Vital Realities: A Conversation with Thomas Ligotti

Vital Realities: A Conversation with Thomas Ligotti

Conducted by Jon Padgett, July 2014

JP: Your two new stories are—in differing ways—both highly personal in nature. What was the genesis of “Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People”?

TL: In the flap copy for The Spectral Link, I wrote in the third person that after having two surgeries in 2012, I became “revitalized” and wrote some new stories. That’s true in a shorthand way. The intent, of course, was to provide the stories with an intriguing background and suggest that they represented a tale of minor triumph. The full details behind “The Making of The Spectral Link” are less inspiring but perhaps more intriguing with respect to the origin of the book from the same anecdotal perspective, should anyone be interested. Since some of this information has appeared in posts of mine on Thomas Ligotti Online or in interviews with me, I’ll try not to elongate certain matters too much beyond the question about the genesis of “Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People,” the stories that make up the contents of The Spectral Link.

Specifically, my “revitalization” followed some days after I collapsed at home and was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. My brother, who made the call, tried to explain to the various parties involved in my transportation that the thing lying on the floor was in abdominal agony and had not, as they insisted, overdosed on his tranquilizing, mood stabilizing, and sleep-inducing medications. He also tried to explain that I had a history of such collapses due to a long-term dysfunction of my digestive system. The techs handling my inarticulate body didn’t believe him for a second. All the way to the hospital I tried to elaborate on the same information my brother gave them. But my words came out sounding like the incomprehensible groans of Boris Karloff in the 1931 version of Frankenstein. The tech who sat in the back with my gurney-bound form kept repeating that I had overdosed, while the tech driving the vehicle took his time getting to the hospital. He also didn’t see fit to engage his siren to clear a path through a four-lane highway clogged with traffic but scrupulously obeyed all the rules of the road, stopping at red lights and making no irregular lane changes. I think I even heard him whistling. I can only suppose that this was their style of handling actual cases of drug overdose. My brother drove fast and furiously alongside the EMU wagon and tried to get the tech to speed up and maybe turn on a few flashing lights. But the driver didn’t heed my brother’s gestures and the tech in the back kept preaching to me about how I had overdosed on my medications for a variety of psychological and emotional disorders, which in 2005 had finally disabled me from functioning as a self-supporting individual.

By the time we arrived at the emergency room of the hospital, I was in such pain that I couldn’t consider what the EMU techs may or may not have told whoever was there to meet us. They could have said that I had overdosed on my medications and just wanted to go bye-bye in a truck, a jaunt their company was pleased to provide for a high fee to Medicare and a lesser one to me. When I received their billing statement a month or so later, somehow I couldn’t find it in my heart to pay for services rendered and instead wrote the company a stern letter regarding the treatment I’d received at the hands of their employees.

All the clocks were striking noon when I began the daylong process of being diagnosed for what was very wrong with me. I can recall some details vividly, like lying on a gurney outside of the radiology department while I screamed for help or euthanasia, which only brought a nurse running to my side to inform me I could either be quiet or be expelled from the hospital. She’d taken sure measures before with screamers like me, and I believed her. What I can’t figure out is how the whole of one day had passed until I was wheeled in for “emergency” surgery in the wee hours of the next day. However, even though I was no more than a heap of messed up meat that hadn’t taken its medications that day, there still was a little voice in the back of my brain that every so often squeaked out a few words. The first of two most memorable squeaks was when the surgeon said to a vague figure in the background, “Your brother is a very sick man,” and then turned to me to inquire whom I wanted to appoint to make decisions for me in case I couldn’t make them for myself. “My brother,” said the little voice in the back of my brain. But I couldn’t say that. I could only raise my arm a little and point toward the vague figure in the background. The second most memorable occasion was when an anesthesiologist manifested himself and said, “My name is Dr. Blackstone.”

“Of course it is,” piped the little voice at the back of my brain.

After suffering pain I’d always hoped to die before I experienced, my first surgery began for what had revealed itself as a crisis of my colon. As it happened, I was never diagnosed as having diverticulosis, which led to an attack of diverticulitis that busted me up inside and caused poisonous fluids to leak from one part of my body into another. I heard the word “septic” before a mask was placed over my face and I lost consciousness, which wasn’t really consciousness by that time—it was just beeps and boops from something that didn’t know or care what it was or what would become of it, that no longer wanted anything, not even relief from the pain that by then had wholly consumed it.

After being slit open in a couple directions, I spent two days in ICU, ten more in a room with a view, and a couple more in a physical therapy slash nursing home because my Medicare money was running too low for me to stay in the hospital. I also became revitalized and a year later wrote two new stories.

