Never Connect

Facebook is like a cell phone: it allows you to speak to yourself in public, and the few passers-by never suspect that your phone is dead.

Dichotomy

I suspect that for many people, life is a series of problems to overcome.

But for others -- people who write, or paint, or compose, or dance -- life is a condition to explore.

For that reason, I can't blame the first group for shaking their heads in frustration over the second.

Challenge Me

Challenge me to understand the implications of your stories, and I'll brood happily for decades.

Challenge me to understand the meaning of your sentences, and I'll go read someone else.

A Fantasizing Sensibility

Strange verse, fantasy verse, call it what you will: when I was younger, I preferred it to "regular" verse.

I was wrong. Or perhaps I should say, I was looking in the wrong direction.

Reading Clark Ashton Smith, George Sterling, Mervyn Peake, John Keats, and so many others, has made me realize that what I value in strange verse is exactly what I find in the regular verse of these poets: a unique perspective that transforms personal experience into something new and striking; a fantasizing sensibility that sees the unusual in the common; a verbal skill that allows the poet to communicate a glimpse of inner life.

In short, what matters are not the fantastic concepts these poets might use, but the personalities and perspectives communicated through the verse.

This is not to say that I dislike strange verse, or consider it less valid than verse that grapples directly with everyday topics. Instead, I feel that strange verse can succeed or fail by the same standards applied to regular verse.

A few examples:

Autumn Orchards
Clark Ashton Smith


Walled with far azures of the wintering year,
Late autumn on a windless altar burns;
Splendid as rubies from Sabean urns,
A holocaust of hues is gathered here.

The pear-trees lift a Tyrian tinged with blood;
Strange purples brighten in the smouldering plums;
The fire-red gold of peach and cherry comes
To storm the bronzing borders of the wood.

Rich as the pyre of some Hesperian queen,
Feeding the ultimate sunset with sad fires,
Is this, where beauty with her doom conspires
To tell in flame what death and beauty mean.

O, loveliness grown tragical and dear!
My heart has taken from the torchful leaf
A swiftly soaring glory, and the grief
Of love is colored like the dying year.

This is very much a Clark Ashton Smith poem, and one of my favourites. But only one thing, here, is fantastic: the intensity of the writers's perception.

A Character
by George Sterling

Blunt as a child, since child he was at heart,
And sun-sincere, my friend to many seemed
Dull, rude, aggressive, tactless. Add to all
His bulk and hairiness and stormy laugh,
And one can find them some excuse for that.
'Twas seeming only. We, who found his soul
Thro friendship's crystal, saw beyond the glass
The elusive seraph.  In his mind were met
The faun, the cynic, the philosopher,
But first of all, the poet. Give to such
Apollo's guise, and matters were not well.
Too glad to pose, ofttimes he held his peace
Before the jest that sought his heart; but let
The whim appeal, and all his mind took fire --
The shifted diamond's instant shock of light.
Beauty to him (as wine's ecstatic draught,
Richer than blood, and every drop a dream)
Was like a wind some hidden world put forth
To baffle, madden, lure -- at times, betray,
Then win him back to worship with a breath
Of Edens never trodden. Yet he stood
No dupe to Nature in her harlotry,
Her guile, her blind injustice and the abrupt
Ferocities of chance, but swift to face
The unkempt fact, and swift no less to snatch
Its honey from illusion's stinging hive --
No moth that beat upon Time's enginery.
Yet loved he Nature well, as one might love
A half-tamed leopardess, for beauty's grace
Alone. Within his enigmatic soul
Sorrow and Art made Love their servitor,
For he would have no master but himself.
To what best liken him? Some singer must
Have used the star-souled geode's rind and heart,
Telling of such as he. Let me compare
His rugged aspect and auroral mind
To that wide shell our western ocean grants --
Without, all harsh and hueless, with, perhaps,
A group of barnacles or tattered weed;
Within, such splendor as would make one guess
That once a score of dawnings and a troop
Of royal sunsets had condensed their pomp
To rainbow lacquer which the ocean pow'rs
Had lavished, godlike, on the gorgeous bowl.

This is typical of George Sterling's approach: unexpected comparisons, vivid metaphors, a riot of imagery... but again, at the service of the everyday, to transform the common "into something rich and strange."

London 1941
by Mervyn Peake.

Half masonry, half pain; her head,
From which the plaster breaks away
Like flesh from the rough bone, is turned
Upon a neck of stones; her eyes
Are lid-less windows of smashed glass,
Each star-shaped pupil
Giving upon a vault so vast
How can the head contain it?

The raw smoke
Is inter-wreathing through the jaggedness
Of her sky-broken panes, and mirror'd
Fires dance like madmen on the splinters.

All else is stillness save the dancing splinters
And the slow inter-wreathing of the smoke.

Her breasts are crumbling brick where the black ivy
Had clung like a fantastic child for succour
And now hangs draggled with long peels of paper
Fire-crisp, fire-faded awnings of limp paper
Repeating still their ghosted leaf and lily.

Grass for her cold skin's hair, the grass of cities
Wilted and swaying on her plaster brow
From winds that stream along the streets of cities:

Across a world of sudden fear and firelight
She towers erect, the great stones at her throat,
Her rusted ribs like railings round her heart;
A figure of dry wounds -- of winter wounds --
O mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain.

