The Make Up Test

"I cannot praise a cloistered virtue," is a John Milton quote that's gained some currency lately. It's from Areopagitica, Milton's pamphlet criticising the English government's policy of licensed publishing, and, more broadly speaking, it's about free speech. Milton's point was that, if a person is never exposed to a diversity of ideas, you can't really know if they have the capacity to discern good ideas from bad, begging the question of whether or not their supposed virtue is legitimate. But I thought of the quote yesterday when reading Harlan Ellison's 1966 story "Delusion for a Dragon Slayer". The concept for this story is that, when people die, if they haven't ever truly been tested in their lives, a new world is created just to give them the opportunity. The story follows Griffin, a dull, ordinary, modern man who's killed suddenly due to a freak chain of circumstances. Suddenly he finds himself transformed into a muscular, classical hero, captaining a galley on a mythic quest.

Ellison finds a voice for this story that is a perfect blend of his confrontational/conversational and prettily poetic. I particularly liked the scene where Griffin finds himself in that classic, truly rare, scenario of rescuing a damsel in distress. Ellison's description of just what the very sight of Griffin's ideal woman does to him simultaneous pokes gentle fun at and honours the most fundamental human needs for sex, love, and validation. It's a great story and it's included in the collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

What Vampires Do

Strange and seductive forms of vampirism manifest in the new Sirenia Digest released a few days ago. The new Caitlin R. Kiernan story, "Mercy Brown", is another dialogue. This time between two people with a friendly and physical relationship, it involves discussion of mythological "hair" vampires as well as a recounting of the first person narrator's encounter with a vampire. Caitlin loads the story with a variety of details to add texture to the concept, including a visit to a museum and an examination of bezoar--hardened food and other material taken from the digestive system of living creatures. This is great but I liked the tale of the narrator's encounter even more.

What does a vampire do to its victim? Many versions of vampires cut out the blood and have the creatures drain energy. In this case, what is more draining than compelling questions that are never answered? The vampire here responds to every question from the narrator with an evasion, with a return question and the advice to wait and see. The mental teasing perfectly suits the the experience. The story also has some lovely description and it made me want to see the vampire described by the narrator.

Electric Surrogates

Two parents go into a holodeck. They may never come back. But their kids, Peter and Wendy, may not be troubled by this. Ray Bradbury leaves it all a little unclear in "The Veldt", his famous story from 1950, included in his 1951 collection The Illustrated Man. The fact that the terrible incident is never spelled out, the motives never truly revealed, is integral to the story's impression of the sinister. If the reader must find and decipher the clues, what else might go unnoticed in this home, this world, ruled by convenient electronic devices?

Obviously it's a story that remains relevant--arguably it grows more relevant every year as the algorthims that shape your social media reality become subtly more powerful as your attentions and appetites are successfully manipulated.

Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children's minds and created life to fulfil their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children though zebras, and there were zebras. Sun--sun. Giraffes--Giraffes. Death and death.

Peter and Wendy's mother, Lydia, wonders if it's unhealthy to allow their lives to be run by machines. They also have a psychiatrist to diagnose their children based on their violent holographic fantasy of lions. Is it really so new? The names Peter and Wendy recall Peter Pan and the phenomenon associated with, but not confined to, the Victorian nanny who displaced the mother in the affections of children for being obliged to spend more time with them.

The impression I have is that the machine nanny doesn't make Wendy and Peter vicious as much as callous. What value can human life have when the machines are so much more accommodating?

Above image "The Wounded Lion" by Raden Saleh (1839)

Paws and Rooms

I've lately found myself often in coffee shops or parks between jobs so I've had plenty of time to read. Mainly still from H.P. Lovecraft Selects and I've recently read two more stories from the compilation; "The Red Room" by H.G. Wells and "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. The latter is of course the more famous story but I also consider it to be much more effective, as much as I did like "The Red Room".

