The fantastic doesn't exist in an ideally routine world (which would be a fantastic reality in itself) or in an entirely unstable universe (equally unimaginable) but in an impure universe where the two are mingled.
Nothing is worth writing about except things sensed, however faintly, outside the visible universe.
Ghost story featuring a horrible, impotent creature that takes any amount of abuse and mutilation yet still remains, still haunts. Its power resides in its dual qualities of persistence and disgusting weakness.
The broken covenant of order.
There is no horror in total chaos. Horror is located in the entropic transition from a greater to a lesser state of order on the way to chaos, with all the little collapses pointing toward the big one.
The realization that there never was a covenant of order, only a devious document written in blood.
Connection between M. R. James's Count Magnus and the family of Erik Count Stenbock as delineated in 'Stenbock, Yeats and the Nineties'. Could James have known Stenbock?
To his credit, Poe goes out of his way to ruin the 'pure entertainment' value of his best stories. Example: undermining the picturesque, sublime effect in the intro section of 'Usher'. Lovecraft does something similar: the most charming New England settings in his tales are always a faÁade.
'Witches!' one rustic says to another, hefting a scythe. The trek through the super-haunted woods to a cottage where two old women live. Horrible turn of events. 'Witches,' everyone said.
Every rupture in routine, however slight, may become a chasm releasing the fantastic from its depths, a fracture opening on the incredible.
Supernatural horror is based on a sense of the world and not on an understanding of any system designed to explain it. The symbols and 'allegories' of supernatural horror refer directly to experience rather than a religious, philosophical, ethical, moral, psychological, or social interpretation of experience. Hence, the referents of these symbols, these allegories are often obscure -- even to the author's own mind -- because they are not articulated, not coded into a system. They are never obscure to the feelings, the viscera.
I hate to speculate on such things, but I have my suspicions that paradise itself is a nightmare.
Revelation of the whole 'scene' of existence leads a character to a self-mocking embracement of horror, an affirmation that this is the best and the worst of all possible worlds.
Not the how and why of the realistic supernatural tale, but simply the WHAT of the nightmare, source of all supernatural horror.
Someone leaves behind not his ghost but his vision of things to haunt a particular place, affecting the way others see it.
Consciousness breeding in some obscure place like a blue fungus.
What do creatures like Lovecraft's Brown Jenkin think and feel?
Everything is a trap, but it's only when one attempts to escape that this fact is realized. Vicious circles of circumstance, weird principles of identity, and self-dependent terms are the materials of this trap. The nausea of trying to break through, destroy these things.
The secret of the success of world religions lies in their genius for trivializing human suffering. Paradoxically, this is done by setting our agony on a cosmic stage.
Taste for violence, grandiosity, cataclysms: good mood. Distaste for the pain of violence, the vulgarity of 'grandeur', the terminal tragedy of cataclysms: bad mood.
The inability to love any particular thing as much as one hates life as a whole.
Interplay of forces bring about natural events. Are there particular forces always present in order to effect particular supernatural events? In fiction, that is.
Boredom, along with the fear of boredom, may serve as the fundamental explanation for all the horrors we inflict upon ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.
Seeing a mother holding an infant in her arms. How does one avoid imagining all the nightmares fermenting inside that tiny skull?
The horror tale: a crazy combo of charlatanry and the howl 'de profundis'.
On earth, we are all in the same mess. Nevertheless, it is the differences, not the identity, among us that constitute the basis for almost all our behavior.
Humor is not only a latent quality of horror, it is the mask of horror, just as horror is humor's secret face. Both are destructive; both have their inspiration in the corruptness of reality; and both seek a remedy in the annihilation of the animalistic values that motivate us.
Story idea: Man saves spider webs.
There is only one possible response to the prospect of living -- escape. Whether escape leads to other worlds or is a flight into the world itself is another matter.
