie aficionados, but I really thought well of the two Final Destination movies. I rented the third installment, which was done by same ex-X-File guys Morgan and Wong who did the first FD. It sucked. I like movies in which everyone is living a doomed existence, which is why I find George Romero's zombie movies so appealing. From the very beginning of the Dead trilogy, everything is hopeless.
"I'm completely detached from anything, including myself and anyone around me. Doing anything just seems plain stupid, which in my opinion it ultimately is. This is the lesson of anhedonia, which is an eminently rational state." MC: How about music? Are you listening to any lately? Awhile back you told me you were encountering some of the best music in the most unlikely places, such as television commercials. Is this still happening?
TL: The reason I hear the best music on television is that I don't listen to music anywhere else, just as I'm not reading fiction or poetry. So music in TV commercials, programs, and movies is all I hear. The exception is the music sent to me by certain people who have recorded their own compositions. I feel that I can still judge whether or not a piece of music is good, even if I don't go spasmodic over it. Presently, I like the theme songs of Cold Case and The 4400, even though the latter show blows. It had promise in the first season, very much like The X-Files, but then it turned into a soap opera.
MC: Speaking of The X-Files, I think life in America and the West is pervaded by an apocalyptic feeling right now. How about you?
TL: At the moment, I'm not very emotionally responsive to anything. My medications only add to that non-responsiveness. In the last session I had with my psychiatrist, he started to talk about the situation in the Middle East heating up toward something apocalyptic. In the past, I would have had something to say on this subject, because what I talk about with my psychiatrist is mostly politics and movies. However, this time I had to say that I just wasn't interested in what was going on in the world. I can't feel anything for what's happening now. About three years ago, I was completely enraged by the whole American scene. I'd go out of my way to watch people like Ann Coulter, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and aggravate myself over the evangelical brood. A lot of that is in TCATHR. I might get exercised about this stuff in the future, but it doesn't penetrate me at the moment. Maybe if somebody nuked someone I'd watch the news stories about it. Short of that, or another 9/11, I don't find current events very diverting. Also, I've had a sense of personal apocalypse for decades due to my psych disorders. I've thought that I was dying literally thousands of times during my panic attacks. The end of the line for me has felt imminent for so long that the real-world version of it woul
d just be another occasion of "Oh, lordy, what's going to become of us." Anyway, all apocalyptic phenomena take place on a personal level. It just seems scarier when it's on a larger scale.
MC: I know you're familiar with Hubbert's Peak and the theory of peak oil. It's an issue that I'm following closely myself. Do you have any thoughts about it?
TL: Yes. I would like to see a total depletion of oil occur as soon as possible . . . just for fun. This might be the best thing that could happen to this world, socially and politically speaking. Of course, it could also be the worst. In either case, I am slightly interested in which way it would go. It might go the latter way for a while and then change course. The whole oil thing brings to mind two of my favorite movies in which the fight for natural resources plays a role: The Formula with Marlon Brando and George C. Scott and Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. Ultimately, I don't have any investment in the future, so I can't get too het up about what's going to happen after I die.
MC: Let's close this out with another question of global scope. What would a perfect world be like for you? That's of course assuming that you and a world would have to exist at all. You've made it perfectly clear in numerous stories and interviews that you're a fundamental pessimist who thinks it a crying shame that there's something instead of nothing. But given the (supposed) necessity of existence, what would be the best life and the best world for you personally, if you had absolute freedom of choice?
TL: Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics—food, shelter, and clothing—but life wouldn't be any more than that. It wouldn't need to be. We would be content just to exist. There's only one problem in this world: none are content with what they have. We always want something else, something "more." And then when we get it, we still want something else and something more. There is no place of satisfaction for us. We die with regrets for what we never did and will never have a chance to do. We die with regrets for what we never got and will never get. The perfect manner of existence that I'm imagining would be different than that of most mammals, who feed on one another and suffer fear due to this arrangement, much of it coming at the hands of human beings. We would naturally still have to feed, but we probably would not be the omnivorous gourmands and gourmets that we presently are. Of course, like any animal we would suffer from pain in one form or another—that's the essence of existence—but there wouldn't be any reason to take it personally, something that escalates natural pain to the level of nightmare. I know that this kind of world would seem terribly empty to most people—no competition, no art, no entertainment of any kind because both art and entertainment are based on conflict between people, and in my world that kind of conflict wouldn't exist. There would be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than you need, no scientific activity because we wouldn't be driven to improve the world or possess information unnecessary to living, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer, no relationships because those are based on difference and in the perfect world we'd all be the same person, as well as being integrated into the natural world. Everything we did would be for practical purposes in order to satisfy our natural needs. We wouldn't be enlightened beings or sages because those ways of being are predicated on the existence of people who live at a lower epistemological stratum.
MC: What you're saying reminds me of some things I've read in the writings of Schopenhauer, U.G. Krishnamurti, and a few others—all of them authors I know you've read. I'm also strongly reminded of Ramesh Baksekar's "euphoric nihilism," as an interviewer for What Is Enlightenment? magazine described it, which envisions the perfect world as one populated by "body/mind organisms" that act in a completely preprogrammed manner with no hint of free will, no trace of any "doers" in the form of self-conscious "I's." The interviewer referred to Balsekar's imagined utopia as "planet advaita."
TL: I looked at Balsekar's Official Web Site. He seems like the perfect example of what U. G. would consider a spiritual huckster. His whole operation seems to be a real racket, and not a particularly distinguished one. Then again, I'm given to snap judgments, and perhaps I'm being unfair in this instance. But I doubt it, especially since he was featured in Andrew Cohen's What Is Enlightenment? and from what I've read, Cohen is the worst guru of all time. Anyway, the phrase "euphoric nihilism" reminds of an electronic book that I downloaded called Conscious Robots, which expostulates very much the same idea. My own perfect world comes from an amalgam of sources, including Skepticism, Nihilism, Buddhism, and accounts of persons who have actually experienced ego-death, including U. G., as you pointed out. Not many people are interested in living in this world, so there is little motivation to work towards it. As much as we complain about life, we're pretty much satisfied, or think we are, with the ways things are from here to eternity. To me, this is definitive proof that human beings don't deserve to live in a perfect world. Even in fables wherein people lived in a paradise that is supposedly without ego or unnatural desires—Adam and Eve, Pandora—someone always does something to fuck things up so that the world can become the one we already know and, in our depraved way, love.
MC: Thanks again for taking the time to answer some questions, Tom. It's been a pleasure.
TL: Same here, Matt.
Source: The New York Review of Science Fiction Issue 218, Vol. 19, No. 2 (October 2006)
Geoffrey H. Goodwin: A Conversation With Thomas Ligotti, 7th October, 2007
What led to your writing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race?
I could recite a litany of reasons for my writing The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but the most immediate cause was my reading an essay written in 1933 called “The Last Messiah” by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. Down the ages, pessimistic writers and thinkers have wailed that our lives are predominantly characterized by meaningless suffering and therefore everyone would be better off not to have been born. This is sometimes referred to as a hedonist view of existence, and for one reason or another practically no one is persuaded that there’s anything to it. Even if someone grants that life is mostly, or even entirely, a trail of tears with nothing but death at the end, they still don’t feel that being alive is not worth it. They’ll carry on till the end and pass on this legacy to another generation, perhaps thinking that somehow things will get better.