Puppet Passage of the Day...

[Bleak&Icy]

Being an Online Anthology of Passages Concerning Puppets, Marionettes, Mannikins, Dolls and Other Slavish Freaks Devoid of Autonomy, Assembled by Ligottians, for the General Instruction, Benefit, and Amusement of Our Members.

"The puppet fascinated Rilke. The marionette--stuffed, stringed, hand-worked, mute--is nothing but external appearance, nothing but toddle and mime, a thing among things. The puppet is neither easy nor anxious about being a puppet. The puppet is the hinge between two worlds: that of the puppet master, in whose hands the puppet literally is, and that of the audience it faces; for if the puppet "comes to life" only in performance, it never sees the strings, the moving fingers, or its master's omnipresent eyes. The puppet's success depends upon the illusion of life it generates in its audience. The puppet, with materials dead as any bolt of cloth or cleverly shaped papier-mache, and usually shrunken as well, down to dollsize, must mimic the manners (however grotesquely burlesqued) of the audience that watches. They also dance and sing and swing their swords, but they do so because they are alive. The thespian, the hypocrite, the liar, is a feigner, too, but no clever-fingered master makes him act the way he does, or pretend that what is not... is, or deny or alter the truth; no, his "acting" is sincere, even if what he pretends to show is not; his desire to deceive comes from the inside, it is as meant as cement. One self, removed and hidden, has created another, the self which the world is allowed to see..."

-- William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation.

[Bleak&Icy]

"Puppet Theater" by Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. William H. Gass)

Behind bars, like beasts,
they pile up their behavior;
their voice is not theirs,
though they swing
their arms and swords
with great variety
as if catching an outcry
to copy while on the wing.

Their limbs have no joints,
and hang awkwardly
in their rig of wires,
which doesn't prevent them
from killing or dancing,
or bowing and scraping
like a courtier to a king.

With them, memory has no point;
they wring their awareness dry;
and all they retain inside them
they generally employ
to beat upon their breast
till it's unable to resist.
They know all breasts
are beaten so.

Their large and formal faces
are there for all to see,
simpler than ours, more
forceful and ideal;
open as eyes seem
when awakening from a dream.
A sight which makes laughter
rise from the pit like steam;
for those on the benches see
how the puppets pound,
wound, and frighten one another,
and collapse in loose heaps,
dead of their exertions.
If anyone were to understand it differently,
and fail to laugh at their consternations,
the puppets would replace their play
to reenact a Last Judgment Day.
They would yank on their wires
to pull before the painted porch
the hands that, hidden high above,
had danced them into their desires--
hands hideously red, gloved no longer--
and they would pour from every door,
and climb those wires and cardboard walls
to set their former land afire,
and assassinate those hands.

[Bleak&Icy]

As the light went out behind him, Stone felt a weight fall beside him on the seat.

He cried out. Or tried to, for as he gulped in air it seemed to draw darkness into his lungs, darkness that swelled and poured into his heart and brain. There was a moment in which he knew nothing, as if he’d become darkness and silence and the memory of suffering. Then the car was rattling on, the darkness was sweeping over him and by, and the nose of the car banged open the doors and plunged out into the night.

As the car swung onto the length of track outside the Ghost Train, Stone caught sight of the gap between the stalls where he thought he’d seen the stallholders. A welling moonlight showed him that between the stalls stood a pile of sacks, nodding and gesticulating in the wind. Then the seat beside him emerged from the shadow, and he looked down.

Next to him on the seat was a shrunken hooded figure. It wore a faded jacket and trousers striped and patched in various colours, indistinguishable in the receding moonlight. The head almost reached his shoulder. Its arms hung slack at its sides, and its feet drummed laxly on the metal beneath the seat. Shrinking away, Stone reached for the front of the car to pull himself to his feet, and the figure’s head fell back.

Stone closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw within the hood an oval of white cloth upon which — black crosses for eyes, a barred crescent for a mouth — a grinning face was stitched.

As he had suddenly realized that the car hadn’t halted nor even slowed down before plunging down the incline back into the Ghost Train, Stone did not immediately notice that the figure had taken his hand.


-- Ramsey Campbell, "The Companion," from Dark Feasts (Robinson Publishing)

[Bleak&Icy]

Ligotti's phenomenological nemocentrism draws out this collapse of any securely demarcated ontological and epistemological foundations in a weird-fictional landscape filled with the ruins and ghosts of puppets. Throughout Ligotti's work, the puppet figures as the insensate and sub-personal reality hidden beneath the 'mindless mirrors' of our naive reality. Puppets function as 'conduits to the unreal', through whose agency hallucinatory phenomenality bleeds into a simultaneous concretisation of the oneiric. Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing, and over which they have no control. As Dziemianowicz notes in relation to Ligotti's 'Dreams of a Mannikin', the puppet's overriding affect is a suspicion that 'he and his entire world are merely a fictional diversion'. The puppet is not merely an mocking parody of man, it is the unmasking of the animate face of insensate reality, the unveiling of the inexorable mechanics of the personal; 'There are no means for escaping this world. It penetrates even into your sleep and is its substance. You are caught in your own dreaming where there is no space. And are held forever where there is no time. You can do nothing you are not told to do. There is no hope for escape from this dream that was never yours. The very words you speak are only its very words.'