With the disappearance of each individual, each generation, life is pardoned of its crimes, but only on a technicality. The witnesses of the deed, innocent bystanders all, can no longer come forth and give their testimony, which has been made inadmissable by death, however elaborately it has been recorded in second-hand form. No one hears them any more.
This maddening game in which one is always walking the edge of irony, hypocrisy, always speaking in tasteless double entendres between truth and appearances. 'Will you play again tomorrow?' you ask yourself before falling asleep each night. 'We shall have to see,' you answer, never knowing who or what else is included in this 'we.'
Wereworld: title for a bad popular horror novel.
Every joy an indirect, even a backward, joy.
Horror: refuge and revenge of the ultra-sensitive.
To hear the mocking laughter of your future self.
It's not that a fantastic story needs to draw its value and validity from the 'real' world -- that it ultimately must refer back to the everyday -- but that the real, everyday world refers to, or at least suggests, the realms which can only be portrayed in a fantastic story. At its deepest level, the world is always strange and frightening to us, as much as we are to ourselves.
Death is fantastic, unnatural. Its constant rearrangement of reality, its derangement of our minds and lives, is all but inconceivable. By contrast, immortality would be the most natural thing in the world.
Epigraph from Ludwig Tieck 'The Runenberg': 'In plants and herbs, in trees and flowers, it is the painful writhing of one universal wound that moves and works; they are the corpse of forgone glorious worlds of rock, they offer to our eye a horrid universe of putrefaction.'
Only in the unreal can we be saved. Reality ruins everything and everyone.
The Bungalow House (1995)
First published in The Urbanite #5, 1995
Also published in: The Nightmare Factory, The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World, Teatro Grottesco.
Early last September I discovered among the exhibits in a local art gallery a sort of performance piece in the form of an audiotape. This, I later learned, was the first of a series of tape-recorded dream monologues by an unknown artist. The following is a brief and highly typical excerpt from the opening section of this work. I recall that after a few seconds of hissing tape noise, the voice began speaking: 'There was far more to deal with in the bungalow house than simply an infestation of vermin,' it said, 'although that too had its questionable aspects.' Then the voice went on: 'I could see only a few of the bodies where the moonlight shone through the open blinds of the living-room windows and fell upon the carpet. Only one of the bodies seemed to be moving, and that very slowly, but there may have been more that were not yet dead. Aside from the chair in which I sat in the darkness there was very little furniture in the room, or elsewhere in the bungalow house for that matter. But a number of lamps were positioned around me, floor lamps and table lamps and even two tiny lamps on the mantel above the fireplace.'
A brief pause occurred here in the opening section of the tape-recorded dream monologue, as I remember it, after which the voice continued: 'The bungalow house was built with a fireplace, I said to myself in the darkness, thinking how long it had been since anyone had made use of this fireplace, or anything else in the house. Then my att
ention returned to the lamps, and I began trying each of them one by one, twisting their little grooved switches in the darkness. The moonlight fell upon the lampshades without shining through them, so I could see that none of the lamps was equipped with a lightbulb, and each time I turned the switch of a floor lamp or a table lamp or one of the tiny lamps on the mantel, nothing changed in the dark living room of the bungalow house: the moonlight shone through the dusty blinds and revealed the bodies of insects and other vermin on the pale carpet.'
'The challenges and obstacles facing me in that bungalow house were becoming more and more oppressive,' whispered the voice on the tape. 'There was something so desolate about being in that place in the dead of night, even if I did not know precisely what time it was. And to see upon the pale, threadbare carpet those verminous bodies, some of which were still barely alive; then to try each of the lamps and find that none of them was in working order—everything, it seemed, was in opposition to my efforts, everything aligned against my taking care of the problems I faced in the bungalow house. For the first time I noticed that the bodies lying for the most part in total stillness on the moonlit carpet were not like any species of vermin I had ever seen,' the voice on the tape recording said. 'Some of them seemed to be deformed, their naturally revolting forms altered in ways I could not discern. I knew that I would require specialized implements for dealing with these creatures, an arsenal of advanced tools of extermination. It was the idea of poisons—the toxic solutions and vapors I would need to use in my assault upon the bungalow hordes—that caused me to become overwhelmed by the complexities of the task before me and the paucity of my resources for dealing with them.'
