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February 10, 2022 - September 14, 2024
The surrealists and the existentialists loved the fantastic story, the weird story, because they had been knocked sideways by psychoanalysis and had come to understand how the unconscious told its tales, apparently through eccentric, innocent or unusual images and strange behavior.
Hunters and fishermen came into the town bringing fantastic-sounding reports of gigantic, shambling animals they claimed to have seen. But being regarded as professional exaggerators anyway, no one believed them. Then suddenly
If you went to your room in the dark you would tread on the eggs lying around and they would burst with a squelch. Castringius devised an ‘egg dance’, which he performed to perfection.
‘How did you come by these pictures?’ I explained. ‘They’re very good. The White-striped Whip is my most mature work. It represents a synthesis of future morality. There’s not a woman alive today capable of understanding the implications. It has a real tang to it.’
The previous day already Giovanni had left one customer half shaved when his attention was drawn by a horde of macaques rushing past. A beautiful long-tailed guenon had waved at him and the temptation had been too much for our barber’s assistant. That time his philosophical master had managed to restrain him with a combination of the cane and the argument that time was divisible into tiny eternities.
we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.
We had ‘strayed’, as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called ‘our lives’, yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the
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‘All my life,’ he said, ‘I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region – not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind – where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul –’
Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible.’
‘Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn’t for the life of me!’ exclaimed a shrill voice. And while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.
No track led up to the sinister gloom of the trees, either of men or cattle; not even a poacher had been there snaring elves for over a hundred years. You did not trespass twice in the dells of the gnoles.
And the dead man quivered in happiness on his white death table, while the iron chisels in the hands of the doctors broke up the bones of his temple.
But my tongue’s running away with me, as usual!’ ‘As usual,’ I retorted impatiently, ‘you open up with all the frankness of a Chinese diplomat.’
There was a sense of evil in the air, a warning of things which it is wise for a clean man to shun and keep clear of. The impression became so strong that before I had walked two squares I began to feel physically ill. Then it occurred to me that the one glass of cheap Chianti I had drunk might have something to do with the feeling. Who knew how that stuff had been manufactured, or whether the juice of the grape entered at all into its ill-flavored composition?
I had never heard of: ‘Xebico’. Here is the dispatch. I saved a duplicate of it from our files: Xebico, Sept. 16 CP BULLETIN The heaviest mist in the history of the city settled over the town at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. All traffic has stopped and the mist hangs like a pall over everything. Lights of ordinary intensity fail to pierce the fog, which is constantly growing heavier. Scientists here are unable to agree as to the cause, and the local weather bureau states that the like has never occurred before in the history of the city. At 7 p.m. last night municipal authorities… (more)
‘Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before. They are transcripts, types – the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without the body, they would have been the same…
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The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.
Trithemius’ Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta’s De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere’s Traite des Chiffres, Falconer’s Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys’ and Thicknesse’s eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and Kluber’s script itself,
travel presents nothing more than ‘identical objects moving in identical spaces.’
The universe that lies beyond common sense and logic – the universe that is known intuitively to the poet – belongs to the metaphysical.
all around him, the hills were so amazingly silent, now like India-rubber clouds that you could push in or pull out as you do those India-rubber faces, grey against the night sky of a crystal purple upon whose surface, like the twinkling eyes of boats at sea, stars were now appearing.
The train was coming slowly to a halt, without puffing, without rattling, as if, together with the last breath of steam, life were slowly escaping from it.
‘You know as well as I that from the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your own country, your father is dead. This cannot be entirely remedied. That death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.’
my father was lying on an ordinary wooden bed, covered by a pile of bedding, fast asleep. His breathing extracted layers of snoring from the depths of his breast. The whole room seemed to be lined with snores from floor to ceiling, and yet new layers were being added all the time.
Like a large black caterpillar, the telescope crept into the lighted shop – an enormous paper arthropod with two imitation headlights on the front. The customers clustered together, retreating before this blind paper dragon; the shop assistants flung open the door to the street, and I rode slowly in my paper car amid rows of onlookers, who followed with scandalized eyes my truly outrageous exit. III
The compulsive readiness to account for the passage of time, the scrupulous penny-wise habit of reporting on the used-up hours – the pride and ambition of our economic system – are forsaken.
