Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

Sometimes you just have to keep some distance between yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

The traffic signal changes and I drive on, watching the bum’s half-collapsed form shrinking in my rearview mirror. But somehow I’ve taken him on as a passenger, a ghostly shape sitting bleary-eyed beside me and raving about all kinds of senseless and fascinating things, the autobiography of confusion.

my appetite was never very strong for physical food. Stronger by far was my hunger for a kind of transcendental fare, a feasting of the mind and soul: the astral banquet of Art. There I fed.

There is only one world and one soul of that world, which appears in forms of beauty or bravery or madness according to how Anima Mundi would turn you. And no ordinary devising may turn you away from what it wills. This is the power that has made you what you now are, and would unmake you for its own design. It has played with you as it would a puppet.”

I know the visions you have known, for they are among the visions that all were born to know. There are eyes within our eyes, and when these others open all becomes confusion. The meaning of my long life consists of the endeavor to seize and settle these visions, until my natural eyes themselves have altered in accordance with my purpose.

Having seen the face behind all its others, your life can never again be as you have known it. All the pleasures of the past are now defiled, all your hopes violated beyond hope. There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them. Your world is presently black with the scars of madness, but you must make it blacker still in order to find any solace. You have seen both too much and not enough.

‘They questioned,’ he said. ‘They accused. They complained that no one in that place ever became well.’ Then he smiled and began to elaborate. ‘What things had they seen,’ he hissed, ‘to give them such . . . wisdom? They did not look into the faces,’ no, he did not say ‘faces’ but ‘eyes.’ Yes, he said, ‘. . . did not look into the eyes of those beings, the eyes that reflected the lifeless beauty of the silent, staring universe itself.’

Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real. And to suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one’s own madness merely emulates that of the world. I have been lured away by dreams; all is nonsense now.

Thus began Victor Keirion’s preoccupation with a certain book and a certain hallucinated world, though to make a distinction between these two phenomena ultimately seemed an error. The book, indeed, did not merely describe that strange world but, in some obscure fashion, was a true composition of the thing itself, its very form incarnate. Each day thereafter he studied the hypnotic episodes of the little book; each night, as he dreamed, he carried out shapeless expeditions into its fantastic topography. To all appearances it seemed he had discovered the summit or abyss of the unreal, that utopia of exhaustion, confusion, and debris where reality ends and where one may dwell among its ruins.

There is a grand lapse of memory that may be the only thing to save us from ultimate horror. Perhaps they know the truth who preach the passing of one life into another, vowing that between a certain death and a certain birth there is an interval in which an old name is forgotten before a new one is learned. And to remember the name of a former life is to begin the backward slide into that great blackness in which all names have their source, becoming incarnate in a succession of bodies like numberless verses of an infinite scripture.

I now feel myself sinking deeper into a velvety white abyss. At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of purity and emptiness, the paradise of the unborn. I remember how I was momentarily overtaken by a feeling I had never known when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. It was the feeling that I had been liberated from the weight of life.

Those are the only words I can use. The only ones that apply. Once I delighted in them. As a young student in philosophy I used to say to myself, ‘I am going to learn the madness of things.’ This was something I felt I needed to know—that I needed to confront. If I could face the madness of things, I thought, then I would have nothing more to fear. I could live in the universe without feeling I was coming apart, without feeling I would explode with the madness of things that to my mind formed the very foundation of existence.

I affect only the slightest interest in his adventures. For as a student of anthropology, one of the few of my kind, I must keep a certain distance from my subjects. They are of a rare type, and outright intimacy tends to impact their behavior in ways that could spoil my study of them. In any case, companionship is not what these adventurers in an alternative existence seek. What they desire, like Jack Quinn, are witnesses to their downfall as they plummet into an abyss of nightmares. What they want are chroniclers of their explorations in a hell of their own choosing.

If things are not what they seem—and we are forever reminded that this is the case—then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing. Though never exact, always shifting somewhat, the proportion is crucial. For a certain number of minds are fated to depart for realms of delusion, as if in accordance with some hideous timetable, and many will never be returning to us.

this acquaintance had deserted the cause of appearances and could no longer be depended on to stick to the common story. Alone he had wandered into a tale of another sort altogether; for him, all things now participated in this nightmare of nonsense. But although his revelations conflicted with the lesser forms of truth, nonetheless he did live in the light of a greater truth: that all is unreal.

“We sleep,” he read, “among the shadows of another world. These are the unshapely substance inflicted upon us and the prime material to which we give the shapes of our understanding. And though we create what is seen, yet we are not the creators of its essence. Thus nightmares are born from the impress of ourselves on the life of things unknown. How terrible these forms of specter and demon when the eyes of the flesh cast light and mold the shadows which are forever around us. How much more terrible to witness their true forms roaming free upon the land, or in the most homely rooms of our houses, or frolicking through that luminous hell which in pursuit of psychic survival we have named the heavens. Then we truly waken from our sleep, but only to sleep once more and shun the nightmares which must ever return to that part of us which is hopelessly dreaming.”