"The Red Room" is another example, like "The Dead Valley", of accomplishing a lot with very little, of creating the sensation of horror from a few subtle suggestions. A man agrees to stay in a haunted room and his courage is shaken by minor but truly inexplicable occurrences. Simply the mental image conjured by a "red room" accomplishes a lot. I found myself thinking of the interiors from Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers.

I don't think I'd ever read "The Monkey's Paw". Though it's quite possible I did but forgot. Sometimes when I look through my blog entries from fifteen years ago I discover even good movies or stories I'd forgotten all about having seen or read. In any case, I was certainly familiar with the concept even before the first airing of The Simpsons episode that parodied it in 1991. I was pleased by the actual story's psychological subtlety, the tormenting ambiguity about the guilt the main character bears for the death that resulted from his use of the paw--and the more fascinatingly murky subject of whether it was a good idea to resurrect the dead man.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. "He has been dead ten days, and besides he - I would not tell you else, but - I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?"

The knocking at the door at the end of the story reminded me a bit of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Body" which concludes with Buffy's sister nearly resurrecting their dead mother. The end of "The Monkey's Paw" is better, though, because it's not as clear that the resurrected person is a zombie or just plain and simply alive again. The man and wife in the story, assuming the wife doesn't get her hands on the paw, will always have that wedge between them because one expected a zombie and the other expected their normal, happy, living son. There will always be the unanswered question and the husband will always have to stand by a position that can never be proved. That's one sinister paw.

Things the River May Conceal

Sometimes less really is more. This is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of two stories in H.P. Lovecraft Selects, the collection of stories drawn from Lovecraft's famous essay on supernatural horror. "The Waters of Death" by Erckmann-Chatrian and "On the River" by Guy de Maupassant are both stories about death in water but while the former involves numerous corpses and eventually a giant spider and pyrotechnics, the latter story involves little more than one man's almost inexplicably troubled night alone, stuck in his boat on the Seine.

Often horror fiction achieves effect by crafting a train of thought. Like the suggestion planted by the discussion of terrible things at the beginning of "What Was It?" or the protagonist's feelings of isolation and displacement in Carnival of Souls. Many good horror writers have realised the dread of the anticipated horror is more effective than the completely random appearance of a new horror. Still, leading up to the appearance of a giant spider crab with the characters in "Waters of Death" talking about how much they're afraid of spider crabs may have been a bit too on the nose. In that essay on horror, Lovecraft has only this to say about that particular story:

“The Owl’s Ear” and “The Waters of Death” are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar overgrown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists.

He has a lot more to say about Guy de Maupassant and he has a pretty persuasive idea of precisely what makes "On the River" so eerie and good:

The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvellous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness.

Maupassant suffered from the effects of syphillis towards the end of his life and this seems to explain more than anything else how he could conceive of such an idea as "On the River". It's a story in which really very little happens--a man takes his boat out on the river, decides to relax in one peaceful spot, drops anchor, and then is forced to remain in the spot a while after his anchor gets stuck.

The fog which, two hours before, had floated on the water, had gradually cleared off and massed on the banks, leaving the river absolutely clear; while it formed on either bank an uninterrupted wall six or seven metres high, which shone in the moonlight with the dazzling brilliance of snow. One saw nothing but the river gleaming with light between these two white mountains; and high above my head sailed the great full moon, in the midst of a bluish, milky sky.

There's nothing especially sinister in this or in the sounds of frogs perceived by the narrator. Though I would think having to spend the night stuck in a boat like that, with no shelter, certainly might be uncomfortable. When the hint of supernatural finally does come, it's so subtle that it's almost merely a tease. The story ends so abruptly on that note that the reader is compelled to second guess the assumption of supernatural. Maybe the river at night is terror enough, though the idea that throughout the ordeal something more lurked beyond the edges of perception does enhance the story considerably, in my opinion.

