Notes: The Frolic

From Anima Mundi: On Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer

I organise my dreams by the encroachments of certain objects. In my earliest memories of dreaming, the revelation of horror would precede or accompany my stumbling upon a shepherd’s crook hooked on a banister or leaning on a door. From twenty-four, recovering from soul-death in a fairylitten flat defaced with presbyteral sketches and chapter diagrams, I was welcomed into bed by Aphrodite, garbed in marble. Her sculpture watched a window I knew only by the moonlight on her skin. But there was never a moon, and there was rarely a shepherd.

“The Frolic” is the first story in every edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, beginning the section entitled “Dreams for Sleepwalkers,” the first and largest panel of an uncloseable triptych. Dr. David Munck and his wife Leslie drink together while their young daughter Norleen sleeps upstairs. David has uprooted his family to the placid town of Nolgate to assume the role of prison psychologist at the state penitentiary. Leslie, at once bored of her quiet life and troubled by the prison’s ever-lengthening shadow, hopes to use this night to tease away at—till now, subtle—signs of David’s disenchantment. (And there is something licentious in Leslie’s calculated doting, her playing wife.) In the course of her prying, she discovers that her husband has been unsettled by a series of encounters with a nameless patient–inmate: a child murderer convicted as John Doe. As Leslie is made privy to the private Neverland where Doe conducts his “frolicking,” the word he uses to refer to his imaginative play, Norleen snuggles a stuffed Bambi in her bedroom, and an Aphrodite sculpture, languorously poised before a window in the living room, regards the ceiling with blind eyes.

There is a tendency when writing about horror to permit the mechanics of a story—i.e., the writer’s handling of the technologies of fiction—to obscure its content. Genre is a machine for dreaming; inputs (our cognitive impressions) are converted into outputs (other planets) through a system of gears, accounting for the unplanned but not intractable infringements of the succubine or the diabolique. Nonetheless, it is appropriate to be upset by horror, especially when innocence (and playfulness) is violated. We would not want a hair on Norleen’s head to be disturbed, and the crooked hatstand in the corner of her bedroom (the coat in your cloakroom that prevents the door from closing) makes our allegiance to the child frightful even to ourselves. In spite of our sins, we are most troubled by the light, the goodness we were unable to stifle.

Innocence is precious because the nascent paradise of our procreant impulse is untainted, for the shortest time, by spiteful and libidinal programming instructions. But playfulness per se is self-subverting; it describes the mode by which disparate entities are juxtaposed and possibilities proliferate; among the nuths and gnoles and Robingoodfellowes who caper and cavort between white statues hung with thorns are personalities for whom pleasure and agony are different shades of gold, who entrust themselves to an aesthetics of play, and who are impatient to involve you in their game.

The blandness and the blamelessness of our two central and characters, Leslie and David, along with the various trappings of plush domesticity in the 1980s—ice buckets and fashion magazines, a birthday television set in little Norleen’s bedroom—set “The Frolic” apart from the rest of the collection. The story, first published in the Spring edition of Fantasy Tales, 1982 (vol. 5, #9), was neither Ligotti’s first published (that would be “The Chymist” (1981), also collected in Songs) nor first written (“The Last Feast of Harlequin,” collected in Grimscribe (1991)). We may assume its placement at the beginning of Songs serves an aesthetic and/or broader narrative purpose (though personally, I struggle to untangle sequences of colours from sequences of events). As the first movement in a series of dreams (or one extended dream, on my preferred reading), “The Frolic” introduces themes that will be developed and recapitulated throughout the collection—dolls, diminutives, and dream geography—but operates, ideasthestically, as a lavish antechamber to a cluttered maze—a map generated procedurally from the data of a derelict clothing store and a miniature theatre, glittering with phosphenes where one might displace a mannequin or brush against a curtain, and interspersed with pockets of miraculous clarity. In this living-room-cum-waiting-area, in whose walls there is somewhere an ugly little door, Leslie and David (who are neither warm nor cold) enact an exchange between a young married couple at the behest of an omniscient, intrusive narrator. The subject of their exchange is where our interest is drawn; we know that John Doe is approaching (for we know how machines dream). But we will find few opportunities to contemplate mundane human psychology elsewhere in this series; let’s us spirits linger here on these well-vacuumed carpets. Ignore the little door.