Nobody knows for sure, but my explanation for my revitalization—which echoes that of others I sought out on the Internet—was that the traumatic events I had undergone swung me into the hypomanic phase of my bipolar disorder. A similar transformation occurred spontaneously and without trauma in 2002, when in a matter of seconds I went from suicidal anhedonia to hypomania. This lasted three weeks, during which I wrote “The Town Manager” and “Purity” in quick succession. Then I was thrown back into the black hole of bipolar depression—or major depressive disorder—or whatever descriptor seems to apply in my case—for another ten years. This time, however, my hypomanic state lasted over a year. I started playing guitar again, then writing new poems for the reprinted edition of Death Poems, and finally in early 2013 quickly completed “Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People.”

I think of myself as truly hypomanic only if I’m led to write. Otherwise, my moods are only slightly regulated by medication. This means that I’m agitated, anhedonic, and anxiety-ridden to some degree every day, aside from periods of lesser hypomania when I become sufficiently activated to do things like spend money I don’t have because, to give an example, I get it into my head that I absolutely need to replace the rug and linoleum in my condo with all-wood and slate floors. Before then, I never in my life had the least impulse to redecorate my living space except with shelves of books. Anyone who has read interviews with me has already been subjected to my true tales of emotional derangement, so this is information I regret repeating for their non-enjoyment.

Moving on, then, it seems obvious that “Metaphysica Morum” has its main source in my memory of the extraordinary pain preceding and following my first surgery. But I’d written about both physical and emotional trauma before my surgical episode of 2012. And the agony of physical pain is supposed to diminish in one’s consciousness over time. However, after I regained my faculties with a steady flow of hydromorphone through my system, I knew I would never forget the hurt to which I had been introduced. Of course, I realized that such a peak of physical pain was possible–for instance, by individuals with burn injuries or any number of diseases. I’d even seen people in extremis pass through a narrow tunnel made of razors to get to the light or nothingness at the end. I also knew that it was likely I would pass through a similar tunnel before my own demise, though for the most part I was preoccupied with enough emotional pain to keep such thoughts at bay. Even though my mood was elevated after my first surgery, I was still fearful of knowing horrible physical pain in the future. At present, if I could have the chance to be anesthetized to death I would jump at it without consideration for anyone else in my life.

As with many, if not most, of my stories, “Metaphysica Morum” is autobiography exaggerated.

The narrator of “Metaphysica Morum” harps on my euthanasia fantasy, except for him it is in connection with longstanding emotional problems having a source beyond the natural. For some people, all experiences of an intensity far surpassing that of ordinary life provoke a need for expression. Another dimension or level of reality opens up, and they begin ranting to a purpose. A few may propound visions as in the biblical Book of Revelation, horrible visions whose author must have felt an insatiable need to make believable and find credence in his readers. Some believe these visions and give them credence; others do not. Which of these postures is assumed could not possibly concern the scribbler of these visions. He has seen. That is enough. This is the state of the narrator of “Metaphysica Morum” and conveying such a state, as I’ve said in interviews and essays, is what supernatural horror fiction does better than any other kind of literature.

I’ve written things in the wake of a previous work, and I think “The Small People” was one of them. It really hit me all at once, and I barely had to think about it either structurally or thematically. “Metaphysica Morum” derived straight from my hospital episode and “The Small People” indirectly. After writing the former story, I was still in an elevated mood from my surgeries. And if I could keep writing, I thought I could keep my elevated mood alive. And only in an elevated mood can I write about the worst. Only in a good mood can I reflect upon what’s in store for me, such as the hospital episode, without fear of overwhelming my consciousness. Only in a good mood can I think about my existence or existence itself without thinking about wanting to be euthanized by anesthesia. I believe this is how it is for many people, though I can’t say how many, and if I claim it is a great many then I would be derided by those for whom this is not how it is. In any case, I think it’s safe to say that the carryover from my hospital episode was more literal in “Metaphysica Morum” than in “The Small People.”