At this point, and many others on the tape (as I recall), the voice became nearly inaudible. 'The bungalow house,' it said, 'was such a bleak environment in which to make a stand: the moonlight through the dusty blinds, the bodies on the carpet, the lamps without any lightbulbs. And the incredible silence. It was not the absence of sounds that I sensed, but the stifling of innumerable sounds and even voices, the muffling of all the noises one might expect to hear in an old bungalow house in the dead of night, as well as countless other sounds and voices. The forces required to accomplish this silence filled me with awe. The infinite terror and dreariness of an infested bungalow house, I whispered to myself. A bungalow universe, I then thought without speaking aloud. Suddenly I was overcome by a feeling of euphoric hopelessness which passed through my body like a powerful drug and held all my thoughts and all my movements in a dreamy, floating suspension. In the moonlight that shone through the blinds of that bungalow house I was now as still and as silent as everything else.'
The title of the tape-recorded artwork from which I have just quoted was The Bungalow House (Plus Silence). I discovered this and other dream monologues by the same artist at Dalha D. Fine Arts, which was located in the near vicinity of the public library (main branch) where I was employed in the Language and Literature department. Sometimes I spent my lunch breaks at the gallery, even consuming my brown-bag meals on the premises. There were a few chairs and benches on the floor of the gallery, and I knew that the woman who owned the place did not discourage any kind of traffic, however lingering. Her actual livelihood was in fact not derived from the gallery itself. How could it have been? Dalha D. Fine Arts was a hole in the wall. One would think it no trouble at all to keep up the premises where there was so little floor space, just a single room that was by no means overcrowded with artworks or art-related merchandise. But no attempt at such upkeeping seemed ever to have been made. The display window was so filmy that someone passing by could barely make out the paintings and sculptures behind it (the same ones year after year). From the street outside, this tiny front window presented the most desolate hallucination of bland colors and shapeless forms, especially on late November afternoons. Further inside the gallery, things were in a similar state—from the cruddy linoleum floor, where some cracked tiles revealed the concrete foundation, to the rather high ceiling, which occasionally sent down small chips of plaster. If every artwork and item of art-related merchandise had been cleared out of that building, no one would think that an art gallery had once occupied this space and not some enterprise of a lesser order. But as many persons were aware, if only through second-hand sources, the woman who operated Dalha D. Fine Arts did not make her living by dealing in those artworks and related items, which only the most desperate or scandalously naïve artist would allow to be put on display in that gallery. By all accounts, including my own brief lunchtime conversations with the woman, she had pursued a variety of careers in her time. She herself had worked as an artist at one point, and some of her works—messy assemblages inside old cigar boxes—were exhibited in a corner of her gallery. But evidently her art gallery business was not self-sustaining, despite minimal overhead, and she made no secret of her true means of income.
'Who wants to buy such junk?' she once explained to me, gesturing with long fingernails painted emerald green. This same color also seemed to dominate her wardrobe of long, loose garments, with many of her outfits featuring incredible scarves or shawls that dragged along the floor as she moved about the art gallery. She paused and with the pointed toe of one of her emerald-green shoes gave a little kick at a wire wastebasket that was filled with the miniature limbs of dolls, all of them individually painted in a variety of colors. 'What are people thinking when they make these things? What was I thinking with those stupid cigar boxes? But no more of that, definitely no more of that sort of thing.'