The Muncks are possessed of neither cruelty nor imaginative fertility; their “playfulness” is circumscribed by their social intelligence. Leslie’s instrumentalising of her role as “wife” is explicable within the boundaries of ordinary human behaviour. Her motivations are transparent and sympathetic (and would be so even without the uncomfortable pealing and prodding of an overly familiar narrator). David’s acceptance of his job at the state prison, though an act of hubris on his own post hoc assessment, seems to have been born of a simple and sincere desire to do good. He is, importantly, “no aesthete of pathology,” which is to say that he has limited access to his own profession outside of the social circuit; he wants to effect some improvement, not to study and conceptualise as one with a more refined aesthetic–systematic sensibility might seek to study and conceptualise the behaviours of entities within some other formal system. To the extent that Leslie and David have a playful dimension, they access it by regressing into previous, more “frolicsome” phases of their relationship; David suggest that he and Leslie “get drunk and fool around” at a moment in their conversation where the tension has abated and it becomes apparent that our couple’s interests are aligned; despite their years of marriage, their mutual attraction is enacted in the spirit of embarrassed adolescent exploration, enabled by the brassy weight and grazed and goading lights of insobriety. There is comfort in the pantomime of misbehaviour, and this is something our omniscient narrator, breathing on the windowglass and drawing smiley faces, incorporates into his own game. The following sentences are from the opening paragraph of “The Frolic” (and thus of Songs of a Dead Dreamer):

Their daughter Norleen was upstairs asleep, or perhaps she was illicitly enjoying an after-hours session with the new television she’s received on her birthday the week before. If so, her violation went undetected by her parents in the living room, where all was quiet.

The first thing that strikes us is Ligotti’s use—via our discarnate witness—of the word “violation” to convey a very minor misdeed. Though David might be lacking in aesthetic sensitivity, our narrator understands a system as being vulnerable to violence—to being trespassed upon. There is, on my count, a three-fold irony: irony 1—reread the middle clause of the second sentence quoted above; irony 2—the narrator is participating in the kind of play our flagitious nuths and gnoles delight in, disrupting eggshell sentences with red words proper to bubbling paint, and thus the prose itself exceeds and parodies David and Leslie’s “fooling around”; irony 3—the narrator’s ironising of our couple’s interactions and their “beautiful home in a beautiful part of town” is itself a “violation” of their privacy and dignity—a peculiar accusation in the context of fiction, but one which may be raised in light Ligotti’s out-of-character endeavour to portray, on first reading, an obtrusively ordinary couple, whose verisimilitude is the uncanny intervention in a story narrated by a strutting ghoul (one who naturally transcends representation but whom we might imagine creamy white and with very long shins). These are the dynamics at play; the museum-perfection of the setting twinkles with the terrible lucidity of seabeams, and John Doe, “a demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm,” subordinates himself first to the swells of a malignant intellect and a designer of games; his way has been prepared for him.

So much, then, already, for our domestic scene. In stories that involve some kind of doorway into Hell, it hardly seems to matter upon which side of the door we’re standing. In Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris (2022), the following passage, in which the duplicated Alice or Alicia Western, a topos theorist of superfluous imagination, recounts “a sort of waking dream,” is reminiscent of Ligotti’s thesis:

…I had no reason to believe that what I saw did not exist and that if the realm was unknown to us that didn’t make it less threatening but more.

What was the dream? Or the vision or whatever it was.

I saw through something like a Judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me.

Something terrible.

Yes. A being. A presence. And that the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge.

There is no description of the thing beyond the gate that one could give without destroying its allure, and it is allure with which we are most taken—the displacement of an object from its symptoms by whatever abides the ink. McCarthy, fully embracing the role of “elevated weird fiction author” in his final years (a distinction he shares with Borges and Nabokov), permits Alice/Alicia an intimation of the Ligottian Anima Mundi, dramatised as “a presence beyond the gate” which, despite its separation from ourselves, is nonetheless running its fingers on our wires. The most straightforward resolution to this paradox comes from the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, who, in The Last Messiah (1933), a text frequently cited by Ligotti, wrote of the night in a bygone time where “man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under the cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought. Wonder above wonder, horror above horror, unfolded in his mind.”[1] And yet “despite his eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into and subordinated to its blind laws…he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena…He comes to matter as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him.” In Zapffe, we, by the miracle of consciousness, are abstracted from Nature; thus, we float like yellow fairies over geoglyphs reflected in facets of our compound eyes. Worse, our “creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death,” and we see that even there, there is no sanctuary because with fire come the faces beyond firelight. Alice/Alicia’s gate, in this manner conceived, marks the discontinuity between dreamer and dreamed, and we are on the side where language jumbles on the page and shepherds tap on windows with their long black nails. If this disappoints you, it is because you misconceive φύσις as native to the dream and not the dreamer. Combining Zapffe and Mcarthy, most “elude this baleful thing” of which they have no knowledge by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” We drink or we anchor ourselves in routine or we write weird fiction in an imbecilic parody of mathematical physics, launching a million fatuous assaults on the gate and expecting to be repelled.