Twitter Sonnet #1292

Entire courts of ghastly runts arrive.
A purple bat asserts the right to rule.
No worser gang could twisted hand contrive.
A cleaner cleaver's never half so cruel.
A walking clock discovers hands and feet.
The velvet curtains clasp a hiding man.
Between the walls a spirit hid the meat.
Behind the house a creature swiftly ran.
Adrift between the rivers, floods arise.
A shaking storm disrupts the poison bog.
Exquisite hands decay in life's reprise.
As yellow eyes observe along the log.
An anchor caught where giant spiders lurk.
A goblin pair retreat beneath the murk.

Reckless Vows Near Ancient Ears

A few years ago, Barnes and Noble released a collection of stories that H.P. Lovecraft recommended in a famous essay on horror literature. I've been slowly making my way through the collection, mostly in Octobers, and to-day I read "The Venus of Ille", a nice, subtle tale of the supernatural from 1837 by Prosper Merimee. An aristocratic, Parisian archaeologist serves as narrator as he visits a remote village where a local, influential landowner has excavated a peculiar statue of Venus.

It's easy to see the story's influence on Lovecraft from the presence of an object that affects the viewer in profound ways through its shape alone.

But the expression of demoniac irony was perhaps increased by the contrast of the bright silver eyes with the dusky green hue which time had given to the statue. The shining eyes produced a sort of life. I remembered what my guide had said, that those who looked at her were forced to lower their eyes. It was almost true, and I could not prevent a movement of anger to myself when I felt ill at ease before this bronze figure.

The characters have an almost comic vivacity you won't find in Lovecraft, though. The man who discovered the statue is a gregarious fellow who happily invites the narrator to the wedding between his son and a girl who, the narrator infers, is forced into the marriage because of financial woes. The son, Alphonse, proudly shows the narrator the ring he intends to give his bride which the narrator finds gaudy and vulgar. After the wedding there's an extraordinary paragraph where the narrator reflects on what he sees as a horrible, unjust marriage of convenience.

All the scenes of the day passed through my mind. I thought of the young girl, so pure and lovely, abandoned to a drunken brute. What an odious thing a marriage of convenience is! A mayor dons a tri-colored scarf, a priest a stole, and then the most virtuous girl in the world is delivered over to the Minotaur! What can two people who do not love each other find to say at a moment, which two lovers would buy at the price of their lives? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once seen coarse? First impressions are never effaced, and I am sure M. Alphonse will deserve to be hated.

This bit of psychological insight renders the horrific deed apparently perpetrated by the statue in a provoking light. The troubling juxtaposition between the narrator's thoughts and the terrible event compels the reader either to interpret a connexion or attempt to avoid seeing a connexion. Merimee leaves it unclear. More prominent is the fact that Alphonse had placed that gaudy ring on the statue's finger during a tennis match. Is this the reason for the statue's wrath? Are the two possible motives more related than they seem at first? In the actions taken by the statue there's a wonderful sense of how things may be connected in ways that can't be articulated by human language. It adds to the sense of this statue being a goddess.

Twitter Sonnet #1288

Colliding moons were ripples round the pond.
Another night repeats the muse's song.
In rhyming ode the marvel proves he's fond.
A burning lake affixed the devil throng.
A climbing foot replaced the inch's nose.
A hand for hand adorns the finger help.
A model shows the glue to hold a pose.
A priceless weed was really less than kelp.
Contagious pages spiked the wine and cheese.
Allowance granted late absorbs the cost.
Across the chocolate lake were coffee seas.
In sugar spray's a single sprinkle tossed.
A copper marriage fills the final bed.
A bronze conception woke the nervous dead.

Ghosts of the Bog

Another lovely tale of an ancient, inherited European estate by HP Lovecraft is "The Moon Bog". A very short story written for Saint Patrick's Day, this one is about a man named Denys Barry who inherits an estate in Ireland. Again, the consequences are tragic as contact with the past proves a too strange and horrible experience.

