Another pompous exegesis

[albie]

Ligotti.( what vast object passed in front of what immense light to fashion the limitless shadow of space?)

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about his writing that makes me feel so…well, if I could find a word to end that sentence I might be half way there. I want to say unreal. But I suddenly want to say the complete opposite. Ligotti does not believe in reality. We are fiction. I think this notion goes beyond religion. It encompasses it. If you believe you are just flesh or if you believe you are Good itself, eternal and boundless. In the end your reality is circular. It exists in a snow globe. And even imagination cannot pass into the realm of nothingness beyond the glass. We are puppets without a puppeteer in a world that came into existence for no reason. A world that is negated by the whole notion of infinity and eternity. (an eternity stretching backwards, not forward is the problem: being that with an infinite past any event cannot find a time early enough to have happened in. If not a billion million years ago, why not a zillion billion million years ago? And so forth. Hence nothing can actually occur. It keeps travelling backwards and backwards earlier and earlier and can never stop travelling backwards and backwards to a point of happening. And all events, including us are trapped by this flaw in reality. Including the very creation of reality itself).


Arrghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nope. It isn’t working. I understand the concepts but I just don’t feel the panic. Maybe Thom just has a chemical imbalance and it’s coincidental that he connects unreality with how he feels.

Anyway. How does he make me feel?

How does he want me to feel? And is it the same as I do feel?

What makes me want to think about that guy in the cloak in GAS STATION CARNIVALS? Isn’t he just another boogie man? A Freddy Kruger? No, I hear you cry. No he isn’t. Because he is still scary.

And fear is real. Being unafraid is unreal. Sitting at a ####ing desk answering phone calls is unreal. It’s bland and functional.

The very fact that our reality is impossible seems to have passed by most of us. And I blame scientists for this. They are unwilling to say the words. And who would believe them if they did? Bar us?

You will of course have realised that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Although perhaps you are so befuddled by my topsy-turvy diatribe to not now know if I am indeed passing on wisdom disguised as the prattlings of a bemused pseud. Or vice-versa.

Is the Ligotti formula built up from the usual building bricks that form our knowledge of horror fiction? Suspense? Mystery? Threat? Ambiguity? The surreal and the incongruous? The psychological triggering of human misery and desire?

They must be. You dirty bunch of ass-bastards! They simply must be! But…is there more? A reality to what he does? Is he telling us of things that have existed, and we have forgotten? Is he allowing us access to our creator’s first instincts? Its emotional language of unveiled esoteric enormity? Are we seeing what God sees when we read Ligotti? Is that why we fear the ghoul from Gas Station Carnivals? Because he points to some actual demon. If not the devil himself? A devil earthed and fleshed out with gravity and the workplace?

The gas station. The gas station. The gas station.

Earthly burning energy. Hell, sir. Hell. Satan prowls the earth like a lion. Satan with only mystery left to tempt us. A face we have already seen.

Yeah, that’s about it for now. Bye.

[matt cardin]

Albie,

Provocative thoughts, these:

"We are puppets without a puppeteer in a world that came into existence for no reason. A world that is negated by the whole notion of infinity and eternity. . . . The very fact that our reality is impossible seems to have passed by most of us. . . . Is he telling us of things that have existed, and we have forgotten? Is he allowing us access to our creator’s first instincts? Its emotional language of unveiled esoteric enormity? Are we seeing what God sees when we read Ligotti?"

I am completely in tune with your inchoate yet undeniable desire to try to express the precise nature of the feeling that Tom's stories generate for you. At certain moments, when the door of my inner ability to respond to literature has been inexplicably opened wide (just as, at other times, that same door is locked and sealed), the reading of almost any Ligotti story will evoke such a powerful sense of something -- a kind of combined cognitive and emotional stew of awe, exhilaration, horror, fascination, longing, and "killing sadness" -- that it almost seems unbearable. And of course it is also highly addictive, like the most potent non-chemical drug I have ever been fortunate enough to stumble upon.