More interesting than the gate are its sentinels; indeed, their purpose is to enforce this conclusion. One of the puzzles in Stella Maris is the relationship between the thing beyond the Gate, which Alice/Alicia calls “the Archatron,” and her “Horts” or “cohorts,” the ragtag troupe whom no one else can see and who have bothered her since puberty. The defective nature of their ringmaster, “the Kid,” i.e., “the Thalidomide Kid,” who shares his name with the protagonist of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, implies a link between the incarcerators of the Archatron and the insensible natives of the unconscious—that is, impressions of personages, characters as-yet-unformed, who linger on the carpet and await their portion of McCarthy’s νοῦς (the pneumatic operation of their “coming to be”). We call them sentinels because, in their promise of mystery, their purpose is to keep us in the dream; they’re spider hiders, guides to our composing riddles. Further, in the context of Stella Maris and her brother novel, The Passenger, the apparent irreconcilability of both halves of story calls both the enterprise of writing fiction and the world that we inhabit into question, eliding them.

In its relationship to Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Stella Maris provides us with a key. David and Leslie are not sentinels; they are components of the gate, an ordinary man and woman carved into the bluestones of a megalithic tomb; our dreamer’s sentinel is John Doe, a killer with neither name, physical description, nor voice of his own, and of whom we learn only through the hieroglyphs on David’s stone. He is as much a character as the question forming within manacled Andromeda: “Black water, blacker still?” Every claim Doe makes of himself gestures away from himself and towards the landscape he inhabits, along with whosoever moves and thinks behind the glass of grimy windows in the crooked homes on tilted streets in this degenerate little town. As David relates:

His psychosis has evidently bred an atrocious fairyland which exists in a powerful way for him. And despite the demented grandeur of his thousand names, he actually sees himself as only a minor figure in this world—a mediocre courtier in a broken-down kingdom of miracles and horrors. This modesty is very interesting when you consider the egotistical magnificence that a lot of psychopaths would attribute to themselves given a limitless imaginary orbit where they could play any imaginary role…There’s actually quite a poetic geography to his interior dreamland as he describes it. He talked about a place that sounded like a cosmos of crooked houses and littered alleys, a slum among the stars. Which may be his distorted rendering of a life spent growing up in a shabby neighborhood—an attempt on his part to recast the traumatic memories of his childhood into a realm that crossbreeds a mean-street reality with a fantasy world of his imagination, a phantasmagoric mingling of heaven and hell. This is where he does his ‘frolicking’ with what he calls his ‘awestruck company.’ The place where he took his victims might possibly have been an abandoned building, or even an accommodating sewer. I say this based on his repeated mentioning of ‘the jolly river of refuse’ and ‘the jagged heaps in shadows,’ which could certainly be mad transmutations of a literal wasteland, some grubby and secluded environment that his mind turned into a funhouse of bizarre marvels. Less fathomable are his memories of a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won’t remain still, a stairway that’s broken in a very strange way, though this last one fits in with the background of a dilapidated slum. There is always a paradoxical blend of forsaken topographies and shining sanctuaries in his mind…

The claustral fantasies of Johnathan Doe pervade the collection. In “Vastarien,” the final story in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, the realm described in Victor Keirion’s “delirious bible” is a reflection of John Doe’s “interior dreamland,” the court sought by the aesthete and inhabited by mannequins. “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech,” a nest of sentences escaped from other of Ligotti’s tales, could take place within the same star-nestled slum where Doe conducts his frolicking. And, as if to make explicit what had been implicit in his earlier work, this degenerate little town would go on to be the subject of Ligotti’s 2001 collaboration with Current 93 (to whom we will return below), where is it presented as the transcendental structure to which all creation owes its nature. This landscape of crooked streets and broken stairwells recalls the senseless sentences of dreams—androgynous monsters, footless, handless, many even without mouths, rename themselves whatever version you believe is an unforgeable demonstration of submission to the ruling cooks (block all like a wound in a worm—Tongue! [to the tune of a computer error—fDm])—which share and washed out greys and greens and vascular surfaces of early 3D videogames. This aesthetic of disjointedness is distinct from the three-panel pronouncements of McCarthy’s Kid (two wrongs don’t make a riot) but the difference is one of delineation within the space of human thought, not one of the generative mechanism; the Kid cannot progress far beyond clang associations because his thinking lacks the aesthetic constraints necessary to produce poetry; Doe is disordered but he has a colour palette—the seawater blacks of gaping alleyways which precede, accommodate, and stimulate his frolicking.

As to the major figures in this world, our only candidate is the omniscient–intrusive narrator, whom I will henceforth call the “Anima Atramenti.” (I am rising from my keyboard to tuck my dufflecoat behind the cloakroom’s inside handle). Others will make themselves apparent later in the text. As to Doe’s compatriots, his methods of evasion produce small tears in the canvas.