We all know that time, this undisciplined element, holds itself within bounds but precariously, thanks to unceasing cultivation, meticulous care, and a continuous regulation and correction of its excesses. Free of this vigilance, it immediately begins to do tricks, run wild, play irresponsible practical jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning.
Heedless of obstacles, obeying only some inner rhythm, each one walks in an inexorably straight line, as if along a thread that she seems to unwind from an invisible skein. This linear trot is full of mincing accuracy and measured grace. Each girl seems to carry inside her an individual rule, wound tight like a spring.
At some point, somewhere on the sharp turn of a snore, I wake up half conscious and feel the body of my father at the foot of the bed. He lies there curled up, small as a kitten. I fall asleep again, with my mouth open, and the vast panorama of mountain landscape glides past me majestically.
it was this – the passionate depth, the convulsive bristling of all his fibers, the mad fury of his barking when the end of a stick was pointed at him – that made him a hundred per cent dog.
Invisible lights – the sort of things that open speakeasy doors and rich men’s garages.
There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by
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‘One becomes very fond of them,’ the woman went on. ‘They each have their own little ways! You would be surprised how very individual rabbits are.’ The rabbits in question were tearing at the meat with their sharp buck teeth. ‘We eat them of course occasionally.
saw her waving her hand over the banister, and as she waved it, her fingers fell off and dropped to the ground like shooting stars.
There must have been dozens of them. They were about two or three inches long and they flew on wide gauzy beetle wings. They looked like little men, strangely terrifying as they flew – clad in their black suits, with their expressionless faces and their dots of watery blue eyes. And they flew out on transparent wings that came from under their black beetle coats.
saw a chimney, not thirty feet away on the next roof. It was squat and of red brick and had two black pipe ends flush with its top. I saw it suddenly vibrate, oddly. And I saw its red brick surface seem to peel away, and the black pipe openings turn suddenly white. I saw two big eyes staring into the sky.
I realized that the poet’s work had lain not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable;
‘However, painfully, business went on as usual. But now one slept with difficulty, due to the fear of waking up exported.
They kept furtive watch over something, a faraway dominion now destroyed, an era of freedom when the world belonged to the Axolotl.
electric chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. He remembered the switch was by the door. For a fraction, then, he hesitated. She raised her eyelids – saw his glance at the chandelier, understood. Her eyes glittered. She murmured: ‘My beloved, don’t worry – don’t move… ’ And she reached out her hand. Her hand grew larger, her arm grew longer and longer, it stretched out through the bed-curtains, across the long carpet, huge and overshadowing the whole of the long room, until at last its giant fingers were at the door. With a terminal click, she switched out the light.
‘Are you lying?’ ‘Father, I am a Bostonian.’
How wonderful it would have been to have known of some apartment, dimly lighted; of a door that opened to the secret knock, three short ones and one long one – where a strawberry blonde was waiting or perhaps, better still, some wise old lady with a cup of tea, an old lady, august and hallowed and whose heels were not worn down on their outside edges.
Indifferent to these manoeuvres, the fleecy blue sea blossomed with white foam like lace crowning the billows, while the topmast, all sails out, stroked the variegated sky.
Good old, mean old Carl was the greatest little drink pourer in the world. He used drinks like other types of sadists used whips. He kept beating you with them until you dropped or sobbed or went mad, and he enjoyed every step of the process.
My rescuer was Irene. Irene was particularly sensitive about seeing people alone because being alone had several times nearly produced fatal results for her. Being alone and taking pills to end the being alone.
When a talcumed smoothie comes at me with his brilliant ivories exposed, it only shows he’s got something he can bite me with, that’s all. But the smile of the Walrus was something else.
Once you got to know Carl, and it took a while, you realized that none of it was really happening. That was because Carl had died, or been killed, long ago. Possibly in childhood. Possibly he had been born dead. So, under the actor’s warmth and rage, the eyes were always the eyes of a corpse.