The basis for both stories, however, was an incredible sense of alienation I felt following my surgeries, the sense of a reality that could not be denied, a vivid reminder of my already pessimistic view of life, and even an expansion of that view due to my experience of literally unbearable physical pain. I had known long-term physical pain before, but this was different somehow. Essentially, though, that pain ultimately made me feel more myself than ever, both emotionally and cognitively. I couldn’t look away any longer from what I once named “the nightmare of the organism,” despite my elevated mood. It was like the phenomenon of always being aware of my heart beating that goes with having panic-anxiety disorder, which is the state I inhabited while writing almost all of my stories. All in all, it seemed I was even less a part of the world’s prevailing sense of the real than I was before. This was not an unfamiliar feeling for me, but it was massively revitalized after the traumatic events of the hospital episode. What kind of world was I living in that could avert its eyes from the most significant realities such as those I had recently confronted? On the other side of the curtain between us in our room, there was an elderly man who was surrounded all day by an animated family. Along with his doctor, they wanted him to get out of the bed where he lay dormant to begin dialysis, something that numerous people refuse every day. Ask Art Buchwald. Apparently, the hospital could do nothing for him if he continued in his stubborn way and would have to discharge him. It seemed to me, who never spoke to or saw him but knew the names of his family members, that he had utterly lost the will to live and wanted nothing more than to lie in a morphine-induced delirium all day and watch marathon showings of Cheers at full volume all night. I can’t say if he desired euthanasia by anesthesia, but I thought it wouldn’t have been a great evil if such an option were available to him and acceptable to the world of his animated family, which was blatantly living in a different world from the one he lived in. Why couldn’t the whole world accept vital realities in the same way that the presence of a bidet in a bathroom illustrates an acceptance of the realities of human hygiene?

For eight months before my second operation, I had to wear a colostomy bag. And I have to say I wore it well. I can understand why some people prefer the bag to the second operation, which no ostomate welcomes for a variety of reasons, not least that it won’t work and you’ll wake up from surgery with the bag still in place. When my colon was reattached to my rectum, the bag was gone. But I still needed to prove that the operation was fully successful, and the only proof that could be accepted was to demonstrate that I could evacuate my bowels in a relatively normal manner. This was more difficult than it sounds, since I hadn’t eaten or drunk liquids for four days, and there wasn’t much inside me to show that I was in need of a bidet. But there were no special accommodations to facilitate this maneuver at the time of night or day when I might be able to do so. There were no special instructions except what I read on ostomy Web sites, where so many good and kind people who were worse off than I was advised others concerning the most discomfiting realities—but only because they could not be ignored. We ignore what we can for as long as we can. But at any time the day of reckoning may come, and for some people it comes quite often.

The logistics of my situation are hard to explain, particularly since I couldn’t use the bathroom because I was sucking tubes. Nevertheless, I had to reach a stage where I could declaim, “Behold the stool.” After my hospital episode there were things that I could no longer ignore, that I didn’t know about at all because who can tolerate or take in the full range of vital realities? Not me.

I wanted to keep my elevated mood alive by writing “The Small People” and maybe something else after that. But my elevated mood began to dissolve, and I was fortunate to have the assistance of an excellent person to help me during the editorial and production stages of The Spectral Link. All in all, I have to say that 2012 and the first three months of 2013 was the best time I’d had since I developed a case of shingles that lasted throughout 2009, during which period I became addicted to hydrocodone. (Narcotics are the only type of drug I’ve found that come close to acting as an anti-depressant.) Hence, “The Small People,” which, as I wrote with respect to this story in the flap copy for The Spectral Link, has something to do with my “fixation on uncanny representations of the so-called human being.” Moreover: “Having nearly ceased to exist on the surgeon’s table, the imposing strangeness of the nature and vicissitudes of this life form once again arose in [my] imagination.” And it really did. Maybe this more detailed account of the events leading up to composition of the stories in The Spectral Link really will be found intriguing. Maybe it will even attach itself to the book in the minds of its readers, though this isn’t necessary in the least. But what happened to me and what came of it are definitely attached in my mind.

JP: I’d like to explore what you call those “biblical Book of Revelation” style visions found in “Metaphysica Morum” – specifically via the singular dream phrases/terminology of the narrator in “Metaphysica Morum”: the repetition of “chain of galaxies showroom,” “an all-new context,” “metaphysical mutant(s),” “dream occasions”; the use of ‘fix you/me up” (not to mention the menacing “Dealer” ); various riffs on “demoralized” and “demoralization.” How were these ideas generated and how did they help advance the plot and clarify/intensify the story’s ultimate point?