Again, this is a matter of perception, one that allows Peake to transform a modern city into a realm as alien and grotesque as Gormenghast. There is no fantasy, here, but there is a fantasizing mind.

This importance of personality and perspective can be seen in prose, too, which is why J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun can be as unsettling as anything in science fiction, why L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between communicates the same dread that we find in his ghost stories, why an everyday story like "The Almond Tree" brings up the same unanswered questions that we find in Walter de la Mare's supernatural tales.

What this implies, for me, is that labels are useless. What matters is perception and skill, and these, more than topics, more than concepts, are what create the fantastic and the strange.

Five Amazing Fantasies

1) "Der goldne Topf," by E. T. A. Hoffmann (usually translated as "The Golden Pot.")

When I studied German 40 million years ago, I read many good stories, but this one shocked me with its utterly modern approach to parallel universes, doubles, reptile women, and the power of imagination to transform a dull existence in what was then modern day Dresden into something very strange indeed. If you want to understand why Hoffmann had such a huge influence on 19th Century fiction, then read this: not a fossil, but a fast-moving work of brilliance.

2) "Les Escales de la haute nuit," by Marcel Brion. When I read this back in the 1990s, I was convinced that it was, by far, the most vivid "dream" story I had ever seen; reading it again a few months ago, I felt the same way. When a night train stops in a town of buildings that are merely facades, a restless man wanders with a garrulous stranger and a living doll from one eerie landscape to another.

As a fine example of visual writing, it compares with anything by J. G. Ballard or William Sansom, but it also moves rapidly, like a story by Hoffmann. Brion paced his emphases; he understood the need to balance detailed passages with fast, simple paragraphs, and the result is a clear, light touch that never feels too thin or too heavy. If the story is like a painting, it's a painting that moves.

L’homme s’endormit. A son tour, la poupée, cessant de grogner et de renifler, glissa dans un sommeil épais. Je restais éveillé, seul dans ce wagon, seul dans ce monde, regardé par cette lune épouvantée qui venait demander du secours contre le garrot des nuages.

The man fell asleep. In its turn, the doll ceased to grumble and sniffle, and slipped into a thick sleep. I remained awake, alone in the compartment, alone in this world, watched by the frightened moon that cried for help against the noose of the clouds. [My rough translation.]

3) "The Colossus of Ylourgne," by Clark Ashton Smith. I could fill a list of favourites with stories by Smith, but I'll hold myself back. This one deals with a mass resurrection of the dead in medieval France, and a mad plan for vengeance against the world.

Smith's ability to put the reader there, right there, in the settings and circumstances of his plot, has rarely been better, and the story moves rapidly, vividly, from setpiece to setpiece until it reaches a giant monster climax. Widescreen Technicolor fantasy? Why not?

So, all that night, and throughout the day that followed, Gaspard du Nord, with the dried slime of the oubliette on his briar-shredded raiment, plunged like a madman through the towering woods that were haunted by robbers and werewolves. The westward-falling moon flickered in his eyes betwixt the gnarled, somber boles as he ran; and the dawn overtook him with the pale shafts of its searching arrows. The moon poured over him its white sultriness, like furnace-heated metal sublimed into light; and the clotted filth that clung to his tatters was again turned into slime by his own sweat. But still he pursued his nightmare-harried way, while a vague, seemingly hopeless plan took form in his mind.

4) "The Coming of the White Worm," by Clark Ashton Smith. When a mobile glacier threatens to freeze the world, its monstrous inhabitant offers one man a choice between death or death-in-life. Once again, Smith pours on the visual details to create a waking dream, and the results are unforgettably grotesque.

In all the world there was naught that could be likened for its foulness to Rlim Shaikorth. Something he had of the semblance of a fat white worm; but his bulk was beyond that of the sea-elephant. His half-coiled tail was thick as the middle folds of his body; and his front reared upward from the dais in the form of a white round disk, and upon it were imprinted vaguely the lineaments of a visage belonging neither to beast of the earth nor ocean-creature. And amid the visage a mouth curved uncleanly from side to side of the disk, opening and shutting incessantly on a pale and tongueless and toothless maw. The eye-sockets of Rlim Shaikorth were close together between his shallow nostrils; and the sockets were eyeless, but in them appeared from moment to moment globules of a blood-colored matter having the form of eyeballs; and ever the globules broke and dripped down before the dais. And from the ice-floor of the dome there ascended two masses like stalagmites, purple and dark as frozen gore, which had been made by the ceaseless dripping of the globules.

5) "The Tree," by Walter de la Mare. The most vivid and troubling fantasy I've read in years, this one is far more quiet than the others I've listed, but will not let me go. It nags at me. Is it about the inability of human beings to accept the everyday marvels of life? Is it about the curse of an artistic perception that can destroy even as it creates? Perhaps it is, and more. All I can say with assurance is that every time I read it, the story grows, both on the page, and within my skull.

These were not eyes -- in that abominable countenance. Speck-pupilled, greenish-grey, unfocused, under their protuberant mat of eyebrow, they remained still as a salt and stagnant sea. And in their uplifted depths, stretching out into endless distances, the Fruit Merchant had seen regions of a country whence neither for love nor money he could ever harvest one fruit, one pip, one cankered bud. And blossoming there beside a glassy stream in the mid-distance of far-mountained sward -- a tree.