I've been thinking more about the strange conflict between Lovecraft's longing for contact with the past and the horror with which he portrays such contact actually achieved. I don't think this horror is necessarily a comment on the past itself but on the unnatural process of the present coming into contact with the past. Lovecraft uses the phenomenon of ancient bodies discovered in peat bogs to marvellous effect. The improbable preservation of corpses in this way, that nonetheless leaves them hideously altered, certainly stirs the imagination with ideas of the cost of traversing the centuries.

The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms, and above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced an effect which almost paralysed me; yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these tireless, mechanical dancers were the labourers whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy beings in white, half indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of the bog.

At the same time, this description has a strange prettiness to it. I don't remember Lovecraft mentioning naiads anywhere else. Most of the horror in what the narrator beholds can almost be imputed entirely to the narrator himself.

Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring from the strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I cannot describe—I must have been mad, for it seemed to rise majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured, the flame-reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex of a temple on a mountain-top.

It's not so much the things described as the fact of the things described, of the incongruity of their presence, that inspires the terror.

Not for the first time, I found myself thinking about Lovecraft's preference for minimal dialogue. The narrator in "Moon Bog" discusses interviewing labourers who experienced bad dreams. Other authors might introduce one labourer and try to paint a picture of his personality to lend a greater sense of credibility. Lovecraft's preference here to keep an academic tone gives a sense of isolation, of someone cornered in the coldness of his own mode of expression. Elsewhere, Lovecraft does invoke colloquial dialogue quite memorably to analyse personality as a specimen of horror, as in "The Picture in the House". That, again, is to show the unnatural quality of a preserved past. I find myself tempted to think there may have been some reflection on himself as someone who longed for the past, that the horror he was portraying was the horror of finding himself so out of step with time in which he lived. I don't think that's something he could have altered even if he wanted to.

Ghosts and Fossils

Here are some fossils I saw in a science building at San Diego State University to-day. A Phorusrhacos skull and a little Archaeopteryx. Along with the strange feeling of seeing physical evidence of a creature long extinct, seeing fossils up close makes me think about how incredible it is that these things exist at all, imagining these shapes in soil and stone over such a long, long period. Shapes that have significance to us because of how we think about life and death but are just more stuff as far as all the dirt and rocks are concerned. There's no motivation to preserve these shapes for millions of years, and yet they're preserved.

I felt like reading a short story to-day so I grabbed a collection by Harlan Ellison before I left the apartment this morning. On the trolley I read a story from 1972 called "On the Downhill Side", the first story in the collection, about a couple of ghosts in New Orleans. It kind of reminds me of the first story in another collection I often pick up when I'm randomly in the mood for short stories, "White Nights" by Dostoevksy, also about two lost souls, also a man and woman, who meet by chance in the street and who talk about relationships. But Ellison's story has a unicorn and some kind of demoniac fog entities with firefly eyes. It's also about people with some kind of mixture of personality and luck who are kept perpetually alone.

Usually when people talk about great Science Fiction authors they talk about concepts, the ideas that prompt the stories--the outer space locations, the manifestation of AI, etc. But with Ellison, as with other greats, its plain and simple great writing that makes those ideas take hold. "Lizette and I were the two sides of the same coin; devalued and impossible to spend," the narrator says at one point. These imagery ideas come up in Ellison so quickly and sometimes they're figurative, sometimes they seem figurative at first and then turn out to be literal, sometimes they exist in some borderline place. The story places grave significance on the potential of a relationship between its leads--the unicorn and the woman's virginity give the story clear sexual overtones that are plainly vulgar and wistfully operatic. I would love to see this story filmed with a heavy metal soundtrack.

But the fantastic imagery doesn't merely express the physical urge, it ties it to a broader human need and the torment in the ambiguity of cause in relationships, the constant nagging thoughts about whether one pushed too hard or not hard enough. A fitting state of mind for the two ghosts who are the story's subject; what more appropriate state of mind to reflect the doom of eternally wandering a city alone?