“…I asked him in a casually interested sort of way where he was from.”

“‘No place,’ he replied like a psychopathic simpleton.

“‘No place,’ I probed.

“‘Yes, precisely, Herr Doktor. I’m not some snob who puts on airs and pretends to emanate from some high-flown patch of geography. Ge-og-ra-phy. That’s a funny word. I like all the languages you have.’

“‘Where were you born?’ I asked in another brilliant alternate form of the question.

“Which time do you mean, you meany?’

Doe’s multiplicitous nativity, as with his thousand names, invites us to look for him in every mirrored cabinet. But we are pre-empted by the text, which counsels us against looking for Doe beyond the injured page. David assures Leslie that prisoners of Doe’s kind do not escape in the normal course of things; they bounce off the walls but never over them. But to whom are these words intended as a comfort? Leslie, we are told, in her mounting anxiety, conceives those same walls as being “rather papery.” It is a further irony that neither David nor Leslie will be proven wrong; the problem is their own condition is—you will forgive me—“rather papery.” They inhabit the imaginal–physical substratum within which Doe’s actions are decided by luminiferous ink, the limitless substance of limited things.

Being the imminence of an exceptionally nasty revelation, Doe is most himself in the condition of approach; like the shadow in a nightmare that diverts itself into your path, what frightens is at once the violation of our faith in nature and the suspicion that this violation is ours to receive; that is, that the promises of the security system on which our salubrity is founded were always a setup to a punchline. While David is relating his encounter with Doe, Leslie comments on the closeness of his John Doe impression to the real thing. But how could she know? She has never heard Doe speak, and Doe, with no singular affect, has no voice to call his own. Nevertheless, she knows him, as she knows the movements of a clockwork toy that nobody has wound. Doe cannot not escape his prison, and nor would he want to. He is a particular creation of the dreamer—the fantasist in fantasy, possessed and possessing.

So where else might he have been? Who lives in the mirrors in his memories of moonlit corridors? In the final episode of the fanatically celebrated first season of the Nic Pizzolato’s True Detective, entitled “Form and Void,” the serial killer Errol Childress, in his doll-crammed, dilapidated country home, announces his ascension “from the disc and the loop” in an accent that clashes with his teeth. In a series that might best be understood as a kind of anti-Weird Fiction polemic, where the allure of Robert Chambers’ foundational short-story quartet (the first four stories in The King in Yellow (1895)) is exploited then dismissed as a distraction from an all-too-human sexual–sadistic predilection, Childress is frightening up until we meet him, whereupon Glenn Fleshler’s flitting between accents seems perfunctory, as do his character’s dolls. Still, his honeycomb psychology and seared eyes betray him as an iteration of John Doe, whose pellucidity captures Pizzolato’s Geneviève in newly milk-white enveloping foam (and Pizzolato’s stealing from other of Ligotti’s works makes this connection too apparent to ignore).

Serial killer–shamans are spent cartridges. They are the vectors through which the Outside acts, or through which the Inside alienates itself from us. The “John Doe” of David Fincher’s variously brown Se-seven-en (1995) subordinates himself to a pseudo-Christian deity, and though his cosmology lacks the eccentricity of our Doe’s post-industrial Kingdom of Voor, he, like Ligotti’s character, arrives in the story without history, having read the whole script backwards from the end. More recently, the eponymous doll-maker in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs (2024)—a film in which an autistic FBI agent is hesitantly approached on several occasions by a large goat—indulges in some post-intentional-capture accent-flipping, and the project grants us insight into how Ligotti’s mind might work if he had spent his childhood breakfasting on pencil lead. Longlegs participates in a convoluted aesthetic project involving familicide and memory-supressing dolls at the behest of a demon who wants to draw a triangle on a calendar. Though Longlegs lacks the naivety (real or feigned) or Ligotti’s character (his is the work that “gets dirty as it cleans”), his violence is nonetheless supplanted by the brilliance of his instructions, and the explicitly Satanic nature of his project, along with the aforesaid instability of affect, puts us in mind of unclean spirits and the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1–20)—of the Devil as a cloud of flies and borrower of costumes.