-- James Trafford, "The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood," Collapse, vol. IV.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Bleak&Icy

James Trafford, "The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood," Collapse, vol. IV.

That's a wonderful article, B&I. A very apt choice for this thread.

I shall keep my eye open for puppet passages. Meanwhile, humbly, here is a puppet story of mine (published 'Waste' (Not One of Us) 1998): http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2004/07/dorothy-alone.html

[Bleak&Icy]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Meanwhile, humbly, here is a puppet story of mine (published 'Waste' (Not One of Us) 1998):

Wonderful puppet story! I hope you don't mind, but I can't resist quoting the following lines from 'Waste':


“Not another dream? I wish I could patrol your sleep, Arabella, to keep anything untoward from your mind.”

She formed a false smile at his overt jest, knowing, in her heart, however, that he was being deadly serious.

“Yes, her damned dolls came to life,” she continued, “and they complained they had not been made properly.”

Don nodded. He had heard recurrent tales about such a dream. A doll in particular - the one sitting upon the ornamental altar - often proceeded to bad-mouth Dorothy about how its joints were too stiff. Only stick-puppets should suffer this way, it maintained. As if to demonstrate, the doll in question showed how sitting stock still belied its own fantastical nature of being able to move.

[The Black Ferris]

In the Temple of the Doll
By
Arthur Cullipher


It was the distant glow of a soft green light, constant, different than the swarming fireflies, that guided us through sleep, into the blackness and the brush. The light divided as we approached it, splitting with darkness, becoming two small display windows of a sort, flanking large wooden doors set into the angle of an imposing stone structure. Beneath the windows, a green fire burned inside of unseemly worm-carven urns. Within the windows, strange dolls stood diligent watch behind panes of rheumy glass, guarding the doors of the Temple with an eerie silence. I traced the symbol of the Laughing House upon these doors with the two outstretched fingers of my left hand and saw their postures relax. And we who seeked to enter, found that we were already inside.
The air in the Temple was wrought from the stinging smell of odd, peppery herbs, coating the back of the throat with the pungent tang of green. Before us stood a crooked man with eyes of that green, set in deep hollows beneath wildly overgrown eyebrows, waiting to welcome us. We knew this was the Dollmaker and when he bade us, we followed him. At the end of a dark hall we reached a circular room with many shelf-like outcroppings, upon which rested a countless array of dolls, large and small. Dolls of children and adults mingled with dolls of monstrous things, semi-human and not at all. The shelves themselves and the walls beneath were laid with doll faces of myriad expression and specie in varying stages of decay, embedded in the rock.
My three companions and I were invited to take our places at the four lower points of a large stone table of seven in the center of the room. There were patterns that seemed to slither like tiny black snakes within it and engraved upon its polished surface was the seven-pointed puppetstar we had all come to know so well. We had been told of this place, the Temple built in the Dream with objects from the waking, the nexus of here and there. We had learned many of its sigils and its secrets and had been given over to mysterious missions as we practiced its ways, the ways of Vrt Lrh, in the waking and the Dream. I knew I had fulfilled all that had been asked of me. Of my companions, I cannot say.
An old gypsy woman draped in black and green, a withered woman we had all seen peddling her wares, wearing her pocketed apron filled with little dolls and bottles, served us small cups made of the same stone as the table, carved with tangles of weird worms like the urns outside. After which the Dollmaker and the Dollpeddlar stood at the upper points and turned their attention upon the altar. As the Dollmaker motioned for us to drink, I could see the clay packed beneath the long fingernails of his left hand.
The subtle fluid, I dare not say liquid, was imbibed in without question. Sailing like an ether breeze across the palate, glowing like swampgas, which it may well have been, perhaps mingled with the breath of whippoorwhills. We were told it was Dollsmilk, a gift from Vrt Lrh, whom we all wanted to know. I felt it moving through me like the vapor of some strong chemical, lacking the substance of either cold or hot.
Symbols were drawn upon the air and praise was given to Vrt Lrh, who rises and writhes in His Great Living City Beyond, to the Walldwellers who are the City and the Gateway, and to That which lurks within and watches from behind the eyes of dolls, having no eyes of Its own. And the eyes of dolls that appeared to be dumbly staring into some unknown space, now gained focus. Their masks of frozen, vacant expression slowly crumbled into intent, turning their necks like the slow creaking of a heavy door, upon us.
I stared back into those eyes of plastic and glass and paint and found it there, moving within them like some tarry intelligent gas, black, fluid, twinkling flatly. It almost seemed timid, but it traveled with a threatening swiftness. I felt beguiled to watch it, as if it were pulling at my eyes, at me somehow. Each doll it passed through began to whisper. A whispering I could hear from inside of me. They told me truths and they told me lies. They told me secret things, things about myself, about the past, the present and the future.
Some of the dolls began playing sweet clockwork music. A chaotic mesh of individual melodies that slowly began circling each other, spinning around each other, finding their place within each other until there was a singular humming, accented by crackling clicks and high pitched notes that tittered like children laughing backwards. Then the dolls, one by one, turned their attention away from us, to what was happening upon the circular altar in the center of our table, their whispers urging us to do the same.