And she made no secret, beyond a certain reasonable caution, of what sort of thing now engaged her energies as a businesswoman. The telephone was always ringing at her art gallery, always upsetting the otherwise dead calm of the place with its cracked, warbling voice that called out from the back room. She would then quickly disappear behind a curtain that hung in the doorway separating the front and back sections of the art gallery. I might be eating a sandwich or a piece of fruit, and then suddenly, for the fourth or fifth time in a half-hour, the telephone would scream from the back room, eventually summoning this woman behind the curtain. But she never answered the telephone with the name of the art gallery or employed any of the stock phrases of business protocol. Not so much as a 'Good afternoon, may I help you?' did I ever hear from the back room as I sat eating my midday meal in the front section of the art gallery. She always answered the telephone in the same way with the same quietly expectant tone in her voice. 'This is Dalha,' she always said.
Before I had known her very long even I found myself using her name in the most familiar way. The mere saying of this name instilled in me a sense of access to what she offered all those telephone-callers, not to mention those individuals who personally visited the art gallery to make or confirm an appointment. Whatever someone was eager to try, whatever step someone was willing to take—Dalha could arrange it. This was the true stock in trade of the art gallery, these arrangements. When I returned to the library after my lunch break, I continued to imagine Dalha back at the art gallery, racing between the front and back sections of the building, making all kinds of arrangements over the telephone, and sometimes in person.
On the day that I first noticed the new artwork entitled The Bungalow House, Dalha's telephone was extremely vocal. While she was talking to her clients in the back section of the art gallery, I was left alone in the front section. Just for a thrill I went over to the wire wastebasket full of dismembered doll parts and helped myself to one of the painted arms (emerald green!), hiding it in the inner pocket of my sportcoat. It was then that I spotted the old audiotape recorder on a small plastic table in the corner. Beside the machine was a business card on which the title of the artwork had been hand-printed, along with the following instructions: PRESS PLAY. PLEASE REWIND AFTER LISTENING. DO NOT REMOVE TAPE. I placed the headphones over my ears and pressed the PLAY button. The voice that spoke through the headphones, which were enormous, sounded distant and was somewhat distorted by the hissing of the tape. Neverth
eless, I was so intrigued by the opening passages of this dream monologue, which I have already transcribed, that I sat down on the floor next to the small plastic table on which the tape recorder was positioned and listened to the entire tape, exceeding my allotted lunchtime by over half an hour. By the time the tape had ended I was in another world—that is, the world of the infested bungalow house, with all its dreamlike crumminess and foul charms.
'Don't forget to rewind the tape,' said Dalha, who was now standing over me, her long gray hair, like steel wool, almost brushing against my face.
I pressed the REWIND button on the tape recorder and got up from the floor. 'Dalha, may I use your lavatory?' I asked. She pointed to the curtain leading to the back section of the art gallery. 'Thank you,' I said.
The effect of listening to the first dream monologue was very intense for reasons I will soon explain. I wanted to be alone for a few moments in order to preserve the state of mind which the voice on the tape had induced in me, much as one might attempt to hold on to the images of a dream just after waking. However, I felt that the lavatory at the library, despite its peculiar virtues which I have appreciated over the years, would somehow undermine the sensations and mental state created by the dream monologue, rather than preserving this experience and even enhancing it, as I hoped the lavatory in the back section of Dalha's art gallery would do.
The very reason why I spent my lunchtimes in the surroundings of Dalha's art gallery, which were so different from those of the library, was exactly why I now wanted to use the lavatory in the back section of that art gallery and definitely not the lavatory at the library, even if I was already overdue from my lunch break. And, indeed, this lavatory had the same qualities as the rest of the art gallery, as I hoped it would. The fact that it was located in the back section of the art gallery, a region of mysteries to my mind, was significant. Just outside the door of the lavatory stood a small, cluttered desk upon which was positioned the telephone that Dalha used in her true business of making arrangements. The telephone was centered in the weak light of a desk lamp, and I noticed, as I passed into the lavatory, that it was an unwieldy object with a straight—that is, uncoiled—cord connecting the receiver to the telephone housing, with its enormous circular dial. But although Dalha answered several calls during the time I was in the lavatory, these seemed to be entirely legitimate conversations having to do either with her personal life or with practical matters relating to the art gallery.