Post-CATHR

[Tsalal Akbar]

Okay. I've read CATHR a total of five times, well, sort of: the book three times and the version posted here twice. After reading the book for the first time and especially this most recent time, last week, I sort of felt like I lost my will-to-read, if you will, which is almost equivalent to my will-to-live...almost. I don't see the point of reading anything besides CATHR any longer, if even that. There's a much greater sense of futility - despite my feeling everything utterly futile before CATHR - in everything now. (I still read but with far less enthusiasm than before). Has anyone else experienced this sort of malaise after ingesting the bleak potency of CATHR?

[starrysothoth]

Quote Originally Posted by Tsalal Akbar

Okay. I've read CATHR a total of five times, well, sort of: the book three times and the version posted here twice. After reading the book for the first time and especially this most recent time, last week, I sort of felt like I lost my will-to-read, if you will, which is almost equivalent to my will-to-live...almost. I don't see the point of reading anything besides CATHR any longer, if even that. There's a much greater sense of futility - despite my feeling everything utterly futile before CATHR - in everything now. (I still read but with far less enthusiasm than before). Has anyone else experienced this sort of malaise after ingesting the bleak potency of CATHR?

It was a very powerful experience when I first read it, and still is on subsequent readings. Actually, I do find it hard to read any other books when I'm deep in TCATHR. I'm not sure if this has to do with the intensity of the philosophy or because it's still a "new" work by TL.

Unlike you, though, I do rebound somewhat quickly. I notice that some time after reading TCATHR, I want to move on to one of Tom's stories. Usually something short from Noctuary, Grimscribe, or SOADD, which is odd, since the stories from Teatro Grottesco seem like its closest philosophic complements.

TCATHR is marvelous, and written in a way that almost demands a palate cleanser - something else by Tom - to comfortably transition out of the state of mind it puts you in. You may want to experiment with this if you feel your Post-Conspiracy state is a holding you back somehow.

[gveranon]

I read the draft version of CATHR a couple of times after it was made available on this site a few years ago. Recently, I read the book. I feel that I've been living with this carefully-pronounced malediction for a long time now, although I guess it's only been -- what? -- three or four years. In that time, I doubt that a day has passed without my thinking of CATHR at least briefly, in passing. I've read a lot of books, but no other book has had such an ongoing, constant presence in my head. It's not my favorite book (even among Ligotti's), but it issues a challenge to my thinking about life -- about my life -- that I can't get past, much as I sometimes would like to. It's not the anti-natalism that gets to me (I never wanted to have children anyway), it's the hard-to-refute MALIGNANTLY USELESS judgment.

By Ligotti's standards, as stated in CATHR, I'm not a pessimist; I'm a chirpy, look-on-the-bright-side optimist. By most people's standards, I'm pretty much a pessimist. I sometimes feel that I'm like the SNL character Debby Downer, spreading gloom and cynicism wherever I go (though less hilariously). I'm actually not trying to do this -- or not always anyway. Despite my dark suspicion that Ligotti is right about everything, I have to cling to a few things I enjoy and value, and I have to have some reason to put one foot in front of the other, at least until I feel my death is imminent. I could be, and probably will be, a deathbed convert to Ligotti-ism, but until then I have to grasp at other philosophies. Not any of the religions on offer, all of which I find unbelievable. And not the happier, let's-link-arms or go-get-'em-slugger versions of secularism, which seem hollow to me, too. It's really slim pickings out here. But I forge onward. One bright spot: CATHR has not diminished my appetite for reading other books.

[Murony_Pyre]

Hi Tsalal Akbar,

Was this reaction to TCATHR a surprise to you or do you think you already had a predisposition to feel this way in general or about reading/books in particular, etc.?
I've not read TCATHR, myself, yet there it rests on the shelf, ominously & irresistibly awaiting my quaking, inevitable approach.
I do believe, however, as with starrysothoth, that I will bounce back from its effect (be that what it may) rather quickly after allowing it to state its case (this is my predisposition, for better or worse or whatever). I already believe on a fundamental level that there is a profound lack of meaning in the universe in general and my life in particular (to borrow some phrasing from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think(?)), but this knowledge in itself has little meaning to my life on an everyday basis, which is where I exist at least most of the time (or so I like to think). I do hope & expect that there is more to TCATHR than this simple, open secret. I'm looking forward to having all my simple expectations crushed like cinders.

I sometimes feel it is a shame I am living (here, there, anywhere?) but I will not feel ashamed for living (which, lets face it, can be such a drag). I believe the current malaise is purely a symptom of an idle culture given time in which to dwell on these matters, they would not occur to a member of an otherwise occupied, say hunter/gatherer type group of human beings who, if they took pause, might think: "Our existence is utterly meaningless, but who gives a ####, we are too busy with the business of surviving to care."

[DoktorH]

Quote Originally Posted by Tsalal Akbar

Has anyone else experienced this sort of malaise after ingesting the bleak potency of CATHR?

my first reading elicited a cackle-and-clap response that I have to movies or books that entertain me while promoting some philosophy or behavior that I agree with. TCATHR was pessimistic, but I found it to be a really vigorous, witty, wisecrack-riddled sort of pessimism rather than a mope-because-everything's-pointless pessimism. Patrick Bateman's social responsibility speech in American Psycho got a similar response out of me, as did the ending of JD Salinger's "A perfect day for banafish."