Oh -- and I'll also aver, or admit, that on a much less exalted level, another emotion that his stories evoke for me is plain old envy. At his virtually unearthly skill as a writer, I mean. If art is defined fundamentally by the artist's attempting to express his or her own emotions, thoughts, intutions, visions, etc., as opposed to attempting to entertain or evoke emotions from others -- and this is a definition that I've come to embrace wholeheartedly -- then Tom is an astonishingly successful artist, because he has so successfully achieved the skill of embedding his inner world in the written word that his stories feel, to those who are innately responsive to them, like direct transmissions of pure affect. It's as if he doses or injects the reader with his own subjectivity for a moment, which in itself may lie at the heart of the magical effect of his writing, since the impassible barrier between subjectivities is one of the fundamental facts of consciousness, the breaching of which is technically and literally an experience of transcendence.

And this all of course underscores the great paradox of art-as-expression: generally speaking, the more an artist seeks simply and purely to express his or her own interiority, with little or no thought for manipulating or moving the reader or viewer, the more powerfully moving to other people will the finished work of art be. Provided that it's not expressed in an impossibly obscure and convoluted private idiom, that is.

Thanks, Albie, for sharing your attempt to formulate a phenomenology of what Tom's work does for you. I find this kind of reflection to be stimulating.

[albie]

Inchoate? Inchoate? Why didn’t I know this word? It would have looked great in my pompous exegesis. Damn it! Damn it all to hell! Well. Just you wait. Next pompous exegesis will contain fifty inchoate.

FIFTY INCHOATE, I TELL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Indeed envy is so prevalent in the section of mental miasma that I’ve created reading the likes of Ligotti and Campbell. With Campbell I can see the build up from M.R James, Aickman, Leiber. But with Ligotti, well, he just seems to have something alien. I myself don’t see much continuation from Lovecraft. If any at all. At least not in the stories that I think define Ligotti’s genius most ( for me): Gas Station Carnivals. The Frolic. The Bungalow House. The Red Tower.

I’m so jealous of his vision that I cannot bear to write another word…….

Gah! It makes me. THE THING IN MY HEAD MAKES ME.

My god, the things we see in The Red Tower. The implications. That’s what it is. The implications of what those images mean to reality. DOH! It slips out of my fingers yet again. It’s so, so…inchoate.
Stories are a mini reality. A good story crushes our true reality (shops and going to toilet and watching TV) so mercilessly, that it is like a religion. It’s the same trick taking place. We want to be there. But the twist is that the world Ligotti weaves is a hell. Or is it? David Lynch once said that the world Henry Spencer lives in is a world he himself would find comfortable. Maybe he was being a tad generous to that reality’s fixtures and fittings. A deformed ‘baby’ isn’t my idea of heaven.

Maybe he just meant the black and white world of the fifties, but drunk on a dark and silent chaos. The arse end of magic. People who are clearly not real. Yet have a kind of unknowable ability for vengeance, if wronged. Our lives altered enough to be alien to us, yet to still have the same emotional resonance. And the mystery never able to be undone. The pain of dreams, and leaks in the barriers of our reincarnation.

Ligotti crafts a brand of horror ( a waveband of horror) that contains an element of the surrealism that abounds in modern culture. Like a bright pink Frankenstein’s Monster, forcing his way into our minds with his blue pincers and grass green beak clacking. It’s there in Campbell. The same plasticine abandon. Francis Bacon’s triptych ghouls lost in our grey world.

Of course. That’s the pain. A monster. Lost in our world of computers and wage packets. A creature that lurks in our minds, yet has a glittery hoof trapped in our cold hard cement. Unable to escape. It’s a mirror horror.

Yep, you’re right. If I stop right here it will have a more meaningful suspense.

Bye. Gotta go and watch TV and shop and use the toilet and be pompous.
:shock:

[Karnos]

Albie... I didn't understand a single line of thought you were trying to string (save for a few things) and I have no idea what you've been smoking these last few days, but damn, I want some!

[The Silent One]

Albie... I didn't understand a single line of thought you were trying to string (save for a few things) and I have no idea what you've been smoking these last few days, but damn, I want some!
I can do that without stimulants, but I'm limited to politics :lol: .

[albie]

Maybe I've been smoking string? Nope. Alas my toking days are over. Sniff.

You couldn't understand my statements? I admit they are a tad...inchoate.

kersplutter!