Truer to Doe’s nature—and in keeping with this theme of possession—is the character of “Simon” in Brad Anderson’s Session 9 (2001), a rare example of a Ligottian film. (There is an adaptation of “The Frolic” which I have hitherto pretended does not exist, have not seen, and will henceforth continue to ignore.) “Simon” is the malignant personality of Mary Hobbes, a fictional DID patient at the non-fictional Danvers State Hospital, Massachusetts (a likely inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanatorium). Through a series of session recordings unearthed by a member of the asbestos abatement crew assigned to the now-defunct asylum, we learn that the young Hobbes, puppetted by Simon, murdered her family on Christmas night. Simon is not an invention of Hobbes; the revelation that the owner of the asbestos abatement company, one Gordon Fleming, has himself been introduced to Simon (seemingly on setting foot in the asylum) and has erased his memories of violence dealt by Simon to his wife and baby, raises the question of entity’s daemonic character—what illuminates of chaos magic would likely describe as the properties or complexity, recurrence, and autonomy localised within human cognition, perhaps belonging to the shadows thrown by some filamentous latrodecteract. The audio recordings from Hobbes’ therapy sessions, where Simon, who is first a voice, arrives like bruising on a chesspiece, recall David’s conversations with John Doe; there is no Simon to whom we can point; there only is imminence, impression, and aftermath. The influence of “The Frolic” is most strongly felt in Session 9’s handling of identity, whereby the operations of the body are not the effects of a singular operator. I come again to David’s impression of Doe, where he speaks as if animated by a different soul such that it surprises and unsettles his wife, who, despite never meeting Doe, is nonetheless familiar with his mark on the ψυχή. David himself, in a different context, indicates some awareness of his own dividing; despite his claim to be “no aesthete of pathology,” he is nonetheless self-conscious of his “psychologist’s detachment,” admitting to Leslie that he finds his conversations with Doe “clinically stimulating” and commenting, as we saw above, on the “poetic geography” of his patient’s imagination. Here, my inner Epicurean occultist drips fresh ink into my pupils: if multiple Davids can run simultaneously on the same substratum, could John Doe, through the transmission of his fantasies, copy himself onto David such that he, or another of his avatars, might assume control?

David paused. From the expression on his face, he seemed to be contemplating a thousand thoughts at once, as if he were engaged in some frantic, rummaging search within every cell of his brain.

“What’s the matter, David? Leslie asked, her voice weakening.

“I’m not sure exactly. It’s as if I know something and don’t know at the same time.”

I entertain the possibility then discard it. (We are being turned away from Alice/Alicia’s gate.) But these questions of identity (and perhaps more pertinently of duality) obtain. David is husband and psychologist. Leslie is both David’s wife and self-consciously playing the part. Their home is beautiful and modern, “not a broken-down hole in the wall hovel where the wind gets in through ancient attic boards and warped window frames,” though perhaps this is how Doe would see it. And this theme of duality finds its darkest (though, at the same time, its most merciful) expression in the violence dealt to Norleen’s Bambi when David finds she has been taken from her bed.

Alone on the bed was the stuffed animal, torn, its soft entrails littering the mattress. Now stuffed inside, blooming like a flower, was a crumpled piece of paper.

The note, which is written in both neat italic script and a child’s scrawl, reads as follows:

Dr. Monk…We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alley of paradise, in the dank and windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums…my awestruck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon. Jonathan Doe.

In emphasising the affinity between Norleen and the stuffed toy, Ligotti transfers the violence on the page to Norleen’s avatar, sparing himself and his readers an account of Norleen’s violation without turning his face from the horror—or, worse still, aggressing on the logic of his discipline by intervening on Norleen’s behalf. Whether this constitutes a triumph, in the end, of the moral writer over the Anima Atramenti, or a further irony, given the parallel our author will recurrently draw between the human and the mannequin, the puppet, and the doll, returns us to our first and final duplication: the author and the narrator; the writer and his voice. A curious note upon which to reflect as I, who write under a pseudonym, expend reserves of energy pretending to be who, in fact, I am. Milk is the beverage of all right-thinking nightfolk. See how the sentinels distract us?

Now, another awestruck deer (and something of an Epicurean swerve). “The Frolic” brought Ligotti to the attention of David Tibet, founder of Current 93, for whom Doe’s note was received as a prophesy of “the ugly and unhappy litany of life in these decadent and degenerate end times,” and who found in Doe a pre-echo of sado-paedophiles such as Marc Dutroux, whose crimes would curse the final decades of the twentieth century. Tibet’s spiritual history ranges broadly, encompassing Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Thelema, but ultimately resolving into Gospel-fastened, “Christocentric” Christianity, with a fondness for Patripassianism, the belief that God the Father suffered with (or rather as) his Son. That Tibet would conclude from his reading of “The Frolic” that he and its author were somehow of a kind is quite surprising, but he supplies an explanation in his essay on the subject, “Soft Black Star: Some Thoughts on Knowing Tom Ligotti,” from which the quote above was also taken:

I told him that I thought he and I shared a similar view of the world and its heart, though we had drawn different conclusions. Both Tom and I saw a fallen world, but I believe in redemption. Tom had gone to that terrible place beyond worlds, beyond redemptions, beyond words, where even the silence was ferocious and painful.