I was also looking at it a bit differently. The book came into my life well after I'd made peace with the pointlessness of my own existence and things in general, and I didn't view it as instructions for living/thinking-about-life so much as a fictional book made real. I equated Ligotti writing that book with that title to Lovecraft putting together a book on ceremonial magick and titling it "The Necronomicon."

Ligotti quipped in one of his interviews (and this is a paraphrase) that good horror writing happens when a seriously disturbed person is still lucid enough to put a few sentences together. With this in mind, taking good horror writing seriously might not be a safe choice, as it could turn it into contagious madness that is spread by the written word (which is itself a subject of some weird fiction).

if you're certain the book is causing the malaise and not other things going on in your life that might magnify your desire to read misnathropic pessimistic antinatalist horror-philosophy, I'd say put it down. Watch cheesy movies while under the influence of alcohol. go bowling. take up stamp/coin/beanie-baby collecting. do something else with your time rather than dunking your brain in the poisoned coffee of that little diner in Crampton.

and if reading TCATHR over and over is a symptom of a longer-lasting, farther-reaching malaise, see a doctor. There's illnesses that can cause that kind of thing.

[Tsalal Akbar]

Quote Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre

Hi Tsalal Akbar, Was this reaction to TCATHR a surprise to you or do you think you already had a predisposition to feel this way in general or about reading/books in particular, etc.?

Not at all. I dreaded reading the book just as much as I couldn't wait for it to be released. I've more of a predestination than a predisposition to have ended up this way. Many books have spoken to me but none this directly, this ominously. Everything I do, so reading included of course, is haunted with MALIGNATLY USELESS stamped onto it. Every way I turn, ever thought I think: MALIGNANTLY USELESS. And this is to top off for me that other feeling that never leaves and is just as strong: there is nothing to do, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be, there is no one to know.

[Tsalal Akbar]

Quote Originally Posted by DoktorH

Ligotti quipped in one of his interviews (and this is a paraphrase) that good horror writing happens when a seriously disturbed person is still lucid enough to put a few sentences together. With this in mind, taking good horror writing seriously might not be a safe choice, as it could turn it into contagious madness that is spread by the written word (which is itself a subject of some weird fiction). if you're certain the book is causing the malaise and not other things going on in your life that might magnify your desire to read misnathropic pessimistic antinatalist horror-philosophy, I'd say put it down. Watch cheesy movies while under the influence of alcohol. go bowling. take up stamp/coin/beanie-baby collecting. do something else with your time rather than dunking your brain in the poisoned coffee of that little diner in Crampton. and if reading TCATHR over and over is a symptom of a longer-lasting, farther-reaching malaise, see a doctor. There's illnesses that can cause that kind of thing.

I didn't know what good horror writing was until after CATHR. I had read Teatro Grottesco once before about a year ago and it didn't have much of an effect. Only after reading CATHR did I truly know what good horror writing was as I immediately read all of Poe and Lovecraft and the rest of everything by Ligotti that I could get my hands on. It was a disturbing experience to read the mantra above in Teatro Grottesco because it resonated so much after reading it in CATHR and yet I totally forgot it was in *oops, I've a piss poor memory, I meant* The Shadow, The Darkness(my favorite Liggoti story, *not The Bungalow House*) first.

As for your suggestions on trying to loosen the Tsalal's grip on me, I appreciate them (the humor included), but they are simply not an option, for the exact reasons you guessed at (but also financial), certain mental illnesses that I have to deal with and do see a doctor about and am on meds for. If anything I've wanted to stop seeing my pdoc and stop tossing the pills back...to see what kind of effect CATHR would have on me then, as deadly as that sounds.

[DoktorH]

Quote Originally Posted by Tsalal Akbar

Everything I do, so reading included of course, is haunted with MALIGNATLY USELESS stamped onto it. Every way I turn, ever thought I think: MALIGNANTLY USELESS. And this is to top off for me that other feeling that never leaves and is just as strong: there is nothing to do, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be, there is no one to know.

I like being useless. If i had a use and knew about it, I'd obsess over fulfilling it to get it over with (which could be stressful) and be upset if I didn't succeed. it reminds me of this passage from the beginning of MWINYD:

"A: There is no grand scheme of things.
B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact -- the fact -- that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity.
C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity."

If it's a multiple-choice test, I think A and C are both right. I don't see the malignance in it, though. I think the useleness is liberating, which ties into the next bit.

If there's nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, no one to know, then there are no obligations, no responsibilities. it's like a vacation!

[Tsalal Akbar]

Quote Originally Posted by Murony_Pyre

I sometimes feel it is a shame I am living (here, there, anywhere?) but I will not feel ashamed for living (which, lets face it, can be such a drag). I believe the current malaise is purely a symptom of an idle culture given time in which to dwell on these matters, they would not occur to a member of an otherwise occupied, say hunter/gatherer type group of human beings who, if they took pause, might think: "Our existence is utterly meaningless, but who gives a ####, we are too busy with the business of surviving to care."

It's a damn crying shame that any of us are living, my friend, ask Ligotti. And, let me tell you, it's a real bitch feeling ashamed for living. One of my favorite novels, No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, starts off with the following: Mine has been a life of much shame. I think we can all say that whether we are ashamed or not of saying so.

[Tsalal Akbar]

Quote Originally Posted by DoktorH

If there's nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, no one to know, then there are no obligations, no responsibilities. it's like a vacation!

I've had no obligations and no responsibilites, or at least extremely negligible ones, for the past five years. It's been hell.