Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 38

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.

The Devil Made Me Do It

And Here I Am, Without a Woodstove

I don't always feel this way, but for the most part, I do.

In younger years, I took the prize
For self-consolatory lies:
I told myself that one who tries
Will grow and learn.

But editors (an honest crew)
Have kicked away the work I do
And snarled at failings that imbrue
My cracked, blank urn.

These latter years reveal the dead
And toxic acres of my head
To be a mapless void, blood-red,
Where doubts return

To poison everything I write
With clear perspective. In this light,
My manuscripts I must indict,
And they should burn.

Canon in Front of Them

For the most part, I respect critics, and I find especially useful those who write about the historical context of a given work, or those who examine the techniques used in a given story. But I have no use for critics who set up a canon of "essential" writers, because I've often learned more about writing from people on the margins of a field than from any central figures.

And so, for example, I've learned more from individual stories by Shamus Frazer, Edward Lucas White, Charles G. D. Roberts, Bernard Capes, and Ralph Adams Cram, than I ever did from Lovecraft, Ligotti, Barker, King, or from any number of writers who are often considered important in the field of horror. I believe that we take away those details of craftsmanship we need to create our own stories in our own styles, and that the best way to find solutions to our creative challenges is to read widely. I also put my trust in random discoveries, in the joy of picking up a magazine, collection, or anthology, and of digging up treasure that might appeal to no one else, but might also show me what I need to do.

I leave canons to composers; they know how to use them. But I read for pleasure, and to learn.

Never One Pip

Although beasts consume dead entities,
Finer ghouls hate indignities:
Jolly kitchens leak monotonies,
Never one pip.

Questioning redundancies,
Spectres tolerate unease,
Valiant when xenogamies
Yield zip.

Not only in the brain's grey spaces

Those who love Oscar Wilde's "The Sphinx," George Sterling's "A Wine of Wizardry," and Clark Ashton Smith's "The Hashish Eater," might want to read Mervyn Peake's "A Reverie of Bone," printed for the first time in its complete form in the FyfieldBooks / Carcanet Collected Poems .

Although it seems unlikely that Peake would have read Sterling or Smith, at one point he did read "The Sphinx," and like that poem, "Reverie" is a long meditation on a theme. But unlike Wilde, Sterling, or Smith, Peake draws his elaborate metaphors and riotous imagery not from the world of Romanticism, but from "vast and valid landscapes" of the world as we know it, and as he would later do in the Titus books, he discovers the fantastic in the down-to-earth:

There is a pearl white arabesque of bones
Behind my eyes where the harsh brow encloses
These bones my visions conjure; I can see
Them lying pranked across a brow of stones.
Beyond them a dramatic mountain raises
High flanks of cold and silver-coloured scree.

And yet not only in the brain's grey spaces
Which, at the imagination's astral touch
Flare into focus, all horizons failing...
Not only through the wastes of thought uprises
A ghosted mountain lit by the full torch
Of a sailing moon that never ceases sailing...

Not only in the brain, nor in the heart
Nor out of love, nor through untethered fancy,
Is that cold mountain littered with the white
Residue of the dead, as though its bright
Steep sides were dusted with dry leprosy --
Nor any other death-engendered sight

Which I envisage in deserted places --
But, in the ruthless regions of what's true --
And I can only hope to grasp the worth
From vast and valid landscapes, while Time passes
Beneath my pen-nib as it trails the blue
Thread of my thought behind each glimpse of truth.

Because fantasy is not a genre but a matter of perception, a shift in perspective, a construction of imagery and metaphor, "A Reverie of Bone" can hit the same nerves that Wilde and Sterling and Smith struck in their own fascinating ways, even as it remains true to this world of life and death and physical transformation by the slow artistry of time.

The Stars in Her Scowl

I can still see the splendid scowl and hear the gorgeously hectoring tone as my last girlfriend turned to me and said, "That's not the 'Big Dipper,' that's the Great Bear." Love, you knew I was a peasant when you kissed me.

That was years ago. Tonight, I thought of her as I biked home beside the Gatineau River, because the Bear stood right in front of me whenever a gap appeared between the branches. For a long time, the Bear never moved, until I veered away from the Gatineau and pursued Arcturus for the last few kilometres.

Alone with cold, clear stars and with 500 billion crickets, I felt happy... but not as happy as I was back in the years of that splendid scowl.

L'occulte hostilité de haineux paysages

Another attempted translation.

ARRIVAL
by Iwan Gilkin.