I know this place. The lights are blue and everything you write molests you. Both Tibet and Ligotti confront “a universe of smeared fairground mirrors,” but Tibet believes that somewhere in the circus walks a perfect person. Absent my own conductive spiritual circuitry, I find in Tibet’s music as hopeful an imaginal cosmography as I could transport brick by brick to the perimeter of a sentient forest.

The Current 93 album All the Pretty Little Horses (TheInmostLightItself) includes a song dedicated to Thomas Ligotti, “Twilight Twlight, Nihil Nihil for Thomas Ligotti, who has seen the bloodbells shine,” a reading from Ligotti of the poem from the end of his “les Fleurs” buried in the silence after “Patripassian,” and a song entitled “The Frolic,” in dialogue with the Ligotti story. The album forms the middle panel of the three-part Inmost Light, whose title is a reference to the Arthur Machen story of the same name (1922). In Machen’s tale, an occult scientist, one Dr. Black, who lives his life at night whereon he contemplates the secret world upon the brink of which he wonders, captures his wife’s essence in an opal, whereafter her vacant body, raped and animated by what lips can hardly utter, assumes a beauty reminiscent of Hell.

The haunting of All the Pretty Little Horses by both Machen and Ligotti—mycelia rippling beneath the tics and spasms of the shadows flung by unstrung marionettes—invites us to oppose Machen’s sumptuous, proliferative spiritual imagination (containing every form of sensual–diagrammatic mysticism beneath the dome of Anglican (and later Catholic) Christianity) to Ligotti’s etchings on a soft black sky, with the lyrics of “Patripassian,” the last track on the album, offering a possible means by which to reconcile “the agnonised ages of a degenerate creation”[2] with “a Christ spun out of the worlds,”[3] while also bringing Tibet’s own Machen-esque spiritual peregrinations to a(n at least temporary) resolution. That Tibet gives Ligotti the final word in the album (by way of the artist–narrator of “les Fleurs”) returns us to the faerie-things for whom all agonies are fecund—to flowers growing from the body of the tortured Christ. But as “les Fleurs” awaits us in the second chapter, we will leave the biocosmological analysis aside and focus instead on the album’s treatment of imaginative play and how Tibet’s “The Frolic” serves this theme. The song takes the form of the internal monologue of a visionary and murderer of children. References to “rubbish-strewn streets” and the “ripe-rising smell of gutters” put us in mind of the “mean-street reality” undergirding John Doe’s fantasies, and certain segments, such as that quoted below, could be read as glimpses into how Doe might experience his crimes.

On the edge of the clouds

we crouch

We smile and spit

The pool of saliva

Coruscates below our feet

It shifts

Children with knives begin

to rise from it

They laugh and blow kisses at the moon

But we should be hesitant in ascribing these words directly to the character in Ligotti’s story. The “rubbish-strewn streets” and “ripe-rising smell of gutters” are properties of the reality that Ligotti’s Doe intensifies or eschews; their presence in the speaker’s monologue betray a rather threadbare fantasy, one that is never fully consuming, and thus not one that grants the speaker perfect absolution. The song’s emotional tone is melancholic and remorseful but not repentant; the speaker cannot be extracted from the mesoglea long enough that he might see himself (his confession—“I have done this” —refers to his destruction of “Avalokitesvara’s hundred faces,” which is to say “compassion” occulted by religious images), but he is not inured to the tragedy of his companions’ passing. He, like John Doe (and like the Dr. Black of Machen’s story), understands himself as a participant in the designs of his (though perhaps we should say the) imagination; his way, too, has been prepared for him. But he cannot sustain his excitement such that he can gaze upon a child’s broken limbs and see only the ink spilled on a butterfly’s wing.

That Doe does not address us directly is further suggested by the fern-and-hunter-green folk melody upraising non-Doe’s monologue like a leaf-carrying wind, marrying with the deciduous imagery belonging to the speaker’s fantasy (and decidedly not to Doe’s). Unlike the machinations of the Anima Atramenti, there is no mischief in Tibet’s melody; the horror nests in its sincerity—its expression not of malice or perversion but of warmth, and sometimes horribly of love. As if to draw attention to the length of string between non-Doe and Doe, the song concludes with the sheet metal incursion of a circus march—the momentary breaching of the curtain by something closer to Ligotti’s character, some wide-brim-hatted thing, who has otherwise been happy to admire from the wings. The final lyric, spoken in the black voice of another—“W-what ssss-sssssshadowsssss wee-eeee arrr-rrrr-rrrrre…”—pervades us like the short-lived revelation at dream’s ending, where the epistemic and the sensory combine.