Time acted as it should not, its order slipping into unreality. One moment we moved through langour, swimming in our own bodies and in the next instant were cranked through a teeth grinding barrage of events happening too fast, of words spoken too quickly. I could see the expressions of my companions shifting from the pride and honor of being here to agitation, nervousness and fear. I wondered to myself what it was that changed in them. Perhaps they were not expecting this, perhaps they did not like what they were being told, what they were seeing. Or maybe they felt uneasy with the way the Temple walls were moving, shadows writhing upon them, the shapes curling within them like pools of eels. I could sense in some of them a wish to never have come here. A foolish wish to make upon the puppetstar. It was too late for that. We had been invited here, had invited It here and our guest, our host was just arriving.
It grew before us upon the altar like curls of smoke, whipping about like mad tentacles, or some wriggling root system. Something resembling black mold began splotching the vapor as it extended a thick fleshy stalk, crowned by a black mass of shifting doll faces, something between tar and shadows, emerging and reabsorbed, crying, laughing, screaming, vomiting, whispering. Always the whispering.
In the presence of this holy incarnation of Vrt Lrh, the dolls of the Temple became excitedly animate. They jumped about and clapped and cheered and gnashed their tiny teeth. They fought and tore at each others clothes and kissed and bit and hit each other, raping and humping with their sexless bodies, cracking fragile hands and faces with tiny weapons. I saw a doll of a little girl that had been disrobed, revealing her naked, white muslin body and the strings attaching her porcelain head. She stabbed at herself again and again with a tiny knife, like a wind-up monkey banging cymbals, ripping and pulling out her mottled, purplish stuffing, shaking in deathless laughter.
Other dolls crawled across the floor, up the back of my chair and began gently pulling at little tufts of my hair, nibbling at my ears, whispering again and again a phrase of wisdom from my childhood. "A little boy who won't be good, might just as well be made of wood."
I understood. Eyes then opened within my eyes and I was allowed to see. And allowed to see through the ever changing eyes of Vrt Lrh I watched the transformations begin in my companions. But they did not embrace the change. The woman across from me screamed and cried and laughed beyond reason as she pulled the flesh from her skeleton like clay and piled it upon the altar, apparently unable to do anything else. The man beside me found his lips and tongue frozen, petrified. Unable to move his mouth with any more articulation than that of a ventriloquist's dummy, he uttered a frightened and senseless babble of "Mahb, maaahb, mab". The other had grabbed a doll and was sucking milk from its teat, becoming smaller and smaller.
Dolls had unbuttoned my shirt and I could feel them kissing my chest, running cold little tongues across my flesh and I did not move or try in any way to stop them. I felt my pants come down and little sucking mouths on my thighs, but too many, too close together.
I looked down to see that the dolls and even the table and the altar were gone. In their place, a groping mass of pulpy tentacles suctioned and entwined between my legs, some hidden orifice tugging at me hard, milking me, slithering inside of me. Its body like a bloated tick inside of a raisin, with countless faces writhing in its wrinkles.
And it spoke to me. It said "I am you."
I knew the response in an instant, knew that my companions had been given this riddle and failed. But I had learned the lesson they had not. The clockwork dollmusic became intensely loud and intricate as they traipsed around us, encircling us in a crazed, clacking jangle dance on sticky, black strings like the puppets they had become, like the puppets they always were. I gave the response in a whisper.
"And I am you."
The reverberation of words I was not sure I had spoken heralded the calm, the end of the maelstrom. Vrt Lrh had gone, Its laughter still ringing through the walls, shadows returned to their rightful order, all dolls returned to their shelves. My companions had left me. Only a pile of clay remained upon the altar.
I awoke, kneeling at the altar in my own room, staring down at the clay in my hands. I pushed my fingers into it, kneaded it and it sang to me of new life and what was expected of me. I am not to go to the City just yet, oh no. There are other, more pressing tasks that have fallen upon me.. The children of here and there anxiously await my first creation. I must not disappoint. I must convert others. I must become a Dollmaker. In His Name. Vrt Lrh demands it.

[The Black Ferris]

I have a room whereinto no one enters
Save I myself alone
There sits a blessed memory on a throne,
There my life centres

　　　　　　　　　.............C. Rossetti

[The Black Ferris]

When a doll offers you a rope, you have to wonder...

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote ( View Quotes )
Here and there scraps of debris hop about with no wind to guide them. These are the only things that seem to move in these streets, though there is a constant scraping noise that follows one's steps. If one pauses for a moment to look into a narrow space between buildings, something may be seen dragging itself along the ground, or perhaps it has already laid itself across the street, obstructing the way that leads out of the city. This figure is only that of a dead-eyed dummy; yet, when someone tries to step over the thing, its mouth suddenly drops open. At the time this is the best the city can do - a sham of menace that has no life and deceives no one.       Thomas Ligotti - “New Faces in the City” Added by: G. S. Carnivals on 06-17-2008 #272