TL: Okay, I’m going to outline the plot-level design of “Metaphysica Morum” as it might be seen by a reader familiar with Lovecraft’s fiction, which is not to say I was consciously attempting a Lovecraftian tale but only that I think my story contains interesting narrative and thematic parallels to such an effort. To start: The narrator suffers from what seems a severe depression that makes him desire the most easeful possible death, at least to my mind and experience, and that would be euthanasia by anesthesia. In fact, however, his condition reflects the workings of greater forces through him, metaphysical forces like those associated with the monstrous beings in Lovecraft’s Mythos stories, which, once understood, lead to the revelation that the actual reality of one’s life or of human life in general is a nightmare. Examples: “Arthur Jermyn” (“Life is a hideous thing” ), “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (unknown to himself until the story’s end, the narrator is a Deep One, which he ultimately comes to terms with, but which still seems rather awful to the reader, or to most readers I would hope), “The Call of Cthulhu” (“The most merciful thing in the world I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” ), “The Shadow out of Time” (in which the narrator’s mental illness turns out to be revelatory of how the human race figures in time and space), “At the Mountains of Madness” (in which the findings of an archeological expedition become revelatory of how the human race figures in time and space), and so on. These forces are shadowy in my story because I don’t do monsters from outer space or wherever. Nevertheless, they are similar to the Lovecraft stories I cited because they are inimical to a tolerable vision of human life, specifically as they relate to its moral aspect, both in the sense of “morale” and in any conception of good and evil, these being based in a construct of human life that is alien to me. Should that truth be discovered, the false or faulty view of reality that is fundamental to the general well-being of humanity would crumble.

Like a Lovecraft character, the narrator of “Metaphysica Morum” finds out that his demoralization is not restricted to him alone—it’s connected to the truth of the universe itself, as well as the fact that it’s trending toward a wholesale rearrangement of what human beings perceive as the world, an acceptably accommodating place for most people where things have a meaning peculiar to us and the majority of our species are probably happy souls—ask any practitioner of positive psychology—or believe in the prospect of becoming so. The narrator both reflects and is instrumental in bringing this horrific rearrangement due to his being a “metaphysical mutant” born into a line of such beings—like the Deep Ones—whose unearthly nature is evident in the letter the narrator receives from one of them. In the letter it’s explained that a family member named Clem can draw other people into his dreams (“Sometimes you don’t even know you’re in there until a zombie or suchlike comes after you or the planets start moving in funny ways” ). There’s a cosmic aspect to the universal upheaval that is signaled by the derangement of the narrator and his kinfolk, a time when the curtain will be pulled back on reality so that all may see and feel the beginning of eons in which those who are not already demoralized by the nightmare of human existence will become so by moral necessity, so to speak. In the meantime, they can live as “self-blinded earth-gazers like little Augie Derleth,” as Lovecraft wrote of his friend, who went on to depict a moralist, quasi-religious view of Lovecraft’s Mythos instead of the view Lovecraft wanted to promulgate: Cosmos equals an amalgam of the intriguingly weird and the soul-shattering.

All the words and phrases you list, as well as the role of the Dealer and the dreamworld in which he communicates with the narrator, are my attempts to illuminate the plot I’ve described, although in an admittedly more abstruse and oblique manner than Lovecraft, who is no longer as abstruse and oblique as he was considered by many in his lifetime. Lovecraft’s later stories convey his maddening practice of telegraphing their endings and revelations so that no one could possibly mistake what exactly transpires in a given narrative or what it means. That’s the influence writing for Weird Tales had on him, and he suspected this was so. His earlier stories aren’t written that way. None of them make you want to rip every adverb from them, as do his post-1926 works. It was during this time that Lovecraft, as he wrote in one or more of his letters, expressed his desire to write about the play of great forces in the universe rather than embody these as monsters described in tedious detail. The later works are the ones critics mean when they speak of what a bad writer Lovecraft was. Then again, with certain writers, and Lovecraft was one of them, there is always room for controversy, because great works are not always written with great style. Think of the poems of Thomas Hardy. “The horror, the horror.”

JP: You also recently had another book released, Born to Fear, a compilation of many of your interviews to date. In the book’s Introduction, Matt Cardin—the book’s editor (and an exceptional author/thinker in his own right)—states that you have, “… turned the act of being interviewed into a kind of philosophical art form of its own.” I agree. And your responses are as surprising and brutally honest as they are entertaining. What do you look for when you read an interview? What makes for a great one? What makes for a disappointing one?