Tibet does not adapt the “The Frolic” for his intellectual edification; it has a function within an album that takes the visionary capacities of the soul as its central theme—the warring of the inmost light and night dramatised through the visions and visionaries who impress on Tibet’s ψυχή. Ligotti’s nihilism (the attribution of substance to Nothing) is given voice in “Twlight Twilight Nihil Nihil,” which finds its counterpart in “The Bloodbells Chime,” a song devoted to the preservation of our “inmost light” despite the tragedy—or less poetically, the horror—of our condition. The Victorian–Edwardian artist, Louis Wain, progenitor and protector of Catland, is cast in “Bloodbells” as light’s champion. Though our hearts break for the following lines,

Tommy Katkins still sends

his regards

Frozen forever on some

Animal Somme

The last thing on his mind

Is marriage

But the call of home and heart

we do not weep for our loss of innocence (or for that of our species during The Great War), we weep because our innocence persists, because there is no metamorphosis in torture—in the mere accumulation of wounds. The “bloodbells” of the title (time and blood and death and puberty and eschatology) weigh on Tibet, who finds in Wain an exemplar of this continuity of spirit (for all that one of Wain’s most famous works, Entrenched (A message from Tommy (c)atkins at the Front), depicting a rifle-and-cigarette-brandishing tabby cat, would acquire a new beauty and a darkness that the artist did not foresee). Catland is form impressed upon the inmost light, but the light is not identified with the imagination (nor with consciousness per se); the waters in the Naiad’s basin are as sweet to kittens as to priests, and Wain’s insistence, in later life, that he was “acted on” by electricity and other malign agencies is an example of what can occur when one’s katechontic faculty—the speed at the which the mind produces alchemy glass—is outpaced by imagination’s liquid fray. (We may recall Zapffe on the repression of surplus consciousness, but we cannot take for granted that we repress our consciousness for fear of the truth; we may repress our consciousness for fear of the worlds it might construct.) But Wain’s prominence in All the Pretty Little Horses has less to do with his specific (inborn or induced) psychological affections than with the consistency of his artistic output despite his overbrimming mind. The fractal felines of his later works—if, indeed, the bulk of his more exuberant paintings do belong to his later period—are anticipated in his childhood visions of extraordinary complexity and fall mercifully short of inviting company. Wain’s playfulness was pure—receptive, above all, to the vibrations transmitted by cats.

Let us consider the topic of surplus consciousness within a more apposite frame: the appetite for γνῶσις. As philosophy concerns the pursuit of truth, not truth in itself, Weird Fiction concerns the imminence of revelation, not revelation. We write to crystalise the shadow in the water or the knocking on the door, and time spent in the service of this vitreous and voluptuous muse is time in which we do not turn the handle. The Dr. Black of Machen’s tale (the inverse of our David Munck) is preyed upon by his own fascinations. He is of the Ambrose type, a dealer in theories; the inside of his skull is lined with richly decorated fabrics, though unlike the voluble recluse of Machen’s masterful “The White People” (to which we will briefly turn below), Black’s experiments are a private affair. In the vastarien comforts of his bedroom, in his fantasies of wayward wonders owing nothing to conventional occultism, Black proceeds down pathways that were laid for him, and he, in turn, makes of his own soul an altar. It is this municipality of visual music on whose outskirts John Doe lingers, a river-black, star-dappled character not-quite-peering from behind a tree; he reminds us that all acts of evil start with acts of fantasy—that anyone and everyone can play.

And still he succeeds in pulling our attention from the Archatron. The more you look, the more you see. Flowers, flowers. I do this to pass the hours. Permit me one final swerve.

We cannot discuss “frolicking” and Arthur Machen without diverting ourselves into the secret woods and White and Green and Scarlet Ceremonies of “The White People” (1904). The story promises a disquisition on the “wholly positive” nature of Evil; sin, we are told, “is simply an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner.” As the original of Dr. Black relates:

“Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort: but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels and in making this effort man becomes a demon.”

Furthermore, the yearning to transform oneself into a demon cannot arise from conscious processes:

“It is like holiness and genius in this as in other points; it is a certain rapture or ecstasy of the soul; a transcendent effort to surpass the ordinary bounds. So, surpassing these, it surpasses also the understanding, the faculty that takes note of that which comes before it. No, a man may be infinitely and horribly wicked and never suspect it.”

I wrote in the introduction to this series of the distinction between Epicurean (aleatory, ontologically profuse) and Stoic (monotheistic, fatalist, evaporative) modes of Weird Fiction, represented by Lovecraft and Ligotti, respectively. Machen is of the former kind; the Christian imagination takes delight in all that it eclipses. Christ is a white castle on a nightblue hill assaulted by demons on all sides, and those upon the parapet would fade like displaced angels should the monsters ever let up their assault. Ecstasy in Machen is an irruption; something gets in from the Outside, and we pursue our intricate—but nonetheless erotic—pleasures deep into the secret heart of sacred Bishop’s wood, our ransacked cabins bright with ichor and the unhushed tinkling of splintered glass.