Towards new countries peopled by other faces, irretrievably dragged by steam, I shiver, I suffer: arrival frightens me. Through hypocritical omens, I forsee

Great castles that sour the bitterness of ages, walls mildewed with boredom from which a torpor oozes, and, despite their adorable, misleading smiles, the secret hostility of hateful landscapes.

-- Rocked by the carriage as by a vessel, I jerk up with a start at the moment of approach, in the same way that a sailor is jolted awake by fanfares.

O distant hearts, in the shadow of a hazardous night I see your fires glare like beacons, where voices call to me from shores unknown.

- - - - - -

L'ARRIVÉE

Vers des pays nouveaux, peuplés d'autres visages,
Irréparablement traîné par la vapeur,
Je frissonne, je souffre: arriver me fait peur.
Je devine, à travers d'hypocrites présages,

De grands châteaux qu'aigrit l'amertume des âges,
Des murs moisis d'ennui, d'où suinte une torpeur,
Et, malgré leur sourire adorable et trompeur,
L'occulte hostilité de haineux paysages.

-- Bercé par le wagon comme par un vaisseau,
Au moment d'aborder je me lève en sursaut,
Ainsi qu'un matelot qu'éveillent des fanfares.

Dans l'ombre de la nuit hasardeuse, je vois
Vos feux, ô cœurs lointains, briller comme des phares
Sur les bords inconnus où m'appellent des voix.

From
La nuit, by Iwan Gilkin, Second Edition. Mercure de France, Paris, 1911.

"J'ai vu. J'ai lu. J'ai su."

I'm always happy to find a writer even less cheerful than Leconte de Lisle, but I can't do justice to his words....

Thought
by Iwan Gilkin.

The black angel offered me a black onyx goblet
From which I drank, in sinister fashion, a cerebral liqueur.
I poured this death into the tomb of my mouth:
O, the charm of terrors! The splendors of despair!

Thought: acrid poison, ratlike nibbler of energies
That destroys happiness, love and health,
You dissolve every hope and desire
In the hearts transformed by your dark magic.

What a cadaver's reek from this horrible wine!
-- I viewed. I perused. I knew. I know that all is vain.
All of my pleasures die before birth.

What is the point of Spring to my Winter soul,
Which no longer feels joy, nor wants know,
Which would spurn a flower for the steel of a handgun?

"J'ai vu. J'ai lu. J'ai su." So simple and elegant. There was no way I could match it.

LA PENSÉE

L'ange noir m'a tendu la coupe d'onyx noir
Où bout sinistrement la liqueur cérébrale.
J'ai versé la mort dans ma bouche sépulcrale:
O charme des terreurs! Splendeurs du désespoir!

Pensée, âcre poison, rongeur des énergies,
Qui détruis le bonheur, l'amour et la santé,
Tu dissous tout espoir et toute volonté
Dans les cœurs altérés de tes sombres magies.

Quelle odeur de cadavre en cet horrible vin!
-- J'ai vu. J'ai lu. J'ai su. Je sais que tout est vain.
Tous les plaisirs pour moi meurent avant de naître.

Qu'importent les printemps à mon âme d'hiver
Qui ne peut plus jouir et ne veut plus connaître
Et qui préfère aux fleurs l'acier d'un revolver!

From
La nuit, by Iwan Gilkin, Second Edition. Mercure de France, Paris, 1911.

My weak translation of a famous rondel from Pierrot lunai...

My weak translation of a famous rondel from Pierrot lunaire .

Sunset,
by Albert Giraud.


The sun has opened its veins
On a bed of russet clouds:
From the mouth of each hole,
Blood ejaculates in red fountains.

Convulsive limbs of the oaks
Whip the insane horizon:
The sun has opened its veins
On a bed of russet clouds.

Like a rakehell filled with disgust,
Who, in Roman shame,
Has gone to bleed sick arteries into a filthy sewer,
The sun has opened its veins!

The original:

Coucher de Soleil

Le Soleil s'est ouvert les veines
Sur un lit de nuages roux:
Son sang, par la bouche des trous,
S'éjacule en rouges fontaines.

Les rameaux convulsifs des chênes
Flagellent les horizons fous:
Le Soleil s'est ouvert les veines
Sur un lit de nuages roux.

Comme, après les hontes romaines,
Un débauché plein de dégoûts
Laissant jusqu'aux sales égouts
Saigner ses artères malsaines,
Le Soleil s'est ouvert les veines!

From
Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques, by Albert Giraud. Alphonse Lemerre, Éditeur. Paris, 1884.