TL: I’m an addict of literary interviews from way back. My bookshelves contained many single-author collections of interviews and all the books of interviews collected from The Paris Review, which to varying degrees I found of interest, possibly because the responses sound crafted and thoughtful, not off the cuff chit-chat. Interviews over the phone or in live settings seem to be what they are: public relations. In such situations, the interview subject too-often speaks in an amiable, colloquial style. Even excellent writers may give such interviews, and in those cases one gets the feeling that they just aren’t trying. The ones who do try and succeed, though, are awesome. One of those is Fran Lebowitz, who stopped writing long before she began her career as a celebrity—and a judge on the TV show Law & Order—who is unafraid to offend people and voices her ideas in a captivating manner. As an ex-writer, the interview has become the only genre of expression for her, and she practices it well—talking fast, smart, and impudently. I envy people who have the nerve and the talent to talk this way in public, which is stupid, because I know that if I had this talent I would take it for granted and not see any point to putting it into practice except as a source of income. Someone once said that Lovecraft spoke like an encyclopedia. I love interviews in which the subject speaks the way a good encyclopedia reads, or even the way a good story, however you conceive such a thing, reads from line one. It conveys the feeling that the interview subject has already thought about his or her responses to questions they haven’t yet been asked. Sidenote: I also like the way Lebowitz dresses, which is somewhat in the style of the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, whom I’ve seen debate Slavoj Žižeck in Youtube videos. Žižeck is easily the worst attired philosopher in the world, and the contrast between him and Lévy is gut-busting, to coin a phrase germane to something that actually happened to me. You wouldn’t think that someone who is presently agitated to the point of wanting to rip the skin off his face would comment on how people garb themselves, or about anything at all. But if you’re trying to be a good interview subject, you have to risk believability and credence.

The one big problem I had with the interviews in The Paris Review is that the editors hardly ever chose subjects who interested me. It was uncanny. I can’t fault them for not interviewing the kind of exotic writers that I’ve named as favorites of mine in my own interviews. But they almost invariably interviewed writers who held no interest for me, especially among American writers. I had a similar problem, and it was my problem, with the fiction published by The New Yorker, which nevertheless did publish many of the best writers outside of the metafictionists from the 1960s through the 1980s. A conspicuous example for me was Ann Beattie, who appeared in The New Yorker practically every other week. I still ended up saying, “Huh?” at the end of almost all the stories in The New Yorker, which is renowned for publishing such stories. While waiting for my car to be repaired not long ago, I picked up a recent copy of The New Yorker and checked out a story published there. Although the writer of the story was known for highly imaginative genre fiction, his story was a “huh” story written in the typical beige New Yorker style, which some writers use quite well. And if I’d never read hundreds of New Yorker stories, I probably wouldn’t have seen the usefulness of writing in the first-person present or the value of ending a story that might cause the reader to erupt with a “huh” at the end.

Aside from Lebowitz, the two names that instantly come into my head as great interview subjects are Vladimir Nabokov, whose interviews were collected as Strong Opinions, and William S. Burroughs, whether the interviewers were in magazines or books like The Job. Burroughs didn’t always express ideas that caught my fancy, but he killed with his self-revelations (the worst regrets and most lurid aspects of his life), depth of thought on things most people don’t think about (creepy mutations he speculated human beings would undergo in the future or under certain conditions, opinions on more dreadful aspects of social and political goings on, including the demonization of drugs and various sons of bitches in power), and his natural talent as a comic writer who could speak in dialects drawn from the lowest to the highest levels of our favorite species—us.

Nabokov was probably the only major writer who was unkind to many classic authors such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, calling them, as I recall, “dwarves or plaster saints” when compared to Franz Kafka, although I think this phrase turned up in a television production in which Christopher Plummer plays Nabokov giving a lecture on “The Metamorphosis.” I sometimes agreed with him and sometimes didn’t. For instance, I think that “The Metamorphosis” makes for painful reading, and the fact that the story featured a bug without doubt drew Nabokov the entomologist to Kafka’s novella. He made a fine case for what he considered the aesthetic structure of the story, as he does in many of his lectures on various literary works he favored, but in both his lectures and interviews the aesthetic design of a story amounted to indirect self-praise for his own nattily constructed works—not that this praise wasn’t warranted or highly instructive. Above all, since Nabokov’s interviews were all written and not spontaneous, as were his lectures, he put on a three-ring circus of laughs in doling out his strong opinions. One thing I miss in Nabokov’s interviews, though, is that he doesn’t speak of death or suffering in connection with his life. He does so indirectly, but mostly when he’s talking about the destruction of his idyllic family life with the rise of the Soviet Union. It’s as if he had vowed to himself that he was never going to let the Soviets see him cry. Such a show of ego can be a trait of either very good or very bad interviews. I suppose the common trait of the three interview subjects I’ve named is courage, self-assuredness, and an unconcern with mass mores and morality. Supremely, they possess the quality of being one of a kind. Most writers are plenty of a kind.

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