The imaginary feats of unsouled things (the blossoming of pebbles, the dancing of chairs…) provide our window into sin as here conceived. When Cotgrave, our eyes and ears, asks what it is that corresponds in man to singing lilies, Ambrose loans him a green pocket-book, the bronze and greensilver diary of a girl of sixteen years. The Green Book, in spritely, white-lily prose, illuminates as it occludes its child-author’s frolic through faerie, where she, ensorcelled, kissed by waternymphs, and encircled by horrid-grinning stones, is inducted into an alien cult. The diary blends the author’s sexual naivety—where marriage to the faerie queen is sealed with a kiss—with a sensuousness proper to the moulding of wet clay. They say that lust is as a golden rope tugged at by white fingers and that tree-nymphs stir from blood spilled on the thick roots of the ash tree and that Aphrodite cut through gleaming Paphos like a scythe. There is even an implication—at least, Lovecraft thought it so—that the diarist became pregnant in the course of her frolic, whether through sympathetic magic or demonic congress, as perhaps suggested in her story of the girl who lay with serpents and the glame stone left upon her breast. The Lovecraft reading extends into physiology the otherwise psychological seduction that pervades Machen’s story and the genre as a whole—the impregnation of receptive intellects with fantasies where miracles and horrors can abide. The diarist and John Doe, given over to play, participate in arcane rites presided over by miraculous agents, be they creatures of the Outside as in Arthur Machen’s fructuous imaginal ecology—faeries or little gods seeking to ensure their purchase on our shared reality; or of the Inside as in Ligotti’s dream—the dreamer in whose mind we overbrim. Fiction is fashioned in a series of glass tubes and bottled; we don’t need to talk about the Whitechapel murders, the From Hell letter, the monstrous birthing of the twentieth century, or the black figure with the dreadful face emerging from the hollow pit.

Venture not upon your life.

This is mine one wedded wife.

Focus instead on the arrangement of the sentences—old gardens strewn with broken flowerpots and sculptures, faint with the odour of white lilies.

“Creativity isn’t always an index of niceness, Leslie.”

The synthetic perfumes of a plug-in air freshener remind us that we never left the living-room-cum-waiting-area, and details that once seemed commonplace now shimmer with a terrible voor. Consider the fashion magazine Leslie is reading. See how it duplicates her eyes in two dimensions? Aphrodite’s presence in the living room is relevant to me, but in the story she is displaced and unfading. The diabolist Irena Pumices writes of the moment in a nightmare when you realise you’ve never owned a dufflecoat. “The compulsion towards syncretism manifests in the Empedoclean cycle of ‘Love–Strife–Love–Strife…’ Should this process conclude in an undifferentiated body (God), then our cycle is, in fact, a spiral, every sorcery a sacrament.”

“You wouldn’t be havin’ a misbehavin’ laddie nor a little colleen of your own, now would you, Professor von Munck?”

The εἴδωλον “nor…colleen/Norleen/nor…colleen/little Nor” impresses itself on the senses and the worn seat of soul; David knows and does not know what John Doe’s errors mean. Likewise, when Leslie produces the head of a young boy “discovered in gray formless clay and glazed in blue,” whom David watched Doe make, and who we learn was modelled on Doe’s most recent and most memorable frolic, we know and we do not know that this unveiling sealed our doom, for something seems to open inside David, or something breaks; it is after the unveiling of this blue and peaceful idol that he addresses himself to John Doe’s fantasy as if it were an ecstasy, an exterior intimacy, and poetry diverts him from the A, B, C. Why would Leslie purchase such an object? Why would she take any object from beyond the little door? In Alicia’s agate lattice every movement of the soul is answered like a prayer. You’re sitting in your mother’s kitchen. Something taps the windowglass and through and now a narrow staircase, carpeted in blue, descending into seawater, and on both sides, wood-panel walls upon which hang and from which dangle paintings of characters and scenes from other dreams, and in one frame, opulent bathtubs, black and rippling like seashells, are arranged like dicedots on a white-tile floor. Seaweed, four steps beneath me, mingles with the carpet fibre.

And something floats

it’s floating like a reed basket

it’s floating

with her ribs like fingers opening

about a glowing stone

See you anon.

---

[1] Trans. Gisle R. (2004).

[2] Ligotti and Current 93, “This Degenerate Little Town” (2001).

[3] Current 93, “The Descent of Long Satan and Babylon” from Thunder Perfect Mind (1992).